Cats, charts, and politics
Ellen Weintraub, a member of the Federal Election Commission, has something she wants to say:
The FEC has six members: three Democrats and three Republicans. Enforcement actions require a majority vote. Since all three Republicans refuse on principle to investigate violations by Donald Trump, it means he's effectively immune from all federal campaign laws.
How fast are sales of EVs growing? That depends. If you look at the full history of EV sales it looks like exponential growth:
But if you look at growth since 2020 it looks linear:
Take your pick. Sales in September were above trend either way you look at it.
NOTE: This includes only full, battery-operated EVs. In September, an additional 30,000 plug-in hybrids were sold along with 110,000 conventional hybrids.
Tim Lee takes a common shot at social media today:
This obviously isn't an original observation but I still think almost everyone is underestimating how much the Internet drives polarization on every controversial topic.
— Timothy B. Lee (@binarybits) November 9, 2023
I know how appealing this is, but most of the research points in the opposite direction: We're already polarized and social media mostly just gives us an opportunity to indulge it. It doesn't make things worse:
Four new papers published in the journals Science and Nature on July 27, 2023 studied the impact of Facebook and Instagram on key political attitudes and behaviors during the 2020 election cycle. The papers found little evidence that key features of these platforms led to polarization. For example, one study found that replacing Facebook and Instagram’s default algorithmic feed with a reverse-chronological feed did not significantly impact political polarization or political knowledge, contradicting the argument that algorithms create filter bubbles rather than, at most, replicating individuals’ existing selection bias.
In addition to studies like these, there's the fact that social media simply doesn't fit the timeframe of increasing polarization. For my money, the strongest evidence for this comes from periodic measures of affective polarization. This is academese for "how much we hate each other guts," and it was pretty flat through the mid-90s:
From 1980 to 1994 the trendline is flat. But starting in the late 90s, and then really taking off after 2000, affective polarization skyrocketed. Most of the damage was done by 2012, before social media became widespread.
I will once again make a pitch for the real reason political polarization has increased so much: it got a kick start in 1994 by Newt Gingrich and then soared in the aughts as Fox News grew its audience by 10x. Social media really and truly had little to do with it. It has merely exposed our behavior, not created it.
A couple of days ago a fire broke out at one of our historic World War II blimp hangars. By the time it was over the entire east side had been gutted. The two top pictures show what it looked like on the day after. The bottom picture shows the hangar in better days (the hangar on the left is the one that burned).
We are, once again, a week away from shutting down the government unless Congress passes a continuing resolution that, um, allows things to continue. Newly minted Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is the key player here:
Some lawmakers say the most plausible scenario is that Johnson puts a relatively clean CR on the floor, just before the shutdown deadline, that can pass with both Republican and Democratic votes — just as McCarthy did before his ouster. But even McCarthy's biggest detractors have said they'll give Johnson more breathing room than his predecessor and it’s unlikely any Republican would force a vote to remove him given that he was elected just two weeks ago with support from all 221 Republicans.
So Republicans oust Kevin McCarthy because he passed a clean CR; then spend three weeks finding someone more to their liking; and the first thing he does is.......pass yet another clean CR? As Obelix¹ would say, these Republicans are crazy.
¹You know, Asterix's pal.
SAG-AFTRA did not immediately disclose terms of the agreement, but the committee said the three-year contract was “valued at over $1 billion.” The details are expected to be released after SAG-AFTRA’s national board reviews the contract on Friday.
The proposed contract — which also still must be ratified by the union’s members — boosts minimum pay for members, increases residual payments for shows streamed online and bolsters contributions to the union’s health and pension plans. It also establishes new rules for the use of artificial intelligence, a major source of concern for actors. SAG-AFTRA said it won “unprecedented provisions for consent and compensation that will protect members from the threat of AI.”
Hollywood is getting back to work. Autoworkers are getting back to work. It's Bidenomics in action!
The moderators of tonight's Republican debate did pretty well! Despite Vivek Ramaswamy's best efforts to remain an asshole, they kept him pretty much under control. Everyone else, too. They mostly did this by asking questions instantly after each speaker had finished, a ploy that other moderators should emulate.
So who did best? Not Tim Scott, who just didn't do anything to make himself stand out. Not Ron DeSantis, who ducked and dodged all night and basically faded into the background.
