Month: January 2022

WHERE'S THE CAT? WHERE'S THE CAT? WHERE'S THE CAT? WHERE'S THE CAT? WHERE'S THE CAT? WHERE'S THE CAT? WHERE'S THE CAT? WHERE'S THE CAT? WHERE'S THE CAT? WHERE'S THE CAT? WHERE'S THE CAT? WHERE'S THE CAT? WHERE'S THE CAT? WHERE'S THE CAT?

Oh wait, here's the cat:

Meet Willow, the new White House cat. Is this what Charlie will look like when he grows up?

In any case, it's good to see that Commander now has someone to take charge and boss him around. Dogs should not be left to their own devices.

Are we in a new housing bubble? I'm generally a fan of ignoring the noise and instead looking at some of the simplest fundamentals, like the price-to-rent ratio and the basic affordability of housing. Right now the price-to-rent ratio is going up, but that may be an artifact of artificially low rents thanks to the pandemic. Even more fundamental is whether housing is eating up a bigger and bigger share of income, and according to the affordability index maintained by Calculated Risk it's not:

In 2006, housing was genuinely getting unaffordable, which explains the explosion of subprime and other dodgy products intended to make homes look cheaper to buyers who couldn't really afford them. Today, however, we see none of that. Looking at the actual cost of buying a house (which takes into account price, interest rates, etc.) nothing is happening at all. Housing affordability improved for a few years starting in 2018 and has now recovered to its usual level of the past decade.

How accurate is this? I can't say for sure, but it seems pretty reasonable. Of course, if interest rates go up—and they will—houses will become less affordable and the home buying frenzy will probably dry up.

It was only a week ago that President Biden was asked about Ukraine and said, more or less, Meh, Putin's gonna do what Putin's gonna do. He'll be sorry in the end.

Was this some kind of diabolical reverse psychology? Because ever since then there's been a whirlwind of activity on Ukraine. Europe is desperately trying to look united and the US is talking about redeploying troops and ships and sending more weapons and everything else that makes the hawks salivate:

The Pentagon is defending its preparations in response to the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, with a top spokesman on Thursday highlighting that the United States has provided millions of dollars in weapons to Kyiv and providing new details about U.S. military forces that could deploy to Eastern Europe to bolster security there.

....The comments came as the U.S. military prepared to potentially send thousands of troops from the United States to Europe. Kirby identified for the first time that elements of the 82nd Airborne Division and XVIII Airborne Corps from Fort Bragg, N.C., the 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell, Ky., and the 4th Infantry Division from Fort Carson, Colo., were among an initial force of 8,500 troops that were put on high alert this week and could be among the first to go.

Other units also have been put on a heightened alert status, Kirby said. He declined to name them but said they are located at bases that include Fort Hood, Tex.; Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state; Fort Polk, La.; and Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona.

....NATO has a response force that includes up to 40,000 troops from member nations, including the United States....Kirby, speaking at the Pentagon, said the United States also could reposition some of the more than 60,000 U.S. troops permanently stationed in Europe.

So what is Putin going to do? His putative desire is to prevent Ukraine from ever joining NATO, and the usual way to address a situation like this is for both sides to publicly remain adamant but for one side to privately provide assurances that NATO won't allow Ukraine to join for, let's say, at least a decade. Or two decades. Whatever.

This worked great to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis,¹ so why shouldn't it work to defuse the Ukraine NATO Crisis? Well, Putin isn't Khrushchev, for one thing, and the world isn't on the brink of nuclear war, for another. So Putin may figure he has more room to act tough.

We'll see. But Putin sure is moving cautiously for a guy who supposedly wants to put the USSR back together. Maybe he's just waiting for his troop deployments to be completed?

¹JFK privately agreed to remove missiles from Turkey if Khrushchev removed his missiles from Cuba. Publicly, Kennedy was a hero for standing up to the Soviets, but six months later he quietly removed the missiles from Turkey, just as promised. It was decades before anyone knew this was how things went down.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis released a bunch of new data this morning and it looks to me like everything is going according to plan. First off, disposable personal income is losing ground to inflation:

With personal savings from the stimulus bills now used up, this means that personal expenditures are also declining:

And despite everything you've heard about workers demanding 20 bucks an hour for flipping burgers, the cost of employment is continuing to decline as well:

All of this puts a damper on demand, which in turn should put a damper on inflation. And with the Fed committed to interest rate increases later in the year, I'd say the risk right now is less inflation than it is killing off the recovery altogether. But I'm not the Fed chairman, am I?

