Month: January 2025

This is a harbor patrol boat of some kind leaving the Seal Beach pier right at sunrise.

DeepSeek R1 has hit the AI community like a slow-rolling tsunami wave. First it was intriguing. Then definitely cool. Then the talk of Silicon Valley. Then the hottest thing since the original ChatGPT.

Now it's broken out of the tech world and come crashing down on Wall Street. Who knows? Maybe we never needed all these Nvidia chips in the first place. Maybe what we needed all along was just smarter programmers who could do more with less. That's good news for most of us, but not good news for investors who bought lots of Nvidia shares on the promise that demand for their chips would grow exponentially forever. Live and learn.

According to the World Bank, the most expensive country in the world is Bermuda. The cheapest is Afghanistan.

I was a little surprised that Taiwan was so low, and that Russia was as low as India.

After blasting out that impressive bit of anti-Trump invective this afternoon, Colombian president Gustavo Petro has apparently backed down. Easy come, easy go.

I have no idea why, aside from the obvious: his advisors persuaded him he was risking economic ruin over nothing much. Who cares if deportees are returned on civilian or military jets?

Still, it's noteworthy that Trump didn't try the same bully-boy tactics on Mexico, which has also refused military flights. He prefers to pick on small countries that can't effectively fight back.

Conservatives are all spiking the football over this, as if it's some kind of triumph that the United States of America managed to bludgeon a small South American neighbor and ally into submission. You bet. We Americans should all be very proud of ourselves.

Next up are apparently Canada and Mexico. Trump reportedly wants to hit them with huge tariffs for no particular reason except to show that he means business. Nobody truly knows why, since Trump can't seriously think there's much that either country can do about fentanyl, and both of them have been pretty cooperative on border issues. As for economic issues, he's the guy who signed a trade deal with them seven years ago and insisted it was the greatest deal in history. So what's his gripe?

When it comes to Twitter diatribes, I think Donald Trump may have met his match in Colombian president Gustavo Petro. Here is his, um, response to Trump's attempts to bully him over military deportation flights. I don't know for sure how good the translation is, but there's a kind of irresistible poetry to it regardless. Enjoy.

Trump, I don't really like traveling to the US, it's a bit boring, but I confess that there are some commendable things. I like going to the black neighborhoods of Washington, where I saw an entire fight in the US capital between blacks and Latinos with barricades, which seemed like nonsense to me, because they should join together.

I confess that I like Walt Whitman and Paul Simon and Noam Chomsky and Miller

I confess that Sacco and Vanzetti, who have my blood, are memorable in the history of the USA and I follow them. They were murdered by labor leaders with the electric chair, the fascists who are within the USA as well as within my country

I don't like your oil, Trump, you're going to wipe out the human species because of greed. Maybe one day, over a glass of whiskey, which I accept, despite my gastritis, we can talk frankly about this, but it's difficult because you consider me an inferior race and I'm not, nor is any Colombian.

So if you know someone who is stubborn, that's me, period. You can try to carry out a coup with your economic strength and your arrogance, like they did with Allende. But I will die in my law, I resisted torture and I resist you. I don't want slavers next to Colombia, we already had many and we freed ourselves. What I want next to Colombia are lovers of freedom. If you can't accompany me, I'll go elsewhere. Colombia is the heart of the world and you didn't understand that, this is the land of the yellow butterflies, of the beauty of Remedios, but also of the colonels Aureliano Buendía, of which I am one, perhaps the last.

You will kill me, but I will survive in my people, which is before yours, in the Americas. We are peoples of the winds, the mountains, the Caribbean Sea and of freedom.

You don't like our freedom, okay. I don't shake hands with white slavers. I shake hands with the white libertarian heirs of Lincoln and the black and white farm boys of the USA, at whose graves I cried and prayed on a battlefield, which I reached after walking the mountains of Italian Tuscany and after being saved from Covid.
They are the United States and before them I kneel, before no one else.

Overthrow me, President, and the Americas and humanity will respond.

Colombia now stops looking north, looks at the world, our blood comes from the blood of the Caliphate of Cordoba, the civilization of that time, of the Roman Latins of the Mediterranean, the civilization of that time, who founded the republic, democracy in Athens; our blood has the black resistance fighters turned into slaves by you. In Colombia is the first free territory of America, before Washington, of all America, there I take refuge in its African songs.

My land is made up of goldsmiths who worked in the time of the Egyptian pharaohs and of the first artists in the world in Chiribiquete.

You will never rule us. The warrior who rode our lands, shouting freedom, who is called Bolívar, opposes us.

Our people are somewhat fearful, somewhat timid, they are naive and kind, loving, but they will know how to win the Panama Canal, which you took from us with violence. Two hundred heroes from all of Latin America lie in Bocas del Toro, today's Panama, formerly Colombia, which you murdered.

I raise a flag and as Gaitán said, even if it remains alone, it will continue to be raised with the Latin American dignity that is the dignity of America, which your great-grandfather did not know, and mine did, Mr. President, an immigrant in the USA,
Your blockade does not scare me, because Colombia, besides being the country of beauty, is the heart of the world. I know that you love beauty as I do, do not disrespect it and you will give it your sweetness.

FROM TODAY ON, COLOMBIA IS OPEN TO THE ENTIRE WORLD, WITH OPEN ARMS, WE ARE BUILDERS OF FREEDOM, LIFE AND HUMANITY.

I am informed that you impose a 50% tariff on the fruits of our human labor to enter the United States, and I do the same.

Let our people plant corn that was discovered in Colombia and feed the world

Colombia turned away a military jet full of deportees yesterday. Today Donald Trump went ballistic:

There are two critically important points here. First, Colombia turned away the flights solely because they were military. The US normally uses civilian jets operated by ICE for deportation flights and Colombia has made it clear that those are fine. Trump is deliberately provoking a showdown for no reason.

