Month: December 2023

Can someone explain to me why this is national news?

This was a minor incident. The kid was never lost, was always under supervision, and was quickly reunited with his family. It produced some understandable, short-lived panic in the boy's family, but why was it even a local news story, let alone a national one?

Last night we got to talking about how fearful people are these days—parents in particular. This has to be one of the reasons why. Millions of parents are probably now terrified to put their child on a plane even though this kind of mistake is literally less likely than being hit by lightning and never ends up with the children in any actual danger. Why do we do this to ourselves?

Atrios notes today that New York City spent $155 million on police overtime this year in the subway and got little in return except lots of arrests and citations of fare dodgers. But it's actually even worse than that. Transit crime so far this year is down 2.3%. Overall serious crime excluding auto theft, which isn't part of transit statistics for obvious reasons, was down 2.7%.

In other words, $155 million—up from $4 million last year—produced more serious crime than the city average. Nice work.

POSTSCRIPT: What's the deal with the obsessive use of overtime in police departments, anyway? I know the cops like it, but why are cities seemingly more willing to pay overtime than to just hire more cops?

 

As you probably know, a Democrat recently won election to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, giving them a majority. They immediately took up a lawsuit challenging the state's infamously gerrymandered legislative maps and ruled yesterday that the maps had to be redrawn.

Bob Somerby is confused by what happened, and that naturally got me curious. It turns out the main issue is a fairly simple one: In Wisconsin it's common for cities to annex nearby areas that are separated from the main municipality. Here's an example in the Madison area:

These annexations are known as "municipal islands," and the question is whether they can be included in legislative districts, which the state constitution says must be contiguous. The majority ruled that contiguous means contiguous, and municipal islands don't qualify.¹ The minority says they've traditionally been considered "politically contiguous" and no one has ever suggested otherwise—and the sudden about-face from Democrats is just cover for their desire to redraw maps they think are unfair.

And that's about it. There are a few other details, but they don't really matter. The primary question is whether to change existing precedent on municipal islands, and you can make a perfectly good case for either side. Nobody really wants to say this out loud, but it's pretty obvious that the previous Republican court ruled in favor of Republicans and the new Democratic court has ruled in favor of Democrats. Neither side is especially imbued with either virtue or villainy here.

But as I was reading through the opinion, what really startled me was the middle-school temper tantrum tone of the dissent. I've never read anything like it. It was written by Annette Kingsland Ziegler, who spends 30 pages (!) on spittle-flecked vituperation before she even bothers to address any of the legal questions. Here's a taste:

This deal was sealed on election night.... the four robe-wearers grab power.... judicial activism on steroids.... wrecking ball.... end-justifies-the-means judicial activist approach.... power grabs by this new rogue court of four.... unlawful power grab.... underhanded and unprecedented manner.... conniving and then implementing.... grab all the power they could find.... four rogue members.... Power at any cost is the new normal for this crew.... window dressing.... preordained.... judicial fiat.... unreviewable "consultants".... hand-picked cover for the court of four's decision to throw out "rigged maps".... partisan political power grabs.... mind-boggling contortion of the law.... political quest masquerading as a legal query.... sham experiment.

It actually sounds worse if you read the whole thing, and it's followed by a remarkable seven-page personal screed targeting justice Ann Walsh Bradley, airing out beefs that go back 20 years. This is interspersed with a lengthy and aggrieved defense of the Republican court's previous decision, which the Democrats overruled.

So, anyway, that's Wisconsin these days.

¹What's more, the majority says that because municipal islands are so widespread—they're found in 50 out of 99 Assembly districts and 20 out of 33 Senate districts—it's not practical to redraw just those districts that contain them. The entire map needs to be redrawn from scratch.

Was our recent bout of inflation "transitory"? That depends on how you define it. But since a picture is worth a thousand words, let's look at a picture of core PCE, the Fed's favored measure of inflation:

The inflationary surge we typically associate with 1980 actually started in the late '60s and didn't fully recede until the early '90s. Call it 25 years.

