Cats, charts, and politics
According to the FBI, here are the number of children in elementary and high schools who are killed each year in active shooter incidents:
Since 2000, an average of five children have been killed each year. The trendline since 2005 has gone up from five per year to seven per year.
Good news! When it comes to surgeons leaving random crap in your body after they've sewn you up, the United States has the lowest rate among all rich nations.¹ We're #1!
¹All the rich nations that happen to be part of the Peterson-KFF health system tracker, anyway.
The spittle flecked anger from conservatives over increased IRS funding to catch rich tax cheats never ceases to astonish me. I can understand this kind of anger over big hot-button subjects like abortion or the border, but IRS funding? Here is Dominic Pino in National Review, who is apoplectic over Biden's recent announcement that the IRS collected an extra $500 million in the first year after the new funding was passed:
This [infographic] just shows how nonsensical the emphasis on extra IRS funding always was.
First, the Biden administration wanted to raise $400 billion over the next ten years with greater tax enforcement.... Now it’s supposed to be some great victory that, over a year after the IRS expansion was passed into law, they’ve raised $500 million.
Second, the purpose of extra revenue from the IRS was supposed to be to balance out the extra spending from the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. But the administration’s post is all about how it wants to spend the extra $500 million. Democrats want to use the money to expand government even further, not reduce the deficit.
As I have noted before, it’s important to remember that IRS employees are some of the only federal workers who are unionized. When in power, perhaps the primary purpose of the Democratic Party as an organization is to direct taxpayer money to unionized government employees. The influx of cash for the IRS will expand membership in the National Treasury Employees Union, which donates almost entirely to Democrats. It was never primarily about the extra revenue.
Let's take a breath. First, President Biden estimated the increased funding would bring in $320 billion over ten years. That's the number.
Second, only 0.8% of the new funding has been spent, and increased enforcement only got seriously underway three months ago. It's hardly surprising that only 0.15% of the expected tax haul has been collected so far.
Third, the infographic is just an aid to understanding, like saying you could stack four million football fields from here to the moon. Dumb, maybe, but otherwise meaningless.
Fourth, NTEU (a labor union that represents 31 federal agencies including the IRS) contributes a grand total of about $800,000 to Democrats each campaign cycle. Realistically, the increase in IRS employees will probably produce an approximately 16% boost in NTEU members,¹ which suggests a similar increase in contributions. That comes to about $100,000 by 2033. This is highly unlikely to have been front of mind when the Inflation Reduction Act was passed.
The IRS plans to use part of its newfound funding to hire several thousand high-end compliance officers, the kind who have the background to go after complicated high-dollar tax returns. There are a variety of estimates of how much this will bring in, but it's notable that literally everyone agrees it will be a net positive. The rest of the funding will be used to man helplines, produce a free online tax filing app, and update the agency's ancient computer systems. Even for Republicans, it's remarkable that they aren't just opposed to this, they are rabidly, madly opposed to it.
¹The net increase in IRS employees from the IRA funding comes to about 37,000. The IRS unionization rate is around 66%, which means NTEU will probably add 24,000 members to its current 150,000. That's a 16% increase.
During its current war against Hamas, Israel has deliberately forced two million Palestinians into refugee camps. Israel has deliberately leveled half of Gaza. Israel has deliberately denied food and medical aid to civilians. Israel has plainly carried out indiscriminate bombing with little care for who they kill.
You can make a pretty good case that these are war crimes. I would. Nonetheless, it's not genocide. It's not an attempt to exterminate the Palestinian population. It's war. As horrific as it is, the death toll in the Gaza war has been sadly ordinary.
"Failed to track." Sure. It went straight into the pockets of the Biden crime family, amirite? Wake up, sheeple.
Here is the national average price of gasoline over the past 20 years:
The price this week is lower than 70% of the months between 2004 and 2023.
I wonder if this is true?
Over the past year, remote workers were promoted 31% less frequently than people who worked in an office, either full-time or on a hybrid basis, according to an analysis of two million white-collar workers by employment-data provider Live Data Technologies. Remote workers also get less mentorship, a gap that’s especially pronounced for women, research shows.
In one sense, of course I think this is true. You'd have to be something of a moron not to understand it as a likely price of working from home.
On the other hand, the business press constantly creates clickbait out of press releases from companies I've never heard of. Here's what Live Data Technologies says about themselves:
Our patented technology continuously monitors the open web for job change signals, tracking the employment status for 95M+ decision makers in North America and the EU.
