Month: May 2024

I guess it's time to update my table of Donald Trump's court cases.

Case	Outcome	Details
E. Jean Carroll #1	Lost	Ordered to pay $5 million. On appeal.
E. Jean Carroll #2	Lost	Ordered to pay $83 million. On appeal.
New York business fraud	Lost	Ordered to pay $454 million. On appeal.
Stormy Daniels hush money	Convicted	Found guilty on all 34 counts.
Hillary Clinton	Lost	Case dismissed, Trump fined $1 million for frivolous lawsuit. On appeal.
Steele dossier	Lost	Ordered to pay legal fees of $382,000.
Pulitzer Prize board	Ongoing	Defamation suit over awarding prize for coverage of Russiagate.
New York Times and Mary Trump for publication of tax information	Lost	Dismissed by judge. Trump ordered to pay legal fees of $392,000.
62 suits over election fraud	All lost	61 suits lost immediately, 62nd lost on appeal.
Mary Trump et al. against Trump over exclusion from will	Won	Suit dismissed, then Mary lost again on appeal.
Georgia election fraud	Ongoing	Of 19 co-defendants, four have pleaded guilty so far. Trump's case hasn't been scheduled yet.
Bob Woodward	Ongoing	Trump is suing Woodward for copyright infringement over an audiobook that includes interviews with Trump. Recently moved to New York.
Classified documents (federal)	Ongoing	Judge doing everything possible to delay case past Election Day.
Strzok/Page charge of political retribution by Trump	Ongoing	A judge has ruled that Trump can be deposed.
January 6 (federal)	Ongoing	Waiting for Supreme Court ruling on Trump claim of presidential immunity.
CNN defamation (2020)	Lost	Dismissed by judge.
CNN defamation (2022)	Lost	Dismissed by judge.
New York Times defamation (2020)	Lost	Dismissed by judge.
Washington Post defamation (2020)	Lost	Dismissed by judge.
WJFW-NBC defamation (2020)	Lost	Dismissed by judge.
Michael Cohen	Lost	Dropped by Trump shortly before he would have been forced to give a deposition.
Trump University	Lost	All three suits settled for $25 million in restitution.
Trump Foundation	Lost	Foundation shut down, Trump ordered to pay $2 million restitution.
Letitia James misconduct	Lost	Dismissed, then dropped by Trump on appeal.
Six lawsuits against Trump related to January 6	Ongoing	Judges have ruled that the suits can proceed.

The big news in the EV world is the announcement of a new hybrid car from Chinese automaker BYD. They claim it has a range of 1,300 miles, but that may be conservative. A couple of Chinese journalists took one out for a test and drove it until it literally coughed and died. It lasted 1,497 miles.

Now, the journalists were driving slowly and carefully, so maybe 1,300 miles is really more plausible. Either way, I want to know how it managed this. It turns out the battery only provides 50-70 miles of range, so the car's impressive performance is almost entirely due to its gasoline engine, which has a mileage rating of 81 mpg.

81 mpg! Yes, that's highway driving, but no gasoline car in the US gets more than about 40 mpg on the highway. So forget about the car's "AI-enabled energy consumption management system." I want to know how they get 81 mpg from the gasoline engine. It's only 99 horsepower, but so was the old Chevy Spark, and it didn't get even half of 81 mpg. What kind of witchcraft are we dealing with here?

We have a verdict! That was quick.

Gotta be guilty, right? There's no way they'd acquit Trump so fast.

UPDATE: Yep, guilty on count 1. And if he's guilty on count 1, he's guilty on all of them.

UPDATE 2: Trump is guilty on all 34 counts.

UPDATE 3: As I suspected, all we get is a verdict. The jurors were not asked which of the "other crimes" they believed Trump was guilty of. My guess is: all three.

Over at Mother Jones, Katie Herchenroeder writes about the new conservative love affair with tightening up divorce laws:

The right has long pushed policies to enshrine a specific view of marriage. But the open discussion of making divorce harder has—in large part because of dudes online with podcasts and politicians who want to appeal to dudes who listen to dudes on podcasts—become more obvious over the last year.

....When I initially set up a Google Alert for “no-fault divorce” last summer, the news was pretty sparse. Now, I’m getting updates daily.

This just goes to show that dudes with podcasts don't represent much of a constituency. Here's the data on how many people agree that we should make it harder to end a marriage:

Virtually nobody is in agreement with the online bros, and that's true for all ages, races, genders, and education levels. Before long, Americans are going to believe that if you want to end a bad marriage all you should have to do is jump over a broom and say "I'm divorced."

Still, I guess we should ask Donald Trump how he feels about this. Melania too.

