Month: May 2022

You guys are an optimistic bunch!

Only 10% of you think that inflation will continue to rise. As it happens I agree with you: I'm guessing a decline to maybe 8.1% or so.

We'll find out tomorrow if this is wishful thinking or not. As usual, though, I won't get around to posting about it until I wake up, which is usually two or three hours after the new print is released at 5:30 am Pacific time. But I always try to make up for being later than everyone else by providing especially incisive analysis and nice, colorful charts.

This post is a shoutout to my buddy Don, who asks "How does this whole Starlink thing work anyway? What are the Ukrainians getting from us?"

No problem. Each Starlink kit comes with a small dish—referred to by fans as dishy or McDishy—which connects via the Ka-Ku band to Starlink's constellation of satellites in low-Earth orbit:

Dishes can be mounted in lots of different ways but must have a clear view of the sky. Second-generation dishes, like the one shown above, connect via a cable to a Starlink WiFi router:

The router has two ports. One connects to the dish and the other connects to power:

After you've given the dish a few minutes to orient itself, go into your phone's WiFi settings and connect to the Starlink network. If everything has gone right, you're in business.

Each kit costs about $600 unless you want the upgraded business kit, which costs $2,500. Monthly costs are $110 for standard service and $500 for the faster business service. Both include unlimited data usage.

So what is Ukraine getting? The good news is that the Ukrainian army says the small size and portability of Starlink kits is a godsend:

For war-torn Ukraine, Starlink has become an information lifeline....Ukraine’s Digital Transformation Minister Mykhailo Fedorov reported there are more than 10,000 Starlink terminals now operating in Ukraine, according to NBC. Unlike cellphone transmission towers, the satellite dishes used by Ukrainian forces for Starlink reception are small—about 23 inches wide—and readily movable to evade detection and retaliation. A Ukrainian soldier identified as Dima—his last name was withheld—told journalist David Patrikarakos: “Starlink is what changed the war in Ukraine’s favor. Russia went out of its way to blow up all our comms. Now they can’t. Starlink works under Katyusha fire, under artillery fire. It even works in Mariupol.”

The terminals are also resilient and adaptable.....When Russia resorted to electronic countermeasures, Starlink simply pushed out software updates to prevent these, according to Dave Tremper, director of electronic warfare at the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense. Temper said the speed at which Starlink countered the attack was “eye-watering.”

The (somewhat) bad news is that all this Starlink equipment is not a purely charitable donation from the company, as Elon Musk kinda sorta seemed to imply. The Washington Post reported about this a few weeks ago:

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced it has purchased more than 1,330 terminals from SpaceX to send to Ukraine, while the company donated nearly 3,670 terminals and the Internet service itself.

....USAID agreed to purchase closer to 1,500 standard Starlink terminals for $1,500 apiece and to pay an additional $800,000 for transportation costs, documents show, adding up to over $3 million in taxpayer dollars paid to SpaceX for the equipment sent to Ukraine.

In a letter to SpaceX last month outlining the deal, the USAID mission director to Ukraine said the terminals...come with three months of “unlimited data.”

....It is [] unclear whether the price the U.S. government is paying for individual Starlink units matches their typical market price. USAID is paying $1,500 for each standard terminal and the accompanying service, documents show. According to the Starlink website, a standard terminal set costs $600, while the monthly service charge costs $110, plus an additional $100 for shipping and handling.

According to The Verge, Starlink recently unveiled a separate premium service that prices the equipment at $2,500 and the monthly Internet charge at $500, but it remains unclear whether that is what Ukraine has received.

So the US has paid $3 million so far, and the units donated by Starlink come with only three months of data. Nobody seems to know if this is for standard kits or business kits.

There's nothing really wrong with this. Just keep in mind that it's more a discounted price than a pure charitable donation.

