Kevin Drum

Donald Trump keeps saying that he's the guy who reduced the price of insulin, not Joe Biden, and he repeated this claim yesterday. What's up with that?

It's a bit like claiming that Henri Poincaré really invented the Theory of Relativity, not that Einstein fellow.¹ It isn't true, but there's a little something there. Here's what Trump did about insulin prices:

• In January 2020 Trump indicated that he wanted CMS to reduce insulin prices under Medicare.
• In March, "under President Trump's leadership," CMS announced a voluntary pilot program that reduced insulin copays to $35.
• In July Trump signed an executive order that reduced insulin copays for certain low-income patients on Medicaid.
• In January 2021 the CMS pilot program for Medicare started.

So that's it. Trump did talk about insulin copays, and he started up a test program with lower copays. But nothing more. It was Joe Biden who permanently lowered insulin copays under the Inflation Reduction Act.

¹Edmund Whittaker published a history of electricity and the aether in 1953 that famously said "Einstein published a paper which set forth the relativity theory of Poincaré and Lorentz with some amplifications."

Now, it's true that the problems of physics in 1905 were very widely known, and it's also true that Poincaré nibbled around the edges of a solution. In a sense, you can say that Einstein merely explained the conceptual premise of empirical facts well known to Poincaré. Needless to say, though, it's those conceptual innovations that were of prime importance.

I think I'll just make this astronomy week. The second picture I took last Friday was another crack at the Milky Way, but it didn't turn out even as good as my first try. There's a long and fascinating story behind this.

I had decided to try a different location in hopes of finding an interesting foreground for the Milky Way. My choice was a place called Arch Rock in Joshua Tree National Park, but things didn't work out.

First, every one of my maps failed. As I was driving through Twentynine Palms my Garmin GPS suddenly stopped working. It just turned off and nothing I could do made it come back on. My phone map only showed detail a little way into the park, and my tablet showed nothing because it relies on the phone for an internet connection and the phone was out of cell range.

As a result, I took the wrong turnoff and, long story short, I never made it to Arch Rock. Instead I settled on a place called Jumbo Rocks, which is exactly what it sounds like. I finally found a place to set up, but it turned out I had chosen the only spot within miles that had a group of night-owl campers with a ton of lights they kept on until 3 am. So I couldn't place my tripod where I wanted to, which would have had an interesting rock and a Joshua tree in the foreground.

It didn't matter anyway. I chose a different spot and hauled out my little portable equatorial mount, but after squinting for a while to find the North Star I realized it wasn't working. I had gotten it out a couple of weeks ago to reacquaint myself with its workings, but apparently I left it on the whole time. So the batteries were drained.

Then, as if that weren't enough, there was a massive glow of light to the southeast, which is where the Milky Way is. What was it? Indio, I guess, which I thought was too far away to interfere much. Wrong.

In the end, all I could do was take a few short exposures at a high ISO and with lots of light interference. Oh, and around 2 am my Garmin suddenly came back to life. Go figure.

I'll try again next month with fresh batteries and yet another location. I'm not sure where that will be, though. I need to do a little more sleuthing.

Seriously?

One of the fastest-spreading corporate buzzwords in recent years, “double-click” is both polarizing and pervasive. Particularly on Wall Street, the figure of speech is now being used as a shorthand for examining something more fully, akin to double-clicking to see a computer folder’s contents. Some, like Roy, find the idiom obnoxious or twee. Double-click defenders say the phrase encourages deeper thinking.

Double clicking has been around for nearly 40 years. Why is it just now being made into a buzzword? And what about Apple users? Do they use it too, only vaguely understanding why?

Matt Yglesias has a bit of an odd cri de couer today about Joe Biden's mental state. Except that it's actually more about Matt's mental state:

I really don’t enjoy being wrong. But looking back on Biden’s disastrous debate with the benefit of some time away, I have to admit that I was wrong.... I’ve felt sick to my stomach since the debate, and I get why key decision-makers don’t want to admit they were also wrong.... I feel, personally, hurt and embarrassed about how this played out. I think Biden made me look foolish, and I don’t like it. But it is true that most people were not fooled and will not necessarily react in the same way.

I don't think this garment rending is really called for. First off, it's not true that most people thought all along that Biden was too old. YouGov polled this question a few months ago when the Hur report came out and the result was that 80% of Republicans said he was too old but only 20% of Democrats agreed. It's obvious that most of the believers were motivated not by evidence but by partisan attacks that had been fanned by Fox News for years, regardless of Biden's condition.

By analogy, it's not right to say that most people think the 2020 election was stolen. Or that most people think the economy is terrible. Most Republicans think the election was stolen and the economy is terrible. There's never been any reason to pay any attention to this. It's just partisan hackery at work.

In any case, the Hur report turned out to be obviously exaggerated, and a few weeks later Biden gave a good performance in his State of the Union Address. At that point there was no compelling reason to think Biden had anything other than physical problems.

