Month: March 2022

As long as we're on the subject of California gasoline, here's an update on the ever-swelling difference between the price of gasoline in California vs. the Lower Atlantic:

When I last checked in on this in 2019, the California premium was a little over a dollar. Three years later it's continued rising and is now about $1.40, with a recent spike to $1.70.

That's far more than you can explain via either inflation or higher gas taxes. In percentage terms, the California premium has gone up from about 10% before the Torrance refinery fire to 40% today.

Back in 2019, gasoline expert Severn Borenstein was unable to figure out why the California premium had gone up so much. He could account for some of it, but there was a stubborn 30-cent difference that defied explanation. He called it the "mystery gas surcharge." Later that year the California Energy Commission published a report about the surcharge and ended up shrugging its collective shoulders: "the primary cause of the residual price increase," the report concluded, "is simply that California’s retail gasoline outlets are charging higher prices."

And that was that. Borenstein says that oil companies have stonewalled any real investigation, so the surcharge remains a mystery. No one knows why the California premium continues to go up and up.

This is the Hollywood/Highland station on the LA subway's Line B. I'm not sure what it's supposed to look like. Does anyone know?

Gasoline prices are up in California:

Experts attributed the rise in local prices to recent trouble at a handful of California oil refineries. PBF Energy refineries in Torrance and Martinez as well as a Valero refinery in Benicia outside San Francisco have experienced problems in recent weeks that caused a hit to gasoline production, driving prices up, said Patrick De Haan, head analyst at GasBuddy.

What bad luck! Refinery shutdowns just as California enters the spring driving season. Who could have predicted that such a thing would happen?

Nothing we can do about it, I guess. But I sure wish the refinery shutdown fairies would go bother some other state for a few decades.

I spent the afternoon today up in LA visiting the Kaiser Permanente bone marrow transplant team to discuss getting the Carvykti CAR-T treatment for my multiple myeloma. These are the same doctors who did my stem cell transplant back in 2015, and the procedure would once again be done at City of Hope in Duarte.

Everything went swimmingly. Nothing is set in stone until the "committee" approves things, but as of now I'm on the waiting list for a slot that would most likely open up in about four months or so. That's sooner than I had expected, so I hope this comes through. Keep your fingers crossed.

This is a foggy autumn morning near Jeanerette, Louisiana. It could probably be a better picture, but I've dicked around with it enough already. I just don't feel like starting over.

Last year home prices increased about 17% according to the Case-Shiller 20-City composite. That's an increase of 12% when adjusted for inflation. After you account for the drop in 30-year fixed mortgage rates, monthly payments—which are what really matter—were up 10%.

That's . . . a lot. Still, payments in 2021 remained lower than pre-housing-boom payments. It was, just barely, manageable.

But the good times might be over. If home prices increase at the same rate this year and mortgage rates hit 5%, average monthly payments will skyrocket by about 40% in 2022:

This is obviously not sustainable, which means that home prices can't possibly increase in 2022 at the same rate as last year.

(We can cross our fingers and hope that mortgage rates don't go up to 5%, but that's a vain hope. Mortgage rates are already at 4.2%, and Jerome Powell has made it clear that (a) the Fed will raise the fed funds rates quite a bit this year, and (b) the Fed will stop net purchases of mortgage securities this month. Some of that has already been priced into mortgage rates, but surely not all of it. Freddie Mac says "mortgage rates should continue to rise over the course of the year," and that sure seems likely to me. The workhorse 30-year fixed mortgage is almost certain to average 5% or more over the rest of this year.)

So one of two things has to happen. If we make the reasonable assumption that buyers can't tolerate a payment increase of more than 10%, either:

• Home prices have to drop 10%.

     or

• Bankers have to start playing big-time games again.

I'm guessing that home prices take a big drop. But I'm always a housing boom pessimist, and maybe I'm not thinking of something. Or maybe this time will be different. Maybe.

Exciting news, word nerds! My copy editor and I got interested in the most widely used spelling of terra cotta, so I went to the Google Ngram Viewer to take a look. Here are the results:

For some reason terra cotta soared in popularity, peaking in 1910, and then plummeted. Terracotta started rising in 1945 and continued through 2000. In 1910, terra cotta was more popular by 7:1. Today, terracotta is more popular by 7:1.

Now, this is an interesting curiosity but obviously not worth posting about unless I have some larger point about the historical description of fired clay pottery. I don't. However, eagle-eyed readers will notice that these results go all the way through 2019. They used to go only through 2008. This is a huge improvement.

