Month: February 2023

Hey there. Have you seen a sign like this lately at a nearby fast food joint?

That seems pretty excessive, doesn't it? Fast food places must be desperate for workers to offer this kind of money.

But not really. First, of all, you won't see this kind of sign in Oklahoma, where they pay fast food workers more like $13 per hour. The national average is around $17. In California, a high-wage state, the average is a little under $20.

There's nothing new about this. Before the pandemic, the average hourly wage for a fast-food worker in California was $18.50. Today, after a few ups and downs, it's $19.50. A sign that advertises jobs for $20 per hour is just offering the average.

NOTE: The wage chart is based on Current Employment Statistics data from the BLS for "limited service restaurants," which it defines as restaurants where you order at a counter and then pick up your own food. In other words, it's mostly fast food. The hourly wage figures are an average of all workers. Managers and cooks make more, counter workers make less. And the figure for California is based on the national average + $3, because BLS data shows that for a wide range of fast food jobs California pays about $3 above the national wage.

I think I said once that it's impossible to take an interesting picture of a cow. This is because cows are inherently boring creatures who do nothing except eat grass and stand around listlessly.

I stand by this, but I think I came close on Sunday. This is a handsome looking cow doing its usual boring eating grass thing, but doing it right next to a sign that spells out its fate. What would happen if this cow learned to read?

UPDATE: After careful observation of other photos in this series, I still can't tell for sure if this is a male or female cow. But I'd say it's probably female, and several commenters think it's female too. If so, it ruins the joke a bit since she will never be eaten, but kept alive to produce lots of baby cows.

Last month The Nation published an article based on records from early 2020 regarding the origin of the COVID virus. The scientists involved, it turns out, were initially receptive to the idea that the virus might have been the result of a leak from a Chinese lab in Wuhan.¹ But after a week of study they wrote a paper that strongly supported the natural spillover hypothesis instead.

Why the turnaround? It happened after they received some new data on coronaviruses in pangolins:

The pangolin data, it turned out, did not provide an explanation for the scientists’ central concerns about the furin cleavage site...but the data did show that coronaviruses circulating in pangolins shared other key features with the pandemic virus. This seems to have played an important role in shifting the scientists’ thinking away from the lab hypothesis.

[Edward] Holmes, who had been described in an earlier e-mail as being “60:40 lab side,” wrote, “Personally, with the pangolin virus possessing 6/6 key sites in the receptor binding domain, I am in favour of the natural evolution theory.”

....Holmes would later describe the evolution of the paper as the scientific process at work: “I’ve absolutely no problem with people knowing that my views on this issue have evolved as more data have appeared. That’s science,” he wrote in a document obtained via FOIA request. “Indeed, I’ve told this to many people: the way [sic] see it is that we set-up an hypothesis and then tested it. As far [sic] I can tell we are only ‘guilty’ of following the proper scientific method.”

"That's science." And indeed it is. Early researchers very seriously considered the lab leak theory—as they should have—but new evidence eventually convinced them that natural spillover was much more likely.

We will likely never know for sure where the COVID virus came from. The only bulletproof evidence will be the discovery of an intermediate host animal that harbors the virus (or one that's very, very close), and so far that hasn't happened.

That said, the consensus among the virology community is pretty strongly on the side of natural spillover. The reason for this is not some kind of Big Brotherish groupthink, it's because their research has persuaded them it's the most likely explanation—and they're among the few with the scientific chops to fully understand the evidence.

Did many of them push back against the lab leak theory? Sure. But this was because they believed it was wrong—and was likely to fuel pointless, time-sapping conspiracy theories. There's really no convincing evidence that they tried to suppress a valid hypothesis for nonscientific reasons.

¹Just for clarity, the researchers discarded almost immediately the idea that the virus had been deliberately engineered. However, they remained wide open to the hypothesis that it had been created via some kind of research at the Wuhan lab and then accidentally leaked.

The Supreme Court heard arguments today about President Biden's student loan forgiveness program. Most of the news reports suggest that a majority of the court was skeptical that Biden had the authority to enact this program via executive action.

