Cats, charts, and politics
The Producer Price Index is an hors d'oeuvre served the day before the latest CPI print is released. It measures inflation in the inputs to the production of goods. In December the PPI came in at 2.7%:
Over the past two years the PPI has averaged 2.21%, almost exactly the same as Trump's pre-pandemic average of 2.26%.
Yuval Levin talks responds to reports that DOGE will be helmed by billionaire tech executives:
The case for the DOGE, as it is taking shape, is basically a case for elite expertise dressed up as a case against bureaucracy. And as such, it is remarkably unconcerned with the challenges of legitimacy that are so central to populism in our politics. It’s being structured as if we haven’t just lived through two decades of increasingly intense populist conspiracism about billionaires using their influence to pull the strings of American government. Without intending it, perhaps without quite seeing it, the DOGE is setting itself up to be the subject of endless conspiracies to come, on all sides of our politics.
....They might as well just call this thing the Trilateral Commission and start talking in hushed tones about a new world order.
Note that Yuval Levin is a conservative. Elon Musk is not making a lot of friends these days.
This is just a periodic reminder that Elon Musk spent months desperately trying not to buy Twitter, and only did so because eventually it became obvious that a judge would force him to make good on the cockamamie contract he signed with the Twitter board in a short-lived fit of hubris.¹ So when you hear Musk talking about all his noble reasons for buying Twitter, it's just garden variety BS. He bought it because he lost a court battle to worm his way out of his agreement. That's it.
¹Or something.
AccuWeather has upped their cost estimate yet again for the LA fires. We're now at $250 billion.
I've been curious off and on about the story of how Silicon Valley turned against Democrats over the past few years. Jeremiah Johnson describes it as the fault of Democrats who broke an implied bargain:
The big concern that emerged in 2016 was misinformation in the form of fake news.... When Donald Trump won, Facebook faced blistering criticism that it didn’t do enough to combat that kind of misinformation. [Mark] Zuckerberg had to do tours of media and Congress, he promised to do better, and Meta built a lot of systems that endure to this day.
....I’ve watched a lot of Zuckerberg’s public appearances in the last year, and as best I can tell he’s genuinely exasperated with how the last few years have played out. I’d summarize his vibe as “I did almost everything you asked and got precisely zero credit, so screw you guys”. This is part of a larger storyline in Silicon Valley where the tech elite view Democrats as having ‘violated the deal’.
....The ‘deal’ was something like this — you mostly leave us alone to build our companies, and we’ll make the country richer and support you politically. This worked for a number of presidential cycles, but the deal started to fall apart as progressives started to villainize the big tech companies. They accused them of allowing misinformation, they railed against billionaires, antitrust crusaders sought to prosecute and break up several large tech companies, and all of the sudden a significant wing of the Democratic party was now treating the tech industry like an enemy. That’s the origin of the new Tech Right.
Alex Heath more or less agrees:
I've been talking to people in and around Meta about Zuckerberg's MAGA-fueled changes. They all describe Meta’s relationship with the Biden admin as quite hostile.
And of course Zuckerberg himself said the same thing to Joe Rogan last week:
Mark Zuckerberg claimed that Biden officials would “scream” and “curse” at his executives at Meta over censoring Facebook’s users, as he continues to take on a more MAGA-friendly persona following Donald Trump’s win.... “They pushed us super hard to take down things that honestly were true.”
....“When it went from ‘two weeks to flatten the curve,’ in the beginning it was, ‘There weren’t enough masks,’ ‘masks aren’t that important,’ to then it’s ‘Oh, no you have to wear a mask.’ Everything was shifting around. It just became really difficult to kind of follow,” he said.
....“They wanted us to take down this meme of Leonardo DiCaprio.... We said, ‘No, we’re not gonna take down humor and satire. We’re not gonna take down things that are true.’”
The Meta CEO said that he’d incurred the administration’s full wrath after that. “Biden gave some statement at some point,” Zuckerberg continued, “where he’s just like, ‘These guys are killing people.’ And I don’t know—then all these different agencies and branches of government just started investigating and coming after our company. It was brutal.”
Now, this all makes sense. Liberal censoriousness can be really annoying, and more than a few people have turned against the left because they just got tired of being constantly hectored.
More accurately, though, it would make sense if it weren't for the fact that conservatives have been hammering tech companies for years in exactly the same way. They've conducted investigation after investigation about how social media companies are biased against conservatives and demanding that they knock it off.
