Month: August 2022

What is this? What are these people looking at?

UPDATE: You guys are too smart and too well-traveled for me. Of course, you all know I've been posting pictures of Paris, so I guess that helped.

Anyway, this is indeed a picture of people ascending the famous outside escalator of the Centre Pompidou. I had a little bit of time to kill the day I took these, but not enough to make it worthwhile visiting the museum itself. So I rambled around the outside taking pictures, and eventually took a whole series of shots of people ascending the escalator.

However, this is a picture of the Pompidou looking east, not west toward the Eiffel Tower.

Suppose President Biden announces that he is canceling all student debt, as many former students would like him to do. What happens to this year's crop of college seniors when they graduate in 2023? Is their debt canceled too? If not, we have a bright line of people ending with the Class of 2022 who have their debt canceled while the Class of 2023 and beyond gets nothing.

(If the cutoff is entering freshmen, you have the same problem, just with slightly different years as the cutoff point.)

Would this fly? Or would you just produce a large number of really pissed off college students who want to know why Mr. 22 got his debt canceled while Ms. 23 still has her entire load to pay off?

I don't see how you make this work. Even if you figured out some complicated scheme to phase out college debt over a series of graduating classes, I doubt you could make it work. It's the biggest obstacle facing the student debt cancellation movement, but nobody ever talks about it in public.

We've heard a lot about how COVID-19 has devastated the commercial office market as more and more people work from home. And it's true that the vacancy rate of office space has gone up over the past couple of years. But the Wall Street Journal tells us the pandemic was not really to blame:

America’s office glut has been decades in the making, real-estate investors, brokers and analysts say. U.S. developers built too many office towers, lured by federal tax breaks, low interest rates and inflated demand from unprofitable startups. At the same time, landlords largely failed to tear down or convert old, mostly vacant buildings to other uses.

....The U.S. office glut traces its roots to a 1981 change in the tax code, brokers and analysts say. In a bid to boost the economy, the Reagan administration allowed investors to depreciate commercial real estate much more quickly than before, among other changes, lowering their tax bills.

Savings-and-loan associations showered developers with easy loans, brokers say. That helped ignite an office-development boom in the 1980s that drove up vacancies to record levels and contributed to the savings-and-loan crisis, when many such institutions failed. Vacancy rates slowly fell in the 1990s, but surged again after the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the subprime mortgage crisis.

This got me curious. The office vacancy rate was about 7% before Reagan took office and exploded to nearly 20% by 1986. Then it declined during the Clinton presidency, though it never reached its pre-Reagan level. Here is the office vacancy rate since 2000:

Using my usual technique of drawing a trendline through the start of the pandemic¹ and then extending it, it's obvious that the current vacancy rate is higher than we'd expect. But not that much higher: about 18% vs. 16%.

As this chart makes obvious, vacancy rates generally go up during (and after) recessions and then go down during recoveries. This makes sense, and it also makes sense that vacancy rates went up during the pandemic. They might go up again in 2023. But I think it's likely that they'll then go down as the economy recovers and employers push for more employees to go back to working in an office instead of from home.

Basically, the pandemic added a little bit to a longtime upward trend caused by an office glut. I think it will probably go back to trend growth before long, but that's largely because I don't think that working from home will stay at its current high levels. Reasonable people may disagree on this point.

¹That's 2000-2019 in this case, since the data is annual and 2020 was obviously affected by the start of the pandemic.

The price of gasoline is still going down:

But it was only down a nickel last week. That's half its average decline since the June peak, so things might be slowing down. The price of oil has been flat for the past few weeks, so it would make sense if the price of gasoline started to flatten out too.

How many classified documents did the FBI find in its search of Mar-a-Lago earlier this month? Today the New York Times provides a pretty good estimate, though they leave the arithmetic to us:

January: "more than 150."

June: "a few dozen more."

Total: "more than 300."

At a best guess, this means the August haul was somewhere around 100 documents, which fits the Times' description of the number as "scores."

So: the FBI got 100 more classified documents in its August search, including one set that "had the highest level of classification, top secret/sensitive compartmented." And there may be more to come as the FBI continues its review.

POSTSCRIPT: Note that a single document can be many pages long. So if you see something like "over a thousand pages of classified information were seized," it doesn't necessarily contradict anything here.

That's right, I've been blogging for 20 years: first on my own; then for the Washington Monthly; then for Mother Jones; and now back on my own again. This is longer than I spent on my allegedly "real" career in the high tech industry from college graduation through 2001.

But I haven't yet achieved my primary blogging goal: persuading someone to change their mind. Someday it'll happen!

I don't know why, but I didn't expect the Seine to have locks. I thought it flowed freely to the sea. But this isn't so, and we traversed half a dozen locks on our way from Paris to Normandy. Here's one of them at dawn while I was meandering around the upper deck waiting for everyone to get up and have breakfast.

