Month: July 2024

This is a Union Pacific freight train passing through Banning. It's a meh kind of picture that normally wouldn't make the cut for the blog.

Except for one thing. When I shot this I framed it poorly and the left edge of the photo stopped right at the signal. That was too tight, so I expanded the canvas and gave Photoshop's AI fill tool a try. The first attempt went poorly: it was mostly just a mirror image of the train. Then I told it to ignore the train and it produced the image you see. Half of the signal plus everything to its left is a pure AI invention.

Now that you know this, you can see some telltale signs if you look closely. I probably could have improved things with further refinements to the prompt, but I wasn't that committed. I was just curious to see if it worked. It did.

Hiring fell by more than 5% in June:

That's a pretty considerable drop, equal to 50% if it kept up for a full year (which it won't). Hiring has declined 17% in the past two years and nearly 10% over the past year. Over the past two years, hiring has dropped about 200,000 more than total separations (quits, firings, retirements, etc.).

The silver lining to this bad news is that a softer job market will prompt the Fed to ease interest rates. So there's that.

Alex Thompson informs me today that Kamala Harris no longer supports Medicare for All; says she won’t ban fracking; wants to increase funding for the border; and doesn’t want to require people to sell their assault weapons back to the government. Obviously this means that Harris has wisely decided to shift a bit toward the center now that she's in a general election contest for the presidency. That's pretty standard triangulating.

But it probably doesn't matter all that much. This is policy stuff, and most voters care about policy only in the broadest terms: for or against abortion, pro or anti gay marriage, and so forth. What they care about a lot more are social values, and even that's mostly on the level of vibes.

This is what J.D. Vance was getting at with his oddball comment about "childless cat ladies." He was using that as a metaphor for lefty women who like to spoil everyone's fun by harrumphing about racism and mass transit and single-use plastic bags. Obviously Vance chose his metaphor badly, but the point he was making is very, very common on the right. They believe that liberals aren't just wrong, but really annoying.

And often we are! This is where Harris would also be wise to shift slightly to the center. Not a lot. Lefty values are more popular than conservatives like to admit. But it wouldn't hurt to make some noises about the evidence on gender affirming care being unsettled. Or that, yes, DEI training can sometimes be a bit on the ridiculous side. Or that the Bible is the word of God (which she presumably believes, being a Baptist and all).

These are the kinds of things that can make centrist voters more comfortable without really ceding anything that's of concrete value to the liberal project. It's basically just a way of putting across the idea that she's a normie, not a nutball extremist. And it draws a contrast with Trump and Vance, who are nutball extremists.

Mock Bill Clinton's Sister Souljah moment all you want, but it worked—and since the liberal coalition isn't in favor of killing white people it didn't concede anything of value. A little bit of this goes a long way, especially if it comes as a bit of surprise and gets some press.

Google is running an ad during the Olympics. Perhaps you've seen it. A little girl wants to write a fan letter to her hero, 400-meter-hurdle world-record holder Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. So Dad suggests she have Google's AI write one for her. He even makes up the prompt for her.

The first time I saw this ad, I turned to Marian and said, "If I were Sydney that's just what I'd want. Fan mail from an AI."

So naturally I was pleased to see a piece in New York today titled "Everyone Hates That Google AI Olympics Commercial." Hooray! Unfortunately, author Matt Stieb didn't really have the receipts for that claim. He demonstrates that a few people didn't like the ad, but "everyone"? I'm not so sure of that.

In any case, I'm sure that Dad and girl will get what's coming to them: an automated AI reply. And I guess everyone will be happy. They get a perfect simulacrum of human warmth and bonding without anyone having to bother making any effort. What's not to like?

Consider the following chart. It shows the value of commercial property under foreclosure:

What conclusion do you draw from the right edge of the chart, which shows foreclosures going up? Here's what the Wall Street Journal says:

Surge in Commercial-Property Foreclosures Suggests Bottom Is Near

In previous downturns, comparable surges in foreclosure activity has signaled the approach of a market bottom. Once lenders seize a property, they are typically quick to sell it, a process that helps determine values of properties after long periods of sluggishness in the sales market.

Does this make any sense at all? What goes up must come down, so foreclosures must be close to going down.

Remarkably, the author doesn't even try to provide evidence for this. And as usual, the Journal's original chart isn't adjusted for inflation, which makes the current surge look sharper than it really is. When you adjust for inflation it looks a lot less like it's reached a peak.

The longer I read the financial press the more I wonder what they're thinking. The actual evidence in this case suggests that foreclosures are going to increase for a while. The Journal itself reported a few months ago that delinquencies would rise at least through 2025 and probably longer. In fact, it was reported by the exact same person who wrote today's story. And office vacancy rates are currently higher than they were during the Great Recession, which suggests foreclosures probably have a fair ways to go.

In any case, no one knows for sure. But it beats me how someone can just declare that the bottom is near based on essentially nothing. Sometimes it's just vibes all the way down.

Here's a remarkable headline from NBC News:

These claims are repeated in the text, so it isn't just a matter of the headline being imprecise in order to save space. And all of them are wrong:

• Inflation has nothing to do with this. The cost of childcare has grown less than overall CPI and less than average wages.
  .
  
• It's not "American families." It's families with kids under 13 who use childcare. This is something on the order of 5-10% of all American families.
• The median family income in 2022 was $93,000. This makes childcare about 10% of the median income, not one-fifth.

