Month: July 2021

If you get COVID-19, you probably won't die. Probably. But about a quarter of all people who come down with COVID-19 develop "long COVID," a series of symptoms that range from the annoying to the severe. These symptoms often last a year or longer and include:

• Loss of smell or taste
• Depression or anxiety
• Difficulty breathing or shortness of breath
• Tiredness or fatigue
• Difficulty thinking or concentrating (sometimes referred to as “brain fog”)
• Chest or stomach pain
• Erectile dysfunction
• Headache
• Fast-beating or pounding heart (also known as heart palpitations)
• Joint or muscle pain
• Pins-and-needles feeling
• Diarrhea
• Sleep problems
• Dizziness on standing (lightheadedness)
• Change in smell or taste
• Changes in period cycles
•  Blood clots
• Strokes, seizures and Guillain-Barre syndrome
• Multiorgan effects or autoimmune conditions
• Multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS)

If you don't get vaccinated, you run a substantial risk of contracting one or more of these problems for an unknown length of time. That's way more serious than the rare and generally mild side effects of the vaccine.

Note to vaccine skeptics: Is that worth it?

Millennials and Gen Xers, I'm told, refuse to use the telephone. Today the New York Times tells me that Gen Z wants to kill off email:

Members of Gen Z do seem to agree with their elders on one thing: Email. Ugh. And, if we’re lucky, maybe they can one day save everyone from overflowing inboxes.

....Adam Simmons, 24, prefers to communicate using “literally anything but email.” Mr. Simmons, who is based in Los Angeles, started his own video production company after graduating from the University of Oregon in 2019. He primarily communicates with his eight employees and his clients, which are mostly sports teams, over text, Instagram messages and Zoom calls.

If you read very closely, you'll notice that the peg for the entire piece is a study from a consulting firm called Creative Strategies about which apps are most used for collaboration with fellow workers. This puts everything in a different light. Of course young workers are abandoning email for collaboration. Email sucks for collaboration. Even we dinosaurs who use it that way know perfectly well that it's horrible.

But collaboration is just one thing that we do at work. We also communicate with the outside world, for example, and email works fine for that. Adam Simmons may prefer text, Instagram, and Zoom calls, but that's just personal preference. In what way is a huge pile of unread texts or an unwieldy Instagram inbox any better than email? I'd even say it's probably worse. At least email once offered the minor blessing of putting everything in one place. Nowadays you have to check five or six different apps to see if anyone is trying to get your attention.

The underlying problem here is obvious: We have made communication too easy. And just as cheap hamburger spurs people to buy more hamburger, cheap communication spurs people to communicate more. What we really need is to figure out a way to make communication more painful.

Consider the olden days. In 1990 there was only one way for people to get my attention: they had to call me and then leave a message if I wasn't there. The post-Boomer generation is quite correct that this was a pain in the ass. It leads to the dreaded "phone tag," and it can also lead to misunderstandings because nothing is in writing. On the other hand, it's also true that a two-minute conversation can often take the place of five or six emails. And I probably got no more than a dozen phone calls a day.

Millennial and Gen X folks had no idea of the havoc they were creating when they gave up on phone calls and instead moved to "more convenient" methods of communicating. For one, more convenient meant higher volumes. For another, it was basically an excuse to avoid actual conversations, where sometimes people get mad at you. For folks who don't really want to communicate all that much in the first place, email and text have advantages: It's easier to ignore anger in written communication; it's easier to ignore written communication completely; and written communication favors highly educated verbal folks.

So they got their wish. Among the young, the phone is dead, replaced by a massive increase in overall communication. How's that working out for you?

Am I nuts? Of course I am. More specifically, am I nuts to think that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has a good handle on how much prices are rising? Here's the Washington Post today:

Rents are starting to surge in many parts of the country as the economy reopens and young people return rapidly to cities....Nationwide, rent prices are up 7.5 percent so far this year, three times higher than normal, according to data from Apartments.com. Analysts expect rent prices to keep climbing for the foreseeable future, a major burden for renters and a warning sign that higher inflation could linger far longer than the White House and Federal Reserve keep predicting.

This actually seems plausible. And yet, here are the BLS numbers:

Not only have rents not risen 7.5% so far this year, BLS says they've risen a paltry 0.5% in big cities and less than 1% in midsize cities since January. And rent growth has been falling steadily for over a year. Compared to 12 months ago, rent is up a very modest 1.2% in big cities and 2.6% in midsize cities.¹

In other words, for most people rent is a bright spot. It's one of the slowest growing major expenses out there.

So what's with the Post? It turns out to be an old story. First off, they ignore the BLS numbers completely. I don't know why. Maybe it ruins their story. Second, if the local numbers from Zillow are to be believed, rents are spiking only in a handful of hot midsize cities: Stockton, Phoenix, Fresno, Boise City, and a few others. Rents are down in places like Seattle, New York, and San Francisco.

