Cats, charts, and politics
This is the Seal Beach pier taken in late morning. There are lots of different ways of taking this picture, and I chose a long exposure without any adjustment for the background. The result is smooth, swirly water and a pure white background from overexposure. I tried a bunch of other variants, including some composites, but this is the one I liked best.
Always remember: pi is not just irrational. It's also transcendental. Omm.
The other day, for no real reason, I was thinking about metric measurements and how often we use them. I'm not thinking of scientific contexts, just everyday uses that most people in the United States accept without thinking much about it. For example:
Any others come to mind? Remember, nothing from the scientific community.
Wikipedia used to confirm that my favorite proverb is "Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics," but I guess somebody must have removed it. Nonetheless, it still is my favorite, and it's apparently something that the Russian military should have paid more attention to:
Thread: on why the Russian advance into Ukraine has bogged down—their logistics suck (especially compared to the USA/Allies during the Iraq invasion). https://t.co/SaxkWjOgo0
— Charlie Stross (@cstross) March 12, 2022
There's an awful lot of amateur military analysis on the web these days, and I can't independently vouch for any of this. But it sounds sort of reasonable and fact-based, and the writer isn't a nutball or anything, so I thought I'd pass it along.
The biggest reason to doubt this analysis is that it's just plain hard to believe that the Russian army could have screwed up something so fundamental. "We'll need to manage supply lines a few hundred miles long" is Warfighting 101, after all. If they really have forgotten that, I have to wonder just what else they've forgotten.
POSTSCRIPT: This reminds me more generally that one of the reasons the US military is the best in the world has nothing to do with its size or technological superiority. It's because we fight actual wars every few years. In the past three decades we've been involved in wars of all types and sizes, from Iraq to Somalia to Kosovo to Afghanistan to Iraq again and then to Libya. Now we're getting some practice in massive, modern economic warfare.
Needless to say, this is not a good reason to fight lots of wars. But there's no question that it gives us an advantage that no one else on the planet has.
I know that measuring COVID cases is no longer considered especially useful, but case rates are still the best early warning metric we have. Here are the case rates for the US and a bunch of European countries:
The US has the lowest case rate among all these countries and it has the lowest test positivity rate. More worrisome, though, is the fact that several big European countries—Germany, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, the UK—have started to spike back up. This may just be an artifact of different testing regimes or it may predict a comeback for Omicron as countries start to eliminate pandemic restrictions. Wait and see.
A few days ago I noted that Sen. Rick Scott¹ had released an "11 Point Plan to Rescue America" which included a proposal to ensure that everyone pays at least some federal income tax. He wants no more of those free riders who pay zero in taxes.
As I mentioned, the problem with this is not that a bunch of folks who pay zero will now have to pay at least one dollar. The problem is that thanks to refundable tax credits like the EITC, lots of poor people pay negative taxes ranging from a few hundred dollars all the way up to thousands of dollars. For those people, a tax of one dollar is an increase of hundreds or thousands of dollars.
So how much does this add up to? The Tax Policy Center crunched the numbers and produced this:
They estimate that Scott's proposal would raise taxes by about $1 trillion over ten years. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy agrees and posted this map of which states will get hit the hardest:
But there's more! Most of the people who pay no income taxes are either college students, disabled, retired, or very poor. Do we really want to raise taxes by thousands of dollars on these people?
And there's even more! As Dana Milbank explains, Scott's plan includes lots of other stuff too:
Suppose, for a moment, that the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the group overseeing the 2022 campaigns of all Democratic senators and Senate candidates, announced that Democrats, if they keep congressional majorities after November’s elections, would enact a plan that would raise taxes on working families more than $1 trillion over 10 years.
Further suppose that this top Democratic official also pledged that the Democratic majority would “sunset” laws that provide Americans with Social Security and Medicare, military retirement benefits, veterans programs, unemployment compensation, student loans, deposit insurance and more. Additionally, the Democrats would...“Gradually end all imports from Communist China.” That’s $600 billion a year in trade.
“Build supply chains that rely solely on American workers and allies.” That would wipe out vast amounts of U.S. foreign investment. “Cut the IRS funding and workforce by 50 percent.” Good luck getting your tax refund. Sell off all “non-essential” government property. Goodbye, national parks? Cut off funds to states “other than disaster relief.” No money for health care, education, housing or roads. “Prohibit debt ceiling increases.” Get ready to default.
Milbank thinks Democrats can make hay with this. It's not as if Scott is just some random fire-breathing backbencher, after all. He's a senior senator who's the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Nor has he backed off his plan, even after Mitch McConnell publicly spanked him for it.
