Month: August 2023

Wisconsin has one of the most egregiously gerrymandered state legislative maps in the country. In 2022 Republicans captured 64% of Wisconsin's Assembly seats even though they won only 47% of the vote.

In April Democrats won an election that gave them a majority on the state Supreme Court, and they have now filed petitions to challenge the gerrymandered lines drawn by the legislature and approved by the former court. One of the court's Republican justices is pretty upset about it:

The outcome of a challenge to Wisconsin’s legislative maps is “predetermined” by the court’s liberal majority, conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley wrote in a dissent issued Tuesday.

....On Tuesday, the court ordered the Wisconsin Elections Commission to file responses to the petitions by Aug. 22. In a dissenting opinion, Bradley wrote that “everyone knows” the court’s four liberal justices will grant the petitions.

This displays some serious chutzpah. Bradley is certainly right that this is a purely partisan case, but she didn't seem to mind that back when the court had a Republican majority and it was equally predetermined that they'd rubber stamp the transparently one-sided map drawn by Republicans.

If you adopt brutally partisan tactics when your party has control, you can hardly feign outrage when the other party does the same. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Last week you saw Charlie peering at Hilbert from a distant hedge. This week you get a closeup of Charlie in the hedge. He was having lots of fun that day, leaping out of the hedge and startling Hilbert, and then circling back to the hedge to do it again. Hilbert just wandered around the whole time, never really catching on.

Apparently a Category 4 hurricane is headed toward sunny little Irvine. That's something new and exciting. It's true that I've been desperately pining away for cooler weather since June, but this sure wasn't what I had in mind. Also, I was hoping to restart my astrophotography this weekend, but I'm pretty sure a hurricane will produce poor viewing conditions.

On the other hand, there's this:

Projections show the storm has about a 50% chance of hitting Southern California late Sunday or early Monday as a tropical storm, meaning sustained winds at or above 39 mph.

Huh. A 50% chance of 39 mph winds. Astrophotography is still out, but maybe this isn't quite as bad as people are making it out to be.

A new Washington Post "analysis" informs us that the Senate and Electoral College are biased in favor of small red states. Also that political polarization has increased and trust in government has decreased.

This is not exactly big news. But at least it's all true. On the other hand, despite all this there's been a lot of substantial action under the past three presidents:

1. Wall Street reform
2. Auto industry rescue
3. Obamacare
4. DACA
5. 2017 tax cut
6. Operation Warp Speed
7. Withdrawal from Afghanistan
8. IRA, CHIPS Act, Infrastructure Act, and 2021 stimulus
9. Global unity on Ukraine
10. Electoral Count Reform Act

This is not the record of a country hobbled by gridlock or the demise of democracy, no matter how loud and belligerent members of Congress are these days. Plus there's this:

11. Donald Trump is facing four separate felony trials

As for the unfairness of Congress and the presidency, since 2000 Democrats have held the presidency for 12 years and Republicans for 12 years. The House has been in Democratic hands for 8 years and the Senate for 13. The number of federal judges is split almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans. This doesn't strike me as demonstrating any fundamental unfairness in a country that's been split 50-50 for more than two decades.

There are gripes on both sides about unpopular policies that nonetheless remain in effect—abortion for liberals, immigration for conservatives.

And yet, things continue to putter along. It's true that suicides are up a bit; weather has gotten crazy as the world continues to warm; and we still haven't figured out how to educate Black children decently. Also, the Republican Party long ago went insane. On the other hand, the economy is good; COVID is no longer a threat; we are making slow progress on solar and EVs and other climate change mitigations; and until COVID hit people continued to report that they were happy. In other words, aside from the fact that we're all spitting mad at each other, things seem fairly normal these days.

I got new test results back today and my M-protein level continues to drop—which means my cancer load is also dropping:

I don't know what this means. I stuck the trendline in just for the hell of it, but I doubt that it means much of anything at this point. That said, lower is always better and there's at least a small chance that the CAR-T worked but it's just taking me longer than usual to get to zero. Cross your fingers.

Here's the long-term chart, which I haven't put up for a while. Regardless of whether the CAR-T fully worked, I'm now at my lowest M-protein level since the cancer was first diagnosed nine years ago.

The New York Times writes today not about the student debt woes of Millennials, but the student debt woes of Gen Xers:

As of the first quarter of this year, members of Generation X held about a quarter of the nation’s outstanding $1.6 trillion in student loan debt — to the tune of nearly $49,000 per borrower, according to TransUnion, the credit reporting bureau.

....For people like Renita Thompson of Washington, D.C., the fast-approaching deadline makes planning for the future more challenging. Ms. Thompson, 51, is earning a bachelor’s degree in human resource management and owes between $75,000 and $80,000 in a combination of federal and private student loans.

It's all but impossible to get detailed data by age for student loans, but enough is available to say that this description is wildly misleading.

First, that $49,000 average is a mean, not a median. That means it's inflated by the astronomical loan balances of a small number of doctors, lawyers, and business grads.

