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I am in Rome and only barely following current events. Nevertheless, I can summarize the latest COVID-19 news for you:

  • The Delta variant is bad. It spreads very quickly.
  • However, all of the vaccines are very effective against it. They strongly reduce your chance of contracting Delta; and if you have the bad luck to get it anyway, the vaccines massively reduce the severity of COVID.
  • So get vaccinated if you prefer not to die. The vaccines are extremely safe.
  • And just suck it up and wear a mask unless you're at home or in uncrowded outdoor settings. Is this overkill? It might be. But then again, it might not be. We don't know for sure. So just do it.

That's about it. This is what all the latest research and all the various announcements (Ptown, "breakthrough" cases, etc.) add up to: If you don't want to die, get vaccinated. Nothing has really changed.

This is ridiculous. Since landing in Rome:

  • After taking thousands of pictures with my current set of batteries, my camera has suddenly decided they're no good. Sometimes things work normally. Sometimes the camera tells me I have an incompatible accessory but then works normally. Other times it tells me my battery is unacceptable and just shuts down. It does this with all three of my batteries.
  • After years of working fine, my tablet no longer likes my wired keyboard. It announces that the keyboard is drawing too much power and refuses to connect.
  • I can't send email with my usual client. This is normal overseas, where I have to use my provider's web client. But it won't let me log in. I did a password reset, which went fine. But the web client still won't let me log in.

What's going on? Am I suddenly radiating some kind of tech-destruction field?

The killer among these three is the camera battery. If my camera decides to permanently go into shutdown mode, I'm screwed. As near as I can tell, there is no place in Rome to buy a replacement. Needless to say, this is a Sony firmware issue, not a genuine battery problem. Thanks a lot, Sony.

The economy grew at an annual rate of 6.5% last quarter. Wow! But the news was nearly ignored because everyone is afraid the Delta variant will wreck the planet again.

It probably won't, though. So go ahead and feel good about this. And if you have any un-vaxxed friends, offer them a cookie if they'll get themselves vaccinated.

Yesterday's puzzler turned out to be more puzzling than I intended. This was partly because I forgot that it's hot pretty much everywhere and partly because you guys assumed I must be in the United States. But no! This should make everything clear:

July 27, 2021 — Vatican City, Italy

Huh. What am I doing in Rome? Well, a few weeks ago I read a piece in the New York Times telling me that tourism hadn't yet gotten back to normal and Rome was all but empty. That sounded great, so on the spur of the moment I decided to go. Marian was going to come too, but it turned out that her passport had expired, so I decided to come by myself.

Which is just as well, as it turns out. Rome is very, very hot right now, which would make it a bit of slog no matter what. However, this trip was also an experiment to see how much energy I had these days. The answer is: not much. I can walk around the city for about two hours before I need to return to the hotel to rest. I can do this two or three times a day, and to make it worse I fall asleep a lot. This very post, for example, is being written at about 7 pm after I fell asleep around noon. This does not make for ideal touristing.

But maybe things will get better. For now, I think I'll head out to the Spanish Steps or maybe the Piazza Navona and see what's going on there. Dinner is most likely in store.

Mother Jones has chosen my vacation to release my latest piece for the magazine. I can't blame them for that, though. Since I don't work there anymore they didn't know I was taking time off. Anyway, the payment for the article financed the vacation, so it all worked out well.

The piece is about why we're all so pissed off these days, politically speaking. I've been working on this for over a year, and I'm far from the first person to take on this subject. But the more I looked into it, the more I got convinced that everyone was ignoring the real problem. Or, at least, not giving it the credit it deserves.

The first thing to ask yourself is when this all started. In some sense, it began in the '60s, the wellspring of the culture wars. But we managed to survive for several decades after that without wanting to slit each others' throats.

Then there were Rush Limbaugh, Drudge, and Newt Gingrich. I give Gingrich credit for being the intellectual force behind our polarized politics, but he only lasted a few years and then faded away in ignominy. That doesn't really fit with (it turns out) the early 2000s being the point when fear and hatred really skyrocketed.