In the few months since then, evidence started to gather about Biden's condition, but there was still little reason to take it too seriously. Republicans had been impugning Biden's mental health long before it was merited, so their attacks were meaningless. And Biden's public appearances were more or less OK. It really was the debate that changed things.

So I see no big reason to be embarrassed by defending Biden up through last week. The evidence of his fitness for the job was debatable but perfectly reasonable. The only reason to be embarrassed is if (a) you've been attacking Biden forever, long before he deteriorated, (b) you knew about his recent decline and covered it up, or (c) you're continuing to defend Biden even after the debate.

As John Maynard Keynes said (maybe), "When the facts change, I change my mind." On June 27 the facts changed. There's no sin in changing your mind only after that.

Apparently the Republican National Committee, under the direction of Comrade Trump, has decided to do away with long, boring fights over the party platform at this year's Republican Convention. I actually think this is a good idea, since party platforms are meaningless these days anyway. But what will replace it?

The answer is: a platform handed down by Trump and prefaced by a 20-point listicle written by Trump himself. Here it is:

I note that this list contains no mention of abortion or mifepristone or IVF; no mention of energy efficient appliances; no mention of NATO; no mention of China; no mention of Russia; no mention of vaccines; no mention of Fauci; no mention of crypto; no mention of health care; no mention of climate change or the environment in any way; no mention of the national debt; no mention of education; no mention of technology even in passing; and no mention of sharks. I guess that stuff is all either too boring for Trump or else too divisive for a guy who's suddenly trying to appear more reasonable.

The full platform does mention some of this stuff, though not in much detail since it's only ten pages long. Still, the listicle is clearly what Republicans want everyone to pay attention to, and I have to say that its lack of any reference to abortion is quite a bold change for a Republican statement of principles. Hell, even the longer platform document barely mentions abortion, saying only that Republicans "stand for life," oppose late term abortions, and think states should be in control. It's remarkable what the MAGA base will let Trump get away with. I suppose it's because he's more or less admitted that he's lying for political purposes.

UPDATE: Sorry, but I was initially under the impression that the listicle was the whole platform. It's not. It's just the preface to a ten-page platform that covers more topics. I've corrected the text.

I was out in the desert Friday night and took this picture of the Trifid Nebula, one of the best nebulas in the night sky. However, it's only really visible in the summer, so it was now or never (until next year, anyway).

My initial integration of the images was disappointing. The problem was that my focuser kept trying to kill itself. It first tried to commit suicide via software, but I managed to revive it via some Task Manager tough love. Then it tried to commit suicide via strangulation, when its USB cable got caught on something during a meridian flip and came apart. I figured the meridian flip shouldn't affect the focus, though, so I kept on going. But I guess I was wrong. I had to throw out all the images from after midnight or so.

(What's a meridian flip? An equatorial mount rotates to track the sky, and eventually it gets to a point where the counterweight is above the telescope and the telescope is in danger of banging into the tripod legs. So it flips 180 degrees on both axes and keeps going. It was while doing this that the focuser cable got stuck.)

In the end, I had only about 20 images left, but the finished stack looks OK. The detail seems a little weak, which might be for several reasons. The Trifid is low in the sky, which means a denser atmosphere and more haze. I was in a new spot, which has a higher altitude than my usual location but is slightly less dark. And I used a broadband filter. A narrowband would have been better for the main part of the Trifid (in red), which is an emission nebula, but would have blocked the blue part, which is a reflection nebula. So I compromised.

Note that it's the Trifid Nebula, not the Triffid. It means "three lobed," even though you can see that it really has four lobes. I suppose only three were visible in 18th century telescopes when it was discovered.

The Trifid is cataloged as M20, and I haven't cropped this image as much as I normally would. That's because I wanted to include the image of M21, a star cluster in the upper left. The Trifid is one of the closest star-forming regions to Earth, a mere 4,100 light years away.

Some time ago I became fatally suspicious of the word trope. Technically there's nothing wrong with it, but in practice it's used exclusively to imply someone has said something vaguely offensive without having the receipts. Here's the latest:

Three Columbia University administrators have been removed from their posts after sending text messages that “disturbingly touched on ancient antisemitic tropes” during a forum about Jewish issues in May, according to a letter sent by Columbia officials to the university community on Monday.

Touched on! And not just tropes, but ancient tropes! Needless to say, these alleged tropes go undefined.

I took a look at these text messages a couple of weeks ago and came away believing there wasn't much there. Since then the entire text conversation has been released, but it doesn't change things. During a panel discussion about antisemitism, the three deans in question shared private texts that you could fairly describe as snarky or irreverent. But that's about it.

To the Columbia administration, however, which was under siege from outraged alumni demanding that the three deans (plus a fourth) be fired immediately, the texts conveyed "a lack of seriousness about the concerns and the experiences of members of our Jewish community."

This is precisely backward. What the deans did was fail to show unconditional earnestness and obeisance toward every last grievance lodged by a particular community, no matter how ridiculous or overstated. This is apparently the price of admission to progressive society these days.

