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Month: July 2022

Published on 40 Comments on Chart of the day: Inflation in June

Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, your inflation rate for June:

As usual, I'm less interested in the headline number and more interested in core CPI, which dropped another tenth of a point last month, ending at 5.9%. It has now declined 0.6% since February.

If you want a sense of how inflation is running this month, your best bet is to extract month-over-month figures and then look at the trend. Here's an updated version of my chart from last month, which does exactly that:

Not so good! The trendline is still down, but the current figure is 9.3%, which marks three consecutive months of strong growth. However, note that this is CPI core inflation, not PCE core, because that's all we have available today.

Overall, my conclusion is that inflation is under control, which I base on the fact that core year-over-year CPI is continuing to trend down. However, I expect to see a general freakout when I'm finished here and start looking at media coverage. The headline number is all they care about, and it was pretty scary this month.

Published on 10 Comments on Health Update

It's been a while since I posted one of these. That's because I went a month without chemo while I was in Paris and then figured it was hardly worth doing the test until I had gotten home and restarted the chemo for a month. And the news is good:

I don't like this Empliciti stuff, but at least it's working while I wait to get to the top of the waiting list for the CAR-T treatment. I really, really hope that's soon, and I hope I'm one of the lucky ones who gets a strongly positive result from it. I'm really getting tired of chemo, especially after two recent rounds of being off it for a month and rediscovering what that's like.

In the meantime, would you like to see a 40-year record of my weight? Of course you would!

The first 25 years of this chart I did from memory because I just happened to remember my occasional adventures with dieting over that period. Starting in 2009, however, Kaiser started weighing me every time I went in for an office visit. I got curious about this a few weeks ago and extracted it all.

As you can see, I started losing weight in 2014 before I started chemo. I can only assume that the multiple myeloma affected my appetite during the few months that I had it but didn't know it. Then my weight plummeted during the first round of chemo and the stem cell therapy. However, as soon as the stem cell stuff ended, I started eating like a horse and spiked up to 240 pounds. After that my weight went up and down, and a careful analysis suggests that the culprit was Darzalex, with an assist from dex. Then, a few months ago, after getting a bad A1C result, I gave up sweets and my weight has since dropped from 267 pounds in March to 247 pounds today. Only another 47 to go!

(The A1C problem, it turns out, is largely due to four years of continuous dex. Apparently this is a well-known side effect. It's yet another reason I'm anxious to get the CAR-T treatment. If it works, I'll be off the dex and my A1C will probably get back to semi-normal levels.)

Published on 13 Comments on Raw data: Earnings of Gen X vs. Millennials

In this chart, the top (orange) line represents the annual earnings of Gen Xers. This age group has been part of Gen X for the entire period shown.

Likewise, the bottom (blue) line represents the annual earnings of Millennials. This age group has been the heart of the Millennials for the entire period shown.

Since Gen Xers are, on average, 15 years older than Millennials, it makes sense that they make more money. But Millennials have been closing the gap. In 2015 they made about 75% as much as Gen X. Today they make 80% as much.

In fact, if you take the person who's right in the middle of each generation and then look at a full generation worth of years (2007-2022) Gen Xers made about $49,000 per year when they were 35 years old in 2007. A 35-year-old Millennial today makes $51,000. (Both numbers are kind of rough, but adjusted for inflation of course.)

These particular wage numbers are solely for full-time workers, but that doesn't matter too much. The unemployment rate of the two generations has been close to identical the entire time.

You can draw your own conclusions from this. But it doesn't really look like Millennials are doing any worse than the generation ahead of them.

POSTSCRIPT: I didn't include Gen Z because none of them were adults during this period. And I didn't include boomers because most of us are now either retired or close to it.

Published on 1 Comment on Lunchtime Photo

This is the owner of one of the famous bookstalls that line the quay of the Seine in Paris. These days most of them sell tourist stuff, back issues of magazines, and copies of old prints that are the same in every stall, but a few still sell old books or, in this case, old records and other music paraphernalia.

June 5, 2022 — Paris, France

Published on 41 Comments on California sets up awesome showdown with Supreme Court

My governor has now signed two gun regulation bills that rely on citizen lawsuits for enforcement:

California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday that he has signed a bill allowing private citizens to sue companies including gun manufacturers for violating the state’s firearms regulations.

It is one of a pair of bills passed by the state’s Democratic-controlled legislature that use civil liability to target the gun industry. Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, has said he would sign the other proposal, which allows individuals to sue to enforce bans on certain types of weapons.

This is, of course, the tactic that Texas used against abortion back when it was still a constitutional right protected by Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court ruled that this was just hunky dory even though it was obvious from the start that it was little more than pathetically juvenile game playing from the Texas legislature.

But conservatives on the Court gave it an emergency green light anyway because they knew it wouldn't matter. No one would ever get a chance to argue against them at a full hearing since they were about to kill Roe v. Wade and make the whole thing moot.

