Month: March 2024

The Guttmacher Institute released numbers today for abortion in 2023. They're from a new monthly survey that isn't as precise as Guttmacher's usual annual abortion count, but probably still pretty close. The figures are startling:

This is a 10% increase from 2020. A big part of the reason is the rise in medication abortions:

If the 2023 numbers are accurate, they suggest that the Dobbs decision had little or no effect on the abortion rate. Abortion rates went down in some states but rose in others, and medication abortions became more widely used in states where abortion has been banned.

Aside from Dobbs, these numbers raise another question: Why did the long decline in the abortion rate suddenly turn around at the start of the Trump era in 2017? The number of annual abortions has increased 19% since then. It doesn't seem likely this has anything to do with Trump, but......

The FBI released crime figures for Q4 of 2023 today, and violent crime is down everywhere:

Nationally, every type of crime was down except for auto theft:

Here's the latest uninsured rate among Americans under age 65:

The uninsured rate was up slightly in Q3 of last year, but still down considerably from 2021, when President Biden's subsidy expansion went into effect.

What is a "personal record" under the Presidential Records Act? The definition in the act is relatively short and simple, so here's the entire, unabridged text:

(3) The term "personal records" means all documentary materials, or any reasonably segregable portion thereof, of a purely private or nonpublic character which do not relate to or have an effect upon the carrying out of the constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President. Such term includes—

(A) diaries, journals, or other personal notes serving as the functional equivalent of a diary or journal which are not prepared or utilized for, or circulated or communicated in the course of, transacting Government business;

(B) materials relating to private political associations, and having no relation to or direct effect upon the carrying out of constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President; and

(C) materials relating exclusively to the President’s own election to the office of the Presidency; and materials directly relating to the election of a particular individual or individuals to Federal, State, or local office, which have no relation to or direct effect upon the carrying out of constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President.

This isn't complicated. Personal records are things that have no relation to official presidential business. Period. There's nothing more to it.

Donald Trump has claimed that the president has sole and unreviewable authority to decide if a record is personal. You don't need to be a lawyer to see that the PRA says no such thing. It says only that materials should be designated as personal "upon their creation" and then "filed separately." There's nothing about the president's decision being absolute or about declaring records to be personal after leaving office. What's more, the PRA doesn't cover classified records at all.

Why the history lesson? Because today judge Aileen Cannon, who's presiding over Trump's classified documents case, issued a bizarre order asking lawyers for both sides to submit hypothetical sets of jury instructions. One set has to assume the jury decides, as a matter of fact, which records are personal. The second set has to assume that if the president says they're personal, that's it. They're personal.

What is possibly the point of this? The second scenario is entirely groundless and accomplishes nothing except to chew up the lawyers' time. So is that all this is? An amateurish attempt to once again delay things? It makes no sense as anything else.

A few months ago I took a look at remote learning during the COVID pandemic and concluded that it hadn't made much difference. States that kept schools open did about as well as states that closed schools. The results internationally were similar.

But that was based on partial data and a specific measure of school openness. Today the New York Times points to a study done about a year ago which concludes that school closures did have an effect. Here's the key chart from the study:

There is a difference, but it's surprisingly small: about a tenth of a grade level between the highest and lowest quintiles of school openness.¹ What's more, the variance is huge, which suggests that the results are pretty sensitive to the precise metrics and controls.

Even more interesting is this:

Unfortunately, the authors presented this only for math, but if I'm parsing their tables correctly the effect is even stronger for reading. What it shows is that among white students, remote learning made virtually no difference: a few percentage points with a lot of noise. Nearly all of the effect of remote learning comes from Black and Hispanic students.

Why would remote learning only affect minority students? The same effect is evident when you look at poor students, so the obvious answer is that it's neither race nor remote learning per se that causes problems, but remote learning in places where kids have less access to computers and parental supervision. Here's a chart that shows this:

Remote learning has an impact, but % FRPL (free lunch students) has the biggest effect of all. There's also a large independent effect from "COVID-19 Disruption," which measures the general social disruption from the pandemic.

Taken together, the evidence suggests that remote learning probably had a negative impact, but it was pretty negligible among middle-class students. They did about the same regardless. However, among poorer students the impact was more noticeable.

These results are, of course, politically charged. Conservatives have been blasting liberals for a long time over school closures, so they're eager for any evidence that they were right. And generally speaking, I think they were. However, if you're going to cite the evidence, you need to cite all of it:

• Among middle-class students, remote learning had very little negative effect. Multiple lines of evidence point this way.
• Among poor students the impact was significant.
• Regardless, it doesn't appear that there would have been any harm in keeping schools open since infection rates didn't change much between places that kept schools open and those that closed them. Keeping schools open would have helped some kids and certainly would have vastly reduced the stress on working parents who had no ready way to take care of house-bound children.