This is a drone's eye view of the Port of Los Angeles (top) and the Port of Long Beach (bottom). Today marks the first meeting to discuss a new labor contract for dockworkers on the West Coast, about two-thirds of whom work at either the LA or Long Beach ports. Backlog at the two ports is currently down to 35 ships from a high of 109 back in January, but that could all fall apart if talks fail to conclude by July 1 and dockworkers go on strike.

I got an email yesterday from a regular reader who asked about something I had been mulling over too: If Roe v. Wade is overturned, can Indian tribes open abortion clinics of their own on tribal land? If they did, could they use them to attract patients from nearby states that have banned abortion?

In other words, the casino model but for abortion. Unfortunately, I had already taken a superficial look into this and every hyperlink I clicked just seemed to make the answer even more vague. Here's what I found out:

• Legally, Indian tribes have the sovereign power to make their own decisions on abortion. This will probably end up in court eventually because everything ends up in court eventually, but as near as I can tell there's not much controversy about it.
• In practice, health care on tribal land is provided by the Indian Health Service, a federal agency. However, the IHS is bound by the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding of abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or the health of the mother. In reality, though, IHS clinics and hospitals perform no abortions at all, and given the widespread poverty in Indian Country this means that most native women have no realistic access to abortion.
• To address this, tribes could raise money to build their own abortion clinics, which would provide access to abortion for both their own people and for residents of nearby conservative states.
  .
  (In 2006, the president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, Cecelia Fire Thunder, tried to do exactly this. The tribal council had previously voted unanimously to ban abortion, and after a battle that remains infamous to this day, they impeached her. You will be unsurprised to learn that the council was mostly male. You can read about it here.)
• Needless to say, a program of opening abortion clinics on tribal land depends on whether tribes want to attract outsiders to abortion clinics. This likely varies from tribe to tribe, just as it does from state to state. Some tribes are conservative about reproductive health and have already banned abortion in their own constitutions.
• For what it's worth, there appear to be no Planned Parenthood clinics on tribal land anywhere. There are a few independent clinics here and there that provide abortion services, but their numbers are minuscule.
• Of course, things are changing. Access to abortion may be limited in tribal areas that adjoin conservative states, but if these states ban abortion then tribal access to abortion will essentially be banned too. This is likely to change attitudes. It will also likely change the odds of attracting outside funding for abortion clinics.

This all adds up to a great big "I don't know." But perhaps there are some people who know more about native culture than me and can offer a few informed opinions in comments.

Let's test the economic mettle of my readers. Do you think inflation went up, down, or stayed the same last month? The BLS will report their results on Wednesday at 8:30 am Eastern time.

I mentioned in the previous post that (a) national polls about abortion are useless, and (b) attitudes toward abortion have been very stable. So here's a set of (a) three national polls (b) showing that attitudes toward abortion have become more liberal over the past couple of decades:

These three polls are all reliable and have been surveying abortion for a long time. Unfortunately, their question wording is just different enough that there isn't a single response that's common to all of them. So for GSS and Gallup I showed the share of people who think abortion should be legal in all cases, and for Pew I showed the number who think it should be legal in all or most cases.

The outlier here is GSS, which says that 54% of Americans think abortion should be legal in all cases. This is far different from other polls, which range in the 20-30% region for this question.

Also worth noting is that in polls that break down responses by political party, the reason for the liberalization of views is strictly due to Democrats. Republicans have stayed about the same for the entire time.

Just a quick note to anyone proposing some sort of compromise position on abortion because it polls well: Don't bother. National polls don't matter. The only thing that matters is how well your compromise fares in each state. If it's really popular in, say, Indiana, then maybe there's a chance of getting the Indiana legislature to pass an abortion bill that's more moderate than an outright ban. If it's not, then they won't.

By my rough count, there are maybe a dozen states where there's a chance of passing some kind of compromise. But keep in mind that this includes purplish states where the bad guys might persuade the legislature to make abortion regulations a little tighter. We're not the only ones pushing for whatever we can get, after all.

