Month: October 2024

The Wall Street Journal asks Donald Trump how he would persuade Xi Jinping to leave Taiwan alone:

“Oh, very easy,” the former president says.... “I would say: If you go into Taiwan, I’m sorry to do this, I’m going to tax you”—meaning impose tariffs—“at 150% to 200%.” He might even shut down trade altogether.

Mr. Gigot: “Would you use military force against a blockade on Taiwan?” Mr. Trump: “I wouldn’t have to, because he respects me and he knows I’m fucking crazy.”

I guess this is his all-purpose answer for everything. I wonder if he realizes that you can only do it once? Or that if he followed through we'd be short of gallium, antibiotics, and iPhones in pretty short order? Probably not.

During his rally today at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump opened with a long, rambling story about.......Arnold Palmer. For your weekend viewing pleasure, here are the last 37 seconds:

A little while back the FBI modified its crime dashboard to show monthly figures instead of annual ones. Here's what it looks like:

SRS is the old FBI crime reporting system. A decade ago they rolled out a new system called NIBRS. Over time, more and more police departments adopted NIBRS, and in 2021 the FBI finally switched to NIBRS only. It was a disaster. Not enough departments had adopted NIBRS to make it reliable, so in 2022 they once again began accepting crime reports in both formats.¹

Now that we have monthly data, we can see an oddity: in the SRS era the crime count doubles every December. During the transition era the spike was reduced as fewer departments used SRS. Finally, in the modern era the spikes go away completely even in the years when SRS data was being accepted.

What's going on? The spikes are obviously some kind of reporting artifact, but does that mean all the monthly figures are unreliable—too high in December and too low the rest of the year? And why did they go away in 2021? If the monthly figures aren't reliable, why bother even showing them?

And here's another thing: the figures for violent crime don't match the figures you get by adding the four sub-crimes (murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault). Not by a mile.

And yet more: the FBI now has figures for lots of very specific crimes. But they're useless because only NIBRS includes this stuff, so everything is shown rising substantially as NIBRS adoption spreads. The numbers literally mean nothing.

What's going on with the FBI's data boffins? Can we trust any of their public facing numbers these days?

¹This is why crime data for 2021 is unreliable.

It was actually this sentence that initially got my attention in Ross Douthat's column today:

Existential anxiety and civilizational ennui, not rationalist optimism and humanist ambition, are the defining moods of secular liberalism nowadays.

Um, what?

Ross Douthat suggests today that the country is ready for a return to religion. He recommends Spencer Klavan’s book Light of the Mind, Light of the World, which he describes this way:

It’s an argument that the materialist model of the universe as a closed physical system, in which units of matter bounce around like billiard balls, has been overthrown by the quantum revolution — which demonstrated, to the bafflement of many scientists, that probabilities only collapse into reality itself when a conscious mind is there to measure and observe.

This is simply not correct. To the extent that we know what's happening at all, wave equations collapse when they interact with the outside world. In the famous example of Schrödinger's cat, the state of the cat is undetermined as long as the box containing the cat is closed. When it's opened and interacts with its environment, the state collapses into either a dead cat or a live cat because, in some sense, the universe is then forced to make a decision.¹ It doesn't matter if anyone is watching.

Likewise, quantum computers perform calculations by taking advantage of superpositions of isolated qubits. When the calculation is complete, the computer measures the resulting state—and it's the interaction with the computer that causes the qubits to decohere and produce a single classical result. No conscious mind is required aside from the trivial one that we humans never know for sure what's going on until we see it ourselves. But as an argument for God that's as silly as suggesting that maybe all the food in your refrigerator appears only when you open the door.

Nobody is persuaded that God does or doesn't exist with logical reasoning like this. But to the extent logic matters, the issue has nothing to do with quantum mechanics. It has to do with whether the universe evolves following mathematical law—any mathematical law. If you believe it does, you're an atheist whether or not you call yourself one. If you don't believe it does, then pick a religion, any religion. You're a person of faith.

¹Or so we think. The collapse of the wave equation—aka decoherence—remains something of a mystery to this day. We have rules for measuring it, but no firm physical model to explain what's really happening.

Elon Musk warns that under Kamala Harris, "All of America will be Californicated. And not in a good way."