A couple of weeks ago I got to see an early morning flag-changing ritual on our cruise ship. As we exited a lock on the Danube near Gottsdorf, just before we crossed the border from Germany to Austria, the captain of our cruise ship took down the German flag and hoisted an Austrian flag. The lock operator yelled down to him that he was a little early, but he told us she was joking and that no one minded if you were a little off. However, some countries—he named Hungary and Romania—are super strict and will fine you if you're so much as a hundred meters late getting the new flag up.

But why are boats required to fly the flag of the country they're sailing through in the first place? ChatGPT instantly informed me that this is called "flag etiquette," and helps ensure that ships adhere to the laws and regulations of the waters they are navigating—among other things. So there you have it.

POSTSCRIPT: I asked the same question of Perplexity and it gave me a completely wrong answer. It didn't even understand the question I was asking. Points deducted for Perplexity.

Politico has yet another article today about Joe Biden's weakness among Black voters:

Prominent Black officials are warning the Biden campaign that the president’s efforts to keep Black voters firmly and enthusiastically in his electoral coalition aren’t working — and that time is running out to get his message across. The publicly voiced concern from these Black Democrats isn’t that the White House lacks policy achievements — it’s that Black voters aren’t hearing about them.

Something about this still doesn't make sense. Black voters aren't "hearing about" Biden's achievements? Why would they be hearing any less than they did in 2020? Nothing much has changed since then about social media or news habits or anything like that. Nor do most voters pay a lot of attention to specific policy issues anyway.

Another oddity: a Pew survey suggests that among Black voters there's no educational gap. Those with college degrees—the kind of people who have heard about Biden's achievements—support him at the same rate as those without degrees. This is wildly different from white voters, where there's a 20-point gap.

Finally, take a look at this:

Instead of focusing only on Biden, check out Trump's support among Black voters. According to YouGov, it's virtually the same as it was four years ago. Biden's number is low because there are lots of undecided voters, not because Black support for Trump has skyrocketed.

Nor is there a big problem for Biden in issue importance. Black voters mostly rate issues the same as white voters. The exceptions are immigration, which they don't care as much about, and civil rights and guns, which they care more about.¹ All of those work in Biden's favor, not against him.

I'm basically thinking out loud here. I'm not trying to deny there's a possible problem for Biden among Black voters, I'm just trying to make sense of it. But no matter how much I stare at things, they don't add up. Biden has been just about the most pro-Black president in modern history and Trump is probably the most anti-Black. Nothing much has changed in the way we get information compared to 2020. Support for Trump hasn't changed a lot. And (apparently) even Black voters with college degrees have soured a bit on Biden. What's really going on here?

¹There's also climate change, which is a bit weird. Compared to white voters, far more Black voters rate it as an important issue but far fewer rate it the most important issue. In any case, this certainly shouldn't hurt Biden even if doesn't help him much.

A South Korean company called Hanwha Group is building a huge solar panel factory in Georgia using a new technology that promises lower prices and higher efficiencies:

The new technology comes from an Israeli startup that promises to simplify one of the most cumbersome steps in solar manufacturing and cut costs by reducing the amount of silver needed to capture sunlight on the panels.

Uh oh. What's more important, fighting climate change with better solar tech or shunning all things Israeli? Decisions, decisions....

Along with revisions to economic growth, BEA also released corporate profit figures this morning. Profits were way up for banks and way down for everyone else, but this is just a blip in the long-term picture:

I hadn't quite realized things were so stark. Nonfinancial corporations saw their profits skyrocket during the pandemic and then flatten out at a permanently higher level. Banks saw no growth, and then negative growth while inflation was high. Even with their rebound in Q1, their profits are still lower than they were five years ago.

Which is fine with me. But it's still a surprising difference in fortunes.

This morning the BEA announced that real GDP growth in Q1 was actually 1.3%, not 1.6%. This isn't great news, but it's only one quarter and probably isn't that meaningful. However, they also released GDI figures, and the mysterious gap between GDP and GDI has disappeared for the second quarter in a row. Both estimates of economic growth now agree with each other:

The average of real GDP and GDI was 1.4% in the first quarter. This might—might—mean the Fed's interest rate hikes are finally slowing the economy.

But it's still only a single quarter and isn't materially different from most of 2022-23. Just something to keep an eye on.

This is one of the more cowardly headlines I've read in a while:

Emerging Portrait of Judge in Trump Documents Case: Prepared, Prickly and Slow

If you read the actual piece, it contains one (1) example of judge Aileen Cannon being prepared—set against half a dozen where she was confused or mistaken. But the main thing the story makes clear is that practically everything Cannon does is to Donald Trump's benefit. The headline says nothing about this.

A more accurate hed would have been, "Inexperienced, Slow, and Always On Trump's Side." Why run the article at all if you're going to bury it under an innocuous and misleading headline?