Kevin Drum

This is unbelievable. Every single person aboard this Japan Airlines jet survived the crash shown in this video.

(The plane it crashed into was not so lucky. Five out of six coast guard crew members were killed.)

Commercial construction dropped in November at an annualized rate of -2.9%. This is the first time it's declined in the past year and a half—and this is despite the continuing tailwinds of the Infrastructure Act and the CHIPS Act. Perhaps the emptying of downtown office buildings is finally taking its toll?

The latest from the Ivy League:

Harvard President Claudine Gay will resign Tuesday afternoon, bringing an end to the shortest presidency in the University's history, according to a person with knowledge of the decision... Gay’s resignation — just six months and two days into the presidency — comes amid growing allegations of plagiarism and lasting doubts over her ability to respond to antisemitism on campus after her disastrous congressional testimony Dec. 5.

I have to admit that despite my misgivings about plagiarism scandals in general, Gay does seem to have done a lot of it. Yesterday's latest batch of discoveries still don't amount to more than sentences here and there, but it's begun to pile up into a lot of sentences.

I will also admit that it distresses me for the odious Rep. Elise Stefanik to win another scalp. She doesn't deserve any rewards for her grotesque behavior when she badgered Gay and two other university presidents about genocide on December 5.

I also hate to see Bill Ackman's resentment-fueled jihad against Gay bear fruit.

And of course there's right-wing warrior Christopher Rufo, who openly engineered the plagiarism charges for political purposes. He wins too, and that kills me.

In other words, every single sentiment I have, tribal and otherwise, makes me want Gay to keep her job. But the plagiarism has turned into bad stuff, and the pressure on other fronts has perhaps become unbearable. I can't deny that this might be for the best.

The Wall Street Journal says things are looking up:

Last year’s widespread skepticism proved to be misplaced.... Now, with the S&P 500 within 0.6% of a record high, the crowd is much more optimistic.

I know it's traditional to report stock market indexes in nominal terms, but that doesn't make it right. It's just a scam that allows new "records" to be announced routinely so that things always look more bullish than they really are. Here's the S&P 500 over the past three years in real terms:

The market did fine this year, but it's not within 0.6% of a record high. It's not even close. It's still got 400 points to go.

I've forgotten to follow up on this recently, so here is K-12 public education employment through November:

November employment was the highest in the past decade with the exception (barely) of 2019—even though school enrollment has dropped about 6%. There's no apparent teacher shortage.

This comes with the usual caveats. It includes all ed employees, not just teachers.¹ It's national, so it doesn't imply that there are no shortages in specific areas. And it says nothing about the quality of teachers (The percentage of teachers with less than three years experience has been generally declining over the past 20 years. At the same time, the percentage entering teaching through nontraditional routes has been increasing. So....)

¹Teachers fairly steadily account for about half of all ed employees, but this data is annual and lags by a couple of years. It probably hasn't changed recently, but there's no way to say for sure.

Happy New Year! I took this photo of Saddleback peak on New Year's Eve three years ago.

December 2023 was the warmest December on record for the Contiguous U.S. by a wide margin using Prism Climate Group data. It was 0.67°F (0.37°C) warmer than December 2021. ???????????? pic.twitter.com/nhRL9j0O4G

— Brian Brettschneider (@Climatologist49) January 1, 2024

These are mostly years in which a surprising number of important things happened. For the most part, wars are excluded. Go ahead and argue with my choices in comments.

1687: Isaac Newton invents physics.

1776: American Revolution, Wealth of Nations, first commercial Watt steam engine, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

1789: French Revolution, first American president, Bill of Rights proposed.

1831: HMS Beagle, Faraday's dynamo, Garrison's Liberator, Hunchback of Notre Dame.

1848: Communist Manifesto, gold discovered in California, Seneca Falls, Revolutions of 1848.

1859: Suez canal, Origin of Species, first American oil well, Tale of Two Cities, Riemann Hypothesis, On Liberty.

1900: Quantum mechanics, Interpretation of Dreams, ABO blood typing system, Wizard of Oz, premiere of Tosca.

1905: Albert Einstein's annus mirabilis.

1928: Penicillin, Coming of Age in Samoa, River Rouge plant completed, Passion of Joan of Arc, Mickey Mouse, OED, first regular TV broadcast, All Quiet on the Western Front, sliced bread (against which all future inventions would be compared).

1939: Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Goodbye Mr. Chips, The Rules of the Game, nuclear fission, Batman, World War II, first televised baseball game, first published stories by Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein.

1958: First credit card, DARPA, integrated circuit, NASA, USS Nautilus, laser, first communications satellite, first transatlantic jet service.

1969: First human on the moon, Boeing 747, Stonewall, Woodstock, Miracle Mets, ARPANET, Unix, Abbey Road.

