Month: September 2022

"What happened to monkeypox?" asks the Washington Post. Here's the answer in the US:

This is why you hardly hear about monkeypox anymore. It peaked in mid-August and it's been fading away ever since. Right now the infection rate has fallen by more than half from its peak, and in the entire time since June only one person has died from monkeypox (a man who was already severely immunocompromised by HIV).

Part of me wants to say I told you so. Things worked out OK and now the disease is ebbing away. There was no need for panic.

And that's true. On the other hand, although most European countries peaked the same way we did (but earlier), they've since declined far faster than us. Compared to our daily infection rate of 200 per million residents, most European countries have infection rates between 0-50 infections per million residents.

This is not because they had bigger supplies of the vaccine than us. They didn't. We've administered about 800,000 doses (in a population of 330 million) while Europe has administered 330,000 doses (in a population of 450 million). In other words, our vaccination rate is more than 3x their rate.

So even though we're doing OK, I would really like to know why most European countries apparently handled things so much better even though their outbreak was just as bad. It might be a reporting issue. Or it might be a timing issue and we just have to wait a few weeks to get to the European level. I'm not sure and I haven't been able to find a good discussion of all this.

My favorite desert spot for astrophotography is a three-hour drive away, and I'm just not always up for that. I've been meaning to find a compromise spot that's closer to home, so last week I checked out Palomar Mountain.

It turned out to be excellent. It's not quite as dark as the desert, but the extra elevation makes up for a lot of that. As it happens, I ran into a lot of unexpected problems and never got the images I wanted, but I did get a nice cityscape at 3 am, which turns out to be a great time to do cityscape photography. The sky is clear, it's nice and dark, and the lights are fairly low, which allows a long exposure without blowing up the skyline itself.

In this picture, the nearby lights on the right are Escondido. The distant lights on the left are San Diego. The dimmer lights on the far left might be Tijuana, but I'm not sure about that.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is likely to win Brazil's next election:

Lula, as he is widely known, appears poised to win Brazil’s presidential election. The question, polls suggest, isn’t whether he will beat far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, but when. Recent surveys have shown Lula with about 45% of the vote compared with 35% for Bolsonaro, putting Lula within striking distance to win outright by capturing at least half the vote in the first round of balloting Sunday.

When Bolsonaro won the presidency in 2018, it was understood as yet another step in the global march toward right-wing populism and the destruction of democracy. That was fair enough in an era that saw the rise of Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, and Boris Johnson.

But now it's four years later. Trump is out of office; Le Pen lost to Emmanuel Macron; Johnson resigned in disgrace; and Bolsonaro is about to lose to a socialist. Spain is ruled by a left-wing party. The Labour Party is 15% ahead of the Tories in the latest British polls. Social Democrats are back in power in Germany. In a recent poll, 58% of Americans said the MAGA movement threatens democracy. So where are the headlines telling us that authoritarianism is losing and democracy is back?

Granted, Orbán is still around; far-right leader Giorgia Meloni will probably form a new government in Italy; and Trump remains a force in American politics—though an increasingly spent one. The far-right party in Sweden also gained ground recently, but the conservative and liberal coalitions as a whole only swapped a grand total of two seats. Their new prime minister will be the head of the Moderate Party.

Overall, things are mostly swinging away from the far right even if few want to acknowledge it. But why not? Is it fear that people will stop fighting if they hear that they're winning? That's crazy.

The pendulum is swinging. The always fickle public is blaming the old guys for today's problems and chucking them out. The circle of life is complete.

So keep fighting! Our side is winning!

We sure do like to bitch about flying around in airplanes. Here's the data for the past four years:

We're up from about 1,000 complaints per month in 2019 to an average of 4-5,000 complaints per month in 2022. Is airline service really five times worse than it used to be? Most of the objective numbers don't support this, but according to you, the American flying public, the answer is yes!

I know that it's hardly worth commenting on whatever new inanity Tucker Carlson spews into the world each day. He's just this decade's Glenn Beck, and he'll disappear soon enough.

