Month: March 2022

This week's picture captures a short break from the bedtime follies that we endure every night. As you can see, toys are sprinkled all over the bed, and the cats compete with each other to attack them. Charlie usually wins.

This picture also shows how photogenic Charlie is. He looks great, just like he does in every picture. Hilbert is a different story. His face, and his eyes in particular, don't look good in flash photography. This is one of the best of the bunch from last night, and it's still not very good.

Over at Vox today we have yet another piece about "America’s housing crisis." The author proposes a "radical" solution (land taxes) that's not especially radical, but put that aside. The real issue here is that America doesn't have a housing crisis.

I'm not sure why, but I find the new urbanists one of the most annoying groups in the progressive pantheon. It's not because they're wrong, precisely, or because they're meanspirited, or anything like that. There's just a disconnect from reality that seems to motivate so much of what they say and do.

Take America's housing crisis. Here it is:

We have as much housing per household as we had in 2001. And just in case you think I'm cheating with this "household" business, here it is per person:

We have more housing per capita than we did in 2001.

Now, there are places—California is ground zero—where the amount of housing per person has indeed gone down. But is this a housing crisis? That depends on what you think the "right" amount of housing is. Urbanists consider it obvious that the right amount is about 4 million more than we have, but the people of California have made it crystal clear over the years that they disagree. They don't want more housing.

So selfish of them! Drawing up the ladder after they've gotten on board! Maybe so, but another word for this phenomenon is "democracy." People who live in a place get to vote for the policies they like, and Californians have decided they don't really want more people. Roughly speaking, California hosts about 10% of the population of the country on less than 1% of the land (the 50-mile-wide stretch from San Francisco to San Diego), and Californians think that's enough.

And anyway, California is still a very nice place. If we build 4 million more housing units, what will happen? Rents will go down and lots of people will resume migrating here. Then rents will go back up and we'll have yet another crisis. What's the point?

But this still doesn't really explain why I find the urbanists annoying. Here's my real beef: they are obsessed with big cities. They spend nearly all their time trying to convince us that big, crowded cities should become even bigger and more crowded. Or that suburbs should become big and crowded, just like cities. This is a fantastic waste of time. Residents of big cities don't want to become more crowded and resident of suburbs don't want to become more like cities. They will fight you forever on this. Absolutely forever. The game isn't worth the candle, especially when there are so many other far more useful things we could be devoting our energy to.

So why waste time on this? The urbanists will haul out studies about economic gains, environmental impacts, mass transit, etc., but they massively oversell those benefits and completely ignore the downsides of crowding. Instead, they should be spending approximately 100% of their time promoting policies that would get people out of big cities and into smaller cities that have room to grow.

Honestly, we don't need a bigger New York or a bigger Los Angeles. But we might need a bigger Flagstaff or a bigger Knoxville. That should be the central goal of the urbanists. I don't understand why it isn't.

The New York Times reports today on tax season:

Decades of Neglect Leave I.R.S. in Tax Season ‘Chaos’

"Neglect" is the opposite of what's happened, as the body of the story makes clear:

Tax-averse Republicans, who have spent years cutting the agency’s budget, have seized on the I.R.S.’s problems as proof it should not be given more money or responsibility, with at least one lawmaker calling for the tax collector to be abolished.

Much of the agency’s current woes can be traced to those budget cuts, which have eroded the agency’s ability to function at a critical moment. Staffing shortages and antiquated technology have collided with a pandemic that kept much of the agency’s work force at home while the I.R.S. was turned into an economic relief spigot responsible for churning out checks and other stimulus payments to millions of Americans.

"Tax averse" is a little better, but still doesn't capture what's really happened to the IRS. "Deliberate destruction" is more like it. Republicans have long had a goal of hollowing out the IRS so that it can't afford to audit the rich taxpayers who are the base of the party.¹ As a bonus, this also guarantees that ordinary taxpayers get lousy service, which makes them generally pissed off about taxes.

This is first-degree murder with malice aforethought. It's a carefully crafted strategy and so far it's worked great.

¹What, you thought that nutcase MAGAnauts were the base of the party? Ha ha ha. No. Take a look at what Republicans do, not what they say. Rich people are still the real base of the party.

