Kevin Drum 🕸

The number of women with BAs who are working full time has nearly caught up with the number of men: Women with advanced degrees overtook men in the workforce in 2017. However, among those with only a high school diploma, men outnumber women by more than 60%.

Silverton, Colorado, in a panorama shot.

Oh ffs: Transgender Floridians can no longer change the listed gender on their driver licenses. ...."Permitting an individual to alter his or her license to reflect an internal sense of gender role or identity, which is neither immutable nor objectively verifiable, undermines the purpose of an identification record and can frustrate the state’s ability to ...continue reading "Florida bans trans identities on driver licenses"

Atrios says this about Joe Biden's efforts to pass immigration legislation: If you concede the issues that the other side have made their own are important, you have conceded that the other side is, in fact, correct, and that what they say is important is, in fact, important. Immigration is especially fraught as there is ...continue reading "Can we ever satisfy conservatives?"

Immigration hawks say that Joe Biden has cut back on deportations. Biden partisans say he's been tougher on deportation than anyone in recent history. Who's right? Both! Here are the stats: In his first three years, Trump deported 408,000 migrants. Biden deported only 385,000. But—in FY23 Biden deported 236,000 migrants, the highest total ever and ...continue reading "Raw data: Deportations under Trump and Biden"

Charles Littlejohn was sentenced today to five years in prison for stealing the tax returns of Donald Trump and thousands of other rich people. But Trump himself has been silent about this. Why isn't he crowing? That's easy. Littlejohn didn't work for the IRS. He was a Booz Allen Hamilton contractor. He was caught by ...continue reading "Trump has no comment about prison sentence of guy who stole his tax returns"

Hiring in December was up and quits were down. Hiring outnumbered total separations by 256,000: This is positive news since the general trend has been downward for the past two years.

Well, this is weird: I endured a lot yesterday. But having my body and outfit photoshopped by a media outlet was not on my bingo card. Note the enlarged boobs and outfit to be made more revealing. Can’t imagine this happening to a male MP. What gives? pic.twitter.com/NhnkDRMidc — Georgie Purcell (@georgievpurcell) January 29, 2024 ...continue reading "The AI ate my homework"

A few days ago I came across this tweet from Matt Yglesias during a stretch of bad weather that was tying up air travel: This has been followed by a bunch of edgelord conservative types complaining that DEI initiatives are making it unsafe to fly. Is this just an offshoot of the recent right-wing kvetching ...continue reading "Here’s the story of DEI in our nation’s skies"

Today's picture is a twin of Friday's. But in this one, the alstroemeria is in focus while the cat, if you look carefully, is just a blur.

Did you know that 23,000 shipping containers have been lost at sea since 2008? That's about 1,500 per year. In 2020 there was a huge spike to 4,000 containers, which prompted the World Shipping Council to start a safety campaign. In 2022 a mere 661 containers were lost: The WSC would like you to know ...continue reading "Raw data: Containers lost at sea"

Everyone's campaign strategy against Donald Trump appears to have converged on the same tactic: trolling. It's all about deliberately hurling insults at him in the hope that he'll melt down completely and eventually lose the plot. Neither Nikki Haley nor Joe Biden are even trying to hide this. They're all but daring Trump to maintain ...continue reading "Baiting Trump"

Here is data from three different survey-based studies. First is loneliness among the elderly over the past few generations: Next is loneliness among high school students over the past three decades up to 2012: Finally, here is Gallup's survey of overall loneliness since the pandemic: Based on these numbers, the best guess is that loneliness ...continue reading "Raw data: Are we getting lonelier?"

The Washington Post writes today about 49ers fullback Kyle Juszczyk: His skill set is hard to see on TV, and the data collected by the computer chips in his shoulder pads doesn’t really stand out. Wait. Computer chips in his shoulder pads? Oh yes: Two chips tucked within both shoulder pads on every NFL player ...continue reading "We have taken the first step toward robot football"

Aquifers around the world are being drained at an alarming speed. Here's what that looks like in two of the biggest aquifers in the US: Red dots are bad (more than one meter per year of water loss). This is from a recent paper that examines 1,693 aquifers around the world: Rapid groundwater-level declines are ...continue reading "We are running out of water"

Terri Gerstein writes today about a couple of cases of employee misclassification in Denver: At issue is whether dishwashers and others like them, placed in their jobs by online temporary staffing agencies, are employees of the agencies or independent contractors running their own businesses. ....The cases demonstrate the spread of the exploitative gig business model ...continue reading "The gig economy is (probably) still small"

Two nights ago Microsoft gifted me with a Windows update on my Surface tablet, and now I can't read anything in the Wall Street Journal. Every story looks like this: Oddly, this is what you get if you don't have a subscription and the Journal paywalls you. But I do, I'm up to date, and ...continue reading "I am unable to read the Wall Street Journal (on my tablet)"

Immigration, man. I don't know. Right now the Senate is working on a compromise immigration bill, but as usual the immigration hawks are doing their best to sink it because they aren't getting 100% of what they want. Some of this is campaign cynicism, but not all of it. It's what they've done over and ...continue reading "How do we get control of the border?"

I'm glad you asked. Here's the latest data from the CDC: Half of us have gotten a flu jab this season but only a fifth of adults have gotten the latest COVID vaccine. How come? Dr. Danielle Ofri has asked, but she rarely gets a straight answer: When I ask my patients if they have ...continue reading "How are we doing on the latest COVID vaccine?"

Here's the line of the day: As a scholar who researches the history of Western fears about human extinction.... That's quite a specialty. This essay grabbed my attention because I've lately been on an anti-doom kick, so I was intrigued by a piece recounting our long history of always thinking we live in uniquely frightening ...continue reading "Wait. You do what?"