Author: Kevin Drum

This is a kid descending from a tree in Square Louis-XVI, a small park just a few hundred feet from our apartment in Paris. He didn't do anything while he was up the tree—or perhaps he failed at whatever he was hoping to do—and eventually he shinnied down.

The Wall Street Journal points out today that our ongoing yield curve inversion is getting worse and worse:

Judging from this, we were already due for a natural recession to start sometime in the first half of 2023. Then, a few months ago, the Fed started jacking up interest rates, which will put downward pressure on the economy at about the same time. The Fed could respond to this double disaster by lowering interest rates—which it will—but of course it will be a year too late for that.

We are so fucked. I sure hope I'm wrong about all this.

NOTE: Normally investors demand higher interest rates for longer-term bonds in order to protect themselves against unexpected inflation and Fed rate increases. For example, if the yield on a 10-year bond is 5% and the yield on a 2-year bond is 3%, the yield curve is 5% - 3%, or +2%. This is normal

Sometimes, however, investors are so convinced that near-term prospects are poor—i.e., a recession is coming—that they expect the Fed to fight it by lowering short-term rates. To protect against this they demand super-high rates for short-term bonds. When this happens you get a situation like we have right now: 10-year yields of 3.68%, 2-year yields of 4.42%, and an inverted yield curve of -0.74%.

Traffic fatalities have increased 15% since 2013. But the increase hasn't been evenly spread:

Since 2013 urban fatalities have grown a whopping 46% more than rural fatalities even though urban miles driven are up only about 10% more than rural miles driven.

Why? The question here is not why there are more urban fatalities. In fact, that hasn't always been true. The question is why the growth of urban fatalities vs. rural fatalities was nearly zero from 2006-12 and then suddenly began to skyrocket starting in 2013.

This is a bulk carrier chugging west out of LA/Long Beach Harbor. It is skirting Santa Catalina Island, which is just off the frame to the right.

Two weeks ago I posted a chart showing that Republicans had won the House popular vote by 5%. There were still votes yet to count, however, so this was just an interim estimate.

Since then 6 million votes have been counted and there are hardly any left to be tallied. As expected, Democrats have done well in the late vote counts, winning 65% of those 6 million votes. Here's the final tally:

Republicans won 51.5% of the two-party vote compared to 48.5% for Democrats. That's a difference of 3.1%.

In the end, then, this turned out not to be a massive loss for Democrats after all. But it was still a substantial one. Overall, the American public showed a decided preference for Republican views this year.

The naivete of the LA Times editorial board is stunning:

Here are two heartening things that happened in the past few weeks: the passage of Measure ULA, which will provide hundreds of millions of dollars annually to build affordable housing and prevent homelessness, and the election of Karen Bass, a smart, experienced leader, as the next mayor of Los Angeles.

....Although Bass, as a candidate, never took a position on the ULA measure, it will be the greatest gift she could get as she takes office....According to a just-released survey, city voters have given the mayor-elect a clear mandate to do whatever is necessary to succeed at the most daunting task she faces — substantially reducing homelessness in a city where 42,000 people were unhoused at the last count earlier this year.

Bass never took a position on ULA because she's a smart, experienced leader who knows perfectly well that it's useless. This is because the voters of Los Angeles didn't give her a "clear mandate to do whatever is necessary" to clean up homelessness or build affordable housing.

What they gave her was a clear mandate to do anything she wants as long as it's someplace else. They may have told a survey taker that they were willing to have a homeless shelter in their neighborhood, but that's laughably idle. The only question that would have meant anything is Are you willing to have a homeless shelter next door? And even that wouldn't mean much. It's a survey, people!

The truth is that ULA is more a problem than an opportunity for Bass. Los Angeles has a weak mayor system that gives her very little authority to do anything about homelessness. What's more, ULA funding is distributed by the LA Housing Department and overseen by a special 15-person committee. The mayor appoints some of these people, but that's about it. Long story short, voters think Bass has the power to address homelessness but in reality she has very little.

Here's what it would take to address homelessness in LA. First, you need money. That's done. Second, you need the mayor to present a new statute to the city council that essentially gives her sole and absolute power to approve and fund housing and homeless shelters anywhere she wants. Third, LA needs a mayor willing to serve only one term, since any mayor who built the kind of shelters the city needs—with the kind of rules that would actually attract the homeless—would be signing their own death warrant.

This statute would also have to wind its way through court, where it would most likely be struck down. But you never know! Maybe the courts are tired of this stuff too and would deem it constitutional.

