Month: September 2021

From Li Zhou at Vox:

For years, progressives have floated the idea of acting as a bloc and using their power to shape the Democratic agenda, a tactic levied by several of the most influential congressional caucuses.

On Thursday, they finally did: Progressives stood by a threat they issued this summer, when they promised to vote against the bipartisan infrastructure bill if it was considered in the House without a concurrent vote on a much larger reconciliation bill.

....This move marks a huge shift in the way the CPC has used its power and what it has asked of its members. Prominent progressives have long argued that if even a subset of the caucus stayed united, it could influence major legislation and make ambitious policy demands — modeling themselves after methods used by groups such as the conservative Freedom Caucus and the moderate Blue Dog Coalition.

Imagine my excitement: Yet another intractable caucus more interested in playing to the Twitter crowd than actually legislating. This hasn't worked out very well for Republicans, but at least they can just shrug if they end up passing nothing. It will work out even worse for us Democrats, who will be utterly defeated if we end up passing nothing.

Now, it's frequently the case that just as the shouting reaches a peak, suddenly everyone comes to an agreement and a compromise package gets passed. Maybe that will happen this time. We can hope.

More generally, though, it kills me to see the opportunity that we're passing up. With Trumpism taking over the entire conservative movement, this is an ideal time for Democrats to present themselves as the only sane alternative and build an unbeatable coalition of centrists and progressives. But the only way to do that is to appeal to purple districts and states, and that means moving toward the center. Not a lot, but at least a little bit. Enough to seem non-scary to middle-of-the-road voters in places like Iowa and Ohio, anyway.

Instead we're doing just the opposite, insisting that these voters will love us if we adopt the Bernie agenda lock, stock, and barrel. I don't understand why even delusional progressives would believe this, but I can only assume it's because they live in a bubble and have never actually met a moderate voter from Iowa or Ohio.

But maybe I'm wrong. I sure hope so. Because if I'm right we're blowing the chance of a generation.

Today is opening day for the David Geffen Theater, designed by Renzo Piano for the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. It's popularly known as the Death Star, but Piano gamely insists it's more like a soap bubble or a magic lantern or a flying vessel—and perhaps it is if you view it from above. But if you view it from ground level, as we do in real life, it looks like this:

Unfortunately, what it reminds me of is this:

For some reason, comic book characters with visible brains always seem to be villains. That's in the DC Universe, anyway. Maybe things are different in the MCU?

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez is fired up with the idea of funding his city via cryptocurrency:

The lofty idea is the byproduct of a cooperation with CityCoins, a nonprofit that allows people to hold and trade cryptocurrency representing a stake in a municipality. By running software on their personal computers, CityCoins’ users mint new tokens and earn a percentage of the cryptocurrency they create. A computer program automatically allocates 30 percent of the currency to a select city, while miners keep the other 70 percent.

Since the nonprofit unveiled “MiamiCoin” in August, it has sent about $7.1 million to Miami....“When you think about the possibility of being able to run a government without the citizens having to pay taxes. That’s incredible,” Suarez said, adding that the partnership creates a “counternarrative” to the idea that city programs require raising taxes or “private sector philanthropy.”

Incredible indeed.

To be clear, MiamiCoins don't actually represent a share of Miami. They merely have Miami in their name. The city of Miami makes money only if fans of the city buy MiamiCoins and then CityCoins turns over a share of the purchases. Plus, of course, there's the usual future jackpot of holding onto their MiamiCoins and selling them for billions—maybe trillions!—once they skyrocket in value. Who needs taxes anymore?

The best you can say about this idiotic scheme is that it seems to be risk-free for Miami. If they get some money, great. If they don't, no harm done. Unless—

Well, unless they get so enthused that Miami's financial wizards decide to start playing games, much as my home of Orange County did in the '90s. That would be bad.

The best thing that could happen to Miami right now is for CityCoins to decline and die quickly. Miami will have its $7 million and will no longer have to fight the urge to do anything stupid. We can hope.

