Month: January 2023

I must be missing something here. The Washington Post reports that Republicans are getting ready to pass a bill that mandates precisely how the Treasury Department handles a breach of the debt ceiling. In particular, it would specify which bills have to be paid and which can be blown off. The must-pay bills are likely to be these:

• Social Security
• Medicare
• Military
• Veterans
• Interest on the national debt

The curious thing about this is not the choice of which bills to pay. It's a pretty conventional list. The curious thing is why MAGA Republicans are so hot to put this down on paper. It's purely symbolic since it will never become law, and it opens up Republicans to pretty obvious attacks:

“Any plan to pay bondholders but not fund school lunches or the FAA or food safety or XYZ is just target practice for us,” a senior Democratic aide said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a proposal that hasn’t yet been released publicly.

Yes, exactly. I mean, this is roughly what Democrats are going to do anyway, but you might as well make them work for it. Why go to the trouble of opening the door to the shooting range yourself instead of making them kick it down on their own?

There's a truly remarkable story unfolding in Pittsburgh right now. About a year ago the city council passed a bill instructing police to stop pulling over drivers for eight specific minor offenses:

1. Expired tags within 60 days
2. Technical violation of temporary permit display
3. Loose license plate
4. Single broken light
5. Stickers on windshield or hanging from mirror
6. Lack of proper bumpers
7. Expired inspection certificate within 60 days
8. Expired emission inspection within 60 days

But sometime during the first week of 2023 the acting police chief, Thomas Stangrecki, wrote a memo telling traffic officers to ignore the law and return to pulling over people for any violation, no matter how minor. There was no reason given.

Well, almost no reason. Stangrecki cited a new state law that pretty obviously has no relevance, and then this:

Stangrecki told WESA another reason for the reversal was to boost morale among the city’s police ranks. He said he’s received steady feedback that the ordinance is “preventing them from doing their jobs.”

Police morale depends on being able to pull over motorists who have recently expired tags? Or a single broken tail light?

We've unfortunately gotten accustomed to police departments essentially extorting city councils into not crossing them. That's bad enough. But in Pittsburgh they're not bothering with stuff like a blue flu or a million dollar campaign to toss out unfriendly council members. Too much work, I guess. Instead they're just flatly telling the council to fuck off and leave them alone.

It doesn't matter whether you agree with Pittsburgh's law. It's still the law, and police aren't allowed to flout it just because they don't like it. But they are.

Hilbert is such a magnificent cat.

Here's the difference between political junkies and normal people:

Me, political junkie: Can you believe this shit? Gas stoves! They think we're going to take their gas stoves away from them. What a bunch of lunatics. This been going on for almost a week now just because some bureaucrat made a comment about gas being dangerous for kids. Don't conservatives even care that their children are going to develop asthma? And what's wrong with induction stoves, anyway? They're great! Even professional chefs like them. And it's better for the environment, too. But no. It's another round of "Liberals want to take away your ______ ." I'm so sick of this shit. Yesterday, nine out of 20 posts on the front page of the National Review blog were about fucking gas stoves. These guys just . . .

You, a normal person: Huh?

As a bit of stretching before the real workout, here's a 10,000 foot view of federal spending in FY22:

The federal deficit in FY22 was $1.4 trillion and we're supposed to get that down to zero. The rules are that (a) you can't raise taxes, and (b) you can't cut defense. Other than that, swing that axe! Let's find out which of you has the stoniest heart in the land.

CNN has infiltrated deep into the bowels of the Republican Party to return this stunning scoop about their priorities for the coming year:

A slide shown in GOP Conference meeting showed the budget and spending priorities for the 118th Congress, including tying the debt ceiling to spending cuts pic.twitter.com/9h1EVQT9ku

— Annie Grayer (@AnnieGrayerCNN) January 10, 2023

I am shocked, shocked, to learn that Republicans plan to insist on a balanced budget within ten years and are pretending they can do this solely by cutting domestic spending programs.

Paul Krugman is first out of the gate with a genre of column that used to be popular in Paul Ryan's day, pointing out that it's mathematically impossible to do this without cutting Social Security and Medicare. Which it is. About a thousand of us will eventually cave in and go through the arithmetic, even though we all know it doesn't matter. Republicans will (a) refuse to say what they want to cut, and (b) claim that they will enact tax cuts that supercharge the economy and send tax receipts through the roof. Take that, liberals.