But today's inanity got me curious about a tiny thing. Tucker started out tonight by blathering for a while about the sabotage of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines off the coast of Sweden. He was apparently unaware that the pipelines are already out of operation, so he began his segment by expressing shock at the potential loss of marine life from the gas leaks and the catastrophic effect all this leaking methane will have on climate change. Crocodile tears flowed.

As it happens, neither of these things is even remotely an issue, but whatever. Next, Tucker rambled on to the question of who sabotaged the pipelines, and eventually concluded that it was probably the United States—which is crazy, but not entirely impossible to believe. Then he got to thinking about how Russia might hit back:

Why wouldn't Russia sever undersea internet cables? What would happen if they did that? What would happen if banks in London couldn't communicate with banks in New York? Just that one piece of it—leaving aside its potential effects on our power grid.

What is that supposed to mean? How would severing transatlantic internet cables affect our power grid? Does anyone have any idea what he's thinking here?

Yeah, yeah, I know this is about the least important part of what he said. But I'm still curious.

Here is today's news about China:

Growth collapse: The World Bank lowered its forecast for GDP growth in China to 2.8%, a big drop from last year's 8.1%.

Belt and Road: The B&R  initiative was designed to spread Chinese influence and goodwill in the developing world. Instead, it's been badly managed and is now being reined in due to huge losses on loans that small countries can no longer pay back.

Currency woes: The yuan hit its weakest level ever against the dollar.

There is no magic to China. It has strengths and it has weaknesses. It is not an implacable foe and it will not bulldoze its way over the US anytime soon. Probably not anytime period.

I was noodling around some stuff this afternoon and happened to end up at the USDA website. Today they released their monthly meat report, and it gives you a pretty good idea of why hamburger is more expensive than it was last year:

The price of a 750 lb feeder steer has gone up 13%. The price of feed has gone up 30%. As you can see from the chart, these increases have far outpaced the rate of inflation (calculated as CPI excluding food).¹

Altogether, the total expense of raising a steer for market has gone up from $1,600 to $1,900 over the past year. That's an increase of 19%.

This is why everyone is unhappy. The price of hamburger has gone up about 10% over the past year, so shoppers are unhappy. But that increase doesn't cover the price of producing the hamburger, which has gone up 19%, so ranchers are unhappy. The Ukrainians have been invaded by Russia, so they aren't happy. And the Russians are losing, so they aren't happy either. That's a lot of unhappy.

¹All prices are nominal and are based on the USDA's High Plains Cattle Feeding Simulator.

This is the Fountain of Apollo in the gardens of Versailles. The top photo is the view from the palace side looking out toward the Grand Canal. The bottom photo is taken in the other direction, looking up from the fountain to the palace.

The votes are in!

By early afternoon on Tuesday, Russia’s state news media had reported what it described as preliminary results showing gigantic levels of support for joining Russia. The RIA state news agency reported votes of 98.19 percent in favor in Zaporizhzhia and 96.97 percent in Kherson in the south, and 97.91 percent in Donetsk and 97.82 percent in Luhansk in the east.

What's up with Kherson? Less than 97% in favor of joining the motherland? What kind of unpatriotic bastards are these guys?

The Wall Street Journal reports that lumber prices have plummeted back to their pre-pandemic levels:

Lumber prices have fallen to their lowest level in more than two years, bringing two-by-fours back to what they cost before the pandemic building boom and pointing to a sharp slowdown in construction.

....Two-by-four prices nearly tripled the prepandemic record in an early sign of the inflation and broken supply chains that would bedevil the economic reopening. But lumber has led the way down for commodities since the central bank took aim at rising consumer prices and the overheated housing market.

Please stop it. The Fed didn't start its aggressive rate hike campaign until June. Lumber prices had been falling since February and had already finished their descent by mid-year. The Fed obviously had nothing to do with it. In fact, the Fed's campaign to throw the economy into recession still hasn't had any effect and probably won't until the end of the year. Anything that happens between now and then most likely would have happened regardless of what the Fed has done.

POSTSCRIPT: The real explanation, of course, is that the housing market started to droop at the beginning of the year and that affected the lumber market. There might also be some international trade issues involved. But not the Fed.