Month: September 2022

You knew I'd get to it eventually, so why not today? This is the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, taken in panorama mode as usual for shots like this. I was happy that I happened to get a few seconds when there was no one at my end of the hall, and that's when I took the three floor-level images that form the bottom of the panorama.

Is COVID over?

The two biggest causes of death are heart disease and cancer. They're off the charts compared to all the rest, so I'm showing only #3-10.

The numbers for everything except COVID-19 are from 2020. I don't imagine they've changed much since then.

The number for COVID-19 is extrapolated from the current death toll of about 450 per day. That makes it—still—the fourth leading cause of death in the United States. You may decide for yourself if this means it's "over."

Over at Vox, Aja Romano tells us about the enormous backlash to the casting of non-white actors in a couple of recent high-profile productions:

Detractors of Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings series, which debuted this month, claim that casting Black and Asian actors undermines the show’s faithfulness to Tolkien’s world. Meanwhile, some ostensible fans of Disney’s animated Little Mermaid are rejecting the new live-action version for swapping out the titular mermaid’s famous blue eyes and red hair for the features of Black actress Halle Bailey.

....To anyone who’s paid any attention to geek culture over the past decade or so, these arguments probably feel endless and exhausting....All of this is the stuff of fantasy, so really, who cares whether they’re played by white or Black actors?

As it turns out, the answer is lots and lots of people.

Just for the record, I've watched the first few episodes of Rings of Power, and I can assure you that it has no shortage of white people. There's Galadriel. Elrond. Nori, the woman who leads everyone to safety when the orcs come calling. And her son. And her son's pal. The dwarf king. The dwarf prince. Isildur. The architect guy. Halbrand. Earien. The giant who arrives via meteorite. And a cast of thousands of others. The show is quite safe for white viewing, I'd say.

But that's not why I'm writing about it. The fact that the complaints are both ungrounded and signs of insecurity (or worse) are pretty obvious to everyone. What I really want to know, though, is whether the complaints are widespread. I know there are some complainers. A few thousand at least. But that's a drop in the ocean. Are there more?

That's hard for me to tell, but my sense is no. There's a tiny cadre of shitposters writing about this, an even tinier cadre of committed racists, and a super tiny cadre of people who think they're arguing for being faithful to Tolkien's legacy. But the numbers are so small that it's not clear why anyone is bothering to write about this.

Am I wrong? Are there really hundreds of thousands of these folks around? Where? And if not, why are we bothering to give voice to a minuscule sliver of dickheads who have done nothing except spend ten seconds to write a snarky tweet?

Anyone have any answers?

POSTSCRIPT: And what about Hispanic actors? In big productions like Rings of Power I always see a bunch of Black actors and a few Asian actors, but hardly any Hispanic actors. Why is that?

On Thursday night I finally declared victory in my long twilight struggle with my telescope. It is now 100% functional.

The final hurdle was getting autoguiding to work. The telescope mount already has a motor that tracks the rotation of the earth, but it's not perfect. With just the mount tracking, I can do a 30 second exposure with my 900mm telescope, but that's about it. Anything longer and the stars look like streaks because the mount isn't tracking the sky perfectly.

Enter autoguiding. An autoguider is a separate small camera controlled by software that looks for a suitable star and then locks onto it. The camera is on a continuous loop, and whenever the star gets slightly away from where it's supposed to be, the software sends a pulse to the mount to put it back on a perfect track. With autoguiding on, I can do a 300-second exposure or more.

But it didn't work! All I got was snow and static and lousy calibration and no effect on the image at all. Until, finally, a light bulb went on in my head and I realized I had everything set up wrong. Here's an annotated picture of my optical train:

I use a device called an off-axis guider, which contains a small prism that sends a bit of light upward into the guiding camera. What I realized is that in order for everything to be in focus—both the main camera and the guide camera—the light path had to be same length both ways. I had read about this but not paid attention, and that was my problem.

The light path from the prism up to the guide camera was about 80mm. This means that the light path from the prism to the main camera also needed to be about 80mm, which in turn meant that I needed 60mm of extension tubes. As it happens, these are neither cheap nor easy to find. But in a stroke of amazing luck, I already had some long extension tubes for a different project that I had abandoned. I put in one of those along with another extension that came with the OAG, and voila! I was able to get perfect focus in both cameras.

On Thursday I took this out to test it, and after a bit of dithering around everything worked great. Focus was good; signal-to-noise ratio was fantastic; calibration was spot-on; and the software was sending pulses out to the mount with great precision.

I tested this on a 150-second exposure and it looked great. Here's a cropped section of the sky:

The stars are all nice little circles, not stretched or streaked. That's just how it should be.

