Month: July 2024

It's a truism that nobody ever gets fired from a government job. But is it actually true? I was curious.

The BLS tracks job separations for both private industry and the federal government, but unfortunately they don't break layoffs and discharges apart. This makes comparison difficult since the federal government doesn't really have layoffs.

But there are estimates of layoffs in the private sector, and if you subtract those from the BLS numbers you get a rough estimate of the number of people fired. Here it is:

(Note that I've eliminated the 2010 and 2020 numbers for the federal government because they include huge spikes for census workers let go after the counting fieldwork is done.)

So the answer is that the truism appears to be true. Private companies fire about 1% of their employees every year while the federal government lets go only about 0.3%. That's a big difference, though I'll bet you're surprised at how low the private sector number is. Very few people ever get outright fired even in famously at-will America.

This is Peterskirche in Vienna. It's not an especially famous church, but it's impressive for the sheer amount of Baroque festoonment that adorns it. Highly recommended for a short visit.

A month ago I wrote that Donald Trump's VP choice would be guided by what he was looking for in a running mate. Ass kissing? Retribution? General shittiness? Here was my entry for the primary virtue of the senator from Ohio:

• Willingness to pretend to be an idiot: J.D. Vance

So I guess that's what Trump values the most. He wants someone who shows his loyalty by a willingness to say anything, no matter how dumb or obviously untrue he knows it to be. Congratulations, J.D.!

Sigh. This is from the Wall Street Journal today:

Eviction filings over the past year in a half-dozen cities and surrounding metropolitan areas are up 35% or more compared with pre-2020 norms, according to the Eviction Lab, a research unit at Princeton University.

This includes Las Vegas, Houston, and in Phoenix, where landlords filed more than 8,000 eviction notices in January. That was the most ever in a single month for the county that includes the Arizona capital.... Overall, eviction notices were up 15% or more compared with the period before the pandemic for 10 of the 33 cities tracked by the Eviction Lab, which looked at filings over the past 12 months.

If you look at a list of major US cities, on any metric, there will always be some at the top and some at the bottom. It takes less than ten seconds to hop over to the Eviction Lab website and see this chart front and center:

As you can see, the national average for evictions is consistently less than their old average. You have to read to the seventh paragraph of the Journal article to learn obliquely that "evictions more broadly have settled to roughly where they were before the pandemic."

Over the past year or so progressives have been hellbent on promoting the idea that we're barreling toward an eviction crisis now that pandemic protections have mostly been loosened. But at least their motivations are clear. What's the Journal's excuse?

Following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, there have been the usual pleas that this was an assault of democracy and has no place in America. An assault on democracy it might have been, but political killings are as American as apple pie.

In just the past century we've lived through the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Huey Long, Harvey Milk, and George Moscone.

Politically adjacent murders include Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Medger Evers, and the Freedom Summer murders.

Attempted assassinations of presidents are too numerous to count, but even if you include only the ones that got close you have FDR, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Harry Truman. Among non-presidents you can count George Wallace, Gabby Giffords, and Steve Scalise.

And let's not forget the 1954 Capitol shootings or the January 6 insurrection.

On average, we have a politically motivated attempt to murder someone every five years or so. And that's just the high-profile murders. There are dozens or hundreds more if you count less prominent political figures.

Welcome to America

The world has gone insane:

A judge on Monday dismissed the federal indictment against former president Donald Trump on charges of mishandling classified documents — his second seismic legal victory in less than a month, following a historic Supreme Court decision on immunity.

Judge Aileen Cannon has demonstrated time and again that she will do whatever it takes to slow Trump's trial to a crawl, and now she's decided to simply say the hell with it and let the world know she's completely in Trump's pocket.

I don't doubt this decision will be quickly overturned on appeal, but "quickly" in the legal world means months. Maybe it will end up in the Supreme Court.

This leaves me speechless. I haven't read Cannon's opinion, and I don't know if I'll bother. It's loony tunes time.

This is just a little something to start your week out with.

The Wall Street Journal says that women are flooding the workplace, largely because of the availability of remote work:

But it’s not time for a victory lap just yet. The same work-from-home opportunities that have enabled many moms in particular to enter or rejoin the workforce are also shackling them with fresh responsibilities. Many say they are effectively working two full-time jobs: managing their households and their careers.

But the Journal leaves something out: this surge of working women started long before the pandemic increased opportunities for remote work. The labor force participation rate for prime age women, for example, started turning up in 2016, not 2021. Likewise, as the Journal's own chart shows, the participation rate of women with small children has been rising since 2004. The same is true for their actual employment rate, and there's no special spike in 2022 or 2023:

The numbers just don't confirm the Journal's narrative that remote work has had an effect on women in general or on women with children. So why are they insisting on it?

A new study is out that provides a variety of estimates of the number of US adults who identify as trans. All of the estimates have something in common:

In one year, between 2020 and 2021, the number of young people identifying as trans nearly doubled. The effect is more pronounced among some groups than it is among others, but it basically holds up across the board.

It's one thing for this number to be steadily increasing. Maybe that's because trans identities have become less marginalized, which makes it easier to go public as trans. But something is way off if you get a sudden huge spike in a single year. I can't really think of any plausible explanation for this that isn't some kind of methodological artifact.

Prominent conservatives were all over Twitter yesterday blaming Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats for the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. But were prominent Democrats acting just as badly?

It turns out this is about Dmitri Mehlhorn, who suggested the attack could have been staged. And who is Dmitri Mehlhorn? He's an aide to a donor to Democrats and he apologized immediately after his private email became public.

Is that really the best they can do? One guy who's completely unknown and quickly apologized? I'll take that as evidence that liberals generally acted pretty well after the attack.

POSTSCRIPT: The Semafor story also mentions that some guy at a nail salon wondered if the attack was staged. And some random people on social media. So there's that. Sheesh.