Month: May 2021

For several years I've had an idea that would at least partially address the homeless problem in warm-weather cities. It was simple: Find a vacant lot, pave it over, and let people pitch their tents there. Provide toilets and running water. If it were up to me, I'd provide food three times a day too. Establish minimal police patrols, solely to prevent outbreaks of fighting or other violence. Otherwise, let the residents do whatever they want.

I never mentioned this for two reasons. First, I figured it probably violated a whole bunch of city codes and was therefore illegal. Second, who needs the grief from the professional homeless folks who will inundate me with tweets and emails telling me that only permanent housing is a real solution?

But last week the LA Times informed me that not only is my idea not outlandish, it's actually being used up and down the Pacific coast:

Cities up and down the West Coast, including Seattle, Sacramento and San Francisco, confronted by the high cost and slow progress of building housing for homeless people, have turned to these permitted tent encampments. They offer services such as toilets, meals and help finding a permanent place to stay. These efforts, once anathema among some homeless service providers, are becoming more widely accepted as unsheltered homelessness has grown and government officials reckon with a pandemic that has made placing people in large shelters dangerous.

The Times spoke with more than two dozen people who either have stayed or currently stay in these sites. Many wished for a room in a hotel or an apartment to call their own. Still, a majority said that they appreciate these lots, some of which will eventually have supportive housing built on them.

Johnson was one. He’s been trying to overcome an addiction to methamphetamine and wants to find a permanent place to live — something he hasn’t had since he broke up with his girlfriend two years ago. A hotel room would be a start, but he won’t go to one of the city’s large shelters, which have been the site of large outbreaks of COVID-19 and have strict rules and curfews.

“You can come and go as you please,” he said of the sanctioned tent encampments, which are called “safe sleep sites” by the city. “There are not as many rules.”

Like it or not, many people on the street actively avoid permanent housing because they don't want to put up with all the rules that come with it. Go ahead and ask anyone who's dealt with the homeless. They'll confirm that there's a percentage of the homeless who will flatly refuse if you offer them some kind of permanent shelter.

The LA Times story went up three days ago, and already there's the usual pushback from the professional homeless crowd. But I'm willing to bet that a big push to build tent encampments in Los Angeles would do more for homelessness in a year than the professionals can accomplish in ten. I mean, the pros are ecstatic if they can build a 50-unit shelter at a cost of $300,000 per unit. At that rate, homelessness will be conquered by around 2080.

So why not give the tent encampments a try? They're cheap, so they won't take much money away from more conventional shelter building, which can continue at its normal snail's pace. Meanwhile, though far from perfect, I'll bet that with cooperation and a concerted effort, you could build space for upwards of 20,000 street people in a year or so using tent encampments. It might not be great, but it would make a lot of lives better than they are now.

And the public would love it. What they want is some way to get homeless people off the streets, and this would do it. It would demonstrate visible progress, and this in turn would increase support for homeless programs. Right now there's tremendous cynicism about the billions of dollars allocated to homelessness that seem to have accomplished literally nothing. Why not try to change that?

The Washington Post reports today that "Recovery’s stumbles leave Americans confronting unfamiliar inflation risk." But if you make it down to the 12th paragraph, you learn this:

To date, the increase in inflation remains modest. Comparing current prices to those one year ago also overstates what’s actually in the economy. During the pandemic’s first months, many prices — including for hotel rooms, airplane tickets and men’s suits — collapsed. So year-over-year comparisons exaggerate the degree of change. Such distortions will become less significant over the remainder of this year.

So inflation is modest, and even at that it's exaggerated, but we're going to run a story about inflation fears anyway. wtf, people?

The US recorded about 20,000 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday. That's the lowest Sunday number since the middle of last year and the trendline is heading downward. We have vaccinated about 150 million people, which is nearly 60% of the adult population.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 9. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

So . . . just a quick piece of advice to everyone writing hair-on-fire hot takes about the economy right now: The April jobs report was just for a single month. Ditto for the inflation report, the upcoming GDP report, etc. There's a massive amount of noise in these numbers right now and you really can't tell much from them.

