Month: August 2024

Over at Tablet, Jeremy Stern has a terrific long profile of Palmer Luckey, the self-taught engineering genius who invented the Oculus Rift; sold out to Meta for $2 billion; got fired by Meta following a moral panic over a political contribution; and went on to found Anduril Industries, a huge and innovative defense tech company. He is 31.

Pretty interesting! However, because it's a particular obsession of mine, I want to highlight this passage about Southern California, where Luckey grew up:

This is the region to which those hundreds of thousands of Dust Bowl migrants fled after the Depression, and where many of them then spent World War II assembling radar units and guidance controls for submarines, missiles, and fighter aircraft. After the war, it’s where a landscape of citrus groves and cattle ranches was transformed into a suburban sprawl of military bases, defense plants, malls, and swimming pools. Fantastical American curiosities like the suburban megachurch, the neo-Pentecostal “charismatic” clinic, drive-thru restaurants, drive-in churches, and Disneyland were created here. It’s where a distinctive style of dress was honed—Palmer Luckey’s style—“shorts, colorful open-necked shirts, sandals,” as an October 1945 feature in Life coined it. Here, where Luckey was born, is where the back of the patrician Northeastern Republican establishment was broken during the Cold War, and replaced by a new power base.

It wasn't just Dust Bowl migrants who formed the core of California's growth in the 20th century, it was Midwesterners in general from Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and nearby states. It was in California where they created a strange blend of stolid, hard-working entrepreneurs with bizarre cults of religion, food, health, and conspiracy theories. Ronald Reagan is probably the most famous Californian to embody both cultures in one person.

None of this is any secret. But I've always wished there were a good, book-length treatment of this phenomenon. The astonishing thing is that somehow it worked spectacularly instead of destroying itself through the sheer centrifugal force of millions of intolerant little squabbles. How that happened is a story worth telling.

This is the interior of Melk Abbey in Austria. Photographs were supposedly not allowed inside the abbey, but no one really seemed to care much so I just snapped away. In theory, I suppose this means they lost the revenue from a postcard I would otherwise have bought, but I wouldn't have. So it was a win-win.

Retail sales have been trending downward for the past couple of years but suddenly spiked upward in July:

That's an annualized jump of 13.7% from June, the biggest increase of the past 24 months aside from January 2023, which I think was an artifact of statistical revisions.

As always, a single month doesn't mean much, especially in the face of a long-term trend. Still, it's good news. People continue working and buying stuff, and that's what we want to see.

In the New York Times today, Nicole Gelinas notes that subway crime is up recently and compares that to the big reductions of earlier years:

How did New York keep its subways safe through 2019? From 1990, the peak year for subway crime, until the late 2010s, the city’s police department, as well as prosecutors and judges used the criminal justice system to deter small crimes, such as turnstile-jumping, before they could escalate to violence.

Ha ha ha. No. Crime plunged in the subway for the same reason it plunged in the rest of the city: less lead poisoning of children in the '70s led to less crime among adults in the '90s. Turnstile jumping had nothing to do with it.

But lead is no longer a factor. So what does subway crime look like recently?

Crime jumped during the 2020 pandemic year and has been declining steadily ever since. Why? It could be because of more policing and more fare compliance and more work to get the mentally ill out of subway stations. It could be. But probably not. The most likely reason is that, for some reason, the pandemic had a big effect on crime which then waned in the four years since. No one knows why.

Needless to say, that isn't very satisfying. We all want answers. But in this case we just don't know. Crime surged everywhere during the pandemic and we don't know why. It then started to decline everywhere, and we don't know the reason for that either. But policing didn't suddenly change in 2020 nor in the two or three years after that. So it almost certainly has little to nothing to do with that. Nor did policing have much if anything to do with the 1990-2019 crime decline. Anyone who nevertheless insists that it must be the answer to the 2024 crime rate is relying on vibes, not evidence.

Chuck Schumer said today, "We all believe in the future of crypto." I say, speak for yourself. There are still a few of us who haven't lost our minds.

This reminds me: Has anyone yet come up with two cases in which crypto is useful to an ordinary person for a legal purpose?¹ By useful, I mean that it's faster or more reliable or cheaper to use than any of the dozens of ordinary payment methods already available.

No drug payments. No transfers to, say, Iranians in contravention of US sanctions. Nothing that's "better" solely because it lets you avoid taxes. Legal, normal, and useful.

Note that I'm not talking about blockchain. That may very well be useful. I'm talking about crypto coins and their supporting architecture.

Anything?

¹Why two? Because you never know. Even the stupidest things can have one redeeming quality.

J.D. Vance says no one can afford a car anymore. As usual, this kind of doom mongering is wrong. It's true that car prices spiked during the pandemic, but here's the long-term picture:

Car affordability goes up and down based on various factors: recessions (2007), factory problems (Fukushima), supply chain problems (COVID), changes in taste (SUVs vs. sedans), and so forth. But the trendline has been dead flat for 30+ years and new car prices are already starting to correct for their pandemic spike.

This is all the more remarkable because you get so much more for the same price these days. Essentially every car made now has: airbags, anti-lock brakes, fuel injection, GPS, infotainment systems, air conditioning, adaptive cruise control, lane keeping, better gas mileage, better reliability, and more.

Things are fine. Politicians and newspapers have incentives to make everything seem bad, but the facts say otherwise. No human beings anywhere in the world at any point in history have been better off than the average US citizen of 2024.

This is Skull Rock at sunset in Joshua Tree National Park. Does it look like a skull to you? It does, doesn't it? But it's a bit of a close call.

An LA Times poll shows that Kamala Harris has surged in California:

Harris leads Trump 59% to 34% in the electoral-vote-rich Golden State, a margin 7 points larger than President Biden held earlier this year.... Fueling the surge by the vice president are much higher levels of support that Harris receives from younger voters, ages 18 to 29, whose backing of the Democrats grew by 23 percentage points; and Black voters, whose backing jumped by 16 percentage points....  11 points among liberals and 10 points among Latinos,

This doesn't matter electorally since Harris was always going to win California anyway. But it's strong evidence that she's doing really well at increasing enthusiasm and support among traditional Democratic base groups who had been reluctant to support Biden. I mean, 23 points among young voters. That's unreal.

Harris has given millions of people instant permission to back the Democratic nominee, which they wanted to do all along. Only Biden's age was holding them back.

Inflation remained moderate in July, with CPI rising at an annual rate of 1.9% since the previous month. Core CPI came in at 2.0%.

On a conventional year-over year basis, CPI was up 2.9% and core CPI was up 3.2%

So far the Trump team has proposed:

• No tax on tips.
• No tax on Social Security.
• Extend the 2017 corporate tax cut.
• Implement a $5,000 Child Tax Credit.

This would collectively blow the deficit to hell, raising it by something like $1 trillion per year. Does anyone care?

Maybe. It makes me wonder if Kamala Harris could benefit from some tough talk on the national debt. She's limited in what she could do thanks to the Democrats' "no tax increase under $400,000" pledge and by her dumb pander on taxing tips. Still, there are possibilities.

But would it help? Would it gain the trust of centrist fence-sitters who like the idea of fiscal discipline? I'm not sure either way.