That appears to be the current state of our knowledge about this.

¹The difference in math was larger: about a fifth of a grade level between the top and bottom quintiles.

Do snakes yawn? This one does. It's a cape cobra at the Los Angeles Zoo, and it was slithering along in its normal snakey way when it stopped, yawned, and then continued on its travels.

But snakes don't yawn because they're tired. They yawn after meals to realign their jaws.

As you know, there are two basic types of Medicare: traditional fee-for-service (FFS) plans, where doctors get paid for services rendered; and Medicare Advantage plans (MA), where doctors are paid a set annual amount for each patient.

In theory, MA plans should be cheaper. In reality, they game the system in two ways. First, they subtly tune their services to attract healthier patients (gym memberships, acupuncture, etc.). Second, they increase their coding intensity.

Wuzzat? Well, the annual payment for each patient is risk-adjusted: the sicker the patient, the bigger the payment. So MA plans benefit by making their patients look sicker than they really are. They do this by coding lots of ailments, even those that don't require treatment. More codes means the appearance of more sickness, which in turn means a higher risk-adjusted payment.

How does this net out? Here's a chart from MedPAC showing how much the government pays MA plans compared to how much they'd pay if the same patients were in traditional FFS plans:

That extra $83 billion for the current year is just shy of 10% of all Medicare spending. It's a lot.

I myself am in a Medicare Advantage plan because it's a great deal. That is, it's a great deal for me personally because my plan can afford to give me extra bennies thanks to the extra money they get from the feds. Needless to say, a great deal for me doesn't mean it's a great deal for the rest of you, whose taxes are paying for this.

So thanks!

The latest AI chips from Nvidia will get the rock star treatment when they're unveiled next week:

Chief Executive Jensen Huang is expected to unveil his company’s latest chips on Monday in a sports arena at an event one analyst dubbed the “AI Woodstock.”

The new chips are expected to be called B100s and be available in September, UBS analysts said in a note. The could be four times faster than H100s and might cost as much as $50,000, they said, about double what analysts have estimated the earlier generation cost.

One thing I still don't quite understand is how Nvidia has managed to corner the market for AI chips. The requirements are widely understood, and there are plenty of engineers who know how to design this stuff. What's their secret sauce?

RANDOM NOTE: Donald Trump could probably post bond in his fraud case if he were able to get his hands on about 20,000 Nvidia H100 chips. Real estate might be iffy, but Nvidia chips? Gold!

Donald Trump says he won't be able to post the $454 million bond required by his loss a few weeks ago in a New York business fraud case:

In a filing to a New York appeals court, Trump said that the judgment, ordered by a state judge last month, was so large that suretors wouldn’t accept real estate as collateral and would require cash to guarantee the bond. A private company like the Trump Organization would need $1 billion in cash to obtain the bond and to continue to operate, an amount the company doesn’t have, the filing said.

....[If] he is unable to obtain a bond, New York Attorney General Letitia James, who sued Trump in 2022, could begin enforcing the judgment at the beginning of next week. James, a Democrat, has said that if Trump can’t come up with the money, she will look to seize his assets.

It's not clear to me why nobody is willing to accept real estate as collateral. Is it because the commercial real estate market is tanking and they're unsure Trump's holdings will maintain their value a year from now? Or that they're unsure they'll be able to seize the collateral if they have to? Or that they just don't trust Trump?

Oh well. It should be fun if Letitia James starts trying to grab Trump's buildings. Like they say, if you can't do the time, don't do the crime.

Last year a Trump judge in Louisiana issued a deranged ruling that said the Biden administration "seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian 'Ministry of Truth'"—and therefore prohibited all communication with social media from a slew of federal agencies. On appeal, even the 5th Circuit couldn't stomach most of it, but they left a few bits of the ruling intact. Today the Supreme Court indicated that it was likely to whack the rest of it:

A majority of the justices appeared convinced that government officials should be able to try to persuade private companies, whether news organizations or tech platforms, not to publish information so long as the requests are not backed by coercive threats.

Justices Brett M. Kavanaugh and Elena Kagan, both former White House lawyers, said interactions between administration officials and news outlets provided a valuable analogy. Efforts by officials to influence coverage were, they said, part of a valuable dialogue that was not prohibited by the First Amendment.

Evidence of coercion in the original case was basically nonexistent, so that shouldn't be a problem. It would sure be nice to see a unanimous reversal in this case, but I suppose it's too much to hope that Sam Alito will join in. Anything that's bad for Republicans will never get his vote.