Month: June 2023

I'm not going to say that the Supreme Court has been Joe Biden's biggest friend lately, but they've been surprisingly sympathetic toward him in several recent medium-button cases. They voted in favor of him yesterday in the Navajo water case, a few days ago in the Alabama redistricting case, and last month in the Section 230 case.¹ Today it's immigration:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday ruled for the Biden administration in an important immigration case, saying Texas and Louisiana lacked the legal standing to challenge the executive branch’s priorities on who should be deported.

At issue is a....focus on arresting recent border crossers and immigrants who pose a threat to public safety, rather than the millions of other noncitizens who have lived here for years.

....Friday’s decision was 8-1, with Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. the lone dissenter. “The States have brought an extraordinarily unusual lawsuit,” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote for the majority. “They want a federal court to order the Executive Branch to alter its arrest policies so as to make more arrests. Federal courts have not traditionally entertained that kind of lawsuit; indeed, the States cite no precedent for a lawsuit like this.”

Various administrations have argued that immigration law is broadly written to give the executive wide powers, and among those powers is one that gives them control over prosecutorial discretion—that is, which immigrants to arrest and which not to. Conservatives have hit back, arguing that prosecutorial discretion is one thing on a case-by-case basis, but not when it's applied automatically to vast groups of people, as it has been in DACA to provide blanket protection for nearly a million undocumented teenagers.

Today's ruling is based on standing, not on the merits, so it's not strong and it could eventually return to the Court for another go-around. All told, though, DACA is now a decade old and has withstood a deluge of challenges. It's starting to seem pretty safe.

The vote was 8-1, and naturally Sam Alito was the lone holdout. He's a hack's hack.

¹They've also voted against him in the wetlands case, the NLRB case, and are likely to vote against him in the Harvard affirmative action case shortly. So it's not a big ol' bowl of cherries out there.

Back in the '80s through the early aughts the US prison population increased inexorably and nearly everyone thought this would continue forever:

But guess what? In the early '90s crime suddenly and permanently started to drop from its peak. Incarceration lags crime, but eventually the prison population finally turned around and started to go down too:

This comes from The Sentencing Project, which in addition to historical trends also makes a projection for future incarceration. They figure that the prison population will continue to follow crime trends, and by the end of the decade will be 40% below its 2007 peak.

This goes a long way toward explaining what's happening in California. For many years we were under court order to fix massive prison overcrowding, even if we had to simply release prisoners to do it. In 2011 the Supreme Court ordered the release of 30,000 nonviolent prisoners, which was mostly accomplished by dumping them on county jails. In the late '90s we also added some prison capacity to get under the "pop cap" mandated by state judges.

But times have changed:

By the time of the 2011 court order the national prison population had already peaked, but the ensuing drop was tiny enough that no one was expecting anything dramatic in the future. We got it anyway, and not just nationally: In the decade following 2011 the California incarceration rate—in addition to those deliberately released—declined by roughly 40,000.

And there's more: The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, following the passage of Proposition 57 a few years ago, expanded a program that allowed 76,000 prisoners to reduce their sentences a little bit in return for good behavior.

Put all this together and we suddenly have too much prison capacity. All the talk in Sacramento now is about saving money by shutting down prisons around the state—with a priority on facilities that need money for repairs, medical upgrades, and so forth. Why spend lots of money on prisons we don't need, after all?

Here's the most amazing part of all this: It's largely the result of an EPA order to mandate unleaded gas nearly 50 years ago. If saving money were your concern, no politician would ever have done it since they don't care about anything 50 years away when they'll no longer be in office. But it's a good thing someone did it, isn't it?

This is an iceberg rose with lots of pink coloring. One of our neighbors has a big hedgerow of icebergs, which bloom and get pruned back several times a year. Some of them are pure white, while others have the pinkish streaks. They make a very striking hedgerow.

Yesterday I posted a pair of charts that showed the growth in various categories for spending on food eaten at home—newly updated through 2022! But over Twitter I got a complaint. First, by showing percent growth all I was demonstrating is that new sources of food (warehouse, home delivery) grew faster than conventional sources (grocery markets, convenience stores). True enough. Also, I limited myself to food eaten at home.