Matt Yglesias wrote recently on his Substack about the Effective Altruism movement, but I think he makes a serious mistake in his historiography.

The EA movement began with a group of rationalists and philosophers who argued we were doing charity all wrong. Instead of wasting your money on, say, a new gym for your alma mater or a food bank for your middle-class neighborhood, EA enthusiasts say you should donate to organizations that demonstrably provide the biggest bang for the buck when it comes to saving and improving lives. For example, mosquito netting, deworming, clean water, etc., in impoverished regions. Obviously there are plenty of things to argue about here, and EA advocates happily argue about all of them.

EA is a thriving movement and a valuable one. Like all movements, however, it suffers from the occasional crank who takes things too far. We should give all our money to longevity research, and here's a 300-page white paper showing expected efficacy of 10 billion QALYs with a probability of 0.034. Etc.

Now, there's also an entirely different movement that originated with artificial intelligence theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky and the LessWrong community. This movement is also rationalist based, which means it has overlaps with the EA community, but LessWrong is, um, considerably farther from the mainstream. It's best known for its concern that artificial intelligence is more dangerous than we think.

The most common illustration of how AI could be dangerous is a self-replicating robot that plays chess. The only thing it cares about is getting better and better at chess, and it correctly deduces that this requires more brainpower. As a result, it starts breaking down the earth to provide feedstock for building more processing power, followed by the rest of the solar system. Result: the end of humanity.

There are other, more sophisticated scenarios in the LessWrong arsenal, though all of them seem to rely on awfully stupid versions of intelligence. I find it vanishingly unlikely that any of them would be created by ordinary AI teams, but it's certainly possible that one could be created by a malevolent AI genius. At that point, it comes down to an arms race—just as it already has in the arenas of nuclear bombs, manmade viruses, and chemical weapons. There's nothing new here, folks.

Bottom line: Effective Altruism is a worthy movement even if true believers and lunatic philosophers like William MacAskill piss all over their own creation with ridiculous doctrines like longtermism, which suggests that the most effective altruism should value the trillions of humans living in the future far more than the mere billions of us who are currently living. This is both analytically barren and empirically impoverished. Can you imagine teaching this doctrine to a race that has trouble passing the marshmallow test? The mind reels.

Anyway, both historically and practically you should treat Effective Altruism and longtermism as separate things even if there's a bit of overlap in their adherents. The former is good stuff if you take it in bite-sized chunks. The latter is basically crackpotism.

The Washington Post gets us up to speed today on the latest meme/vibe/tiktok taking over the business world. It's called "quiet quittting":

Kathy Kacher, founder of Career/Life Alliance Services, said that “quiet quitting” is a new term for an old concept: employee disengagement.

But it’s arriving in a moment of “unprecedented burnout,” Kacher said. It’s coming in on the heels of the “Great Resignation,” which saw an average of nearly 4 million employees leave their jobs each month in 2021 amid clashes over flexibility and a widespread reevaluation of how work should fit into their lives.

And it’s also gaining steam at a moment of peak tension between managers and employees, as many companies prepare for another push to bring workers back to offices.

For some workers, office mandates aren’t just a pain. They’re harmful. “If some one is giving their best in 40 hours and then want to spend rest of time for living isn’t terming/labeling that behavior quiet quitting derogatory?” a HomeAway employee asked earlier this week on Blind, an anonymous corporate messaging board.

Consider what we've been told—and what we haven't:

• Quiet quitting is just a new term for an old idea.
• We are in a moment of unprecedented burnout.
• We are also at a moment of peak tension between workers and managers.
• Workers are reevaluating how work should fit into their lives.
• Quiet quitting means working your 40 hours a week and then going home.

Absolutely no evidence is provided for any of the claims about burnout, tension, or reevaluating work. None. But here's some:

God knows there was an uptick in general unhappiness during the pandemic. It would be remarkable if there hadn't been. But stress on the job seems to have gone up only a bit, and even at that only to the level it was at for most of the aughts. So where did "quiet quitting" come from?

As near as I can tell from the article, last month a TikTok user named zaidleppelin invented the term in a banal 17-second video that told people there's more to life than work. For some reason this bit of threadbare advice has gotten 3 million views and this is enough for people who should know better to go gaga over the claim that Millennials and Gen Zs are widely unhappy with their work/life balance.

And maybe they are. So were boomers, who made "work/life balance" practically a mantra in the '70s. Gen Xers did the same in the '90s, and now Millennials are doing it. Welcome to the workplace, folks.

A cat and his shadow. This is Charlie sitting on a kitchen cabinet that looks into the late afternoon sun. He's probably watching the birds outside the dining room window, who tend to congregate around the bird feeder at this time of day.