Month: September 2021

Here's the latest on l'affaire submarine:

Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Sunday it had “deep and grave” concerns about the diesel-powered submarines it planned to buy from France — and that Paris knew this well before Canberra abruptly cancelled that deal in favor of sharing nuclear submarine technology with the United States and Britain.

Maybe so. But something that's gotten oddly little attention is that the French submarine fleet is entirely nuclear powered. The Australian project was indeed going poorly, but that was largely because the Aussies wanted diesel-powered subs and converting the French Attack-class boats to diesel engines turned out to be more fraught than anyone had predicted. If nuclear propulsion and a faster schedule had really been at the bottom of Australian concerns there was a pretty easy solution at hand: ditch the reconfiguration and buy off-the-shelf nuke-powered Attack-class subs.

It's true that US Virginia-class subs are technologically more advanced than anything France can offer, but not by enough to really be the driver of the Australian decision. This is why France is so put off by the abrupt switch: they know perfectly well that problems with construction weren't a big factor. The whole thing is largely symbolic, demonstrating that the US, UK, and Australia want to form a close alliance in the western Pacific that very publicly excludes France. Especially since it came without warning, it's hard to think of anything that could have been more insulting.

All three AUKUS members were surely well aware of this. So either they decided the strategic benefits were worth the cost or else they actively wanted to insult the French. But which was it?

Immigration, illegal and otherwise, is not one of my hot buttons. However, I do believe that countries have an obligation to control their borders, and I also recognize that immigration is a hot button for lots of people. That said, here are the latest figures for encounters along the border with Mexico:

Even those of us who don't feel strongly about immigration can surely understand that a spike of this magnitude requires a response of some kind, something that the Biden administration doesn't seem much interested in providing. I find this a bit of a mystery. Is Biden simply assuming that the spike will be old news by the time midterms roll around next year? Does he not care much about the border? Or does he simply not have any idea what to do about the current ayslum-driven spike?

UPDATE: The original version of the chart showed the wrong dates. Sorry about that. It's correct now.

As long as poor Hopper has to stay in her cone, she gets special treatment. That includes her own food dish, her own water dish, and Friday catblogging every week.

Hilbert is not happy with this since he thinks he's the one who's truly suffering. He remains bizarrely nervous around Hopper, as if the cone has transformed her into something very strange and possibly dangerous. I really have no idea what's going on. She can't smell all that much different, can she?

Anyway, here she is sitting on my lap and demanding that I pet her and scratch her tummy. Which I did.

Tyler Cowen links to the course description for "Foundations of Blockchains" by Columbia's Tim Roughgarden:

Perhaps this course will also serve as a partial corrective to the misguided coverage and discussion of blockchains in a typical mainstream media article or water cooler conversation, which seems bizarrely stuck in 2013 (focused almost entirely on Bitcoin, its environmental impact, the use case of payments, Silk Road, etc.). An enormous number of people, including a majority of computer science researchers and academics, have yet to grok the modern vision of blockchains: a new computing paradigm that will enable the next incarnation of the Internet and the Web, along with an entirely new generation of applications.

I would be delighted to read the layman's version of this, free of hype and full of serious applications for the future. So I'll open this to the hive mind: has anybody written such a thing?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its statewide employment data today, which allows us to look once again at unemployment rates in states that stopped paying expanded UI benefits in June. Did this get people back to work faster? Did unemployment go down more in states that stopped the expanded benefits?

Last month the evidence suggested that stopping UI benefits early had no effect. Here's the latest data using unemployment figures from May through August:

• States that ended benefits early: -2.3 percentage points
• States that continued benefits: -3.4 percentage points

Once again, there's no effect. In fact, states that stopped UI benefits early performed worse than states that continued benefits.

For what it's worth, if you look at the percent difference instead of the percentage point difference, both sets of states saw the same decline in unemployment, about 5.1%.

There is some evidence from other studies that job seekers were more likely to find a job in states that stopped UI benefits early, but there's still no evidence that either employment levels or unemployment rates responded. Overall, it's hard to see that stopping UI benefits early had much effect at all on the labor market.

This is a lovely picture of the Huntington Beach pier at sunset, a photographic favorite. I found this image¹ a couple of days ago when I was looking for a picture I had taken last November of the "Stop the Steal" nutbags rallying in Huntington Beach. I didn't remember taking any pictures of the pier, but of course I did. If you're at the pier when the sun is going down, it's almost impossible to resist.

¹Two images, actually, stitched together in Photoshop.

