Kevin Drum

A friend of mine told me today that 60 Minutes ran an episode on Sunday about a gap in the border wall near Jacumba Hot Springs. Here's what it looked like:

The implicit question from the 60 Minutes piece is, why can't the government fill this four-foot gap "between the 30-foot steel border fence and rock"? How much can it cost to fill up four feet?

By an odd coincidence, I can explain. Four years ago I drove down to the border to take pictures at sunrise, and I noticed that very gap. It attracted my attention because it made the whole fence seem kind of pointless. To see why, here's the picture I took in 2020. It shows a wider view than 60 Minutes did:

As you can see, it's not a four-foot gap between "fence and rock." The fence stops where this hill starts. There's no fence over the entire hill, and it's pretty obvious that climbing up and down that hill would be easy even if the fence were extended. The only way to close it off is to complete the fence all the way up and over the hill.

Why haven't they done that? Beats me, but I assume that building the fence across steep, rocky terrain is challenging in some non-obvious way.

There are lots of rocky hills like this along the border, some them considerably bigger than this one—but still accessible to anyone willing to do a bit of climbing. With enough money I suppose you could still build a fence over any obstacle along the border, but it wouldn't be easy.

This is Bovard Hall on the USC campus at dusk. It is also Bovard Auditorium and the Bovard Administration Building. Take your pick.

Pew Research released some survey results today about voting. The partisan divides were mostly unsurprising, but there were a couple that were unexpected:

It looks like liberals have lost the battle on voter ID: even 69% of Democrats think it's a good idea.

At the same time, conservatives have lost the battle on felon voting. Even 60% of Republicans think felons ought to be able to vote after they've served their time.

Republicans have become bitterly opposed to vote-by-mail, ironically at the very time that mail voting has become more popular among Republicans than Democrats. It's time to suddenly switch gears, folks, and pretend that Democrats have been taking away your right to vote by mail for years and it's time to fight back.

Greg Ip says today that tariffs haven't reduced "trade links" with China much. But year-end trade figures were released today, and if you look at imports of goods from China it sure looks like they had an impact:

Ip says this is a bit of a mirage because imports from places like Mexico and Vietnam increased, and a lot of those imports consisted of inputs from China. And that seems to be the case:

This only goes through 2022, but it certainly suggests that overall exports from China to the rest of the world didn't suffer any from the Trump tariffs. They just sold stuff to other places, some of which then ended up in the US.

UPDATE: I modified the top chart to include a second line that includes so-called de minimus imports, small packages that aren't tracked and pay no tariffs. There is no firm estimate of the value of de minimus imports from China, but US Customs does track the number of packages. The Coalition for a Prosperous America estimates average package value at roughly $200, which allows us to make a ballpark guess at the total annual value of de minimus imports from China over the past few years.

Los Angeles County spends a lot of money on litigation:

This is a 212% increase from the year before. Most of it goes to settlements and judgments, and there were three gigantic ones last year:

You may have seen reports that Republicans have failed in their attempt to impeach Homeland secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. But it's not really true.

Three Republicans defected to make the vote 215-215. Rep. Blake Brooks then switched his vote to No to make it 214-216, but this was purely a procedural move that allows impeachment to be brought up again tomorrow. If Steve Scalise, who has been getting treatment for multiple myeloma, is back in the chamber, it will pass 216-215.

So hold your applause. This is still a live issue.

UPDATE: Apparently Scalise won't be back tomorrow. Maybe later.

Over at National Review, Kayla Bartsch says shoplifting is rampant:

The Left says retail crime is going down. The truth? Theft has become so pervasive — and ordinary — that retailers have simply stopped reporting it. The well-documented surge in shoplifting in the U.S. has....

Let's just stop right here. Bartsch specifically links "well-documented" to a recent report from the National Retail Federation. Here's what the report actually says about a surge in shoplifting:

On average, retailers reported inventory shrink of 1.6%, which is slightly up from last year and in line with shrink rates in 2019 and 2020.

And here's what NRF reports over the past few years show:

The 2023 NRF report is, in fact, full of alarming news. But the NRF's annual Retail Security Survey is always full of alarming news. The only section of the report with a more moderate tone is the section that presents the actual survey numbers.

Note that this is not a matter of whether retailers report theft. It's a survey. Everyone who participates provides an estimate of both their total shrink and the percentage of shrink due to shoplifting (generally around a third).