Ha ha, the headline is just clickbait. Most of these aren't really extinction level events, they're just really bad. And the odds of any of them happening in 2024 are minuscule. But still possible!

1. Miyake event. This mysterious burst of cosmic rays has occurred several times in the past 10,000 years. It wouldn't actually kill a lot of people aside from, maybe, passengers on jet airliners, but "the induced current would flood the thousands of satellites that encircle Earth, crippling them for months and possibly years. Power grids would topple immediately, leaving anything reliant on electricity, like lights, electric vehicles, and ventilators, inoperable." Bad!
2. Cascadia subduction zone. This is the fault line that runs under Seattle. A magnitude 9 earthquake there would basically flood the entire area, level everything in its path, and kill upwards of 100,000 people.
3. The Toba supervolcano. Forget Yellowstone. The Toba eruption was bigger and happened a mere 74,000 years ago. It's credited with almost destroying the human race, leaving only a few tens of thousands tenuously alive. If it happened again it would blacken the skies; send temperatures plummeting; destroy crops globally; and produce huge tsunamis. It would likely kill millions immediately and many, many more over the course of a few years.
4. The Atlantic thermohaline current shuts down. Yeah, this is the thing from the disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow. The thermohaline is a current of warm water that keeps northern Europe cozy even though most of it is at about the latitude of Hudson Bay. An influx of fresh water from global warming could shut it down, which would produce frigid winters in Europe, sea level rise of a foot or more on the US eastern seaboard, crop wreckage worldwide, and possibly force us to burn books to keep from freezing to death.
5. Giant asteroid hits earth. This really is the big one. The Chicxulub asteroid produced tsunamis worldwide, threw enormous amounts of debris into the sky, and killed off the dinosaurs. NASA says a medium size asteroid has a tiny chance of hitting Earth in 2046, but how accurate are these guys, really? Maybe they got their orbital mechanics wrong and it will hit in 2024 instead.
6. COVID-24. Look, COVID-19 was bad, but it could have been a lot worse. Bats are busily incubating new coronaviruses all the time, and all it would take is a little bit higher transmissibility and a little bit higher mortality rate to kill off humans and turn things over to the apes. Wasn't there even a movie about this?
7. Hilina slump. The south slope of Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawaii is geologically unstable. If it collapses it would send 2,000 cubic miles of rock into the ocean and produce tsunami waves a thousand feet high on the California coast. There's a similar sort of danger from the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the Canary Islands, which could produce huge tsunamis off the coast of Africa and the eastern US.
8. Colony collapse. Bee colonies are mysteriously collapsing worldwide, posing a threat to pollination of crops. Not all crops, mind you, but plenty of important ones like alfalfa, canola, apples, and more. But what if other pollinators start collapsing too? Grains and nuts would be OK, but everything else would be in danger until we invent nanobot pollinators.
9. Hypercane. If sea surface temperatures reach 122°F it could create a hypercane, a hurricane the size of Europe with wind speeds up to 500 mph. Hypercanes would also reach into the stratosphere, potentially damaging the ozone layer with who knows what impact on human life. Now, these kinds of temps are 22°F higher than the highest sea temperature ever recorded, but still. It could happen, right?
10. Oh come on. There's only a limited number of these things and I could only come up with seven good ones. Colony collapse and hypercanes are already pushing it. What else is there? Aliens who invade and eat us? But I've never understood why super advanced aliens would want us as a food source. Or as slaves. Or for anything else other than sociological observation. Maybe a stray black hole? Giant ants? A big pink cloud that appears out of nowhere and eats the sun?
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Here are a few miscellaneous predictions for the new year:

1. Donald Trump will win the Republican nomination. Joe Biden will be reelected president.
2. Waymo will solve its highway problems and finally have a true driverless car that can go pretty much anywhere in pretty much any conditions. It will still be a couple more years before you can buy one, but it will exist.
3. The odds are greater than 50% of a recession by summer. It will likely be a moderate one, maybe about the size of the dotcom bust. There's even a chance of a brief deflation.
4. Israel will effectively destroy Hamas. But this won't accomplish anything because an even worse group will eventually rise from the ashes.
5. Republicans will not impeach Joe Biden.
6. Labor will win in UK elections, but by less than polls predicted.
7. GPT-5 will be released. 2024 will be the first year when a significant number of people lose their jobs to AI, possibly as many as half a million or so.
8. China will continue to get weaker and weaker. The headwinds of fertility declines, population aging, endemic corruption, youth unemployment, a property bust, and continuing stupid disputes with the west will simply be too great.
9. Humans will orbit the moon for the first time in half a century.
10. There will be at least one big scandal involving AI deepfakes during the 2024 presidential race.
11. The world will become ever warmer. Duh.