Author: Kevin Drum

Hopper is doing fine. She has grown more accustomed to the cone and is no longer banging into things as she walks around. We've also discovered the easiest way for her to eat while wearing the cone, and she's pretty happy with that.

Hilbert is a whole different story. He is completely nonplussed by events in his house, and apparently he doesn't recognize Hopper at all. Whenever they're close, he hisses and then takes the widest possible path around her. He seems to think that he's been invaded by some alien creature carrying around a book called To Serve Cats. When Hopper shakes her conehead Hilbert jumps a foot in the air and scurries away.

But I guess we should have expected this. A few years ago a friend of ours came to Southern California to pick up a kitten, and afterward he spent a couple of days with us. The kitten was a tiny furball about 10 weeks old and Hilbert was terrified of it. A kitten! But Hilbert spent a good part of the next two days hiding under the bed.

Cowardice, thy name is Hilbert.

This chart has become so depressing I can hardly stand to post it anymore. Our death rate from COVID-19 is nearly three times higher than the next highest country and more than double that of Europe as a whole. Ditto for our case rate. And both are rising at a much faster rate than in Europe.

Is this entirely due to our lower vaccination rate? Or our mask idiocy? Or something else? If you look at excess mortality instead of official COVID data, the US looks fairly normal compared to Europe. Is this all just an artifact of different countries accounting for deaths differently?

We have lots of job openings these days and lots of unemployed workers. So why aren't those jobs being filled? The Wall Street Journal offers up this explanation:

Employers today rely on increasing levels of automation to fill vacancies efficiently, deploying software to do everything from sourcing candidates and managing the application process to scheduling interviews and performing background checks. These systems do the job they are supposed to do. They also exclude more than 10 million workers from hiring discussions, according to a new Harvard Business School study released Saturday.

....Many company leaders—nearly nine out of 10 executives surveyed by Harvard—said they know the software they use to filter applicants prevents them from seeing good candidates. Firms such as Amazon.com Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. said they are studying these tools as well as other hiring methods to understand why they can’t find the workers they need. Some said the technology can be changed to serve them better.

Hmmm. The robots are attacking humanity by interfering with our labor market. Interesting. Here's another view courtesy of labor economist David Autor:

Let’s start with the causes of the current labor shortage. Research on this question is unambiguous: We don’t know what’s going on.

I think I prefer this explanation.

John McWhorter says we should quit arguing about how to teach reading and just accept that we already know perfectly well how to do it:

In a word, phonics....Phonics works better for more children. Project Follow Through, a huge investigation in the late 1960s led by education scholar Siegfried Englemann, taught 75,000 children via the phonics-based Direct Instruction method from kindergarten through third grade at 10 sites nationwide. The results were polio-vaccine-level dramatic. At all 10 sites, 4-year-olds were reading like 8-year-olds, for example.

....However, there is a persistent disconnect between the world of reading science and the world of people teaching children to read. Only 15 percent of programs training elementary-school teachers include actual instruction on how to teach children to read. There remain people who favor the whole word method, or a combination of whole word and phonics, or even no particular “method” at all.

There's a wealth of research that confirms this, but unfortunately reading instruction has become part of the culture wars, with conservatives taking the side of phonics while university education departments tend to favor other methods.

This is unfortunate. Phonics works, and to the extent that you can invent add-ons that are potentially a little bit better it's really not worth the effort. DI-based phonics instruction is so good that we'd be a lot better off simply making it universal since it works well with both poor and affluent children. In addition:

There is a racial angle to this....We have known how to teach Black children, including poor ones, how to read since the Johnson administration: the Direct Instruction method of phonics. In this case, Black children don’t need special materials; districts need incur no extra expenses in purchasing such things. I consider getting Direct Instruction to every Black child in the country a key plank of three in turning the corner on race in America (the other two are ending the War on Drugs and sharply increasing funding and cultural support to vocational education).

Liberals should get on this train. Stop resisting just because conservatives have been pushing this for decades. In this case, they're right.

Poor little Hopper is stuck in a cone for the next ten days:

Around noon yesterday we noticed a long string hanging off her tail. At the base of the string there was a small wound covered in blood. So I headed off to the vet.

Sure enough, she had injured her tail in some way, and then spent the past day or so worrying at it and pulling off a long stretch of skin and tendon. So now she has a bandage on her tail and a cone around her neck. We are crossing our fingers that this is enough. If it's not, and there's nerve death toward the end of her tail, a little piece will have to be amputated.

Hopper is not adjusting well to the cone: she keeps bumping into things like a drunkard, and then getting stuck. We're taking her in today to get the bandage rewrapped, and I'll ask about this. She seems to be getting a little better as she explores the house, but still, I've never quite seen this behavior in a cat with a cone and I wonder if it means there's something off about her eyesight.

