Month: April 2024

Here's the definition of fascism, very slightly altered, given by Wikipedia. There's no firm consensus about what makes a regime fascist, but this is as good as any:

Fascism is an authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and/or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.

What country in the world does this most remind you of? Why is it never used to describe them?

It feels like old times again. Donald Trump gave a long interview to Time magazine and it's a bottomless morass of lies, personal grievances, evasions, and word salad. Is it even worth commenting on? Half the country has seen this before and already understands Trump is a sociopathic buffoon. The other half simply doesn't care, no matter what he says.

Here's a typical Trump exchange:

Okay, sir. Violent crime is going down throughout the country. There was a 6% drop in—

Trump: I don't believe it.

You don’t believe that?

Trump: Yeah, they’re fake numbers.

You think so?

Trump: Well it came out last night. The FBI gave fake numbers.... It’s a lie. It’s fake news.

Sir, these numbers are collected by state and local police departments across the country. Most of them support you. Are they wrong?

Trump: Yeah. Last night. Well, maybe, maybe not. The FBI fudged the numbers and other people fudged numbers. There is no way that crime went down over the last year. There's no way because you have migrant crime. Are they adding migrant crime? Or do they consider that a different form of crime?

What does Trump mean, "It came out last night"? He's apparently referring to an interview on Real America's Voice—the news network for people who think even OAN is a little too lefty—with our old friend John Lott.

John Lott! ZOMG! The guy just won't go away. He's presented as president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, and his latest schtick is telling anyone who will listen that the FBI's crime figures are bogus. This is accomplished via his usual blizzard of misleading statistics—partly by using incorrect data and partly by ignoring inconvenient facts. At the moment, his primary claim is that the FBI's 2023 figures aren't believable because they don't match figures from the NCVS survey of crime. But NCVS hasn't even released its 2023 figures yet, and they won't for several more months. In any case, as you can see, the FBI is, if anything, more conservative in its reporting than the NCVS:

NCVS figures are quite a bit more volatile than the FBI numbers, but the overall trend is pretty similar.

This has been quite the rabbit hole, hasn't it? But this is the kind of stuff Trump is referring to when he says something is "fake news." It means some right-wing quack has shown him whatever it is he wants to see. That's all.

Yesterday Hunter Biden threatened to sue Fox News for publishing sexually explicit photos and claiming that he took bribes from a Ukrainian oligarch. Much of his letter focused on a six-part fictional series called “The Trial of Hunter Biden”:

“While using certain true information, the series intentionally manipulates the facts, distorts the truth, narrates happenings out of context, and invents dialogue intended to entertain,” says the 14-page letter, signed by Tina Glandian of Geragos & Geragos. “Thus, the viewer of the series cannot decipher what is fact and what is fiction, which is highly damaging to Mr. Biden.”

That actually sounded a little weak to me, but guess what?

Hmm. An "abundance of caution." How about that? This is yet another (small) sign that right-wingers are being put on notice that they can no longer peddle their lies with no fear of being held accountable for them.

In related news, Gateway Pundit has declared bankruptcy. Publisher Jim Hoft tried to put a brave face on it (“a common tool for reorganization and to consolidate litigation when attacks are coming from all sides”) but don't believe it. They're being sued into oblivion for very good reason. Flagrant right-wing lies are no longer cost free.

This is a Grevy's zebra at the Los Angeles Zoo. It's the largest of the three species of zebra.

Shocking news in the LA Times today:

A monthly payment of $750 to $1,000 would allow thousands of the city’s homeless people to find informal housing, living in boarding homes, in shared apartments and with family and friends, according to a policy brief by four prominent Los Angeles academics.

No kidding. In the policy brief itself the authors say:

Put simply, many unhoused people in Los Angeles...have a central problem much more easily addressed than [mental illness or substance abuse]: They are extremely poor.... Los Angeles has created a very complex, bureaucratic, and expensive system that struggles to find even “interim” housing for those who are unhoused. That system ignores the potential of many unhoused people to solve their housing problems if they had a little more money.

The authors are clear: no vouchers, no rules, no bureaucracy. Just give them cash. About two-thirds of homeless people lived in informal housing before becoming homeless—mostly renting rooms from other people—and $1,000 would allow them to return to that. Even in LA that's enough.

If there's a surprise here, it's not that money helps poor people. It's that money doesn't help very much. A USC study looked at the impact of giving homeless people $750 per month:

Although the study is ongoing, initial results show that after 6 months, almost 30% of people who received basic income exited homelessness, which is approximately twice the rate of people who did not receive money.

Only 30% get a home versus 15% if you do nothing? That doesn't seem like a lot.

