This is M16, the Eagle Nebula, taken from Palomar Mountain. As usual, I wish I could pick up more colors in my astronomy photos, but the reds usually overwhelm everything else. I'd need to do multiple exposures with four different filters to really pick up all the colors, and that's both expensive and time consuming. Maybe someday.
The second photo is an enlarged (and rotated) view of the center of the nebula. This is the part of the nebula known as the "Pillars of Creation" thanks to a famous Hubble Telescope picture of them. Click the link to see the difference in resolution between the Hubble and my telescope. It's, um, a lot.
The detailed picture also provides a good look at my guiding problem. As you can see, the stars are slightly oblong, which means my telescope isn't following the sky precisely. I'm still not sure why. It's also odd that the stars are so far out of round but the picture itself is fairly sharp. That doesn't make sense to me.
I'm not sure how much real-world difference this makes, since excess savings have been nearly zero for awhile outside of the affluent, but it's still a milestone. From this point on, the economy is on its own.
Now, some consumers are hitting their limits. Restaurant chains and some food manufacturers are reporting sliding sales or slowing growth that they attribute to consumers’ inability—or refusal—to pay prices that are in some cases a third higher than prepandemic times.
....U.S. fast-food traffic declined 3.5% in the first three months of this year compared with the same period in 2023, according to market-research firm Revenue Management Solutions. U.S. grocery sales of food and beverages fell 2% by volume for the 52 weeks ended April 20 compared with the year-ago period, according to NielsenIQ.
This might be true—but only for food suppliers who greedily pushed prices up well beyond the pace of inflation. Here's the overall story:
Since the start of the pandemic, food prices have kept pace with blue-collar wage growth almost perfectly. Both groceries and restaurant food have grown about half a percent more than wages.
So there's nothing special to be ticked off about except in the case of multinational chains and food companies that decided to test the limits of consumer patience by raising prices until they finally got pushback. Well guess what? If that's your strategy, then eventually you're going to get pushback. Duh. That was the whole point.
In any case, the food giants who followed this strategy apparently have no plans to do the obvious thing and just lower prices a bit. Instead they intend to continue trying to trick customers into paying more for less:
McDonald’s and Starbucks plan to launch more promotions and communicate them more clearly to consumers.... Van de Put said Mondelez will introduce new, smaller multipacks for Clif Bar, for example, with 10 energy bars instead of 12 inside, to offer the bars at a lower price. Kellanova CEO Steve Cahillane said the company is offering more deals and adjusting their timing throughout the month, promoting large pack sizes at the beginning of the month, when consumers have the most cash on hand, and smaller ones toward the end of the month.
They’re tired of growing up with forever wars, with no healthcare, with crumbling infrastructure. Young people have every right to demand better from their leaders. It’s their job to. pic.twitter.com/aCqrVLZESi
— Rep. Jamaal Bowman Ed.D. (@JamaalBowmanNY) May 3, 2024
Just stop it. Joe Biden ended the Afghanistan war and cut American drone strikes nearly to zero. The US is not currently fighting any major wars and in 2022, for the first time in decades, reported no civilian deaths due to US combat.
Health insurance coverage has steadily increased among the young for the past decade:
And infrastructure is not "crumbling" by any stretch of rhetoric. Even the always dour American Society of Civil Engineers says as much: its most recent report gives US infrastructure its highest grade in more than a quarter of a century.¹ Spending on infrastructure has increased by a quarter since 2000:
There is a relentless drumbeat of claims on both sides of the aisle that America is falling apart at the seams and _________ has it worse than ever in living memory. But it's just not true. Wages are high for every demographic group you can name; life satisfaction is steady; unemployment is low; drug abuse overall is down; our educational system is good; poverty is declining; we have more entrepreneurs than any country in the world by a wide margin; democracy is alive and well; our economy is the envy of the world; social welfare spending is generous; and a future of driverless cars, artificial intelligence, medical revolutions, and abundant energy is practically on our doorsteps. Even our demographic problems are about the least bad of any advanced economy—thanks, in part, to our supposed problem of too much illegal immigration.