So what will they do this time around? What California has done is plainly ridiculous, but conservatives on the Supreme Court have already ruled that it's OK. Will they stick to their guns even though the subject is now guns, which they like, instead of abortion, which they don't? Or will they stroke their chins and come up with some kind of sophistry to explain why California has done something slightly different from Texas and therefore they have to overturn our shiny new law?

I don't really care much about the laws in question, which are unlikely to have much effect. But I am absolutely mesmerized about what the Supreme Court is going to do.

Stay tuned.

Published on 44 Comments on Every month we find something new to panic about

It strikes me that we have been in an almost continuous state of panic this entire year. Some is real, some is media-driven. Here are a few examples:

  • The withdrawal from Afghanistan, even though it had major problems only on the first day and then went pretty well, considering the circumstances.
  • The Fed's panic over inflation, even though there's considerable evidence that core inflation is abating on its own and non-core inflation is outside the Fed's control to begin with.
  • Monkeypox. New York City is in an uproar over monkeypox but has mostly shrugged off the latest COVID surge. This is despite the fact that over the next month it's likely that a hundred or more people in the city will die of COVID but zero people will die of monkeypox.
  • Republicans, of course, have thrown their followers into a panic over the supposed takeover of our public school system by CRT.
  • Democrats, by contrast, are currently panicking over President Biden's response to Dobbs, even though everyone knows perfectly well that there's very little he can do about abortion laws.
  • Basically, Dems are in a perpetual panic about losing various fights—over abortion, over BBB, over cancel culture and guns and how to teach about racism—while Republicans are in a perpetual panic about whatever Fox News is outraging them about.

The really aggravating thing about this list is that almost none of this panic has any good reason. But it does accomplish one thing: it makes it a lot easier to hide the stuff we really should be panicked about, like climate change and an ex-president leading a charge to overturn democracy.

And that's not all. Constant panic and anxiety has well-known long-term effects on human beings. It causes depression. Headaches. Bad temper. Fatigue. Loss of interest in sex. Stomach distress. Insomnia. Bad judgment. Faster aging. Overuse of drugs and alcohol. Increased risk of suicide.

We are a country where half the population seems to be at risk of all this. And for very little reason since, at a concrete level, things are going pretty well. Not everything. There are always problems, both personal and political. But the past two decades really haven't been that bad compared to most decades before them.

The easiest way to ruin a life—or a country—is to constantly panic about things. That does little except lead to a constant string of bad decisions. This is bad enough when the panic is justified, but genuinely appalling when it's not.

Published on 6 Comments on NASA unveils Webb images of the Carina Nebula, Stephen’s Quintet, and the Southern Ring planetary nebula

Now we're talking.

NOTE: If you're wondering how they get colors out of all the infrared, it goes more or less like this:

In the visible spectrum, our brains convert different wavelengths into colors. Our eyes can't see into infrared, but we can pretend that the different infrared wavelengths are colors too. It's all just something our brain does to make sense of different wavelengths anyway. So we take the near-infrared signals in the Webb images and color them blue. The near part of the mid-infrared gets tagged as green, and the mid-infrared is red.

There's awesome math and computer automation that goes into making this realistic, but this is basically what they're doing. It's just a computer brain that's transforming wavelengths into colors instead of a human brain.

Published on 5 Comments on Infrared’s 15 minutes are over

Man, listening to these NASA people you'd think infrared was the greatest invention since the yellow first down line. Are they really trying to explain a chart showing a spectrograph of an exoplanet in the near infrared?

Come on. No more infrared boosterism. Let's see some images!

Published on 28 Comments on How big a disaster is the FDA’s monkeypox approval delay?

Here's the latest internet meme about monkeypox:

After seeing this, I mouthed off on Twitter about holding off on the vitriol until we got some more detailed reporting on what's really going on here. Certainly something better than clickbait from the New York Post. But I figure I should put my money where my mouth is and at least gather up what I can find out right now. Here we go:

Background:

  • Monkeypox is mostly spread by direct contact with the lesions of someone who has it. It's not clear yet if it can be spread through saliva, semen, or vaginal fluids. In any case, compared to COVID-19 it's relatively easy to avoid.
  • As I write this, the US has 865 confirmed cases of monkeypox, although the actual number is probably at least double that.
  • Monkeypox is unpleasant but almost never deadly. No one in the US has yet died from it. Worldwide, three people have died out of 9,000 cases, all in Africa.

