Month: February 2023

Daniel Friedman writes today about whether Twitter blew it by suppressing tweets about Hunter Biden prior to the election:

[Steve] Bannon in October 2020 gave data from Hunter’s laptop to Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese mogul. Guo then oversaw an effort by his own subordinates to post that material, much which consisted of explicit material—like dick pics and videos and pictures showing Hunter engaged in sexual encounters and using drugs.

....In his reporting, Taibbi noted that Joe Biden’s campaign had successfully asked Twitter to take down a number of tweets related to Hunter. But as I explained in December, Taibbi failed to note that the requests from the Biden campaign that he highlighted did not relate to reporting by the New York Post. The tweets that the Biden campaign asked to have removed—at least the ones that Taibbi shared—contained explicit images of Hunter. That was the material that Guo’s followers distributed at Bannon’s behest.

Twitter, to be sure, did suppress reporting on Biden’s business entanglements that was based on laptop material....Subsequent reporting has indicated the material the Post cited did indeed come from Hunter’s hard drive and was not the result of a hack, all of which suggests Twitter’s decision was a poor one.

Twitter may have done the wrong thing, but I'd like to take a broader view. This isn't just about Twitter and one specific decision they made. Pretty much everyone made the decision not to write about Hunter's laptop, and they did it for a few simple reasons: The provenance of the laptop was fishy in the extreme; everyone knew it was part of a deliberately timed ratfuck that had been shopped around forever; reporters were unable to confirm the Post story; and the folks involved refused to make the laptop hard drive available to anyone.

So the decision to hold off on reporting about the laptop was perfectly sensible. Any decent editor would have made the same call until the facts could be independently confirmed.

That's the real story, not the fact that Twitter made a mistake that it corrected 24 hours later.

My latest bit of astrophotography is an image of the M81 Group, which consists of three big galaxies and a bunch of dwarf hangers-on. The big one in the picture is M81, aka Bode's galaxy. The smaller one (seen side-on)  is M82, aka the Cigar galaxy.

I'm not posting this because it's an especially good photograph. It's not. However, it's remarkably good considering I took it in my backyard under a full moon.

This was sort of an accident. I bought a new electric focuser for my telescope and I wanted to test it out just to make sure it worked. I don't need a dark sky for that, so I hauled my gear into the backyard and set it up. Then, once I had the focuser working, I figured I might as well take a picture or two. My backyard is hemmed in by trees, so I had to search out something interesting that was up and visible in the small part of the sky I could see. M81 was the winner.

As you may know, we live on the outer edges of the Milky Way galaxy, which is part of the Local Group (us, the Andromeda galaxy, and the Triangulum galaxy). The M81 Group is our nearest neighbor, a mere 11 million light years away. We are both part of the Virgo Supercluster, which in turn is part of the Laniakea Supercluster Complex. There are five supercluster complexes in the universe, and Laniakea is ours. Remember that when the next massive intergalactic war breaks out.

Fascinating:

Former Trump administration officials and Twitter employees tell Rolling Stone that the ... Trump administration and its allied Republicans in Congress routinely asked Twitter to take down posts they objected to — the exact behavior that they’re claiming makes President Biden, the Democrats, and Twitter complicit in an anti-free speech conspiracy to muzzle conservatives online.

....The voluminous requests often came from high-ranking political appointees working in different departments, offices, and agencies in the Trump administration. But during both the Trump and Biden presidencies, these types of moderation requests or demands were routinely sent to Twitter by the staff of influential GOP lawmakers — ones with names like Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik.

I guess Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss somehow missed this during their extensive investigation into Twitter's email. I wonder how that happened?

Apparently President Biden is fond of the British Parliament's tradition of Question Time, because that's what tonight's State of the Union address resembled. The crowd heckled him and he heckled them back—with a big grin on his face.

Biden's finest moment came about halfway through, when he baited Republicans about Social Security and Medicare. Some of you guys want to cut it, he taunted. When they rolled their eyes and yelled back, he turned it around on them and got a huge bipartisan cheer for never cutting either program. We've got unanimity, he said, with just the slightest trace of mockery in his voice.

Otherwise, the speech was fine. Biden stumbled a few times, but not in any big way. He didn't present a laundry list of stuff he wanted to accomplish, but instead bragged on all the stuff he had already gotten done. Then he'd yell out let's finish the job along with some (usually) minor asks.

So it was a modest speech, with no pretense that he was going to get much done with a Republican House in place. But it was also a friendly speech, delivered as if he was sitting in your living room with you. That probably went over pretty well.

What's the best way of comparing violent crime between countries, as I did yesterday? Lots of people are asking me this—in Twitter's usual polite fashion—so maybe you'd be interested in a brief primer.