It's the same old crap back for another round. I almost object more to the fact that Republicans are so tedious than I do to the fact that they're so petty and malignant.

From National Review's Jim Geraghty:

Apparently, the leadership of the University of Southern California’s Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work decided to “remove the term ‘field’ from our curriculum and practice and replace it with ‘practicum,’” declaring, “this change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that would be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant in favor of inclusive language.”

....Talk about a policy that is out in left fie-, er, I mean, out in left practicum....But maybe decisions like this are necessary so that all students have a level playing fie-, er, practicum.

Yeah yeah. But I can hardly blame Geraghty for his little joke. He couldn't have written it if we weren't doing stupid stuff like deciding that "phrases such as going into the field or field work may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign."

If field has painful "connotations" for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers, then so do:

• cotton
• pick
• spade
• passage
• hoe
• black
• lash
• plantation
• crop
• exploit
• traffic
• etc. etc. etc.

This list could go on forever. But guess what? We're not the only ones who do this. Rep. Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, has renamed the Committee on Education and Labor to the Committee on Education and the Workforce:

Why does that matter?

“Labor” is an antiquated term that excludes individuals who contribute to the American workforce but aren’t classified as conventional employees. “Labor” also carries a negative connotation that ignores the dignity of work; the term is something out of a Marxist textbook that fails to capture the accomplishments of the full spectrum of the American workforce.

....Language matters. Using outdated terms like “labor” creates an overt bias towards union bosses while widening fissures created by Big Labor between workers and employers.

There are those connotations again! Foxx must have lab-, er, thought hard to come up with this. But I don't have time to belab-, er, make a big thing of it right now. A friend just called and needs a ride to the hospital. She was watching Love's Lab-, er, Efforts Lost when she suddenly started lab-, er, having contractions.

I wish we could knock this off. There are a small number of words that really ought to be either avoided or banned altogether in polite society. But it's hard to make the case when we've already made laughingstocks of ourselves by pretending that words like field and labor are insults to various categories of people. Can we please get hold of ourselves?

From Speaker Kevin McCarthy, reminded that serial liar George Santos fabricated big chunks of his resume:

So did a lot of people here in the Senate.

Do tell! Let's name names, please.

This is a nice, shaggy horse in Modjeska Canyon lit by the late afternoon sun. I have no idea what kind of horse this is, or if there's anything special about it. But it's a pretty critter.

A new paper in Nature claims that "disruptive" discoveries in science have been on a downward trend over the past few decades. The authors use a measure of disruptiveness that basically measures whether anyone cares about previous work once the disruptive paper has been published:

The intuition is that if a paper or patent is disruptive, the subsequent work that cites it is less likely to also cite its predecessors; for future researchers, the ideas that went into its production are less relevant. If a paper or patent is consolidating, subsequent work that cites it is also more likely to cite its predecessors; for future researchers, the knowledge upon which the work builds is still (and perhaps more) relevant.

I'm . . . not so sure about this. All the various papers and patents that went into CRISPR, for example, may have been ho-hum, but CRISPR itself is pretty disruptive. You could say the same thing about the internet, cell phones, and GPS. The increasing complexity of the world means that it takes a lot of small pieces to construct a single disruptive discovery.

But there's another thing as well: A very few discoveries in human history might be called super-disruptive: discoveries so big that for many years they enable a follow-on surge of ordinarily disruptive discoveries. Here's a list:

Don't take the details too seriously here, but this table lists most of the consensus super-technologies and a few of the follow-on technologies they enabled. After the electric grid was invented, for example, households got air conditioning, refrigerators, TVs, microwaves, stereo systems, dishwashers, electric lighting, washers and dryers, and a vast array of other electrical gadgets.

The discovery of these super-technologies got closer and closer together all the way through 1950, but now progress seems to have stalled. This is because we're still living in the Computer Age, which our timeline suggests should have lasted about 50 years before giving way to a new super technology. That hasn't happened, which means we're still living on the dregs of an era that's largely played out.

But why hasn't a new super-technology been discovered yet? Because the next super-technology is artificial intelligence, and it turns out that it's really, really hard, even compared to previous gut busters. So we're piddling along with routine improvements and ordinary new inventions while we wait for AI to come along. When that happens, we'll have yet another explosion of innovation.