Month: January 2024

Jeez. AP called New Hampshire for both Trump and Biden about one minute after the polls closed? That's gotta be a new record. The exits must have been a tidal wave.

Here is the growth of US energy production since the beginning of the Biden administration:

Note that energy use is seasonal, so comparisons have to be made between the same month in different years. The latest data is for October 2023, so all comparisons are between October 2020 and October 2023.

Bob Somerby takes me to task today for posting a clip of Donald Trump that he says is grossly misleading and dishonest. I don't agree. The Biden campaign's snarky summary is fairly conventional Twitter abridgment and the video is right there for anyone who wants more. It wouldn't pass muster in a PhD dissertation, but it's fairly unremarkable in the context of a quick hit in a political campaign.

But agree to disagree! What I'm really curious about is Bob's response to Trump's declaration that we've become a pitiful country that can't solve even the smallest problem:

Just with regard to that one state of affairs, who can doubt the accuracy of what Trump said? Who can doubt the accuracy of the claim that we have become a nation that can't solve the simplest problem?

Of course we've become a nation which can't solve the smallest problem! It isn't perfectly easy to dole out blame for that situation, but the accuracy of the basic statement is blindingly obvious.

....We have become a small, pitiful nation "which is incapable of solving even the smallest problem." Everybody knows that's true—and in our view, a lot of that stems from our blue tribe's unintelligent behavior over the past many years, though your assessments may differ.

Huh? The United States, despite polarized politics and one major party that's all but insane, has been cruising along and solving problems at a remarkable clip for the past couple of decades. We've passed tax cuts, bankruptcy reform, Obamacare, financial reform, and an infrastructure act. We created and distributed a COVID-19 vaccine in less than a year and made it through the pandemic in better shape than nearly all our peer countries. We invented modern AI and we dominate the tech world. Our economy is the most vigorous on the planet. We've slashed crime, teen pregnancies, cigarette smoking, cancer deaths, air and water pollution, and HIV. Our educational system is one of the best.

Are there problems we haven't solved? Of course.¹ But there always are. Contrary to the mass depression that seems to have settled over so many of us, neither the US nor the world are undergoing a "polycrisis"—one of the most fatuous notions I've heard in a long time. In fact, the world is in remarkably calm and resilient shape, but only if you take your head out of the sand long enough to recall what things were like in the recent past.

Just stop it.

¹Fentanyl, illegal immigration, climate change, mass shootings, persistent deficits, racism, Fox News, obesity, falling fertility, social media disinformation, poor life expectancy, the Black-white educational gap, aquifer deterioration, housing shortages, pickleball beefs, mass incarceration, delusional conspiracy theorizing, student debt, Donald Trump, door plugs popping off of airplanes, and kids these days. Feel free to add to this list.

This is the St. Martin Canal in Paris, somewhere near République, I think, where a lock takes it underground. The lock was used back in the day, when boats cruised the canal for both commerce and pleasure, and it's still functional. I don't know how often it actually gets used anymore, though.

The Chevron rules says that if a law is ambiguous, courts should defer to any reasonable interpretation of the agency charged with enforcing it. Jonah Goldberg doesn't like this:

The question of whether the judicial or the executive branches should be the final word on regulatory policies misses the elephant in the room: Congress should be the first word.

If Congress wants to pass a law requiring fishermen to pay for monitors on fishing boats it can. Likewise, it can pass laws to forgive student debt, legalize marijuana, clarify free-speech issues for social media, provide amnesty for illegal immigrants, build a border wall, and a thousand other things.

But it doesn’t. Instead, Congress does one of three things: 1) Nothing at all 2) Write deliberately vague legislation punting hard decisions to Cabinet secretaries and administrators or 3) Lobby the executive branch to do things Congress is too cowardly to do itself.

This is a common complaint, and there are times when it has some force. But I think it mostly misses the point. The problem isn't that Congress is cowardly. The problem is that the world has long since become far too complex and fast changing for Congress to write detailed laws that stand the test of time.

Take, for example, the massive financial reform act passed in 2010. It was a thousand pages long, and even so it took a full decade to create the detailed rules implementing it. There's no way Congress could ever have done that. It's not just lack of expertise, it's the fact that even for experts it took ten years.

This is why the Supreme Court in 1984 adopted the Chevron rule unanimously. Unanimously! And just consider what it means that Congress nonetheless delegates so much authority to rulemaking agencies. It means that both parties are willing to let the executive branch make rules regardless of who controls the White House. There's no way this would happen unless they were absolutely convinced there was no other way.

And there isn't. Federal laws are already inhumanly labyrinthine and complex. It defies common sense to believe that Congress could pass even more complex laws that foresee every possible twist and turn of time and tide. Giving authority to federal agencies isn't a betrayal of its duty; it's just Congress bowing to reality.

Once you accept this, you need only decide what to do about all that rulemaking. Should courts generally defer to Congress's express desire to delegate it to the executive branch? Or should they insert themselves into every petty controversy de novo? Your mileage may vary, but I think the question answers itself.

I agree with Charles Cooke!

I don’t know how much more plainly I can say it than this: If you believe that Donald Trump represents a unique threat to democracy — as Joe Biden and his team keep saying that they do — then you should not want Donald Trump on the ballot. There are no exceptions to this rule. If Trump is the nominee, he has a chance of winning. If he is a threat to the republic, he ought not to be in a position from which he has a chance of winning. The moment — the very moment — that you start muttering about jolts of energy to voters and donors, or about the best contrast to be drawn, or about motivators of Democrats, you have signaled that you don’t actually consider Trump to be the risk that you say you do.

