Month: September 2022

From the Consumer Expenditure Survey, here is the growth rate of every product category from 2019 through 2021:

A little surprisingly, there are several categories that are still way below their pre-pandemic levels: restaurants, apparel, personal care, and education.

I understand why restaurants and education might still be trying to claw their way back up, but what's the deal with apparel and personal care? Why are people still spending way less on clothing than they used to? Is this just a consequence of having fewer cocktail parties and concerts and so forth? I guess we'll find out a year from now when the 2022 numbers are released.

Queen Elizabeth II has died, which means that Prince Charles finally becomes King Charles. But what number will he be?

We've already had King Charles I, who got into a fight with the Trumpists of his time and was eventually beheaded by their rump in 1649.

After a few years had gone by the Brits began to feel a little bad about what they'd done to Charles, so in 1660 they texted his son an invitation to come back if he'd promise to be nice. He did, and became King Charles II a few days later. Charles II presided over the founding of the Royal Society, the Great Plague of London, the Great Fire of London, the discovery of gravity, his wife's inability to produce an heir, his long affair with Nell Gwyn, and just generally a period of merriment and good times.

By the end of his reign, however, the British people were exhausted by kings named Charles, so they took a little break and then decided to have a run of Georges. This means Prince Charles is now King Charles III.

However, what's really important is how we can use the queen's death to stick yet another fork into Prince Harry. Here is the Daily Mail:

Flight data shows that Harry didn't make it to Balmoral in time to say goodbye! Take that, Harry!

In other news, the Mail tells us all about the code names that have now been activated:

Operation Unicorn will transport the queen's coffin back to London, with Operation Overstudy held in waiting in case the journey is made by air. This will be followed tomorrow by Operation Spring Tide, which spells out the details for Prince Charles' accession to the throne. These are all subsumed under the master plan named Operation London Bridge, details of which have been obtained EXCLUSIVELY BY POLITICO.

By the way, Prince William, now the heir to the throne, inherits his father's title of Duke of Cornwall, along with an income of about £20 million per year.

So there you have it. The queen is dead, long live the king. Plus we need to change the title of the national anthem.

This picture was taken at La Defense in Paris. Stop me if I'm wrong, but it's the starship Enterprise, right? And it's connected to the building via part of the Starfleet emblem. Or am I losing my mind?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the 2021 version of the Survey of Consumer Expenditures today. It's not complete, but it has all the major categories. The chart below shows the growth of consumer expenditures in 2019, 2020, and 2021:

Income was down 1% in 2021 while total expenditures were up 4.2% Both figures are adjusted for inflation, which amounted to 4.7% in 2021.

There are, obviously, lots of expenditure categories that were down in the pandemic year of 2020: food, restaurants, apparel, personal care, education, and others.

But 2021 was a different story. The amount spend on homes and education were down a bit, but that's all. Every other category showed an increase. The largest were in food, restaurants, apparel, transportation, entertainment, and personal care.

Those are the basics. More analysis to come, I'm sure. The basic good news is that even during the second stage of the pandemic, incomes remained about flat and expenditures were up substantially. That's what saved our economy, and it's largely due to Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion stimulus at the beginning of the year.

This morning Marian and I made our first trip to City of Hope to get things rolling on my CAR-T treatment. It was an adventure.

I'll spare you the routine griping and get straight to our meeting with the doctor. We were running late so he launched into his spiel right away, explaining how Abecma works by modifying my T-cells and then—

"Abecma?"

"Yes, that's the name of the drug."

"That doesn't sound right. Hold on...."

I had blanked on the name of the drug I was expecting, but I did some googling while the doctor kept talking.

"Carvykti! That's the one we talked about when I first came in. I've been following its progress for years."

Discussion follows. It ends like this:

"When a slot opens up, we give it to the top person on the waiting list and they get whatever drug is available."

"But—"

"And both drugs are about the same anyway. Carvykti has a 92-95% response rate, while Abecma is around 90%."

Long story short, I agreed to the Abecma, but only to buy myself time to go home and check things out. It's always dangerous for a layman to do this, but the clinical trials were pretty clear: Abecma had a 72% response rate and Carvykti had a 98% response rate. But there's more: Abecma had a 29% "stringent complete" response rate while Carvykti clocked in at 83%.

That's an enormous difference, and the stringent complete response is what you really want. This kind of response means that the level of cancerous cells is so low they can't be detected.

Anyway, I was just on the verge of calling back to cancel tomorrow's leukapheresis appointment when the doctor called me. He felt bad about the misunderstanding etc. etc. and now acknowledged that Carvykti was, in fact, more effective. "And it lasts longer, too!"

So we all agreed to put me back on the waiting list, this time specifically for a Carvykti slot. This probably means a few more months of waiting, but it also means a far greater likelihood of success. In the meantime, it's back to chemo and the evil dex for me.

The bureaucracy giveth and the bureaucracy taketh away. This is not what I was expecting today, but I guess things could be worse.

This is one of the tree-lined paths at the Rodin Museum in Paris. It's really a beautiful place.

How's our crystal ball working these days? Let's roll the tape:

August 12: Kevin says the "nuclear secrets" taken from Mar-a-Lago were probably "intel about other countries' nuclear programs."

September 6: The Washington post reports that the FBI had found a document "describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities."

Always trust Kevin Drum for the finest in blog-based prophecy.

I know it's Wednesday, but better late than never:

The price of gasoline dropped another dime last week. Life under President Biden just keeps getting better and better!

Here is the price of natural gas in the US and Europe:

Until February, the US and European prices of natural gas were generally within a few dollars of each other. Today, the US price is $9 and the average price in Europe is about $70.

Much of this is because Europe is trying to replace Russian gas with liquefied natural gas from other countries. However, Europe doesn't have enough capacity at its LNG ports to come even close to making up the loss from Russia. This supply constraint has produced bidding wars with Japan and South Korea that have caused natural gas prices to skyrocket around the world. In the US, by contrast, we have plenty of domestic supply and prices are low and fairly stable.

This is why Europe is way more panicked about energy prices this winter than we are.

During our stay in Paris a pair of wood pigeons came and sat together outside our window every evening around dusk. They seemed quite attached to each other, cooing softly for a couple of hours before flying off somewhere else for the night. They were lovely companions in the ruddy light of the setting sun.