Timo Lenzen

So what happened? It can't be social media, which only took off a few years ago. It's not an increase in conspiracy theories, which are no more popular then they've ever been (honest). And it's not likely to be material circumstances, since on a wide variety of topics most us are better off—or at least no worse off—than we've ever been. There are a few exceptions, but they just aren't numerous enough to wreck an entire country.

No, the only answer that really fits is an old, familiar one: Fox News. Many liberals don't remember this, but when Fox News started up in 1996 it was a fairly generic center-right newscast. But around 2000 that changed and Fox increasingly adopted the hard-nosed attitude it maintains to this day. Why? Maybe it was the 2000 election. Maybe it was 9/11. Maybe someone did some market research. I don't know.

In any case, around 2000 Fox became ever more vicious at the same time that its audience really began to grow. Liberals weren't just bad, they hated America. They were unpatriotic. They wanted to tax away all your money and give it to, um, you know. White America was on the precipice and there wasn't much time left. Etc.

The result has been not just polarization, but a genuine fear among many conservatives that if liberals are allowed in power, the America they know and love is doomed. And that's the heart of the anger and hatred that power our country today. You may hear a handful of Republicans finally criticizing Donald Trump, but you'll never hear any of them criticizing Fox News, the organization that put him in the White House in the first place. That's because they know where the real power lies.

There's much more to this, so I urge you to read the whole piece. Just click here. Let me know if I've convinced you.

I see that cats and dogs are living together and have produced a bipartisan infrastructure bill. I figure they did this just to annoy me, but I hold no grudges. I just want to know how they're going to pay for it:

The new agreement also included significant changes to how the infrastructure spending will be paid for, after Republicans resisted supporting a pillar of the original framework: increased revenues from an I.R.S. crackdown on tax cheats, which was to have supplied nearly one-fifth of the funding for the plan.

In place of those lost revenues, negotiators agreed to repurpose more than $250 billion from previous pandemic aid legislation, including $50 billion from expanded unemployment benefits that have been canceled prematurely this summer by two dozen Republican governors, according to a fact sheet reviewed by The New York Times. That is more than double the repurposed money in the original deal.

As I recall, the previous version of this "$1 trillion" bill actually represented $600 billion in new spending. With this new funding in place, it looks like the $1 trillion bill is now a $350 billion bill. In other words, starting with the very first proposal from the Biden administration, the amount of new spending has gone from $2 trillion to $1 trillion to $600 billion to $350 billion. I think. This gets kind of tricky. In any case, it sure seems like Republicans got a helluva good deal here.

And there's this:

“We still have a long way to go before we get to the finish line, but this was a vitally important first step,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), one of the lawmakers who helped broker the deal, at a press conference after a vote.

That sounds mighty familiar, doesn't it? For one thing, it turns out there's still no actual legislative text. I'm sure that's not a problem, though. Stay tuned.

POSTSCRIPT: Of course, coming up next is the gazillion-dollar Democratic bill that, among other things, will sweep up anything that Republicans refused to agree to in the bipartisan bill. That should be fun.

How accurate are inflation expectations? The literature says two things:

  • Any measure based on consumer expectations is pretty worthless. This is no surprise since consumers don't really know much of anything.
  • Market-based measures, such as the breakeven rate, are reasonably accurate, generally within a percentage point or two of reality.

So let's take a look at the 5-year breakeven rate, which forecasts the inflation rate five years in the future:

As you can see, inflation over the past 20 years has been running at roughly 2% and the breakeven rate has also been at about 2%. This means that the breakeven forecast is pretty good when inflation is steady.

It's also no problem that the forecast didn't predict the big temporary spikes in 2009 and 2021. There's no way it could do that.

But there is a problem here: the predicted plummet for 2014. What happened here is that actual inflation in 2009 went negative (red line), so the bond markets mindlessly predicted that five years later in 2014 it would also be negative (blue line). Needless to say, this makes no sense and it didn't happen.

Conclusion: market forecasts of inflation may be better than consumer forecasts, but the "market" basically just figures that inflation in five years will be about the same as it is today. As long as inflation is steady, this works OK. But then again, as long as inflation is steady, who needs forecasts?