I don't know about that. California looks pretty good to me:

What exactly is the problem here? Warts and all, it seems like the whole world, let alone the whole country, would be lucky to be Californicated.

The homelessness rate in California is 3x the rate for the rest of the country.

Adam Ozimek and John Lettieri talk about housing:

How the next president can solve America’s housing crisis

U.S. housing costs are out of control.... Renters have not fared better.... The main reason housing is too expensive is that we don’t build nearly enough of it. The most recent estimates from Freddie Mac place the national shortfall at a staggering 3.8 million housing units.

....How did we get here? After all, buyers want to buy and builders want to build. The answer is found in a labyrinth of local zoning rules, building codes, and land use regulations that shape the map of what gets built and where. Thanks to the proliferation of local red tape, it is now impossible for the market to deliver the housing supply Americans need at prices that are broadly affordable.

The first thing we should do is call this by its proper name: California's housing crisis. That estimate of a 3.8 million unit shortage is virtually all in California. The rest of the country is OK.

But I want to push back on more than that. Let's start with the popular notion that red tape and zoning are making it impossible to build housing. Here are raw housing starts over the past few decades:

A housing start happens when a builder has acquired all the necessary permits, approvals, and zoning variances needed to break ground. It's currently right at its 40-year average.

This is strictly a measure of red tape: is it possible to build the volume of housing we need? The answer is obviously yes. And we built more in 2005, when zoning regulations were little different than they are now.

But are we building as much housing as we need? That requires a different look at things. The question is: how much net housing are we building each year compared to the net number of new buyers?

Net housing is just new units minus demolished units. Net buyers is a little more complicated, but a reasonable estimate is the number of people who turn 25 each year minus the number of people who die. Here's the ratio of those two things:

On average, we've been building more housing per buyer recently than we did in the '80s and '90s. And the level right now is historically high.

(The 2020-22 spike is due to COVID killing lots of people.)

But if we're building at a normal pace, why have prices skyrocketed? This gets a little fuzzy. The price of single-family homes is up, but that's largely because of the 2022 boom. Who knows why weird booms and busts happen? But if you look at the bigger picture it's not clear if housing really has gotten much more expensive lately:

Compared to wage growth, CPI rent is pretty much unchanged. And the two big private research firms disagree violently about how much rent has gone up after 2021. Average them together and they pretty closely match wage growth.

There are other things you can look at to judge the housing market. For example, a low rental vacancy rate means that housing is tight:

The vacancy rate is a little low right now, but not at crisis level. Take out California's super-low 4.4% rate and things would probably look pretty normal.

Bottom line: Outside of California, the evidence doesn't support the idea of either a red tape crisis or a more general housing crisis. The post-COVID scene did have some weirdness to it that we might not have fully worked through yet, but you shouldn't get panicky over a couple of years of pandemic weirdness. Nor should you overreact to media accounts of housing in California or the very hottest cities. For 90% of you, the housing market is, at most, a little warmish, nothing more.

Here's Hilbert in his box, staring into the room to keep an eye on Charlie, who was rolling around on the floor while I took this picture. Plus Marian was around. Hilbert loves to keep an eye on Marian.

Today is a milestone: it's been ten years since I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. Since then I've been treated with Velcade, Cytoxan, an autologous stem cell transfer, Revlimid, Darzalex, Pomalyst, Emplicity, Carvykti CAR-T, and now Talvey. And of course the Evil Dex™ has been along for the whole journey.

Overall, it hasn't been all that bad until now. Yesterday was supposed to be my first regular dose of Talvey after the hospital stay, but I canceled it until my taste buds and breathing recover. Once that happens, I'll have to decide what to do next: try another dose of the Talvey or talk to my oncologist about switching to a different bispecific treatment (which would require yet another stay in the hospital while they ramp it up). We'll see.

As I've said before, I haven't learned any deep life lessons from this experience. I just wish it had never happened. Nor has there ever been any bravery or resilience or any of that involved. The heroes of this story are the research scientists who invented all the different molecules I've taken over the years. My part was only to take the meds the doctors recommended and put up with whatever they did to me. The alternative was worse, right?

So happy birthday, cancer. May you have many more.¹

¹Because every additional birthday for the cancer is an additional birthday for me.