Everyone has personal problems. Every country has national problems. The fact that we have problems is completely normal. But honestly, our problems right now are about as mild as they've been in our entire history.
¹Their 2021 report gave infrastructure a grade of C-. By ACSE standards this is roughly an A+.
A reader comments on generational views of Israel:
I see three generational views. My parents, who see Israel as it was in the 1960s and 1970s: constantly at risk of annihilation. Then there's my generation, that sees Israel as a strong democratic island in a sea of totalitarian neighbors. And the younger generation, that sees Israel as an oppressor.
What makes the Israel-Palestinian conflict so intractable is that both sides view themselves as besieged minorities fighting for their lives against implacable foes. And they're both right. Israel has fought since its beginning against the entire Arab world, which surrounds them and is massively larger. But in the specific fight of Palestinians against Israel, it's the Palestinians who are overwhelmed by a larger and far more powerful enemy.
Even in theory, I'm no longer able to conceive of a plausible resolution. The West Bank is now too carved up to support a Palestinian state, which means a two-state solution is effectively impossible. And a one-state solution is intolerable to both sides. The status quo is abhorrent—one of the few things everyone agrees on—but it's all we have.
LA Times culture critic Mary McNamara is oddly angry about the fact that Ozempic can sometimes make women more fertile. I say "oddly" because this is just one of the hundreds of side effects of popular drugs and no one even knows if it's very common. Most of the evidence so far is from TikTok, and research is ongoing.
Conditions that predominantly affect men also receive more attention and funding than those that affect women: Despite ranking fifth in lethality among cancers, for instance, ovarian cancer comes 12th in terms of the resources devoted to it.
I get a little tired of this stuff. Ovarian cancer has a high death rate, but it's also uncommon and thus has only a small number of deaths. It ranks around 14th in actual deaths, so 12th in resources is about what you'd expect.
Besides, why cherry pick ovarian cancer when there's a far more obvious comparison available? The two most common cancers, prostate cancer and breast cancer, are nearly identical. They both produce about 300,000 new cases and 40,000 deaths per year. But breast cancer receives more than twice the funding of prostate cancer and about a thousand times more publicity.
The other evidence of bias against women is equally thin. McNamara links to a study suggesting that illnesses that mostly affect women get less funding, but this turns out to be based largely on things like mental illness and migraines, which affect women only modestly more than men. In any case, six of the eight most burdensome diseases affect mostly women, while five of the eight most funded diseases affect mostly women. That's not a big difference.
I wouldn't bring this up except that it's all too common. We've become far too insistent that the medical industry must be unfair to women and minorities just because it has been historically. So writers keep lazily googling and linking to the same few studies, most of which are either low quality or don't say what activists think they say. Biases surely remain in health care, but they're nowhere near as widespread as a lot of people seem to believe. Tuskegee ended more than 50 years ago. Black maternal mortality is unlikely to be a result of racism. Women are not excluded from clinical research studies. Medical students don't have lots of false racial misconceptions. Depression, breast cancer, and other "women's diseases" get tons of funding. Medicare doesn't cover Viagra.
I understand the desire to stay focused on bias and mistreatment in health care, but we shouldn't do it at the expense of promoting outdated and discredited narratives that have long since become little more than urban legends.
Opinion about the Gaza protests at college campuses obviously differs between Muslims and Jews and between Republicans and Democrats. But the key difference is this one:
The experience of older Americans was shaped by an era in which Israel was repeatedly attacked by Arab states (and nonstates) and was forced to defend itself against relentless Palestinian terrorism. It may have since become a brutal, paranoid country, but oldsters understand why it's become that way and therefore retain some sympathy for Israel.
Younger Americans have experienced none of that. They've grown up almost exclusively in the Netanyahu era, during which Israel blockaded Gaza; built up the West Bank in a way deliberately intended to eliminate any possibility of a Palestinian state; and kept Palestinians under harsh military occupation. Palestinians have been (relatively) peaceful over the past 20 years but Israel has nonetheless treated them viciously and oppressively for seemingly little reason.
Of course, old people eventually die, and Israel shows no signs of changing its ways. In another 20 years there will be almost no one left who remembers anything good about the country.
