Cats, charts, and politics
Why is it that union organizing drives so often fail? Brutal opposition from management is one reason, but another is simply that a lot of workers don't feel they'd get any benefit from belonging to a union. That's wrong:
These are the latest estimates from the BLS, and they show pretty clearly that in addition to better pay, union members also have considerably greater access to benefits. I don't imagine this comes as a surprise to anyone, but sometimes it's nice to see the actual numbers.
After a long day of eating and snoozing, Hilbert can't be bothered to actually get up on his feet and chase around a toy on a string. Last night he wouldn't even go so far as to roll over. But if you wave it right in front of him he will deign to wave his paws at it.
He is not always this lazy. But sometimes he is.
Every year the Koch brothers—or brother, since David Koch died—hold a big donor meeting in Palm Springs. It's an explicitly political event that typically raises hundreds of millions of dollars for conservative and libertarian causes.
In other words, it's not really the place for a Supreme Court justice. But that kind of thinking has never stopped Clarence Thomas:
Thomas has attended Koch donor events at least twice over the years, according to interviews with three former network employees and one major donor. The justice was brought in to speak, staffers said, in the hopes that such access would encourage donors to continue giving.
That puts Thomas in the extraordinary position of having served as a fundraising draw for a network that has brought cases before the Supreme Court, including one of the most closely watched of the upcoming term.
Thomas never reported the 2018 flight to Palm Springs on his annual financial disclosure form, an apparent violation of federal law requiring justices to report most gifts. A Koch network spokesperson said the network did not pay for the private jet. Since Thomas didn’t disclose it, it’s not clear who did pay.
Back in the day, it wasn't unusual for Supreme Court justices to hobnob with senators and presidents and discuss the issues of the day with them. We'd like to think we've gotten beyond that in our more enlightened era, but apparently not. At least not in the case of Clarence Thomas.
Of course, maybe he'll recuse himself in cases that involve the Koch network. That would certainly impr—ha ha. Just kidding. Of course he won't recuse himself. Let's not be silly.
Just to remind everyone, here's the basic shape of the federal budget:
The orange line is the one that has Republicans tearing each other apart. It is lower today than it was in 1980, and about the same as it was in 1990, 2000, and 2010. But for some reason it's an intolerable problem.
In fact, discretionary spending isn't a problem. It's been slowly but steadily declining for decades. What's more, there's simply not very much there to cut, even in the fever dreams of hardcore right-wingers. Even the zealots in the House Freedom Caucus, for example, are demanding only $120 billion in spending cuts. That's a lot, but it's less than a tenth the size of the federal deficit. It's a pinprick.
If you're serious about reining in the federal deficit, you have two choices:
That's it. Unless you want to continue living in fantasyland, those are your only choices. It doesn't matter if you hate them both. This is all we've got.
Here's a headline from the Washington Post today:
Return to the office? These workers quit instead.
At the risk of being a bit of a dick, the text of the story really doesn't back this up. Here's a summary of the people interviewed in this piece:
All of these are related in vagueish ways to remote work, but only one person truly quit solely over a mandate to report back to the office. Of the others, two are relocations; two are changes in personal circumstances; and one got tired of Zoom.
If so many people are quitting over return-to-office mandates, it ought to be easy to find half a dozen clear-cut examples. But apparently it's not, and that makes me wonder if there really are lots of people quitting over work mandates.
POSTSCRIPT: It's worth noting that people have long chosen jobs based on specific needs for flexibility. This is still happening, but has nothing special to do with either COVID or remote work.
Vox writes about our recent increase in traffic deaths:
According to a 2021 survey of over 1,000 police officers, nearly 60 percent said they were less likely to stop a vehicle for violating traffic laws than they were prior to 2020, when the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police inspired nationwide protests over police brutality, and the pandemic disrupted usual enforcement practices.
....The fact that traffic stops are decreasing while deaths are rising doesn’t necessarily mean that one is causing the other, because correlation does not equal causation, as any good statistics teacher will tell you....Some experts, however, think there’s an obvious link. Enforcement efforts that are high-visibility and focused on safety are shown to reduce risky driving. Experts believe the opposite might also be true.
Here's the problem: this doesn't match the data. Here are traffic fatalities over the past ten years:
Traffic fatalities jumped suddenly in the second quarter of 2020 and then flattened out at their new higher level.
It's possible this is related to the George Floyd protests, but it seems unlikely since those protests only started at the tail end of the second quarter of 2020. Nor is it likely related to fewer traffic stops. Those didn't suddenly drop off in the second quarter of 2020 and, in any case, can't have an effect until drivers realize that enforcement is down. That takes a while.
By far the most likely explanation is COVID, which exploded precisely in the second quarter of 2020. But why? Why did COVID suddenly make us into reckless drivers? And why have we remained reckless drivers even as COVID has waned?
The truth is that none of this really makes sense. It's unlikely that the sudden spike in traffic deaths has anything to do with George Floyd, and it's more or less impossible that it has anything to do with reductions in traffic stops. It is likely that it's related to COVID, but that just pushes the question a level deeper. What does COVID have to do with driving?
This is, for now, an unsolved mystery.
Grape juice lupine by the side of the road near Palm Springs.
Alex Tabarrok says today that pharmaceutical companies are undervalued because "pharmaceutical innovations earn only a fraction of the value that they create." For this reason, he opposes the Medicare price controls in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Trying to quantify innovation is hard. Instead, let's just look at profitability:
Pharma is the most profitable major industry group in the world, earning nearly double the amount of most other industries. The only one that's close is software, which has even more enviable production costs (zero) than pharma.
My view is that it's hopeless to try to quantify things like innovation or value to humanity. Penicillin and birth control didn't earn their inventors a penny. Instead, simply look at financial returns when there's true competition. This tells you that the average competitive large company has earnings that are about 8% of revenue. In the pharma industry it's 14%.
Real competition instead of artificial (and unpredictable) patent rights would be the best thing for the pharmaceutical market. Failing that, price controls seem pretty reasonable for an industry that takes very profitable advantage of its favored status.
Hurricane Hilary was something of a bust, producing far less rain and wind than predicted. But it turns out that our true reckoning with Hilary was delayed a bit: a huge spike in the mosquito population thanks to pools of water left behind by the storm. And it's one specific mosquito doing most of the damage:
Like a typical rising pop icon in L.A., it’s often referred to by its first name: Aedes. And it’s the Aedes — Aedes aegypti in particular — that’s really popping off right now....All was going well on the containment front until Hilary struck in late August...
Our native Culex mosquitoes apparently prefer birds to humans, so it's the Aedes variety that's most annoying. And annoying it is: Marian and I have both been covered with mosquito bites over the past month. Now I know why.
When will this all go away? Not until December, according to our local vector control boffins. Crap.
Here is the history of new one-family home sales in a nutshell:
Over the past 60 years, new one-family homes have been built and sold at an average rate of 2,500 per million population. We exceeded that average by a cumulative 2.8 million homes during the boom of 1995-2006, and then lagged it by 4.0 million homes during the bust of 2007-2019.
And we're still below average. Even during the 2020-21 boom we only slightly exceeded it for a grand total of six months before falling below again.