Month: July 2024

Does this count as good news? Ocean temps are almost not at record-setting levels now. They're merely slightly above the unbelievable, record-shattering temps of last year.

Gallup's global survey of positive and negative emotions sheds some interesting light on the proposition that smartphones are harming young people. Here are positive emotions:

There's no change after 2012, when smartphones became widely used. Now here are negative emotions:

Negative emotions did start to rise around 2012. However, this was a broad trend that had nothing to do specifically with young people. Everyone is becoming more negative. Also, this peaked in 2020 and has been declining ever since. If smartphones are the cause, why would that be?

This is a very limited look at things since it includes the whole world, not just the US or even just rich countries. Nor does it break things down by gender, which might be important. However, we do have individual country ratings for certain emotions, and they tell us that overall the US is about average on most things—including sadness—with the exception of stress, where we rate high, and loneliness, where we rate low.

Gallup has all the detailed data necessary to produce annual charts by age for just the US. In fact, it's available to anyone who subscribes to their service, which doesn't include me. But whether it's Gallup or a subscriber, it would sure be nice if someone could replicate the two charts above just for the US, broken down by gender.

According to preliminary estimates from the Border Patrol, it looks like total illegal border crossings in June were down to about 84,000:

This doesn't include requests for asylum, which usually amount to about 50,000 per month.

Is this decline because of summer or because of President Biden's recent crackdown on border crossings? That's impossible to say. We'll know in a few months.

Here is YouGov's weekly tracking poll of the presidential race:

After Joe Biden's disastrous CNN debate, he lost a grand total of two points of support. Trump gained nothing.

Among independents Biden lost four points and Trump, remarkably, lost one point. Their support mostly went to RFK Jr. and Jill Stein. This suggests that Trump really does have a ceiling on his support.

On average, other polls also show Biden losing a net of 2-3% after the debate. This is remarkably little, probably due to a combination of low viewership and high partisanship.

This is world famous Melk Abbey, about halfway between Linz and Vienna in Austria. At any given time, its population is 22 monks and about two thousand tourists. Those 22 monks do a helluva job raising funds.

Employers have increasingly turned to surveillance of keystrokes to make sure their workers are actually working, and this is especially true of people working from home. However, remote workers can fight back with hacks that fake keyboard strokes and mouse movements. The Wall Street Journal reports:

When Teramind examined an anonymized sample of 1,000,000 workers at 5,000 corporate clients late last year, it says it found 7% of employees appeared to be faking work activity on their machines. It has since fine-tuned the algorithms and rerun the test, this time finding over 8%.

“The true number is almost certainly higher,” Kleyman says, since the company found no false-positive results when it investigated the findings.

I've seen various measures of productivity for remote workers. Most suggest that it's lower, but some recent ones have pointed in the other direction. But I'd take this Journal article as evidence for the former. If 10-20% of remote workers are going to active lengths to fake work, that surely must mean less work is getting done.

For more on that score we can turn to the latest release of the American Time Use Study. Among full-time workers, it reports 8.19 hours of work per day for those in a workplace compared to 5.37 hours for those at home. That's a difference of two hours and 50 minutes.

Now, sure, that's not the end of the story. Some of those workplace hours were spent around the water cooler and some of the remote workers might have been hybrids. But there's no way that accounts for more than a bit of the difference. Nor is there much reason to think that the hours spent working are any more intense for home workers than for workplace workers.¹

The difference is just too big. Remote workers just don't work as much.

¹Though it's possible: fewer interruptions, less time on the phone, maybe fewer meetings, etc.

Quite a few people have called for Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race, but I'm surprised that so few have taken the logical next step: urging him to resign immediately.

At the risk of being overly earnest, this is not—or shouldn't be—a matter of partisan politics. It's not about who's most likely to beat Trump in November. It's about whether Biden is mentally fit to be president. On that score, recent reporting has done nothing but confirm the evidence of our own eyes and ears from last Thursday: obviously he's not. Even if, optimistically, he only performs that badly for a few hours once a week, it's simply not safe to have a commander-in-chief with that kind of cognitive deficit.

So he needs to leave the Oval Office and let Kamala Harris take over. It doesn't matter if you like Harris or not. She's plainly fit for the office, and that's all that counts right now. November's election is the time to choose candidates based on whether you like them or not.

There's no telling how Biden's resignation would affect either the race in general or Donald Trump's chances of winning reelection, but that's not what should be guiding us. Biden's fitness is. He needs to resign.

The panic over the Supreme Court's immunity decision has reached absurd levels. Today the New York Times reports that our allies can no longer trust us:

“If the U.S. president is free from the restrictions of criminal law, if he has that level of criminal immunity, the other leaders of the allied nations cannot trust the U.S.,” said Keigo Komamura, a professor of law at Keio University in Tokyo. “We cannot maintain a stable national security relationship.”

....In South Korea, political leaders essentially have no legal protections from criminal prosecution once they are out of office — and the president is limited to a single term. Four of the past eight former presidents have been convicted and imprisoned after leaving office for corruption and other crimes they committed before and while they were in office.

This is crazy. Criminal immunity has no effect on international relations. And convicting four of your past eight presidents hardly makes you a poster child for global stability.