Hey, this is bound to happen occasionally. But he's right: Even if you think Trump is the easiest Republican to beat, you shouldn't be hoping he'll be their nominee. He could win, after all. Even if the fundamentals are against him, stuff can happen. Maybe the economy goes sour. Maybe Biden has a heart attack. Who knows?

It goes without saying that I have no love for Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley. But they are ordinary Republicans. The country will survive four or eight years of a Republican presidency, just like it always has. But another four years of Trump? The country will survive, but it will come out the other end pretty damaged.

But at this point it no longer matters. Trump is going to be the nominee, and now we just have to make sure he doesn't win.

The top chart shows total federal social welfare spending (adjusted for inflation) since 1960. The bottom chart breaks out the categories for 2023 so you can see exactly what I'm including.

The trendline in the top chart is for 1960-2019, extended through 2023. Social welfare spending surged during the pandemic for obvious reasons, and is now back on its pre-pandemic trend.

NOTE: All data comes from OMB Table 11.3 except for recent SNAP figures, which come from the USDA. All figures are adjusted for inflation using the PCE index.

What is Trump even saying here?

On his good days, Trump is still fine. On his bad days he can barely string two sentences together.

Still, his meaning is clear: America is going completely to hell. It's doom porn. For some reason, there's a big audience of people who just can't get enough of this stuff. Like Ted Johnson, who was profiled today in Politico:

“People need to be held accountable. That’s why you’ve got to break the system to fix the system,” he said. “Because it’s a zero-sum game right now. And to be honest with you, the Democrats are genius. They did anything they could do to win and gain power, even if they lie, cheat, steal. … What they’re doing is they’re destroying the country. Who could bring it back?” He answered his own question: “Trump’s the only one.”

What's remarkable is this description of Johnson:

He’s 58. He’s married to his second wife and has three young adult sons. He was in the Army for 22 years — he retired as a lieutenant colonel — and now he is a senior project manager for an IT security company and works from home. He lives in a classic three-bedroom house he bought almost four years ago for $485,000 that’s now worth roughly a quarter-million dollars more.

This is not some discouraged working class guy who lost his job to outsourcing and has never been able to recover. Johnson is married, upper middle class, makes good money, and lives in a nice, safe small town where almost everyone has a college degree. But after watching Fox News he went from thinking he'd vote for Nikki Haley to being a die-hard Trump supporter. Because Democrats are destroying the country and someone has to take a wrecking ball to it before we can rebuild.

I know that not everyone is as well off as me. Still, it's just a fact that the vast majority of Americans are in pretty good shape and the country as a whole is as strong as any country in the world. The burning desire among many conservatives and liberals to believe that everything is horrible—and getting worse—is nothing short of inexplicable.

How many people were apprehended trying to cross the border illegally in December? We don't know yet because CBP hasn't yet released its monthly update.

Why? Literally on January 1st there were news reports saying that border apprehensions reached a record 300,000 in December. This was based on "internal government data," which isn't really a surprise since CBP keeps daily counts for its own use. They could routinely release the monthly numbers on the first of the month if they felt like it.

But not only do they not do this, it's actually taking them longer and longer to publish each month's figures. Because I'm a huge dork, I herewith present a chart showing the day of the month that border numbers are released:

As you can see, CBP used to release updates around the tenth of each month. Then, in mid-2021, the releases got later and later until they were coming out a full week later on average.

I say "on average" because CBP has no published schedule for these releases. They basically appear randomly between the 14th and 24th of the month.

Now, you might wonder why I care. It's not as if anything important hinges on this, after all. And that's totally fair. It's just that as a numbers nerd it offends me that CBP is so sloppy with this stuff. What's the explanation?

POSTSCRIPT: Do you wish this chart went further back? Of course you do! The reason it doesn't is that CBP, for reasons known only to God and its comms shop, provides access to press releases only from the current administration. So February 2021 is the earliest they have. (I tracked down a few miscellaneous ones from 2020, but that was all I could find.)

They do have an archive from previous administrations. But it doesn't work. That is, it literally does nothing. No matter what you do, it presents you with the last few press releases of the Trump administration and that's it. Your tax dollars at work.

A couple of years ago I tossed out a perfectly good printer. It was an HP, and I had signed up for their Instant Ink "subscription" service, which allows you to print a set number of pages for a flat monthly fee. This caused some problems, so I canceled it. But that bricked my printer because I was no longer paying for continued use of the ink cartridges already in it. Then, when I tried to replace the ink cartridges with non-HP cartridges, it became permanently bricked because HP doesn't allow this. There was more to this whole sorry tale, but I'll spare you the details. In the end, I was so pissed I got rid of the printer and resolved never to buy another HP product in my life.

I'm reminded of this today because I learned about this laughable explanation for HP's policy:

Last Thursday, HP CEO Enrique Lores addressed the company's controversial practice of bricking printers when users load them with third-party ink. Speaking to CNBC Television, he said, "We have seen that you can embed viruses in the cartridges. Through the cartridge, [the virus can] go to the printer, [and then] from the printer, go to the network."

As this Ars Technica piece points out, HP's policy of prohibiting third-party cartridges started in 2016 but it wasn't until 2022 that they found this alleged vulnerability. What's more, it's a highly theoretical hack that's never been seen in the real world. And it's doubtful it could do any real damage anyway. And HP fixed the bug shortly after they found it. But they continue to claim that third-party cartridges are unsafe. This is highly unlikely—and anyway, as Ars Technica says, "Its response is to inconvenience customers rather than beef up HP printers to be invulnerable to remote code execution via ink cartridges."

What a crock of shit. I don't expect everyone to be as peeved as I am over HP's rigid ink policies, but this kind of corporate deceit displays a contempt for its customers that no one should have to put up with.