In any case, that's what it would take: money and the power to use it. It's the second thing that no mayor has ever had, which is why LA has such a pitiful record of fighting homelessness.

Years ago I promised myself that I would never buy another HP printer. This is not because of any problem with printing. They print just fine. The problem is—

Well, for some reason I did buy another HP printer, so let me show you. A couple of days ago Marian asked me to take a look at the status screen:

Huh. I've never seen that before. So I hopped over to Control Panel:

That wasn't much help, so I launched the HP Smart app:

"Estimated supply needs"—i.e., ink cartridges—are grayed out. But we don't print much, so I didn't think that was a problem. After looking around a bit I found the account button and logged in:

I've been suspended! It turns out my credit card had been canceled and I forgot about it. But my HP printer refuses to print if it doesn't have my credit card on file. Why? Because I had signed up for HP's Instant Ink program.

That was annoying, so I clicked the button to cancel my subscription.

Shazam! My ink cartridges—which I've already paid for—will no longer work. I will have to go out and buy brand new cartridges.

I'm sure this was all in the fine print when I initially signed up for Instant Ink, but somehow I must have missed it. Someday I'll go back and check the thousand words of agate type to find out.

In any case, I chickened out and re-upped my subscription.

With credit card in hand, HP is now willing to inform me that my cartridges are nearly 100% full. If I cancel Instant Ink in the future I will lose this entire set of cartridges plus a second set of cartridges that I also have. It's probably not worth it. HP has me neatly tied up.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the reason I promised never to buy an HP printer again. I don't remember why I broke that promise, but this time I'll say it for sure: I'll never buy an HP printer again.

This is just a quick reminder:

The first big rate increase from the Fed was in May, and they didn't start pushing through 0.75% increases until June. Since it takes roughly a year for rate increases to feed through into the broader economy and bring down inflation, the current round of increases will start to take effect around May of next year. Given a few other factors, however, I'd put it at around February or so.

In other words, everything that's happened until now has been unrelated to the Fed's actions. It all would have happened anyway. The Fed hasn't been "fighting inflation," it's been working to choke off economic growth in 2023.

John Scalzi has taken up one of the growing practices of the Twitter cognoscenti:

Honestly life on Twitter has gotten much better since I switched to DGAF blocking. Be mildly annoying to me? That's a block. Look at me wrong? Blockeroonies. Like a post from a racist shitbag and I see it? Blocktown, population you. It's glorious.

— John Scalzi (@scalzi) November 26, 2022

For those of you as out of touch as I am, DGAF means "Don't Give a Fuck," which in turn means just what you think it does. Blocking someone on Twitter is no longer something to ponder over or feel guilty about. Just do it. You will feel much better if you ruthlessly block every human being who irks you even slightly.

But there's an alternative! I don't block assholes, I mute them. This is because I get a kick out of the idea that they're going to waste huge amounts of time screaming into the ether, not realizing that I don't hear a single one of their dimwitted insults. And if they do realize it, they're powerless to do anything about it.

Conversely, the advantage of blocking over muting is that it's public. Your victim knows he's been tossed out of the house.

So what does your preference say about your personality? Do you prefer to be above board and simply punch your prey in the mouth? Or do you prefer to exhaust them by secretly making them run in endless circles without ever knowing it? Tough choice.

NOTE: I don't actually mute all that many people. Twitter morons don't bother me that much, and sometimes they amuse me. But then again, my audience is nowhere near as big as Scalzi's.

Gyles Brandreth, the queen's biographer, passes along the latest scuttlebutt about her final days:

I had heard that the Queen had a form of myeloma — bone marrow cancer — which would explain her tiredness and weight loss and those 'mobility issues' we were often told about during the last year or so of her life. The most common symptom of myeloma is bone pain, especially in the pelvis and lower back, and multiple myeloma is a disease that often affects the elderly.

Currently, there is no known cure, but treatment — including medicines to help regulate the immune system and drugs that help prevent the weakening of the bones — can reduce the severity of its symptoms and extend the patient's survival by months or two to three years.

This is all true, though I confess I never quite got the straight story on those bone drugs. I took them for several years, and when I was through with them I asked if my bones were now fully recovered, totally healthy, etc. The answer was yes, but I'd have bone lesions forever.

But the lesions don't matter? Yes, they matter. Then I'm not fully recovered? Your bones are completely healthy. But....

And that's about where I left things eventually. These days my bones are fine except for whichever bone I injured tumbling off a low berm a couple of weeks ago. I really have to stop doing that. Nothing was broken, but it sure hurts.

As for multiple myeloma, I recommend we rename it The Royal Disease. It has a ring to it.