POSTSCRIPT: Feel free to come up with worst-case scenarios. Here's mine: MiamiCoins become the currency of choice for organized crime and drug smugglers and Miami gets rich. But only because it's literally being funded by organized crime and drug smugglers. Every time the feds come in and announce a bust, municipal revenues crater. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.

Enough of this drone nonsense. Let's return to regular photography.

This is a picture of the Trajan Market in Rome. Unlike Americans—the ones here in Southern California, anyway—the good folks in Rome light up their monuments handsomely at night. This may or may not be a frugal policy, but it's certainly great for insomniac photographers.

In news that comes as a shock to everyone who hasn't actually been paying attention, evictions haven't skyrocketed since the eviction moratorium ended last month:

In major metropolitan areas, the number of eviction filings has dropped or remained flat since the Supreme Court struck down the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention moratorium on Aug. 26, according to experts and data collected by the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. In cities around the country, including Cleveland, Memphis, Charleston and Indianapolis, eviction filings are well below their pre-pandemic levels.

....The overall picture has confused experts who had grim warnings for the looming crisis once the federal ban was no longer in place. Those same experts are hesitant to say the wave won’t come. After all, recent Pulse Survey data by the Census Bureau suggests that some 3 million households have reported concerns of imminent eviction.

Yes, the Household Pulse survey suggests that about 3 million families fear that they may be evicted in the next couple of months. However, this is a pretty worthless statistic. First, it includes only families that are renting homes, not apartments. Second, it's based on the number of people surveyed, which changes from week to week. Third, what we want to know is not the raw number anyway, but whether it's going up or down as a percentage of all home renters. Here's the answer:

I wouldn't take this very seriously, but just for the record it shows that fear of eviction has been pretty stable for the past year and actually dipped a bit at the end of September.

Here's a better set of data from the survey:

This includes all renters and goes back further than the eviction question. It shows that trouble making rent has trended generally downward, but with a small blip upward at the end of September. Is that meaningful? It's too early to say. The next release of the Household Pulse survey will give us our first true look at things in the weeks following the end of the rent moratorium.

In any case, there's no mystery here. The reason that evictions aren't skyrocketing is because the rescue packages passed by Congress kept poor people whole during the pandemic and even allowed them to save a little. Those benefits have now ended, but people are mostly as current on their rent as usual and are now back to where they started before the recession. There's really no special reason why they should be any farther behind on rent than they've ever been.

It's striking to me that this isn't more widely recognized. The big pandemic rescue packages were a victory for liberals, and we should be celebrating the fact that they allowed low-income workers to survive the pandemic recession mostly intact. The rent figures are pretty good evidence that we did the right thing.

Thank God for Joe Biden:

Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified Thursday that U.S. military officials did not give President Biden a “unanimous” recommendation to leave Afghanistan until 10 days after the fall of its capital city of Kabul.

This is the work of the infamous Blob, the foreign policy establishment made up of the Pentagon, Congress, think tanks, intelligence services, and private contractors. They always lobby for hawkish policies and their combined influence is all but impossible for a president to stand up to.

So it's notable that Biden did stand up to them. He knew what he wanted, and he stuck to his guns even in the face of intense contrary lobbying from both the domestic and foreign versions of the Blob. Any other president probably would have caved in—the generals are only asking for 2,500 troops!—but Biden understood the difference between zero and any other number, no matter how small. It's the difference that keeps forever wars going forever.

We're now out of Afghanistan, as we probably should have been years ago. I doubt that anyone else would have had the spine or the self confidence to get us out. Three cheers for Joe.

It's true: I bought a drone last week. It's a DJI Mini 2, which is a very nice, compact, and fairly cheap drone (about $500). It turns out to be butt-easy to operate thanks to very good internal firmware, and I got pretty good at flying it almost immediately. On the downside, the camera is OK but not great.

The drone controller connects to my phone, which provides real-time video of what the camera is seeing. Among other things, the phone app also includes an internal map that tells you what areas are off-limits. Most of these are airports, and it turns out that I live right on the line of the restricted area for John Wayne Airport. Literally. I can't operate the drone at home, but if I walk a few doors down it works fine.

