Kevin Drum

The Washington Post has a story about yet another school that uses Yondr pouches to prevent cell phone use during the day:

Administrators said some of the changes among students have surprised them. Group vaping sessions where students would coordinate to meet in restrooms to smoke prohibited electronic cigarettes? Finished. Using AirDrop to share inappropriate photos during class? No more. Social-media-fueled arguments during school? Over.

Interesting! But what was more interesting was the anecdotal evidence that after a little while even the students themselves liked it:

Multiple students have told him they feel like they are making more friends. His gut also tells him that “the angsty intensity kids are living under” — he mimicked a person with head down, lost in a screen — has diminished.

Students confirmed that the disappearance of cellphones has, in turn, stimulated something old-fashioned.... When the pouches first arrived, “everyone was miserable and no one was talking to each other,” he said. Now he can hear the difference at lunch and in the hallways. It’s louder. Students are chatting more “face to face, in person,” Gabe said. “And that’s a crucial part of growing up.”

Some students hadn’t realized how much their phones diverted their focus....It turns out that being separated from your phone for the day isn’t as big a deal as some students feared. “People thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to miss so much,’” Nicole said. “You don’t miss anything. Nothing important is happening outside school.”

I have consistently argued that the evidence of cell phones causing serious problems among teens is pretty thin. That's what the evidence says. But I believe this even though my gut feeling agrees entirely with the anti-phone crowd.¹ This article confirms my gut feeling, but of course "we talk more" is hardly evidence that cell phones are genuinely causing depression or suicide or brain rewiring among teens.

In any case, the entire piece is worth reading. Aside from anything else, I continue to believe that the argument for banning cell phones during the school day is very convincing. Whatever else they may or may not do, they're certainly a distraction for kids who are supposed to be paying attention in class. And there's certainly no harm in teens having an oasis away from social media for a few hours every day.

¹I mostly attribute my gut feeling to the fact that I'm 65 and didn't grow up with cell phones. I suspect that this is responsible for a lot of anti-phone sentiment.

Productivity growth sucked in Q1. It was up 0.3% from the previous quarter, an annualized rate of only 1.2%

This is an Nvidia NVL72 Blackwell compute node:

Give or take a bit, it has the compute power of a human brain and is likely to be priced at about $200,000.

Seven years ago I thought it would take until 2040 to have something like this for a few thousand dollars. It's obvious now that it will be more like 2030 or so. Maybe sooner. Welcome to the future.

For now, I'll stick to 2033 as my best guess for full AGI at some kind of reasonable price (< $1 million). I'm not sure I even want to guess at when we'll have AGI at an unreasonable price. Five years? That sounds crackers, even to me, but....

Here's an update on aid shipments into Gaza:

COGAT hasn't been super reliable about providing daily updates, so it's hard to compare the UN numbers with Israeli numbers. On average, though, the Israeli figures are about 20% higher than the UN figures.

The number of aid trucks getting through is up by about a fifth since the middle of April, and several hundred aid trucks have been allowed into northern Gaza, where the situation is the worst. In addition, World Central Kitchen is once again operating, and the pier being constructed by the US military is a few weeks from completion. The UN secretary general says "incremental progress" has been made in getting more food and medical aid into Gaza.

Santa Catalina island from the air.

Chris Hayes has a question:

Point taken, but you may be surprised to know that it's not quite as true as Chris thinks—not in the US, anyway. Students occupied plenty of buildings during the protests of the '60s, but have done it only sporadically since then—usually ending with police being called in and arrests made.

In 2001 SJP occupied a building at UC Berkeley, interrupting a midterm exam. Police were called. SJP did it again in 2002 and police were called again. In both cases, dozens of protesters were arrested.

In 2008, protesters at New School occupied a faculty building. Police were called but things ended peacefully. A few months later they occupied another building. Riot police were called and the students were arrested.

In 2009 protesters occupied the food court at NYU. Police were called and the protesters were dispersed after a raid by campus security.

Also in 2009, UC students began protests over tuition hikes. Protesters took over buildings on some campuses, and in all cases were forced out by police.

Between 2011 and 2018 there were brief building occupations at CSU East Bay, Occidental College, and Ole Miss. During the same period UC Davis students had a habit of periodically semi-occupying the administration building for various reasons, but it was always very polite and they never closed down the building. Police roamed the hallways, disciplinary action was sometimes taken, and eventually everyone got bored and left.

In 2018 students at Seton Hall overstayed their permit to occupy the administration building but eventually left peacefully.

There may be other examples, but these were all I could find over the past few decades. So it's not really all that common, and police are often called in if things last more than a couple of days. What's happening to today's Gaza protesters is extremely normal.

JOLTS data came out today, and as usual I try to show something different about it each month. Here are hires vs. job openings since the end of the Great Recession:

In the past, there were more hires than job openings. Presumably this means that companies filled lots of jobs from personal recommendations without ever formally opening them.

That changed in 2014 and the number of hires per job opening steadily declined. This trend was interrupted by the pandemic, but afterward the number of job openings skyrocketed while hires remained pretty steady. You remember this period: it was allegedly when COVID had decimated the workforce and businesses were tearing their hair out trying to hire enough people.

But that was never really the case. Now that we have a longer look, it's obvious that hires have been relatively steady for over a decade. What's unusual is that for some reason employers are advertising way more openings than they used to. Why?

There's little evidence that this is because there were genuinely twice as many job openings in 2022 as there were in 2019. The idea is absurd. So why the steady increase in job openings per actual job? And why the huge spike in 2022?

I don't know, but I suspect it has something to do with the way companies hire and is unrelated to skills or labor force retrenchment or anything like that. Skills haven't changed much—certainly not over the course of three years—and labor force participation is normal.

Three possibilities occur to me. The first is that it has something to do with the increasing use of online recruitment and hiring. The second is that HR departments have gotten more forceful about insisting on formal job searches. The third is that there really were more job openings and a large number of them were filled off the books with illegal immigrants.

My guess? It's a little bit of the third but mostly the first. But I don't understand the mechanism. If online hiring is the culprit, how did it change things?

It's remarkable how the Gaza demonstrations on college campuses have become almost an exact mirror of the events they're protesting. One side spent a long time provoking, finally went a step too far, and the other, more powerful side, then massively overreacted. Art imitates life, or something like that.

Data for both "felonious killings" and the total number of sworn police officers comes from the FBI. It does not include deaths from illness or accidental deaths.

Here's the definition of fascism, very slightly altered, given by Wikipedia. There's no firm consensus about what makes a regime fascist, but this is as good as any:

Fascism is an authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and/or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.

What country in the world does this most remind you of? Why is it never used to describe them?