The Supreme Court currently has before it a number of cases that could demonstrate its rank partisanship. We'll have to wait and see how it rules on them before we know. However, I think liberals should steel themselves for a legitimate loss in the student loan case. It's not open-and-shut, but there's a reasonable argument to be made that permanent mass debt forgiveness was not the intent of the HEROES Act, which provides the authority for Biden's program.

The main arguments mostly revolve around the meaning of the president's authority to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision” of the student loan program during an emergency. But is outright forgiveness a "statutory or regulatory" provision? This is genuinely arguable, and it's not unreasonable to conclude that the legislative record doesn't support it. This is especially the case for a large-scale forgiveness program that doesn't make any distinction between those who suffered financial setbacks during the pandemic and those who didn't.

I don't know how I'd vote if I were on the Supreme Court. I'd have to study the issues more closely. But some disagreements are just that: disagreements, not partisan hackery. The student loan dispute is such a case.

William McGurn says the danger of East Palestine's chemical spill has been exaggerated. The EPA and private scientists have declared the air and water safe, but a lot of residents don't believe them:

Today’s fear is the price Americans are paying for the public-health authorities’ response to Covid. So many things experts claimed in the name of science—from the efficacy of masks to the shortcomings of natural immunity—turned out not to be true. The result is East Palestine, where many ask why they should now believe authorities who assure them the air and water are safe.

This is tiresome. Scientists did not, in fact, get all that much wrong about COVID. The bigger problem is people like McGurn, who seem not to understand how science works. It doesn't produce correct answers instantly out of thin air; actual research and analysis has to be done first. This takes time and frequently overturns previously held beliefs. That's not a problem with science, it's the very thing that makes science science.

There are also some pretty concrete reasons to be skeptical of official pronouncements about stuff like this. Corporations routinely lie about the dangers of their products. Politicians, mostly on the right, routinely belittle science whenever it doesn't provide answers they like. And of course, governments have a pretty spotty record of being open and honest about anything that might inconvenience them.

All of this is in play in East Palestine, and it goes back way, way further than COVID. I doubt there's any kind of PR miracle cure for this, but a starting point would be a basic understanding of how science works in the first place. Unlike the other problems, at least that one is relatively easy.

I don't have any special reason for posting this, but I happened to be checking out some abortion polling numbers and came across the latest from Gallup:

Support for more lenient abortion rules had been rising steadily since 2013 and then skyrocketed after the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision was leaked in early 2022.

Only 15% of Americans still want stricter rules, and the number who think abortion should always be illegal has already dropped by 7 percentage points—and might drop even further when we get the 2023 polling on this question. It appears that even a lot of hardcore abortion opponents were taken aback when they actually got what they had wanted.

A few days ago we got a glimpse at a deposition in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News. It showed that primetime stars like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson knew that conspiracy theories about ballot machines were nonsense, but didn't want to stop talking about it because it might be bad for ratings.

Today brings us a further deposition. This time it's Fox News's billionaire owner, Rupert Murdoch, being questioned. Here's the Washington Post:

When asked in particular if Fox News host Jeanine Pirro was among the hosts who endorsed the claims, Murdoch replied “I think so.” He said that former host Lou Dobbs did so “a lot,” and that prime-time host Sean Hannity did so “a bit.” Yet Murdoch denied that Fox itself endorsed the claims.

....In the filing on Monday, Murdoch is quoted saying that it was “wrong” to allow MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, a staunch Trump ally, to appear on Tucker Carlson’s show in January 2021, during which he repeated allegations against Dominion. And he acknowledged that he could have stopped Giuliani from appearing on his network “but didn’t.”

And this from the New York Times:

Dominion’s latest filing also described how Paul D. Ryan, a former Republican speaker of the House and current member of the Fox Corporation board of directors, said in his deposition that he had told Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Murdoch’s son Lachlan, the chief executive officer, “Fox News should not be spreading conspiracy theories.” Mr. Ryan suggested that the network pivot and “move on from Donald Trump and stop spouting election lies.”

And this from the LA Times:

On January 5, Murdoch and [CEO Suzanne Scott] discussed whether hosts Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham should say some version of “The election is over and Joe Biden won.” Murdoch believed those words “would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election was stolen.”

