Month: June 2024

The Dallas Fed reports today that AI has so far had "minimal" effects on employment in Texas firms. Maybe. But first, take a look at their chart:

Among firms that use AI, that's a net of 8% of firms saying it's decreased their need for workers. That doesn't seem so minimal to me—especially for a technology that was effectively introduced only in late 2022. I wonder how many actual employees this represents?

It's also instructive to listen to the anecdotal evidence:

Most companies using AI report it has not affected their need for workers. A financial services firm noted, “AI is helpful in offloading workload and increasing productivity, but we are not at the point where AI is going to replace workers.”

Ten percent of companies using AI say it reduced their need for employees; these firms were largely using AI for customer service and process automation. A manufacturer noted, “There is strong potential for AI to automate or eliminate many clerical jobs in our business that will save our team time and money.” Workforce reductions from AI use are notably more common among large firms than small ones.

If AI is offloading workload, then it's going to replace workers pretty shortly. And if there's "strong potential" to eliminate clerical jobs, then those jobs are going away.

About 20% of all firms surveyed say they use generative AI (Copilot, GPT-4, Claude, etc.). That's a helluva lot for a technology that's only been around in usable form for two years. And the firms using it sure seem happy with the results:

I'll concede that findings like this aren't always reliable. Whoever fills out the survey is guessing at this stuff and might not be guessing correctly. Still, even if some of the AI use is sketchy (Copilot to help write emails, for example), it sure seems to have gained adoption remarkably quickly.

The Denver Basic Income Project is a program that gave no-strings money to homeless people in Denver. It ran through most of 2023 and included three randomly chosen groups. Group A got $1,000 per month for 12 months. Group B we don't care about. Group C got $50 per month. Here's how they did on housing after ten months:

This is the damnedest thing I've ever seen. One way of describing it is to say that the treatment group ($1,000 per month) did barely any better than the control group ($50 per month). So it turns out that giving people money has no effect.

And that's true. But the more important finding, I think, is that giving people $50 per month had a huge impact. How is that possible? This is nowhere near enough money to help someone rent an apartment, and yet rentals went up from 12% to 43%.

In another part of the study, the researchers try to calculate how much the city saved in social services due to the homeless being better off. These exercises are frequently fantasies, but let's take a look anyway:

Again, there are two ways of looking at this. One is that the total savings (about $500,000) are nowhere near what the project cost (about $5 million). The other is that giving people $50 per month had a huge impact. But how?

Another oddity is that about a third of the participants dropped out before the project ended. I get that these are homeless people, not all of whom routinely make great life decisions. Still, in Group A it's a no-strings monthly handout of $1,000! But a third of the participants dropped out partway through.

There are other bizarre findings. For example, although the money seems to have had a big impact on housing, it had almost no impact on food security. And mental health deteriorated a bit for all groups.

I don't know what to think. My main interest is that giving people $50 per month seems to have made a substantial difference on some metrics. That can't possibly be because of the money, which is too small to have an impact. Was it simply the effect of being in the project at all? That homeless people who feel cared about are more likely to get off the street?

This really demands some answers. If it holds up, it would be a cheap way of making a huge difference in homelessness, and it would pay for itself. Needless to say, I'm skeptical. But it needs to be followed up.

Remember that federal judge who banned the Biden administration from contact with social media? He wrote a humdinger of an opinion claiming the government had pressured Facebook and others to censor right-wing views:

Virtually all of the free speech suppressed was “conservative” free speech.... The Plaintiffs have outlined a federal regime of mass censorship.... The evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario.... The United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth.”

This guy was so crazy that even the Fifth Circuit—where crazy goes to thrive—couldn't stomach most of it on appeal. But they left some of the ruling in place, so the government took it to the Supreme Court. Today they punted:

Held: Neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established Article III standing to seek an injunction against any defendant.

They denied standing and never even got to the merits, so we have no idea what they really think. But even at that it was only a 6-3 ruling, with Alito and Thomas in dissent as usual, and Gorsuch joining them.

I'm getting a little nervous. The Court seems to be dribbling out rulings that are favorable to liberals in an effort to clear the ground for some blockbuster conservative rulings. The big ones left are Chevron and Trump's immunity claim. I won't be surprised if they do some big damage to Chevron, but they can't have decided to uphold Trump's absurd total immunity claim, can they?

Can they?

The Wall Street Journal has a long piece today about something I've been puzzled over: Has the US actually slowed down its arms shipments to Israel?  But after nearly a thousand words of saying, basically, no, the reporters suddenly toss in this short paragraph:

Since May, the State Department has delayed moving forward with a sale to Israel of new F-15 jet fighters, precision weapons and $1 billion deal for mortar rounds, military vehicles and tank ammunition, U.S. officials said.

So this means...... what? State has delayed approving some new orders for future delivery, but not anything currently in the pipeline? Hmmm.

In any case, the bulk of the article is pretty simple. US officials say that we fast tracked a huge backlog of arms early in the Gaza war and have since resumed a more normal pace. So things have slowed down relative to last October, but nothing has been delayed or held up. Apparently, though, Benjamin Netanyahu thinks otherwise.

Given Joe Biden's attitude toward arming Israel, which has been consistent, uncompromising, and of very long standing, I can't imagine anyone is fibbing about this. There's no way Biden is holding anything up without making it clear and public that he's doing so. Netanyahu's recent outburst sounds like a guy coming down with a case of the Trumpies.

