Kevin Drum

I don't have a fourth picture for astronomy week, but this is close. It shows the sun—an astronomical body—setting behind a Joshua tree that's near the location I ended up at for my telescoping last week. Enjoy.

Headline CPI came in at -0.7% in June:

Now can we please cut interest rates? It sure seems like inflation is well under control. Maybe too much under control?

In conventional year-over-year terms, headline inflation in June clocked in at 3.0% and core inflation was 3.3%.

The Guardian describes Donald Trump's latest rally:

It was a standard Trump stump speech, full of evidence-free claims that his 2020 election defeat was fraudulent; baseless accusations that overseas nations were sending to the US “most of their prisoners”; and a laughable assertion that a gathering of supporters numbering in the hundreds was really a crowd of 45,000.

It also touched on the surreal. Biden, he insisted, had raised the price of bacon four-fold. “We don’t eat bacon any more,” Trump said.

This might be the most trivial Trump falsehood ever, but that's sort of the point. He'll literally make up anything.

The price of bacon is up a mere 14% since Trump left office, and if you adjust for wages it's cheaper than when Trump left office. Meanwhile, total bacon production is 13% higher than it was when Trump left office. For better or worse, the American love affair with bacon is far from over.

Why would anyone make up lies as frivolous as this? Because Trump lives in a fantasy world where everything has to be the worst ever in history unless he was personally involved with it. His brain is so badly beyond repair that I suspect he literally can't help himself, and he's surrounded by sycophants who will never confront him with the truth. This is not a man fit to be president of the United States.

Here's the latest hotness on the economy: Desperate fast food chains are being forced to offer cheap meal deals to lure back customers who have abandoned them due to high inflation. Maybe so. But first take a look at this:

This goes through Q1 and it's for all restaurant spending, not just fast food. But conventional wisdom suggests that when times are tight, cheap places do relatively better than upscale places. So this likely overstates the problems of fast food restaurants.

Even at that, spending dipped only slightly more than 1% in the most recent quarter and is still 15% higher than before the pandemic. This doesn't suggest to me that fast food chains are hemorrhaging business in any serious way.  They advertise specials and deals all the time, and sales go up and down slightly all the time—in good times and bad.

I don't see any serious problems here aside from the possibility that maybe they got a little too greedy about raising prices well above inflation and are now paying a slight price. Them's the breaks, folks.

Astronomy week continues! I finished up my most recent shoot around 4 am and had everything packed up and ready to go by 4:30. Then, just as I was getting into my car, I looked north and saw a string of eight or nine stars in an eerily perfect line.

I'm not much of a constellation guy, but I had never heard of a constellation like this. And sure enough, it was moving. It wasn't a constellation, it was a string of Starlink satellites.

I pulled out my camera and tripod, and by a stroke of good luck I got one good picture. This was a four-second exposure, which is not very long, but even so you can see the streaks made by the moving satellites. The bright star near the center is Capella, and according to Stellarium Starlink satellites go by Capella all the time. I don't know how often there's a long, perfect string of them all moving in the same direction, though.

According to YouGov, here's the latest breakdown of how partisans plan to vote:

Since the CNN debate, Trump has gained four points among Republicans while Biden has lost two points among Democrats.

This is a fairly remarkable performance from Democrats. There are two possibilities here. The first is that most of them are like me: Biden could be stuffed and mounted on a wall and I'd still vote for him if the only other choice was Trump. The second is that lots of Democrats are convinced that the debate, as Biden puts it, was just a "bad night." I hope that's not the case, since it would show a remarkable divorce from reality. That debate wasn't just a bad night. It was a complete catastrophe that showed a man who was lost and often incoherent. I wonder how many people refuse to see that?

I'm now one-fourth of the way through my radiation treatment. No ill effects yet, as expected. The worst is yet to come.

I've already warned Marian that I plan to whine endlessly when the pain starts. But maybe I'll give her a break once in a while and whine to you guys instead. Something to look forward to.

Business Insider says human beings are behind the scenes of Tesla's AI-driven cars:

The company relies on a small army of human "data annotators" who continuously improve how the cars drive by reviewing camera footage from thousands of Tesla drivers and teaching the vehicle how to behave like a human driver, like deciding when it's appropriate to use a blinker or identifying a construction cone.

This is nothing unusual. Annotators are key parts of every commercial AI model. But then there's this:

Business Insider has learned that those annotators focus their efforts on two high-profile categories of drivers: Tesla CEO Elon Musk and a select set of "VIP" drivers. BI spoke with over a dozen current and former Tesla employees, all but one who spoke on condition of anonymity, who said images and video clips from Musk's Teslas received meticulous scrutiny, while data from high-profile drivers like YouTubers received "VIP" treatment in identifying and addressing issues with the Full Self-Driving software.

This comes via Atrios, but unlike him I mostly find it kind of funny. Musk is a man so rich he can afford to have an army of annotators to make his drive more pleasant instead of just hiring a chauffeur.

It's all part of Musk's theory of life. He owns an auto company so that he, personally, can have a custom self-driving car. He owns Twitter so that he, personally, can have an extra special megaphone for his political opinions. He owns a rocket company so that he, personally, can someday be emperor of Mars.

I guess there are worse things to do with billions of dollars.

Various reports say that NATO is about to announce that Ukraine is on an "irreversible" course to gain membership just as soon as they get their corruption under control.

So out of an alleged fear of NATO encirclement, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and got (a) Sweden in NATO, (b) Finland in NATO, (c) NATO members finally spending 2% of GDP on defense, and (d) Ukraine on a clear course to join NATO.

Quite the geopolitical genius, Putin is.

Donald Trump today:

We will rebuild our capital city so it is no longer a nightmare of murder and crime.... Right now if you leave Florida — "Oh, let's go darling, let's go look at the Jefferson Memorial" ... and you end up getting shot, mugged, raped.

Uh huh. Washington DC has always been a high-crime city, but as usual, Trump is full of shit:

As of the first quarter of 2024, the violent crime rate in Washington DC is 18% lower than it was when Donald Trump left.