Month: July 2022

Over at National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty looks at the decline of marriage in the US and places some of blame on the LGBT movement in general and the Supreme Court's 2015 Obergefell decision in particular:

Proponents of same-sex marriage like Sullivan and Rauch won in the courts, and in a thin slice of the elite. But it looks more like the anti-marriage radicals won the future in the culture. Marriage is in steady and steep decline, as the rise in unmarried and never-married adults and in the share of out-of-wedlock births continues.

As they say, let's roll the tape:

It's pretty plain that Obergefell had no influence on marriage at all.

More interestingly, perhaps, is the common notion that the decline of marriage can be pinned on the rise of feminism and the counterculture in the 1960s. I don't doubt that both have played a role, but take a look at the data: marriage in the US peaked in 1949 and had been declining for 16 years before the counterculture was even a glimmer in your mother's eyes.

FWIW, I'd give social changes some of the blame for the decline of marriage, but I suspect the biggest share of the blame is down to pure economics. As America got richer, marriage simply became less necessary for a lot of people. Some of those people kept on getting married because they wanted to, but a lot of them never really wanted to in the first place. So they stopped.

This is Charlie about to attack Hilbert's tail—though Charlie is hardly to blame for this. There are, after all, limits to what you can expect when you start waving your tail in somebody's face.

I don't have any special reason for posting this. I was just curious about it.

Hey! I wrote this afternoon about the FCC shutting down all those fake auto warranty robocalls, but I missed the big story: This is about all robocalls, not just the auto warranty guys.

Years ago I remember writing about STIR/SHAKEN, a protocol for verified caller ID that the FCC was working on, but then I lost track of it. It was part of a plan to end mass robocalls, and since I kept on getting lots of robocalls I figured it was one of those things that got talked about a lot and then disappeared into the miasma of bureaucracy.

But no. It kept chugging along and was put into place for the big phone carriers on June 2021. That didn't end things, though. Smaller carriers were given a more lenient schedule, so the the spammers just moved their operations there. But then, late last year, the FCC decided to move up the implementation date for small carriers from June 2023 to June 2022. This means that as of July 1 every US carrier is required to implement STIR/SHAKEN.

Ah, you say, but what about overseas carriers? That's still a problem, thanks to so-called "gateway providers," who take foreign calls and then pass them along to US carriers. These folks are still in operation, but a couple of months ago the FCC ordered them to comply with STIR/SHAKEN by June 2023.

And then what? There are undoubtedly other loopholes, and the FCC will steadily plug them up. In the meantime, the number of robocalls you get should be going down—though I can't say that I've noticed any diminution myself. Perhaps that's why this hasn't been big news. There isn't going to be some big day when robocalls all suddenly stop, just a steady decline as STIR/SHAKEN is implemented and loopholes are steadily shut down. Stay tuned.

This is a lovely red alstroemeria blooming in our front yard garden this spring. Isn't it pretty?

This happened two weeks ago, but for some reason Bloomberg wrote about it today:

The Federal Communications Commission has ordered phone companies to stop carrying traffic related to robocalls about scam auto warranties.

US voice service providers must now “take all necessary steps to avoid carrying this robocall traffic,” or provide a report outlining how they’re mitigating the traffic, the FFC’s Robocall Response Team said in a statement on Thursday. “Consumers are out of patience and I’m right there with them,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in the statement.

I have questions. First of all, why did it take Rosenworcel so long to run out of patience? The rest of us have been sick of this scam for years.

Second, and more important: wtf? Is this all it takes to stop spam? Just issue an order telling phone companies to stop carrying it? I mean, if that's all it takes then I have a long list of spam calls that I would like to order phone companies to stop carrying.

This statement from the FCC might shed some light on the matter:

The FCC and its partners believe upwards of eight billion robocalls have been generated by Roy Cox, Jr., Aaron Michael Jones, their Sumco Panama companies, and international associates....The Cox/Jones/Sumco Panama operation appears to be responsible for making more than eight billion unlawful prerecorded message calls to American consumers since at least 2018. The robocalls include prerecorded messages marketing vehicle service warranties. The messages encouraged call recipients to follow prompts to speak with a “warranty specialist” about extending or reinstating their car warranty.

Apparently this enforcement action became possible after the FCC (in cooperation with the Ohio Attorney General) figured out who was responsible for the calls and where they originated from. Without that, I suppose there's nothing much they can do.

Oh well. I'm sure Cox and Jones are on to their next scam already.

The Washington Post takes on one of my favorite questions today: Why don't we use more heat pumps here in the United States?

There are two kinds of heat pumps, and I love them both. The first type should really be called "a cheap air conditioner," because that's what it is: an air conditioner that uses better technology than the one you have now. In summer it pumps heat out of your house and in winter it pumps heat into your house. And it does so for about half the cost of traditional heating and cooling.

The units are more expensive than standard air conditioners—and some climates are more favorable for heat pumps than others—but they don't cost that much more. And they save a lot of money in the long run:

In the United States, about 16,000 air conditioning units are installed daily on average. Researchers from CLASP and Harvard University predicted that if over the remaining decade, all houses installing central air conditioners bought a subsidized heat pump instead, consumers would save approximately $27 billion on heating and cooling bills, while decreasing greenhouse gas emissions by 49 million tons of carbon dioxide by 2032.

Hell, I had to replace our central air conditioner a few years ago and it cost somewhere around $10,000. The heat pump alternative might be a little more expensive than that, but only a little.

The second type of heat pump is geothermal, and it's a practical option only when you're building a new house. It looks like this:

A geothermal heat pump takes advantage of the fact that once you dig down about six or seven feet, the temperature of the soil stays the same all year round, usually around 55° or so. In winter that's hot water that can be used to heat a house. In summer it's cold water that can be used to cool a house. That's super-efficient.

