Cats, charts, and politics
Inflation in July remained high at 5.4%, largely due to huge increases in the cost of gasoline and used cars. However, the increase from the previous month was much lower than in June:
The inflation rate for food remained pretty reasonable at 2.6%. Whatever people may say, a trip to the supermarket just isn't a lot more expensive than it was a year ago.
Via the New York Times, here are the increased odds of dying from COVID-19 if you remain unvaccinated:
In Georgia, the unvaccinated are 87 times more likely to die than the vaccinated. In North Dakota the number is 5x. For the nation as a whole, it's probably around 40x.
This is Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the four major papal basilicas in Rome and the largest church in Rome dedicated to the Virgin Mary. It was right outside my hotel door—or, I guess I should say, the rear of the church was right outside my hotel door. For some reason that I can't recall, I was too lazy to walk around to the front and take a picture, even though I had to do this to go inside.
(Which I did. I have several interior pictures to share over the coming months.)
In any case, which side of the church to photograph is sort of a crapshoot. From the front, you can't see the domes and there's no obelisk in the piazza. On the other hand, from the rear you can't see the bell tower or Fuga's famous loggia. As with so many things, the only way to encompass the whole thing is by helicopter, which I am routinely without.
This image was the product of one of my periodic bouts of messing around in Photoshop. Mostly this produces dreck, but occasionally I like the results. This one I like.
However, for those of you who think this is stupid, the original photo is below it.
Tyler Cowen takes a look at the housing market . . .
. . . and concludes that we didn't really have a housing bubble in the early aughts. Prices have now returned to their 2006 height, which suggests that the big price runup was mostly based on fundamentals with just a little bit of bubbly mixed in.
Maybe! Let's take a look at two other things before we decide. First, here's the home price index adjusted for mortgage interest rates, which have declined steadily for the past 20 years:
On average, this represents what people actually have to pay each month, which is more important than the raw house price. As you can see, we aren't yet at the level of 2006.
Second, I've always been sort of addicted to the price-rent ratio as one of the best signs of a housing bubble. Via Calculated Risk, here it is through May of this year:
We're getting close to the 2006 peak, but we're not there yet. (Not through May, anyway.) Still, a price-to-rent ratio this high sure seems kind of bubbly to me, and I wouldn't be surprised if the big spike starting in 2020 is COVID related, not fundamentals related.
So . . . who knows? When you adjust for both inflation and interest rates, we're still below the 2006 bubble peak. On the other hand, over the past 18 months there's been a spike that does look kind of bubbly. If I had to guess, I'd say (a) 2006 was a bubble, though perhaps more driven by fundamentals than we thought at the time; and (b) we weren't in a bubble up through 2020, but we might be in one now.
Of course, the pandemic will end eventually and—presumably—housing pressure will continue to grow until it reaches a point that we start building enough houses to serve the market again. If we do, then house prices will either go down or stabilize. This will depend a lot on whether young buyers continue to lust after houses in urban markets that are likely to stay tight or if they finally give up and start looking at mid-size cities that have more scope for home building.
So what's in the big $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill that Senate Democrats will start working on after today's vote to pass the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill? Here are the basics:
This is only where things are now, and various provisions will certainly be added and dropped from the final bill. DACA, for example, seems unlikely to survive a parliamentary challenge.
Democrats claim that the entire cost of the bill will be paid for, primarily through higher taxes on corporations and the rich. We'll see about that.
My M-protein level spiked upward a bit to 0.57 in my latest test, and normally this would be worrisome. However, I've been off the chemo meds for the past three weeks so I don't think this is surprising. I've started them back up now, and I expect to see a drop next month.
This is a cabbage white butterfly, although it seems to have a bit of yellow on its underside. As far as I know, it neither eats cabbage nor looks like cabbage, so I don't quite know where it got its nickname.
UPDATE: Apparently the name derives from the fact that the worm of the species is an absolute scourge to cabbage plants.
There are two pieces of good news on the COVID-19 front today. First there's this:
Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings received a federal judge’s blessing on Sunday to flout the Florida law that bans companies from demanding proof of vaccination against the coronavirus. It will be the first cruise operator to require every person on board in Florida to be fully vaccinated, in defiance of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), whose office has called the lawsuit “meritless” and the company’s vaccine policy discriminatory.
Thank God. Of all the idiotic, performative anti-vax grandstanding that DeSantis has done, this is arguably the worst. Cruise ships are practically floating petri dishes even in the absence of COVID-19, and if it makes sense to demand vaccination anywhere, this is it.
Cruise ships are private enterprises, and it goes against all common sense and against Republican orthodoxy to subject them to a government regulation explicitly designed to make them less safe. DeSantis should be ashamed of himself.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will require that all service members get a coronavirus vaccine by mid-September....The mandate is an acknowledgment of rising coronavirus rates across the country as the delta variant of the virus spreads, and the way in which the coronavirus can wreak chaos in military units. It comes after months of senior defense officials cajoling service members to consult with their doctors and get the vaccine. The Biden administration has directed agencies throughout the federal government to devise plans for requiring workers to get vaccinated.
Good for Biden and good for Austin. We mandate vaccinations of all kinds for all sorts of different reasons. There's no reason not to mandate this one.
The sixth edition of the IPCC climate report is out, and this time there's no shilly-shallying around with "medium confidence" and "most likely" and so forth. Temps are going up; humans are the cause; and the results will be catastrophic if we don't do anything about it. Here's the latest hockey-stick chart:
The whole report is a million pages long and I haven't even begun to dive into it. However, the parts I've looked at so far are clear enough: we need to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions right now or else face a future of more wildfires, more heat episodes, more rain, more floods, and more drought. In fact, more of everything except cold spells:
More later. In the meantime, you can read the whole thing here.
Welp, this is what we're up against:
Rand Paul today: “It’s time for us to resist. They can’t arrest all of us .. No one should follow the CDC.” He then says he will introduce amendments to defund any govt agency that seeks to enforce CDC guidelines, including schools. pic.twitter.com/PYOQtKDYBN
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 9, 2021