Over the past year, for no good reason aside from chronic tiredness, I've been reading less and instead watching a lot of old and new TV. Here's what I've watched in (very) rough order from best to worst. The shows in the bottom half of the list mostly suffered from getting a little tiresome toward the end.
Liked a lot:
Deadwood
Ozark
Boardwalk Empire
Travelers
Rome
Orange is the New Black
Bridgerton
Money Heist
Perry Mason
Lost in Space
True Detective
The Wire
Bosch
The Boys
Liked:
Game of Thrones
Umbrella Academy
Mad Men
Broadchurch
Clarkson's Farm
Night Sky
Queen's Gambit
Watchmen
Chernobyl
Painkiller (thanks entirely to Uzo Aduba)
Bodyguard
Halt and Catch Fire (first three seasons)
The OA
Not bad:
The Sopranos
Behind Her Eyes
The Peripheral
Russian Doll
Succession
The Leftovers
Mare of Easttown
The Expanse
Bodies
Meh:
Band of Brothers
Beef
Wheel of Time
The Mandalorian
1899
In From the Cold
Counterpart
Squid Game
The English (though it had an odd charm)
The Magicians
No good:
Archive 81
Lupin
His Dark Materials
The Book of Boba Fett
Man in the High Castle
Jack Ryan
The Witcher
Dead to Me
This list doesn't include shows that I gave up on after watching a few episodes, including: Station Eleven, Ballers, Entourage, Barry, The Pacific, The Deuce, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry Sanders, Breaking Bad, The Diplomat, Shadow and Bone, Mr. Robot, Schitt's Creek, Veep, Emily in Paris, and Silicon Valley.
The New York Times has some pretty maps today showing how shipping through the Suez Canal is diverting around the Cape of Good Hope. They also have a chart showing how much this costs:
That doesn't look like an especially huge increase to me, but the chart was sourced to Freightos Data so I clicked around to see what they could tell me. Here are recent shipping costs:
The interesting thing is that although the biggest increases came in shipping diverted from the Suez, everything else surged too. The cost of shipping from China to the US west coast, which involves no canals at all, has nearly doubled. Shipment costs to the east coast have more than doubled. Even the short voyage from Europe to South America has gone up.
I don't quite get this. I suppose that delays due to avoiding the Suez might be soaking up additional ships, which would have a knock-on effect everywhere, but that doesn't seem like enough to double rates.
But who knows? Spot shipping rates are notoriously volatile, so maybe this is just par for the course.
POSTSCRIPT: Freightos data is specifically for ocean freight only, which makes me wonder why they say a "key port" on the US west coast is Chicago. The last time I looked it was neither an ocean port nor on the west coast.
In an essay about a hometown friend of his who recently passed away, Nick Kristof says, "There isn’t a good term for the bundle of pathologies that have afflicted working-class Americans like Bill."
Then, to drive home the point that working-class Americans are in trouble, he adds this:
One gauge of how many Americans are struggling is that average weekly nonsupervisory wages, a metric for blue-collar earnings, were lower in the first half of 2023 than they had been (adjusted for inflation) in the first half of 1969. That’s not a misprint.
It's not a misprint, but it's not right, either. The problem is that Kristof used CPI as his measure of inflation. That's not surprising since it's the most common measure, and I use it myself all the time. But only for recent history and over short periods.
Over longer periods CPI is badly off. Without diving into a bunch of niggling details, the best bet for long periods that go back far into the past is PCE inflation. Here's what blue-collar earnings look like:
Either way, blue-collar workers lost a lot of ground in the Reagan-Bush years. But they've recovered from that, and if you calculate inflation correctly blue collar wages are up 27% since 1969. That's still no great shakes, but it's way different from "lower than 1969."
For some reason, lefty sports fans have taken to blaming the demise of Sports Illustrated on greed run amok. And sure, owners of companies tend to be greedy. But SI's circulation peaked 30 years ago and has been declining ever since. In 2018 it went biweekly and in 2020 it went monthly. Total annual circulation has fallen off a cliff:
The reason is hardly a mystery. When SI started up, it was one of the few sources of real sports reporting. TV broadcast a smallish number of sports events and that was that.
But then came ESPN and then the web, which combined to saturate the public with sports and sports commentary. There wasn't a whole lot of room left for week-old reporting that was stale by the time it landed in your mailbox.
And of course that's all against a backdrop of general interest magazines dying off. Life and Look died long ago. Newsweek is dead. TV Guide is still around, but it's a shadow of itself. Reader's Digest filed for bankruptcy twice and is now mostly online. Playboy died four years ago. National Geographic's circulation has dropped by 85% and was recently pulled off newsstands. Time magazine is still around but its readership is down 70% from its peak.
So that's that. Magazines are in trouble generally and the sports commentary market is wildly oversaturated. There's not much more to it than that.
To stop the deadly drugs that are poisoning our people, I will deploy the U.S. Navy to impose a full fentanyl blockade on the waters of our region.…The drug cartels are waging war on America, and we will destroy those cartels!
Pretty much nothing. Seizures of fentanyl by Border Control stayed low and flat through the end of his presidency. It wasn't until Joe Biden had been in office for a year that the numbers finally increased significantly.
As usual, Trump is full of hot air. "We are going to stop the inflow of drugs into New Hampshire and into our country 100%," he said in 2016. But interdictions didn't rise. Funding to reduce the supply of opioids was cut. He promised to designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorists but then backed down. He held a bunch of press conferences and promised a "war" on fentanyl, but in the end he hardly did a thing. What makes anyone believe he'd do anything a second time around?
