Month: September 2022

So what happened today? The 11th Circuit Court eviscerated Aileen Cannon, the Trump lackey who serves on the federal district court of Mar-a-Lago. The attorney general of New York filed a civil suit against the entire Trump family for various acts of mopery and dopery. The Fed raised interest rates another slug in its shadow boxing contest with inflation. Trump told Sean Hannity that (a) maybe the FBI actually searched Mar-a-Lago looking for Hillary's emails, (b) the FBI stole his will, (c) he can declassify documents just by thinking the thought, and (d) and . . . um, something else ridiculous that I can't remember. And Vladimir Putin has apparently doubled down on Ukraine by instituting a new draft. He would be wise to remember how well that worked out for us during the Vietnam War.

In other words, two bits of bad news and three bits of news I don't care about (i.e., all things Trump). Oh well.

This is a lovely blue and green damselfly sitting near a stream in Giverny, about a mile from Monet's cottage. I had wandered off to the southern edge of town while I waited for the entry line to dissipate, and that's when I spotted this little guy. When I went back, the line was indeed gone. On the downside, I had used up an hour of our visiting time and had only an hour left. But that was enough.

I have just returned from getting my bivalent COVID-19 booster, which provides protection against the Omicron variant. This makes me quintuply vaccinated, and the folks at Kaiser even tossed in a flu shot for free. I feel like I'm now ready to face the brutal Southern California winter with full protection from all common transmissible diseases.¹

¹Except for the common cold, of course.

Good news! The Department of Transportation says that transborder freight between the US, Canada, and Mexico has recovered strongly from the pandemic:

That's a nice infographic, all ready for newspapers and TV news to copy and publish without thinking about it. But wait. What's that footnote in tiny type at the bottom? Let me put on my reading glasses:

Ah, of course. Let's go ahead and fix that:

That's more like it. Assuming, of course, that you want to give people an honest idea of how much North American freight has really increased over the past year.

The Wall Street Journal reports that rent and housing inflation are staying stubbornly high:

Economists expect housing inflation to strengthen further before cooling off in the coming months, but are unsure of when relief will appear....Not only are shelter costs rising, they are climbing at an accelerating pace....Shelter costs—comprising mostly rents and a gauge of home prices known as owners’ equivalent rent—rose 0.7% in August from the previous month, up from 0.5% in July. They rose 6.2% in August from a year before, up from 5.7% in July.

Rent is a tricky thing to measure. Here is the official CPI measure specifically of rent:

It is indeed high and accelerating. But now take a look at this:

Same time frame, same subject matter. So why are they wildly different?

There are two reasons. The first is a matter of what's getting measured. When we think of rising rents, we usually think of what landlords are asking for new rentals. But CPI measures rent broadly, including both new rentals and apartments that are already occupied. This means that if there's a big surge (or drop) in asking prices for new rentals, CPI will barely notice it because it's such a small part of their overall index. By contrast, if you look solely at asking prices for new rentals—as in the Zillow chart—you'll see big ups and downs as they happen.

Second, CPI is measured using a complicated methodology (see here) that effectively makes it six or more months out of date at all times. So if rental prices go up or down, it will take a while for those changes to show up. The Zillow methodology is simpler and basically measures monthly changes in real time.

So what's happening is probably this: rents increased sharply in 2021 but then settled down in 2022. However, the CPI is too far behind to see this and thinks that rent inflation is still accelerating. Since rent is a big part of CPI, this means that it's artificially keeping the overall inflation index high too.

Even by Zillow's measure, rent inflation for new rentals is still fairly high—around 7-8% or so—but it's not accelerating and it's not higher than the overall inflation rate. Just the opposite. In another six months or so CPI will probably catch up with all this and then slowly start to decline.

Bottom line: don't let rent or housing inflation fool you. Both have already settled down and are getting pretty close to normal. CPI, because of the way it measures things, will show this slowly and late. But eventually it will show it.

In the meantime, we should base economic policy right now on what's actually happening right now. For that, the CPI measure is one of the worst. We should switch to something better in the overall inflation measure, but for now we're stuck with it. So just ignore it.