How about the average monthly cost of childcare, which the Fed puts at $800. Has that gone up over the past few years? The Fed didn't track this in previous reports, but BEA data suggests probably not. There's no crisis and no chaos here.

In general, that is. NBC naturally found a family who says their spending on summer child care has more than doubled since last year. It's probably true! But it's also wildly unrepresentative of the overall situation.

We all know the old saying, "If it bleeds, it leads." News organizations have always focused on the sensational and the horrible, which is why we get so many stories like this one. Even in sober financial spaces, reporters insist on grasping for eyeballs with sensational claims that scare the hell out of people. The problem is that most of them aren't true. As with so many other things in America, childcare in general is about the same as it's always been.

Did I visit the Sahara Desert recently? No, just the Cadiz Dunes Wilderness near sunset, right here in Southern California. It's out in the middle of the Mojave Desert, sort of between Barstow and Needles.

I was there to see if it would be a good place for astrophotography and Milky Way pictures, which it turned out not to be. Partly this is because the dunes themselves aren't all that accessible and partly because the drive out there was considerably more of an adventure than I had counted on. More about that later.

Here's a chart showing how many of us have either gotten COVID or been vaccinated against it:

(Note that the line on the chart shows inverse seroprevalence. That is, the number of people who haven't had COVID and haven't been vaccinated. This allows me to draw a proper trendline, but you have to subtract the numbers on the trendline from one to get the actual seroprevalence.)

The trendline suggests we're now at 99.4% seroprevalence in the US population. We've finally reached the fabled level of herd immunity!

Sadly, it doesn't matter. It turns out that neither vaccines nor previous infections stop the spread of COVID. They just make it less dangerous. Oh well.

POSTSCRIPT: In case you're curious about how this breaks down, roughly 60% of the population has had COVID. (Almost) all the rest have been vaccinated.

Over the weekend, Jack Herrera had a piece in Politico that provides an interesting perspective on the Biden administration's immigration policy. It's true that illegal border crossings soared after Biden took office, but expulsions soared too, starting from his first day:

Most Americans don’t understand how many people the Biden-Harris administration has removed from the country.... In the spring of 2021, deep in the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, I was in a camp in Tijuana, where some migrants were so hopeful the new president would let them in that they flew “BIDEN FOR PRESIDENT” flags outside their tents. But most of them who crossed got a slap from reality: They were quickly frog-marched by U.S. Border Patrol back through the deportation doorway, back to the squalid camps in cartel turf. Others got rapidly loaded onto ICE planes and flown back to Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, wherever. As the number of people crossing the border grew during Biden’s first two years in office, these expulsions reached a scorching pace. ICE charter flights bounced around the globe like Taylor Swift’s jet.

Naturally you want to see this in chart form. I'm here to help:

During Biden's term in office, he will have expelled, detained, or deported 6.9 million illegal immigrants. That's 73% more than Donald Trump.

This is why, despite the surge in migrants, the total population of illegal immigrants in the US has probably increased less than most people think. Out of roughly 11 million migrants (border crossers plus asylum seekers), around 7 million of them were expelled. At the same time, about 2 million illegal immigrants who are already in the country return to their homes every year. That gets us to 9 million. So net population growth has probably been on the order of 2 million or so, an increase of 18%.

That's just a guess, and it might be off on either side. Still, you might wonder why, if this is the case, Biden hasn't bragged more about it. I imagine there are two reasons. First, it's still growth of 2 million illegal immigrants compared to roughly zero during the Trump administration. Second, the Democratic base doesn't want to hear that Biden has been pretty strict about expelling illegal immigrants. It's a no-win problem.

The latest micro outrage on the right is about a performance at the Paris Olympics opening ceremonies. It involved some drag queens at a table full of people that supposedly resembled The Last Supper, and the New York Times says that organizers "have remained largely vague about the references associated with the images."

Then there's this brief reference seven paragraphs down:

It is unclear whether the drag queens scene was intended to reference “The Last Supper.” The official account of the Olympic Games said on the social media platform X that the scene with the blue-painted man, the French actor and singer Philippe Katerine, was an interpretation of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and revelry, which “makes us aware of the absurdity of violence between human beings.”

Am I being obtuse here? If the official Twitter feed says this tableau was some kind of takeoff on Dionysus and classical myth, then there's nothing vague or unclear about it. And that's what it said in real time:

This was posted as the scene was televised. It's not some post facto effort to weasel out of responsibility. Thomas Jolly, the artistic designer of the show, provided this explanation on French TV:

[The Last Supper] was not my inspiration and that should be pretty obvious. There’s Dionysus arriving on a table. Why is he there? First and foremost because he is the god of celebration in Greek mythology and the tableau is called "Festivity," He is also the god of wine, which is also one of the jewels of France, and the father of Séquana, the goddess of the river Seine. The idea was to depict a big pagan celebration, linked to the gods of Olympus, and thus the Olympics.

This is pretty detailed. It's obviously not something you could make up on the spot. Given all this, how did the whole Last Supper thing gain so much traction?

POSTSCRIPT: I'm still trying to suss this out. Perhaps the tableau was meant to illustrate The Last Supper morphing into an episode of Dionysian revelry, and that's now being deliberately obscured by focusing only on the Dionysus scene? I suppose Jolly didn't explicitly rule this out, though it's a stretch. But maybe?