Cats, charts, and politics
It's inflation day, and the BLS reports that CPI spiked up to 3.7% in December on an annualized basis:
Core CPI didn't change much and ended the month at 3.8%. This is obviously not a good report, but as usual, it's a noisy series and a single month doesn't mean much.
On a conventional year-over-year basis, CPI clocked in at 3.3% and core CPI was 3.9%.
Among Republicans, sympathy for Israel far outweighs sympathy for the Palestinians, and this hasn't changed much over the years. The story among Democrats is different. Although sympathy for Israel has long been firmly positive, around 2015 it began to steadily deteriorate. Then, in 2023—but before the Gaza war started—it finally went negative, with more Democrats supporting the Palestinians than Israel:
What happened in 2015 to cause this decline among Democrats? Bibi Netanyahu's speech to Congress flaying Barack Obama's Iran treaty? Rising settler violence against Palestinians? Growing disillusionment over Israel's rightward drift?
I don't know. The change is driven largely by young Democrats, but not exclusively, and there's no apparent difference between college and non-college voters. So it seems unlikely to be the result of a sudden shift among university faculty or administrators.
In any case, the partisan divide is now huge. Support for Israel's war in Gaza is net +48% among Republicans but -27% among Democrats. The age divide is equally huge: among older voters net support for the war is +29% compared to -37% among the young.
Yesterday I posted a chart comparing illegal immigration to the number of job openings in the US. It was only for the past few years, and I thought you might be interested in a longer term look. Here it is:
Illegal immigration has roughly followed job prospects for the past two decades. The number of migrants went up during the expansion of the aughts; dropped along with the Great Recession; rose late in the subsequent expansion; and then skyrocketed following the pandemic when job openings also skyrocketed.
The period from 2011-18 is a modest anomaly: illegal immigration stayed flat while job openings were steadily increasing. But that pressure couldn't be contained forever. Starting around 2018—aside from a brief drop during the pandemic—illegal immigration punched through and rose like a rocket until it finally caught up with job demands.
None of this means that border policies literally have no effect. George Bush and Barack Obama emphasized tough border policies that pushed against the tailwinds of job growth. Donald Trump and Joe Biden mostly did the opposite. But push is all you can do. The pressure from American companies to hire cheap labor when the economy is good is always going to win eventually.
It was cold on Monday night: 33°F at the top of Palomar Mountain, where I did this month's bit of astrophotography. I thought my fingers were going to fall off.
The sky wasn't perfect, but it was pretty good and nothing went wrong. I got a full night's worth of images and all of them were usable to create the final image stack. My target was the Crab Nebula, aka M1, the remains of a supernova that exploded in 1054. It's fairly small and distant, which puts it at about the limits of my telescope. In the end though, the image turned out better than I expected. There are a few odd artifacts in the interior, but the colors are nice and the resolution is fairly good. The stars aren't quite round, which suggests my guiding was mediocre. The noise that I've gotten previously when I use the narrowband filter is mostly gone thanks to increased dithering. And refocusing with the filter in place produced a nice, sharp image.
So overall, not bad. Until I get a bigger scope, this is as good as it's going to get.
Finally I have a chance to post some cheesecake with a genuinely newsworthy purpose:
This might not look especially racy to you, and when I first heard about it I figured it was just an ordinary case of a conservative guy trying to make a buck. But no! Vox informs me today that it's become a flash point on the right:
It’s called “Calendargate,” and it’s raising the question of what — and whom — the right-wing war on “wokeness” is really for.
....Last month, Ultra Right Beer — a company founded as a conservative alternative to allegedly woke Bud Light — released a 2024 calendar titled “Conservative Dad’s Real Women of America 2024 Calendar.” The calendar contains photos of “the most beautiful conservative women in America” in various sexy poses. Some, like anti-trans swimmer Riley Gaines and writer Ashley St. Clair, are wearing revealing outfits; others, like former House candidate Kim Klacik, are fully clothed. No one is naked.
