Month: April 2024

This is the main altar at the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur in Paris. The top photo is a panorama that shows everything from side to side. The bottom photo looks up into the dome.

Via Tyler Cowen, a new study attempts to estimate if crime goes up when a county elects a progressive chief prosecutor. Here's the key chart:

As you can see, crime was on a generally downward path everywhere. So the question is whether it went down less when a progressive prosecutor was elected. The authors conclude that this was the case for property crime but not for violent crime. Thanks to a divergence between traditional and progressive counties in 2018-20, the end result was 6.98% higher property crime due to electing a progressive prosecutor.

It's a little hard to make much of this. The property crime figures converge for ten years and then diverge slightly in the following ten years. Do they continue diverging after that? We'll have to wait and see. Crime figures are noisy, and they routinely jump up and down by well more than 6.98%. The current figures might be a blip or they might be something real.

A Utah couple accidentally wrapped up a box of Amazon returns while their cat was inside. Six days later she was freed in an Amazon warehouse in California:

Carrie Clark said her family’s indoor-only cat, Galena, mysteriously disappeared on April 10. Friends and family helped them search their house, neighborhood and surrounding community for a week while they plastered missing posters around town and on social media.

....Then, on April 17, Clark received a text that Galena’s microchip had been scanned that afternoon. Immediately after, imagine Clark’s surprise when she received a call from a vet — in California.... “I ran to tell my husband that Galena was found and we broke down upon realizing that she must have jumped into an oversized box that we shipped out the previous Wednesday,” Clark said. “The box was a ‘try before you buy,’ and filled with steel-toed work boots.”

As is so often the case in these stories, the cat was basically fine. It's remarkable how well cats can survive being stuck in weird places for a week or more and come out of it suffering nothing more than mild dehydration.

Also, cats are idiots.

Did you know that for the past couple of years Russia has been jamming GPS signals in the Baltic? They have! Allegedly, of course:

Tens of thousands of civilian flights have been affected by the GPS jamming in recent months, according to experts. The jamming, which affects all GPS users in the area when it is in operation, has also impeded signals used by boats in the Baltic Sea, leading to warnings from the Swedish navy about the safety of shipping.

GPS jamming is easy to conduct with relatively cheap equipment, according to experts.

"Easy to conduct," they say. If that's the case, I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often. The dimwits who hang around airports and shine lasers at arriving planes should be all over this.

Or maybe not, since it turns out it doesn't usually disrupt anything. A couple of Finnair flights had to turn around last week and return to Helsinki, but that was only because they were making night landings at Tartu, one of the rare circumstances that requires a GPS signal.

So why is Russia doing this? Nobody seems to know, and Russia denies everything. It's just to be annoying, I guess.

And it can have an impact. Not on airplanes but on online dating. Apparently the IDF routinely jams GPS signals near Gaza and Lebanon, which confuses cell phones into thinking they're somewhere else. So Israelis using Tinder get lots of profiles of Lebanese residents and vice versa. I wonder if Estonians are likewise getting hooked up with Finns?

"What have the Romans ever done for us?" is a classic Monty Python bit:

Fittingly, this takes place in Judea, because it's how I view modern-day Judea:

From the Palestinian side: All right, but apart from the 1948 war, the Red Sea blockades, the creation of the PLO, the 1967 war, the 1973 war, the 1987 intifada, the rejection of Camp David, the 2000 intifada, relentless missile attacks, and the October 7 massacre—apart from that, what have we ever done to the Jews?

From the Israeli side: All right, but apart from the Nabka, the Suez war, the military occupation of the West Bank, the settlements, the invasion of Lebanon, the takeover of Arab homes in East Jerusalem, the wall, apartheid-like treatment of non-Israelis, vicious settler violence, and the slaughter of Gazans—apart from that, what have we ever done to the Palestinians?

This is what I mean when I say there are no good guys in the Middle East. There's just a lot of people who all want the same thing and are willing to fight bitterly and endlessly over it.

In the two-things-can-be-true-at-once file:

• The Gaza protests on university campuses are mostly peaceful. The extreme behavior is largely happening outside of campus walls.
• Nevertheless, Jewish students on these campuses widely report feeling scared and harassed.

I feel a lot of sympathy for university presidents dealing with this, even the ones who have made some unquestionably bad choices. They're in an almost impossible situation and are operating with, I'm sure, maddeningly limited and conflicting information.

