Month: November 2022

You may recall that a couple of weeks ago I was trying to use my telescope when it just stopped dead. I'm sure you're wondering what happened next, aren't you? Well, settle in.

I was pretty sure the problem was in the equipment, not the software, but I wasn't totally sure. For one thing, Device Manager didn't show any COM ports, and that seemed—

Wait. COM ports? Like serial ports? Who cares about those anymore?

Well, it so happens that my telescope mount was initially designed about 20 years ago and was fitted out with an RS-232 serial port. This was back in the day when most computers also had a serial port. But time passed, and eventually it was redesigned to ditch the RS-232 port and look like this:

But here's the thing: that RJ45 jack on the bottom might look like an RJ45 jack, but it's not. It's really a serial port with an odd connector. Later still the USB port was added, but that's also a serial port.

This is generally not a problem. The USB port connects to a virtual COM port created by software, and that's been working fine for me for months. But not only did it stop working, it also seemed like my virtual COM ports had gone away too.

After much fussing around, which resulted in everything being wrecked, I restored to an old restore point and voilà! My COM ports were back. But they still didn't work. So I finally bought a special cable that has an RJ45 plug on one end, a USB plug on the other, and a chip that provides the proper conversion of current levels. I also hauled out my old Radio Shack multimeter, which I bought 40 years ago and use about once every two or three years,

The multimeter confirmed that the USB port was dead¹ but the RJ45 port was active. So I plugged everything in, installed the drivers for the cable,² started up the software, and . . .

It still didn't work. Waah!

I was getting ready to throw in the towel and send the whole thing in for service when I happened to notice a Test button on the software interface. Hmmm. So I clicked it. It didn't really tell me much except that by default it was set to 9600 baud. Who sets anything to 9600 baud these days?

No one. But back in the days when the RJ45 jack was first added to the mount . . .

Well, even then 9600 baud was a thing of the distant past. But long story short, that was the key. When I set the COM port speed to 9600, everything lit up and the software said it was good to go.

What a clusterfuck. But at least I think it's working now. I haven't actually tested it fully yet, but I'll do that in the next few days. It'll be a couple of weeks before the moon is back down and I can do any kind of serious imaging.

¹Yeah, the USB port had just suddenly gone dead. I don't know why. It was added to the mount a couple of years ago by popular demand, and my guess is that it was kludged in by connecting it to a little circuit board of its own that was connected to power separately from the other stuff. Most likely, the power connection came apart.

²I had to install drivers for a cable? Yes indeed. These are the drivers that create a virtual COM port that's assigned to the cable.

It's been a while since I've updated everyone on our various pandemics, so let's do that. Here's monkeypox:

Roughly speaking, monkeypox is over. In the US we administered about 1 million doses of the vaccine compared to a few hundred thousand in Europe for a similar sized population. Despite the difference, both had almost identical experiences and the FDA recently approved a one-fifth dose, which apparently works just as well. In the end, it's not clear how much impact the vaccine had vs. simple immunity buildup among those who were infected.

COVID-19 isn't really trackable by case rates these days, so instead here's the ongoing fatality rate:

The United States is at 1 death per week per million, or roughly 300 deaths per week. That puts us right in the middle among peer countries.

Seth Masket is tired of stale old stories about why Democrats lose elections:

What are the narratives going to be Tuesday night? It’s fairly easy to know these ahead of time....In all circumstances, Democrats will be advised to moderate.

Republicans interpret election losses very differently from Democrats....Democrats are constantly trying to downplay their more liberal members’ desires....Contrast this with the behavior of Republicans, who largely ignore abhorrent statements from the likes of Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene and downplay attempts to undermine democratic elections by Trump supporters.

It sure doesn't sound like Republicans interpret election losses differently from Democrats. Masket himself says here that both parties try to downplay and ignore their own most extreme members—which they do, since this makes obvious sense.

At the same time, it's also true that Democrats tend to lose more than Republicans do when they're perceived as extreme. Maybe that's unfair, but it's reality. The reason for this, as always, is that the United States is a center-right country. I know you're tired of hearing that too, but I don't care. It's true:

The good news here is that liberals are taking share away from moderates. The bad news is that conservatives are still well ahead, 36-25%. In every election, liberals begin in a deep hole compared to conservatives.

And that's not all. It's also a simple truth that centrist voters tend to be more scared by extreme liberalism than by extreme conservatism. The reason, once again, is obvious: if you feel sort of cautious about change, it's always safer to vote for a conservative—even an extreme one, since they'll just keep things extremely the same. You can always change your mind later, after all. But if some extreme liberal manages to pass Medicare for All, you're stuck with it forever.