For people who say that Americans care about the level of prices, not the inflation rate, note that cumulative inflation under Biden so far is close to the number under Reagan. Which is why Reagan lost the 84 election in a landslide. Oh, wait pic.twitter.com/KhThKZOZ3A
I get that Krugman is being careful here, talking about the cumulative price level rather than the inflation rate, but it's still misleading. It also happens to be a pet peeve of mine, so here's a chart showing the inflation rate under Reagan and Biden:
The difference is obvious. Under Reagan, the inflation rate peaked before he entered office and then declined steadily. Nobody blamed him for inflation, but they did give him credit for three years of consecutive decline amounting to a whopping 10 percentage points.
Biden's term has been completely different: inflation peaked a year into his presidency and has been under 4% for only a few months. People do blame him for sparking inflation, and the slowdown is still too recent for him to get much credit for the recent 5-point decline.
The only reason I bring this up is because of an annoyingly common media criticism: Why does [my guy] not get the same credit as [their guy] even though [economic indicator] is the same for both?
The answer is tediously obvious: even if some economic indicator is identical between two presidents, it makes a big difference whether it's going up or down. A year into their presidencies, Reagan and Biden were both presiding over 8% inflation. But for Reagan that was a big drop while for Biden it was a big increase.
POSTSCRIPT: A different question is whether Reagan should have gotten credit for declining inflation and whether Biden should have gotten blame for rising inflation. The answer is pretty simple: Reagan had nothing to do with slowing inflation (it was all Paul Volcker and tight monetary policy) and Biden had only a little to do with rising inflation (it was the pandemic and government stimulus—almost all of which predated Biden). Neither man should have gotten much credit or blame.
POSTSCRIPT 2: It's instructive to take a look at another metric: the unemployment rate. Here it is:
In this case, unemployment rose sharply under Reagan and dropped only late in his first term. By contrast, it came down steadily under Biden and has been at a very low level for two years already.
And yet, the same dynamic seems to have played out: Reagan got credit for bringing down unemployment (which was still above 7% when he ran for reelection) while Biden seems to have gotten almost no credit for historically low unemployment.
What's going on here? My longstanding guess has been simple: Reagan ran for office on a very loud and persistent platform that promoted supply-side economics and tax cuts as a cure for the economy. When the economy did finally improve, the conservative press crowed and everyone was primed to believe that Reagan's policies were responsible.
Democrats in general—and Biden specifically—don't do this. Nor does the liberal press play along with partisan pretenses nearly as much. As a result, the public isn't primed to believe that there was any plan in the first place, so if and when the economy improves Democrats get little credit.
It's a continuing curiosity that, generally speaking, it seems like the greatest fear of illegal immigration comes from states that are nowhere near the southern border. It turns out that Pew Research has state-by-state figures, so I went ahead and plotted it:
The four border states are California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Their population share of illegal immigrants is currently 4.8%. For the rest of the country it's 2.7%. In both, the number has been declining for 15 years.
This only goes through 2021, and it will be a while before we see what effect the current border surge has had. But in 2021 the country was 1.7 million below its 2007 peak, so 2022 and 2023 are unlikely to set any kind of record.
Wow while rambling about January 6th, a confused Trump blames Nikki Haley for January 6th and says she was in charge of security for the Capitol pic.twitter.com/uw6FzJsqD9
The risk that inflation could spike again is growing as disruption to one of the world’s main trade routes persists.
....“I do think that there is a level of complacency in the financial markets in respect of the inflation outlook,” UBS CEO Sergio Ermotti said Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, citing higher shipping costs caused by assaults in the Red Sea, which were likely to translate into higher costs for goods. “I can’t imagine inflation won’t suffer from that,” he said.
Well, I can imagine it. You know why? Because a drought has caused a 40% reduction in traffic and a 40% reduction in cargo weight through the Panama Canal over the past year. Inflation dropped like a stone anyway.
The Suez Canal carries more trade than the Panama Canal, but not that much more. It just isn't as big a deal as people think to divert cargo ships around the capes. The net cost is a little higher (longer journey but no canal tolls) and cargo is delayed for a couple of weeks. That's it.
The LA Times tells us today that we all forgot our social skills during the pandemic:
As companies increasingly recall workers to the office, employees and managers alike are finding that the pandemic made us all a little rusty with in-person conduct. Co-workers are too loud at their desks. People are on their phones during meetings. Shaking hands is no longer a given. Small talk at networking events is ... awkward.
Bosses’ solution to this stilted behavior? Charm school.
More than 6 in 10 companies will send their employees to office etiquette classes by 2024, according to a July survey of 1,548 business leaders by ResumeBuilder.com.
Oh come on. Does anyone seriously believe that we all forgot routine social behavior while we were working from home? Likewise, does anyone believe that 60% of all companies plan to send their workers to business etiquette classes this year? Here's what ResumeBuilder.com says these classes are going to teach people:
Uh huh. This is almost certainly just another press release survey of no value whatsoever. And even if it did have value, it tells us nothing about whether this changed during the pandemic. I can't think of anything that would, but here's my best try:
Google's Ngram viewer says that mentions of "business etiquette" peaked in 2011 and have been going down ever since. It only goes through 2019, so I used Google Trends to get more recent data. It confirms the downward slope, both before and after the pandemic.¹
Why are business writers such suckers for this kind of press release stuff? It's becoming one of my pet peeves. Do you really need to hang a 2,000 word story on this kind of nonsense?
¹Results are the same if you search for "office etiquette."
