Month: April 2022

I met a friend for lunch this afternoon and called his attention to the design of this toilet: The handle and the seat work together to force (men) to lower the seat in order to flush the toilet. I think this is deliberate design (it's an all-gender restroom). My friend thinks it's just an unplanned accident.

We call on you to settle this dispute. Is this a deliberate design or not? You may register your opinion in the poll below. If you have something more to say about this, comments are open as usual.

Tim Cook says that disaster will befall us if Apple is forced to allow users to download apps that aren't sold through Apple's official App Store:

“Taking away a more secure option will leave users with less choice—not more,” Mr. Cook said Tuesday during a speech at the International Association of Privacy Professionals’ summit in Washington, D.C. “And when companies decide to leave the App Store because they want to exploit user data, it could put significant pressure on people to engage with alternate app stores—app stores where their privacy and security may not be protected.”

....“Apple believes in competition,” Mr. Cook said. “But if we are forced to let unvetted apps on to iPhone, the unintended consequences will be profound and when we see that we feel an obligation to speak up and ask policy makers to work with us to advance goals that I truly believe we share without undermining privacy in the process.”

Nice try, Tim, but no one is buying this tale of woe. If you really think that Apple's vetting is the cornerstone of the App Store, all you have to do is cut your commission from 30% to, say, 5%. That would remove any pressure to create new, unvetted stores.

Of course, Apple would make a lot less money if you did that. But if vetting is really so important to you, maybe that's a price you're willing to pay.

But probably not, right?

The Washington Post has a piece today about the return of young children to school after a year and a half at home due to the pandemic. Mostly it's about socialization, with teachers saying that kids are more fidgety, more likely to get into minor scuffles on the playground, and less able to make connections with other kids. But there's also this:

In a normal year, up to half of Christine Jarboe’s first-graders start school knowing how to tie their shoelaces.

But thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, school hasn’t been normal for more than two years....“You’d say, ‘Okay, can you show me how to tie your shoes?’ and most of them would just kind of look at me, like, really confused,” Jarboe said. “They really weren’t sure even where to start.”

....In Fairfax County, Jarboe has kicked off a weekly shoelace tying contest. She provides laces to students who wear Velcro or slip-on footwear, and hands out small hourglass sand timers so children can time themselves. Since Jarboe began the competition two months ago, improvement has been rapid: As of early April, 17 of her 20 students have learned to fashion and dismember double knots with aplomb.

Two things here. First, do schools really teach kids how to tie their shoelaces these days? When did that start? I certainly don't recall that from first grade. I mean, how do these kids get to school in the first place?

Second, why would kids no longer know how to tie their shoelaces after spending a couple of years at home? Did their parents not teach them just because there was a pandemic going on? Did they just not wear shoes because they weren't going anywhere? Or what? This is very strange.

I went to a wedding this weekend! Here's an artsy shot.

Oh, and my old friends at Mother Jones are having a fundraiser. Go give them some money! They deserve it. And be sure to read Monika Bauerlein's letter about why the fundraiser is a little late this year. I confess that I was never a big fan of these really long letters, but this one is worth reading.

The LA Times writes today about the vast army of Twitter bots that fly into action whenever Tesla has some bad news and could use a little PR help. They've been doing this for the past decade:

Over that period, Tesla lost an accumulated $5.7 billion, even as its stock soared and Musk became one of the richest humans on the planet; his net worth is estimated at $275 billion. Operational results can’t justify anything close to the company’s $1-trillion market value, based on any kind of traditional stock-pricing metric.

It's hard to judge Tesla based on earnings since it's still in startup mode—although that story is getting long in the tooth after 13 years. But it's fair to value it based on revenue, which is what the PS ratio does. Here it is for the world's top 20 car companies:

Tesla's PS ratio is 45 times higher than the average of the other 19 biggest car companies. Needless to say, this makes no sense. It might make sense for a company that has some kind of patented product that it has monopoly or semi-monopoly power over, but Tesla doesn't. Quite the opposite: Every car company in the world is building electric cars and Tesla stands to face intense competition over the next decade. Even if they can keep a top position, that wouldn't justify a PS ratio of more than 2.0 at the most.

