Cats, charts, and politics
Can someone tell me what's going on with the Russian army? Nothing I've read truly seems to explain its epic incompetence. I mean, I know all about the maintenance issues and the logistics and the pallets and all that stuff, but Russia's operational problems go way beyond that. They seem literally unable to accomplish anything.
The longer this goes on, the more boggled I am. Is US intelligence equally boggled?
Here's a look at how many abortions are likely to be halted after Roe v. Wade is overturned and conservative red states have passed laws outlawing abortion (red bars):
I've counted any state with a 50% majority opposed to "all or most" abortions as a state likely to pass a law banning all or most abortions. As you might guess, most of these states have already passed laws making it difficult to get abortions, so they don't account for that many to begin with. They make up about 22% of the 800,000 abortions performed each year, with half of that in Texas and Georgia alone.
Obviously there are other states, like North Carolina and Florida, that might ban abortion as well, even though majorities don't support it. And there are some in the opposite category. Nevertheless, if we want to provide abortion services to everyone who's cut off from them by the Supreme Court, this gives us a rough baseline number: about 3,000 per week. Add in another couple thousand who have already been partly cut off, and then figure an average out-of-state abortion costs about $1,500, and we're talking something like $7-8 million per week.
If progressive organizations—and progressive billionaires—are serious about this, it's not really very much money at all.
Hilbert jumped onto our marble coffee table this morning and began rolling around deliriously. This attracted the attention of the camera, and eventually it attracted the attention of another cat, too.
The American economy gained 428,000 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 338,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate remained at 3.6%.
Among blue-collar workers, weekly wages were up 0.37% from last month. That's an annual rate of 4.6%, which is about -4% adjusted for inflation.
Among all workers, weekly wages were up 0.31% from last month. That's an annual rate of 3.9%, which is about -4.6% adjusted for inflation.
On a yearly basis, blue-collar wages were up 5.5%, which is about -3% adjusted for inflation. Among all workers, wages were up 4.6%, which is about -3.9% adjusted for inflation.
Here is the April unemployment rate for various races and education levels.
Well, partially. After four weeks of adjustments to my bionic lenses, they are as good as they're going to get. Yesterday was Phase One of locking them permanently into place, and next week will be Phase Two. At that point, the whole process will be done and I'll have fully adjusted artificial lenses in both eyes.
Thanks to a combination of dilation fluid and lens adjustment, my eyesight is pretty fuzzy for a day or two after treatment, which is why I didn't write anything yesterday. Today might be a little slow too since everything is a little blurry and shimmery at the moment. But soon it will all be over and my eyesight will be . . .
What? Only time will tell.
Today I have remarkable photographic news.
It starts pretty slow. Monday was dex day, so I decided to go out and look for the Milky Way again. I took it a little more seriously this time, driving out to Joshua Tree for some good night sky, but in the event I stopped a little short at a place called Whitewater Preserve. As it turned out, the night sky was good but not great on Monday, and the Milky Way was down very near the horizon. Since it was also in the southeast, that put it right above the light dome from Palm Springs. This is the best I could get:
Even with a lot of editing in Photoshop, the light from Palm Springs was too strong to allow much of a view. You can see a bit of the galactic core, but that's it.
So I drove back down and then remembered that I had forgotten to give my cell phone a try. It's a Pixel 6 with "Night Sight" and I was curious to see what I could get from it. So I retrieved my cell phone bracket, got the phone attached to the tripod, and pressed the button. At that point, I was out from behind the shadow of the mountains and even closer to Palm Springs, which should have made things even worse. But after chugging along for four minutes, here's what it gave me:
This has also been edited, but it's pretty remarkable nonetheless. The phone seems to expose different areas separately, which is how there's a bit of color and detail in the foreground.
The resolution of the phone is still considerably worse than my camera, and if I could ever figure out how to do image stacking properly I could get better results from the camera. Regardless, though, this is a surprisingly lovely picture from a tiny cell phone.
And here's another thing. The wind was so strong at the foot of the mountain that it kept blowing the tripod over. But the software in the camera was smart enough to know that whatever it was seeing after it got knocked over was obviously not meant to be part of the picture. So it removed it. This meant that it only got about 90 seconds of light capture instead of four minutes, but even that was enough to produce adequate results:
This is no great shakes, but it's not ruined either. All in all, an impressive performance from a little cell phone.
The LA Times writes about homelessness today:
The Los Angeles mayoral primary has seen candidates throwing big numbers around concerning how much shelter they’d like to see built for homeless people. Rick Caruso wants 30,000 new beds in his first year in office, Rep. Karen Bass says 15,000 new beds in hers and Councilman Joe Buscaino wants 9,000 new beds within 36 months, to name a few of the candidates’ publicized ideas.
....The question is, if these beds are built, will homeless people use them? New research from the Rand Corp. suggests that the type of shelters that could end up being the centerpiece of multiple candidates’ homeless plans is not homeless people’s preferred destination....“There seems to be very low appetite among people to move into group shelters, which seems to be a key part of the landscape of a lot of mayoral proposals,” said the study’s lead writer.
No kidding. There surely isn't a single person operating in the homeless biz who doesn't know that group shelters are losers. Here instead is Kevin's Plan, which has the virtue of being something that would work. The downside—well, you can probably guess that. Here it is:
This would cost a lot of money, but we have a lot of money. The main problem, of course, is that no one would want any of these buildings across the street from where they live, and every single one would spend endless years in court trying to get built. Other than that, though, it would be great.
For what it's worth, you should ignore all the folks talking about how badly Roe v. Wade was written. I've read plenty of commentary on this, and even liberal scholars mostly agree that Blackmun did a lousy job.
But it doesn't matter. The opinion could have been written by John Marshall himself and no one would care. Liberals wanted it to stay and conservatives wanted it to go. End of story.
There's not a ton of state-by-state polling on abortion, but when Roe v. Wade is overturned and control of abortion law is returned to the states this is suddenly going to become very important.
Here is a Pew survey from 2014 that asks whether abortion should be legal or illegal in "most or all" cases. I have eliminated the "don't know" respondents to produce percentages only among the people who have an actual opinion.
This is a lovely yellow alstroemeria hiding in the shadows in our front yard. It is apparently commonly known as a Peruvian lily or lily of the Incas, which I didn't know until about half a minute ago. I'm learning more about flowers every day.