This is all going to fade away naturally when the semester is over and students go home. In the meantime, I only wish everyone—protesters, faculty, administrators, cops, Israel supporters—could show a little more empathy for both sides. Neither Israel nor the Palestinians are pure evil and neither are purely righteous. They've both done hideous things and they both have understandable grievances. There's a century of history that shows this pretty clearly.

Of course, if either side accepted this, that century of history would have unfolded very differently. It's hard to even conceive of a peaceful resolution today.

Via Kriston Capps, here's an interesting chart from a pair of researchers who have tracked how much Supreme Court justices interrupt each other during hearings:

The court has gotten steadily testier over the past couple of decades. In 1997 there was about one interruption per hearing. Today it's up to six. Why?

In addition, you will be unsurprised to learn that it's mostly men doing all the interrupting and mostly women being interrupted:

The gender difference is pretty much zero through 2005 and then suddenly starts up in 2006. It's been growing ever since. This is all adjusted for the number of women on the court, so it's not related to the fact that there are now more of them.

Another oddity is how noisy the data is. For example, in 2016 there's an average of three interruptions per hearing and in 2017 that goes up to eight. Why would that happen over the course of a single year? The justices each speak hundreds of times per term,¹ so it's not just a statistical aberration caused by low sample size. It's a real difference.

Anyway, this is all kind of interesting and hard to explain. Feel free to speculate in comments.

¹Except for Clarence Thomas, of course.

Today has been fun. Several months ago Cox decided to offload their email service to Yahoo, and this was the day. They're transitioning customers in waves, and apparently my wave came up today.

So I hopped over to Yahoo for the first time in forever and chose a new password. This went wrong in some very peculiar ways, but eventually I got it set up—which was all very fine, but of little use since I don't access email via the web. As it happens, I use Thunderbird on my desktop and Outlook on my tablet (don't ask).

But nothing I did got my email up on either platform. I had gotten a message with a link if I needed instructions for getting an app connected, but it just led to a generic Yahoo page that was no help. All the server names were correct, the password was correct, but nada. Eventually I gave up.

But after dinner I figured it out. Can you guess? No you can't. It turns out that Yahoo demands OAuth2 password authentication. Why? Beats me. Do they tell you this anywhere? No they do not. It's insane. There can't be more than one person in a hundred who would ever figure this out.

But it was the key that finally got Thunderbird going. Sadly, Outlook doesn't support OAuth2, so I'm now reinstalling Thunderbird on my tablet. I don't quite remember why I ditched it in the first place, but I have a feeling I'm about to get my memory jogged.

Anyway, why all the grief? My guess: Yahoo wants people to give up and just use webmail, which includes their ads. So their instructions for third-party clients are deliberately obtuse. Assholes.

This is so tedious:

Restaurants for months have said menu prices in California would rise as the state raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers. Now they are following through.

....Since September, when California moved to require large fast-food chains to bump up their minimum hourly pay to $20 in April, fast-food and fast-casual restaurants in California have increased prices by 10% overall, outpacing all other states.

Just stop it. California may have "moved" to increase the minimum wage in September, but:

• Nothing actually happened until April. Price increases before then have nothing to do with the minimum wage increase.
• The actual average wage for fast food workers before the new law was about $18 per hour. So the real-life increase is only around 11% or so.
• If you figure that labor costs are roughly a quarter of sales revenue, you only need a retail price increase of 4% to keep profit margins the same.

California's minimum wage increase is nowhere near the big deal that fast food chains are making it out to be. They're mostly just using it as a smokescreen for whatever the real reason is for raising prices.

Obviously I'm way out of date, but I learned something new today from Charles Homans' big Donald Trump piece in the New York Times. The setting is one of Trump's campaign rallies:

As the speech neared its conclusion, the room once again filled with music, a stately cinematic swell of synthesized strings. This recording, an instrumental composition called “Mirrors,” was also thick with subtextual information.

Several years ago it was appropriated, seemingly at random, by devotees of QAnon, the conspiracist cosmology that holds Trump to be the central figure in a world-historical battle against a cabal of Democrats, business leaders and celebrities trafficking and torturing children.

In 2022, Trump appropriated it, too, using the song for a video he released on social media, and later at a rally in Ohio, as a soundtrack for the rousing finale of his speech. Although a spokesman denied that it was a wink at the QAnon faithful, supporters at the rally responded by raising their hands in a familiar QAnon gesture.

This has been extensively reported before, but I missed it. It's just another log on the bonfire of vileness that is Donald Trump.