But guess what? Rents are always spiking in a handful of hot cities. The only thing that changes is which cities happen to be hot. If the Post wants to write a story about which cities have lost their luster and which cities have gained, that's fine. But this headline is just plain wrong:

Rent prices are soaring as Americans flock back to cities

Readers shouldn't have to plow through ten paragraphs to find out that this applies only to "more than a dozen cities," which is about 1% of all the cities in the United States. In the other 99%, rent is fine. Come on, folks.

¹We'll get new inflation numbers through June in a few days. Maybe they'll show a huge spike in rents! But I doubt it.

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

The Washington Post describes the scene in the capital of Badghis province after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan:

Many of the Taliban’s advances have faced little to no resistance in the wake of the United States’ withdrawal. Without close U.S. support, specifically airstrikes, Afghan forces have been unable to hold territory even in parts of the country far from the Taliban’s traditional heartland in the south.

“It was exactly like a dam breaking down,” said Abdul Aziz Beg, a member of the Badghis provincial council who was in the city when the assault began. Beg said the breach was triggered by the deputy police chief deserting his post. After he fled, the Afghan police staffing key checkpoints protecting Qala-e Nau abandoned their positions, he said, allowing Taliban fighters to easily enter the capital.

Conservatives have used this—and similar scenes elsewhere—to criticize President Biden's decision to withdraw completely from Afghanistan. This is pretty rich considering that it was one of their presidents who got us stuck there in the first place and another of their presidents who promised to withdraw but never had the guts to do it.

Biden says he trusts the Afghan military, but this is obviously just happy talk. Like all of us, he knows perfectly well what's going to happen next. As this article makes all too clear, after 20 years of American assistance the Afghan military is still so feeble that the Taliban can practically stroll into cities and take over. They will continue to do this, and by the end of the year they will control most or all of the country.

This is an enormous tragedy on many levels. But it's plain that the Afghan government is fatally impotent and its military is inept. It's equally plain that the United States has tried everything it reasonably could and has had no success in turning this around.

It takes some guts to order the US withdrawal knowing that it means Afghanistan will fall to the Taliban within months. This is why no previous president has done it. Kudos to Biden for recognizing reality and following through on this regardless of the political hit he's bound to take for it. It's the right thing to do.

Our new box has attracted the attention of both cats. Oddly, though, they don't squabble over it. They just take turns. Here is Hilbert peering over the side of the box to keep an eye on whatever the humans are doing in the living room.

The Public Religion Research Institute has released its latest survey of religion in the United States and it continues the string of bad news for white evangelical churches:

The number of white people who identify as evangelical has declined by more than a third since 2006, and this is a big part of the reason that white evangelicals were so eager to jump on the Trump bandwagon in 2016. After spending the '80s and '90s as a potent political force, white evangelicals spent the next two decades losing both membership and influence. By 2016 they were in panic and despair, so when Trump showed up sounding like an old time tent preacher they were ready to swoon. And they did.

But it's done them no good. Since 2016 the number of white evangelicals has continued to drop while mainstream protestant churches have regained more than a quarter of the followers they had lost.

White evangelicals made a deal with the devil when they decided to become an arm of the Republican Party during the Reagan era, and reviving that deal with an obvious charlatan like Trump hasn't worked. Perhaps the answer is for them to try acting like a church, not a PAC. You never know. It might work.

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

I have a question. It's a serious question, though I doubt anyone has an answer. Here it is:

What do we actually teach in our public school classrooms these days?

Obviously I'm talking about history classes and racism here, not auto shop. And just as obviously, this is going to vary from school to school and teacher to teacher.

But do we know anything concrete about this, even as some kind of rough observational average? Has anyone toured the country, sitting in on classes, to find out first hand what's going on?

I'm not really concerned about diversity training for teachers or anything else that happens outside the classroom. That's a topic for another day. I want to know what our kids are being taught in public schools. Does anyone have even the slightest idea?

Are you curious enough about inflation to dive into some of the details? Of course you are! Here's a breakdown of which categories are up a lot and which ones aren't:

The first thing to notice is the enormous inflation in used cars. All by itself, this category boosts the overall inflation rate by about 1.5 points. If you're in the market for a used car this is bad news, but for the rest of us it means the overall inflation rate is closer to 3.5% than the official rate of 5%.

The next thing that should grab your eye is that food, the perennial favorite of B-roll footage on nightly news shows, is up only 0.7%. In other words, barely at all.

Ditto for just about everything else aside from household furnishings and apparel. I assume furnishings are up due to the shortage of lumber, and apparel is up because . . . um, I have no idea.

Bottom line: There are a few specific things that have shot up temporarily since last year, most famously lumber and used cars. This is obviously due to spot shortages that will go away pretty soon. Then there are things like gasoline that go up and down at the whim of OPEC and have nothing to do with overall inflation. Aside from that, most goods and services have gone up only a little bit, and even that little bit is exaggerated thanks to base effects from last year.

I don't have a crystal ball. Maybe inflation is about to bust wide open and we'll soon be withdrawing thousand-dollar bills from our local ATMs. But I doubt it. Most categories are under control; used cars are skewing everything; the base effect will go away shortly; and inflationary expectations remain well anchored at around 2%. At the moment, inflation doesn't even make a top ten list of things to be worried about.