The difference, I suppose, is that during the height of the COVID vaccination misinformation campaign Democrats happened to be in charge, not Republicans. And Zuckerberg has obviously swallowed the right-wing meme that the CDC and others had no idea what they were doing and therefore had no business telling anyone else how to do things. More importantly, he's also bought into the conspiracy theory that government actions against Meta were plain and simple revenge:
"Then all these different agencies and branches of government just started investigating and coming after our company."
It's pretty common to get paranoid like this, especially among people who aren't especially mature, so it's no big surprise that Zuckerberg feels this way. So why not take a flyer on Trump? Zuckerberg probably sees it like this: If you do everything liberals want, it just makes them hungry for more. They're never satisfied. But Trump? Sure, you have to do what he wants, but if you do he's your best friend for life.
Maybe. I'm not entirely convinced by this, though. In the end, I think Josh Marshall may have the best answer: Silicon Valley companies got big and rich. And when you get big and rich, you almost automatically become friendlier toward Republicans:
The major technology platforms became mature businesses at vast scales; in so doing they butted up against the regulatory purview of the national government; and with the former leading to the latter they shifted toward a more conventionally anti-regulatory politics. A lot of it is really that simple.
....This was a period in which the focus on wealth inequality and the light tax touch applied to Big Tech became a big deal; people became more aware of the role of devices creating a generation of device addicts; then there was the 2016 election and scrutiny of the way social platforms were vehicles for foreign and domestic election subversion. And then there was anti-trust, a genuine existential threat to the whole word of Silicon Valley or at least the big companies which dominated it.
....Big picture it was inevitable that Silicon Valley would get a lot more involved in Washington, DC and just about as inevitable that Silicon Valley’s corporate power would align more and more with Republicans, or at least in ways that were less and less distinct from other industries.
It's all fun and games when you're a feisty new startup and everyone is cheering you on. It's a different story when you become bigger than General Motors and you have to play by the same rules as General Motors. Democrats were in charge when that rule change finally broke out and became serious business, which made it very appealing to take a look at the other side to see if maybe they treated gigantic companies more indulgently. The answer was straightforward: yes, Republicans have always been friendlier to big corporations than Democrats.
All that was left was to come up with an excuse that didn't look too money grubbing. The obvious option was to blame it on lefty wokeness in one form or another, and that's what many of them have done.
Some of these players might truly be annoyed by wokeness. There's no law that says tech CEOs have to be socially super liberal. But I'm willing to bet that it's mostly a way of assuaging their guilt over becoming standard issue money-grubbing industrial titans.
Self interest is the biggest impulse in politics. Never, ever doubt that. The second biggest is building an intellectual superstructure that justifies your self interest as truly being in the national interest. That's what's happening in much of Silicon Valley.
Some top notch work here from the Irvine Department of Public Works.
This is actually even weirder than it looks. These signs are placed outside a street that exits a neighborhood and dead ends. You always have to turn either left or right regardless of what's going on. Also, nothing is closed down. There's no need to detour in the first place. And if you turn right you head straight into the roadwork that presumably motivated these signs.
So . . . wtf?
The New York Times reports today that childhood vaccination rates have dropped in the post-COVID era. That's true, but the news is both better and worse than they suggest:
The news is better because the Times chart has a short y-axis that exaggerates the reported decline of 2-3 percentage points.
But the news is worse because the Times focuses on a few individual vaccines instead of the full 7-series recommended for newborns (which immunizes against 11 diseases). The coverage rate for that has dropped four points and is now a full eight points below our longtime target.
As for why this has happened, a different Times graphic tells most of the story:
The conservative jihad against the COVID vaccine spilled over into everything. Red states are vaccinating their kids less, and that probably accounts for most of the overall decline.
The list of Trump walkbacks so far:
That last one is brand new and comes from J.D. Vance, who says Trump will only pardon insurrectionists who didn't commit violence. But everyone who was convicted of using violence was sent to prison, and Trump originally said he would release everyone in prison. Now J.D. Vance says they're going to have to serve out their sentences. Sad.
UPDATE: Wait! There's more:
Sorry. It's hard to keep up.
Here is the Pacific Palisades fire a few minutes after it started:
Here it is about an hour later.
This is what 60-80 mph winds funneled through a canyon will do.
Jon Sindreu notes that long-term bond rates have surged higher over the past month:
What accounts for this?
Some analysts attribute this to the possibility of Donald Trump’s promised tariffs derailing the global economy and leading to a jump in inflation, while his tax cuts bloat budget deficits further.... The S&P 500 and the Stoxx Europe 600 ended Friday down 1.5%, and 0.8%, respectively.
The stock market initially cheered Trump's election, but within a few weeks reality began to set in:
There's a lot of nervousness about Trump, and it's spilling over to the rest of the world too. It just goes to show that you should be careful what you wish for.