Month: January 2025

China senses weakness and is going in for the kill:

TikTok said the app will have to “go dark” in the United States on Sunday barring a last-minute intervention from the Biden administration to halt enforcement of a federal ban.

....“Unless the Biden administration immediately provides a definitive statement to satisfy the most critical service providers assuring nonenforcement, unfortunately TikTok will be forced to go dark on Jan. 19,” the company said in a statement posted on X.

TikTok doesn't need to go dark. US-based hosting services and CDNs have to stop supporting TikTok on Sunday, and both Apple and Google have to remove the app from their app stores. But TikTok has plenty of hosting capacity outside the US, and anyone who already has the app can keep using it. This isn't a long-term solution, but it does mean that TikTok has the option of delaying the shutdown for many months while it works on getting a reprieve.

So why the threat to shut down instantly on the 19th? I have two guesses:

• It's just a garden variety power play against Biden. They're hoping that the prospect of an imminent revolt among 170 million TikTok users will coerce Biden into caving in and extending the deadline.
• It's some kind of weird 4D chess maneuver. They want everyone to know that it was Biden who shut them down and Donald Trump who saved the day when he reverses the shutdown a day later. Why? Just to cozy up to their new buddy. Their CEO has an invitation to the inauguration, after all.

Well, maybe. Who knows for sure. We'll see how it all plays out.

POSTSCRIPT: There is one thing I'm not sure about. TikTok's user data is hosted by Oracle in Texas, and Oracle will have to shut that down. I think. If they do, would that prevent TikTok from operating? Do they have backups of that data outside the US or has the transfer to Oracle been fully completed? I'm not sure.

I swear I'm eventually going to be driven around the bend by doomsayers. The culprit this time is unexpected: Kelsey Piper at Vox, who says the LA fires "were the product of gross mismanagement by the city and state governments." I don't have the energy to take this on yet again, so I'll just say that her bill of particulars is unfounded except for the insurance commissioner's ineptitude, which really was substantial.

Instead I'm going to comment about her claim that this is just like COVID, which the CDC screwed up: they blew it on testing; they blew it on masks; and they blew it on vaccine distribution. But this isn't true. Only the testing stumble was a botched job, not any of the others. The CDC did change its advice on masks, but for chrissake people, it was only for one month and it happened because we learned that COVID could be asymptomatic. What were they supposed to do? It's time to get over it. As for this:

There were plenty of individuals who did plenty of heroics to try to see what was coming and do something about it, but there weren’t any institutions waiting behind the scenes to save the day. When we got vaccines, it was a bunch of well-meaning private actors organized on Discord who did much of the legwork to make them accessible to the public, often by systematically calling every pharmacy to put in a spreadsheet whether they had availability.

Say what? There were arguments early on about who should get priority, but here's how we did overall compared to peer countries in Europe:

We distributed 13 million vaccine doses in the first 30 days and 56 million in the first 60 days—far more than any other country. That's pretty good performance.

But wait. The US is a big country. Of course we distributed more doses than medium-sized France or tiny Sweden. How do things look on a per capita basis?

The UK was best, but we were second. Eventually we lost our lead, but that was due to vaccine resistance in red states, not distribution problems.

I'm sure the Discord group did good work, but it's just not true that vaccine distribution was some kind of epic horror show. We did a pretty good job.

You want to know what our biggest problem really is? It's the frenzy, whenever something goes wrong, to pronounce it the downfall of western civ. Some of this is deliberate partisan nonsense, but more of it is due to our habit of overreacting wildly to every imaginable setback. That's how we get polycrises; the end of global supply chains; CDC ineptitude; a "chaotic" withdrawal from Afghanistan; and "gross mismanagement" as the cause of fires that couldn't have been contained by any firefighting force on earth.¹ We are a panic prone people, and that's our biggest problem of all.

¹We don't have any more crises than usual; the global logistics network did pretty well during COVID and is decidedly still around; the CDC actually performed admirably; the Afghanistan withdrawal was remarkably efficient under impossible circumstances; and sure, California could do better, but the LA fires were the result of a perfect storm (climate change, warm weather in January, 300 days of drought, 80 mph winds), not mismanagement of any kind.

Oh come on:

Paramount Global executives have held internal discussions about settling a lawsuit filed by Donald Trump over a CBS News interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, according to people familiar with the situation, a sign of larger efforts to dial down tensions with the incoming president.