Democrats in the House have decided that chaos is worse than Mike Johnson. They say that if Marjorie Taylor-Greene tries to oust Johnson as Speaker, they'll vote to rescue him:

“At this moment, upon completion of our national security work, the time has come to turn the page on this chapter of Pro-Putin Republican obstruction. We will vote to table [Greene’s] Motion to Vacate the Chair. If she invokes the motion, it will not succeed,” the Democratic leadership trio said in a statement.

This doesn't come as a surprise. If Johnson were ousted, Democrats know his replacement would be no better. It would just be weeks of anarchy for no purpose. At this point it's better to let Johnson serve out the rest of the year and hope to fire him at the polls in November.

Alex Tabarrok has a problem with AI:

Recently, I have seen two innovations in retail, AI cashiers and human cashiers but working remotely from another country such as the Philippines and making much lower wages than domestic workers (examples are below). I fear that the AI cashiers will outcompete the Philippine cashiers leading to the worst of all worlds, AIs doing low-productivity work.

I'm not picking on Alex over this, but it gives me a handy excuse to take on two aspects of AI at once.

The first is the complaint that AI will mostly just displace low-productivity tasks. But this is only true in the short run. It might be true of AI right now, this very second, but to focus on what AI can do at this moment is badly misguided. There's no question that current AI models have limitations, but those are (a) inevitable and (b) won't last long. Don't obsess over this. Bloggers and university professors are in AI's gunsights too.

The second aspect is that, in the short run, AI will displace low-productivity tasks. Indeed it will. AI is slowly but surely going to replace (practically) everyone. That definitely includes low-productivity workers like cashiers (3 million in the US), truck drivers (2 million), grounds maintenance (1 million), etc. This is still a few years away from happening in volume, but it is going to happen and it will make millions of workers unemployable. We remain woefully unprepared for the seismic shift this will cause.

The Employment Cost Index is one of the most conservative measures of wage growth. Adjusted for inflation, it rose at an annual rate of 0.6% in the first quarter of 2024:

The good news is that wages are rising. The other good news is that they're rising slowly, which means the Fed shouldn't be worried about the economy running too hot. It's all good.

CNN reports that 92% of Republicans say Donald Trump's time in office was a success. Some of that is just MAGA cultists, but before you roll your eyes, take a look at Trump's term through even a normie conservative lens:

1. Banned travel from various, mostly Muslim, countries.
2. Killed Obama's Iran nuclear treaty.
3. Pulled out of the Paris climate treaty.
4. Appointed hundreds of conservative judges, including three to the Supreme Court.
5. Tried to gut Obamacare, and successfully repealed the individual mandate.
6. Moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
7. Brokered the Abraham Accords.
8. Passed a big tax cut.
9. Got tough on illegal immigration.
10. Established Operation Warp Speed to produce a COVID vaccine in record time.
11. Told Europe to make good on their NATO commitments.
12. Instituted big tariffs on China.
13. Fought against DEI, CRT, and other forms of wokeness.
14. Put in place an order that required the repeal of two regulations for every new one. Generally deregulated vast swaths of industry.
15. Launched a worldwide push against using Chinese 5G technology from Huawei and others.
16. Consistently supported religious rights.
17. Withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and declared an end to multilateral trade deals.
18. Passed USMCA, a replacement for NAFTA.
19. Approved oil pipelines, fracking, offshore drilling, new coal leases, LNG exports, and opened ANWR. Killed Obama's Clean Power Plan as well as several other big environmental regulations.
20. Revoked most of Obama's policies that had opened up engagement with Cuba. Withdrew most personnel from the embassy in Havana.
21. Established the Space Force.
22. Fought relentlessly against Democratic efforts to steal the 2020 election.
23. Before COVID hit, oversaw three years of strong economic growth, low inflation, rising wages, and low unemployment.

Sure, there was also lots of buffoonish behavior, bombastic talk, paranoid rants, and embarrassing ignorance. Even a lot of Republicans weren't happy about that stuff. But hey, in the end it was mostly harmless, amirite? And look at what he actually did in office. He saved us from four more years of liberals destroying the country.

Having just warned you about issues with polling, here's a snippet from the Harvard Youth Poll about which issues are most important to young people. The pollster has a pretty good way of measuring this that involves asking people to choose among pairs of topics. The pairs are rotated randomly and then added up. Here's how it came out:

Note that this is not a poll of "liberal young people" or "college-educated young people." It's everyone.

Among young people, it turns out they could hardly care less about climate change, Gaza, or student debt. Even abortion only makes the middle of the pack. They are most concerned about bog ordinary things like inflation, health care, and housing.

Interpret this as you will.