Second, Trump is finally making it clear that he's willing to do a lot more than just threaten tariffs to get his way. The US all but controls the international banking system, and there's nothing to stop Trump from, say, cutting off Colombia from American banks, freezing assets, or levying a wide array of other sanctions. The rest of the world has long been wary of America's unique ability to throw its economic weight around, but it's always been a bit of a hypothetical concern because US presidents have generally moved only against bad actors and after broad consultation. But this takes on a whole new significance with Trump as president. What was once a sort of theoretical concern is now very, very real.

What if Trump seriously tries some of this same stuff against Denmark or Panama or whoever else catches his ire? It's hard to believe we need to take this seriously, but now we do.

Hear me out. The title of the screenplay is Revenge of the Danes. It's the story of a plucky squadron of frigates and gunboats in the Royal Danish Navy who use a combination of high technology and good old-fashioned ingenuity to sneak up on the US military base on Greenland. The Americans fight back bravely, but in the end they're subdued and the Danes take over. Soon everything goes dark. NORAD is missing its most crucial early warning site and the Pentagon is in chaos. This goes on for 24 hours, along with attempted escapes by the American captives and a romantic subplot between the Danish mission commander and a beautiful American astrophysicist. Finally, Donald Trump gives in to the Danish demands: He appears on television and publicly promises to never bother Greenland again. Everyone celebrates with a nice plate of warm aebleskiver.

In Revenge of the Danes 2: The Pølsa Diktat four nuclear-armed US supercarrier groups descend on Copenhagen. But it turns out the Danes still have a few tricks up their sleeve....

What do you think? Box office boffo?

Where did COVID come from?

The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.

But the agency issued a new assessment this week, with analysts saying they now favor the lab theory. There is no new intelligence behind the agency’s shift, officials said.

How is anyone supposed to evaluate this? There's nothing new but they changed their minds anyway.

When I read a report from scientists about the origin of COVID, it's packed with evidence and argument. It might still be wrong, but at least it's transparent.

But when intel agencies do this, they just release a sentence or two and that's it. They don't even say if their conclusion is based on classified evidence that the rest of us haven't seen. But that's pretty important, no? After all, if their finding is based on the same public information available to everyone, then who cares what they think? Their analysts are certainly no better than the world's top virologists and epidemiologists. Their opinion only carries weight if it's based on stuff that's in their wheelhouse. That is, spy stuff. Signal intelligence. Human sources. Imagery. But if that's the case, we'll never see it and we're explicitly being asked to take their conclusions on faith.

And that's the problem. The incoming boss of the CIA has been very public about his belief in the lab leak theory. The agency says that had no impact: they wrote their assessment under the old regime. Maybe so. Then again, they'd say that regardless, wouldn't they? It's meaningless.

And none of us will ever get to see either their assessment or the evidence it's based on. Is it a rigorous review of all the evidence based on a foundation of deep scientific understanding? Or is it a sloppy broadside written by a bunch of naifs who never even engage with the scientific debate and just want avoid a fight with new boss?

We'll never know. But remember the aluminum tubes?

Declining fertility is the shiny new crisis we're all supposed to be losing sleep over, so I've been reading a bit about it lately. Here in the US, fertility looks like this:

The basic state of things is that after the Baby Boom fertility was flat and stable until 2007, when it suddenly began a (now) 17-year decline. Why? What happened in 2007?

For a start, let's break things down by age:

The downward inflection in 2007 is only for women in their twenties. Teen births have been going down since the early '90s, thanks to the end of the lead era, and show no particular shift in 2007. Older women haven't experienced a fertility decline at all.

Now, one thing we know is that fertility is tied to marriage. People are more likely to have their desired number of children if they're married, and the age of marriage keeps going up. Increasing numbers of women aren't married until their late twenties, which might explain the fertility decline in that age group. Let's look:

The age of first marriage has been rising ever since 1970, so it seems like a poor guess at an explanation for something that started in 2007.

So what was it? One obvious possibility is the Great Recession, but that hardly seems likely. It might have dampened fertility for a few years, but then it would have bounced back during the recovery. Right?

That's certainly what I'd think, except for one thing:

The Great Recession was a uniquely devastating event. Even the Great Depression, though deeper and longer, had only a temporary effect. By 1940 we were back to trend growth and stayed there. Nothing—not the go-go '60s or the Reagan recession or the dotcom boom—pushed the economy off its trend growth by more than a hair or for more than a few years.

Until 2007. During the Great Recession the economy declined by a lot and never made it back. It's been nearly two decades and we're still nowhere near making it back.

We've never before had a recession with a permanent effect. This makes it at least plausible that it had an acute impact on people in their twenties that's continued ever since. They're permanently more wary about their future and less likely to have kids until they're financially confident—and by that time the old biological clock is starting to rein in their options.

Of course, fertility has been dropping everywhere in the rich world and beyond. Other countries don't precisely fit the 2007 theory—you'd hardly expect them to—but they're not that far off:

What other possibilities are there? If you squint a bit you could say that the fertility decline actually started around 2010 and social media is to blame. I'm pretty skeptical of this, but it does have the virtue of being a permanent thing, which fits the evidence of an ongoing decline.

Anything else?

I have some excellent and unexpected news. It's been six weeks since I started the Tecvayli treatment and last night I got back my first M-protein result. The result was......

. . . no result. Happily, since I've been through this before, I know what that means: My M-protein level is below the detection threshold of 0.1. However, my immunofixation result is still abnormal, which means I'm above 0.05. Call it 0.07.

I have a visit with my doctor in another week, and maybe I'll learn more. But for now, this is great news. I had no idea the Tecvayli acted so quickly. Now let's see how long it lasts.