Month: August 2024

Several weeks ago a handful of big-name news outlets began receiving a trove of documents about J.D. Vance from "Robert," all of which had been hacked from the Trump campaign. So far, though, nobody has published any of it—even though when the same thing happened in 2016 to Hillary Clinton, they eagerly splashed the hacked documents all over their front pages.

Why? Maybe they've learned their lesson? Or maybe it's just plain bias against Democrats.

Maybe. But 15 paragraphs into today's Washington Post's story about this, they finally fess up:

The decision for newsrooms to not publish the Vance materials — a compilation of publicly available records and statements, including Vance’s past criticisms of Trump — appeared to be more straightforward because they also didn’t reach a high level of public interest. “In the end, it didn’t seem fresh or new enough,” [Matt] Murray said.

They haven't learned any lessons. And they learned of the hack's possible Iranian origins only a few days ago, so they haven't suddenly become concerned about foreign interference. They just didn't find anything juicy. If they had, it would be all over the place. There's nothing high-minded about any of this.

Behold the following timeline:

November 21, 2023: Twitter, owned by Elon Musk, sues Media Matters for saying mean things about him.

Nine months pass . . .

August 9, 2024: NPR reports that the judge in the case, Reed O'Connor, holds stock in Tesla, which is also owned by Musk.

Today: O'Connor recuses himself from a different lawsuit involving Musk.

O'Connor only recused himself after he was caught, and only from one of the lawsuits. He provided no reasoning, but I suppose his excuse is that he doesn't own stock in Twitter, only Tesla, and he recused from the second case not because of Musk but because he owns stock in Unilever, one of the parties Musk is suing. Do you buy this?

Never mentioned is the obvious elephant in the room: Musk filed both suits in Wichita Falls, Texas, specifically so O'Connor would be his judge. Are you suspicious now? Judges get to unilaterally decide whether to recuse themselves, so it doesn't matter. But at the very least, my eyebrows were raised.

When I was out in the desert last week letting my telescope image the Lagoon Nebula, I spent my downtime trying yet again to take a better picture of the Milky Way.

The basic problem is simple. Since my camera is on a fixed tripod, the longest exposure I can take is about 15 seconds before the stars start to blur. That short exposure time means I have to use my maximum ISO, 12800, which produces lots of noise and soft, blotchy images. I can improve things by taking multiple images, but I'm limited to about ten.

But! Years ago I bought a cheap little equatorial mount designed specifically for cameras. The mount tracks the sky, which means I can make a long exposure with a lower ISO, and I can easily stack 20 or 30 exposures into a final image.

There's only one problem: the mount has to be pointed at Polaris, and I've forgotten how to do this. (With the telescope it's all handled by software.) The basic process is simple: Tilt the mount upward 33° (because I live at 33° latitude) and point it by eyeball toward Polaris. Then look through the polarscope to line up precisely on Polaris.

The problem is that while it's easy to find Polaris just by looking at the sky, the polarscope provides a magnified view where all the stars look alike. So which one is Polaris? I used to be able to do this, but I seem to have lost the knack.

Eventually I gave up and figured that approximately right was good enough. It wasn't. The stars were still streaky, which made the whole image blurry. The image also had a green cast, which might be an artifact of the camera. I'm not sure. On the bright side, the exposure and stacking captured plenty of light and showed lots of the Milky Way, not just the brightest parts.

Oh well. I'll try again next June, when Milky Way season returns.

A decade ago California passed Prop 47, which converted certain nonviolent property crimes into misdemeanors and reduced sentences a bit. But did it go too far? This year, Prop 36 is on the November ballot to reverse some of the changes.

The motivation, of course, is a rise in crime. But has crime actually gone up? Of course not. Crime has been declining in California for more than 30 years, and property crime is currently 4% below its 2014 level.

But that doesn't tell us much. Crime has been declining everywhere, so it's hardly a surprise that it's also declined in California. What's of more interest is how crime in California compares to the national trend. Here it is:

For a long time, property crime in California was dropping faster than the national rate. That turned around abruptly when Prop 47 passed. Since then, property crime has increased compared to the national average. Put another way, property crime dropped 29% in the decade before Prop 47 but only 4% in the decade after.

This is hardly the final word. Still, it looks like California might benefit from reining in Prop 47 a bit.

