Cats, charts, and politics
This is a cute little house jutting out over the Seine. I guess the passage under the house is sort of like having an attached garage: just tie up your boat and take the elevator directly up to your living room. It's got an elevator, doesn't it?
Punchbowl reports today about a bill that trades a Republican tax cut for a Democratic increase in the Child Tax Credit:
The Wyden-Smith tax bill is in deep trouble. The Senate Finance Committee’s top Republican, Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho, told GOP colleagues privately on Wednesday that he doesn’t want to pass a tax bill this year, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the conversation.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told Republicans at the lunch that he hopes they’ll back Crapo’s position on the tax bill.... Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) also spoke up against the tax bill and its child tax credit expansion during the lunch, according to two sources.
Republicans are a strange bunch these days. Last year the Senate passed a budget nearly on time with two-thirds of Senate Republicans joining in. But House Republicans revolted, finally relenting only a couple of days ago.
The tax bill is just the opposite. It sailed through the House with 80% of Republicans voting for it. In the Senate, something like 0% of Republicans are on board.
How is it that House and Senate Republicans can be so wildly at odds? It's like they're hardly even the same party these days.
Sales of existing homes rose sharply in February, up 9.5% from January:
Prices broke a yearlong slide, rising 1.6% from January.
Surgeons in Boston have transplanted a kidney from a genetically engineered pig into an ailing 62-year-old man, the first procedure of its kind. If successful, the breakthrough offers hope to hundreds of thousands of Americans whose kidneys have failed.
I'm personally looking forward to new eyes from a genetically engineered hawk and a new nose from a genetically engineered bloodhound. Someday.
Total factor productivity is, roughly, the increase in productivity due to technological progress. The BLS reported today that it rose 0.7% in 2023:
This is right at the average of the past five years and slightly below the average since 2000. In other words, kind of meh.
I have a feeling that we're in a period like the '40s and the '80s right now, where there's been a lot of technological progress but it hasn't quite turned into productivity. It was pent up in the '40s by the Great Depression and World War II and in the '80s by the time it took to truly integrate the PC revolution into business practices. Eventually, in the '50s and the '90s, the pent-up change broke through and we saw some real progress.
Maybe we're still a few years away from that. I don't know. But my instinct tells me that AI, communications, biotech, energy production, and a few other things have been gaining steam and will soon turn into serious progress on the ground. Just a guess, though.
The Republican Study Committee—which includes nearly every Republican in Congress—released its latest budget proposal today. It's getting a lot of attention on Twitter because it includes cuts to Social Security even though Republicans have spent the past year angrily denying Democratic claims that they plan to cut Social Security.
But that's not what struck me. After browsing through it, it's clear that it's just a recitation of greatest hits:
Old timers will recognize most of these things as reliable warhorses in Paul Ryan's old budget proposals. In other words, the GOP isn't Donald Trump's party in any meaningful sense of the word. It's the same party it's been for decades, with the same old tired proposals.
POSTSCRIPT: There's some new claptrap in the budget too. Times change, after all. There's elimination of the Inflation Reduction Act, for example, and lots of anti-woke stuff. There's a whole section called "Oppose Socialistic Overregulation Related to the COVID-19 Pandemic." And a few lines about eliminating any last dregs of student loan forgiveness.
But mostly it's just the same old stuff.
Somebody help me out here. The Washington Post reports that in order to avoid posting a $454 million bond in his business fraud case, Donald Trump could file for bankruptcy:
As Donald Trump faces dwindling options to pay off a massive fine imposed as a result of losing a fraud case in New York, financial experts say filing for bankruptcy would provide one clear way out of his financial jam.
....Some of the people in Trump’s orbit think filing for bankruptcy makes financial sense — even if it could be politically problematic. “What is happening to him and his businesses right now is exactly why the bankruptcy code exists,” said one of the people.
I am not a bankruptcy lawyer, but I thought the reason the bankruptcy code existed was to provide a method of orderly liquidation for people who are, um, bankrupt. As in, liabilities greater than their assets and no plausible prospect of that changing.
But Trump is nowhere near that. His net worth is in the billions. The fact that he doesn't feel like selling property to pay a fine is not a justification for bankruptcy, is it? What am I missing here?
In other, completely unrelated news, the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump's Truth Social scam will soon net him a payday of $3.5 billion. Just thought I'd throw that out there.
Julian Assange's extradition hearing in London has been ongoing for weeks with seemingly no end in sight. Today the Wall Street Journal reports that the US is considering a plea deal that would eliminate the 18 espionage charges against him, leaving only a single charge of computer hacking:
If prosecutors allow Assange to plead to a U.S. charge of mishandling classified documents—something his lawyers have floated as a possibility—it would be a misdemeanor offense. Under such a deal, Assange potentially could enter that plea remotely, without setting foot in the U.S. The time he has spent behind bars in London would count toward any U.S. sentence, and he would likely be free to leave prison shortly after any deal was concluded.
This would be the right thing to do. Fred Kaplan describes a bit of the history here:
In 2019, the Department of Justice issued a single-count indictment against Assange, charging him—under a completely different statute—with conspiring to break into a computer containing classified information. The evidence was mountainous that he not only encouraged but instructed people with security clearances and a desire to leak secrets precisely how to tap into codewords and compartments to which they did not have legitimate access.
This charge was probably reasonable. The other 18 charges, however, were solely about obtaining and disseminating classified documents—something that ordinary journalists do all the time without repercussions. Just because Assange doesn't work for the New York Times doesn't mean he should be treated any differently.
Limiting the prosecution to the single charge of hacking makes sense. And since Assange has already spent five years in prison, it also makes sense not to impose any more time on him. Whether you like Assange personally or not, this has all gone on quite long enough.
Last month I took a picture of a globular cluster catalogued as M5. I wasn't able to do a great job with it, however, and thought I'd give it another try sometime. A week ago I was out in the desert again, but M5 was too low in the sky to image properly. Pretty much everything else was also below the horizon.
But there was one thing that wasn't: M3, a different globular cluster near the Big Dipper. So that's what I imaged. I cut my exposure time to 30 seconds and ended up with 672 usable frames over six hours.
So did this improve things? It did not. The final image was no better than the image of M5, and in the end I only used about a hundred frames. I did get a little bit more color than I did with M5, but that might be only because M3 is inherently more colorful.
I suspect there's only so much you can do with a globular cluster. They're stars, so they're bright and just don't need a lot of exposure time. I may do another one in the future, but probably not. I still find them kind of boring.
The EPA announced new tailpipe emissions standards today. The headline impact is that the new standards will spur sales of electric vehicles, but they'll also cut air pollutants substantially:
And here are the new rules for CO2 emissions between now and 2032:
This is all from the text of the final rule, which is 1,181 pages long if you're looking for some light afternoon reading.