So let everything play out for another month or two. The economy is going to open up in fits and starts and it probably won't be until July or so that we really get a grip on how things are going. In the meantime, chill. Nothing we do right now is going to affect things more than a hair anyway.

Here's a headline from today's Wall Street Journal:

Higher Prices Leave Consumers Feeling the Pinch
Rising costs for everything from fresh fruit to freezers are shaping purchase decisions

The text of the article is the usual nonsense, so I won't bother describing it. Instead, here are actual inflation rates of nine broad categories of goods:

We already know that these inflation rates are artificially high because they're being compared to March 2020, which was artificially low. But even at that, they're in the range of -4% to 4% with the sole exception of transportation (primarily cars). Food at home is up 3.3%, which isn't enough to "feel the pinch" even if it were real.

But there's also another way of looking at things. Here's a list of 30 randomly chosen detailed items:

So here's what happens: Everyone notices that bacon, apples, ground beef, and whole chickens are noticeably more expensive than they used to be. But they don't notice that bananas and butter and tomatoes are less expensive. Homo sapiens being what we are—i.e., bad at on-the-run arithmetic—we conclude that prices are skyrocketing. Did you see what I had to pay for a pound of bacon!

(And even that's a mirage. Remember that these prices are artificially high because the base year for comparison is 2020. A closer look using 2019 as the base year reveals that bacon is actually up only 3.5% annually over the past two years. The entire category of food at home is up 2.2% annually over the past two years, about the same as overall inflation.)

So what explains the media's endless focus on allegedly skyrocketing prices? I don't really know. I have an old-fashioned belief that the media should be informative and truthful, knocking down popular beliefs if they turn out to be wrong. In this case, the popular belief that prices are skyrocketing is wrong. And yet instead of explaining why, the media produces story after story pandering to the misguided beliefs of its readers. Why?

POSTSCRIPT: It's possible, of course, that prices really are skyrocketing and the Bureau of Labor Statistics is miscalculating it. But if that's the case, there's a great story to be written about the BLS and I haven't seen it yet.

POSTSCRIPT 2: Plus there's this:

Personal income has soared! It's up by $13,000 over last year. So who cares if bacon is up a few cents? I wonder why no one reports this?

(Answer: Because it's as fake as the supposedly skyrocketing food prices. The apparent increase is due to benefits from the January rescue bill that have been annualized, not permanent income from salaries. This is what happens when you can cherry pick starting and ending points.)

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 8. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

You may not be aware of this if you lead a normal life, but the latest anti-woke jihad from Fox News is about Snow White. (I know. Snow White. It could hardly be more perfect, could it?) In particular, the new Snow White ride at Disneyland ends with Prince Charming kissing Ms. White to wake her from the spell of the evil queen, and we liberals are in an uproar over this depiction of kissing "without consent." How ridiculous!

It may surprise you to know this. Has it been plastered all over Rachel Maddow's show? Has it gone viral on progressive Twitter? How have you missed this?

It turns out that it comes from one (1) place: a review of the ride in SFGATE (which is not the San Francisco Chronicle, in case you're interested). The two reviewers do indeed point out that the kiss is problematic in view of Disney's history, but they sensibly concluded that it wasn't really a big deal:

Still, with the twinkling lights all around and the gorgeous special effects, that final scene is beautifully executed — as long as you're watching it as a fairy tale, not a life lesson.

So that's that. An pair of online reviewers mentioned the kiss but then told everyone not to worry about it. And no one did. But it is now canon among the Fox News set that liberals are up in arms about this and are pressuring Disneyland to change it. Thus are myths and legends born.

POSTSCRIPT: For what it's worth, I think the reviewers have it wrong anyway. I am, needless to say, opposed to kissing without consent, but if I knew for a fact that a quick peck could cure you of cancer or wake you from a coma, I would conclude that the quick peck wins this contest of competing values. So I think Prince Charming is in the clear.