Five years ago Australia cut a deal with France to supply them with $66 billion worth of diesel-powered submarines. Today, they suddenly announced that they were pulling out of the deal and would instead be working with the US and UK on a program to supply them with nuclear-propulsion subs. The French are not happy about this:

The world is a jungle. France has just been reminded this bitter truth by the way the US and the UK have stabbed her in the back in Australia. C’est la vie.

— Gérard Araud (@GerardAraud) September 15, 2021

All the reporting I've seen says that it was Australia that initiated talks with the US and Britain, so if anyone stabbed France in the back it would seem to be Australia. But I guess it's easier to blame countries you don't like that much in the first place.

The US has never shared its nuclear propulsion tech with anyone aside from the UK, so this agreement basically puts Australia on the top of the heap of US allies. Naturally this irked the French, who put out an official statement:

The American choice to exclude a European ally and partner such as France from a structuring partnership with Australia, at a time when we are facing unprecedented challenges in the Indo-Pacific region, whether in terms of our values or in terms of respect for multilateralism based on the rule of law, shows a lack of coherence that France can only note and regret.

I'm sure more will be leaked shortly about what was behind this specific deal, but generally speaking it's little more than a dramatic illustration of something that's been obvious for a long time: Australia is simply a more reliable ally than anyone in continental Europe. And that's become more and more true over time as Europe's interests steadily diverge from ours.

This is not a judgment about whose foreign policy is better or more farsighted. It's just acknowledging a fact. Europe is reluctant to challenge China because they're more economically dependent on them than we are. They're friendlier toward Russia because Russia is right next door. Most of them (though not France) are unwilling to meet their NATO funding obligations. Beyond that, there always seems to be endless squabbling over trade and security issues of all kinds and sizes. France, needless to say, is one of the worst squabblers.

It's entirely understandable that Europe chafes at the idea that they should accept junior status and let the US call the shots. At the same time, they can hardly blame the US for wanting allies who have a similar view of the world. Australia does, and increasingly Europe doesn't.

This is hardly a sign of some kind of huge breakdown in US-European relations. It's not. It's just one more straw on the camel's back. At some point, though, Europe needs to make up its mind. Do they want to do what they continually threaten to do, namely build a genuinely formidable pan-European military force? Or do they want to continue along the fractured, militarily useless path they're on? If the former, they can call their own shots. If the latter, they have to accept that the US is going to provide the lead whether they like it or not.

So far they haven't decided. But they can't put it off forever.

This is apropos of nothing in particular. It just happened to come up in conversation the other day:

The US suicide rate has been increasing since 2000, and it's a worrisome trend. On the other hand, suicide is still less common than it was during the entire first half of the 20th century.

So is suicide "higher than normal"? It depends on whether normal is the first or second half of the 20th century, and that's impossible to say. On the other hand, we can say that the US trend is quite different from that of our peer countries:

In 1990 the US suicide rate was middle of the pack. Today it's at the top and still rising. Why?

I don't know who this dude is. We were out and about on some errand or another and Marian was driving while I randomly snapped pictures out my window. I caught this guy waiting for the pedestrian signal to change and decided he had sort of an interesting look to him. So now he's our lunchtime photo.

In their new book, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa report that Gen. Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was worried that Donald Trump might do something deranged after losing the 2020 election. So he did two things.

First, he called the head of China's military to assure him that the US was stable and had no plans to start a war. Second, he convened his senior officers and told them to let him know if they received orders to launch nuclear weapons. This came after a phone call with Nancy Pelosi following the January 6 insurrection in which they both agreed that Trump's mental capacity had deteriorated and he was going crazy.

The big question here is whether Milley's actions violated the US tradition of civilian control of the military. Was he seizing control from Trump, the legally elected commander-in-chief?

On the calls to China, I don't see it. It's routine for people in Milley's position to speak privately with their counterparts in other countries, and all Milley did was try to reassure Li Zuocheng that he had no need to worry about a surprise attack. That doesn't strike me as being outside his lane, especially taking into account that Trump really was acting so erratically that even his own staff was deeply worried about him. Reassuring both allies and adversaries is part of the territory under circumstances like this.

The call with Pelosi and the order to his senior officers is a different thing entirely. The former could easily be construed as a conspiracy to oppose the president, and the latter could just as easily be construed as direct interference in the president's legal authority over nuclear weapons.

At the same time, what do you do if you honestly think the president is acting so bizarrely that he can't be trusted? Just sit around and stew about it? There are, unfortunately, things that simply aren't black and white.

My tentative sense is that (a) Milley did the right thing, but (b) he needed to resign afterward. That's a heavy price, but if the situation is that serious you need to demonstrate clearly that it's a price you're willing to pay. A personal sacrifice sends the message that you take civilian control of the military seriously even if you felt you had to interfere with it temporarily under extraordinary circumstances.