In other words, Tesla stock is overvalued by at least 10x even on a conservative basis. And for what it's worth, that means Elon Musk's wealth is probably overvalued by about 10x too. That still leaves him with $20-30 billion in Tesla wealth, which is a lot! But it doesn't make him the richest human in the world.

POSTSCRIPT: If there's a car company in the chart that you've never heard of, it's probably Chinese. Tata is Indian.

Here's an interesting thing. I was looking at Joe Biden's approval level trying to figure out what events plausibly produced especially big drops when I happened upon YouGov's tracking poll. Most polls consist of responses from all adults, but the YouGov poll is limited to registered voters. This makes a difference: Gallup's poll, like most others, show that Biden has suffered a 15% drop between inauguration and today. YouGov's poll shows only an 8% drop.

More interestingly, the YouGov poll also makes all its crosstabs freely available:

If these numbers are accurate, Biden's biggest drop has been among women and college dropouts. He's also lost significant support among Hispanics and the elderly.

Conversely, his decline among the young, which conventional wisdom says is large, is actually just average. And his decline among high school grads is quite small.

The four demographics with the biggest declines are interesting. There's nothing that really seems to tie them together. Why have women lost faith in Biden? And why have college dropouts declined far more than any other educational group? And what's going on with the elderly? Biden hasn't done anything to piss them off that I can think of. It's all very odd.

POSTSCRIPT: For some reason, YouGov had a crosstab for men but not for women. What's up with that? So I had to extrapolate the numbers for women on the assumption that the poll had equal numbers of men and women. Thus, the figure for women might be off by a point or two.

POSTSCRIPT 2: So what events plausibly produced especially big drops? I never got a good handle on that. There's a drop in August that's probably caused by the Afghanistan withdrawal. But there's also a drop in July when nothing much was happening. And another drop in December, which I guess might be Omicron related?

People like me talk frequently about the fact that folks who are modestly right of center are obviously scared by a lot of the Democratic stands on culture war issues these days. Perhaps we should dial down the way we talk—or maybe even what we genuinely believe—about these things?

People to my left demand particulars. Just who should we throw under the bus? Trans people? Black people? Poor people? Let's name names.

Fine. Here are a variety of issues that might benefit from a rethinking. I'm not going to say anything dogmatic here. I'd just like to spur discussion. These are in no particular order.

1. Defund the police. I find this one particularly annoying because lefties like to pretend that it's completely ridiculous and there's no evidence that it had any effect. Besides, we explained at length that defund the police didn't really mean defund the police anyway.
   

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   This is sophistry. Unless you're completely out of touch it should be obvious that this is something that puts off a lot of people. And as the old saying goes, when you're explaining you're losing. It's one thing to support police reform; it's quite another for activists to literally want to defund the police and for politicians to mumble into their sandwiches about it instead of having the guts to clearly say if they really support the idea.

2. Critical Race Theory. I'm not quite sure what we should do about this, but what we've done so far doesn't seem to be working. There's not much question that Republicans have cynically used CRT, which is a graduate level legal theory, to tar elementary school education where it's simply not used. But that doesn't mean Republicans haven't hit a nerve.
   

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   Partly, that nerve is simple racism, and we just have to fight that even if it does lose some votes. But there are also legitimate questions about how far we should go in public schools about teaching modern progressive views of systemic racism and white supremacy. There are also legitimate questions of how much to emphasize the heinous parts of American history (primarily slavery and the genocide of indigenous Americans) and how much to emphasize the admirable parts of American history (democracy, economic dynamism, the right side of history during the Cold War, etc.). There are ways of talking about this that might not satisfy Nikole Hannah-Jones but would make sure that slavery and racism got their due in history courses but were not presented as the backbone of our country.

3. Sex ed in lower grades. First off, this is nothing new. It's been a flash point for decades.
   

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   Today's flash point is different, focused mostly on gay and trans issues. It's frankly a little hard for me to accept that sex ed of any sort really needs to be taught much before middle school, but maybe I'm wrong. I haven't been in an elementary school classroom for 50 years, after all. Still, I guess I'd like to hear the argument. I wonder if this is something we should really be supporting at all.