Rep. Jamaal Bowman lost his primary race tonight to challenger George Latimer. The final tally was a 58%-42% landslide in Latimer's favor.

Conventional wisdom says this was mostly due to massive spending by AIPAC, the American-Israel lobbying group. And that surely had a big impact. But it's worth noting a couple of things. First, Bowman was behind even before AIPAC started spending. Second, the AIPAC ads never mentioned Israel. And third, it's possible—just possible—that Bowman lost mostly because he's a crackpot. Let's put it this way: the gurus behind the AIPAC advertising didn't have to work very hard to create their scorched-earth campaign. It was a target rich environment.

So I wouldn't take too much away from this. Yes, it's a loss for progressives, but with a candidate as bad as Bowman they never really had a chance. I doubt this is much of a bellwether for anything.

On the other hand, with any luck this is a bellwether:

Here is per capita spending on food over the past 90 years:

The spike during World War II is interesting, as well as the short drop in eating out as soon as the war was over. The pandemic produced an increase in food at home but a bigger decline in food out. Since then, however, restaurant spending has returned to the sharp growth it's enjoyed ever since 2010.

This is a statue of Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna at the turn of the century. "Under his administration," says the Encyclopedia Britannica, "Vienna became an efficient, modern metropolis." Thus the statue.

Unfortunately, Lueger was also something of an antisemite—apparently an inspiration for no less than Adolf Hitler. This is why SHAME is now spray painted all over his statue. The authorities have tried to stop it, but whenever they clean up the statue the spray painters just come back.

But according to our guide LR, everyone has finally agreed to a solution after years of bickering: They plan to leave the statue up but tilt it five degrees like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. LR said this was a typical Viennese compromise, meaning that it's basically sort of inscrutable. The idea, presumably, is that Lueger still gets his statue for all his good works, but the tilt makes it immediately obvious that something is off. That will prompt you to read the accompanying sign to find out what's up, and you'll learn about the antisemitism.

Kinda weird. On the other hand, I suppose it's better than just endlessly fighting over it like we do.

The Julian Assange plea deal is a little more interesting than I initially thought. To simplify considerably, there were basically two things Assange was charged with:

• Obtaining and distributing classified national defense material.
• Actively helping Chelsea Manning obtain the material. In particular, prosecutors alleged that Assange "agreed to crack a password hash stored on U.S. Department of Defense computers."

The charges of distributing classified information were problematic because Assange was plainly not a spy. He was in the business of gathering classified documents and then publishing them widely. This is the same thing that journalists do routinely.

Conversely, cracking a password and then giving it to a source is not something journalists do routinely. That part of the indictment was relatively uncontroversial—though it might have been difficult to prove in court.

But it wasn't part of the single count that Assange agreed to plead guilty to. The plea deal very explicitly avoids the hacking offense and charges only that Assange violated the Espionage Act by receiving and distributing classified documents. This is precisely the precedent that journalists objected to.

A plea deal doesn't officially set a precedent, but in effect the Department of Justice is making it clear that it can and will prosecute someone who does nothing more than publish classified information.

Why? Assange has denied that he hacked a password, so this deal allows him to maintain that denial. Conversely, he obviously did publish classified documents, so the plea deal requires him to admit nothing new. Perhaps that was part of it? Or perhaps DOJ very specifically wanted to make it clear that it would prosecute even a journalist if the leaked documents were sufficiently harmful.¹

I don't know if we'll ever learn more about the motivations behind this. In any case, I remain a little befuddled about how Assange could have been indicted in the first place since he's not a US citizen and wasn't resident in the US or subject to US laws when he published the leaks. It turns out this is a bit of a complicated question, but apparently there are indeed circumstances in which US law has a global reach.

¹In particular, the government alleged that Assange published documents that contained the names of human sources:

The superseding indictment charges that Assange then published on WikiLeaks classified documents that contained the unredacted names of human sources who provided information to United States forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to U.S. State Department diplomats around the world. These human sources included local Afghans and Iraqis, journalists, religious leaders, human rights advocates, and political dissidents from repressive regimes. According to the superseding indictment, Assange’s actions risked serious harm to United States national security to the benefit of our adversaries and put the unredacted named human sources at a grave and imminent risk of serious physical harm and/or arbitrary detention.

Here are the top and bottom ten states for change in unemployment over the past year:

The worst performers are mostly blue states. The best performers are mostly red states. Make of that what you will.

Well, this is going to piss off a whole lot of people:

Israel’s Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that the military must begin drafting ultra-Orthodox Jewish men.... In a unanimous decision, nine judges held that there was no legal basis for the longstanding military exemption given to many ultra-Orthodox religious students. Given the absence of a law distinguishing between seminarians and other men of draft age, the court ruled, the country’s compulsory service laws must similarly apply to the ultra-Orthodox minority.

Honestly, my only question is how this exemption managed to stay in place so long. Or, maybe more accurately, how it managed to survive so long on a purely handshake basis without ever being codified into law.

In any case, after 70-some years it's finally been called out and now Benjamin Netanyahu has to get parliament to change the law. With every other Israeli running the risk of fighting and dying in the Gaza war, that's not an easy ask. But his shaky government depends on extremist conservative support, so he has no choice. Stay tuned.