Month: December 2024

Here are the federal agencies that America's civilian workers call home:

Two-thirds of all civil service workers are in Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security. Unless you're planning to slash those departments, there's not a whole lot left to slash.

This is the Naschmarkt in Vienna. It's been there since the 16th century and nobody really knows why it's called that. Just look at all the pretty produce!

Elon Musk, the Sarah Palin of the '20s, has something to say:

The “save the homeless” NGOs are often paid according to how many homeless people are on the streets, thus creating a strong financial incentive for them to maximize the number of homeless people and never actually solve the problem! Incentives explain outcomes.

That sounds really stupid! We're paying homeless nonprofits more if there are more homeless on the streets? No wonder the homeless population keeps growing!

Except, of course, that (a) no one actually does this, and (b) the homeless population outside California has been shrinking for years:

Next up on the Musk hit parade was a chart specially formatted to show that assets of those sneaky nonprofits have skyrocketed over the past few decades. But as any businessman knows, organizations also have liabilities. If it's wealth you're after, you have to look at actual wealth. It also helps if you compare it to something else. I have helpfully done that:

The net worth of nonprofits has indeed skyrocketed—up 800% in 30 years. But that's because the entire economy has skyrocketed even more, thanks to things like Nvidia chips and Tesla cars. The nonprofit sector is actually a bit of a laggard.

Does Musk simply believe anything that gets tweeted at him? Most of the stuff he passes along with one of his famous curt warnings—Concerning. Must stop. Killer problem—is just slop. But he doesn't care because he's quickly on to the next thing and never gets asked any questions. Meanwhile his devoted legions casually believe the constant stream of swill he passes along. Why wouldn't they?

In his final column today, Paul Krugman reflects on what's happened to the country in the past 25 years:

What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then.... It’s hard to convey just how good most Americans were feeling in 1999 and early 2000. Polls showed a level of satisfaction with the direction of the country that looks surreal by today’s standards.

So what happened?

Why did this optimism curdle? As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest.

....The financial crisis of 2008 undermined any faith the public had that governments knew how to manage economies.... [And] it’s not just governments that have lost the public’s trust. It’s astonishing to look back and see how much more favorably banks were viewed before the financial crisis.

Krugman is right, but with an asterisk. In a 1999 Pew poll, 70% of the respondents said they were optimistic about the nation. Fast forward to 2023 and here's another Pew poll:

The total number of optimists has gone down by ten points, but it's not evenly split. Democrats are nearly as optimistic as they were 25 years ago, but Republicans are 14 points less optimistic.

I think this provides the answer about what happened. Sure, we lost our faith in the elites, but it wasn't quite "we." It was Republicans who watch Fox News. They're the ones who lost their optimism.

This is because conservatism isn't Fox's core brand. Outrage is. And the outrage isn't just aimed liberals; it's aimed at big government, big medicine, big banks, and anywhere else that outrage can be mined. This outrage naturally produces pessimism—why else would so many gold scammers advertise there?—and that pessimism is ultimately directed toward authority figures of all kinds.

Whether consciously or not, Fox News is in the business of undermining faith in America and the people who run it. They're not alone in doing this, but they're by far the leader and the agenda setter. Because they know that nothing keeps viewers coming back like wanting to hear the latest about some giant, stupid cock-up.

I have little hope for a restoration of optimism until Fox News leaves the air. They just have too much invested in keeping their viewers on edge and constantly pissed off about the stupidity of both liberals and elites. But how likely is that to happen anytime soon?

Does the jackboot of the federal government throttle economic activity in the US? It doesn't seem that way:

I'm a little surprised to see Hong Kong still at the top of the list. I guess that when China cracked down on civil liberties they left all the economic regulations alone. As usual, we're in the top two three among large countries.

We're really good at encouraging entrepreneurs, too, and allowing them to grow to $1 billion or more.

We're pretty good on patents:

According to the World Bank, we make it pretty easy to get a loan if you want to open a diner or an auto shop:

Our regulatory environment is second in the world among large countries:

It looks to me like we do really well on practically every metric of dynamism, economic freedom, and ease of doing business. There's always room for improvement, though!

I see that, as usual, the postal service is in crisis:

Last week, Senator Rand Paul used an oversight hearing on the USPS to reveal that much of its problem lies in its decision to convert 190,000 employees to permanent positions with union benefits — thus ballooning its debt. Paul told Postmaster General Louis DeJoy that he should use cheaper, contracted employees to stop the bleeding.

I have no idea where Rand Paul got that 190,000 figure. USPS is indeed starting to insource its long-haul truck routes, which have been handled by contractors for years, but inexplicably the number of long-haul contract drivers isn't public information. My best guess, based on hints here and there, is that it's maybe 50-60,000 or so.

