Cats, charts, and politics
Let's make this dome week. Yesterday I featured the observatory dome of the 200-inch telescope at Mount Palomar, so today is something completely different: the glass dome of the Galleries Lafayette department store in Paris. This picture was taken from directly below the dome, and it's actually a panorama stitched together in Photoshop. I couldn't quite get the whole thing in a single frame. At the lower right is a walkway that allows you to see the dome closer up.
Via Atrios, I see that Donald Trump will be in Detroit tomorrow to talk to strik—
Wait. I'm getting an update:
But other than that, Trump will be in Detroit to woo striking auto workers.
I'm confused:
So which is it? I'm betting on #2.
The San Francisco Fed has updated its analysis of COVID-era savings based on more recent data, and it now concludes that the money saved from pandemic relief programs is pretty much gone:
The SF Fed estimates that only $190 billion is left in excess savings—and the odds are good that even that is mostly in the hands of the affluent, where it does little good. The average consumer has nothing left aside from what they normally hold.
Generally speaking, this is fine. The whole point of the pandemic relief programs was to sustain spending during the pandemic by giving people money they could gradually spend down. That's been propping up the economy longer than anyone anticipated, but no longer. We now have to make do with what we earn.
Here's the annual growth rate of the largest countries in the world:
Of the top eight countries, all have per capita GDPs under $15,000 except for the US, which clocks in at $60,000. Who's your bet to lead this list 30 years from now?
The Supreme Court has told Alabama to sod off:
The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused Alabama’s request to reinstate a congressional map drawn by Republican lawmakers that had only one majority-Black district, paving the way for a new map to be put in place before the 2024 election.
....The court’s order gave no reasons, which is often the case when the justices decide on emergency applications. The ruling clears the way for a special master and court-appointed cartographer to create a new map.
The Supreme Court might be skeptical of race-based legislating in general, but it's downright unfriendly to being flatly defied. They told Alabama to obey a lower court order to redraw their congressional map and Alabama refused. That was never likely to be taken lightly.
So now Alabama's Republicans have lost control of redistricting entirely. That will mean losing at least one seat, and who knows? Maybe more. Once you let a special master loose there's no telling what he'll do.
The Wall Street Journal reports that consumers are finally feeling the effects of high interest rates. They are buying fewer houses (true), fewer cars (not really true), and loading up their credit cards:
“Consumers are carrying much higher balances than they were two years ago,” said Charlie Wise, head of global research and consulting at TransUnion. “There are always people at the margin where any increase in rates is going to hurt them.”
That's really, really not true:
Even if you cherry pick the low point of credit card balances exactly two years ago, the average credit card balance is only up 4%. If you compare to the pre-pandemic level, balances are down 16%. And delinquencies are stable. I wish reporters would check this kind of stuff instead of just passing along whatever story some expert tells them.
We need new drugs to fight the surge of antibiotic-resistant bugs that have been making the rounds in recent years. And we have them! But there's a catch:
Six startups have won Food and Drug Administration approval for new antibiotics since 2017. All have filed for bankruptcy, been acquired or are shutting down.
The problem turns out to be a simple one: there aren't really that many superbugs out there. This means that demand for super-antibiotics is fairly low, which makes them very expensive, which in turn reduces demand even further. A million bucks for a cancer drug is pretty ho-hum these days, but apparently we haven't quite gotten ourselves used to million-dollar penicillin:
About 13,000 people in the U.S. each year develop a severe type of drug-resistant infection that Achaogen’s drug Zemdri was developed to defeat. Up to half of people hospitalized with such infections die. They are among the more than 35,000 people in the U.S. who die annually from drug-resistant bacterial or fungal infections, a toll that has risen in recent years.
The year Zemdri was approved, Achaogen spent almost $200 million on manufacturing, marketing and other costs and generated $800,000 in sales of the drug. Achaogen’s stock price fell more than 96% from approval in June 2018 to the end of the first quarter in 2019.
I don't know how much $800,000 represents in doses, but it's way less than 13,000 people. For some reason, thousands of people die every year from this particular type of infection, but almost none of them were prescribed Zemdri to treat it. This is not a good thing for the future development of super-antibiotics
There are lots of people who think Donald Trump is a boor but plan to vote for him anyway. I'm not talking here about the dead-enders who worship Trump, but the center-right voters who really don't like him but will hold their noses and mark their ballot for him even so. Why? Because the alternative is voting for a Democrat.
You may wonder what's so scary about that. The answer is pretty simple: they don't like Democratic policies. They think we let in too many illegal immigrants. They think we spend too much money and run up the deficit. They think we're too soft on criminals. They think we're too willing to raise taxes in order to spend it on the poor. They think we're sexual libertines. They think we care more about saving a few fish than we do about jobs. They think we're pro-abortion. They think we want religion gone from public life. They think we've been hijacked by identity politics. They think we want to take away their guns.
And guess what? Put aside the uncharitable wording of these complaints and they're basically right about all this stuff.
It's common to say that people don't vote for policy, but that's dead wrong. Sure, they don't care much about minutiae like Title 42 or debt ceiling fights, but they care a lot about the broad outlines. And a lot of them believe the basics of Democratic policy are misguided and dangerous.
The economy affects voters. Fox News affects voters. Political hysteria affects voters. And in a country divided nearly 50-50 that makes all those things important. But by far the most important thing of all is broad policy. If you want to attract more voters on a durable basis, that's what you need to pay attention to.
I drove up to Palomar Mountain yesterday to scout around for skygazing sites, and I was surprised to find out that Caltech's stewards of the 200-inch telescope had finally opened up the observatory to visitors again. So as long as I was there I popped in. I was unable to get a good picture of the telescope itself, but it was a fine clear day for photographs of the dome.
