Month: March 2024

The Justice Department has released a transcript of Joe Biden's interview with special counsel Robert Hur, and the Wall Street Journal has read it:

Other news outlets basically agree, mostly opting to present their findings as "nuanced" or providing "context." But they fundamentally say the same thing: Biden was being Biden. He joked, he veered off into stories, and he got two or three things wrong during a five-hour interview. In no way did he seem like a forgetful grandpa, as Hur gratuitously implied in his report.

This whole thing has been a travesty. Someday maybe we'll get a special counsel—just one!—who isn't a partisan Republican with an axe to grind. Someday.

Yikes! The BLS reported CPI inflation of 5.4% in February. Core CPI was lower at 4.4%:

This is a big increase, driven by inflation in services and an increase in gasoline prices over the past month. Other commodities were either flat or down, including food, which showed no price increase from last month.

On a more conventional year-over-year basis, headline CPI inflation was 3.2% and core inflation was 3.8%.

The Stormy Daniels hush money trial is scheduled to begin in two weeks. Naturally this means that Donald Trump's legal team is just now getting around to asking for a delay while we wait for the Supreme Court to rule on whether Trump is automatically immune to prosecution for anything he did while president.

The timing of this is obviously suspect, but you may also be wondering what official presidential acts Trump is trying to protect. After all, this case is about alleged hush money paid to keep Stormy Daniels quiet during the 2016 campaign, months before Trump was inaugurated.

One possibility is that although Michael Cohen made the payments in 2016 on Trump's behalf, he was reimbursed in 2017, while Trump was in office. But it turns out that's not part of Trump's argument. Instead, he's arguing that part of the prosecution's case includes evidence of statements Trump made in 2018. That's it. The actual acts predated his presidency, but some of his incriminating public statements were made on Twitter two years later. And nothing he said while in office can be used in the case.

This seems mighty thin to me, but IANAL. Stay tuned.

The whole Kate Middleton Photoshopping scandal is bizarrely inexplicable. Journalists have now identified nearly two dozen edits to the Mother's Day picture, and the inexplicable part is that they're both clumsy and pointless. Kate says she did the edits herself, which is kind of believable. Certainly no expert did this stuff.

And why? The edits are all tiny and accomplish nothing. The Guardian's imaging manager thinks that several images were composited together, which would explain the large number of anomalies but not the reason for doing it. Photoshop itself wouldn't have been so clumsy constructing a composite, which means Kate manually cut and pasted pieces from different frames into the primary shot.

But that doesn't make sense either. I don't really care much if Kate decided to spruce up an image a little bit, but on a purely technical level I'm burning with curiosity about what really happened.

This is from an article Derek Thompson wrote for the Atlantic last month:

This is a remarkable finding, but I was unable to replicate it until Thompson was kind enough to show me exactly where it came from. As I thought, it was from the American Time Use Survey, and compares "Animal and pet care" with "Socializing and communicating." But there's a problem here.

ATUS always reports two results. The first is the average time spent among all people, even those who don't participate in a particular activity. The second is the average time spent among those who participate. Thompson used the first for socializing and the second for pets.

That's apples to oranges. Here are the numbers for participants for both metrics:

There's another issue with the ATUS data: it reports that only a fifth of women spend any time at all on pet care. However, since anyone who owns a pet has to spend at least a few minutes caring for their pets, if only to feed them, this suggests that only a fifth of women own pets. That defies every other survey in existence, which report that 50-60% of women own pets.¹

So I'm not sure what to make of the ATUS data. However, my guess is that "participants" ends up being a proxy for the most dedicated pet owners, who are naturally likely to spend a fair amount of time on their critters.

There's not much question that socializing has diminished and pet care has gone up. The data all points that way. But I think the situation is not quite as dire as Thompson suggests.

¹It's less for men, but only by a little.

Sometime in the next few months a star called T Corona Borealis is going to explode. How do we know this? Because T CrB isn't going to be a supernova—which would be unpredictable and destroy the star for good. In fact, T CrB isn't even a single star. It's a binary star: a white dwarf orbiting around a red giant. The white dwarf sucks in material from the red giant, and every 80 years it gets dense enough to explode in a nova. But only the outer layer of the dwarf explodes. The rest is left intact to begin the cycle anew.

I was in the desert last night doing a bit of astrophotography, and while I was there I decided to shoot a picture of T CrB. This is the before picture. If the weather cooperates, I'll shoot the same picture when it explodes, and you'll see the same white dot except bigger. Exciting!

