Month: August 2023

The Washington Post informs us that Millennials are screwed:

Homeownership — the main driver of wealth for most Americans — is out of reach for large swaths of the population. But the pinch is most pronounced for millennials, who are buying homes at a slower pace than those before them.

....Those born between 1981 to 1996 have been called the “unluckiest generation.” Since entering the workforce, they’ve experienced the slowest economic growth of any age group. They’ve also been weighed down by student debt and child-care costs, Lautz said.

I'll spare you the usual rant about this. Instead I'll just show you a few simple charts. For 30-somethings here is homeownership:

Here is the average cost of a house over the past 40 years:

Here is income:

And here is student debt:

Through 2021, Millennial homeownership is at its average for the past 30 years. The average mortgage payment is the same as it was for Boomers and Gen X. Income is higher than both Gen X and Baby Boomers at the same age. And average  student debt is lower than either Gen X or Baby Boomers (although only 10% of Boomers have student debt compared to 20% of Millennials).

The average mortgage has increased and the homeownership rate has undoubtedly decreased since 2021 thanks to our recent housing boom and interest rate spike. And while it's true that this affects young families the worst, it's also (a) temporary and (b) something that every generation has gone through (Boomers got the 1981 Volcker recession and Gen X got the 2001 dotcom crash as well as the 2008 Great Recession). It's nothing unique to Millennials.

Millennials are doing fine. There's a small and vocal subset who are unhappy that they can't afford to live by themselves in a spacious apartment in Manhattan, but the vast majority are faring as well as previous generations and better than Millennials in any other country in the world. Someday a reporter from the Washington Post will read this and pass the news along to the rest of the country.

In newspaper articles about court cases it's now routine to name the president(s) who appointed the judge(s) involved.¹ The reason is simple: it tells you everything you need to know. Hell, if they put this information in the lead you could skip the whole rest of the story. Democratic appointees reliably deliver liberal results and Republican appointees deliver conservative ones.

As near as I can tell, this is even more true in lower courts than in the Supreme Court. At this point, the Supreme Court might actually be the least partisan court in the country.

Is this new? The Supreme Court has always been political, but what about district courts? How long have they been so neatly polarized? I'd put it at 20 years or so, ever since the two parties got serious about naming reliably partisan lower court judges because they were the eventual feeders to Supreme Court appointments. After all, if you're dead set on nominating Supreme Court justices in their 40s and 50s then you need a big pool of judges to choose from who were partisans in their 30s. That means district courts. On the flip side, district court judges are all essentially auditioning for the Supreme Court. They can't afford to even occasionally break ranks if they have ambitions for promotion.

Bottom line: we really do have a two-tier justice system. Half is red and half is blue. Which one you happen to get is a matter of geography and chance.²

¹This usually isn't done on TV, which means TV news consistently leaves out one of the most important aspects of court stories.

²Except for the occasional bit of forum shopping, of course, where nothing is left to chance.

A common meme is one where you suggest that kids these days are unfamiliar with some item or activity from the past. The usual suspects are things like dial telephones, stick shifts, cursive handwriting, and so forth.

But this is ridiculous. There's so much period TV available that kids are familiar with practically all this old stuff. What you need is something that (a) went away a while ago and (b) never shows up on TV. It's actually hard to come up with examples, but tonight I finally did: opening a can of Spam with the little key taped to the bottom:

This occurred to me because I had Spam for dinner tonight. Yum!

This is Hilbert relaxing in our front yard. He's taking a little me time. Just a cat alone with his thoughts.

David Weiss has been investigating Hunter Biden for five years, ever since Donald Trump appointed him US Attorney for Delaware. Apparently he requested special counsel status on Tuesday, and today Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that he had granted it.

This is a very strange story. Last month Weiss wound up his investigation and agreed to a plea deal with Hunter. Then a Trump-appointed judge raised questions about a minor element of the deal, causing Hunter to reverse course and enter a plea of not guilty to the charges against him. For some reason this has prompted Weiss to not only continue the investigation, but to do so as a special counsel.

What's happened over the past two weeks to cause this change? As far as I know there have been no new revelations about Hunter. Is this purely political, motivated by recent Republican hollering over Weiss's independence coupled with news about Hunter's offshore accounts that's months old and has been well known to Weiss since it was made public?

There are no answers—yet. I assume Weiss will hold a press conference at some point, but I also assume he'll decline to say much. It's all very mysterious.