Paramount, owner of CBS, its namesake studio and several cable channels, has a major piece of business in front of the new administration: its planned merger with Skydance Media. It’s become clear to executives at both companies that Trump’s dissatisfaction with CBS News will make the review tougher than they anticipated, and that they’ll likely need to offer concessions to win approval, people familiar with the situation said.

This is ridiculous. When ABC settled its lawsuit against Trump there was at least a colorable argument that they had libeled him. In this case there's nothing. Trump argues that CBS edited an interview with Kamala Harris to make her look good, which is nothing actionable even if it's true. This case was never going anywhere.

Settling would be a bribe in all but name—or maybe extortion if Trump tried to follow through in his official capacity. This is like being ruled by the Corleone family.

Andrew Prokop at Vox writes today that Joe Biden's "political disaster" on immigration was due to infighting among his aides, not because Biden himself was soft on border enforcement:

All the way back in March 2021, the New York Times reported, Biden was furious about the border crisis, demanding to know whom he needed to fire to fix it.

The problem was that, for three full years, Biden’s team proved unable to fix it.

Until, in 2024, they suddenly did.

During Biden’s first three years in office, the number of arriving migrants skyrocketed.... Then, starting early in 2024, and continuing throughout the year, border arrivals plummeted. In August, border encounters had dropped to about 58,000 — 77 percent lower than the previous December’s level. By the end of the year, they’d dropped even further.

....If it was possible all along to get the border much more under control, why didn’t Biden do it years ago? If this was what Biden hoped to achieve all along, what went wrong in the administration’s decision-making that it only materialized after years of political pain?

Prokop falls victim to the common idea that policy is everything and the crisis continued until Biden finally adopted some decisive policy changes. But there's no mention of the most obvious explanation: jobs.

The usual policy explanation for the drop in border crossings is (a) increased enforcement from Mexico in early 2024 and (b) Biden's June 2024 asylum order. But this is backward.

Take a close look at the chart. Border crossings started to skyrocket under Trump as job demand skyrocketed, and this continued under Biden. In early 2022 job demand softened, and shortly thereafter border crossings began softening too—before any policy changes of any kind—and kept dropping through mid-2023. This would have continued except that Mexico suddenly loosened its border policies. When they went back to normal, border crossings returned to their previous downward trend. Then they started another plunge that went through May 2024, before Biden signed his order. June brought only a small additional increase.

Unless you believe in time machines, the immigration story is clear: the fundamental driver was jobs. Mexico interrupted that briefly and Biden later gave it a push, but that's all. When job demand was high, so was illegal immigration. When job demand dropped, illegal immigration dropped right alongside it.

None of this is to say that a more cohesive White House couldn't have done more. Perhaps they could have. But they were fighting strong headwinds—unlike Donald Trump in 2019, who had the tailwind of slowing job demand at his back.

It's the jobs, stupid. Nothing else made more than a small difference.

Hilbert has things to do and places to go. Don't get in his way.

The Supreme Court has upheld Congress's demand that TikTok either sell itself to an American owner or shut down. How do I know? Because the New York Times has treated this event with about the same world-historical banner-headline flood-the-zone gravity as 9/11. As of 1:30 pm, they had written 14 separate pieces about it by 13 different reporters—and that's only counting the ones that got headlines:

1. Adam Liptak: The Supreme Court has backed a law requiring TikTok be sold or banned.
2. Adam Liptak: The Supreme Court appeared poised to uphold the law when it heard arguments on Friday.
3. David McCabe: Here’s what to know about the potential TikTok ban.
4. David Sanger: The government’s case for banning TikTok on national security grounds was light on examples.
5. Katie Mogg: A TikTok habit is hard to break.
6. Cecilia Kang: Parents express mixed reactions to a potential TikTok ban.
7. J.D. Biersdorfer: Here’s how to download your videos and data from TikTok.
8. Meaghan Tobin: Here’s why Beijing could have the last say on any TikTok deal.
9. Alexandra Alter: Publishers and authors wonder: Can anything replace BookTok
10. Sheera Frenkel: Teenagers on TikTok exchanged advice on how to get around a ban.
11. Cecilia Kang: The ban is based on national security concerns. Limits because of foreign ownership are not unusual.
12. Madison Malone Kircher: Influencers React to a World Without TikTok.
13. Tripp Mickle and Nico Grant: For Apple and Google, complying with the law would be easy.
14. David McCabe and Maya C. Miller: Government officials react to the looming TikTok ban.

Come on. Let's all calm down. It's a social media app for teenagers. The Republic will survive no matter what happens.