This whole thing is bonkers. The grievances of specific communities deserve to be given fair consideration, but they don't automatically demand absolute deference. In this case, the deans privately exhibited moderate skepticism toward a few of the claims from the panelists, some of it expressed a little bit caustically. None of it could reasonably be called antisemitic, and at most they deserve a verbal reprimand. Instead they're all out of jobs.

A few weeks ago there was a story about a senior citizens center that had won a grant for a new elevator. Great! But on Twitter it was an object of scorn: Why were we so delighted about a $365,000 elevator that would have cost half that in Europe and been installed twice as fast?

I couldn't confirm any of that, so I skipped past without writing about it. But on my recent vacation I did notice that Austria seemed to have an awful lot of elevators and they all had an odd sameness of appearance. It turns out I wasn't mistaken. There are a lot of elevators in Europe and they are pretty standardized. Stephen Smith explains:

A basic four-stop elevator costs about $158,000 in New York City, compared with about $36,000 in Switzerland. A six-stop model will set you back more than three times as much in Pennsylvania as in Belgium. Maintenance, repairs, and inspections all cost more in America too.

The first thing to notice about our elevators is that, like many things in America, they are huge. New elevators outside the U.S. are typically sized to accommodate a person in a large wheelchair plus somebody standing behind them. American elevators have ballooned to about twice that size, driven by a drip-drip-drip of regulations, each motivated by a slightly different concern — first accessibility, then accommodation for ambulance stretchers, then even bigger stretchers.

The U.S. and Canada have also marooned themselves on a regulatory island for elevator parts and designs.... Not only do we have our own elevator code, but individual U.S. jurisdictions modify it further. More accurate and efficient electronic testing practices, for example, are still mostly viewed with suspicion by the nearly 100 separate boards and jurisdictions that regulate elevator safety in North America (the exact number in the regulatory patchwork is hard to nail down exactly).

....Architects have dreamed of modular construction for decades, where entire rooms are built in factories and then shipped on flatbed trucks to sites, for lower costs and greater precision. But we can’t even put elevators together in factories in America, because the elevator union’s contract forbids even basic forms of preassembly and prefabrication that have become standard in elevators in the rest of the world. The union and manufacturers bicker over which holes can be drilled in a factory and which must be drilled (or redrilled) on site.

So there you have it. Elevators are cheap and standardized in Europe, so they're everywhere. They're expensive and customized in America, so we have fewer of them. Apparently the ADA doesn't require elevators in low-rise apartment buildings, and a lot of them go without because it's too expensive and too much of a hassle.

Is this a metaphor for American construction in general? I'm not sure I'd go that far. But you could talk me into it.

Historically, the Black unemployment rate has always been higher than the white unemployment rate—and the difference spikes during recessions as Black workers are the first to be let go. However, the gap has steadily declined over the years. After peaking in 1983 at above 10%, it's come down to just over 2% more recently. If this keeps up, the difference will be zero in another decade or two.

Hum de hum. You may know that a number of studies have demonstrated that higher intelligence is correlated with left-wing political beliefs. And that might be so. But I've always been a bit skeptical because (a) it seems unlikely, and (b) maybe what's really going on is that smart people tend to go to college and it's actually college education that's correlated with lefty beliefs.

A new study from a grad student at the University of Minnesota tries to tease this apart. Here's the basic result:

This chart shows how much political beliefs shift leftward in response to an IQ increase of one standard deviation (15 points). The raw result is 0.54, which is—a lot? A little? It's hard to say because the paper doesn't explain the scale they use to measure political orientation.¹ In any case, if you control for income and education about a third of the effect goes away: the new result is 0.38 and is no longer statistically significant.

Now let's take a look at a different table:

This is the correlation between political beliefs and educational attainment (EA). The raw result is 0.176, which is about a third of the raw effect of IQ. That fits with the first result.

I have no idea if the authors' methods are reliable. For technical reasons, their measures of intelligence and educational attainment are based on clusters of genetic markers from other studies: One cluster is associated with intelligence and the other is associated with education. So a big part of the correlations depends on whether these genetic clusters are reliable in the first place.

There's also the fact that once you control for education you (barely) lose statistical significance for the effect of IQ. This may not be a big deal, but it's not especially promising either.

In any case, if the genetic clusters are reliable and the methodology is sound, it suggests that intelligence really does have an impact on political beliefs regardless of educational level. Which I still find odd. I know that we lefties want to say "Duh, of course smart people are more liberal," but that's really not persuasive. It's very hard to conceive of why a high IQ should make you more likely to support abortion or social welfare or a smaller defense budget. But maybe that's just a failure of imagination on my part.

¹Their scale is a "summed composite" of five other scales, which I'd guess are each scales of 0-1. That makes the composite a scale of 0-5, so an increase of 0.54 is about 10%. However, this is just a wild guess on my part. I have no clue why the authors present a bunch of numbers without explaining what they mean.