I hate to do this since I think the Supreme Court overreached considerably in several ways, but the hair-on-fire attitude over this ruling ("above the law," "now a king," "fearing for our democracy," etc.) really needs to be taken down a notch. I pointed out a few reasons on Monday, but here are several more:

• This was not a final decision. Trump's January 6 case was remanded back to the district court for further hearings, after which it will be appealed and eventually return to the Supreme Court. At that point it's likely that parts of the original ruling will be scaled back and fleshed out.
• The Court didn't literally immunize the president from every possible criminal infraction. Details will have to await a final decision, but it's highly unlikely that the president has immunity from ordinary personal corruption, bribery, etc.
• The president is only immune from most criminal prosecutions. He is still bound by all the normal rules of democracy. He has to be elected. He has to work with Congress. His executive actions have to pass court muster. His aides still have to be confirmed by the Senate. None of that has changed. In fact, the president has a little less power than he used to thanks to the death of Chevron, and election interference was reined in a bit by the Election Reform Act.
• No president has ever been taken to court for criminal behavior before, so this is obviously a pretty rare state of affairs. In any case, fear of prosecution didn't stop Teapot Dome, it didn't stop Watergate, it didn't stop Iran-Contra, and it didn't stop the torture of prisoners under George Bush. In the real world, presidents have never demonstrated much fear of being held criminally responsible for their actions.
• In an analogous sense, CEOs are rarely jailed for criminal activity in their companies even when it's pretty obvious they must have known about it. But nobody runs around suggesting that CEOs operate like nobility of old just because, in a practical sense, they're mostly immune from personal criminal prosecution.

To repeat: yes, the Supreme Court went too far. Their decision is based on neither statute nor the Constitution, which is silent on the matter. They set the boundaries of official action too broadly. They ruled that actions immune from prosecution couldn't even be used as evidence in a trial. They ruled that motivations don't matter.

It's a bad ruling. But it's not the end of democracy.

Washington DC is suddenly full of anonymous Democratic insiders who are dishing dirt on Joe Biden's parlous mental state. The New York Times rounds up a lot of them for a long story today, and if you read carefully one of the recurrent themes is that Biden's mental state has fallen off a cliff in just the last few months:

People in the room with him more recently said that the lapses seemed to be growing more frequent, more pronounced and more worrisome.... Last week’s debate prompted some around him to express concern that the decline had accelerated lately.... This person said Mr. Biden had shown a “sharp decline” since a meeting only weeks earlier.... A senior European official who was present said that there had been a noticeable decline in Mr. Biden’s physical state since the previous fall.

Politico described Biden as getting worse recently during routine briefings:

During meetings with aides who are putting together formal briefings they’ll deliver to Biden, some senior officials have at times gone to great lengths to curate the information being presented in an effort to avoid provoking a negative reaction. “It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official. “It’s a Rorschach test, not a briefing. Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed. It’s very difficult, and people are scared shitless of him.”

Angry outbursts are a bad sign. All of this is a bad sign. And it might explain why nobody talked about it until now: no one is going to tattle about occasional lapses, and it may be that Biden hasn't shown any serious cognitive issues until relatively recently.

In any case, if this is right it means things are going to get even worse in fairly short order. Unfortunately, Biden himself doesn't see it. When you start to lose your faculties, the first thing to go is your ability to recognize that you're losing your faculties.

When a federal agency issues a new rule, you can sue them in federal court if you think the rule was wrongly approved. For example, maybe you think the agency violated proper procedure or failed to properly account for public comments. The default statute of limitations for filing a suit is six years. But six years from what? There are two possibilities:

• Six years from when the final rule was issued.
• Six years from whenever a plaintiff first suffers some injury from the rule.

The Supreme Court took up this question and handed down its decision yesterday. It mostly comes down to the wording of the law, which states that suits “shall be barred unless the complaint is filed within six years after the right of action first accrues.”

The majority opinion says this clearly means the statute of limitations begins when an injury has been suffered:

§2401(a)’s text focuses on a specific plaintiff: “the complaint is filed within six years after the right of action first accrues.”

The dissent says this clearly means exactly the opposite:

§2401(a) does not say that the clock starts when the plaintiff’s right of action first accrues; rather, §2401(a) starts the clock when “the right of action first accrues.”

Both sides agree that "the" is the operative word in this passage. However, the majority contrasts "the" with "a" while the dissent contrasts "the" with "the plaintiff." It is of such things that Supreme Court decisions are made.

Perhaps more to the point, however, is that for 75 years courts have routinely believed the statute of limitations for agency actions begins when the rule is issued. So why the sudden change? I think Ketanji Brown Jackson gets it right in the dissent:

Any established government regulation about any issue—say, workplace safety, toxic waste, or consumer protection—can now be attacked by any new regulated entity within six years of the entity’s formation. A brand new entity could pop up and challenge a regulation that is decades old; perhaps even one that is as old as the APA itself. No matter how entrenched, heavily relied upon, or central to the functioning of our society a rule is, the majority has announced open season.

As in the case overturning Chevron deference, the conservative majority on the court is dedicated to any interpretation of the law that makes it easier to attack federal agency rules. Precedent doesn't matter; language doesn't matter; intent doesn't matter. They just want to weaken federal rulemaking and they'll do it any way they can.