4. 1/6 commission. This one is a little different. When Republicans conduct an investigation they leak like crazy in order to keep media attention alive. But Democrats don't do that much. The 1/6 commission has leaked some stuff, but it's been seldom and low-key. Why is this? Is it because the commission hasn't come up with much new stuff? Or because they're just afraid to be as belligerent as Republicans?
   

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5. Voting laws. Yesterday I casually mentioned that Democrats had tried to pass a couple of bad voting laws and promised to explain what I meant today. Here it is: Both of the voting laws, but especially the Freedom to Vote Act, focused on loads and loads of useless ephemera. Who really cares if voting drop boxes exist? Who cares if early voting is 12 days or 15 days? Who cares if voters are required to vote in the correct precinct?
   

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   Republicans complain that these are things that were put in place because of the unique demands of the COVID pandemic and are now being made permanent. And they're right. More importantly, these kinds of provisions (a) have virtually no effect on partisan turnout, (b) are not very popular, and (c) never had the slightest chance of getting Republican support. It was political malpractice to introduce these bills. A much better bet would have been a narrower law that focused on something voters really do care about: bills that give red states the ability to overturn, or at least affect, the official vote count after it's finished. When people hear about this they don't like it. And it's even possible that banning it might draw some Republican support. This is what Democrats should have done from the start.

6. Afghanistan withdrawal. Why were liberals so afraid to rally around their president on this? The evidence on the ground gives plenty of support for the idea that it was handled pretty well under the circumstances. And Biden showed some guts by sticking to his guns on a liberal priority even under withering criticism. But Democrats failed to loudly support Biden. That was a huge mistake.
   

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7. Trans issues. For the most part, liberal support for trans issues is fine even if it costs some votes—which is questionable anyway. But the trans lobby is ruthless and extreme. For example, should we really support without question allowing trans women to compete in women's sports, even given the plain evidence that this can produce unfair results? Should we shout down women who think that growing up female gives them a different perspective than someone who transitioned later in life—especially if the transition is after puberty? Is there really no legitimate concern about transitioning children who are likely too young to know for certain what their long-term gender identity is likely to be?
   

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   FWIW, I belong to several lefty listservs and I can tell you without question that there are plenty of lefties who are willing to talk about this stuff in private. They generally believe that the trans lobby has forced too many extremist positions on liberals and that this likely hurts them with voters.¹ And they really, really hate language that frames even the least divergence from extreme views as "murdering" trans people.

This is just half a dozen issues off the top of my head. There are others. But this is representative of the kinds of things that I think probably hurt liberals and that could be dialed down without really betraying liberal principles. Discuss.

In addition, it's worth noting that of course many of these things haven't been spread organically but are heavily pushed by Fox News and the Republican establishment. So what? They're pushing things they think will help them, and that's what partisans do. We have to accept the reality of how this affects voters regardless of where it comes from.

In a nutshell, both parties want to focus the media spotlight on things that are good for them and bad for the other guys. So Democrats need to do two things. First, settle on topics that are less policy oriented and have a big emotional charge. That means finding issues of our own that scare centrists about Republicans. Second, we need to stop giving Republicans such easy layups on their emotionally charged attacks. That means easing up on some of our most extreme positions.

¹However, there are also plenty of lefties on these chat groups who disagree. And no one has an awful lot of evidence about how much, if at all, this affects centrist voters. (Though it probably boosts turnout among strong conservatives.)

Today is inflation day, and the BLS reports that the US inflation rate rose considerably less than than the European rate jump announced a few days ago. But it still went up a lot. The headline inflation rate increased from 7.9% in February to 8.5% in March:

(Note that this chart shows headline CPI, which is measured year over year. This is the normal way of looking at inflation.)

Gasoline alone was responsible for more than half of the increase in the headline rate from February to March. Among core prices, services rose at an annualized rate of 7.4% while commodities dropped -4.7%. Among non-core prices, food rose at an annualized rate of 12.7% while energy rose a whopping 250%.

On a year-over-year basis, services rose 4.7% and commodities increased 11.7%. Among non-core prices, food rose 8.8% while energy rose 32%.

Average weekly earnings, adjusted for inflation, declined -1.1% from February to March. That's an annualized rate of about -12.4%. The yearly decline was -3.6%.

