Cats, charts, and politics
Maybe you know this, maybe you don't. For most of the economic expansion following the Great Recession, wages grew about the same for everyone. In 2019 that changed. Over the past five years, incomes of the poor have increased 10% while incomes of the rich have stagnated:
There's no need to feel sorry for the rich, though. They have lots of investment income too, and the stock market has been going gangbusters recently. They're still doing OK.
Yesterday morning, a fellow named Justin McGowan asked his local country station to play a song from Beyoncé's new album. The New York Times tells us what happened next:
The station manager, Roger Harris, emailed Mr. McGowan back with a concise rejection: “We do not play Beyoncé at KYKC as we are a country music station.”
Mr. McGowan put a screenshot of the rejection on social media, tagging a Beyoncé fan group in a post that drew 3.4 million views on X and sparked conversations on Reddit and TikTok. “This is absolutely ridiculous and racist,” Mr. McGowan wrote, urging people to email the station and request the song.
Why do so many people lunge for the r-word as a first resort? Beyoncé isn't a country singer and Harris was unaware that she had dropped two country tracks on Sunday. His response was perfectly reasonable, and he reversed course when he found out that Beyoncé is, in fact, a country singer, at least for the moment.
Not everything involving Black people is automatically racist. Let's save the word for when it really applies, OK?
A pair of dolphins swimming alongside our boat during my whale watching cruise last month.
Has anyone ever explained this?
It just keeps going on and on. New business applications have been running more than 100,000 above trend ever since the start of the pandemic. By now it amounts to about 5 million excess applications.
Why would the pandemic have this effect? And why would it still be going strong four years later?
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has drafted plans to release thousands of immigrants and slash its capacity to hold detainees after the failure of a Senate border bill that would have erased a $700 million budget shortfall, according to four officials at ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.
....Some of the proposed cost savings in ICE detention would occur through attrition — deportations — but much of it would have to happen through the mass release of detainees, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.
This is precisely what Republicans hoped for when they killed the border bill. A mass release of detainees would produce the panic and outrage they want, largely directed against Joe Biden. It might be bad for the country, but it would be good for Donald Trump.
The cynicism on display here is jaw dropping. Everybody plays politics in an election year, but a deliberate—and entirely public—attempt to sow chaos is a new thing entirely. They need to be made to pay the price.
Republicans were smart to take a second crack at impeaching Alejandro Mayorkas today. Rep. Steve Scalise is back to give them one more vote and break last week's tie, but Tom Suozzi, a Democrat who won George Santos's old seat tonight, hasn't been sworn in yet. He could be by the end of the week, though, and that would have tied things up again and killed impeachment. Republicans had a window of only a few days when they had the votes to impeach, and they took it.
It's still pretty shameful that the vote was close enough for this to matter, thanks to the fact that only three Republicans were honest enough to break ranks on the Mayorkas charade. But those are the times we live in.
A Wall Street Journal story today got me pulled down a rabbit hole. The point of the article was that, except for gasoline, the cost of owning a car has been going up, up, up recently. This got me curious, so I took a look at auto-related costs over the past couple of years:
It turns out this is really a story about auto insurance. Parking and auto parts have gone up less than wages, and after a year of big price hikes repairs have slowed down a lot over the past half year.
Insurance, conversely, has gone up like a rocket and has kept going up. What gives?
Part of the answer comes from choosing 2022 as the starting point. Here are auto insurance premiums adjusted for inflation going back to before the pandemic:
The peak pandemic years of 2020-21 were actually rare profitable ones for auto insurers, and they lowered their premiums in response. You probably didn't notice this since premiums mostly stayed about the same and only dropped relative to inflation. But it really happened, and insurers found themselves stuck with those low premiums in 2022, when things went back to normal.
Or worse than normal, actually. We've been driving like maniacs ever since the pandemic started, and accident rates have stayed high through the end of 2023. What's more, as you can see in the top chart, auto repair costs have recently gone up a lot. The combination of these two things has led to premiums (a) going up to claw back the earlier declines, and then (b) going up more to make up for the increasing cost of accidents.
That's all a pretty reasonable story. There's just one thing that nags at me:
Auto insurers almost never make a profit on writing premiums. They take a loss and then make it up by investing the money we give them. As you can see, overall underwriting losses—which include all payouts for accidents—have indeed gotten bigger over the past couple of years, but they're still less than they were before the pandemic. If that's the case, why do premiums in real terms need to be higher than they were before the pandemic?
I don't know. The insurance biz is extraordinarily complicated and opaque, which makes it hard to figure out what's really going on. However, there's one thing that suggests insurance companies really are justified in their rate hikes: state commissioners everywhere are approving them, even in historically adversarial states like California.
Bottom line:
Make of this what you will.
