Month: November 2023

Stephen Wertheim repeats a common sentiment today: the United States has forfeited world opinion by supporting Israel in its war against Hamas. His evidence is a UN vote a couple of weeks ago calling for a "humanitarian truce":

Washington is hemorrhaging influence around the world.... Displeasure is not confined to Arab states. In the U.N. General Assembly, 120 countries supported a resolution calling for a humanitarian truce. Just 12 countries joined the United States and Israel in voting no.

This is not precisely untrue, but it's woefully misleading. Among major allies, only three joined the US in voting against the resolution. However, there were 45 abstentions, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, South Korea, Poland, Slovakia, Sweden, Ukraine, and Great Britain. That's completely normal.

What's more, the UN General Assembly has long been massively pro-Palestinian. A 1979 resolution demanding Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories got 102 votes (67%). A 1988 resolution expressing sympathy for the first intifada received 130 votes (82%). A 2004 resolution calling again on Israel to withdraw from occupied territories drew 140 votes (73%). A 2012 resolution making Palestine a non-voting member garnered 138 votes (72%). A 2017 resolution opposing US policy on Jerusalem got 128 votes (66%).

By comparison, 120 votes (62%) is practically a show of support. At the very least, it demonstrates nothing except that everyone voted the same way they always vote.

I wish there were some plausible way forward on all this, but if there is I don't what it might be. Since 2000, when Palestinians rejected the two-state solution offered to them at Camp David, progress toward a Palestinian state has been zero. Not that there was much before then either. The UN partition initially set aside land for a Palestinian state, but Arabs lost much of it in their 1948 war, and the remainder was seized by Jordan (the West Bank) and Egypt (Gaza). Despite rhetoric to the contrary, nobody in the Arab world took Palestinian independence seriously after that—and following the 1967 war it became little more than a political weapon against Israel. Today it's an impossible dream because Israeli settlements have chopped up the West Bank and East Jerusalem so thoroughly that it's all but impossible to stitch them together into a state.

If, even after taking Israeli occupation into account, you believe Hamas is a ruthless, reactionary terrorist organization that Israel has the right to uproot—especially after the savage attacks of October 7—the only question left is how they're allowed to do it. Diplomacy only? That's unlikely to get anywhere. War? If so, it's going to be a brutal urban war because that's where Hamas is. Something else? What?

I don't know. I don't think anyone else does either.

The Supreme Court issued a new code of ethics today. Huzzah? It is eight (8) pages long, five of which deal with recusal and outside activities such as speaking—none of which have been especially controversial lately.

But gifts have been controversial, so let's take a look at the gift section:

A Justice should comply with the restrictions on acceptance of gifts and the prohibition on solicitation of gifts set forth in the Judicial Conference Regulations on Gifts now in effect.

Also, this includes family members. And that's it. In short, the current rules are fine and no further clarifications are needed. You'll please excuse me if I'm underwhelmed.

POSTSCRIPT: The word "disclosure" appears only twice: once to ensure that justices don't disclose nonpublic information and once here:

For some time [since 1991], all Justices have agreed to comply with the statute governing financial disclosure, and the undersigned Members of the Court each individually reaffirm that commitment.

That's all there is. Everything is fine the way it is. Note also that this is phrased merely as a personal commitment. It's not part of the actual code.

Last month I showed you the Heart Nebula—or part of it, anyway, since it was too big to fit in a single frame. Today I've got the nearby Soul Nebula, aka IC 1848. Get it? Heart and soul.

Anyway, the Soul Nebula only barely fits in a single frame, but it's almost all there. And it's a pretty collection of interstellar gas. I went out to the desert for this and got seven hours of exposure time under excellent skies, but even so the result wasn't great. The narrowband filter I used does a good job of making the colors pop, but it introduces some odd streakiness. The final picture was also blotchy and extraordinarily noisy, for reasons I can't figure out. I have good denoising software, but it still has limits. And once again, the blues are weak even though the Soul Nebula has 'em. Partly this is because I have a slow telescope and I just can't capture enough light to show everything.

My other experiment failed completely. A few months ago I made a contraption that allows me to attach my camera to the telescope. I tried it for the first time this weekend, hoping to capture a wide angle view of both the Heart and Soul nebulas. Unfortunately, I must have bumped the focus or something, because every frame came out badly out of focus. I'll try again next time.

BY THE WAY: For my money, the Soul Nebula in my picture looks like a semi-terrified human face. Do you see it? Red hair at the top right; black eye in the upper middle; nose to the left of that; and an open mouth at the bottom. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

This isn't new, but I just saw it today. On Delta airlines, miles flown are no longer the metric for earning elite status:

Beginning next year for the 2025 travel year, Delta will have just one metric for earning status: money. Money spent on Delta tickets, vacation packages, hotels and car rentals booked through Delta and spending on Delta’s SkyMiles credit cards.

The spending on Delta’s American Express cards is staggering—nearly 1% of the entire U.S. gross domestic product, Bastian said in June. The airline hopes these changes generate an even larger gusher of cash.

Delta will collect nearly $7 billion in revenue from American Express this year from the sale of miles, ancillary services and brand fees. Its long-term goal is $10 billion. That’s nearly equal to the amount the airline generated from flying passengers in 2022.

Delta now makes about as much money from its credit cards as it does from actually flying people around—and I imagine they aren't the only ones. Is it any wonder that airlines seem to care so little these days about the business of hauling ordinary people from place to place?