Those were reasonable complaints, and I figure at least four or five of you care about it. But I'm one of them, so here are revised versions of the two charts:

Once again, you can see that even when you adjust for inflation, absolute spending on food is up by $4.4 billion since 1997, or 38%. But as a percentage of income, it's up only slightly—and even that's due solely to a spike in 2022. So the revised charts show much the same thing as the originals: They're a pretty good indication that our standard of living has improved considerably in the past 25 years. We buy a lot more food but it costs us about the same share of our net income as it always has.

This chart shows the growth and decline of the nine largest US shale plays over the past  three years:

Out of nine fields, only two have shown production growth since 2020. The rest are either flat or down.

This is one of the drawbacks of shale.¹ The development of fracking has allowed us to open up about 8 million barrels per day of crude oil from shale rock in the US, but individual drilling sites have short lifespans. Overall production is still increasing thanks to two medium-size fields that have continued to grow, but that's it. Our best guess is that shale will top out at 8-10 million barrels per day as new drills are installed while old ones start to play out after they've produced for about five years.

¹Others: it's relatively expensive to produce and is difficult to supply profitably when world prices are lower than about $80 per barrel; it requires lots of possibly poisonous slurry, which production companies treat as "trade secrets" and therefore refuse to break down into components for public review; and it releases a lot of methane into the atmosphere thanks to inadequate seals.

Every year the boffins at the USDA Economic Research Service tot up the amount we spend on food from different kinds of outlets. On Tuesday they released final figures for 2022. Adjusted for inflation, here's the growth in nine categories since 1997 for food eaten at home:

In absolute terms, grocery stores remain by far the biggest sellers of food to be eaten at home. They clocked in at $554 billion in 2022, more than twice the amount of the runner-up, warehouse stores, at $229 billion

One interesting item in this chart is that although we think of home delivery as a pandemic thing, it actually started skyrocketing around 2013. In fact, the onset of the pandemic barely changed its growth rate at all.

Also, note that even adjusted for inflation, total spending is up 52% since 1997. But check this out:

Even with food spending up substantially in absolute terms, it's still a smaller percentage of our incomes. This is a pretty good indication that our standard of living has improved considerably in the past 25 years.

Yesterday I mentioned that government bureaucracies were no worse—and probably better than—corporate bureaucracies, which are "frequently set up explicitly to help customers as little as possible without losing them." Today, by chance, we get a perfect example of this: Amazon Prime, whose parent is being sued by the FTC for making it just a little too easy to sign up for Prime and all but impossible to cancel. Sara Morrison at Vox has the deets:

The FTC points out that Amazon places multiple points along the way of a customer’s purchasing journey where they’re urged to sign up for Prime, including “interrupting” their shopping with “prominent” buttons offering Prime enrollments and tiny links declining them. The customer must select one in order to continue their purchase. The suit claims that Prime subscription offers aren’t always clearly worded as such, and consumers may think they’re simply choosing to get free shipping or a free trial without realizing that a paid subscription comes along with it.

And then there’s the Homeric journey one must take to cancel their Prime subscription. Seriously: Amazon even called it the “Iliad Flow” in internal documents uncovered last year by Insider. There, customers had to get through a four-page, six-click, 15-option process to cancel their subscriptions on desktop and an eight-page, eight-click minimum process on mobile. Getting to the Iliad Flow in the first place is its own odyssey, as the FTC describes:

To cancel via the Iliad Flow, a consumer had to first locate it, which Amazon made difficult. Consumers could access the Iliad Flow from Amazon.com by navigating to the Prime Central page, which consumers could reach by selecting the “Account & Lists” dropdown menu, reviewing the third column of dropdown links Amazon presented, and selecting the eleventh option in the third column (“Prime Membership”). This took the consumer to the Prime Central Page.

And then ...

Once the consumer reached Prime Central, the consumer had to click on the “Manage Membership” button to access the dropdown menu. That revealed three options. The first two were “Share your benefits” (to add household members to Prime) and “Remind me before renewing” (Amazon then sent the consumer an email reminder before the next charge). The last option was “End Membership.” The “End Membership” button did not end membership. Rather, it took the consumer to the Iliad Flow.

According to the Wall Street Journal, 72% of all American households subscribe to Prime. I wonder how many of them actually want to subscribe to Prime?

