Month: June 2024

From the Washington Post:

More than 300 House lawmakers were reimbursed at least $5.2 million for food and lodging while on official business in Washington last year under a new, taxpayer-funded program that does not require them to provide receipts.

....Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), the program’s overall top spender, was reimbursed for nearly $30,000 in lodging expenses and more than $10,000 for food in 2023. He was reimbursed for more than $4,000 for lodging in two different months and more than $3,000 in five different months.

In the great scheme of things, $5.2 million isn't even pocket change. It's nickels-in-the-couch money. Still, combining this bill's reliance on the honor system with the fact that Matt Gaetz is the top spender is pretty good evidence that it's crooked. It's sort of like shoplifting, I suppose. Just a price of doing business.

I was poking around yesterday's update on construction spending and I noticed something odd. Total spending on construction has increased pretty steadily for the past decade. However, the number of construction workers took a big hit during the pandemic and never recovered to its previous trend:

This means that construction workers today are considerably more productive than they were a few years ago:

Has construction productivity really increased by $24,000 per worker? No special reason for this comes to mind.

Another possibility is that employment of construction workers has caught up to its pre-pandemic trend, but mostly by hiring illegal immigrants who don't show up on the books and aren't reported to BLS.

Or is there some other explanation?

Job openings dropped yet again in April, this time by a whopping 300,000. The long-term trend continues to be perplexing:

Just before the pandemic the total employment level was 48.1%. Today it's 48.0%. In other words, exactly the same. But in the interval job openings skyrocketed and are still considerably higher than in January 2020. By contrast, actual hires are close to the same.

The story this seems to tell is that the economy did well after the pandemic and hiring increased by a normal amount for a good economy. In other words, the blue line is the real story of the economy. But for some reason, businesses began advertising for far more jobs than they really needed. It was never a case of businesses not being able to find enough workers to fill their real requirements.

So what happened? Was it just panic? Some artifact of the hiring process? It's a mystery.

President Biden plans to sign an executive order that would effectively close the border to asylum seekers. Atrios isn't impressed:

This will solve an undefinable problem and satisfy all the people who have good faith concerns!

I don't get this. Even if you oppose Biden's plan, it's pretty obvious what problem he's trying to solve:

We're down from the huge peak of last December, but there are still nearly 200,000 illegal immigrants—many of them trying to claim asylum—crossing the border every month. That's a lot.

The real problem with Biden's plan is that it's likely illegal and a court will strike it down in short order. Also, according to the Washington Post, migrants who "state a fear of persecution" will remain eligible for protection. But don't they all do that?

Today is a huge relief: My doctor called to tell me that my PET scan results were, in his words, "clean." Here's the report:

The first sentence means the scan found strong evidence of prostate cancer in my prostate. The second sentence means it didn't find it anywhere else. It hasn't metastasized. There's no cancer in my bones or my lymph nodes.

This is the best possible news. Well, second best: the best news would have been not to have prostate cancer in the first place. But as long as it's localized just to the prostate, it's extremely treatable and unlikely to have any permanent effects.

On Wednesday I have a consult with the oncologists to discuss treatment options. I'm a wee bit tired of cancer, so my preference at the moment is "all of the above." Surgically remove it, hit it with some radiation, and then pump some hormones into my body just to make sure it's gone. Maybe toss in some chemo for good measure. Most likely, though, it will only be one of the three.

This poor tree has been the target of so many woodpeckers that it's practically falling apart. This is something of a metaphor for human beings and nearly everything we touch, but at least we're not the only ones. Just the only ones who should know better.

A week ago I mentioned there was now a huge discrepancy between UN and Israeli figures for aid getting into Gaza. The UN acknowledged that it wasn't counting commercial shipments, but that hardly seemed like enough to account for the difference.

But maybe it is. This is from the Guardian:

In May, the Israeli military lifted a ban on the sale of food to Gaza from Israel and the occupied West Bank, Reuters reported last week. Traders got the green light to resume buying fresh fruit and vegetables, dairy and other goods.

Hmmm. Here's what the Israelis say:

Ami Shaked, the manager of the crossing complex where shipments are checked by Israeli security, confirmed that truck deliveries for business were outpacing aid, but said it was driven by the commercial interests of logistics firms.

....“Because if I have a contract with UNWRA [the UN agency for Palestinian refugees], they will pay, for example, 2,000 shekels for each truck. The market now (for) pure business is between 7,000 and 10,000 for each truck, so they prefer to take the goods of the businessmen.”