Unfortunately, the camera giveth and the camera taketh away. You may notice that some of the smaller stars seem to have a bit of a halo around them. It turns out that after weeks of high heat, Thursday was actually a bit chilly. So my telescope dewed up. This had never happened before and I had vaguely assumed it only happened to people unlucky enough to live in places other than Southern California.

But no. Even after I had wiped off the lens as best I could, some of the fogginess stayed around and ruined the pictures.

But that's a minor problem. I went home and bought a dew heater that promises to make dew a problem of the past. It should come today and I will once again be in good shape.

Except . . . I had a wee accident. There are a few little pieces of dust on my camera sensor, so I went in yesterday to clean them off. Unfortunately, the instructions for getting access to the sensor are extremely unclear, so I ended up removing the wrong doodad. It was pretty stupid of me. Ironically, this doodad turned out to be a built-in dew heater for the piece of glass that protects the sensor, and I broke the wires connecting it to power. Will that matter? I'll find out soon enough. If it does, I'll have to send the whole camera in for repair.

But even given this little piece of idiocy, I think I'm now 100% functional and finally ready to study up and go beyond functional. I shall report back whenever the skies are clear and I can go out again.

I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who sees things this way:

Stubbornly high inflation has Wall Street worried that the Federal Reserve will respond by raising interest rates until the United States tumbles into recession, taking the weakening global economy with it.

The Fed and other central banks are tightening credit to fight historically high inflation even as three of the world’s main economic engines — the United States, Europe and China — are sputtering.

....“I don’t really get the sense that many or any central banks are paying huge attention to how their policies are affecting the rest of the world,” said Maurice Obstfeld of the University of California at Berkeley, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.

Here's a quick summary of the US economy since the start of 2022:

Labor force participation is up slightly, but everything else is down. And have I mentioned that the yield curve inverted a month ago?

The global economy is not booming or overheated. It's in rickety shape, and right now it needs help. It's already started to roll down a hill on its own and the last thing it needs a big push to get it barreling over everything in its path.

And one other thing. Larry Summers says that no one really understands inflation, and at least in the modern US context he's right. In fact, it's worse than that. Take a look at this long-term chart showing the inflation rate over the 70 years since the end of Korean War:

In this entire period there has been only one major inflationary episode aside from our current one: 1973-83. We know what caused that one, and we know—or think we know—that big interest rate increases and a sharp recession were the only cure.

But that's it: In the US for the past 70 years, we have n=1. And even that single n is nothing like our current situation, which was fundamentally caused by a global pandemic and its effect on supply chains and business lockdowns. We don't have any experience at all to tell us the best response to this, so instead we're doing what we always do: looking back at the '70s and panicking that it's happening all over again. Don't do what Richard Nixon and Arthur Burns did! It took Paul Volcker to fix that!

But we're not doing that. This time around there's no Nixon, no Burns, and no circumstances even remotely like the one they created. But we're putting out the call for the Volcker playbook anyway. Why? A little humility would go a long way right now.

POSTSCRIPT: John Maynard Keynes allegedly warned that "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." He was talking about asset bubbles, but the same idea is true of other things. Team Transitory originally thought that our current round of inflation would last a few months, and when it kept going beyond that they gave up and decided we must be replaying the '70s.

I doubt it. I just think that things like inflationary episodes (and pandemics) can last longer than you think. This is why I remain stubbornly on Team Transitory. At most the Fed should be slowly and calmly raising interest rates. At best they should probably be doing nothing while we wait to get a better idea of how everything is going to play out. After all, inflation is already subsiding before anything they've done has had any effect, and I'll bet it will continue to. But watch out for 2023 when all those interest rate hikes suddenly kick in just when we don't need them.

Every year the Annenberg Center conducts a survey of civics knowledge among American adults and every year we obligingly fail it miserably. This gives older Americans a chance to complain about how modern education is a shambles compared to the rigorous standards of their day¹ and it gives Annenberg a chance to moan about how knowledge of civics is essential to participation in a democratic society blah blah blah.

But beware of glass houses. Here are the results of one question over the past few years:

Take a look at freedom of religion: Annenberg claims that last year 56% of all adults knew that this was part of the First Amendment, but this year only 24% knew it. That's a whole lot of forgetting in the space of one year! On the other hand, it went up from 15% to 47% between 2017 and 2020. We sure got a lot smarter during the Trump administration!

The other questions show similar spikes. This is obviously ridiculous and suggests that Annenberg knows very little about statistics or polling—something that might be more important in modern democracies than being able to name the three branches of government. Can anyone explain what's going on here?

¹This is because they never seem to realize that the Annenberg survey is a survey of adults, not high school kids.

Here is brave Sir Hilbert fleeing from the silent approach of the Gray Knight, whose tail you can see sticking up above the tall grasses. The backstory is simplicity itself: Hilbert and Charlie were playing over in our neighbor's yard and Charlie decided to sneak up on Hilbert—one of his favorite activities. Hilbert, as usual, was caught unaware and leaped away to safety.