All of this means that, yes, Democrats need to moderate if they want to win over centrist voters. And like it or not, there are things centrist voters don't like about us liberals:

• They think we're too lax on crime.
• They think we're constantly making up stupid new rules.
• They think we want to let in too many illegal immigrants.
• They think we want to spend money endlessly and drive up the debt.
• They were appalled by the looting and rioting during the BLM protests of 2020 and think Democrats should have denounced it more vigorously.
• They think wokeness is ridiculous. They want us to stop talking like academics from another galaxy.
• They do not like being called racist.

You don't need polls or long treatises to understand these concerns. All you need is a few center-right friends—assuming you have any. And remember: it doesn't matter whether these concerns are legitimate or whether they're based merely on ignorance or Fox News demagoguery. They exist no matter what.

Now, if Democrats end up doing poorly on Tuesday, the real reason is that the party in power always does poorly in midterm elections. But the secondary reason will indeed be that Democrats have spent the past few years moving to the left and allowing folks like Bernie and Elizabeth and Alexandria and Katie to become the best known faces of the party—all the while convincing centrists that good ol' Joe Biden is little more than a captive of these progressive do-gooders.

That's OK with me. In this household we all love Katie (Porter) and would vote for her multiple times if we could. But I'm not a centrist. I think Medicare for All is a great idea and I'm not opposed to funding social programs with higher tax rates on the rich. Democrats already have my vote.

But my center-right friends? They're kind of scared of us these days, and that's enough to keep them voting for Republicans even though they agree that Republicans have gone nuts. How hard is this to understand?

Over at Mother Jones, Kiera Butler says that Florida is "flirting with an anti-vaccine apocalypse." Naturally I wanted to see it in chart form:

Shazam! I suppose the big drop in 2020 can be chalked up to COVID-19. Hospitals were jammed and both patients and doctors were reluctant to schedule in-person visits. But the coverage rate stayed way down in 2021 even after those problems had eased.

Note that these are figures for the so-called 4:3:1:3:3:1:4 series of childhood vaccines. That doesn't include COVID-19 and it doesn't include HPV, which has gotten a lot of resistance, especially in conservative regions. These are just the usual measles/polio/diptheria/etc. vaccines.

In 2019, when Gov. Ron DeSantis took office, Florida had an enviable childhood immunization rate. Today they're probably not even average. What an unbelievable waste of years of hard work.

NOTE: Just in case anyone notices, the official numbers from Florida are based on immunization rates as of January 1. For example, the 2022 number is for January 1, 2022, which means it's really the rate for 2021. I've used the real years in the chart above.

How do you persuade an 18-year-old Samoan kid with a howitzer for an arm to move from Southern California to Tennessee for college? If he's a 5-star quarterback, it's easy:

Since committing in March to Tennessee — signing a name, image and likeness deal with a school booster collective rumored to be worth $8 million — Iamaleava has been a recruiter and a promoter for the program, garnering a large platform on social media with his pajama-wearing appearances at 7-on-7 passing tournaments.

Nico Iamaleava is the fourth highest ranked quarterback recruit in the country. Fourth.

Once again I have a chart-a-rama for you. Here are four charts all related to the employment rate:

All of these metrics are in agreement: Starting around January employment growth started to fall steadily. Since then, the number of job openings has dropped by nearly 2 million; the growth of the employment level has declined from 8% to nothing; and the number of industries that are expanding their workforce has fallen by 20 percentage points.

My point here is the usual one: these are signs that the economy is cooling, and all of them started well before the Fed began raising interest rates. We didn't need those big increases—maybe a slow and steady series of small ones instead—but we got them anyway and now they're starting to produce a headwind against an already slowing economy. Remember the big shortage of computer chips, for example? All gone:

Chip companies in recent weeks have instituted hiring freezes and layoffs, slashed capital spending plans, reduced factory output and warned investors of a stark reversal in their customers’ buying habits....Many chip executives don’t see a near-term reprieve. “We are planning for the economic uncertainty to persist into 2023,” Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said on an earnings call last week. “It’s just hard to see any points of good news on the horizon.”

Buckle up, folks, the flight is about to get bumpy.

You remember James Bennet, don't you? He was the editor of the Atlantic who got hired to run the New York Times editorial section in 2016. One of his goals was to diversify the range of opinion on the op-ed page, which in practice meant hiring a bunch of conservatives. Needless to say, this didn't go down well with lots of liberal Times readers.

Bennet kept his job, but he exhibited some misjudgments here and there and apparently by 2020 his position was a bit tenuous. That was when the Times published an op-ed by right-wing Sen. Tom Cotton. The op-ed caused an uproar, and a few days later Bennet was gone.

It was all a bit fuzzy, though. The op-ed was published online, but never in print. It was handled by an assistant editor and Bennet wasn't involved. I read it at the time and don't recall thinking it was anything out of the ordinary for a publicity seeking twit like Cotton.