The short answer is that it's really hard. The two biggest problems are both ones of measurement:

1. Different countries put different sets of crimes into the "violent crime" basket.
2. Reliability of reporting data differs considerably between countries.

In the US, there are four violent crimes: murder, rape, aggravated assault, and robbery. That's what I used in yesterday's chart. I didn't use a violent crime index from each country, I used just the rates for those four crimes and then converted them myself into a standard form (incidents per 100,000 population).

This takes care of the first problem but not the second, which itself can be broken into two primary components:

1. Some crimes simply have vague definitions and therefore leave a lot of discretion in the hands of local police.
2. Some countries have better reporting rates and better statistical services that make them publicly available. These are, unsurprisingly, the richer countries.

There's not a lot to be done about #1, and it's a problem even within the United States. The main offender is aggravated assault, which is by far the biggest component of overall violent crime. It's generally defined as either assault with a deadly weapon or the infliction of "severe" bodily injury. This is obviously a judgment call, and we just have to take what we can get.

Problem #2 is more serious. Not only is it likely to produce bigger discrepancies than #1, but it's impossible to get a handle on. In yesterday's chart, for example, Guatemala clocked in with a very low violent crime rate. That's ridiculous! But how do you know it's ridiculous? Only because you already have a preconceived notion of what the "real" crime rate is in Guatemala. But is your notion accurate? How do you know? Is it just because you've heard anecdotal reports, or because you really, truly have some knowledge about crime in Guatemala?

Now, I'm inclined to agree about Guatemala. Its violent crime rate, as calculated by outside sources, marks it very firmly as a high-crime country. However, the officially reported figures are very low.

There's not really a good answer to this problem of unreliable reporting. In yesterday's chart I was performing a comparison with another chart, so I had to use the same countries as the original. That meant including Guatemala. Normally I'd limit comparisons to similar-ish rich countries, where I trust that crime reporting is reasonably accurate. For example:

Now we can finally get to the meat of this post: If comparisons of violent crime are so difficult, should we just use murder rates instead?

The advantage of doing this is that murder is very well defined: If someone is dead and it's not a suicide, then it's murder. What's more, murders tend to get reported to police. It's hard for a dead body in the street to be ignored.

The downside is twofold. First, you're still getting numbers from a national authority, and there's no telling how reliable they are. Second, murder isn't a great proxy for overall violent crime. Partly this is because murder is rare: The US is a high-murder country, but even here it makes up barely more than 1% of all violent crimes. In other countries it's even less. Going solely by murder rates, for example, the US is 5x more dangerous than Germany. Going by overall violent crime, it's about 1.5x more dangerous.

Which do you think is more accurate? I'd go with the violent crime measure in a heartbeat. Thanks to the widespread availability of guns, our murder rate is relatively high, but no one thinks our overall crime rate is 5x that of Germany.

Here's my advice:

• If you're doing comparisons among rich countries, use violent crime. But even though it's a pain in the ass, make sure you use the same set of crimes for every country. It's more reliable than the murder rate.
• If you're making comparisons of relatively poorer countries, murder might be a decent proxy for overall violence. It's not great, but the violent crime rate is often useless, so it's better than nothing.

Finally, just to give you an idea of what different crime rates are like, here is violent crime in the US broken into its four constituents:

Robbery is down 70% while murder is down only 30%. Using only one or the other as a proxy for all of violent crime provides a very distorted picture. This is why the overall rate of violent crime is best if you have even modest trust in the reliability of a country's national crime reporting.

Happy Birthday, Karen! Marian picked this photo just for you.

Social Security is back in the news. The word on the street is that MAGA Republicans—unlike Donald Trump himself—want to "reform" Social Security so it doesn't go "bankrupt" and cut off our kids from their rightful pensions.

I'm willing to go toe-to-toe on the gritty details of Social Security with anyone, but not today. Instead, I'll just give you a taste of the Social Security doomsaying we're likely to get. Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, here is Travis Nix telling us that raising the payroll tax cap is a bad idea:

The Social Security administration forecasts that without benefit cuts or structural reforms the entitlement program will run out of money in 2035. In response, lawmakers in both parties are mulling the idea of lifting the payroll tax cap.

....[This] wouldn’t fix the structural issues with Social Security. Like a ponzi scheme, the program relies on the contributions of a shrinking young population to pay off an increasing elderly population.

....These programs need serious structural reforms—more tax revenue won’t save them....Lawmakers need to think bigger to offer real solutions. By raising the retirement age, letting workers put their tax in personal accounts instead of Social Security, and shifting Social Security to a flat benefit to make it a true antipoverty program, lawmakers could begin to address the crisis.

First off, Social Security will not "run out of money" in 2035. Current estimates say it will run about 25% short in 2035. That's a big difference, but conservatives can never bring themselves to say it.