The American economy gained a stellar 678,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 588,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate fell yet again to 3.8%.

There's no bad news in this report. Employment increased by more than 500,000 jobs, unemployment went down by 243,000, the labor force grew, and the participation rate went up.

Even wage growth picked up a little bit. Accounting for inflation, blue-collar earnings were about flat, which is nothing to write home about but still better than the declines we've seen over the past few months.

Wages have been slowly trending downward since the start of 2021, but the good news is that they're still about 4% higher than pre-pandemic wages.

There is something peculiar about the photojournalism of the Ukraine war. I've seen pictures of missiles arcing through the sky. I've seen pictures of blasted out buildings. I've seen pictures of refugees piling into trains. I've seen pictures of Russian soldiers walking through the empty streets of Kherson. I've seen satellite pictures of Russian convoys. I've seen maps showing the progress of Russian troops. I've seen videos of Volodymyr Zelensky pleading for more Western help.

But I haven't seen a single picture of actual battle. Not one.

Have I just missed this somehow? Or are there really no photographers at all in the vicinity of Ukranian troops as they fight the Russian invasion force? Not even around the cities? No embeds? No nothing?

What's going on?

The price of vegetable oil has shot up by an average of two-thirds since the start of the pandemic. Here's the trend over the past two years:

Ukraine is a fairly big exporter of both raw grain and seed oils, and a long, grinding war might well have a big effect on supplies of both. This is bad for Ukraine, of course, but also bad for poor countries that are already feeling the pinch of high prices for vegetable oils.

A couple of weeks ago we were at the San Antonio Regional Hospital in Upland, where Marian was taking care of some administrative business for a relative. I stayed in the car and randomly shot pictures, including a series of high-shutter-speed photos of the fountain out front. This is one of them.

I suppose it was inevitable:

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is scrutinizing creators of nonfungible tokens and the crypto exchanges where they trade to determine whether some of the assets run afoul of the agency’s rules, according to people familiar with the matter.

....As part of its review, the SEC is seeking information on so-called fractional NFTs, which involve breaking down the assets into units that can be easily bought and sold, said the people, who asked not to be named as the investigation hasn’t been disclosed publicly.

First we had CDOs, then mortgage-backed CDOs, then synthetic CDOs, and then the financial system collapsed. Now, as a way to cure the financial boredom of the past decade, we're moving toward NFT-based CDOs. That's the obvious next step after you've sliced and diced all your NFTs, right? Put 'em in tranches and start selling them off as high-return AAA securities.

The mind reels. My mind does, anyway.

Vladimir Putin dialed up the president of France earlier today to let him know about Russia's plans for Ukraine:

Vladimir Putin has told Emmanuel Macron that Kyiv’s “refusal to accept Russia’s conditions” means “the worst is still to come” in Ukraine, saying Moscow was aiming to take “full control” by diplomatic or military means, according to the Elysée.

....Putin – who initiated the call – repeated that Moscow’s objective was the “neutralisation, demilitarisation and de-nazification” of Ukraine, the official said, adding that Macron had responded that Putin was making a “major mistake” that would cost Russia dearly over the long term.

"Full control." That's clear enough, isn't it?

In a court filing seeking access to emails between President Trump and attorney John Eastman about the 2020 election, the January 6 Committee tipped its hand:

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol said on Wednesday that there was enough evidence to conclude that former President Donald J. Trump and some of his allies might have conspired to commit fraud and obstruction by misleading Americans about the outcome of the 2020 election and attempting to overturn the result.

....The evidence gathered by the committee “provides, at minimum, a good-faith basis for concluding that President Trump has violated” the obstruction count, the filing, written by Douglas N. Letter, the general counsel of the House, said, adding: “The select committee also has a good-faith basis for concluding that the president and members of his campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States.”

Of course, it will be the Department of Justice that ultimately decides what to do with all this evidence, which means a trial is a long way off even if they decide to go ahead with the charges against Trump.

Personally, I'd love to see Trump on trial over this stuff. He should be. But where are they going to round up 12 impartial jurors? The moon?