The producer price index is our glimpse into the future: Changes in the PPI are usually reflected in the consumer price index a few months later. July's PPI wasn't good news:

The overall PPI was up 3.6% in July compared to -0.5% in June. The component indexes were also up. We can hope for better news next month.

We keep asking when driverless cars will "really" be here, but it's an odd question. They already are:

California regulators agreed on Thursday to the expansion of driverless taxi services in San Francisco, despite the safety concerns of local officials and community activists. In a 3-to-1 vote, the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates self-driving cars in the state, gave Cruise and Waymo permission to offer paid rides anytime during the day throughout the city.

OK, this doesn't mean we have full-fledged driverless cars capable of going anywhere at anytime. But it does mean we have driverless cars capable of driving around the city anywhere at anytime—and if that's not "really" here, I'm not sure what is.

If Waymo and Cruise can pilot their driverless cars reliably around San Francisco, 100% autonomous cars can't be too far away. Highway driving isn't a big deal compared to city driving, and that takes care of all driving on streets. All that's left is non-street driving: parking lots, drive throughs, dirt roads, and so forth. I'm not sure how hard that is to automate, but I'm willing to bet that my longtime prediction of 2025 for honest-to-God driverless cars is pretty close to the mark.

This is a panoramic view of the Orangerie, part of the gardens of Versailles, looking southwest from the palace toward the Swiss Lake. It's certainly an impressive bit of craftsmanship, but I can't bring myself to love it. Even to my OCD-inflected mind, it seems just a little too overplanned and sterile. But I guess Louis XIV liked it, and that's all that matters.

From Vox today:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is tripling down on his state’s newly approved social studies curriculum guidelines that erroneously teach students that enslaved people “developed skills” that they could use for “personal benefit.”

I've had enough of this. There are plenty of problems with Florida's Black history curriculum,¹ but the "skills" passage isn't one of them. It is:

• A single footnote to a single standard in the curriculum.
• True. (In fact, not even controversial.)
• In no way minimizes the evil of slavery.

This is an example of the way liberals spend way too much time focusing on the wrong stuff whenever race is in play. We are still claiming that cops shot a defenseless Michael Brown in Ferguson even though this was debunked years ago. We insist that police kill lots of unarmed Black suspects even though the actual rate is extremely low and declining (a grand total of seven in 2022). We blame standardized tests for low Black admittance to selective high schools instead of accepting the fact that we do a lousy job of educating them. We refuse to come to grips with the fact that Black men really do commit violent crimes at triple the rate of white men.

Conservatives are so horrific on race that it's only natural for liberals to feel that they can never cede even the slightest ground to them. I get pissed off all the time at the fact that conservatives virtually never even acknowledge racism aside from the occasional pro forma "Of course...." As in: "Of course racism is still around, but ________ is not the right way to deal with it [followed by 3,000 words on why we shouldn't do anything]." In these kinds of constructions, _______ is every single racial remedy ever proposed in American history.

But spending time on ridiculous stuff does nothing but give right-wing apologists more ammunition. We really need to be more serious about where we focus our energy.

¹Among them: (a) It spends too much time telling kids that American slavery was unexceptional because everyone did it; (b) It spends too little time describing the actual conditions of North American slavery; and (c) It significantly overplays the virtue of white abolitionism.

ProPublica today provides us with the fullest accounting yet of the endless largesse provided over the years to Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas from his cadre of billionaire friends:

Their gifts include: At least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.

....The pattern exposes consistent violations of judicial norms, experts, including seven current and former federal judges appointed by both parties, told ProPublica. “In my career I don’t remember ever seeing this degree of largesse given to anybody,” said Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge who served for years on the judicial committee that reviews judges’ financial disclosures. “I think it’s unprecedented.”

The gifts were provided by David Sokol, a former top executive at Berkshire Hathaway; the late H. Wayne Huizenga, founder of AutoNation and Waste Management; Paul “Tony” Novelly, an oil baron; and, of course, the ubiquitous Harlan Crow, a real estate magnate.

But did Thomas violate any laws by hoovering up all these private gifts? Maybe! Can anyone do anything about it? Probably not. As near as I can tell, a Supreme Court justice could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and then just disappear safely into his chambers and refuse to ever talk about it.

This whole story gets sleazier and harder to believe with every new revelation. Thomas makes Hunter Biden look like a piker. But apparently nobody either can or will do anything about it. Welcome to America.