Month: May 2024

Vox reports on a new law in New York that gives New York City the authority to lower speed limits:

Sammy’s Law allows city officials — rather than the state’s Department of Transportation — to determine the speed limits on their streets with input from community members. The bill will allow the city to drop the speed limit to 20 miles per hour on some streets in an effort to reduce pedestrian deaths.

I hate hate hate this. 20 mph! You might as well be riding a tricycle.

Also, I hate laws named after a child. It's usually a dead giveaway that it's the product of browbeating by some tiny but psychotic group of parents, not reasoned thought.

And yet, the fact that I hate it doesn't mean it's wrong. In Europe, the normal residential speed limit is 18 mph,¹ and they have way fewer pedestrian deaths than we do. I'm sure we could all get used to it too.

Personally, I still hate the idea. But that doesn't make it a bad one.²

¹That's 30 kilometers per hour in commie units.

²Plus I've never really understood why New York City has so little autonomy in the first place. Why does it have to get state approval for so many things? Good idea or not, I can't think of any good reason why they shouldn't be allowed to set their own speed limits.

A pair of researchers has published a new paper claiming that global warming is astronomically more dangerous than we've thought until now. Their thesis is simple: historical evidence shows a very strong correlation between average global temps and extreme weather events, and those extreme weather events are very costly.

Interestingly, they do something I haven't seen before. Instead of just projecting what will happen in the future, they go backward and look at the past:

Our results also indicate that world GDP per capita would be 37% higher today had no warming occurred between 1960 and 2019 instead of the 0.75°C observed increase in global mean temperature.

World GDP is currently around $100 trillion, so the authors are saying that it would be $37 trillion higher in the absence of climate change. This is presumably the price we're paying for more extreme weather events.

I'm having some trouble with this. Even if you just add up all the weather events in a year and attribute every single one of them to climate change, does anyone think they currently cost us $37 trillion?

Let's take a look around. Insurance broker Gallagher Re estimates that the total cost of all weather disasters was $360 billion in 2022 and $301 billion in 2023. The European Environmental Agency estimates about $50 billion for Europe in 2022. The World Meteorological Association estimates roughly $200 billion in 2019 and $4.3 trillion over the past 50 years.

That's enough to give us a pretty good idea of the shape of things. If extreme weather events cause around $200-300 billion in direct damages and, let's say, half of that is due to climate change, they would need to account for 100-200 times as much in indirect economic impact to hit $37 trillion in lost GDP.

So I dunno. Maybe I'm missing some crucial point. But these numbers don't seem very plausible.

The job hunting market has evolved approximately like this:

• In the late '90s, a few bright entrepreneurs began creating online job seeking websites like Monster and Indeed.
• This made it easier to apply for jobs, and companies became awash in applications.
• To keep from going mad, HR departments started employing automated screening technology.
• The job boards fought back by promoting "One Click Apply."
• This made things worse, and HR departments began tightening their screening even more.
• Job seekers responded with AI-driven services that allowed them to game the screening services.
• HR departments deployed AI in return.
• Etc.

Obviously this war of all against all kind of sucks, and the Wall Street Journal does a pretty good job of describing the resulting employment hell here. But it also says things like this:

The result: a bot versus bot war that’s leaving both applicants and employers irritated and has made the chances of landing an interview, much less a job, even slimmer than before.

This can't be true. Irritating or not, hiring figures are crystal clear: practically everyone who wants to be employed is. One side clicks a button and applies to a thousand jobs. The other side clicks a button and discards 99% of all applicants. But in the end, there's one job and one person who gets the job. It is no harder to land a job than it's ever been, and no harder to find qualified applicants.

Still, it really does seem like the whole thing is a gigantic waste of time. But maybe not? Is it possible that this arms race has produced better overall job matching? Or just lots of angst and extra work to accomplish no more than ever?

Here's an interesting tidbit. Since the start of the year there have been precisely two short periods when people were interested in Joe Biden's age:

The first spike came when special counsel Robert Hur made gratuitous remarks about Biden's age in his classified documents report and spurred a mountain of press coverage. The second spike came when Biden's State of the Union address made it clear that his age wasn't a big deal after all. And since then there's been nothing.

The recent police shooting of Roger Fortson, a US Air Force senior airman, prompts Vox to look at the bigger picture of police killings:

Black people comprised 13 percent of the US population but accounted for 27 percent of those killed by police, according to Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit tracking this information.

That's one way of putting it. Here's another way:

Black people comprised 36 percent of violent offenders but accounted for only 27 percent of those killed by police, according to "Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Offenders and Arrestees," a statistical brief from the Office of Justice Statistics.

The MPV figures are for 2023 while the OJS figures are for 2018, but the differences are likely to be minute. Note that the 36% rate of Black violent offenders comes from both the FBI, which tallies arrests, and the NCVS, which directly surveys victims of crime. Both sources agree quite closely.

Why do Black people commit violent crime at such a high rate? There are plenty of fancy arguments out there, but the most likely cause is that, on average, they graduate from high school with roughly 9th grade math and reading skills. Once you adjust for that, their crime rates are entirely normal.

The Washington Post brings our attention today to the famous Keeling Curve, which shows the concentration of CO₂ at the top of Mauna Loa. In March CO₂ concentrations were 4.4 ppm higher than the year before, a new record.¹

In 2000, CO₂ increased at an annual average of 1.17 ppm from the previous year. In the most recent 12 months that was up to 3.17 ppm.

¹The Post article says 4.7 ppm, but I get 4.4 ppm from the NOAA data. It's a record either way.

I forgot to take a new picture of Hilbert before we left town, so instead here's a rare archival photo of Hilbert on his first day home from the shelter, September 22, 2014. Wasn't he a cutie pie?

The Biden administration is set to raise tariffs on a range of Chinese imports:

Officials are particularly focused on electric vehicles, and they are expected to raise the tariff rate to roughly 100% from 25%.

Well, that should do it. If GM and Ford can't compete against 100% tariffs it's time to give up the ballgame.

But what does this leave for Donald Trump? 200% tariffs? He's gonna have to do something if he wants to remain king of the sinophobes.

According to Morning Consult, Joe Biden is the most popular leader in the G7 group of rich countries:

Among all countries surveyed, only four have leaders with approval ratings over 50%: India, Argentina, Mexico, and Switzerland.

You don't need a chart to tell you when a dependent variable goes to zero, but just for the record:

COGAT's motto is, "We’ve said it the whole time — There is no limit to the amount of aid that can be facilitated into Gaza." That's obviously pretty questionable, but in any case they aren't saying it any more.

For what it's worth, the main Rafah crossing into Gaza remains shut down, but COGAT says a few trucks are now entering through both the Erez crossing and the just reopened Kerem Shalom crossing.