Maybe Vivek Ramaswamy? I hate to say it, but he was better than usual this time around. He was less condescending in his tone and better at hitting his marks. His marks were mostly insane, mind you, but he hit them.
Chris Christie? He did OK, but let's face it: nobody takes him seriously.
Nikki Haley? She came across well, I thought. She might be the winner of the night.
But let's talk specifics. First off, what is "Biden's whale EZ pass lane"? That wasn't part of the debate, it was a commercial midway through. But what is it? Five seconds of googling didn't tell me, and after that I gave up.
The China bashing tonight was truly memorable. It was "can you top this?" the entire time. Nikki Haley wants to cut all trade ties! That would be something. Everyone wanted to ban TikTok, which is apparently the greatest threat America faces.
Lester Holt wanted to know what everyone would do to get prices down, and he wanted no tepid mush. He wanted to know what they'd do on DAY ONE, dammit. The answer for all of them was: gasoline. They would do.......something.......to get the price of gasoline down, which would put money in everyone's pockets. None of them acknowledged the basic fact that oil prices are set globally, which means that none of their proposals would have any effect. Nor did any of them seem to realize that the real price of gasoline is down very nearly to its pre-pandemic average:
Hugh Hewitt wanted to talk about the navy, but most of the candidates seemed to barely know we even have a navy—aside from knowing how many ships we have compared to China. But then Chris Christie saved the day by talking about ballistic missile submarines. Hewitt must have swooned. Replacing the Ohio class boomers has been an obsession of his for years, so this was right in his strike zone. Unfortunately, I doubt that any viewers even knew what Christie was talking about.
Nikki Haley became the latest candidate to suggest sending special ops troops into Mexico to take out fentanyl dealers. This would require a declaration of war against Mexico, which I suspect wouldn't go over too well. It's remarkable how casually Republicans say stuff like this. But it was just a small part of the discussion of fentanyl, which every candidate said they'd stop dead in its tracks by getting tough with someone or other. The problem with this is that fentanyl is too small to be effectively stopped. We can't even stop smuggling of cocaine and heroin, and those amount to thousands of tons per year. The entire US consumption of fentanyl, by contrast, could probably be smuggled in by about one fishing boat per month. There's very little that anyone can credibly promise to do about this.
There were some howlers. Ramaswamy said that prices had gone up but wages hadn't. He's too smart for this to be anything other than a lie. Haley said we should save money by expanding Medicare Advantage, seemingly unaware that MA costs more than traditional Medicare. Ramaswamy wanted to build a wall on the Canadian border. Tim Scott suggested that the way to save Social Security was to cut taxes. Huh?
On abortion, Nikki Haley insisted on honesty: Republicans don't have 60 votes in the Senate, so they aren't going to pass anything. This is absolutely true, but I've always wondered if this tactic works. Do viewers see it as truthtelling or as just another way to duck responsibility?
Finally, Tim Scott gets an award for making a good point on the subject of raising the retirement age for Social Security. It might not seem like it to us, he said, pointing at his fellow panelists, but for a manual worker it's not so easy to keep working until you're 70. He's right about that, and it's not something you usually hear Republicans acknowledge.
Moms for Liberty, the hard-right group best known for banning books in schools and opposing CRT, backed a bunch of candidates for school boards across the country during this election cycle. But over at Mother Jones, Kiera Butler reports that most of them lost. I've taken the liberty of summarizing her results in the chart at the right.
This isn't definitive, but it includes the highest profile races that MfL was involved in. As with most groups like this, they're a shooting star. For a brief moment they take advantage of the hysteria of the moment (communists, gays, CRT, whatever) but then they flame out. Tuesday's losses might not spell the end of Moms for Liberty, but it sure seems like people have gotten tired of their schtick already.
Via Atrios, I see that Citibank has been fined for discriminating against.......Armenians:
Citi treated Armenian Americans as criminals who were likely to commit fraud. From at least 2015 through 2021, Citi targeted retail services credit card applicants with surnames that Citi employees associated with Armenian national origin as well as applicants in or around Glendale, California. The bank specifically targeted surnames ending in “-ian” and “-yan.” Nicknamed “Little Armenia,” Glendale is home to approximately 15% of the Armenian American population in the U.S.
The fuck? This sounds like something you'd expect from the mob, not the third biggest retail bank in the country. I'd really love to know the background behind this.
A woman and her parasol on a sunny day at the Huntington Library.