Housing starts spiked upward in December:

This is more good news for the beginning of the Trump administration. Over the past two years housing starts have averaged 140,000 per year higher than the pre-pandemic average from his first term.

In other good news, the Atlanta Fed is now forecasting 3% GDP growth in the final quarter of 2024. Trump is taking over a strong economy.

Do we have a spending problem or a revenue problem? You be the judge:

This includes everything: defense, welfare, Social Security, Medicare, interest on the debt, etc. In 2019, spending was exactly the same as it was in 1980. Revenue was down by two percentage points.

After that we had a huge spike in spending due to COVID—and thank goodness for that since it rescued the economy. Most of it, along with some bits from the American Rescue Plan, has gone away but some of it is still hanging around. That's mostly why we had the upward spike in 2024:

The increase is entirely accounted for by leftover COVID spending plus a big increase in interest payments thanks to the Fed. Some of that still needs to be cut back, but an overall spending target of around 22% of GDP is unavoidable thanks to Social Security and Medicare over the long term.

So that's the story. Aside from COVID, spending has stayed level for nearly half a century. It will go up a bit over the next decade thanks to an aging population, but that's it. All we need now is for revenue to catch up.

Matt Yglesias is reading Middlemarch, and it turns out that a minor plot point in the novel is about the construction of a London-Birmingham railroad that will go through Middlemarch. Not everyone is happy about this, but as one of the book's characters explains, there's no use fighting because the law is on the railroad's side. Matt strongly supports this anti-NIMBY attitude of yore:

That’s how you get things done.... A company willing to invest private capital in the construction of such a railroad was given the right to survey the route and to take whatever land they wanted via the British version of eminent domain. British law is more generous to the landowner than American law in this regard and requires that the company pay the market value plus ten percent to the landowner. But (at the time) there were no procedural tools of delay. The railroad had to pay for what they wanted, but they otherwise operated under very few constraints.

This attitude is one of the things that most bothers me about liberal YIMBYs. You can make a case that modern America puts too much red tape in the way of building new stuff, but the answer is surely not to extol 19th century robber baron practices. That's what was responsible for all the red tape in the first place: during and after the '60s, people got sick and tired of rich corporations having carte blanche to do anything they wanted, wherever they wanted, with no concern for either the environment or the opinions of the people whose lives they were wrecking.

They wanted a say, and that's what gave us laws like NEPA at the federal level (signed by Richard Nixon) and CEQA in California (signed by Ronald Reagan). Have those laws gotten out of hand? Maybe. We're a litigious society, and lots of things get out of hand. But surely the people most affected by development deserve a voice in that development?

Later on Matt glosses the railroad building boom like this:

The railroads got built because the national government decided it wanted a national railroad network to get built, so that the aggregate benefits would exceed the costs. And then having decided that the aggregate benefits would exceed the costs, it created an institutional framework that facilitated doing the thing and cleared out procedural obstacles to it happening.

This, I think, is an exorbitantly rosy view of things. As in the US, British railroad building was largely a frenzy of projects launched by rich people who won permissions and contracts via political hardball and outright bribery. It was decidedly not the result of a cool cost-benefit analysis followed by technocratic white papers setting out national plans.

As genuine democracy advances, things get messy. It often turns out that when people get enfranchised they aren't happy with the status quo after all. So they fight. That means it's inherently harder to make decisions today, with a huge and diverse electorate, than it was in 1789 when only a relatively small and homogeneous group (white, male, well-to-do) had to agree on things. But that's the price. If you want democracy, you have to accept that everyone gets a say and a lot of extremely stubborn people are going to disagree with you. Fractious, unsatisfactory compromise is unavoidable.

When Joe Biden became president he directed immigration officials to focus their arrest and removal efforts on criminals, national security threats, and recent border crossers. Here's the guidance DHS issued a few weeks after inauguration:

This didn't restrict the removal of illegal immigrants, which was far higher under Biden than Trump:

That's from David Bier, an immigration expert at the Cato Institute. He has a long examination of Biden's immigration record here, and it's worth reading. His conclusion is pretty close to my own:

• Biden's record was far from perfect.
• But the surge in immigration was mostly due to an ultra-hot labor market.
  
• Biden increased enforcement in almost every possible category (arrests, removals, detention space, deportation flights, etc.).

Biden's record on the border is mixed, and he did a poor job of explaining what he was doing. That said, it's a lot like inflation: he got the blame for something that was set in motion by the pandemic a year before he took office. It was unlucky timing more than poor policy.