Team Transitory continued to take a hit last month as headline inflation growth accelerated—though this was largely due to gasoline prices. Core inflation growth slowed down, which should work its way through to headline inflation before long.

In a few hours the Commerce Department will release inflation figures for March, something that we're all waiting for with bated breath.

While we await this momentous event, here's an inflation chart inspired by Brad Polumbo. However, unlike his, which shows year-over-year inflation, mine is based on the inflation rate from month to month. Why? I don't usually do this, but if you want to look at the impetus produced by events, you need to look solely at inflation levels following the event. The spending from the American Rescue Plan, for example, might be responsible for higher inflation, but it's certainly not responsible for all the inflation that happened in the 11 months before it was passed. However, that inflation is baked into the year-over-year figures.

So without further ado, here it is:¹

I'm using core inflation, which doesn't include food or energy, because the Fed believes this is a better measure of underlying inflationary pressure. And I drew the line for the American Rescue Plan at April 1, since that's the earliest date the spending could plausibly have had an effect.

Oddly, this chart shows inflation levels rising after the passage of the $900 billion Coronavirus Response Act but declining after the passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Act. Is that possible?

Sure, because there's a lag between spending and inflation. Normally a spending impetus takes a few months to have a significant effect and then produces temporary high inflation before fading out. CRA fits that model through August 2021 but never fades fully out because then ARP takes over. On a full year basis, CRA produced three months of very high inflation but much lower levels for the other nine months. ARP appears to produce steadily high inflation rates starting in October.

Here's a different way of looking at it. We can roughly say that CRA is responsible for the months January through August. On an annualized basis that's an inflation rate of 5.1%

Likewise, ARP is responsible for the months September though March (so far). On an annualized basis that's an inflation rate of 5.4%. That's not a big difference, which is odd since ARP was more than twice the size of CRA.

But of course spending isn't the entire cause of inflation increases. Supply chain problems are also part of it, and it may be that supply chain problems started to ease in the second half of 2021. Consumer spending also plays a role, and that also slowed considerably in the second half of 2021 as savings accumulated from the various rescue acts were spent down.

In other words, it's hard to pin down just how much ARP affected the inflation rate. I think this chart is consistent with other evidence that it's around 2-3%, which should fade away by late spring. This will leave us with a core inflation rate of around 3% or so. It could even be less if supply chain problems continue to improve.

Or I could be completely wrong. For one thing, I harbor a deep fear that COVID might finally explode in China, which would decimate supply chains beyond anything we've seen before. I sure hope this is just a fantastical fear on my part and it never happens. Somehow, though, it seems like every country eventually has its turn in the barrel.

¹Now that the latest CPI figures are out, I've updated the chart to show core inflation through March.

Voting rights are in the news again thanks to Andy Kroll's semi-tick-tock in Rolling Stone about the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, both of which failed to pass earlier this year because Republicans filibustered them.

The whole story is strange. Everyone agrees that there was never any chance of getting support from ten Republicans in order to pass the bills under normal order with 60 votes. Passage depended entirely on getting all 50 Democrats to change the filibuster rules, which would allow both measures to pass with 50 votes. That effort failed, and Kroll does his best to frame the defeat as mainly due to Sen. Joe Manchin gradually agreeing to modify the filibuster rules but then betraying the party in the end by changing his mind and voting against it.

But regardless of whether you like Joe Manchin or not, no fair-minded reading of the story supports this. What you have is a small handful of senators who spent months lobbying Manchin and repeatedly coming away with the "impression" that maybe he was coming along. But it looks to me like this was mostly wishful thinking. Manchin was never on board with modifying the filibuster.

And it never mattered anyway: For some reason nobody bothered lobbying Sen. Kyrsten Sinema about the filibuster even though her position was, if anything, more adamantine than Manchin's. She was never a Yes vote and never gave even the slightest hope that she might become one.

For what it's worth, I think Joe Biden and his White House staff knew this perfectly well, which is why they never put much effort into the two voting rights bills. It was obvious to them a year ago that neither of them could pass, and they never let themselves get fooled by ambiguous comments here and there from Manchin.

That's my take, anyway. Basically, Dems wrote a couple of bad bills and then lost themselves in rose-colored confidence that they could somehow get a couple of votes that they were never close to getting. It was bad politics on practically every level.