Henry Farrell has critical words for the notion that technological progress is both inevitable and inevitably good:

Marc Andreessen’s recent “tech optimist manifesto” is one of the most significant statements of Silicon Valley ideology. As I’ve written elsewhere, it’s actually less a political manifesto than an apostolic credo for the Religion of Progress. The words “we believe” appear no less than 113 times in the text, not counting synonyms.

....The religion of the engineers is the hopium of Silicon Valley elites. It’s less a complex theology than an eschatological soporific, a prosperity gospel for venture capitalists, founders and wannabes. It tells its votaries that profits and progress point in exactly the same direction, and that by doing well they will most certainly do good. It should barely need pointing out that the actual problems and promise of technology lie in the current political struggles that this vision of the future waves away.

I haven't read the "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" and I don't want to. However, I've read a few bits of it and I wonder how much of the backlash is due to its actual content vs. its triumphalist language? The latter is why I don't want to read it, but I suspect that if it were toned down considerably I'd more-or-less agree with what it says.

The "Religion of Progress," as Henry puts it, is hardly new or unique to Silicon Valley. It's two or three centuries old and it really did mark a sea change in human affairs. Before the Enlightenment, people assumed that their lives would be mostly the same from birth to death. After that, we started to see change on a short enough timescale that it was noticeable during a lifetime. And after that, we adopted the notion not just that change happened, but that it was something we should actively seek out and encourage. This is the Religion of Progress, and you can date it back to Francis Bacon in its embryonic form and to around the mid-18th century in its more widespread form.

Henry knows all this better than me. It's pretty conventional stuff. So why the contempt for the modern version of it? Technological progress is obviously not all good—climate change, anyone?—but on the whole the prosperity of the world really does depend on it. If you stop technological progress you'll also stop economic growth.

The Silicon Valley version of this is mostly bound up in software, but so what? That just makes it closer to the Platonic ideal of progress: an advance in thinking that eventually produces material benefits. Artificial intelligence is closer still.

The better that AI gets, the more progress it will produce. What's more, truly advanced AI is far more likely to produce progress with fewer harmful effects. Why? Because it's smarter, more knowledgeable, and able to think more broadly. So even if Marc Andreessen expresses himself in the most annoying way possible, we should all be hoping like hell that he's right.

Everyone is forecasting a weak holiday season this year. Here's the latest:

The number of seasonal positions publicly advertised this fall fell to the lowest level in a decade, according to outplacement-services firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The National Retail Federation estimates that between 345,000 to 445,000 seasonal workers will be hired this year, down as much as 40% from a recent high in 2021.

Holiday hiring begins in October, and those numbers won't be available for another few weeks. For now, all we have are guesses.

Tyler Cowen asks today why more intellectuals don't convert to Protestantism, and I figured the answer was simple: intellectuals tend to be nonreligious and rarely convert to anything. But no!

According to GSS data, level of education doesn't correlate in any way with being nonreligious. It doesn't really correlate with any other religious question on the GSS survey either. This surprises me, but maybe it was just vanity on my part to assume that smart people tend to be nonreligious?

However, there's a huge chasm when you look by age:

On the question of Protestantism, there is an educational difference: people with college degrees don't go in much for fundamentalist churches, but they have a high engagement with mainline denominations (Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, etc.).

Who's doing what in Gaza? It's something of a fog to me because I literally don't believe a word coming from either side. They both simply have too much incentive to lie since this is a war for public opinion as much as it's a war for control of territory.

What little do we know for sure? A few things:

• Hamas continues to hold hundreds of civilian hostages.
• Israel has killed thousands of civilians. There's no reason to think this is deliberate, but neither is there any reason to think Israel is trying very hard to avoid civilian casualties.
• Hamas hides pretty well. So far Israel seems to have captured or killed only a small number of Hamas fighters in Gaza.
• Food, water, power, and medicine are in very short supply because of Israel's reluctance to allow in very much humanitarian aid.
• Both Hamas and Israel continue to stake out maximalist positions. Israel's goal is to destroy Hamas. Hamas's goal is to destroy Israel. Neither side has any interest in a ceasefire.
• Tens of thousand of Gazans have been forcibly relocated from the north to the south. Exact numbers are a matter of dispute.

What else do we know for sure? Nothing about Shifa Hospital, which Palestinians claim is just a hospital and Israel claims is Hamas headquarters. Am I missing anything important?

Yes, I know all about Godwin's Law. It's worth paying attention to. However, having paid due attention, there's no way to avoid saying that this sounds like Adolf Hitler at a Nuremburg rally:

Trump didn't say stuff like this as recently as a few years ago. Nor did he routinely forget who's president or who he's run against in the past. Is there any serious question anymore about his steadily declining cognitive abilities?

You all know that I'm a bug about the delayed effects of Fed interest rate hikes. Here's a simple chart that shows why:

Fed interest rate hikes don't directly affect inflation. They produce higher long-term rates which in turn slow down the economy. That's what reduces inflation.

Long-term rates have indeed gone up since the Fed first started raising rates, but that's only the first step. So far the economy hasn't responded. Just the opposite, in fact: it's gone from strength to strength. If the Fed's hikes have had any effect at all yet, this would certainly be a very strange one.

The more likely explanation is that we're still waiting for the Fed's rate hikes to produce any economic change. It normally takes at least a year for Fed action to affect the economy, but it can take longer. We're now at the 18-month mark, and it's hard to believe that it will take much longer.

This is why I think we're in for a recession. Hopefully it will be a light one, but there's no special reason to think so. I'm not worried about either Joe Biden's age or alleged unpopularity, but I'm definitely worried about a recession. The party in power never wins an election if there's a recession in the first half of an election year. Just ask Jimmy Carter, John McCain, and Donald Trump.