The usual suspects are grousing about President Biden's promise to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court. That's racist. He should nominate whoever is best qualified!

Sure, sure. Everyone knows the truth here: there is no such thing as a "best qualified" nominee. There are dozens of well-qualified nominees, any of whom would do fine on the Supreme Court. All that really matters is that you restrict yourself to this pool.

So if Biden thinks it's high time that a Black woman served on the Supreme Court—and surely it is—he's not bypassing "better qualified" prospects. He's just picking from the pool of qualified candidates, the same way everyone else does. When he finds the person who fits his judicial philosophy best, that's who he'll nominate. And she'll be just as qualified as anyone else.

POSTSCRIPT: It's worth noting that nobody pretends to nominate the "best qualified" person. Unless, that is, you think it's just a wild coincidence that 5½ out of the six sitting justices nominated by Republican presidents are Catholic.

This week I've purchased two camera accessories that I've been resisting for years. The first one is designed for problems like this:

The sky is too damn bright! The foreground is already pretty dark, so I can't reduce the exposure any further, but there are still areas of the clouds that are completely blown out. They're pure white and no amount of Photoshopping will fix it.

The answer is a graduated neutral density filter:

Stick this in front of your lens and the sky is darkened while the foreground is left untouched:

Both of these photos are straight out of the camera, but in the second one there are no more blown out areas and the whole thing can now be edited to taste. For example:

Tomorrow is catblogging day, which gives me a chance to demonstrate the other piece of equipment I bought. I've been resisting this one for upwards of 40 years, but I finally caved in.

Here's another way of looking at the latest GDP numbers:

After the Great Recession of 2008-09, economic stimulus was weak and we never came close to getting back on our previous growth path.

The pandemic recession was just the opposite. We poured stimulus money into the economy and we're now within a hair's breadth of getting back to our previous growth path.

This may end up costing us a year of moderately high inflation. Maybe. But even if it does, surely it was worth it?

Our story so far: East Bumfuck County¹ in Tennessee—about 20 miles away from the site of the Scopes monkey trial—has banned Maus, a Pulitzer-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust. Outrage is universal.

But rural, conservative school districts have been doing this kind of stuff forever. They don't like sexual themes. They don't like nudity. They don't like swearing. Maus is an adult novel that features all of these things. But there are lots of other novels and nonfiction books about the Holocaust. If Maus is too raw for them, how about recommending something else instead of getting dragged into the usual pointless culture war squabble. Wouldn't that be a better use of time?

¹It's really McMinn County, population 50,000, about which Wikipedia says this:

In August 1946, an uprising known as the Battle of Athens erupted when the McMinn County sheriff and several other county officials (most of whom had ties to Memphis political boss E.H. Crump) attempted to fix local elections. A group of World War II veterans launched an armed assault on the jail in Athens, where the county officials had retreated with the ballot boxes. After an exchange of gunfire, the county officials turned over the ballot boxes, and the votes were counted in a public setting.

Economic growth skyrocketed in Q4 of last year:

That's annualized growth over the previous quarter, which is how BEA reports it. On a year-over-year basis, GDP was up 5.5% since the fourth quarter of 2020.

For the whole year, GDP increased 5.7%, the highest growth rate since 1984. However, most of that just made up for the big decline in 2020. The average of the past two years is an annual increase of about 1%.

GDP growth in Q4 was driven neither by personal consumption (up 3.3%) nor by investment in structures (down about 6%). As usual for the past few years, it was largely driven by growth in IP products. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

Seriously?

Fashion has done thin people. It's done fat people. And now, just to blow your mind wide open, it's doing average people. I think fashion folks have a strange idea of what a "last taboo" is.

Speaking of which, how many last taboos are there? Even the briefest scan of Google brings up dozens: incest, bladder weakness, sexual assault, money, death, race, body hair, IQ, human waste, library fines (seriously), salaries, male vulnerability, laziness, the n-word, capitalism, tattoos, Israeli treatment of Palestinians, menopause, pedophilia, ageism, job searching, suicide, atheist politicians, masturbation, incontinence, and pretty much anything else that someone thinks we don't discuss enough.

And yet, somehow all of these things seem to get discussed an awful lot. How can that be if they're all not just taboo, but the very last taboo?