Our current surge began in early 2021 and receded by late 2023. That's about 2½ years.

So yeah, I'd call it transitory.

Here's an interesting chart showing post-Brexit immigration into the UK:

Apparently the Brexiteers promised a new immigration system that favored skilled workers, and they delivered. After it went into effect immigration from the EU (i.e., plumbers from Poland) plummeted while immigration from the rest of the world (doctors from Delhi) tripled. Overall immigration has increased since Brexit by about 50%.

Some of this rise is temporary, such as refugees from Ukraine. But any way you look at it, the net impact of Brexit has been more immigration. This is quite a shock to Brexit voters who expected just the opposite, but apparently Britain has such an intense shortage of doctors, nurses, and so forth that no one minds too much.

This is just one person, but I thought it was worth sharing. It came in response to my question about antisemitism on college campuses:

I recently just started working on a college campus, and the question I get all the time now (including earlier today) is “What’s up with all the antisemitism on campus? Are you seeing this?” Every time I explain that I’ve seen a lot of emails about Israel and Hamas from the administration, which generally talk about respecting everybody’s concerns about the war. I also explain that I’ve seen zero evidence of any antisemitism. I’ve talked to faculty who’ve had to respond to angry parents who are convinced that the faculty is spreading antisemitism. Mostly they tell the parents that aside from the political science classes, nobody has any reason to talk about it (certainly not in a math class for crying out loud).

So my experience so far has been zero antisemitic acts/statements/anything. But boy people sure think it’s all over, like you said.

Nothing new to report on the border. The stream of immigrants continued to be very high in November:

Total encounters in November came to 242,000, the same as October. Of those, about 50,000 were asylum seekers processed at border stations. The other 192,000 were caught crossing illegally between ports of entry.

New York will not be joining California as a state that bans noncompete agreements in employment contracts:

Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) will veto a bill to ban employee non-competes in New York, after facing intense pressure from Wall Street, hospitals, and business groups that opposed the measure, according to sources familiar with the matter.

This sounds nuts to someone from California. We've banned noncompetes since 1872—and not just as a weird unintended consequence of some poorly worded legislation or something like that. The ban was passed expressly to overturn a court ruling that had allowed noncompetes as long as they incorporated "reasonable limits." The 1872 statute banned all noncompetes, reasonable or not. It was superseded by nearly identical wording in 1941, and then expanded further by a court ruling in 2008. California courts by then had long ruled that noncompetes were invalid if they prohibited employees from quitting to work for competitors, but the 2008 case involved a contract that allowed workers to join competitors but prohibited them from poaching clients. The California Supreme Court, ruling that state law was "unambiguous," voided the contract, thus ending even the smallest exceptions to noncompete bans.

Long story short, it's been the law in California for 151 years with no perceptible problem. Quite the contrary: California's big industries—tech, Hollywood, aerospace, farming—have thrived. They are among the most dynamic and profitable in the country.

So jump in, the water's fine. How many years of evidence do you need?

Today we get one second more daylight than yesterday. Hooray! That may not seem like a lot, but don't worry: it adds up fast.

This week, instead of a boring old accurate photograph of Hilbert, I asked GPT4 to create a portrait of him. This turned out to be surprisingly difficult. It says it can't just go out to the internet and find pictures, so I had to upload one. Then another. And another. But no matter how much I tried, and how many hints I gave it, GPT4 absolutely insisted on giving Hilbert a white forehead. (Click here to see what he actually looks like.) I finally gave up and instead asked it to redraw the portrait in the style of Monet. This prompted the following odd response:

I'm unable to create an image in the style of Claude Monet due to the content policy, which prevents generating images in the style of artists whose latest work was created after 1912. If you'd like, I can create an image inspired by the qualities of Impressionist painting, such as soft brushstrokes and a play of light, without directly referencing Monet's style. Would you like me to try that instead?

What's up with that? And why 1912? But I said fine, do that. The result was more teen unicorn than Impressionist, but I guess you can't take the artificial out of AI.