Here is a headline and subhead from the New York Times today:

I continue to be stupefied by this. Why are people so convinced that both of these things can't be true at once? A military evacuation of 120,000 people is not a NASA moon landing. It's inherently turbulent, crowded, and desperate. The kinds of things the Times describes are practically the baseline expectation in an evacuation of this size, even if it took two months instead of two weeks.

So yes: rogue flights, crowded tents, hope, and chaos.

And also yes: An enormous number of people rescued with minimal casualties and now on their way to asylum. It really was done about as efficiently as possible.

Here's a picture of Hopper taken with the Nikon Z50 that I rented. It's fine. But there was never any reason to expect much difference between the Z50 and my old Sony for casual snapshots.

Sadly, the Nikon bundle performed poorly on every other dimension. The Nikkor 18-300 zoom lens was pretty sharp in the center at full telephoto, but soft at the edges. That's to be expected with any zoom lens, but the Nikkor was pretty bad. The entire right and left hand quarters of images were quite blurred at 300mm, even when I stopped down to f/11.

That was disappointing, but at least the Z50 made up for it by having a bigger sensor that produced better low-light images. Right? In a word, no. I took picture after picture at different settings, many of them using the same settings I used for night pictures in Rome with the Sony. I took lots of pictures because I had a hard time accepting the results: the Sony's low-light performance was equal to or better than the Nikon. Sharpness was better and, crucially, noise was more controlled. I still have a hard time believing this, but I have a whole pile of images that tell me it's true.

I dunno. The Sony RX10 continues to be a miracle camera. So I'm going to send it in for repair and stick with it. Perhaps someday Sony will produce a newer version, but there's barely even a rumor of if or when that might be, so I'm not going to wait for it.

A new mask study has been getting a lot of attention. It tested thousands of people in Bangladeshi villages and came to two conclusions: (a) masks work, and (b) surgical masks work better than cloth masks. A 28 percentage point increase in surgical mask wearing within a village reduced COVID-19 incidence from 0.76% to 0.67%.

But there was also this odd result:

An increase in mask wearing within a village had zero effect on subjects under the age of 50. The entire effect is for those 50 and older. That deserves a whole lot of attention since it's such an unexpected result. What is it about older age that makes mask wearing so effective?

Generally speaking, I have to confess that I've given up on masks as a way of reducing COVID-19 spread. The people who hate masks are simply never going to give in on this, especially since it's a very public behavior and, it's worth acknowledging, a genuinely annoying one. Some people may not mind masks, but a lot of us, including me, find them uncomfortable.

I don't mind if other people want to continue going after mask policies, but I no longer think they have much chance of working. At this point, our energies are better used on vaccination and nothing else.

The American economy gained 235,000 jobs last month. The unemployment rate declined to 5.2%.

This is obviously a significant slowdown, led by a collapse of growth in government jobs. On the bright side, earnings for blue-collar workers rose at an annualized rate of about 2% after accounting for inflation.

The consensus of analysts is that the slow hiring rate in August was due to the threat of Delta. Maybe so, but I suspect that it also has something to do with the wonky labor market that I mentioned a couple of days ago. I have no evidence for this, so don't take it too seriously, but there sure seems to be something a little weird going on. I don't think this is all due to Delta.

Sen. Joe Manchin has published a manifesto in the Wall Street Journal saying that he won't support the Democrats' $3.5 trillion spending bill because he's worried about its effect on inflation. This is nothing new from Manchin, and it's no less crazy than it's ever been. The spending bill amounts to only $350 billion per year and is mostly paid for, which means that its effect on inflation will be negligible.

Part of the problem here is that everyone, including me, keeps referring to this legislation as a "$3.5 trillion bill," as if its size were the main thing that defines it. But it's not meant as a stimulus bill or a recovery bill or anything like that. It's just a bill that funds a bunch of progressive programs. This means the questions we should be asking about it are less about its raw size and more about which of these programs you support.

There are seven sizeable programs funded by the fill, and if you think its price tag is too high then you should fess up about which ones you would prioritize the highest. For example, here's my rough list:

1. Makes the increased Obamacare subsidies from January's coronavirus bill permanent.
2. Provides universal pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds.
3. Provides funding for long-term care done at home.
4. Provides two years of free community college.
5. Makes the increased child tax credit permanent.
6. Adds dental, hearing, and vision benefits to Medicare.
7. Funds various climate initiatives.

This was done off the top of my head in about a minute, so don't take it too seriously. Roughly speaking, though, if I had to cut programs out of this bill, I'd probably choose the climate stuff, the Medicare benefits, and the child tax credit.

Your priorities might be entirely different, and since #1 is the only one firmly on my list I'd probably be willing to negotiate. The same is true of Democratic lawmakers, including Joe Manchin.

Or so I assume. In any case, Democrats should start talking in terms of programs, and skeptics should start talking in terms of programs they think we should hold off on. Constantly talking about nothing but the $3.5 trillion price tag is pointless.