In case you're curious, here's a breakdown of the president's FY25 budget proposal:

The two pink regions represent approximately 5% of the defense budget and 5% of the domestic discretionary budget. The whole interminable fight before we finally agree on a budget will be entirely about those two slivers—or less. Those fights will seem very important when they happen, but keep this chart in mind for perspective. As with academic squabbles, the fighting is intense because the stakes are so low.

President Biden released a new campaign pledge federal budget today:

President Biden on Monday called for major new spending initiatives to lower costs for health care, child care and housing and enough new taxes on the wealthy and major corporations to pay for those proposals and also shave $3 trillion off the national debt over the next decade.

....In a $7.3 trillion budget for fiscal year 2025, Biden would have Congress offer universal prekindergarten education, provide 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, expand anti-poverty tax credits and create a new tax break for first-time home buyers.

So that's what Biden wants. By contrast, Donald Trump is proposing mass roundups of immigrants; a fight against COVID vaccines; huge new middle-class taxes in the form of tariffs; politicization of the civil service; a rollback of any and all climate regulation; a National Guard takeover of major cities; and retribution against liberals.

Take your pick.

Anyway, the federal budget continues to sort of dumbfound me. It is, as everyone has long acknowledged, dead on arrival. Literally no one on Capitol Hill cares about it or uses it as a baseline for anything. In one sense this is fine: if Congress wants to control the budget, that's their prerogative. But the president's budget is a massive, detailed undertaking that sucks up God only knows how many hours of time from every federal agency.

So why bother with this if no one pays any attention to it? Why not produce a simple, stripped down high-level budget and leave it to Congress to sweat the details? Is there any concrete benefit to the 2,000-page behemoth the White House produces every year? Or would 50 pages have the same real-world usefulness?

A couple of days ago TikTok's users were greeted with an unusual welcome screen when they logged in: a message from the company warning that Congress was trying to shut them down and asking its fans to call their senators and representatives about it. I remain ambivalent about TikTok, but the reaction of the right to TikTok's lobbying is flatly deranged:

The way in which the Chinese-owned social-media app TikTok went about trying to convince lawmakers to leave it alone was unique. It sicced its youthful users on Washington in a campaign of intimidation and emotional blackmail, confirming that the air of menace the app has cultivated for itself is no accident.

....The campaign was a disaster. It presented tangible evidence to lawmakers not only that TikTok’s capacity to track the data and locations of their users was quite robust but also that those users were in the throes of a deep dependency.

....If TikTok survives as a CCP-controlled entity despite the clear evidence of not just the psychological damage it is doing to the American public but the peril it presents to American national security, we will know why. It will be the culmination of this intimidation campaign, in which a well-funded effort to hold America’s children hostage succeeded.

What in the actual fuck is this about? The NRA, just to take one example, is famous for "siccing" its members on Congress by the millions. AIPAC does it, AARP does it, and the NEA does it. It's all just ordinary political mobilization, not "intimidation and emotional blackmail."

Nor does any of this indicate that TikTok knows anything unusual about its users. Its message went out to everyone, young and old, and was personalized only to the extent of guessing what congressional district they were in.

Nor, finally, does TikTok "hold America's children hostage," at least no more than Taylor Swift does. It's just popular with teenagers, like sugary cereal, sappy music, and other dubious habits of the young—whose mercurial passions and fads aren't exactly a well-kept secret.

If there's any real psychological damage here, it's among America's adults, who have flung themselves into a frenzied moral panic about TikTok based on the flimsiest of evidence. I'll be happy to join them if that evidence ever becomes firm, but you have to give me something, folks. Wild screeds with literally zero behind them aren't going to do it.

Paul Krugman says that recent job growth is all about migrant labor. Immigration hawk Mickey Kaus isn't amused:

And the hell with marginally employed native minorities, high-school dropouts and ex-offenders who might have been hoping that a tight labor market would finally offer them a good shot at steady, decently paid employment ....

Anti-immigration folks have long suggested that high immigration produces a loose labor market and falling wages, and it's a perfectly plausible argument. But I wonder if it's reached its sell-by date? The last three years have been something of a destruction test of this idea, after all. Upwards of 2-3 million immigrants have poured into the country, but the labor market remains tighter than its pre-pandemic average and wages have gone up for the lowest paid workers.

Previous academic studies on the effect of immigration have been equivocal, but none of them have been a natural experiment this big. The effect of the Mariel boatlift on the Florida economy in 1980, for example, has been studied extensively, but even that only involved about 100,000 immigrants. Conversely, the past three years have seen a net increase in the immigrant population of several million with no noticeable effect on low-end employment or wages. At this point, it seems likely that immigration responds to labor tightness, not the other way around.