Month: January 2025

How long will it take LA to rebuild in the aftermath of this month's wildfires? Here are a few comparisons from recent fires:

Three years after the Marshall Fire destroyed 1,105 homes in Boulder County, about two-thirds have been rebuilt....

It took nearly seven years to completely rebuild after a 2012 fire that destroyed hundreds of homes in Colorado Springs, and homebuilders are still finishing up work after a 2017 fire in Santa Rosa, Calif....

In August 2023, wildfires devastated the island of Maui, completely destroying the town of Lahaina.... As of last week, roughly a year and a half since the fires, a total of three of those homes have been rebuilt....

In Paradise, 90% of the town, including 18,000 structures, was destroyed and 85 people were killed.... Six years later...the city is constructing around 500 homes a year and has rebuilt a third of its homes....

It's gonna be a while. Hell, Hurricane Harvey hit Houston eight years ago and they're still fighting over recovery funding.

We have a new AI champion: 深度求索.

Yes, it's a Chinese AI with the English name DeepSeek. And it's sort of the new champion, but it gets complicated. Overall, their R1 model, released yesterday, appears to be about as good as the latest GPT-4 model, or maybe a hair worse. But it's got a lot of other things going for it:

• It's open source. Completely open source, model weights and all.
• It's trained via reinforcement learning.
• It's far cheaper to run than GPT-4.
• Smaller "distilled" versions can run on a laptop and perform pretty well.

I've used DeepSeek a little bit and it seems to work pretty well—though I haven't pushed it very hard. Here are the benchmarks they've run:

Is this really the next great advance, or it typical AI hype? I don't know, but Sam Altman seems to be afraid of it, and that must mean something. On the more noxious side, you have to be a little careful about your subject matter:

I suppose there's always Wikipedia for stuff the CCP is sensitive about. In any case, stay tuned. There are a ton of good AI models available these days, and in the end DeepSeek might just be part of the pack. But maybe not.

Stephen Miller has been thinking for a while about how to bring back Title 42 expulsions along the border, which were imposed during the COVID epidemic and then lifted when the emergency was declared over. But no matter how hard Miller looked, there were no suitable diseases around. So apparently he just gave up:

President Donald Trump is preparing to send 10,000 troops to the southern border, and Border Patrol agents have been directed to deny entry to asylum seekers if they “traveled through a country with communicable disease,” according to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection briefing document obtained by The Washington Post.

The order does not list any specific disease, essentially closing the border to anyone attempting to exercise the right to seek humanitarian refuge under U.S. law.

That should do the job, since every country has some communicable diseases. As with so much of Trump's activity, however, it has a fatal flaw: It's illegal. But I guess he doesn't care. I suppose the idea is to shut the border until a judge orders him to open it back up, in hopes that the confusion by itself will scare everyone off. Who knows? It might work.

But that's true of lots of things as long as you don't care about the law.

This is the famous blue tower in Durnstein, Austria, as seen from our Danube cruise ship. But why is it famous just for sporting some blue trim? That's a mystery.

Donald Trump says that if Russia doesn't settle its war with Ukraine he will put "high levels" of tariffs on Russian goods. Apparently no one has told him that we only imported $3 billion worth of stuff from Russia in 2024. Even for Russia that's only 0.1% of GDP. This is about like Belgium threatening tariffs on us. Who cares?

The guy's only got one playbook. If this was his big plan to end the war within 24 hours, he's going to have a lot of disappointed fans.

Wages went up at a very healthy rate in the final quarter of 2024: 2.8% for men and 2.1% for women.

As usual, this is good news and bad news. It's good news for workers but bad news for the Fed, which will take this as a sign of inflation and keep interest rates high.

I must say, there are Easter eggs scattered all through Donald Trump's blizzard of executive orders. I imagine we'll be uncovering them for a long time.