But this mild sexiness was just a bit too much for some prominent social conservatives, who started decrying the calendar in late December as (among other things) “demonic.” The basic complaint is that the calendar is pandering to married men’s sinful lust, debasing conservative women, and making conservatives seem like hypocrites when they complain about leftist immorality.
Fabulous! I only wish that I believed this would become a huge, ongoing fight rather than petering out (so to speak) after a few weeks. But this isn't the kind of thing Fox News will obsess about, so it's unlikely to last.
Or—and hear me out on this—maybe Donald Trump will get involved. The guy behind the calendar has said he doesn't support Trump, which is usually all it takes to bait Trump into a wild Truth Social screed. Wouldn't that be something? Donald Trump insisting he's offended by a slightly sexy calendar and its objectification of women? But it might be good for his recent campaign to persuade Christian conservatives that he's really one of them.
It's usually liberals who conduct internecine wars over trivia like this, so it's nice to see conservatives taking a crack at it. Let's keep it going, OK?
The Artemis II mission to orbit the moon has been pushed back:
The space agency had planned to send four astronauts around the moon late this year, but pushed the flight to September 2025.... NASA cited safety concerns with its own spacecraft, as well as development issues with the moonsuits and landers coming from private industry.
Damn. It's only January 10th and already one of my predictions for 2024 has failed. I knew I was being aggressively optimistic when I made it, but I foolishly went ahead anyway. I should have remembered my own advice: Everything takes longer than you think.
Alex Tabarrok takes on federal dishwasher regulations today:
Why do today’s dishwashers typically take more than 2 hours to run through a normal cycle when less than a hour was common in the past? The reason is absurd energy and water “conservation” rules. These rules, imposed on dish and clothes washers, have made these products perform worse than in the past, cleaning less well or much more slowly. One of the best things that the Trump administration did (other than Operation Warp Speed, of course) was creating a product class–superwashers!–that cleaned in under an hour and were not subject to energy and water conservation standards.
First off: Operation Warp Speed was a sham. All the important work had been done by Congress long before Donald Trump came up with his (admittedly terrific) marketing slogan.
But back to dishwashers. Honest question here: Why does anyone care if a dishwasher takes two hours to finish a cycle? I typically load the dishes at night and then turn on the dishwasher. The next day I unload it. Who cares how long it took?
Obviously (I guess) there must be people out there who run their dishwashers in the middle of the day and then sit on the edge of their seats until it's done. But why? This isn't like a clothes washer, where you might want to put in another load right away.
Can somebody help me out here?
Former President Trump won’t make his own closing argument in his New York civil business fraud trial after his lawyers objected to the judge’s insistence that the former president would stick to “relevant” matters.
Poor Donald. The judge won't allow him to rant about how unfair everything is, so instead he's going to sit at his table and pout. Poor baby.
Here is the average rental price of a vacant apartment over the past couple of decades:
Note that this is the asking price for a vacant apartment, so it represents the actual cost of moving into a new place. Income is for nonsupervisory workers, who represent about 80% of the workforce, so it isn't skewed by the top 5%.
Rents increased steadily after the Great Recession and then surged during the pandemic, rising from 30% of income to 35% of income in only four years. For the most recent quarter, average national rent was $1,462 compared to average blue-collar income of $4,245 per month. This puts rent at 34.4% of individual income. As a percentage of the median household income it's about 25%.
As always, keep in mind that this is a national average. Rents are higher in hot markets and lower in rural areas and the burbs.
Today we have a new entry in the Annals of Pseudoscience: an estimate from Bloomberg News that war over Taiwan would be really expensive:
This is based on some handwaving estimates that in the event of war Taiwan's GDP would fall 40%, China's would fall 17%, and US GDP would fall 7%. Add it up and world GDP drops 10.2%. And that's just the first year.
Bloomberg's writeup is light on details, which I suppose is inevitable, but appears to be based on an assumption that a war would cut off 100% of Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturing.
Maybe so. Who knows? But I imagine that your guess is as good as Bloomberg's.