Eric Wemple of the Washington Post brought all of this back to light by writing a column a few days ago provocatively headlined "James Bennet was right." So I went back and read Cotton's op-ed again to see what I thought with the passage of time.

My response, yet again, was "meh." It was written during the BLM protests over George Floyd's death and Cotton was upset about the rioting and destruction that accompanied them:

Some elites have excused this orgy of violence in the spirit of radical chic, calling it an understandable response to the wrongful death of George Floyd. Those excuses are built on a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters. A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants.

....Some governors have mobilized the National Guard, yet others refuse, and in some cases the rioters still outnumber the police and Guard combined. In these circumstances, the Insurrection Act authorizes the president to employ the military “or any other means” in “cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws.”

Cotton wanted the president to authorize military intervention in cases where "rioters and looters" were beyond the control of local police. In particular, he proposed an "overwhelming show of force," which sounds like a bad idea to me but an entirely normal one for a right-wing Republican. In any case, it's an idea to disagree with, not to put beyond the pale of even discussing. I continue to see the case for arguing with Cotton, but I still don't see the case for the entire Times newsroom going nuts and Bennet ending up out on his ear.

But no worries on that score. Bennet is now "Lexington," the columnist who writes about America for the Economist. So he landed on his feet.

I said I wasn't going to do this, so naturally I did it: I took a look at violent crime rates in all ten of our biggest cities. Here it is:

One caveat: I wanted to compare apples to apples, and that meant violent crime, which is defined as murder + rape + robbery + aggravated assault. Some cities still provide their crime rates like this, but others don't and I had to extract those four crimes by hand. That's why a few of these numbers might be a little different from the headline numbers you've seen elsewhere, notably New York City. But mostly they're pretty close.

Now here's the chart for murder:

With the exception of a couple of outliers, it looks like our murder wave is over. The increases in murder in eight out of ten of our biggest cities are small, zero or negative.

And now a comment: I continue to be very suspicious of the numbers from New York City. There are three obvious reasons:

• NYC is an extreme outlier. Violent crime is up 20%, while every other big city is at 5% or lower.
• There's a massive disconnect between violent crime (up 20%) and murder (down 14%).
• The big increase in 2022 literally came out of nowhere. This chart uses NYC's "seven major crimes" definition:
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None of these three things is ironclad proof of anything, but together it's hard not to shake your head and wonder what's going on. For more than 20 years serious crime in New York was consistently down with only a couple of short and minor blips. Then suddenly, out of the blue, it's up 30%? What's going on?

UPDATE: The murder rate for San Antonio originally included 53 migrants found dead in an abandoned tractor-trailer in June 2022. The chart has been redrawn to exclude these deaths since they don't fit the normal sense of the word murder.

The New York Times reported yesterday on fear of crime:

Debra Kowalski, a 49-year-old nurse in Bucks County, Pa., has been pleading with her elderly parents to move out of Philadelphia, especially after a delivery driver was shot and killed last month a few blocks from their home.

....Though polls show that voters’ biggest concerns are about the economy and inflation, many Americans — especially more conservative voters like these, but also moderates and liberals — say they are gripped by worries over crime and disorder. Even though national crime trends are mixed, these voters have seen reports of homicide spikes in places like Memphis, Milwaukee, Albuquerque and Jacksonville, Fla., and have heard from friends and neighbors who have been victims of car thefts or muggings.

In many cases, their anxieties stem not from experiencing serious crime, but from seeing homeless encampments, or finding a syringe or human waste on the sidewalk, or reading accounts in their neighborhood social networks of vandalism on a local bike path.

As the article goes on to say, national statistics are hopeless and wouldn't be available yet for 2022 even under the best circumstances. But we do have some local stats, especially from big cities that use CompStat or some other crime software that they make available to the public.

I don't feel like doing this for every city that comes up in the news, but here's the latest from the crime infested city of Philadelphia:

Violent crime is up 4.18% this year. What's more, that's driven entirely by robberies. Murder is down, rape is down, and serious assault is down. Only robberies are up.

And one other thing: outside of the top five biggest cities, I'm not sure people realize how small the violent crime numbers are. For example, the robbery numbers in Philadelphia really are up a ton, but even at that it's an increase of 1,100 incidents in a city of 1.6 million. Your odds of being robbed in 2022 increased by considerably less than one in a thousand. Without underplaying the seriousness of any increase in crime, especially one like robbery, this is just not a crime wave, no matter how many times Fox News says it is.

Here is Charlie looking back as he contemplates wandering into our neighbor's yard. Luckily this didn't turn him into a pillar of salt. He made it through his ordeal completely intact.