Month: August 2023

Sunset over Indio.

There was a lot of blather at the Republican debate last night about the need to supercharge our energy production, all of it centered on fossil fuels. (For some reason Republicans have no apparent interest in supercharging any other type of energy production.) This makes me think that a lot of people don't realize just how much US oil and gas production has skyrocketed over the past 20 years. It's more than doubled:

Here is annual growth in crude oil production by president:

• Bush: -1.4% per year
• Obama: +9.1% per year
• Trump: +6.2% per year
• Biden (so far): +5.9% per year

Here are the counties that saw the biggest average pay increases in 2023:

Clayton County, a suburb of Atlanta, is some kind of weird outlier with 18% real wage growth since last year. I have no idea why. After that, everything looks fairly normal with no special geographic focus.

Yes, I watched the Republican debate. Not all that closely, but I did watch it.

It was a shitshow. With the exception of Chris Christie, every candidate on the stage seemed to think the key to victory was to talk really fast and stuff as much as possible into every answer. Add to that an immense amount of crosstalk and probably about half the debate was unintelligible. Hell, even the two Fox moderators talked over each other.

Nobody stood out. Vivek Ramaswamy stuck with his usual schtick of trying to be the most ridiculous person in the field and refusing to ever shut up. Ron DeSantis never came close to answering a question. He sounded like he was reading off cue cards transcribed from his website. Chris Christie is the anti-Trump guy, but even when he finally got a question about Trump he waffled around and didn't say much. Nikki Haley tried to straddle a lot of lines and failed to distinguish herself from the others. Mike Pence invoked Christ a lot but never said anything very interesting. Ditto for Tim Scott, though he tried pretty hard to out-conservative everyone there. Asa Hutchinson—I dunno. I can't really remember anything he said. Doug Burgum produced probably the worst closing statement I've ever heard. He sounded like a fourth grader mumbling a speech because he was embarrassed to be up there.

Nearly everyone agreed that climate change was real but we shouldn't do anything about it. Everyone was in favor of securing our borders. Everyone agreed that our nation is in decline. Everyone (apparently) believed that American education is in crisis. In fact, almost every person on the stage agreed with everyone else. There was precious little actual debate.

Other than that it was great.

A new paper estimates the number of gender surgeries performed over the period 2016-2020. Here's the breakdown by age:

The total number of gender surgeries in the 12-18 age group was 3,678, nearly all of them breast/chest surgeries. The annual number of surgeries started at 200 in 2016 and rose steadily through 2019 before dropping a bit in the COVID year of 2020:

At a guess, upwards of half of these surgeries were performed at age 18, which means minors received 1,839 surgeries, or 367 per year. In the most recent year studied (2020) the number was probably around 500.

Is 367 per year a lot or a little? I guess that's up to you to decide.

This is the 405-105 interchange near LAX. I've posted this photo before, and the only real difference is that I kept this one in color instead of desaturating it to black-and-white.¹ You wouldn't think that would matter much since it's not a colorful picture in the first place, but it does change the feel and texture a little bit.

¹In the B&W version I was also more aggressive about erasing the cars to produce a more deserted look.

Politico reports today on the strange partnership between progressives and hard right-wingers who don't want to reauthorize FISA Section 702, which has been routinely and massively abused in the past to spy on Americans. Until recently, the two sides mainly wanted to reform Section 702 so that the FBI requires a warrant before it's allowed to read emails, texts and so forth sent by Americans.

But lately the right-wingers have shifted. They are now focused on reforming "traditional" FISA:

Traditional FISA involves the use of court orders to surveil individuals physically inside the United States. Conservatives allege that the Justice Department has abused it to unlawfully spy on allies of former President Donald Trump — and in particular, former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

....“The Carter Page investigation is just one example of the FBI abusing FISA to surveil American citizens,” Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “I will be allowing FISA to sunset if we do not see significant reforms in the agency.”

FFS. But I suppose this isn't surprising. Conservatives these days are obsessed with conspiracy theories to the exclusion of almost everything else. In particular, they have spent years claiming that the FBI's investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016—which was kicked off after they got a tip about Carter Page—was illegal, unwarranted, and motivated by partisan witch hunting within the bureau. Nobody believes this except for extreme MAGAnauts, but they believe it with a burning passion.

Because of this we might lose our only chance of reforming Section 702 to require a warrant before the FBI scavenges through mammoth databases of communications by American citizens. Great.

A while back I watched a TV show with a plot point that featured a government agency bringing down an airplane just to kill a single person on board. Has fiction turned into real life today?

Reuters has reported that the Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was listed as a passenger on a private jet which crashed north of Moscow on Wednesday, the TASS news agency reported, citing Rosaviatsia, Russia’s aviation authority.

....The cause of the crash was not immediately clear, but Prigozhin’s longstanding feud with the military and the armed uprising he led in June would give ample motive to the Russian state for revenge. Media channels linked to Wagner quickly suggested that a Russian air defence missile had shot down the plane.

....The plane has been under US sanctions since 2019 because of its connection to Prigozhin. The Wagner chief has been reported to use the plane, including shortly after his failed mutiny, when the plane departed from St Petersburg to Belarus on the morning of 27 June.

The air defense missile theory is just rumor at this point, but who knows? It's hardly unthinkable that Vladimir Putin would do something like this. It's the kind of thing that happens when you launch a military coup in Russia, even if you call it off and apologize afterward. All ten people aboard the plane were killed.

The federal fiscal year begins on October 1st and goes through September 30th. We are currently in FY23, which began in October 2022 and will end in a few weeks.

But why? What's the deal with starting our fiscal year in October? I'm glad you asked. Here's the answer.

• For our first 50 years, we used a normal calendar year. There was no such thing as a budget back then, just appropriations that were passed whenever an agency happened to request one. So nobody really cared very much about when the official accounting year started.
• In 1842 the fiscal year was changed to begin on July 1st. Nobody knows why. One account says it was done for the "convenience of the public service," which obviously doesn't tell us anything. Why was it more convenient? Another theory says it had something to do with seasonal fluctuations in revenue. Or maybe it was a middle finger to President John Tyler, though it's hard to see why he'd care. (And he signed the bill making the change.)
• In 1974, the fiscal year was changed to its current structure (effective in 1976). By this time Congress did pass budgets, which were getting bigger and more complex all the time. They were never able to finish by July 1st, so they moved the start of the fiscal year to October 1st. This gave them three more months to pass a budget.

Today, of course, Congress is unable to finish a budget even by October 1st. Maybe it's time to come full circle and go back to a calendar year, which would give Congress until January 1st to finish up?

Or maybe it doesn't matter. The president, after all, releases a detailed budget document by March every year. It's hardly impossible. The real problem isn't so much size and complexity, but partisanship. Congress spends all year fighting over the budget and refusing to broker a deal until the very last second. If the fiscal year started on January 1st, it would just allow them three more months of brinkmanship and grandstanding and it would require them to hang around through the holidays. We might as well just leave things as they are.

A paper released today documents one of the most impressive uses of AI language models yet. A woman with ALS who was physically unable to speak—but still had a normally functioning language center in her brain—was fitted with electrodes that fed their output into a large language model similar to ChatGPT. It was able to produce sentences at 62 words per minute with a 76% accuracy rate.

Accuracy went down with larger vocabulary sizes, but improved with more electrodes and more training:

Obviously this is just the beginning. With more electrodes and faster processing, this BCI should be able to produce virtually normal, error-free speech. Needless to say, it could also be used by people with normal speaking capability—for example, to produce writing without ever saying a word. Do it in reverse and eventually two people might be able to communicate telepathically.