"Since 2018," they say, "we have turned the open web into a continuously updated truth source for workforce data." A truth source. Uh huh. Should I hold this kind of tech mumbo jumbo against them? Or just shrug it off as standard marketing patter updated for the 2020s?
I don't know. But I also don't know how seriously to take anything they say. This might be genuinely state-of-the-art stuff powered by very powerful analytic software—or it might be bullshit. How can you tell?
In its never-ending war against government interference with the perfect life, National Review recommends to us today an essay by Matthew Crawford about the indignity of motion-sensitive bathroom faucets. I'd normally try to provide you with an abridged excerpt, but it's really better if you read it in its full glory:
It is characteristic of the spirited man that...when he finds himself in public spaces that seem contrived to break the connection between his will and his environment, as though he had no hands, this brings out a certain hostility in him. Consider the angry feeling that bubbles up in this person when, in a public bathroom, he finds himself waving his hands under the faucet, trying to elicit a few seconds of water from it in a futile rain dance of guessed-at mudras. This man would like to know: Why should there not be a handle? Instead he is asked to supplicate invisible powers.
It’s true, some people fail to turn off a manual faucet. With its blanket presumption of irresponsibility, the infrared faucet doesn’t merely respond to this fact, it installs it, giving it the status of normalcy. There is a kind of infantilization at work, and it offends the spirited personality.
To maintain decorum, the angry bathroom user does one of two things. He may seethe silently, succumbing to that self- division between inner and outer that is the mark of the defeated. In that case, the ratchet of his self-respect makes one more click in the wrong direction. Alternatively, he makes an effort to reevaluate his own response as unreasonable. In either case, he is called upon to do a certain emotional work on himself. Often the murky fog of prescriptions that gets conveyed implicitly in our material culture would have us interpret as somehow more rational a state of being manually disengaged. More rational because more free.
I have to admit there's something epic about this rage against hands-free operation. And yes, when motion-sensitive faucets work poorly they can be annoying.
But the reason for their existence is far more prosaic than Crawford imagines. There's no infantilization at work, nor an ideological battle against hands. The benefits of motion-sensitive faucets are twofold: they are sanitary and they are ADA compliant. ADA doesn't require hands-free faucets, but it does require either hands-free or a handle with a light touch. For obvious reasons, handles with a light touch don't always fare well in commercial environments, so motion-sensitive faucets have become popular. That's really all there is to this.
As for Crawford's "few seconds of water" from "a futile rain dance of guessed-at mudras," ADA guidelines actually require 10 seconds of water. If you're getting less, don't blame either the disabled or a bureaucratic disdain for spirited men. Instead blame lousy maintenance, a scourge of cheap corporations and water faucets of all types.
This is an odd post from Atrios:
Remember Libya?
A funny forgotten war in which we destroyed a country most likely (whether we knew it or not) to cover up Sarkozy's crimes. No one can offer up a better explanation, anyway, other than the usual liberal humanitarian intervention nonsense which explodes as ridiculous as soon as you look at what actually happened.
There's no question that postwar planning following the 2011 NATO campaign against Libya was a failure. But aside from that it's an odd military intervention to condemn. NATO didn't destroy Libya. It was already engulfed in a brutal civil war at the time. The no-fly zone and naval blockade against Muammar Ghaddafi was approved unanimously by the UN—and by the US Senate. The military campaign was joined by more than a dozen countries and was supported by the Arab League as well as several individual Arab states. Civilian casualties remain a point of contention but were probably only a few hundred. Ghaddafi was killed after seven months and the NATO mission ended.
A couple of years later another civil war erupted, but it's hard to pin the blame for that on NATO. Libya was a volatile place with a lot of ethnic tensions, and by then both Al-Qaeda and ISIS were involved. This war lasted a long time and devastated the country before a ceasefire was finally agreed to in 2020.
Bottom line: War is destructive and cruel. But the NATO strikes of 2011 were, by all odds, the most widely supported and justified military intervention in recent history. Its objective was clear and its scope was limited. Almost literally no one wanted to see Ghaddafi remain in power, which would have surely ended in far more death and destruction than the air strikes caused. And when he was gone, NATO left. War is never perfect, but in the end there's little to criticize about this one.
Iowa has gotten about a foot of snow during the current storm. According to Research™ an inch of snow reduces voter turnout by 0.5%. Roughly speaking, then, we should expect that Monday's caucuses will see turnout about 5% lower than usual.
That's not much, really, and there's no telling what it means in an all-Republican caucus anyway. But I figured you'd want to know.