I don't know when this happened. Maybe last year. Maybe yesterday. But I didn't know about it before now, and it makes the fabulous Ngram Viewer even more fabulous. You're welcome.

Over the past year I've gotten interested in the steady decline of children's mental health. I haven't looked into it in any depth, though, so I was interested in a survey of the topic by Judith Warner in the Washington Post Magazine yesterday. First off, she takes on the possibility that the crisis is an outgrowth of the COVID-19 pandemic:

That’s an explanation that feels right, particularly if you’re one of the millions of parents trying to balance back-to-normal work expectations with the continued chaos of your school-age children’s lives. It feels especially right if you’re someone whose child, pre-pandemic, seemed basically fine (or fine enough) and then just … wasn’t.

But — as the shrinks say — feelings aren’t facts.

Bottom line: It's not COVID. The pandemic might have made things worse, but this problem has been growing for at least a decade. So how about smartphones and social media?

Theories as to why children’s mental health was so bad pre-covid abound. A prominent subset — popularized most notably by San Diego State psychologist Jean Twenge’s 2017 Atlantic story, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” — blames technology. That theory — regretfully, I’m tempted to add, because it’s one of those ideas that, no matter how wrong, still feel perfectly right — has been extensively refuted.

So it's not down to tech. Here's another guess:

Then there’s the view that part of what we’re seeing is a greater awareness and openness about children’s mental health on the part of a new generation of parents, the first to grow up at a time when it was common for kids to be diagnosed with issues like attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and to come of age in a world where celebrities talked publicly about their struggles with depression or addiction. But most experts feel that this hypothesis doesn’t tell the whole story. Beyond the research evidence, their gut-level take tells them that young people truly have become more anxious and despairing.

So there's more. But what? Warner stops there to tell the rest of her story, which is about politicizing mental health and other topics. In other words, we don't really have a good idea yet of why kids today seem to have much worse mental health problems than previous generations.

FWIW, one of the first things I do when I come across something like this is to see if it's worldwide or mainly an American phenomenon. This is hard to suss out, but a brief survey suggests that it's a problem in Europe too, though possibly not quite as severe. So whatever's causing it, it's something at least moderately universal in rich Western countries.

But what?

The redoubtable Eliot Cohen surveys the evidence that Russia is doing poorly in its war against Ukraine and then laments that too few people are willing to admit that Ukraine is winning:

The West’s biggest obstacle to accepting success [] is that we have become accustomed over the past 20 years to think of our side as being stymied, ineffective, or incompetent. It is time to get beyond that, and consider the facts that we can see.

I don't really buy this on a bunch of different levels:

• Over the last 20 years we have relearned the lesson of Vietnam: the US military is not very good at counterinsurgency. But aside from super-hawks trying to justify huge increases in defense spending, I haven't come across anyone in all that time who doubts our massive global superiority in more conventional forms of warfare.
• There were reasons to think the Russian military had reformed and improved over the past decade. A lot of people are still a little flabbergasted at what's turned out to be something of a Potemkin army.
• Before all of this was making headlines, Ukraine was hardly a poster child for clean living and high efficiency. It was widely viewed as corrupt and ineffectual, both in the military and elsewhere throughout its government.

Put all this together and it's hardly surprising that most analysts are still hedging their bets. But this has nothing to do with Cohen's notional Western inferiority complex. Partly it's because three weeks is not really a long time, but mostly it's thanks to so many analysts being suckered by the oldest gimmick in the American neoconservative playbook: wildly inflated warnings about the threat posed by the Russian military. Cohen ought to be pretty familiar with that.

POSTSCRIPT: Unlike Cohen, I don't think anyone needs to declare Ukraine the winner of this war just yet. Stalemate still seems more likely to me. However, I'm on board for a broader point that Cohen doesn't quite broach: Liberal democracy is in much better shape than many people think. The last few years, featuring first the Great Recession and then Trump and Brexit and Orbán and so forth, have certainly been tough ones for fans of liberal democracy, but I continue to think that they've been blips, not harbingers of the future. The global reaction to Russia's invasion of Ukraine is just another piece of evidence pointing in that direction.

You've all heard of the famous terracotta army assembled by the Qin dynasty emperor Qin Shi Huang at his imperial capital in Xianyang. Well, this is the not-quite-as-famous terracotta rabbit army assembled by the Drum dynasty empress Marian in her imperial capital of Irvine. Someday these two armies will have it out. My money is on the rabbits.