I confess that my brain is muddled on this subject. It's wise not to get sucked into moral panics led by the media, but at the same time it does seem as if there are signs of increased shoplifting. However, the survey numbers say there isn't, and other surveys confirm this.

So what's going on? One possibility is that retailers have been locking up more stuff, and that's kept shoplifting rates down. Another possibility is that shoplifting is up in New York City, which gets outsize attention in the national press. A third possibility is that nothing is going on. After all, the NRF's 2022 report suggested that spending on loss prevention had declined after adjusting for inflation.

I dunno. My best guess is that shoplifting is up in some high profile cities but is generally unchanged everywhere else. That's where the evidence seems to point, anyway.

This is a very sociable horse that I met in Colorado. All the other horses ignored me, but this one cantered right up and let me stroke her face. I felt kind of guilty that I didn't have an apple or something to give her.

You probably don't watch much Fox News, do you? If that's the case, you're behind the times. Your impression of Fox News has been formed by folks like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Bill O'Reilly, and so forth. Conservative, sometimes crazy, but basically just political outrage artists.

That's not the Fox News of today. Hannity is still around, and so is Laura Ingraham, though she's been relegated to the 7 pm hour. The other two primetime spots are held down by Jesse Waters and Greg Gutfeld.

Waters and Gutfeld are not conventional TV shouters. They're sophomoric jokesters. Here is Bob Somerby's description of Gutfeld today:

As the program returned from commercial break, a jingle announced the nature of the new segment.... Producers played a brief video clip from "President Poopy Pants," a public figure also described as "the vegetable in chief."

In their homes around the nation, millions of citizens saw a sitting president referred to as "President Poopy Pants." In this moment, we start to see the intellectual and emotional horizons of the 59-year-old man.

Let us repeat the most surprising part of this tableau. This weirdly adolescent 59-year-old man is the nightly host of a primetime American "cable news" program. He assembles a four-member panel each night to help him discuss the news. His panels are larded with low-grade comedians, along with one former professional wrestling heavyweight champion.

This is what Fox News has been morphing into over the past couple of years. Gutfeld, Waters, The Five, and the morning crew have become increasingly juvenile and vacuous, promoting stories like the Taylor Swift conspiracy that even Hannity wouldn't have touched in days gone by.

Despite my endless harangues about how things are better than most people think they are, it's remarkable how much worse things can get even when you believe they've hit their nadir. If Israel wipes out Hamas, it probably won't matter because something worse will spring up in its place. Newt Gingrich was forced to leave politics but eventually got replaced by Donald Trump. Fox News seemed to have hit bottom with the likes of Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson, but after they left we ended up with Gutfeld and Watters.

H.L. Mencken allegedly said you can never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Primetime on Fox News is our best and final proof that he was right.

I wrote this about artificial intelligence in 2017:

Even if Moore’s law slows down or stops, the total power of everything put together—more use of custom microchips, more parallelism, more sophisticated software, and even the possibility of entirely new ways of doing computing—will almost certainly keep growing for many more years.

....We’ve finally built computers with roughly the raw processing power of the human brain—although only at a cost of more than $100 million and with an internal architecture that may or may not work well for emulating the human mind. But in another 10 years, this level of power will likely be available for less than $1 million, and thousands of teams will be testing AI software on a platform that’s actually capable of competing with humans.

The custom microchips turned out to be (for now) Nvidia graphics processors. Increased parallelism takes the form of cloud computing. The software is transformer-based large language models. And the processing power of the human brain is on the order of 10-50 petaflops—far less than $1 million worth of Nvidia's latest chip provided via a cloud network.

I'm just bragging here. Sorry. It's just that at the time I first started writing seriously about artificial intelligence (in 2013) I had to put up with endless pushback to the prospect of AI ever existing, let alone in the near future. The idea that our main problem was raw compute power seemed laughable. But as near as I can tell, my only mistake was being too conservative. Five years ago we didn't have the software for today's chatbots, and it didn't matter since we had nowhere near the compute power to make them work. Today we have both. Progress has been spectacular beyond belief.

This is why I now think true AI will be here around 2030-35 rather than 2040. After decades of disappointment, AI is now exceeding expectations. There's very little reason to think this will slow down anytime soon.