The Producer Price Index, a measure of wholesale inflation, rose a bit through the beginning of the year but fell sharply in July, from 2.7% to 2.3%:

Average PPI over the past year has been 1.8%. This is more evidence, as if more were needed, that inflation is sufficiently under control. There's no need to drive the country into a recessionary ditch just for a few more tenths of a point.

In honor of the end of the Paris Olympics, here's one of my last remaining pictures from our trip to Paris a couple of years ago. This is the Palais de Justice taken from the Seine. You can't see it in the photo, but it was pretty busy this day, with gendarmes blocking off entrances all over the place. Apparently the trial of a drug kingpin was taking place.

Here's the lead of a Wall Street Journal article about hourly workers:

In the bowels of Boston Logan International Airport, a sign on the door of ABM Industries recently warned would-be job seekers: “WE ARE CURRENTLY NOT HIRING,” it said. “PLEASE KEEP CHECKING.”

This was their premier example of an alleged slowdown in the hiring of hourly workers. The best they had. Something that would grab your attention and reel you in. Nine paragraphs down they add this:

After The Wall Street Journal reached out, inquiring about the sign, the company said it had been removed. ABM continues to accept applications on a rolling basis, and its number of job openings has been stable, the spokesman said.

Oh come on. As usual, this is a Rolodex story based almost entirely on anecdotes. And it's true that no one specifically tracks hourly vs. salaried workers, which makes data hard to come by. But there's this:

Non-supervisory isn't a perfect proxy for hourly workers, but it's close. And I don't see anything special going on. Hiring is slowing down a bit for everyone, as we've known for a while, but there's not much difference between supervisory and non-supervisory growth. If you squint really closely maybe you can suss out the tiniest divergence in July, but that's it.

Are you tired of me nitpicking the Journal's news stories? I know I am. But I'm beginning to think it's just the Daily Mail for people who wear suits: an endless quest for dramatic trend stories that turn out to be tissue-paper thin when you read them closely. I suppose there's no point in asking why. It attracts eyeballs; it panders to their readers' preconceived notions; and most people don't read all that closely anyway. It beats the hell out of real news.

The Wall Street Journal is inexplicable. Take a look at this headline/chart combo from today's paper:

The chart is clear as day: Boomers in the Reagan era were stuck well into "unaffordable" territory for more than six years. Millennials, by contrast, spent 15 years with wonderful, super-affordable housing and since then have been barely in unaffordable territory for one year.

So where does the headline come from? The story is an endless hodgepodge of unrelated data, but its main point seems to be that back in the '80s interest rates were high but housing supply was fine. Today housing supply is tight so we're all doomed.

Which might be true, I suppose, if housing supply stays tight forever. Which it won't. New home building (and sales) are at a fairly normal rate right now, about the same as in 2019. The problem is that existing homes aren't being put on the market at the usual rate. But there's no reason to think this will last forever, and when it turns around housing supply will ease. Then, when the Fed finally lowers interest rates, mortgages will return to normal levels.

But I guess that's not a very interesting story.

NOTE: I should add that the Journal's data is actually more optimistic than I expected. I thought housing affordability really was in the dumpster at the moment, but it's not. It is in weak shape by historical standards, but it's only barely below the 100% mark. That's not as bad as I thought.

J.D. Vance says he thinks we ought to have a bigger Child Tax Credit. Kamala Harris says we should eliminate the tax on tips.

Huh. What's next? Vance saying we need more illegal immigrants to get the birth rate up and Harris saying we need both a Bitcoin and an Ethereum strategic reserve?

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is yelling on Truth Social that Harris is a CHEATER who uses AI to make it look like big crowds greeted her at the airport:

There you have it. Trump has been driven completely over the edge into madness by his tiny crowds compared to Harris's huge ones.

It's been a remarkable few weeks. It turns out lots of voters really don't like Trump's constant catastrophism and were just waiting for someone to make them feel better. That's really all Harris has been doing, and Trump doesn't know what to do about it. Making up stupid names falls flat in the face of honest exuberance, and Trump has no Plan B.

I get three or four fundraising emails every day from the Kamala Harris campaign. That strikes me as fairly normal these days.

But before Joe Biden dropped out and she entered the race, I got zero emails per day. Can anyone explain this? Obviously I was on the email lists, but the Biden team never bothered to use them. Why?

Naturally I didn't notice this when I wasn't getting emails, but in hindsight it's pretty severe campaign malpractice. Harris fixed it in a couple of days.

UPDATE: It's worth noting that other people in comments are all over the map on this. My experience might not be typical.