Specifics

  • The US has 100 million doses of ACAM2000, a smallpox/monkeypox vaccine. However, it has occasional serious side effects and is not the best vaccine.
  • The best vaccine is JYNNEOS, manufactured by Bavarian Nordic. The vaccine is manufactured in a plant in Denmark, and BN has already produced 30 million doses in bulk form under a contact with the Pentagon, which helped pay for its development. We have ordered 4 million doses for delivery by the end of the year and millions more in 2023 and 2024.
  • Currently we have about 300,000 doses available in the Strategic National Reserve, some of which have already been used, with another 300,000 arriving over the next few days.
  • The vaccine was previously manufactured in a facility that was fully inspected and approved by the FDA. This is why we are continuing to get delivery of smallish numbers of doses. However, in 2020 manufacturing was moved and inspection was delayed, probably due to COVID. I imagine it was a pretty low priority for the FDA at the time. The result is that we can't yet take delivery of any vaccine doses manufactured in the new facility.
  • We have agreed to sell about 200,000 of our doses to Europe. This is why European regulators inspected the BN facility a little while back.
  • The FDA began its inspection of the BN facility this week. According to BN, this is the result of an "expedited inspection" that was originally scheduled to start on July 1. It is unclear why it was delayed ten days.
  • Why didn't the FDA simply accept the European approval and get the doses moving? As near as I can tell, the answer is that they aren't allowed to. They can change this, but there are rules for doing so. They can't just decide on their own to instantly abandon their legal responsibility.
  • Should the president have issued some kind of emergency executive order allowing the vaccine to be shipped from Denmark? I don't know. In particular, I don't know if (a) the president can legally do this, or (b) if it would even be a good idea. Something like this always seems like a great idea during a panic—until it eventually backfires, which it will eventually. Acting calmly is often the best response.
  • Has this inspection delay had any actual effect? That's unclear. Right now we still have hundreds of thousands of doses available and we haven't used them all. It's quite possible that BN will deliver more doses before we run out of what we have.
  • The first case in Europe was reported on May 6. The first vaccine delivery was on June 28. That's 53 days.
  • The first case of monkeypox in the US was reported on May 27 in Massachusetts. Health care workers who had had been in close contact with the patient received the JYNNEOS vaccine within hours. That's zero days. On June 24 it was rolled out in New York City to people at high risk of infection who had "presumed" exposures. That's 28 days. Since then distribution has been expanded and will be expanded further as we receive more supplies from BN. Counting off 53 days from May 27 gets you to July 19. We will likely receive hundreds of thousand more doses shortly after that, and millions more over the next few months.

I will change my mind if new evidence arrives, but at this point it doesn't look to me like the FDA or anybody else has done anything especially bad. Things could perhaps have happened faster, but honestly, the rollout happened pretty damn fast—especially for a disease that's not really all that dangerous.

Here's a summary of lessons:

  • Inspecting the BN factory was not a high priority in early 2022. Why would it be?
  • Monkeypox is a well known virus, but the latest outbreak came out of nowhere.
  • We have spent years helping develop a better vaccine and stockpiling doses. There is no country in the world that was better prepared than we were. We have done considerably better than anyone else, and that definitely includes Europe.
  • We went through with this preparation even though monkeypox is (a) difficult to spread, (b) not very deadly, and (c) not generally recommended as a candidate for mass vaccination.
  • The initial rollout of anything has problems. The first few weeks of the polio vaccine rollout were a mess. The vaccine rollout for the 1957 Asian flu went . . . pretty well!—largely because the vaccine could be manufactured and distributed on one man's orders with no testing. The vaccine for the 1968 Hong Kong flu was ineffective because the pandemic was over by the time the vaccine got rolled out. The 1976 swine flu vaccine rollout was a full-on disaster. And I hardly need to remind you about the endless groaning and faux expertise that overwhelmed social media during the first few weeks of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. By comparison, the monkeypox vaccine rollout is proceeding with Swiss watch efficiency.

Unless you're a true expert—i.e., someone who's very well informed about how vaccines are approved and distributed—I really don't want to hear crap like "I don't get it. Just put a few guys on planes and get over there." And while I don't blame anyone personally at risk for bitching about difficulties getting vaccinated, the rest of should recognize it for what it mostly is: just routine griping.

But as I said, if the evidence changes, I'll look at it and change my mind if it's warranted. I don't have an axe to grind here. But I recommend that for everyone else too. We are not—repeat not—all experts on pharmaceutical inspections and vaccine distribution. And most of us probably never will be.

Published on 27 Comments on Republicans are souring on Donald Trump

According to a new poll, Donald Trump is not very popular these days among Republicans:

His post-presidential quest to consolidate his support within the Republican Party has instead left him weakened, with nearly half the party’s primary voters seeking someone different for president in 2024 and a significant number vowing to abandon him if he wins the nomination.

A clear majority of primary voters under 35 years old, 64 percent, as well as 65 percent of those with at least a college degree — a leading indicator of political preferences inside the donor class — told pollsters they would vote against Mr. Trump in a presidential primary.

Hmmm. Joe Biden isn't all that popular among Democrats, either. But at least this explains why Biden is still ahead of Trump in straw polls. It's all a question of who's least popular, not most popular.