I'm skeptical, but I suppose it might work. I guess it depends on how many Republicans we could sucker into supporting Scott.
¹He's the one who looks eerily like Lex Luthor.
I mentioned yesterday that my new Pixel 6 Pro phone has not just a pretty good normal camera but also an awesome low-light camera. I'll show you an example.
In the early hours of the morning everyone is asleep except me, and the only light in the bedroom is my reading lamp. I can tell you from experience that my regular camera is barely able to take a legible picture in this light, but the Pixel 6 didn't have a big problem:
Not great but not bad. It's perfectly good for everyday purposes like posting to Facebook or something like that. But here's what you get when you turn on Night Sight:
This is much better. It's less shadowy, less noisy, and the colors are more accurate. It's not super sharp, but even on this score it's not bad.
There's no magic in how this is done: Night Sight keeps the shutter open for four seconds. My regular camera could do just as well or better if I used a long shutter speed like that.
But a 4-second exposure with my regular camera would only work if the camera were on a tripod. Even with image stabilization, I couldn't keep it steady for nearly long enough with hand holding. All I'd get is a big blur.
This is where the magic comes in. The Pixel 6 software apparently has some kind of wildly great image stabilization. It works better the steadier the camera is, but even if you're hand holding the phone it does pretty well. I don't know for sure what it's doing, but I suspect it's a combination of super stabilization plus stacking (taking multiple pictures and then merging them).
Now, one thing to keep in mind is that super stabilization will remove camera shake, but it won't remove target shake. That is, if your subject is moving then you'll get a blurred subject. In a picture like this, however, where everyone is snoozing, it works fine.
I was up in the wee hours (thanks, evil dex) and clearing out my RSS feeds when I noticed that the top entry on Memeorandum happened to be something by Francis Fukuyama. He's a smart and interesting guy and I had lots of time on my hands, so I clicked.
It turns out that Fukuyama is an optimist:
Russia is heading for an outright defeat in Ukraine. Russian planning was incompetent, based on a flawed assumption that Ukrainians were favorable to Russia and that their military would collapse immediately following an invasion. Russian soldiers were evidently carrying dress uniforms for their victory parade in Kyiv rather than extra ammo and rations. Putin at this point has committed the bulk of his entire military to this operation—there are no vast reserves of forces he can call up to add to the battle. Russian troops are stuck outside various Ukrainian cities where they face huge supply problems and constant Ukrainian attacks.
Sounds great! After a bit more, including a prediction that Vladimir Putin won't survive the loss, he also suggests that this will be a boon for democracy worldwide:
The invasion has already done huge damage to populists all over the world, who prior to the attack uniformly expressed sympathy for Putin. That includes Matteo Salvini, Jair Bolsonaro, Éric Zemmour, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, and of course Donald Trump. The politics of the war has exposed their openly authoritarian leanings....A Russian defeat will make possible a “new birth of freedom,” and get us out of our funk about the declining state of global democracy. The spirit of 1989 will live on, thanks to a bunch of brave Ukrainians.
Also great! Isn't it nice to read something optimistic these days?
Of course, everything Fukuyama says depends on his initial prediction of Russian defeat. Not very many people seem to agree with this, unless I'm just not reading the right people. But I'm going to hold Fukuyama to this. I sure hope he's right.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency—aka the hated ICE—announced today that it made about 74,000 administrative arrests last year. That's down from 104,000 arrests in 2020.
These are not border detentions, which are handled by the Border Patrol. They are arrests in the interior of the country. This chart shows the number of arrests over the past decade along with the percentage of targets who had prior criminal convictions:
Toward the end of the Obama administration, arrests went down but they were highly targeted toward those with criminal records. Donald Trump increased the annual arrest rate a bit but took the focus away from convicted criminals. In his first year, Joe Biden has reduced the arrest rate and focused even less on convicted criminals.
NOTE: "Criminal conviction" includes all non-immigration offenses. ICE classifies these as Level 1-3 depending on severity:
About half of all arrestees have committed Level 1 offenses.
My old phone spontaneously disintegrated a couple of weeks ago, so I got a new Pixel 6 Pro. I didn't get it for the camera, but it does turn out to have a great camera. This picture of Charlie and Hilbert isn't as sharp as I get with my regular camera, and the resolution isn't as high, but it's still pretty good! And its low-light performance is stunning. Maybe I'll show that to you next week.
BTW, Marian would like me to tell you that our bed isn't always unmade.