This is phase two of my Andromeda Galaxy imaging. My previous attempt used 10-second exposures because that was the best I could do. Now, with autoguiding working properly, I was able to do a set of 180-second exposures on Sunday night. I let the camera run for about two hours, which gave me 40 frames to feed into the stacker software. I've posted both the old image and the new one so you can see the difference.

Light pollution is measured on the Bortle scale. I live in a Bortle 9 area, which is about as bad as it gets short of downtown Tokyo. Both of the images below were taken in Trabuco Canyon, a Bortle 7 region about a half hour away. If the weather cooperates, then later this week I'll take a trip out to my favorite Bortle 2 area in the desert. In addition to a few other improvements, I plan to let the camera run for four or five hours, which will give me something like a hundred images to feed into the software. That will be my phase three image. It won't be the best possible image, but it will probably be the best feasible image until I gain a lot more expertise in the details of pre- and post-processing.

Housing permits, the earliest leading indicator of the housing construction market, were down for the fifth straight month in August. Permitting has now fallen below the pre-pandemic trendline and is headed almost straight down:

In the bellwether region of Southern California, the housing market has cooled down considerably:

Sales of new and existing houses, condos and townhomes dropped 28.3% from a year earlier.

....The Southern California median price — the point at which half of homes sold for more and half for less — is 2.6% less than the all-time high reached this spring. And compared with the white-hot market of recent years, the buying experience could be less stressful, without the need to bid on dozens of homes before either securing one or giving up altogether.

“That maddening competition is gone,” said Jeff Lazerson, president of brokerage Mortgage Grader, noting sellers are more open to low down payment offers they previously would have ignored.

For technical reasons, this slowdown has yet to show up in official inflation figures, but that doesn't mean it's not happening. It is. Inflation in the housing market peaked earlier this year and is now declining.

Rent is still a problem, though up-to-date information is hard to come by. It's probably settling down, but we won't know for sure until the end of the year.

A Georgia Republican Party official named Cathy Latham, one of the "alternate" electors for Donald Trump, has testified that she had nothing to do with a bunch of tech experts hired by Big Lie lawyers who copied data from voting machines in Coffee County. Surveillance footage suggests otherwise, and new surveillance footage suggests really, really otherwise:

A Post examination found that elements of the account Latham gave in her deposition on the events of Jan. 6 and 7, 2021, appear to diverge from the footage and other evidence, including depositions and text messages.

In other words, she lied. Right?

In response to questions from The Post, Latham’s lawyers said, “Failing to accurately remember the details of events from almost two years ago is not lying.” They have said she did not take part in the copying or in anything improper or illegal.

Latham says she was in the foyer of the Coffee County elections office for a few minutes and chatted with a couple of people. Surveillance footage shows that she visited twice, spent about four hours total, visited every part of the office, and finally took a selfie with one of the forensics experts.

That's quite a memory lapse, no? You can make up your own mind, but if I were a juror in her inevitable perjury case, I'm pretty sure I'd go with "lie."

I decided to make up for my sloth last week by posting gasoline prices a little early this week. Here you go:

Gasoline was down nearly another nickel last week, though the price declines are starting to flatten out.

You may be wondering if President Biden's executive order to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is responsible for some of this drop. Probably not. Since mid-June, the price of oil is down 29% and the price of gasoline is down 27%. The declining price of oil is more than enough to account for the entire decrease in prices at the pump.

Back in 1954, after Joe McCarthy finally crossed one too many lines during the Army-McCarthy hearings, Joseph Welch famously stood up and asked him, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

This has become almost a cliche, but I think about it a lot these days. I think about it when I read reports of Ron DeSantis and his immigrant stunt. I think about it when Donald Trump accuses the FBI of "massive fraud and election interference" and calls their agents "vicious monsters" for trying to retrieve highly classified documents that he tried to hide from them. I think about it when Tucker Carlson says on national TV that Anthony Fauci “apparently engineered the single most devastating event in modern American history.”

I think about it all the time.