Second, this is the average among people who still have debt. Almost by definition, these are the people who borrowed the largest amount of money (i.e., doctors, lawyers, and business grads).

Third, it says nothing about how many Gen Xers still have loan debt. The answer is about 15%, nearly all of whom are folks who earned professional degrees and are now earning high salaries. Among the ordinary Gen Xers who got their BA and then entered the workforce, almost all have already paid off their loans.¹

Fourth, Renita Thompson is extremely non-representative of borrowers. She's 51 and apparently getting a BA from a private, for-profit college like DeVry or the University of Phoenix. The median amount borrowed by 4-year public school grads is around $20,000.

I almost don't pin any blame on the reporter who wrote the Times story since it's so damn hard to get numbers for student debt that make sense. But I can blame her for choosing such an obviously unusual and misleading example of Gen X student debt. Everyone does this, and it should stop.

¹I'm pretty sure of this, but I admit that it's a bit of a guess. Straight-up data on the number of borrowers at different ages and levels of debt doesn't seem to be available, so it has to be extrapolated from other sources.

This is the town of Buckhorn, about 40 miles northwest of Los Angeles. No, I'd never heard of it either until I had stared at a map for a while to figure out what I'd taken a picture of on takeoff out of LAX headed to Rome. It's not actually a city, merely a "populated place name" according to Wikipedia:

Located in the Santa Clara River Valley, this was an early stagecoach stop and a regular eating place known for being midway between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. It was run by the Warring family who came to the county in 1869 and owned the nearby Buckhorn Ranch. Buckhorn was also a station on the initial route of the coast rail line that arrived in the valley in 1887.

Sadly, after the 1904 opening of the Santa Susana Tunnel, which I've also never heard of, traffic moved elsewhere and Buckhorn withered. Apparently no one even knows its population these days.

Please don't confuse this Buckhorn with California's other Buckhorn, located in Amador County east of Sacramento.

From the New York Times, describing a massive internal strategy document posted today by Ron DeSantis's Super PAC:

The main strategy memo for the debate contains no mention of policy — and the advice steers Mr. DeSantis away from talking about specific solutions because doing so won’t get him headlines.

It's all zingers and attack lines. And why not? DeSantis's policy positions aren't all that popular in the first place.

In the New York Times today, Julia Angwin talks about the various problems created by social media algorithms deciding what you see. She lists several:

Yet not one of those problems is as damaging as the problem of who controls the algorithms. Never has the power to control public discourse been so completely in the hands of a few profit-seeking corporations with no requirements to serve the public good. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which he renamed X, has shown what can happen when an individual pushes a political agenda by controlling a social media company.

How is it that our memories have become so busted? Not so long ago there were a grand total of three (3) TV networks that provided us with whatever news they felt like giving us. That was it. Maybe you also read a daily newspaper. In Los Angeles that would have been the conservative LA Times until the late '60s, when it became the liberal LA Times whether you liked it or not. Later, Fox News showed precisely what can happen when an individual pushes a political agenda by controlling a (regular old) media company. Elon Musk is a pipsqueak next to Rupert Murdoch.

I agree that algorithmic curation of our social media feeds poses a problem—though the problem is typically one of prioritizing addictive clickbait, not choosing political sides. But in the end there are multiple, competitive social media platforms available to all of us. Their popularity changes rapidly, and that's at least partly due to how they manage what you see. The market really does provide a fair amount of discipline here, even for social media companies.

The reality is that we have way more choice in media consumption today than we had 50 years ago. The network news shows are still around but are now supplemented by cable news. Daily newspapers have declined, but our effective access to them has grown. In practice, most of us were limited to one newspaper back in the so-called "Golden Age," while today it's simple to browse a dozen if you feel like it. (Some are behind paywalls, but in the print era they were all behind paywalls.) And of course there's also social media.

Put all this together—plus radio, podcasts, magazines, curation sites, and even blogs—and our real problem isn't that we're limited in what we can see. The problem is choosing among the literal tsunami of news sources available to us.

Honestly, if you're not happy about what Facebook shows you, then switch to—or add—something else. If you're too lazy to bother doing this, maybe you don't really mind the algorithm very much after all. And if you demand to have your precise desires handed to you on a custom-curated platter instead of broadening your appetite for browsing a few different media outlets to find ones you like, maybe you never really cared that much about the news in the first place.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Despite the decline in inflation since last year, families with young children still face sharp increases in one of their biggest expenses—child care. The national average price of daycare and preschool services rose 6% in July from a year before, the Labor Department reported recently. That was nearly double the overall inflation rate of 3.2%.

This is ridiculous. Why does the Journal insist on printing nonsense like this? Here is what the cost of preschool looks like:

Yes, there was a brief spike in preschool costs at the beginning of the year, but price growth has been flat since April—in fact, down 0.2% compared to an increase of 0.5% for overall inflation. And since 2019 preschool costs have increased considerably less than overall inflation (up only 16.7% compared to 20.4% for CPI). That represents a real price change of -3.1%.

There is no preschool crisis.