CBP released border numbers today and they're way down from December:
Total encounters came to 176,000, of which 45,000 were migrants who made appointments for asylum through CBP's mobile app. The number apprehended crossing illegally was 131,000.
In other immigration news, Republicans chose the day of this good news to impeach DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. There's no reason for this except to keep public attention on the border via an impeachment proceeding that the media has to report on. Mayorkas has done nothing except disagree with Republicans, and it's not even clear if the Senate will bother with this charade. The New York Times says:
The charges against Mr. Mayorkas are expected to be rejected in the Democratic-led Senate, where conviction would require a two-thirds majority and even some Republicans have called the effort dead on arrival. It was not immediately clear whether senators would hold a trial to consider the articles, or vote to dismiss them.
The New York Times reports today on bigoted remarks from Republicans:
The racist discourse by Republican members of Congress, both in casual comments and in official statements, has become so commonplace that it now often slips by without any real condemnation from the G.O.P. Democrats frequently call for apologies but no longer expect any response, and those futile denunciations quickly disappear into a morass of polarized content on social media.
....The race-baiting comments resonate with Mr. Trump’s political coalition, which is 85 percent white in a country that is 59 percent white and becoming less so every day. Republicans in Congress have also sought to capitalize on the grievances of their base.
There's more to this than plain old anti-Black racism among the Republican base. Even among the relatively unbigoted, white Republicans are scared to death of being accused of racism. Take a look at this survey:
A full third of Republicans think racism against whites is a big problem and nearly three quarters think it's at least a moderate problem. This reflects several related fears. They're afraid that a stray remark could get them in trouble with HR. Or that a harmless (in their view) joke could get them ostracized. Or that affirmative action might cost them a job or promotion they deserve. They're afraid of young Black men but know they can't admit it. They're cynical about DEI training but feel they're not allowed to say so. And they're just not convinced that things are all that bad for Black people anyway nowadays.
These people generally don't approve of blatantly racist remarks, but they are tired of being forced participants in what they view as a racial charade that's way overblown. In the end, they're willing to tolerate racist overtones more than they're willing to tolerate Democrats who keep them in constant fear of setting a foot wrong with a "microaggression" or a "trigger."
Ferguson and George Floyd sparked this massive split between Democrats and Republicans on race issues. Take a look at this chart:
Republicans have always been less willing to spend money on Black assistance than Democrats. After Ferguson, though, they became a little more willing while Democrats became a lot more willing. However, that all disappeared after the Black Lives Matter protests following the George Floyd murder. Republicans thought things had gotten out of hand and returned to their old views. Democrats barely budged.
The result is a massive gap: only 13% of Republicans favor spending more on Black assistance while 70% of Democrats favor it. This is about the biggest partisan gap of any issue in America today. Even abortion isn't as polarized.
It's not easy to adjudicate this. Liberals believe that too many conservatives are just plain racist and won't admit it. Conservatives think liberals have taken identity politics way beyond the bounds of reason. But conservatives have always thought that, which makes it very hard to take them seriously this time around.
Still, that's the shape of the river these days. Education and race are the two biggest partisan identifiers in American politics today. Democrats are woke and college educated. Republicans didn't go to college and feel like they've been gaslit on race. This is where we're at.
I missed the Super Bowl on Sunday because I was driving out to the desert for my latest astronomy session. It was a dog's breakfast.
I set everything up normally, but for some reason neither the mount nor the focuser would work. After hours of investigation I discovered that, for some reason, the computer's virtual serial ports had been shut down last Thursday and then reinstalled when I turned on the laptop on Sunday. I have no idea how or why this could happen since the laptop wasn't even running on Thursday. It just sits around in sleep mode in between astronomy sessions.
In any case, the ports were somehow reinstalled differently or wrong and wouldn't communicate with either the mount or the focuser. Finally, with no idea what else to try, I rolled back everything to a week ago, and it worked! Unfortunately, it also wiped out all the settings from my astronomy program, which I slowly figured out and had to reset from memory.
Yeesh. But finally everything worked and, for the first time, I took a picture of a globular cluster. I've never done it before because globular clusters are boring: they are, as the name implies, just a glob of stars.
Still, they're some of the oldest stars in the galaxy. The cluster below is M5, aka the globular cluster in Serpens. It contains about 100,000 stars (out of 100 billion in the galaxy) and is about 10 billion years old. The bright star in the upper left is known as 5 Serpentis. It's a close star, only about 80 light years away (M5 itself is more than 20,000 light years from us).
I may try this one again someday. I cut the exposure time to 2 minutes per frame, but that might still have been too much. I also imaged it for only 90 minutes. It might be better with a shorter exposure to resolve the stars better and a much larger stack to resolve out the noise and (possibly) bring out the star colors better.
