Month: August 2024

A couple of days ago Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Republicans saying that health officials had pressured Meta to remove COVID misinformation while the vaccine was being rolled out. He now regrets this, though he didn't really say why. Then there's this:

The Zuckerberg letter didn’t stop with details of the well-known crackdown on Covid misinformation. It also reminds the public of the time the Biden administration asked social media companies to slow the spread of a New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 election.

That's from Vox, and it echoes Truth Social posts from Donald Trump saying "THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED!"

Perhaps you've already noticed the problem with this: in 2020 Trump was president. There was no Biden administration to do any pressuring.

Nor did the Biden campaign do any pressuring. As Zuckerberg has said multiple times, Meta restricted the laptop story solely because they had gotten vague warnings from the FBI (Trump's FBI) that they should be on alert for Russian disinformation. There was never any mention of Hunter Biden.

In fact—as we've all known for years—both social media and the mainstream media reacted skeptically to the laptop story because it seemed like pure ratfuckery and the Trump campaign refused to allow reporters to verify it. Despite this, the Twitter ban lasted only a day and the Meta restriction lasted only a week.

That's all. That's the story.

This is the famous wheel at the Prater amusement park in Vienna. If you've ever seen The Third Man, you'll recognize it.

According to the International Monetary Fund, per capita GDP in the US is currently $85,000. This figure is adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity, so it takes into account differences in living standards throughout the world. Here's how everyone else is doing:

The US is the richest large region in the world and the fastest growing except for China and India—both of whom are still far behind us.

This is remarkable.

This feels like about the millionth time we've seen this recently:

A federal judge in Texas has....

Does it even matter what this judge did? He overturned a Biden program, of course, and in this case it happens to be one that provides a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who are married to US citizens. But it hardly matters. It could have been anything from Biden. Just bring it to the Eastern District of Texas and it's toast.

The new school year has started, and that means it's time for an evergreen story about teachers being burnt out and quitting in record numbers:

Teacher exit rates reached new highs in the past two years, according to data from several states. In Texas, thousands more teachers left the classroom in 2022 and 2023 compared with the years before the pandemic.

....“Across multiple data points, we see that the health and the state of the teaching profession is at or near a 50-year low,” said Matthew Kraft, a Brown University professor.

I can't say for sure if teachers are more burnt out than usual. Every year there are stories saying they are, and they're never backed up with anything more than anecdotal evidence. So who knows?

But it's easy to see if they're leaving the profession in droves. Just look at the number of teachers:

There are more teachers this year than any year in history, despite the fact that student enrollment is down yet again. Whatever teachers say, they're still showing up to teach.

Now, it's true that this doesn't tell us anything about the quality of teachers. And I don't doubt that teacher exits are up, what with baby boomers retiring. One way or another, though, there seem to be plenty of teachers to replace the boomers.

NOTE: This chart is for "local government education," which includes more than just teachers. But it goes up and down in sync with teachers, so it gives a good indication of teacher employment. Also note that for maximum accuracy I'm using numbers just for the month of July each year, not seasonally adjusted. They haven't been modified in any way.

Pew has a new report out today about the values and policy opinions of Trump and Harris voters. As you'd expect, they disagree widely on everything. Except for Social Security:

Nobody—not Democrats, not Republicans, not independents—wants Social Security touched even slightly. It's still the third rail of American politics.

From Axios:

House Republicans are furious about being forced into a last-minute Biden impeachment vote — which they say could hurt their campaigns, top GOP sources tell Axios. Even leadership doesn't want it.

But just one member can force a vote.... With Congress stuck in D.C. next month to hammer out a short-term funding deal, there's plenty of time for an enterprising Republican to force the issue.

A vote on articles of impeachment is privileged and has to be voted on within two days. In the past this didn't matter because even crazy members of Congress didn't toss out impeachment resolutions just for the hell of it. Today they do. Trying to impeach Democrats over nothing has become a favorite pastime of MAGA Republicans.

This is from a research letter in JAMA today:

Average temperatures in the US have gone up 2°F since 2000. That might not seem like much, but when the average increases a little the tail of the bell curve increases a lot. In the past decade, that small increase in average temps has caused the number of extreme heat waves to increase by upwards of 3x. Thus the very large increase in heat-related deaths.

From the Wall Street Journal today:

Why Philadelphia Is Bucking a Nationwide Surge in Evictions

In a nutshell, Philadelphia's success is chalked up to its mandatory eviction diversion program: "After a trial period [starting in 2020], the city in June made it a permanent requirement for landlords to go through out-of-court negotiations with tenants before they can sue to remove them."

The Journal uses data from the Eviction Lab, which got me curious about evictions in general. It turns out Philadelphia isn't the top performer:

Philadelphia is down 41% compared to before the pandemic but New York City is even better, with a decline of 48%. So what's their secret? Here is eviction nationwide:

Evictions never turned into a crisis. After the pandemic they reverted to their normal rate and have declined by about a quarter over the past year.

As an aside, I have some doubts about the Eviction Lab data. They show Maryland as the eviction capital of the country—which might be true—but their most recent data includes things like 98.8 eviction filings per hundred renters in Baltimore County. It doesn't seem especially likely that landlords literally tried to evict everyone, which prompts me to have some doubts about the rest of their data. Caveat emptor.

This is the shoe fence near Rice, California. It was initially a shoe tree of obscure origin, where travelers would hang pairs of shoes, but the tree burned down in 2003 and was replaced by a "shoe garden." It's a garden only in the loosest sense of the word: a bare patch of ground about a hundred feet square surrounded by fencing. This allows the tradition to continue, and apparently also serves as a roadside memorial to someone named Dominick who died last year. The bottom photo shows the "garden" from the inside.