Month: September 2021

Here's a picture of Hopper taken with the Nikon Z50 that I rented. It's fine. But there was never any reason to expect much difference between the Z50 and my old Sony for casual snapshots.

Sadly, the Nikon bundle performed poorly on every other dimension. The Nikkor 18-300 zoom lens was pretty sharp in the center at full telephoto, but soft at the edges. That's to be expected with any zoom lens, but the Nikkor was pretty bad. The entire right and left hand quarters of images were quite blurred at 300mm, even when I stopped down to f/11.

That was disappointing, but at least the Z50 made up for it by having a bigger sensor that produced better low-light images. Right? In a word, no. I took picture after picture at different settings, many of them using the same settings I used for night pictures in Rome with the Sony. I took lots of pictures because I had a hard time accepting the results: the Sony's low-light performance was equal to or better than the Nikon. Sharpness was better and, crucially, noise was more controlled. I still have a hard time believing this, but I have a whole pile of images that tell me it's true.

I dunno. The Sony RX10 continues to be a miracle camera. So I'm going to send it in for repair and stick with it. Perhaps someday Sony will produce a newer version, but there's barely even a rumor of if or when that might be, so I'm not going to wait for it.

A new mask study has been getting a lot of attention. It tested thousands of people in Bangladeshi villages and came to two conclusions: (a) masks work, and (b) surgical masks work better than cloth masks. A 28 percentage point increase in surgical mask wearing within a village reduced COVID-19 incidence from 0.76% to 0.67%.

But there was also this odd result:

An increase in mask wearing within a village had zero effect on subjects under the age of 50. The entire effect is for those 50 and older. That deserves a whole lot of attention since it's such an unexpected result. What is it about older age that makes mask wearing so effective?

Generally speaking, I have to confess that I've given up on masks as a way of reducing COVID-19 spread. The people who hate masks are simply never going to give in on this, especially since it's a very public behavior and, it's worth acknowledging, a genuinely annoying one. Some people may not mind masks, but a lot of us, including me, find them uncomfortable.

I don't mind if other people want to continue going after mask policies, but I no longer think they have much chance of working. At this point, our energies are better used on vaccination and nothing else.

The American economy gained 235,000 jobs last month. The unemployment rate declined to 5.2%.

This is obviously a significant slowdown, led by a collapse of growth in government jobs. On the bright side, earnings for blue-collar workers rose at an annualized rate of about 2% after accounting for inflation.

The consensus of analysts is that the slow hiring rate in August was due to the threat of Delta. Maybe so, but I suspect that it also has something to do with the wonky labor market that I mentioned a couple of days ago. I have no evidence for this, so don't take it too seriously, but there sure seems to be something a little weird going on. I don't think this is all due to Delta.

Sen. Joe Manchin has published a manifesto in the Wall Street Journal saying that he won't support the Democrats' $3.5 trillion spending bill because he's worried about its effect on inflation. This is nothing new from Manchin, and it's no less crazy than it's ever been. The spending bill amounts to only $350 billion per year and is mostly paid for, which means that its effect on inflation will be negligible.

Part of the problem here is that everyone, including me, keeps referring to this legislation as a "$3.5 trillion bill," as if its size were the main thing that defines it. But it's not meant as a stimulus bill or a recovery bill or anything like that. It's just a bill that funds a bunch of progressive programs. This means the questions we should be asking about it are less about its raw size and more about which of these programs you support.

There are seven sizeable programs funded by the fill, and if you think its price tag is too high then you should fess up about which ones you would prioritize the highest. For example, here's my rough list:

1. Makes the increased Obamacare subsidies from January's coronavirus bill permanent.
2. Provides universal pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds.
3. Provides funding for long-term care done at home.
4. Provides two years of free community college.
5. Makes the increased child tax credit permanent.
6. Adds dental, hearing, and vision benefits to Medicare.
7. Funds various climate initiatives.

This was done off the top of my head in about a minute, so don't take it too seriously. Roughly speaking, though, if I had to cut programs out of this bill, I'd probably choose the climate stuff, the Medicare benefits, and the child tax credit.

Your priorities might be entirely different, and since #1 is the only one firmly on my list I'd probably be willing to negotiate. The same is true of Democratic lawmakers, including Joe Manchin.

Or so I assume. In any case, Democrats should start talking in terms of programs, and skeptics should start talking in terms of programs they think we should hold off on. Constantly talking about nothing but the $3.5 trillion price tag is pointless.

This is the interior of the Pantheon, everyone's favorite building in Rome. It's a panoramic shot, which turned out to be surprisingly difficult to stitch together properly after I got home. In part this was because the roof should look symmetrical, but for some reason I didn't center myself when I took the picture. That's just sloppiness, and I paid for my sin with a great deal of time in Photoshop.

As we all know, the Republican leader in the House has warned telecom companies not to comply with Democratic subpoenas of phone records related to the January 6 insurrection:

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who opposed creation of the Jan. 6 committee, warned those companies that they would be violating federal law if they handed over those phone records. To which two experts who served as House lawyers say: What federal law? No one really knows what McCarthy is talking about, said Stanley Brand, a former lawyer for the House of Representatives.

Oh come on. Can we please ditch the faux naivete? There is no such law and McCarthy knows it. The only thing that matters is the threat itself. McCarthy is making it plain to these companies that if they cause trouble for Republicans, then Republicans will make their lives miserable if they ever regain power.

That's it. Don't get suckered into wasting time on a rabbit hole that has no bottom.

