Month: November 2024

The answer, generally, is anywhere in the South, and specifically, South Carolina:

The safest state, for some reason, is Rhode Island.

In August Waymo reported about 300,000 driverless taxi trips carrying 500,000 passengers in California. All (or nearly all) of this was in San Francisco.

This amounts to 10,000 rides per day. The average Waymo taxi ride is about six miles, fairly average for taxis.

Usage has been growing 30% per month over the past quarter. Waymo reported 55 minor collisions over the most recent reporting quarter (June-August) with no injuries or fatalities.

This is shameless sleaze:

It's one thing when this nonsense comes from a crank or a fanatic. Every party has 'em. But it's now almost conventional wisdom among Republicans that the BLS is deliberately overstating job growth in order to make Joe Biden look good. It's both stupid and dangerous.

The BLS always reports three values for job estimates: an advance value, a revised value, and a final value. Sometimes the final value is higher than the advance value, sometimes it's lower. It all depends on the data.

The economy has been unusually volatile as it recovers from the pandemic, and revisions have been a bit higher than usual. But they plainly don't favor anyone in particular. Rubio should be ashamed of himself for promoting this crackpottery.¹

¹Needless to say, he won't be. The MAGA era has given every Republican a license to lie.

Donald Trump is getting raked over the coals for an interview he did yesterday where he mused about Liz Cheney being killed: "Let's put her with a rifle standing there, with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let's see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face."

By itself this quote is misleading, but it's getting all the attention anyway. That's politics. But it's too bad in a way, because the rest of Trump's long monologue is actually much more interesting.

Trump has long run on a weird combination of being anti-war while constantly threatening massive retaliation against our enemies. But he goes well beyond that in this clip.

Trump portrays himself in the interview as no less than a gung-ho "No Blood for Oil" lefty. The whole point of his Liz Cheney remark was that she was a chickenhawk—a favorite lefty sneer during the runup to the Iraq War. "They're all war hawks when they're sitting in Washington in a nice building," he declared, "saying, 'Oh, gee, well let's send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.'"

Trump even says explicitly that he saw little point in invading Iraq if we weren't going to stick around and take all their oil. Check out these other excerpts:

"The reason [Liz Cheney] couldn't stand me is that she always wanted to go to war with people. I don't want to go to war.... Number one, it's very dangerous. Number two, a lot of people get killed. And number three, it's very, very expensive."

"We go in and bomb the hell out of [Iraq]...and then all of a sudden Iran has the whole Middle East to itself. Right now Iran has Iraq; Iraq is like a subsidiary of Iran."

"Anybody that went into the Middle East I thought was stupid."

"We spent $9 trillion bombing the hell out of the Middle East and what the hell did we get other than lots of dead people, including our people? Nothing."

This would fit right into a conversation with Noam Chomsky in the Guardian. And Trump gets cheers for this! From Republicans!

That's inexplicable. And the funny thing is that I don't think Trump is bullshitting about this. He truly is anti-war. When he was in office I always got the impression, in an odd way, that he didn't have the guts to go to war. He was afraid of it. He was afraid of sending soldiers to their death. Even his periodic retaliatory strikes, a staple of US presidents, tended to be small and cautious.

And good for him. War should be a last resort, not a routine part of foreign policy. Joe Biden feels much the same way, though, unlike Trump, probably more on an intellectual level than a gut level.

But I still wonder at the willingness of the Republican rank and file to go along with this. George W. Bush was literally deified as the greatest president in history for going into Iraq to get revenge for 9/11. Now, 20 years later, they cheer when Trump tells them they were all idiots and we should avoid war at all cost—especially war in the Middle East.

It's one thing for the Republican Party to flip on something like free trade at Trump's command. That's not a hot button issue for most people. But being anti-war? That's pretty visceral. Is this change of heart for real? Or is it just something Trump's fans are shrugging at because there's no particular war fever at the moment? It's a mystery.

Patrick Ruffini has a warning for obsessive poll watchers:

This is very true. Most political polls have a margin of error around ±3 percentage points, but that's just the potential sampling error. When you account for model error, weighting errors, differential response rates, and so forth, the real MOE is probably closer to ±5-6 points.

So if a poll shows a race tied, there's a roughly one-third chance that the winning candidate will win by three points or more.

In other words, we just don't know. Anybody could win and there's nothing more that polls can tell us at this point. It might not even be close once all the counting is done.

Four more days . . .

My mother has a black and white cat named Luna. But she's also been adopted by another cat that comes around for dinner every night. That makes it hers de facto, and it looks just like Luna. So its name is Fake Luna. Here's a rare picture of Fake Luna, who is not especially sociable and does not often sit still for the camera.

The Washington Post has a nice piece today about an underappreciated part of the recent surge in illegal immigration: the transition of smuggling operations from inefficient amateurs to large-scale professionals who operate with military precision. It's big business:

With revenue estimated at $4 billion to $12 billion a year, the smuggling of migrants has joined drugs and extortion as a top income stream for groups like Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, increasing their economic clout throughout the hemisphere.

Ironically, one of the big drivers of this transformation was America's obsession with hardening the border:

Migrant smuggling has been around for decades, with “coyotes,” or guides, a fixture in many Central American and Mexican villages. Only recently has it ballooned into a transnational, industrial-scale activity, involving sophisticated criminal groups, fleets of tractor-trailers, and hotels and warehouses that can hold hundreds of migrants a night.

U.S. policy, in part, explains the change. In the 1990s, as illegal immigration mounted, Washington began a major buildup on the Mexican border, doubling the number of Border Patrol agents, building walls and barriers, and adding sensors. Yet the incentives for migration remained unchanged. American employers were hungry for cheap labor. Mexicans and Central Americans were fleeing poverty and violence.

And smugglers connected the two.

Kamala Harris and Attorney General Merrick Garland were the first to seriously attack this problem, starting shortly after Joe Biden took office. But it was obviously a long-term effort with little immediate effect. As US job demand grew after the pandemic, the big gangs ramped up their efforts and moved hundreds of thousands of migrants from places like Guatemala to the US border and then to safe houses, all for a single package price of about $10,000.

This is why I endlessly harp on things like E-Verify: Walls and border fortifications just don't work. Supply and demand won't be denied so easily, and as long as the demand is there, supply will find a way.

Of course, maybe E-Verify wouldn't work either. It wouldn't affect demand, after all, just make it harder for employers to fill that demand. If demand is strong enough, it might not matter.

But it's the only option with any chance of success—which is precisely why it gets so little attention. The business community in the US doesn't mind border theater, but it does mind things that might work. So they oppose E-Verify on specious anti-regulation grounds and Republican leaders go along with a wink and a nudge. The cynicism is sort of jaw dropping.

The American economy gained 12,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at -78,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate stayed at 4.1%.

The jobs survey is in the field early each month, and October's survey may have been affected by Hurricane Milton. However, the BLS says data collection was fairly normal, so the October numbers were most likely just an extension of the downward trend that's been obvious for years.

The good news is that the Fed certainly has no reason to hold back on further rate cuts anymore. In fact, they should do another big one.