As usual, there are major disputes between Israel and the UN about what's really going on. Also as usual, there's simply no way for me to know which side is closer to the truth. At this point, I'm not entirely sure I trust either one of them.

But.......I have a delicate question. Every month since January we've been told that Gaza is on the verge of mass famine. And every month, there's no famine. So what's really happening? There are still some journalists in Gaza, aren't there? Just by virtue of roaming around, they should be able to tell us what things are like.

Is my memory shot? The Washington Post has a piece today about social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic and whether it was really necessary. This is apparently going to be a key point in tomorrow's congressional hearings featuring Anthony Fauci.

It takes ten paragraphs before the Post provides a straightforward answer: "Experts agree that social distancing saved lives." The question, it turns out, is only about whether six feet was really the right social distance. WHO said that three feet was enough, and Fauci and others have already testified that they don't really know where six feet came from. Apparently it was partly based on our old friend, droplet vs. aerosol emission. Six feet is a safer distance for droplet transmission, so the CDC initially adopted it because they thought COVID was spread via droplets. As we all know by now, that was wrong. COVID is spread mostly by airborne aerosols, and for that six feet doesn't do any more good than three feet.

Fine. I gather that everyone agrees about this now, but members of Congress want to showboat about it some more anyway. Whatever.

But here's where my memory comes into play. You might wonder why anyone cares that much about 3 feet vs. 6 feet, and the answer is that lots of schools were shut down because they didn't have enough space to keep kids separated by six feet.

But is that true? My recollection is that schools were mostly shut down over fear that teachers were in danger of being infected. On the other side of the argument, there was concern that keeping kids at home would expose them to elderly relatives and prevent parents who were caregivers from going to work. Beyond all this, the most common reason provided at the time was, basically, "It's a pandemic! Of course we have to shut the schools."

For example, here's a contemporary list of arguments for and against school closures. There's no mention of six feet. I asked GPT-4 and it produced many reasons, none related to six feet. Announcements at the time mostly just said schools were being shut for safety reasons that were assumed to be obvious. And lots of schools in other countries were shut down even if they were following WHO's three-foot guideline.

What am I missing? I'm well aware of the arguments that we should have opened schools more quickly after the initial panic subsided. Some states did and some didn't, even though classrooms are about the same size everywhere. Was the six-foot guideline really in play here?

Dr Pepper is now the #2 soda brand in the US:

Huh. I didn't realize that Pepsi had plummeted so badly. I wonder why?

The other thing this chart reminds me of is my longtime puzzlement that consumption of diet sodas is so far behind their sugary cousins. I know they don't taste the same, but they've never seemed that bad to me. Certainly not bad enough to be worth all the extra calories, and that would be even more true if I were a soda addict.¹

Then again, if the "set point" theory of calories is true—namely that we all have a particular number of calories we crave one way or another—then maybe it doesn't matter. If you drink sugary sodas, you're just going to consume less of something else. Maybe I should test that by switching to regular soda and seeing if I gain any weight.

¹In my case, I generally have one soda with lunch and that's it. Aside from that I drink nothing but water.

I see that we're back to playing an old favorite game:

Wait. The Department of the Interior? Where did that come from? Republicans are always talking about cutting the EPA and Education, but until now Interior has been famous only as the third agency that Rick Perry wanted to cut but couldn't remember.

So what's Trump's beef with the Department of the Interior? Well, part of the department is the Bureau of Land Management, and back in the day it was dedicated to making sure oil companies could drill on federal land. Another part is the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which was dedicated to screwing Native Americans.

But times have changed, and now the BLM is often an obstacle to drilling and spends a lot of time on preservation and environmental concerns. They were also mean to the Bundy family, who only wanted to illegally let their cows graze on federal land. Meanwhile, the BIA is trying to make up for its past bad behavior by treating Native Americans more decently. President Biden even appointed a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe to head the entire Interior Department!

This is bad. We're spending about $5 billion per year on Indians—who vote for Democrats—and another $5 billion on bureaucrats meddling with environmental nonsense and making life difficult for hardworking ranchers—who vote for Republicans. The rest of the budget is for parks and wildlife, another big liberal wonkathon. The whole department is a liberal sinkhole. Best to get rid of the entire thing.

So there you have it. We can privatize the national parks, let timber and oil companies do whatever they want on federal land, and tell the natives to stand on their own two feet. Problem solved.

And here's the best part. If we really and truly gut the entire department we'll save $17 billion per year. That's one quarter of one percent of the federal budget. Gone! Just like that! And Cliven Bundy will be avenged.