Month: April 2024

Due mostly to laziness, I suppose, I've been laboring under the impression that last year the International Court of Justice ruled there was a "plausible" case to be made for genocide in Gaza. But Joan Donoghue, who was president of the court at the time, says this isn't so:

The court decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide.... But it didn't decide that the claim of genocide is plausible.... The shorthand that often appears, which is that there's a plausible case of genocide, isn't what the court decided.

Here's her full answer during an interview with the BBC:

We've banned TikTok and now we're considering a ban on DJI drones because maybe the Chinese can use them to collect personal information and spy on us:

“DJI presents an unacceptable national security risk, and it is past time that drones made by Communist China are removed from America,” Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York and one of the bill’s primary sponsors, said in an emailed statement this month.

If Stefanik is in favor of this, it's a pretty big clue that it's just bullshit grandstanding. In any case, we're sure building up a big list of Chinese products that are either banned in the US or getting close:

• Huawei and ZTE 5G equipment over fears they provide backdoors into American comms networks.
• ZMPC cranes at US ports over fear that the CCP could take control of our infrastructure.
• TikTok over concerns they are collecting personal information and poisoning teen minds.
• DJI drones over concerns about their access to personal information on cell phones.
• BGI and WuXi biotech over concerns about access to genetic information.
• Chinese EVs over concerns they collect personal data.
• Hytera, Dahua, and Hikvision surveillance equipment.

I dunno. Maybe all this stuff really has been compromised by China. I wouldn't put it past them. Alternatively, China may be just the latest country for us to demonize and panic over. I'm not sure how a layman is supposed to figure this out, though trusting Elise Stefanik's say-so certainly isn't on the list.

There's no question that China makes it all too easy to be suspicious of them. And even if they aren't using this stuff to spy on us, it's still pretty reasonable to ban it as simple retaliation for China's endless bans on US products. Just generally, though, the current panic over China sure seems overwrought. But that's America for you.

I noticed something odd yesterday. There are many different ways of estimating the net number of new jobs each quarter, and one of the least known is the quarterly BLS report on employment dynamics. It measures the number of jobs gained from businesses opening or expanding minus the number of jobs lost from businesses closing or contracting. Put them together and you get the net number of new jobs.

This figure is always way behind: yesterday's number was for Q3 of last year. What was odd is that it says we lost 192,000 jobs that quarter. The other primary sources of employment data all agree that we added 500-700,000 jobs.

This is probably not too big a deal. These figures diverge all the time, partly because of statistical noise and partly because they don't measure precisely the same things. However, this is the second quarter in a row it's happened, and it's the biggest negative divergence in the past decade:

It's worth noting that the low employment dynamics number is not because businesses are letting more people go. It's specifically because many fewer businesses are opening or expanding. That number has declined by more than a million jobs over the past year.

I suppose this doesn't mean anything. It's probably just one of those oddities that crops up from time to time. But it does make me wonder if maybe we're not creating as many jobs as we think.

UPDATE: I've changed the chart to show to show the actual difference, not the percentage difference. It gives a better idea of what the divergence really looks like.

This is a scarlet ibis spreading its wings at the LA Zoo. They're really quite magnificent creatures.

A friend of mine recently got back from a trip to Japan and says their tour guide told them something remarkable: the Japanese spend more on adult diapers these days than they do on baby diapers.

Huh. But then he asked Microsoft's Copilot, which is based on ChatGPT, about the United States. It said the same thing was true here as well. This got me curious because it seems unlikely. In Japan, the ratio of elderly to babies is a whopping 19x. In the US it's only 7x.

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that Copilot screwed up: It mixed up US sales and global sales. If you compare just US sales, baby diapers are approximately a $15 billion market compared to only $5 billion for adult diapers.

I say "approximately" because I had a very hard time dredging up this number, and in the process I noticed there were a lot of estimates of the global diaper market from market research companies. Here they are:

This is sort of amazing. First, because there are so many formal market research reports, and second, because they vary wildly. The lowest estimate is $41 billion and the highest is $83 billion. Growth rates are estimated at anywhere from 4.3% to 7.3%. There's not even the remotest agreement about the size or growth rate of this market.

