Category: Uncategorized

Charlie is not a happy cat. He wounded his back leg somehow, so we took him to the vet and got him an antibiotic shot, but of course recovery also includes a cone to keep him from licking the spot. The regular cone was too big, so we got him this stylish Darth Vader cone instead. He is unimpressed with it. As usual, the lack of peripheral vision unnerves him, so he skulks around very slowly these days.

But it probably won't be for long. His sore spot is visibly better already, so it will probably only be a few more days.

On an annual basis, the United States supplies about 12% of Israel's military budget. That's the equivalent of topping up the US military budget by $100 billion per year.

TikTok and Instagram get all the attention, but YouTube remains by far the most popular social media app among American teens:

On YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, Hispanic teens report using them "almost constantly" at rates more than three time higher than white teens. Among teens, generally speaking, social media is most heavily used by Hispanics, girls, and low-income households.

How are our family farms doing? The USDA's annual survey reports good news:

As in previous years, the median total income of all U.S. family farm households ($95,418) was greater in 2022 than the median income of all U.S. households ($74,580). The median total household income for all family farms in 2022 increased from $92,239 in 2021.

Not bad! But now take a look at this table, which shows farm income by race:

The median family farmer, no matter their race, reports negative farm income. They make money almost exclusively from non-farm work.

Now, this varies substantially by farm size. Farm income is negative for small farms and about $45,000 for medium size farms. That's still not much. Only at midsize farms does income reach $130,000, and it goes up from there.

Still, for the majority of family farmers, the actual farm itself is at best a break-even operation. I wonder why they bother?

The New York Times presents us today with this chart showing congressional retirements compared to the past couple of election cycles:

It looks like everything is perfectly normal this year. Both Democratic and Republican retirements are right on track with their 2022 levels.

Ho ho ho:

Congress has approved legislation that would prevent any president from withdrawing the United States from NATO without approval from the Senate or an Act of Congress.

The measure, spearheaded by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), was included in the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which passed out of the House on Thursday and is expected to be signed by President Biden.

Republicans might all bow and scrape to Donald Trump in public, but even they have their limits. Trump keeps talking about pulling out of NATO, and they want to nip that in the bud while they have a Democratic president willing to sign it. It's a big middle finger to the Donald.

Today Mother Jones re-upped an interview from 2021 with Dorothy Brown, a law professor at Emory University who argues that the US tax code is rigged against Black people. The example she gives has to do with the so-called "marriage penalty," which in some cases makes taxes higher for married couples than if they had stayed unmarried and paid separate individual taxes:

When Congress passed the joint return, they set the stage for the marriage bonus/penalty to exist. Single-wage-earner couples, who are most likely to be white, get a tax cut when they marry, and equal-earning couples, who are most likely to be Black, pay the marriage penalty. The key is which couples are likely to be single-wage-earner households and which are likely to be co-equal earners. Black Americans need two earners to make ends meet because the labor market doesn’t compensate Black Americans the way it does white Americans.

This is not the whole story. Brown is right that among married couples, Black families are more likely to have two earners than white families, by 91% to 68%. This makes tax penalties larger and more likely for Black families. According to the Tax Policy Center:

Among those with penalties, relative to white couples, Black couples paid less in dollars ($1,804 versus $2,091) but paid more as a share of income (1.8 percent versus 1.4 percent).

This is not a huge difference. Moreover, it doesn't take into account the fact that Black women marry at much lower rates than white women. If you look at all families, it's Black families that are less likely to have two earners:

It's true that there's a slightly bigger penalty for getting married among Black couples compared to white couples, but if you look at all families it's Black taxpayers who come out ahead. Overall, there's not much evidence here of a racial bias in the tax code.

POSTSCRIPT: This is an example of doing a deep dive into some aspect of life and discovering a disparate impact on Black and white people. But while this might be a reason to change things, it doesn't necessarily show evidence of any racial animus. It took 50 years for anyone to notice this, and it's unlikely in the extreme that anyone in Congress in 1969 had the slightest idea that the creation of a new tax schedule would have any racial impact at all.

Do I have any readers under 30? This chart made the rounds today and I'm confused:

I don't know how accurate this is, but I've seen plenty of charts like it. Here's what I don't get.

It makes sense that online introductions have gone up. But that much? People still go to college, they go to work, and they go to bars. They still have family, friends, and neighbors. But those modes of introduction have dropped to almost nothing. Why?

Is it because online dating is so hugely superior that no one is willing to risk any other method now? Have we gotten so woke that no one dares make an in-person advance these days? Are you just more likely to hit it off with someone you meet online compared to meeting IRL? Thoughts?

For the record, I wish the authors would distinguish between meeting someone at an online dating site and meeting someone during some other kind of online activity. These are very different things to casually lump together.

Here's my sorta-monthly look at how Joe Biden is polling compared to our last two presidents:

Biden has dipped recently and is no longer equal to Obama and Trump at this point in their presidencies. But the differences are still at the noise level. We have not yet seen the whites of their eyes.

Here's a look at recent gasoline prices:

There's really nothing to see. When we started driving less at the start of the pandemic, that reduced demand for gasoline and prices went down. At the start of the Ukraine war supplies of gasoline cratered and prices went up. Aside from that, gasoline has been pretty steadily selling for around $3-3.50 a gallon for the past five years.

Supply and demand: Not just a good idea. It's the law.