Of course, there are also companies that make it hard to buy stuff in the first place. For the past two days I've been trying to buy a gift subscription to Tatler but . . . I can't. I enter all my address information and supply a credit card and Condé Nast seems happy with everything. Then I push the "Confirm Purchase" button and an icon starts spinning. And spinning. And spinning some more. An hour later it's still spinning and nothing has happened. I guess they don't want my business very much after all. Before long I may even be forced into using the telephone.

The big Supreme Court news today is that Sam Alito once accepted a fishing vacation in Alaska that was arranged and paid for by a guy named Robin Arkley II. Other guests on the trip included Leonard Leo, head of the Federalist Society, and Paul Singer, a hedge fund zillionaire.

ProPublica, which broke the story, sent Alito questions on Friday and asked for a response by Tuesday. This gave Alito the time to write a pre-buttal in the Wall Street Journal opinion page before ProPublica even had a chance to release its story. This is considered bad form, but it's one of the risks of modern journalism.

I hate to say it, but it's kind of a weak story and Alito probably has the best of it:

• It involves a single 3-day trip in 2008. That's 15 years ago, a time when the court's ethics advisors said that such a trip didn't have to be disclosed. (There is, however, some question about whether the free private jet that Singer provided for Alito and Leo should have been reported.¹)
• Robin Arkley II, who organized and funded the trip, has apparently never had business before the Supreme Court.
• So instead the story focuses on Singer, who has indeed had business before the court. But Alito makes a reasonable case that he barely even talked to Singer and had no idea he was a party to any of the cases brought before the court.

The nickel summary here is that the whole story is about a single trip that cost a few thousand dollars 15 years ago. The law at the time was (a) clear that Alito didn't have to disclose the food and lodging, (b) a little muddy about whether he had to disclose the private jet, and (c) more or less silent on whether Alito's apparently mild relationship with Singer was enough to require him to recuse himself when Singer's Elliott Management brought cases before the court.

Overall, I'd say that Alito showed bad judgment here, but it doesn't seem like he did anything illegal.

¹Here's the relevant text of what Alito was and wasn't required to disclose:

In paragraph A, there's a clear exemption for food, lodging, and entertainment, but nothing about travel. In paragraph B, the law suggests that a "travel itinerary" should be disclosed if it's a "reimbursement."

Alito claims he follows the advice of Judicial Conference, which interprets the law to say that disclosure is exempt for "hospitality . . . on property or facilities owned by [a] person." Alito then makes a long and convoluted argument that "facilities" has always included travel.

But this is all pretty sketchy, especially in light of Paragraph B, which specifically mentions that a travel itinerary isn't exempted if it's a reimbursement. Was Alito's free trip a reimbursement? Not in normal usage, I think, but it may be a term of art here.

Long story short, the private jet business is a dog's breakfast. I don't know what its legal status is.

Today is the summer solstice—that is, it was the summer solstice 4½ hours ago at 7:58 am Pacific time. But why get fussy about things? It's the longest day of the year, which is why I've always hated it. I don't want the days to get shorter from here on out.

But here's a picture of the fickle sun anyway. It was taken on Veterans Day, not some astronomical trifle-day, but it's still the sun and we have to worship it.

Hey, did I tell you all that I'm planning to go to Durango in October to see the annular full eclipse this year? By good luck, we have a friend in Durango, so it's a two-fer.

The NAEP has released brand new results for its long-term reading and math tests. The long-term test is a special version of the NAEP that strives to stay the same from year to year so it produces scores that can be compared over time. Here's the main takeaway:

Despite the pandemic, reading scores didn't go down much, but the scores in mathematics were fairly disastrous. Math showed a decline of nine points in three years, sending scores back to their 1990 levels. Despite their small absolute drop, reading scores were back to their 1975 levels.

Score drops were significantly different for different racial and ethnic groups:

Using the rough rule of thumb that 10 points equals one grade level, white students lost about half a grade level while Black students lost 1½ grade levels. Native Americans lost an astonishing two grade levels.

Similar trends could be seen among different performing students. The highest performing students lost 7 points while the lowest performing students lost 15 points. Students in the middle lost 8 points.

So scores were down and the racial gap went up. It doesn't get much worse than that. There's considerably more reason to panic now than there was for last year's scores, which I predicted kids would make up in the next test. I was wrong.