Great. This is just what we needed:

Rogan will almost certainly recover just fine from his bout with COVID-19, as nearly everyone does. This means that the country's most popular podcaster will be able to go around saying that he took ivermectin and he recovered in a few days. Everyone should try it!

Just great.

The Supreme Court has finally bestirred itself to issue a ruling on the Texas anti-abortion law that went into effect last night, and long story short, they allowed it to take effect. The vote was 5-4, with John Roberts plus the three liberals dissenting.

A bit of background: The intent of the Texas law is to prohibit abortions after six weeks. However, it's obviously contrary to law for a state to do this, so instead the legislature delegated enforcement of the law to private citizens, who can file lawsuits against anyone who performs or "abets" an abortion after six weeks. In a way, this is not a new approach: many laws have "citizen attorney general" provisions that allow private attorneys to sue for enforcement. However, these laws are constitutional in the first place and the state can enforce them whenever it wishes to; allowing citizen lawsuits is merely a convenient way of expanding enforcement activities. By contrast, delegating this power entirely to citizens solely because the state is forbidden to enforce the law itself is a playground level gambit: "Ha ha, you can't sue us because we're not the ones enforcing the law." As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her blistering dissent, this is little more than half-witted game playing by the state of Texas:

The Act is clearly unconstitutional under existing precedents....The respondents do not even try to argue otherwise. Nor could they: No federal appellate court has upheld such a comprehensive prohibition on abortions before viability under current law. The Texas Legislature was well aware of this binding precedent. To circumvent it, the Legislature took the extraordinary step of enlisting private citizens to do what the State could not.

....Today, the Court finally tells the Nation that it declined to act because, in short, the State’s gambit worked. The structure of the State’s scheme, the Court reasons, raises “complex and novel antecedent procedural questions” that counsel against granting the application, just as the State intended. This is untenable. It cannot be the case that a State can evade federal judicial scrutiny by outsourcing the enforcement of unconstitutional laws to its citizenry.

In essence, the Texas legislature threw up a bunch of chaff that made the law complex and novel for no real reason, and the Supreme Court then rewarded them by saying that it had to withhold judgment because there were so many complex and novel provisions to consider.

All of this was done on the Court's infamous "shadow docket," which permits brief, unsigned rulings without normal hearings. Justice Elena Kagan had this to say:

Today’s ruling illustrates just how far the Court’s “shadow-docket” decisions may depart from the usual principles of appellate process. That ruling, as everyone must agree, is of great consequence. Yet the majority has acted without any guidance from the Court of Appeals—which is right now considering the same issues. It has reviewed only the most cursory party submissions, and then only hastily. And it barely bothers to explain its conclusion—that a challenge to an obviously unconstitutional abortion regulation backed by a wholly unprecedented enforcement scheme is unlikely to prevail. In all these ways, the majority’s decision is emblematic of too much of this Court’s shadow-docket decisionmaking—which every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend. I respectfully dissent.

Needless to say, this law will eventually wend its way through the court system and end up in the Supreme Court for a traditional hearing, possibly joined with other similar laws. At that point, the Court will have an opportunity to reconsider Roe v. Wade and either confirm or overturn it. In the meantime, no one is performing abortions in Texas and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

The state of Texas has passed a law that, in practical terms, outlaws abortion, and the Supreme Court has so far not responded to a request to block it. This makes Texas yet another state where it's either impossible or nearly impossible to procure an abortion.

There's nothing unexpected about this. Ever since last year, when Republicans got a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, abortion activists have been eager to find test cases that will give the Court an excuse to overturn Roe v. Wade. Maybe it will be the Texas law or maybe it will be some other abortion law. But sometime in the next year or two this is going to happen, and there's every reason to think that Roe will then be either completely or largely overturned. At that point, every state will have the authority to pass its own abortion laws, including ones that outright ban abortion.

This prompts me to propose something that's been niggling away at me for a long time. It might be completely stupid, but here it is.

Even if Roe is overturned, there will still be states in which abortion is fully legal. For the sake of conversation, let's pick California, Illinois, and New York as our examples.

So here's my idea. Someone rich sets up an organization, probably in partnership with Planned Parenthood, that arranges for abortions in any state where it's illegal. Basically, you call an 800 number and arrange a date. Maybe there's phone counseling required too. On the date, a car comes to your house and drives you to the nearest airport. You get on a plane to the closest state with liberal abortion laws, where a car is waiting for you when you land. You head off to the clinic and get your abortion. Then a car takes you back and you're home by nightfall. All of this is free of charge—or perhaps on a sliding scale depending on income.

My super rough horseback guess is that this would cost a billion dollars a year. Maybe two or three. This is really not much for a Bezos/Gates/Zuckerberg class of zillionaire for whom reproductive rights are something of a crusade.

I know that I'm being cavalier about a billion dollars, but honestly, I'd be willing to vote for an initiative in California that would fund something like this entirely out of taxpayer pockets and make California the abortion capital of the country.

Is there something I'm missing here? There's a whole lot of us, billionaires and thousandaires alike, who would be willing to fund something like this. Would there be something illegal about soliciting across state lines? Am I miscalculating the cost by a factor of a hundred? Is there some other obvious thing I'm overlooking?

None of this is meant to minimize the preferred solution of simply keeping Roe alive across the country. But given the fact that this might not be possible, is there anything wrong with making plans for what to do if and when it falls? If we can truly guarantee reproductive rights for a few billion dollars a year, surely that's not a very high price to pay?

This is a rare photo of a bee taken from above. It's rare for me, anyway, since I mostly capture them from the side. The shutter speed was 1/8000th of a second, which still wasn't quite enough to freeze the wing movement.