There are two lessons to take away from this. The first, of course, is that I can create charts about even the most trivial stuff. The second, and more important, is how much disagreement there is. The next time you see something in, say, the Washington Post about how "_________ estimates the market for _________ is X and it's growing at Y," just keep in mind that it's probably just a wild guess. Ask somebody else and you'll get a whole different guess.

David Pecker, the publisher of National Enquirer, is still testifying in the Trump hush money trial. I'm not sure how they've managed to fill up three days with Pecker—and that's before any cross examination—but they have. The New York Times tells us about a snippet of his testimony this morning:

Pecker has just given us a very detailed description of Jared Kushner walking him into Trump Tower, and then into Trump’s office, shortly before Trump's inauguration as president. In the office were four noteworthy people: James Comey, Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus and Mike Pompeo.

....Pecker says that in front of Comey, the head of the F.B.I., Trump thanked him for purchasing the stories — and likely committing at least one crime in the process, as Pecker well knew. It's of course not clear what Comey heard. But this is a wild, wild scene we are hearing about.

This is classic Trump: bragging about breaking the law in front of the head of the FBI because, hey, the guy works for me now and has to protect me. Also this:

Prosecutors ask David Pecker whether Trump was concerned about his wife or family finding out about his alleged affairs when he was campaigning for office. Pecker responds no. This suggests that Trump’s worries were electoral, not personal.

Pecker has already testified that the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels was "to help the campaign," but here the prosecution asks him again in more detail. Pecker is very clear: Trump didn't care about his family knowing about it. The concern was all about Trump's campaign.

This is crucial because it (potentially) makes the hush money effectively an unreported and covered-up campaign contribution. That's the underlying felony the prosecution is trying to prove.

The Atlanta Fed should hang its head in shame. GDP growth in Q1 clocked in way below their forecast, rising only 1.6% in the first quarter:

Is this good news or bad news? We have to play the usual game here: it's bad news because it suggests the economy is getting weak. But it's good news because it means the Fed might reduce interest rates to help restore strong growth. Flip a coin.

A few facts about the H5N1 avian flu virus:

Humans who are in close contact with sick birds like poultry farmers and slaughterhouse workers are at a high risk of infection.... Despite confined examples of person-to-person transmission occurring since 1997, constant transmission has not been observed.

....H5N1 was first discovered in humans in 1997 in Hong Kong.... Worldwide, from 2003 to 05 October 2022, 865 cases were reported from 21 countries with a case fatality rate of 53%.

Virtually all cases of avian flu in humans have come from Egypt and Asia. In the entire rest of the world there have been 14 cases since 2003. The United States has had two of them: one in 2022 and one this year.

I warned you that someday there would be a pop quiz to see if you've been paying attention to me, and today's the day. Please explain what's wrong with this infographic:

The key result here is that 38% of protests turn violent if police are present, while only 7% turn violent if police stay away. It's the police who cause the violence!

It wouldn't surprise me if this is often true. But this statistic is meaningless. Police are obviously more likely to show up at protests that pose a high chance of danger in the first place. If you want the formal academic explanation, here it is:

Tests of dominant explanations of police presence using logistic regression analysis indicate that the best predictor of police presence at a protest event was how threatening the event was—police attended larger protest events and those that used confrontational tactics.

Confrontational events are the most likely to have a police presence, and confrontational events are also the most likely to become, uh, confrontational. That's all that's going on here.

Yesterday Truth Social had 136 million shares outstanding at a closing price of $32.57. Today, after Trump met the terms for a payout of 36 million new shares, they effectively have 172 million shares outstanding at a closing price of $35.67.

So in one day, in which nothing happened, the paper value of the company went from $4.4 billion to $6.1 billion. That's an increase of nearly 40% in an already valueless company for no reason whatsoever.

It's a 20th century version of the South Sea Bubble, and it's too late to stop it. So many people are going to lose their life savings over this.