Anyway, that's it. For the time being, national polls and national support for various abortion proposals don't matter. That's a long-term PR job that neither side has been very good at.¹ Right now, all the fights are at the state level.

¹National attitudes on abortion have been famously stable for the past 50 years. Neither side has made much progress, although there are a few polls that show a bit of pro-choice movement over the past five years.

The nation's press has finally caught on to the nation's shortage of infant formula. That's good.

What's not so good is that they keep mindlessly repeating the same phrase over and over: "The out-of stock percentage has reached 40%." Or, even worse, "40% of baby formula was out of stock in more than 11,000 stores across the country."

What does this mean? That 40% of stores are out of stock? That store shelves have 60% of their usual quantities? That 40% of the time shelves are empty?

None of the above. "Out-of-stock percentage" comes from Datasembly, an industry analyst, and it's a term of art. Specifically, it refers to the percentage of SKUs that are unavailable.¹

SKU is short for stock keeping unit, and it's yet another term of art. Every single product a retailer sells is an individual SKU. A seven ounce Hershey bar is one SKU. A four ounce bar with almonds is a different SKU. A four ounce Cadbury fruit-nut bar is yet another.

In other words, an OOS percentage of 40% means that 40% of infant formula SKUs are out of stock these days. If you normally purchase Similac Advance in the 32-ounce size, you might find that you can't get it. But Similac 360 Total Care in the 8-ounce size might be easily available.

So in the category of news you can use, here's the bottom line:

The good news for harried parents is that that one brand of formula is as good as another, nutritionally — so if their regular brand is out of stock, parents can use another brand as a substitute with no concerns.

“It’s okay to switch between brands if needed. They’re generally the same ingredients, but maybe tweaked in very small, minimal ways, but you can switch between brand names or off-brand names from the supermarkets and the bulk stores.” Tom Herrmann, a spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Health Services, told a local Arizona CBS affiliate.

The formula shortage really is bad news, and it's gotten worse since a major recall earlier this year. But if it's causing you problems, check with your doctor. Unless your infant has special requirements, you can probably just buy whatever's available if your favorite brand is out of stock.

¹If you want to sound effortlessly knowledgeable about this stuff, SKU is pronounced skew in normal conversation. Example: "We did an audit and there were 237 skews that were misidentified in the MRP database." ²

²MRP stands for Material Requirements Planning. It's pronounced Emm Are Pee, and it's the software used for forecasting, BOM management, ordering, and other factory floor operations. Example: "We use Oracle for MRP but we're thinking of doing a big switch to SAP." ³

³BOM stands for Bill of Materials, the list of all the bits and pieces that go into a finished product. Note that MRP can also stand for Manufacturing Resource Planning, which is typically referred to as MRP II. The biggest MRP packages these days go by the name of ERP, or Enterprise Resource Planning. These software suites basically run everything from MRP to financials to human resources and more. Two of the biggest suppliers of ERP software are Oracle and a German company called SAP.

I'm not sure what this is, but an image search suggests it might be a stonecrop of some sort. Maybe a white diamond stonecrop? For those of you who want to take a guess, it's about two feet across and was growing out of a vertical face (mostly just dirt, though, not stone).

After overturning abortion protections, is contraception next for the Supreme Court? A couple of years ago Gallup polled Americans about the moral acceptability of various issues and this is what they came up with:

A Pew poll taken a couple of years before this one came up with an even lower number: nationally, only 4% of the population opposed contraception on moral grounds.

I wish we had state-by-state polling for contraception, but given these national results I'll bet there's not a single state where more than 10% of the population opposes contraception in general. The number is certainly higher for emergency contraception, but oddly, I can't find any survey data about that.

There's no question that emergency contraception is controversial in the same states that oppose abortion, and this is something the Supreme Court will probably rule on eventually. But ordinary contraception? I doubt it's in any trouble. The Supreme Court might pretend that it doesn't care about public opinion, but they're not going to endanger access to something that's approved by 92% of the country. Even Sam Alito isn't that stupid.