Month: January 2022

Oh come on:

Trucks are taking over American roads, fueled by a rise in pandemic online shopping and disruptions to global supply chains.

Along the way they’re chewing up pavement, adding to congestion and infuriating residents, who must contend with 18-wheelers and delivery trucks as soon as they pull out of their driveways. They’re also causing headaches for state and local governments that face multibillion-dollar bills to finance road upkeep and expansions.

....Truck mileage—tractor trailers and delivery trucks combined—on all roads hit a record of nearly 300 billion miles in the 12 months ended September 2021, roughly 2% above the same period in 2019, before the start of the pandemic, according to data from FTR Transportation Intelligence, a freight forecasting firm.

A month ago every newspaper was full of stories about shortages of truck drivers. Now we're complaining about too many trucks.

Which is it? Can we please get our story straight?

When you're in Rome, every time you glance down a street you're likely to see something historic.

The latest results of a longitudinal study of Tennessee children who attended the state's pre-K program have been released. Here's a summary from the Hechinger Report:

Children who attended Tennessee’s state-funded voluntary pre-K program during the 2009-10 and 2010-11 school years were doing worse than their peers by the end of sixth grade in academic achievement, discipline issues and special education referrals. The trend emerged by the end of third grade and was even more pronounced three years later.

....The first part of the study of Tennessee’s program was released by the Vanderbilt University researchers in 2015. The results, said Farran, were “alarming”: The positive effects of the state-funded pre-K program faded out by the end of kindergarten and turned “slightly negative” by the end of third grade.

I find this very peculiar. Apparently the pre-K program had positive effects through the middle of kindergarten, but then turned negative three years later and even more negative three years after that.

What could possibly cause this? I can imagine positive effects that continue to be positive. I can imagine negative effects that continue to be negative. And I can imagine any kind of effect that eventually flattens out.

But a positive effect that, mysteriously, turns negative years later? What could a pre-K program possibly do that would sit around dormant for years and then suddenly erupt like a time bomb starting around third grade? I can't make any sense out of that.

Something very strange is going on here. But what? The study was an RCT, so the treatment and control groups should have been similar. Was there a difference in how parents responded to the program? Did primary teachers know which kids had been in the program? Or what? This really demands some kind of answer, or, at the very least, a bit of informed speculation.

The Electoral College is biased against Democrats. Ditto for the Senate. The House is gerrymandered against us. And let's not even talk about the judiciary.

I suppose this is all true, though it turns out that gerrymandering has been mostly a wash this cycle. And yet, somehow this hasn't spelled doom for Democrats:

Democrats have controlled the House in four of the last ten congressional sessions and have controlled the Senate in five of the last ten. Here's the makeup of the federal courts:

Finally, since 2000 Democrats have controlled the presidency for 12 years (counting Biden), exactly the same as Republicans.

The Supreme Court is a big problem. No argument there. But Democrats and Republicans have been pretty even everywhere else in the federal government.

So what would it take to do better? Really, only two things:

• An acknowledgement that we aren't going to abolish the Senate or change the Electoral College or make Guam the 54th state or anything else that's pie in the sky.
• Move a little bit toward the center in order to attract votes from people in states like North Carolina, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, and so forth. This doesn't require abandoning any principles or making wholesale changes in our policy preferences. It just requires reining in a few excesses here and there to make us less scary.

I think a lot of people are (or should be) surprised at how even things are and how easy it could be for Democrats to produce a lasting electoral majority. It really wouldn't take a lot.

Apparently Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has learned the "RBG lesson" and plans to retire so that President Biden can nominate a liberal replacement. I sure hope Joe Manchin doesn't suddenly decide this is a nice, high-profile time to start objecting to Biden's judicial picks.

As I recall, the last time a vacancy was open I favored Diane Wood, but at 71 she's out of the running. So who will it be? I'm willing to entertain anyone who doesn't have an Ivy League law degree.

UPDATE: I'd forgotten (or maybe never knew) that Biden promised to nominate a Black woman to any empty seat on the Supreme Court. The leading candidates are apparently Ketanji Brown Jackson (Harvard), Candace Jackson-Akiwumi (Yale), Leondra Kruger (Yale), Sherrilyn Ifill (NYU), Anita Earls (Yale), and Tiffany Cunningham (Harvard). The tyranny of the Ivy League looks likely to continue, but I guess there's still a tiny ray of hope

I just got back from lunch with a friend who insisted that a big part of the rise in grocery prices was due to higher wages for grocery workers. I promised to look this up when I got home, promising him that the BLS "tracks everything." Sure enough, here it is:

Both hourly and weekly earnings jumped at the start of the pandemic, but then settled back down and haven't changed much throughout 2021. There's a spike at the end of the year of about 4%, which may or may not stick. We'll have to wait and see.

While I was out snapping pictures of Hilbert last Friday, I noticed a single daisy in our front garden that was sitting directly in a small patch of sunlight. So I took a picture. Marian tells me that it's not really a daisy, it's a something something, but it certainly seems very daisy-like to me. And pretty.

Bitcoin is crashing!

But don't get smug just yet. It might go up again! If you think of Bitcoin (and NFTs etc.) as collectibles or commodities, you'll understand things much better. They're valuable when they're popular and they lose value when they fall out of favor. Just like stamps or old masters or pork bellies. That's all crypto is.

Hey, what happened to all the sharing buttons at the bottom of each post? I don't know. The plugin I use for those things updated itself last night and removed them. I went into the settings page, and sure enough it listed no active buttons. It told me to drag and drop the ones I wanted, but there was no list of things to choose from.

I'm sure there's an answer to this, but I'm a little pressed for time this morning. If it hasn't magically repaired itself by this afternoon I'll dive back in and see what I can do.

FALSE ALARM! It was all because I had changed my AdBlock settings. Everything is actually fine.

Hmmm:

U.S. manufacturers and other companies that use semiconductors are down to less than five days of inventory for key chips, the Commerce Department said Tuesday, citing the results of a new survey.

So we're OK until Sunday? Or will we then have another five days of inventory?

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said the survey results show the urgency for Congress to approve the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, which includes $52 billion to boost domestic chip production.

Right. That might help or it might not, but in any case it won't help for a few years. New fabs don't spring out of the ground like tulips.

There's no compelling reason to point this out except for one: it's yet more evidence that we need to stop talking about shortages as a "supply chain crisis." They're not. They're a growth problem. Demand has skyrocketed beyond all forecasts and chip manufacturers don't have the capacity to meet it. And that has nothing to do with where the chips are made: nobody was investing in enough capacity a couple of years ago, when it would have mattered.

In any case, here's my (probably foolish) prediction: the Fed is going to put the brakes on expansion and demand will then start to cool off. At that point we will magically have enough chips again. It's the free market at work.