Month: May 2021

This cracks me up:

Startup chief executives are turning a cold shoulder to SPACs....So-called blank-check companies, which go public with no assets and then merge with private companies, exploded in popularity last year as a mechanism for startups to raise a lot of money with more speed and fewer regulatory hurdles than a traditional initial public offering.

More recently, startup CEOs have watched many of their peers endure stock slides and earnings calls with disappointed investors in the weeks after finishing a SPAC deal. For many, it has been a bitter reality check that public-market investors might not be as generous as SPAC creators have been with early-stage companies with unpredictable revenue and growing pains.

Did these clowns think that just because they took a trendy shortcut to going public that investors would automatically fall in love with them? That lousy earnings growth or missed targets would be cheerfully ignored? What galaxy are they from?

A word to the wise: Once you're public, you're public. If you don't perform, you get hammered. End of story.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 23. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

The New York Times says that the LA police department is ramping up patrols:

All of this necessary, some city leaders believe, because violent crime is up sharply — last year murders were up 36 percent in L.A. — and the city is awash in new guns....“We’ve lost more than a decade of progress,” Chief Michel Moore of the Los Angeles Police Department said in an interview, referring to the significant drops in crime in the years before the pandemic.

I am so tired of this crap. How hard is it for reporters to look up the latest crime data?

Homicide is up in Los Angeles, as it is in many large cities. This is a serious problem and its roots are not well understood—nor is it something to be played down. But violent crime more generally? In 2020 it was down 2% over the previous year. Property crime was down 10%.

If you're concerned about being caught in the middle of a gang war, then Los Angeles is a little less safe than it was a year ago. But that's not a real danger for most people. If you're truly concerned about your overall personal safety, then violent crime is the stat to look at. On that score, Los Angeles is safer than it was pre-pandemic.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 22. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

The New York Times published an interesting essay today that includes a chart showing support for Black Lives Matter in the wake of the George Floyd murder. But it's even more interesting if you put some dates on the chart:

Support for BLM starts to increase within both parties at the beginning of April, following a couple of lower-profile police killings. George Floyd was killed on May 25, and that's when support for BLM hits its peak.

But within three weeks, Republican support has plummeted to its level at the beginning of the year, and by autumn it's another 15 points lower. Democratic support also wanes, but only a little bit.

As you'd expect, since Republicans are mostly white while Democrats have a large Black contingent, white support for BLM went down sharply after the George Floyd murder while Black support went down only a little. Without further crosstabs, it's hard to say whether race or party ID is the most important factor here.

I remember writing something a couple of months after the George Floyd murder about BLM having a "moment." I got some editorial pushback on that and revised it. But compared to support for BLM right before the George Floyd murder, the BLM protests of last summer produced:

• A huge decline in BLM support among white people.
• A big decline in support among Hispanics.
• A modest decline among "Other."
• A modest increase in support among Black people.
  

Even among Black respondents, who registered an eight-point spike immediately after the George Floyd murder, support for BLM by the end of the year was only about two points higher than it was just before the George Floyd murder.

It's pretty obvious that the massive downturn among Republicans is due largely to Fox News and its cronies. But every other group also ended the year with less support for BLM than it had before the protests. The only exception is among Black people, and even that's a close call.

So a moment it was. The question now is how to turn it into more than that.

As of a couple of months ago, here is the latest Gallup poll on American attitudes toward Israel and the Palestinians:

There was an uptick in favorable feelings toward the Palestinian Authority over the past year, but there's no way to know if that's just a blip (like 2005) or a more permanent change. Oddly, the spike was due to a large improvement in Republican attitudes toward the PA.

Also worth noting: since 2000, favorable feelings toward Israel have increased by about 15 percentage points. Favorable feelings toward the PA have increased by nine points. On a different question that explicitly asks where your sympathies lie, Israel is ahead 58-25%. Since 2000, sympathy toward Israel has increased by seven points while sympathy toward the Palestinians has increased by nine points.

The reason for posting this is to provide a baseline for comparison. I would strongly recommend ignoring poll results on this subject while feelings are still high following the latest Gaza war. Just wait a while. Only then will we know for sure how the war truly affected American feelings toward Israel.

A few days ago I wrote a post about the American aversion to vaccines going back to World War II. Over at Science News, Tara Haelle has an excellent piece that goes back further and explains vaccine hesitancy from its very beginnings with Edward Jenner.

I highly recommend reading it. In fact, I recommend reading it first and then reading my piece for a closer focus on recent history. We need to treat vaccine hesitancy for what it is: a longstanding problem with multiple roots that has very little to do with the poisonous partisan politics of the current day.

Haelle's piece is here.

My piece is here.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 21. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

You have probably heard that the murder rate spiked massively in 2020, and according to preliminary FBI data this is true. But take a look at this chart:

Generally speaking, homicide and violent crime move in sync. The two exceptions are 2015 and 2020. Does this give us any clues about what the cause of the increased murder rate is?

The 2015 spike coincided with the aftermath of Ferguson. The 2020 spike coincided with both the aftermath of George Floyd and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. If I had to guess, I'd say that anger over police brutality was the primary cause of the murder spike, with the pandemic providing an extra push.

And there's (maybe) more bad news. The 2015 spike lasted two years, so again, if I had to guess, I'd say that our current spike will last through 2021.

And yet more bad news: The 2015 spike started to ebb in 2017, but it ebbed slowly. It probably would have been five years before it reverted to its past level. If the same is true this time, it will be 2026 or so before the murder rate goes back down to its pre-Ferguson level.

These are all just guesses, however. The mystery here is that, in general, crime hasn't increased over the past year. Violent crime is basically flat and property crime continues to go down. We are as safe as we've ever been. It's only murder that's up, but it's up a lot. What's going on?

NOTE: The effect of lead poisoning on crime was strong only from ~1965-2010, so none of this has anything to do with lead.

A few nights ago Hilbert decided he wanted to relax in the hamper, but Hopper heard odd noises in the closet and had to investigate. Eventually she found her quarry. We're just lucky she didn't decide to jump in after him.