Kevin Drum 🕸

This is the Pauma Valley on a hazy day, shot from about halfway up Palomar Mountain. I took this on a rare daytime scouting mission that led me up a progressively rockier road that, toward the end, was only barely passable. It's a good thing I hadn't tried this in my old Mazda. But it ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

New York City will soon have a new congestion pricing program. At peak hours, it will cost $15 to enter lower Manhattan by car. Naturally lots of people don't like this, so just as naturally they're suing over it. And naturally naturally, they're suing over allegedly insufficient environmental review: In court papers, they have challenged ...continue reading "New York City congestion pricing faces nearly a dozen lawsuits"

The BLS released its latest salary figures today, so I took a look because I was at loose ends. According to their data, the highest paid occupation in America is pediatric surgeon, at $449,320. In fact, physicians in general take 15 of the top 16 spots, with athletes squeezing in at #10. The lowest paid ...continue reading "Pediatric surgeons kicked ass last year"

Over at the LA Times, Lorraine Ali selflessly spent a day on Truth Social and reports back: Twenty-four hours of scrolling through posts from “Truthsayers” on the two-year-old platform explained why the site is tanking. In short, partisan echo chambers are stale, musty spaces that lack the sort of oppositional views needed to make social ...continue reading "Hardened reporter spends a day on Truth Social"

A couple of weeks ago Aileen Cannon, the judge in Donald Trump's classified documents case, asked attorneys for both sides to write hypothetical jury instructions based on two scenarios. Scenario A: the jury gets to decide if any particular document is a "personal record." Scenario B: Trump gets to decide unilaterally. This is based on ...continue reading "Trump prosecutor issues ultimatum to Florida judge"

Peak snowpack in the Sierra Nevada is typically measured on April 1, so the numbers are in for 2024: we ended up about 9% above average. The snowpack trendline is a little tricky because there are occasional super-years that make it sensitive to exactly when you start. But if you start with the earliest records, ...continue reading "Raw data: Water in California"

Next year the cannabis crowd will be celebrating their degenerate habit on April 20th. The same day as Easter! Can you believe these people? And just wait: If Joe Biden is still president, I'll bet the egg decorating contest will encourage kids to paint marijuana leaves on their eggs. This is what liberals have done ...continue reading "The war on Easter has just gotten started"

This is getting a lot of attention: Good news of the day: We can fix really hard & scary problems if we try. pic.twitter.com/cQBD0FlcNC — Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) April 2, 2024 This is not quite what's happened. The Andrew Van Dam piece referenced here is great, but you really have to read the whole thing. ...continue reading "We still have a bee problem"

This is inside the palace of Versailles: the omnipresent fleur de lis surrounded by brightly finished goldwork. Does the decorating style of the Sun King remind you of anyone?

I have an update on judge shopping. Three weeks ago the Judicial Conference of the United States cracked down on the practice, but then they caved: Following blowback from Senate Republicans and some conservative judges, judicial policymakers later clarified that the policy was discretionary, leaving it to each district court to decide how to implement ...continue reading "Judge shopping ban lasted three weeks. Now it’s gone."

We've done it. We've now measured everything worth measuring, so we're moving on: This comes from a paper about patents. The author believes he can identify "creative" patents by analyzing word pairs: if a word pair has never been used before, it's a sign that a patent is breaking new ground. However, old patents are ...continue reading "We have finally reached the end of science"

Benjamin Netanyahu on an air strike that killed seven aid workers delivering food to Gaza: Unfortunately, in the last day there was a tragic case of our forces unintentionally hitting innocent people in the Gaza Strip. It happens in war. Is it just me or does Netanyahu sound slightly less than grief-stricken over these deaths?

We're still increasing the number of houses we build, but nonresidential construction declined in February for the second month in a row: A couple of months isn't something to worry too much about, but it is a suggestion to keep your eyes on this. The biggest drop was in health care construction, which surprises me ...continue reading "Raw data: Commercial construction is turning down"

There's good news and bad news out of Florida today. The bad news is that the state supreme court approved a ban on abortions beyond six weeks.¹ The good news is that the court also approved a ballot measure that would legalize abortion before fetal viability, which is usually around 24 weeks. The ballot measure ...continue reading "Florida bans abortion but allows vote to make it legal again"

This is nuts. Truth Social stock plummeted 20% today: Why the big decline? The Washington Post explains: Trump Media and Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that the company generated just over $4 million in revenue last year, including less than $1 million in the last quarter. ...continue reading "Truth Social still sucks, stock plummets"

This is a meerket peering out from its hidey hole at the LA Zoo. They're cute little things, but I suppose they'd rip your arms off if you tried to touch one, wouldn't they?

Every month I get a big pile of blood tests. Here's one of them: This result happens to be from May 26, 2020. A year later the "Non Black" designation suddenly disappeared. Why? Well, there's now a note that says "GFR estimate is by the CKD-EPI 2021 equation." I never noticed that before, but today ...continue reading "A new kidney test is still racist. It just harms a different race."

According to the Wall Street Journal, "Enrollment in vocational training programs is surging." Do you see the cheat? This is year-by-year growth, not overall growth since the NSC started collecting data. Here's the real growth: There was a spike in 2023, but it was only a recovery from the huge decline during the pandemic. Enrollment ...continue reading "Gen Z isn’t getting its hands dirty"

Why does Easter move around? The short answer is that the Bible suggests Jesus was resurrected on the third day after Passover, and since Passover moves around, so does Easter. Slightly longer answer: In 325 AD, the Council of Nicaea decided that the leap months in the Hebrew calendar made it unreliable, so they decreed ...continue reading "Some Easter ponderings"

Behold Donald Trump's Easter morning message of redemption and grace to the American people: There's an ancient online controversy about how best to respond to manufactured outrage like this. One camp says we should ignore it. The folks who produce this stuff just want attention, so by responding we're taking the bait. The other camp ...continue reading "Donald Trump celebrates Easter with yet another vicious rant"