Cats, charts, and politics
Here is Hilbert, tail in the air, exploring the front yard garden. In a minute or so he will flop on ground and roll around in the warm, sunshiny dirt.
At the bottom is some bonus catblogging. This picture was sent to me by a regular reader and has some advice for the royal family: If you're going to Photoshop something, do it right.
The New York Times reports that although anti-TikTok fever is high in the United States, China is taking a low-key approach to things:
The fervor has not yet triggered a high-alert response from China’s leaders or prompted retaliatory threats against American companies. Instead, officials in Beijing have blasted the bill but largely reiterated common criticisms of U.S. policy as unfair to China.
....“China is not ready to pull the trigger outright for a full scale retaliation against what the United States is doing,” said Scott Kennedy, a China specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Retaliate? What can they do? Ban Facebook and Twitter and Gmail and Google and YouTube and Instagram and Bloomberg and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and WhatsApp and Reddit and LinkedIn and Wikipedia?
Oh right. They've already done that. In fact, even TikTok is banned in China.
This is the one reason for banning TikTok that I have a lot of sympathy for. Dangerous or not, why should we allow Chinese social media companies to operate freely in the US when US social media companies are universally banned in China? TikTok earned about $16 billion in the US last year, and I can't think of any good reason to allow that when US companies aren't allowed to earn a penny in China.
Oddly, this is not something that seems to bother most people. Instead, it's all about the Chinese Communist Party turning our teens into socialist zombies, which is faintly ridiculous. Why not just make this a standard trade dispute, where pretty much everything supports the US position?
New tracking polls have started coming out and they pretty consistently show that Joe Biden didn't get a bounce from his State of the Union address. But even if that's true, I think it misses the real impact of the speech.
State of the Union addresses never have much effect on a president's approval ratings. But this one had a big impact on the media narrative. When was the last time you saw a story about Biden being too old and infirm for the job? About a week ago Wednesday, I'd say. Outside of Fox News, they just disappeared after Biden's address.
So was the speech a big win? Oh yes indeed.
The judge in the Fani Willis case ruled today that Team Trump failed to prove a conflict of interest because of her romantic relationship with prosecutor Nathan Wade:
But the judge also found a “significant appearance of impropriety that infects the current structure of the prosecution team” and said either Willis and her office must fully leave the case or Wade must withdraw.
Sigh. The "appearance" of impropriety is mostly because the Trumpies yelled and screamed about it.
So now Willis has to find a new prosecutor, a job that no one wants because it will put them in Trump's crosshairs—which, these days, means doxxing, harassment, and having your past examined under a microscope for anything that might prove useful to the opposition. Who needs it?
The United States Congress is mysterious as hell:
Speaker Mike Johnson told Politico that he expects to pass a future Ukraine assistance bill with Democratic votes, an acknowledgment of the persistent resistance to any new aid within the GOP.... “I think it is a stand-alone, and I suspect it will need to be on suspension,” Johnson said of foreign assistance.
Why would a Ukraine bill have to be on the suspension calendar? This is a procedure that fast tracks a bill by eliminating committee approvals and debate, at the cost of requiring a two-thirds vote.
But I don't get why Johnson needs to do this. He can move a bill anytime he wants, and Ukraine aid would surely get out of the Rules Committee pretty easily. Its chair, Rep. Tom Cole, supports it, and a normal rule wouldn't allow much more debate than suspension.
I'm sure there's some parliamentary minutiae I'm missing, but what? Ukraine aid has broad bipartisan support, so all Johnson has to do is get out of the way and let it come up for a vote. What's the deal here?
Matt Darling writes today that although the unemployment rate is low, the length of unemployment spells has gone up. This is probably true over the very long term, but it doesn't really seem to be true over the past couple of decades:
I didn't put in trend lines since it would have made the chart too busy, but all of them are absolutely flat. I'm not sure there's really much to see here.
This is the surprisingly colorful view from Mesa Verde National Park, looking west toward the Ute Mountain Reservation. I don't know what the purple and green and yellow vegetation is, but it's pretty striking.
A group in California is hoping to make financial literacy a requirement in high school:
The plan is to make all high school students, as a condition of graduation, take at least a one-semester class in financial literacy.... Petition organizers said Tuesday that they are submitting nearly 900,000 signatures to county registrars across the state to qualify the California Personal Finance Initiative for the November election.
I've got nothing against financial literacy, but this would join media literacy and computer literacy in our current fad to make kids "literate" in the business of daily life.
But what I really want to know is whether there's any evidence of a growing problem with financial literacy. I can't find any. There are no long-term tests of financial literacy that I can locate, and overall financial indicators aren't flashing any red lights. Over the past few decades, both mortgage delinquency and credit card delinquency are down. Retirement accounts are up. Installment loan balances are down. Foreclosures and bankruptcies are down. Savings are up. Overdrafts are down.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I just don't see any special evidence that financial literacy is in some sort of crisis state. Nor am I convinced that a financial literacy course would actually change the habits of ordinary human beings, who mostly do dumb stuff because they feel like it, not because they're unaware it's dumb. So why is this necessary?
Show me the evidence or gtfo.
More bad news on the inflation front. The Producer Price Index, which measures wholesale prices, surged in February. Goods remain below their peak prices of 2022 but spiked up 15.5% between January and February on an annualized basis. Services continued their steady rise and were up 3.6%.
PPI tends to be volatile, and two-thirds of the spike in goods was due to energy. Still, since PPI increases tend to eventually feed through into consumer goods, this is not good news.
The primary objection to Chinese ownership of TikTok is based on stats showing that something like a third of teenagers "regularly" get news from TikTok—which could make them targets for Chinese propaganda. But this is based on survey data, and most people have a very wide definition of news. It includes celebrity news, sports news, music news, movie news, and so forth. So how much real news do most people get from TikTok?
Spoiler alert: There's no way to know for sure. There just aren't any concrete statistics for what you and I think of as "real" news (politics, foreign affairs, the economy, etc.). However, I got curious about this and after doing a bit of digging I think we can make a pretty good guess.
First, here are a couple of rankings of the most popular topics on TikTok:
News is nowhere to be found. You can find dozens of different estimates like this, and they're all the same: TikTok users are interested in entertainment, sports, fashion, health, etc. etc. Not news.
Here's another chart, this one dedicated solely to real news:
These are the top conventional news sources on TikTok, and taken together they have about 30 million followers. By contrast, a list of the 50 most popular TikTok accounts has about 3 billion followers, and not a single one of the accounts in the top 50 is news related.
Among unconventional sources, the biggest accounts have around 10 million followers. That's more than traditional publishers, but still a tiny drop in the TikTok bucket.
Finally, a couple of researchers took a look at news served up by TikTok's algorithm last year. An online article summed up their conclusions like this:
The findings reveal a considerable lack of user interest in news coverage on TikTok.... Users are primarily exposed to entertainment content, trending news topics tend to lean towards entertainment, and news producers receive limited engagement.
Put all this together and it points in one direction: TikTok users probably get very little real news from either conventional or digital native sources. My horseback guess based on everything I dug up is that maybe 5% of teens get any real news from TikTok, and probably not very much of it. This means that their potential exposure to Chinese propaganda is tiny because they don't pay attention to news in the first place.
I'd be very interested in a survey that dived deeper and asked TikTok users what kind of news they typically get and how much of it they get each day. I have a feeling the results would be instructive.