Month: September 2024

The last three out of four nights I've gotten about two hours of sleep. I'm tired. So, so tired.

But the Evil Dex™ keeps my eyes wide open and my brain spinning. Fuck cancer? No, fuck dexamethasone.¹

But then a miracle! I was talking to my latest nurse last night and it turned out she has the same problem. In her case it's prednisone for asthma, and the first night she takes it she's buzzing around all night cleaning the house and so forth. So she took pity on me and came back at 11:30 pm with an Ambien. I don't know if she got a doctor's authorization for this or just did it on her own, but I don't care. I got about 4-5 hours of sleep last night, which is pretty glorious under the circumstances.

Anyway, it's a ray of sunshine. I have now survived the 1 mg shot and the 6 mg shot of Talvey with nothing more than minor reactions. Tomorrow we jump up to a 40 mg shot. On Thursday we'll do the final 80 mg dose. If I survive, I'll get 80 grams of this stuff every two weeks for as long as it keeps working.

¹Though it does keep me alive, so I suppose I should show a little respect.

Here's a random thought for the weekend. Over the last decade or two there have been a lot of prominent opinion-havers moving from right to left. Here's a tiny sampling:

• Max Boot
• Bruce Bartlett
• John Cole
• Bill Kristol
• David Frum
• Jennifer Rubin
• Michael Steele
• Stuart Stevens
• George Conway
• Charlie Sykes
• etc.

Some of this was a reaction to George Bush. Some to Donald Trump. Some have become generally more liberal, others are just opposed to the current state of conservatism under Donald Trump. I'm not trying here to characterize them in any detail.

But what about the other direction?

• Dave Rubin
• Dennis Miller (remember him?)
• Glenn Greenwald (not conservative, but certainly anti-liberal these days)
• Elon Musk (never really liberal, but definitely hard conservative now)
• Russell Brand

Even this list is obviously a stretch, but it's the best I can do. Is my memory just completely failing me? Are there other, more serious folks in the pundit space that have moved recently from liberal to conservative?

POSTSCRIPT: And what do we call the people in the first group? In the '60s, liberals who became conservatives were eventually called neocons. Unfortunately, neoliberal is already taken so we can't use that. Maybe anti-cons? Non-cons?

Huh. This hadn't even occurred to me:

The whole $100,000 watch scam had me puzzled. It's way too expensive for Trump's usual MAGA crowd, and it's almost laughably obvious that it's barely even a luxury watch, let alone a high-end luxury watch. No rich person would wear it.

So what's the deal? The most obvious one is that it's just a way for rich donors to exceed campaign finance limits. The money goes to Trump, who then turns around and makes a $100,000 donation to his campaign. This is legal because you're allowed to contribute any amount to your own campaign. Just be careful to space things out a little randomly and you won't get caught.

Or maybe it's for his legal defense fund? Or he just figured it was worth a flyer? Ideas?

POSTSCRIPT: The watches are sold in a limited edition of 147. Why 147? Well, that's the number of Trump allies who voted against certifying the election for Joe Biden on January 6. Coincidence?

Globally, Tesla has built about 60,000 EV charging stalls at 6,500 stations. How much did this cost? I asked seven different AI models:

• ChatGPT: $5 billion
• Perplexity: $2 billion
• Meta: no answer
• Google Gemini: "billions of dollars"
• Microsoft Copilot: $8 billion
• Claude: "in the billions of dollars range over the past decade"
• Grok: "likely ranging into the billions when considering the global scale"

So if I had to extract an estimate from this, I'd put it at.......$3 billion? I wonder if this is a reasonable guess?

The prompt in all cases was "How much has Tesla spent to build its charging network?"

Tesla has built an impressive network of EV charging stations in the US, but marketing has made it seem bigger than it really is:

Public charging ports currently outnumber Tesla ports by 6:1—though the Tesla chargers are often higher performance. But even in the high-performance realm, the times they are a' changing. Tesla has slowed its expansion while public expansion is about to explode thanks to funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. By 2030, public chargers will probably account for more than 90% of all EV chargers in the US.

Here are the top 20 countries we import from:

China makes up 13% of the total. Here are exports:

What is the Netherlands doing at #4? What do we export to them?

Nothing special, it turns out. Lubricants, machinery, chemicals, and miscellaneous manufactured articles make up 90% of it. I'm not sure why the Dutch are such big importers of US goods relative to their size, but we thank them for their patronage.

Over at Vox, Anna North has a piece about the disappearance of the school bus thanks to widespread budget cuts. However, it was all anecdotal and I got curious about whether the data backs up the story. For starters, it looks like the cost issue is very real:

The cost to transport a single student on a school bus has gone up 40% over the past couple of decades. Why? There are some obvious possibilities like improved safety or a growing preference for small buses, but neither of those seems like it can explain a 40% increase. Moving on:

Sales of new school buses seem basically healthy. We haven't yet made up for the pandemic slowdown, but we're pretty close. Here are school bus drivers:

Same thing here: generally a steady increase, but we haven't yet recovered fully from the pandemic. Some of that may be due to a reported shortage of school bus drivers. Finally, here's the actual number of students who ride school buses each day:

This figure does show a steady decrease since 2006, well before the pandemic. At the same time, it's pretty small: a decline of about 0.3% per year. It's affected fewer than a million kids over the past 20 years.

None of this is definitive; it's just a quick data dump. My insta-take is that the school bus infrastructure looks pretty healthy but fewer kids are using it. In other words,  the buses are generally still there. Most of the kids who aren't taking the bus anymore are probably doing it by choice.

Just a guess, though.

Hi there. Did you miss me?

I'm still at the hospital, but last night I had the mother of all dex crashes. I only wakened for good about half an hour ago.

Also, I caught a cold. In the hospital! I feel pretty crappy.

Also also, I caved in on the IV line, but with a compromise: the line is in, but it's not connected to anything. So I'm still untethered.

And now the news: Inflation is down! This is PCE inflation, the Fed's favorite, and the core rate (i.e., everything except food and energy) is down to 1.6%.

On a conventional year-over-year basis, headline PCE is down to 2.2% and core PCE is down to 2.7%.

Here's a closeup portrait of Charlie to go along with last week's portrait of Hilbert. This one was also taken indoors with the little flash unit, and the autoexposure ended up choosing an ISO level of 28800. This is remarkable for two reasons. First, it must mean the flash provided hardly any extra illumination. Second, with an ISO that high the picture should be a noisy mess. But it's not bad! My old camera didn't go higher than 12800, and even at that level the noise was terrible. So: good job from the camera, not so good job from the flash.

The Great Recession produced a sudden and permanent reduction in the growth rate of labor productivity:

Productivity today is 20% lower than it would have been if it had kept growing at its rate of the previous few decades.

But what was the cause of the slowdown? The recession itself? Our tepid response to it? Or was the old growth rate a bubble that we were simply never going to be able to keep up forever?

Whatever the answer, it left a vast amount of wealth on the table. If the old growth rate had continued, median household income would probably be cracking six figures this year instead of just the $80,00 we actually ended up with.