However, it also requires a whole bunch of piping to be installed underground, and that's a lot easier to do when a house is being built. Once the house is finished it's a lot harder to find the space to install the ground loops, though it's usually not impossible.

So this is a no-brainer. If you're building a house in a favorable area, it should include the piping for a geothermal heat pump. If you're replacing a central AC unit, it should be replaced with a heat pump. The Post story, sadly, doesn't really explain why heat pumps aren't more popular in the United States:

Estimates show that 90 percent of Japanese households use heat pumps to heat and cool homes, contributing to a 40 percent drop in the country’s electricity consumption over the past decade. In Italy, the government effectively pays citizens to use the technology; homeowners can get 110 percent of their heat pump cost reimbursed.

But the devices lack popularity in parts of the United States and Europe....Energy experts point to a couple of reasons heat pumps haven’t entered the mainstream. First is the name, which makes it difficult for people to recognize that it heats and cools. “It is confusing,” said Corinne Schneider, the chief communications officer for CLASP, an energy nonprofit. The high price of installation — systems can cost upward of $10,000 to buy and install — is also a hurdle for many users.

Well . . . maybe. But is it really that confusing? And aftermarket heat pumps aren't way more expensive than conventional AC compressors. I honestly don't understand why both of these aren't mandated technologies wherever they can be used.

UPDATE: I was writing sort of casually here and should have been more careful. Heat pumps really are great technology, and Japanese manufacturers have made them even better over the past decade. However, not every American should literally have one. They work better in some climates than others, so there are plenty of places where they don't do a very good job.

Just generally, though, we should use them more than we do. That's especially true for geothermal heat pumps, but their high installation cost keeps them from being more widespread. However, geothermal systems would mostly be installed by home developers, and a government mandate/assistance program aimed at developers could probably go a long way toward making them more popular.

Paul Krugman writes today that he was wrong about inflation. Fair enough. But suppose, just for the sake of conversation, that inflation goes like this over the next year or so:

This is not a projection or even a guess. Just a possibility. But if the core PCE index—the Fed's favorite!—follows the dashed line or something close to it over the coming year, what will be our conclusion about inflation? That the hawks were right? Or that Team Transitory was right, but "transitory" turned out to be a little longer than they thought?

For the record, I think Team Transitory figured that inflation would come down by the end of 2021. At this point, it looks like either (a) they were utterly, catastrophically wrong, or (b) they were about a year too optimistic. I would like everyone on either side of this debate to tell us where they stand now. For the record, I'm on Team "We Were a Wee Bit Too Optimistic."

The Russians must think they're doing pretty well in their war for the Donbas region in Ukraine:

In recent months, Russian forces have concentrated their assault on eastern Ukraine, which by all indications Russia appears determined to annex as it did Crimea in 2014. But on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov told the Russian state news agency that Moscow was now casting its gaze on a swath of Ukraine’s south, as well, specifically naming the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions as well as “a number of other territories.”

Here's a map:

Right now the Russian army is concentrated in the Luhansk and Donetsk provinces, but Zaporizhia and Kherson are obvious targets that would allow Russia to control territory all the way down to Crimea.

As for "a number of other territories," I suppose it would make sense to keep moving west in order to completely control access to the Black Sea. Beyond that, who knows?

Secret Servicegate is slowly coming into sharper focus. Here's what we seem to know:

• On January 16, 2021, Congress sent a "broad" preservation and production request to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service. Another was sent on January 25. Both requests were aimed at preserving records related to the 1/6 insurrection.
• On January 27, as part of a system upgrade called Intune, "USSS began to reset its mobile phones to factory settings as part of a pre-planned, three-month system migration. In that process, data resident on some phones was lost." Italics mine.
• In February the inspector general of HHS, Joseph Cuffari, asked the Secret Service for text messages related to the 1/6 insurrection. He learned about the purge of phone records at that time but didn't tell Congress. In June he issued a request for all text messages sent and received by 24 specific Secret Service agents between December 7, 2020 and January 8, 2021.
• The Secret Service eventually responded with a single text message.
• But what about backups? According to CNN, "A source familiar with the matter told CNN that employees were instructed twice to back up their phones." Employees were given instructions on how to do the manual backup but apparently the instructions were widely ignored.
• Today the Secret Service said that its search for further messages had turned up nothing. They were gone for good.

Do you remember those torture videos that the CIA destroyed in 2005? Or the night in 2019 when Jeffrey Epstein killed himself in a jail cell and we later learned that the guards were all napping and his roommate had been transferred and all the CCTV video had been erased due to a "technical error"? Sound familiar?

Nothing about the Secret Service's story makes any sense. They were doing a system-wide upgrade but didn't do a system-wide backup? They instead instructed their agents (twice) to back up their phones themselves, but apparently not a single agent did? Then, literally two days after getting a preservation request from Congress, they just went ahead with the system reset without bothering to check if it would erase anything Congress was interested in?

No. That's Brooklyn Bridge stuff. One way or another, it's hard to believe anything other than the obvious: those texts were damning enough that the Secret Service knew it would get in more trouble for keeping them than for erasing them—no matter how much trouble they'd get into for erasing them.

And they were right. Sure, they're taking some heat right now, and they'll take some more. But if they stick to their story that it was just a big ol' accident, there won't be much that anyone can do.

In the meantime, common sense combined with the fact pattern of the case tells us that these text messages must have been genuinely explosive. But because they're gone, the public perception will always be a shoulder shrug and the "coincidence" story will end up being the official narrative.

It's just unbelievable. Literally.