Second, it's not a Ponzi scheme. If you cut off all the babble surrounding it, Social Security is just a standard social welfare program: Taxes go in and pensions go out. This can keep up forever, just like it can for Medicaid or the military or anything else.

Third, raising the retirement age saves money but does so mainly on the backs of the poor. Personal accounts are risky, which is why Social Security doesn't use them. And a flat, small benefit for the few would destroy public support for Social Security. Nix surely knows all this.

Fourth, literally everything Nix implies is baloney. I'm excited to report that the Social Security Trustees now include Excel data in their annual report, which means I can recreate their charts on my own. Here's the most basic, most important single chart you will ever see about Social Security:

That's it. That's all you need to know. Forget about high and low estimates or bend points or the accuracy of the Trustees' actuarial assumptions or any of that. Those are trivial. What this chart tells you is that Social Security is not doomed to an endless spiral of death. It's projected to eventually run annual deficits of about 1.5% of GDP forever.

So to fix it, all we need is reform that eventually adds up to 1.5% of GDP. That's it. Some combination of tax hikes and benefit cuts that come to 1.5% of GDP. That will keep Social Security properly financed forever.

Now, having said that, I should let everyone know that I've changed my mind about all this. In the past, I was in favor of some kind of sensible compromise that could be put in place now. But it's obvious that Republicans won't negotiate anything of the sort. They won't raise taxes, period, and they don't really want to give up doom mongering about Social Security either. It's a good brand for them: They can yell loudly about how Social Security is fatally broken and then quote surveys showing that young people don't believe Social Security will be around when they retire. It's a nice gig.

So even though sensible is sort of bred in my bones, I'm on Team Atrios these days: There's no point in—what? Cutting now so we don't have to cut later? What's the point of that? We might as well wait until later, when we'll know for sure what we need to do.

In reality, no one is going to cut a deal until the very last moment, just like we did in 1984. So when 2035 rolls around, our hair will suddenly be on fire and everyone will finally come to the table. And we'll find our 1.5% of GDP without too much effort.

The New York Times has a story today about Jaden Rashada, a star high-school quarterback who initially committed to play college ball at Miami. Part of the commitment involved endorsing a company called LifeWallet via an NIL contract:

Three people with knowledge of the negotiations said that LifeWallet eventually reached a deal to run through Rashada’s senior year of high school — with the contract consummated in California, where, unlike in Florida, NIL payments to high school players are legal. But the promised dollar figure was closer to $500,000.

Wait. NIL deals are legal in California for high school athletes? Yes indeed. In fact, we were the first to allow them—though the rest of the country caught up pretty fast. If this map is correct, high school athletes can now sign NIL deals in more than half the states:

I suppose none of this should be a surprise. Hell, Shirley Temple earned something like $6 million¹ in merchandise royalties before she was ten. And if Twentieth Century-Fox and MGM could compete for her services, why shouldn't Miami and U of Florida compete for Rashada's?

I haven't really figured that out yet, actually. In any case, Rashada ended up switching his commitment to Florida, but its booster group promptly reneged on his NIL deal. He's now committed to Arizona State, where he's reported to be receiving nothing (yet).

The moral of this story seems to be that Rashada pretty much got screwed by all the adults involved in this, but he's a good kid and will probably be OK. Maybe even rich someday.

¹That's in 2023 dollars, of course.

The balloon is the latest shiny object in our national discourse, and I'm weary of shiny objects. Still, I have to admit that the Pentagon is doing its best to keep balloon mania going. Here they are following up on their previous admission that balloons had flown over the US during the Trump administration:

“Every day as a NORAD commander, it’s my responsibility to detect threats to North America. I will tell you that we did not detect those threats,” Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of US Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command said when asked about the three other balloons.

....VanHerck added that the intelligence community after the fact was able to gather intelligence “from additional means that made us aware of those balloons that were previously approaching North America or transited North America.”

The Pentagon needs to either shut up or else provide enough information to satisfy a reasonable person. If they say from the start that they won't provide any further balloon information due to national security concerns, then fine. It's probably hogwash, but fine.

But if you drop a few more details that are obviously going to pique even more interest, you'd better be prepared to explain. Why didn't we detect the previous balloons? When did they fly over us? Where did they fly? What "additional means" recognized the balloons that weren't available in real time?

If you're not going to answer questions like these, then don't make things worse by providing titillating half answers that do nothing except keep the balloons in the news, but without providing the American public any context to evaluate how much they should care about them.

This is a little house in La Roche-Guyon, about 30 miles west of Paris. There's nothing special about it except for one thing: it has enough wiring coming into its roof to support a CIA surveillance station. What do you think they're doing in there?