For example: you remember Elon Musk's promise to use DOGE to cut $2 trillion from federal spending? It's true that no one ever seriously thought he could do that. On the other hand, we all figured he'd do something to pare down government. But apparently not. According to the EO implementing it, DOGE has precisely one function:

Sec. 4. Modernizing Federal Technology and Software to Maximize Efficiency and Productivity. (a) The USDS Administrator shall commence a Software Modernization Initiative to improve the quality and efficiency of government-wide software, network infrastructure, and information technology (IT) systems. Among other things, the USDS Administrator shall work with Agency Heads to promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization.

So that's it? Software modernization? Interoperability? The federal government has been grinding away on interoperability for more than 20 years. Just to give you an example, here's a 2004 paper just for the Department of Defense that lists 35 interoperability initiatives, 3 standards, 4 strategies, and 4 testbeds. And it comes with a vintage Word 6.0 graphic to explain everything. This is what Musk has gotten himself into.

I don't know. Maybe Musk has a clever plan to leverage this into some kind of all-powerful Rasputinish hold over the Oval Office. But it sounds more like stepping into a pool of quicksand to me. And it definitely sounds like it's light years from cutting $2 trillion in spending and turning the federal government into a lean, mean fighting machine.

Now this is what I'm talking about:

Oh hell yes. I might have to make a late career change. OK kids, open your laptops to fred.stlouisfed.org. Who can tell me the difference between the labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio? Betty?

Just shoot it directly into my veins.

It's not just the J6ers who got pardons from Trump:

Ulbricht is the founder of Silk Road, an online platform for large-scale transactions by drug traffickers and other criminals with a need for secrecy. Now, maybe you think that's OK because drugs shouldn't be illegal in the first place. Mileage will vary. But Ulbricht was also accused of contracting to have people killed—though apparently he was duped and the murders never took place.¹ Still, as an appellate court noted, he certainly tried:

DPR [Ulbricht's handle, "Dread Pirate Roberts"] connected with Redandwhite, who was FriendlyChemist’s supplier, and wrote that “FriendlyChemist is a liability and I wouldn’t mind if he was executed.” After negotiating the logistical details of the murder, Ulbricht agreed to pay Redandwhite $150,000 in Bitcoins to kill FriendlyChemist. DPR paid Redandwhite, who later confirmed that he had received the payment and carried out the murder, and sent what appeared to be a photo of the dead victim to DPR. DPR replied that he had “received the picture and deleted it,” and thanked Redandwhite for his “swift action.”

....Later, DPR ordered four other murders through Redandwhite.... One of the government’s expert witnesses was able to link the payments for all five murders to Bitcoin wallets located on Ulbricht’s laptop.

....At the sentencing hearing, the district court resolved several disputed issues of fact. For example, because Ulbricht contested his responsibility for the five commissioned murders for hire, the district court found by a preponderance of the evidence that Ulbricht did in fact commission the murders, believing that they would be carried out. The district court characterized the evidence of the murders for hire, which included Ulbricht’s journal, chats with other Silk Road users, and the evidence showing that Ulbricht actually paid a total of $650,000 in Bitcoins for the killings, as “ample and unambiguous.”

Bygones. Ulbricht is free now, solely because libertarians supported Trump and this is the payoff they asked for. That's how our president operates, ladies and gentlemen.

¹Nor was he tried on these charges. After Ulbricht received two life sentences on the drug charges, it apparently didn't seem worth it.

Huh:

Sec. 7. Terminating the Green New Deal. (a) All agencies shall immediately pause the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (Public Law 117-169) or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Public Law 117-58), including but not limited to funds for electric vehicle charging stations made available through the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program and the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program.

I guess we're all going to get tired of asking this eventually, but is this legal? Both of these laws were passed by Congress and Trump can't just unilaterally annul them. Nor is he allowed to impound the funds, if that's what he's thinking. If he wants to kill IRA and the infrastructure act, he's going to have to get Congress to do it.

But can he "pause" disbursement? Good question. I'm not sure how flexible the law is. It's certainly true that the executive has a certain amount of leeway in planning and implementation, but not if the goal is to frustrate Congress's intent—and that sure seems to be the case here.

As for the charging stations, the bulk of that money has already been allocated to the states and Trump can't claw it back. So the practical effect of this is pretty much nil for the near future.