(Yes, this means that I'm experimenting with letting Charlie out again. So far it's going OK. Both cats like it: Charlie because he gets access to a vast new playground, and Hilbert because he once again has a ringleader that he can follow around and have fun with.)

Writing about inflation, Paul Krugman says:

While interest rates have risen a lot this year, they haven’t yet had much effect on the real economy. Never mind claims that we’re in a recession; the reality is that unemployment is still near a historic low, and other measures, like the number of job vacancies, suggest that the economy in general and the labor market in particular are still running very hot. And we won’t get inflation down to an acceptable rate until things cool off.

Last year the Fed didn't take inflation seriously, so this year we have inflation. The lesson from this is that long and variable lags still exist.

This year the Fed is facing up to the high inflation it didn't stop last year, so it's raising interest rates. But inflation is still plugging along, so the Fed is panicking and considering even more interest rate hikes.

In other words, no lesson has been learned. There's no reason to expect that the interest rate hikes in March, May, June, and July should have already had an effect, and therefore no reason to keep panicking. Those interest rate hikes are working their way through the economy and will slow things down by the start of 2023.

This is doubly true since we already know that the housing market is slowing down, but because of delays in data collection this won't show up in the inflation figures until the end of the year.

Core PCE is already down to about 4%. The interest rate hikes so far will probably knock off another percentage point, and housing has probably already shaved off a point that won't show up until December. Plus there are ongoing improvements in the supply chain that will also push inflation down. In other words, if we do nothing more we'll still probably get core PCE down to 2-3% by Christmas. Maybe lower. Who knows?

So my plea to the Fed is: don't keep doing the same thing over and over. Don't keep panicking because your actions aren't having an immediate effect. Don't keep leaking hot air out of your balloon because you can't see that the hot air you've already vented is already enough to eventually smash you into the ground.

Instead, you should let us know what you think the underlying drivers of core inflation are. Stimulus spending? That's already long gone. Housing? It's declining already and is sure to decline some more. Supply chain problems? They're improving. A wage-price spiral? We sure haven't seen much evidence yet of wages skyrocketing. Bond market expectations? They're anchored.

So what is it? I'm open to being persuaded that I've missed something. Instead there's silence. Can't you at least pretend to take seriously all the workers you plan to throw out of jobs and explain why you're doing it?

And that goes for you too, Krugman. You say that both the labor market and the broad economy are running hot, but the data doesn't seem to back you up:

After adjusting for inflation, GDP growth has been negative since the start of 2022. Both ordinary wages and the Employee Compensation Index have been dropping steadily for the past two years. And this is supposed to be an overheated labor market?

Talk to me. Tell me why I'm wrong. I'm listening.

My memory must be getting worse. This week I'm two days late with my usual gasoline chart:

But wait! This isn't my usual chart. What happened to the orange line representing the inflation-adjusted price?

Here's the deal: inflation figures are always a month or two behind, so I have to estimate recent inflation based on past trends. However, there hasn't been any inflation for the past couple of months—yet another accomplishment of our magnificent president—and when I corrected all my estimates the orange line disappeared. So I just deleted it.

Anyway, this means that whether you correct for inflation or not, gasoline is now $1.32 cheaper than it was at its June peak. No wonder Biden's approval rating is now skyrocketing.

Back in the day I used to tell people that if they wanted to understand a particular segment of the working class they needed to read supermarket tabloids. Aside from the endless celebrity gossip, the tabs embraced a political view that I'd call not ideologically conservative, but "common sense" conservative. That is, it was stuff that ordinary, nonpolitical, small-townish folks mostly considered obvious common sense: Government is incompetent; poor people are lazy; America needs to teach people a lesson sometimes; wokeness is ridiculous. Etc.

That came to mind again when I saw the current issue of the National Enquirer at the supermarket checkout today. Now, these days the Enquirer is more overtly political than it used to be, but tellingly, it still doesn't bother much with ideology or policy, since it knows that its working class readers don't care about that stuff. Rather, it focuses on gossipy pieces but featuring politicians instead of celebrities. This week the subject is Joe Biden's obvious mental decline.

The story inside is about what you'd expect: not even blind quotes, just assertions that "sources say" and "insiders dish" that Biden constantly loses his temper thanks to his "undiagnosed dementia."

This is politics as gossip, which is something the Enquirer used to have almost to itself. It's now only one of many, but it's still useful reading because its audience requires it to be blunt about things instead of just slyly insinuating them. As their motto says, they're "the only publication with the guts to tell it like it is."

And this is what its readers are being fed. Fox News may be the standard bearer for Republican agitprop, but there are other sources too. And not just the usual suspects.