Month: November 2021

This is a lovely little water lily in the Honey Island swamp, just a couple of miles from the Mississippi border. I snapped this picture on the first of the two swamp tours I took.

I had a very mistaken idea at first of how to go about photographing the swamps and bayous. The reading I had done suggested (I thought) that I could just drive around on back roads in swamp country and get plenty of good views. That turned out not to be the case. To really see the swamps you have to take the swamp tours, but of course I had made no reservations for any of the tours. Luckily, I managed to squeeze myself in at the last minute a couple of times, and my vacation was saved.

In a geothermal system—not the kind in Iceland, which confusingly has the same name—pipes are buried underground where they stay at a constant temperature. Refrigerant circulates in the pipes, warming air and water in the winter and cooling it in the summer.

This is the greatest thing in the world: essentially free energy. Oh, you still need pumps to keep the refrigerant circulating, but that's not much. And of course it's entirely carbon free.

It's also expensive, though not wildly so. So why isn't it more popular? Why don't states like California require it for all new residential housing? Am I missing something about its greatness?

Since we have new inflation numbers today, we can also calculate real earnings over the past year. Here they are:

For all workers, hourly earnings are down 1.3% compared to a year ago. For blue-collar workers, hourly earnings are down 0.5%.

Needless to say, this is not so good. At the same time, it also gives the lie to claims of a worker shortage. If there were truly a shortage, wages would be going up, not down.

The news this morning was bad for those of us who continue to think that high inflation is temporary and still under control:

Compared to the previous month, the annualized rate of inflation in October was 11.3%. Compared to a year ago, prices were up 6.2%.

Core inflation (which excludes food and energy) was up 7.2% over the previous month and 4.6% compared to a year ago.

Those are big numbers! But are they temporary, caused by shortages of goods and the injection of lots of COVID-19 money earlier in the year? I continue to think so, but only time will tell. One thing to watch for is whether inflationary expectations respond to this later in the day.

Every state gets two statues as part of the Capitol building's Statuary Hall Collection. One of California's is Junipero Serra, who seems likely to be replaced in the near future. But with whom?

Patt Morrison provides a few guesses here, but leaves out my choice: John Steinbeck. Unfortunately, this would give us two white guys representing a state that's now two-thirds non-white. So probably it ought to be someone else.

One solution might be to put statues on a ten-year rotation instead of trying to find an "eternal" representative. That would put less pressure on each choice since it wouldn't be considered the last chance ever to get a favored choice immortalized in bronze. If that means I have to wait 20 or 30 years for a Steinbeck statue, I can live with that.

This is the skyline of New Orleans near sunset. It was taken while crawling along in my rental car east of the city on Interstate 10.

Why did Elon Musk tell the world that he would sell 10% of his Tesla stock based on the results of a Twitter poll? Scott Galloway says he knows the answer, and my response was "Yeah, yeah. I know the answer, not you."

But it turns out his answer is the same as mine! What a smart guy he is.

Using Twitter results as cloud cover to monetize $TSLA at prices he knows aren’t sustainable without outright telling the market he’s lost faith in its valuation https://t.co/sIaGKhk3Vt

— Scott Galloway (@profgalloway) November 6, 2021

This was my instantaneous thought when I heard about Elon's Twitter poll. But there may be a little more to it than just cover for selling off some stock at a high price. Most CEOs of large corporations sell stock on a schedule so that they avoid charges of insider trading. I don't know if Elon does that, but if he has reason to think that Tesla stock might tank in the near future, he could be in trouble if he "coincidentally" sells a $20 billion chunk of it right now to cover upcoming taxes.

Like I said, this was my guess almost instantly, so I assume that lots of other people are thinking the same thing. And Elon does have a board of directors to report to, which might look askance at a big stock sale that might get the company in trouble. Conversely, they seem to have infinite patience with Elon doing eccentric stuff, so the Twitter poll might not have bothered them.

Then again, who knows? Elon is both a very weird and a very smart guy. Maybe it was just another of his publicity stunts. Anything is possible.

The New York Times helpfully explains the biggest problem with our supply chain these days:

Well, sure. But there's always been a shortage of truckers. You can find a story like this practically every year for the past few decades. In fact, the claimed shortage this year of 80,000 truckers is less than the claimed shortage in many prior years. For example, here's a CNN piece from 2012 claiming a shortage of 200,000 truckers just in the long-haul business.

In any case, if there really is a shortage of truckers, it sure looks like no one is bothering to do much about it:

Back in the 1990s, blue-collar trucking jobs paid a little less than $1,100 per week. That figure then declined for years until finally rising a bit above $1,100 during the strong wage growth of the past few years.