The only real problem I've had so far is that the controller seems to randomly lose contact with the drone on a regular basis, even when it's fairly close. Or, maybe it's more accurate to say that only the video goes out. It seems as if the drone continues flying in whatever direction it was going but refuses to update the video, which is obviously very bad. When that happens, the drone could be anywhere and you don't know it.

On one occasion, the controller app not only lost contact but froze up so completely that I had to reboot my phone to get control back. On the bright side, once I rebooted everything went back to normal.

Anyway, just as I showed you lots of panoramic photos after I learned about Photoshop's photo stitching function, I'm sure I'll be putting up a fair number of drone photos now that I have this new toy. Today's top photo is a picture of the Chase building on El Toro Road near the 5. I was looking for a tallish building to illustrate what the drone could do, and it happened to be the closest one around in legal airspace.

After I took that picture I turned the drone around and puttered around a bit. Then, as I was about halfway home, I turned the camera back around and discovered a plume of black smoke nearby. Apparently a motor home caught on fire, but the flames were extinguished within a few minutes. That's the lower picture.

While we're on the subject of the poorly named "$3.5 trillion bill," I notice that the latest round of negotiations is centered on the shiny new idea of means testing the various programs that are funded by the bill.¹ Why didn't anyone think of that before?

Snark aside, I'm not opposed to means testing. If your goal is explicitly to help the poor while keeping costs under control, means testing is a good way of doing it. It has drawbacks, the biggest of which is added complexity, but in some cases that's worth it.

But it's a poor idea if you want programs that also benefit the middle class. In that case, the limit for means testing needs to be so high (probably around an income level of $150,000) that hardly anyone is left out. Is the added complexity of means testing really worth it just to reduce the number of recipients by 10% or so? Probably not.

So we need to be careful with this. If you truly want to limit a program to the poor, go ahead and means test. But if you want to benefit the middle class as well—something that Democrats should pay way more attention to—then means testing is just not worth it. Off the top of my head, I'd say that none of the programs in the spending bill should be means tested. If we really and truly need to reduce the cost of the bill, we should eliminate a couple of programs entirely and leave the rest alone.

¹Just in case you're not up with budget jargon, a program is "means tested" if it's available only to people with low incomes. Speaking very roughly, things like food stamps and Section 8 housing are available only to families who earn less than $30-40,000 or so, which accounts for about a third of the country. If there were no means testing these programs would cost about three times as much.

A few days ago Joe Biden said that the $3.5 trillion omnibus spending bill "costs zero dollars." Since then outrage has flown from conservatives and earnest defenses have issued forth from liberals.

Please just stop it. Biden obviously misspoke, but only slightly. All he meant is that the bill won't raise the deficit because it's paid for by higher taxes. That's it. This has absolutely no effect on whether you should support or oppose the bill, so how about if we ditch all the dumb arguing about it?

In addition, I continue to find it unfortunate that DC convention continues to force us to refer to things by their ten-year cost. Sure, you can write "ten year cost" every single time you mention the bill, but most people only pay attention to the headline number itself, especially if it's in the, um, headline. The reality is that this bill, in its current form, would increase spending by about $350 billion per year out of a federal budget of $5 trillion. That's an increase of 7%. You may decide for yourself if that's too much, or if the programs funded by the bill are worth that kind of spending.

I'm sure I'm not the only person so disgusted with yet another debt ceiling standoff that I sort of wish we'd just go ahead and default and see what happens. But no. We are Responsible People™ around here, so the feeling soon passes.

But how about this instead? The latest estimate of when we'll really and truly run out of money is October 18. So starting around, say, October 15 the House passes a bill to raise the debt ceiling and sends it to the Senate. It will be filibustered by Republicans, of course, and fail.

So do it again the next day. And the next. And the next.

Every single day make Republicans filibuster a simple, clean debt ceiling bill while the government slowly gets shut down. Eventually they'll cave, and it will put an end to debt ceiling hostage taking forever.

No one's ever done this, so I assume there are technical reasons it wouldn't work. You'd think they could be overcome, though. Does the majority leader have the authority to send bills to the floor immediately without going through the usual committee process? What else would get in the way of doing this?