Is there much question that Shelby County v. Holder is the worst Supreme Court opinion of the 21st century so far? I'm not claiming that it's in the same league as Dred Scott or Plessy, but John Roberts explicitly overruled the nearly unanimous will of Congress for no good reason and has since watched as, first, North Carolina introduced an anti-Black voting bill literally on the day after the decision was announced, followed by an increasing number of Southern states that have enacted increasingly bold anti-Black voting bills. In 2021, voter suppression bills have become an avalanche.

I wonder what Roberts thinks of all this? Is he happy that this will be his legacy? Does he still believe that he was right? Would he write the same opinion today? Or a narrower one?

I wonder.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 7. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Cathy Merrill is the publisher of Washingtonian magazine, and she is in big trouble over an op-ed she wrote on Thursday for the Washington Post. Here is a typical response from a staff member:

As members of the Washingtonian editorial staff, we want our CEO to understand the risks of not valuing our labor. We are dismayed by Cathy Merrill’s public threat to our livelihoods. We will not be publishing today.

— Jane Recker (@janerecker) May 7, 2021

So what was the problem with Merrill's op-ed? Answer: it urged people to think twice before insisting on working from home after the pandemic has lifted. The first few paragraphs are basically some throat clearing about the difficulty of building a corporate culture if older workers are at home and not available to mentor and manage new hires. Then the fun started:

While some employees might like to continue to work from home and pop in only when necessary, that presents executives with a tempting economic option the employees might not like. I estimate that about 20 percent of every office job is outside one’s core responsibilities — “extra.” It involves helping a colleague, mentoring more junior people, celebrating someone’s birthday — things that drive office culture. If the employee is rarely around to participate in those extras, management has a strong incentive to change their status to “contractor.” Instead of receiving a set salary, contractors are paid only for the work they do, either hourly or by appropriate output metrics. That would also mean not having to pay for health care, a 401(k) match and our share of FICA and Medicare taxes — benefits that in my company’s case add up roughly to an extra 15 percent of compensation. Not to mention the potential savings of reduced office space and extras such as bonuses and parking fees.

....People considering just dropping into their office should also think about FOMO, fear of missing out. Those who work from home probably won’t have FOMO, they will just have MO. The casual meetings that take place during the workday. The “Do you have three minutes to discuss X?” These encounters will happen. Information will be shared. Decisions will be made. Maybe if you are at home you’ll be Zoomed in, but probably not. As one CEO put it, “There is no such thing as a three-minute Zoom.” Being out of that informal loop is likely to make you a less valuable employee.

There are two ways of thinking about this. The first is that Merrill is an unbelievable idiot and intended to threaten her own employees in the pages of the Washington Post.

The second is that she was genuinely trying to offer some career advice that she's afraid a lot of workers might not consider. In this case, I suppose, her sin lies in being a little too blunt, contrary to modern standards that require lots of tip-toeing and invocations of "this would be wrong, of course, but..." It so happens that I've become a sworn foe of this style of writing, but that's just me.

In any case, I vote for #2 unless someone provides evidence that Merrill is not just stupid, but a sociopathic Trumplike monster.

UPDATE: The inevitable apology tour has begun:

Merrill issued a statement to this blog: “Washingtonian embraces a culture in which employees are able to express themselves openly. I value each member of our team not only on a professional level but on a personal one as well. I could not be more proud of their work and achievements under the incredibly difficult circumstances of the past year. I have assured our team that there will be no changes to benefits or employee status. I am sorry if the op-ed made it appear like anything else.”

She gave a more piercing self-evaluation via phone: “Everyone needs an editor," she told us. "I wish I had run my piece by mine.”

I assume that Merrill's op-ed was, in fact, seen by an editor at the Washington Post before it ran. And presumably that editor didn't see anything especially wrong with it. Still, Merrill's update is welcome. As I mentioned, I'm not a fan of nuancing pieces to death, but sometimes a little bit of diplomacy goes a long way.