Conversely, weekly earnings for the rest of the blue-collar workforce rose slowly but steadily during the same time. Roughly speaking, truckers earned about 44% more than other blue-collar workers in 1995 but now earn only 23% more.

So is there really a shortage of truckers? Maybe, but I trust wage data a whole lot more than I trust either anecdotes or claims from industry associations. If real wages are going down, both in absolute and relative terms, there's no shortage. It's all but impossible.

So what's really going on? The specific reason this is in the news right now is that we need trucks to haul away containers from our jammed ports. This means we need to dive a little deeper and look at what it means to be a driver for a dedicated port trucking company, the only ones who are in this business. Ryan Johnson explains one big problem:

I’m fortunate enough to be a Teamster — a union driver — an employee paid by the hour. Most port drivers are ‘independent contractors’, leased onto a carrier who is paying them by the load. Whether their load takes two hours, fourteen hours, or three days to complete, they get paid the same.

....So when the coastal ports started getting clogged up last spring due to the impacts of COVID on business everywhere, drivers started refusing to show up. Congestion got so bad that instead of being able to do three loads a day, they could only do one. They took a 2/3 pay cut and most of these drivers were working 12 hours a day or more. While carriers were charging increased pandemic shipping rates, none of those rate increases went to the driver wages.

There's much more of interest here, but it all comes down to the same thing: money. There are more drivers out there, but the port business has gotten so crappy that it's a money-losing proposition for a lot of these guys. Trucking companies could attract them back with higher wages, but that's considered beyond the pale. As with so many employers, they'll whine and complain and claim to be willing to do anything—except pay more. It's an old story.

UPDATE: Here's another factor, which is yet another subset of "money":

Kevin - bizarrely enough, I just got off a call about this exact issue with a client (I'm in PR). One of the big issues is the rise in insurance (400% or so in the last decade), making barriers to entry for new and younger drivers almost cost-prohibitive in many circumstances.

— DowntonShabby (@ButternutLlama) November 9, 2021

I've mostly kept a low profile on the whole CRT thing, largely because I think both sides are acting in bad faith and I don't feel like getting in the middle of it. But today Eric Levitz presents something worth a mordant chuckle from us oldsters.

Naturally this is about Virginia. It turns out that Loudoun County's public schools offered a teacher training unit on diversity last year and someone released the PowerPoint deck used in the class. Here's one of the slides:

Eric Levitz comments:

It’s important to put this PowerPoint in context. Contrary to the insinuations of some anti-CRT agitators, this was not used as an instruction material for children. Nor was it meant to teach “that some races are morally superior to others.” Rather, it is a reductive summation of research on the ways that cultural insensitivity can impair educational outcomes for immigrant children.

It is also, by all appearances, racist.

For a moment, try to ignore the specific recommendations on this slide. They might be right or wrong, and they might be expressed in problematic ways. Instead, just consider the overall objective here: to help teachers become "culturally competent professionals" who are aware of their "assumptions about human behavior, values, biases, preconceived notions, personal limitations, and so forth."

Those of you who are my age—or close to it—will recognize this. Back in the '80s and '90s this kind of thing was considered state-of-the-art advice for corporations and school districts who wanted to fight racism. Managers were taught to recognize that many of the things white people took for granted weren't actually universal. If a Black job prospect didn't make eye contact, for example, it wasn't because he was shifty; it was because Black people consider it rude to lock eyes on someone.

I have no idea if this is actually true, but it might be. Regardless, most of the stuff in these training courses was urged on white managers by Black activists. They were the ones who wanted to educate white folks about the cultural norms of Black people so that they weren't taken as signs of sullenness or low intelligence.

But now a couple of decades have gone by. Lefties consider this sort of guidance to be reductive and racist. Right wingers view it as a sign of wokeness run amok even though it's not even remotely new. And the poor schmoes who wrote this PowerPoint deck are caught in between, confused about why they're suddenly getting beat up from all sides over something that's been commonplace for years with the best of intentions.

But times change. Cultural norms change. Acceptable discourse changes. And not everyone keeps up. Nevertheless, it's useful to at least understand the context and history behind things like this.

I didn't put up any pictures of my Louisiana trip last week, so I think this week will be all Louisiana all the time.

First up is a broad view of a swamp. This turned out to be more difficult than I anticipated because any shot that takes in lots of swamp has so much fiddly little detail that nothing really stands out. It's just a mishmash of trees and plants, which might work on a 2' x 3' enlargement but not so much on a 600 pixel web display.

Still, I took about half a dozen wide shots that I'll share over the next few months. The best of the bunch is probably the one below, which was taken off the shore of Lake Martin and features a resting egret to provide the eye with something to focus on.