Scott told Murdoch that “privately they are all there” but “we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers.”

I would also offer you a quote from the Wall Street Journal—owned by one Rupert Murdoch—but they're apparently less motivated to report this story than other outlets. I'm sure they'll have something soon.

Over at National Review, Nate Hochman is annoyed at Stanford University:

The demographic profile of Stanford University’s class of 2026 is out, with 1,736 matriculated students in the freshman class of one of the world’s most prestigious universities. But as some perceptive critics were quick to notice, one key demographic is disproportionately underrepresented: While whites make up more than 50 percent of the nation’s adolescent population, per 2019 Office of Population Affairs numbers, they were only 22 percent of Stanford’s class of 2026.

I was curious about this because there's something that I bet most people are unaware of: Stanford draws nearly half its students from California, which has a very different demographic profile than the rest of the country. Here it is for public school students:

The white population is probably undercounted because these numbers are only for public schools, but not by much. Private schools make up less than a tenth of all California schools.

Stanford draws 40% of its students from California and 60% from other states. It's simple to calculate a weighted average of their applicant pool, which looks about like this:

White kids are slightly more than a third of the total pool, not half.

But this isn't enough: Stanford is an elite university that draws from about the top 5% of high school students. By chance, the "advanced" level on the NAEP test also represents approximately the top 5% of students, so this is the pool that Stanford draws from. Here's what it looks like:

Now we need to apply this to Stanford's pool of applicants. For example, white kids make up 36% of Stanford's raw pool of applicants, but only 6.5% of those are performing at an advanced level. That's 2.3% of the total raw pool. Here's the number for all groups:

• Hispanic: 0.78%
• White: 2.35%
• Asian: 1.03%
• Black: 0.08%

This adds up to 4.23%, which means, for example, that Hispanic kids make up 18% of the entire pool (0.0078 ÷ 0.0423). Here's how this looks for all groups compared to Stanford's actual enrollment for the class of 2026:¹

This is all fairly crude, but it's in the ballpark. And after all that work we're back where we started: white kids make up more than half of Stanford's total pool of applicants but only 22% of their enrollment. Hochman was right.

Oddly enough, this analysis makes it look like Stanford enrolls a disproportionate number of Asian students. If I had to guess, I'd say it's because all the other groups do poorly in math,² and Stanford might put more emphasis on math ability because of its high enrollment of STEM and computer science students. But that's just a guess.

¹Note that my percentages for Stanford enrollment don't match theirs. This is because I discarded two groups that didn't have racial IDs (international and multiple-race) and then recalculated the percentages.

²It's not because Asian kids do well in math and poorly in reading. In fact, they do as well in reading (14% advanced) as in math (15% advanced).

NOTE: California public school enrollment is here. National public school enrollment is here. NAEP scores can be extracted here. Stanford enrollment is here.

I realize this will seem sort of pitiful to you folks east of the Mississippi, with your frigid weather and routine winter blizzards, but we don't get many blizzards here in Southern California. This weekend we did, and we're all pretty excited about it.

So today we have a diptych of Saddleback, a pair of peaks in the Santa Ana Mountains that dominates most of Orange County (Modjeska peak is on the left, Santiago peak on the right). And look! Snow! This is as much snow as I've ever seen on Saddleback, though that might be due to faulty memory.

But it faded fast. I took these pictures around noon, and by 3 o'clock there wasn't much left.

A few weeks ago I reported that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wasn't through with Disney. After eliminating Disney World's special taxing district in an act of revenge, he now planned to reinstate the district but with a board appointed entirely by him.

It seemed as if DeSantis was taking further revenge, but not everyone thought so. Maybe there was something else involved in all this?

It turns out that, yes, there was. S.V. Date has the story:

An unintended consequence of last April’s law was to transfer Disney’s outstanding debt onto the 700,000 homeowners and businesses in Orange and Osceola counties. Had that law taken effect on June 1 as scheduled, their tax bills would have increased by thousands of dollars per year until 2038.

Ouch. That would be very bad for someone who wants to run for president as a conservative. So the special district is back.

Date reports that at the signing ceremony today DeSantis also unleashed a barrage of falsehoods about the whole affair. Click the link above for the whole story.