Do unionized USPS long-haul drivers cost more than contract drivers? Beats me. Nobody at the hearing provided any evidence one way or the other. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a Trump appointee, told Paul "perhaps you're right," but then sort of suggested that efficiency would increase by having everything under one roof.

The postal service is a mammoth beast working under mountains of restrictions. But the underlying problem is that members of Congress are constantly saying it needs to be run like a private business but are generally unwilling to actually let it run that way. Here are a few charts to show the lay of the land. First up is delivery volume:

Delivery volume is down substantially, but the number of addresses and delivery routes keeps going up. This means the cost of delivering the mail has increased while revenues have gone down:

The postal service lost $9.5 billion last year. If it had the same operating revenue as in 2014 that would have been a $1 billion surplus. So how do you square this circle of rising costs and declining revenue? One way would be to relax the postal service's mandate for universal delivery, but Congress would never allow that. Another way would be to allow postal rates to increase a little more:

A few years ago the postal service received permission to raise rates by more than inflation—but only by a little bit. As a result our first class rates remain among the cheapest in the world:

If first class postage rose by 20 cents the postal service's $9.5 billion loss would go away. If it rose to merely the international average, it would have turned into a surplus of $9.5 billion. Any private enterprise would be able to do that, but Congress won't allow it. Constituents would complain, after all. Even regulated public utilities get a better deal than the postal service.

If Congress wants USPS to run like a private business, then butt out and let them run like a private business. Allow them to set rates and delivery standards and labor policies without a bunch of grandstanding politicians second guessing everything they do. Fat chance of that, though.

I've been wanting to take a picture of the Milky Way with my new camera, but hospitals and meds kept me home for too long. We're way past Milky Way season now.

But why let that stop me? The bright core of the Milky Way is way below the horizon at the moment, but the wispy far end is still barely visible. So why not take a crack at it?

The photo on the left was taken with the camera on a normal tripod. Exposure time was therefore restricted to 25 seconds to prevent blur, and the stacking software could handle only ten images because the stars move slightly with each exposure. That's a total exposure time of about four minutes. The result is poor, but under the circumstances it was probably better than I expected.

The photo on the right was taken with the camera on my little equatorial mount. Exposure time was two minutes, which allowed the ISO setting to be lower. And since it was tracking the sky I could take as many images as I wanted. This photo is a stack of 40 individual images, which adds up to a total exposure time of 80 minutes.

It's pretty good! Because the camera is tracking the sky, the foreground changes slightly with each exposure. Put 40 of those together and you get a big blur. Normally I'd composite this with a single frame of the ground, but I decided to leave it so you could see the weird effect.

I'm looking forward to trying this in the summer, when the real Milky Way is visible.

Here's an odd thing. While I was poking around in the TIMSS mathematics results, I took a look at the size of the decline in test scores during the pandemic:

Scores among Black students barely dropped at all. This conflicts with every other analysis of test scores I'm familiar with, which unanimously find that Black students (and low-income students in general) had the biggest learning declines during the pandemic.

What's even weirder is that results for 4th graders were exactly the opposite:

This is sort of inexplicable. How could Black 4th graders show big learning losses while 8th graders showed none? It's damn peculiar.

I haven't followed the Daniel Penny trial especially closely, but this morning he was acquitted of killing Jordan Neely in a subway incident last year:

A Manhattan jury found Penny, 26 years old, not guilty of criminally negligent homicide in the killing of Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old Michael Jackson impersonator with a history of mental illness.

After several days of deliberation last week, jurors were deadlocked on second-degree manslaughter, a more serious charge that would have required they find he acted recklessly—as opposed to with negligence—and caused Neely’s death. A judge granted prosecutors’ request to dismiss that charge so that jurors could move on to deliberations on the lesser offense.

This doesn't make any sense. It means there were at least some jurors who wanted to convict Penny on the more serious charge but quickly agreed to acquit him of the lesser charge. What's the explanation for that?

It's possible, of course, that "deadlocked" means there was one holdout who wanted to convict, but after a weekend to stew about it decided, fuck it, and went along with the majority on the lesser charge just to get it over with. Weariness with the whole affair is often a powerful motivation for finally getting a unanimous verdict in court cases.

Are you curious about how the US did on the latest international TIMSS test of mathematics? Here it is:

I had to leave some countries out to make everything fit. All the Asian countries topped the charts, so you can take that as read. I also removed some tiny countries that don't test their entire populations, as well as half a dozen countries at the bottom. Click the link above if you want to see the whole list.

There's nothing especially new this year. American white and Asian kids are among the best in the world, while Black and Hispanic kids do poorly. It's your call whether you think this means our educational system is great or horrible.