Non-elderly Americans have pretty much give up on the COVID vaccine:
The CDC counts vaccination rates starting from zero at the beginning of each flu season in September. By the end of the 2024 season only 15% of middle-age Americans had bothered getting freshly vaccinated. In the 2025 season so far the number is 12%.
The good news is that things have gotten off to a good start among older Americans, who are already up to 45% coverage.
The broad reluctance to get vaccinated is remarkable. It's true that the risk has diminished considerably, but COVID is still killing 50,000 people a year and producing Long COVID in countless others. It's worth getting protected from!
A few days ago I said I was "on the fence" over the issue of China hawkery. A few people suggested I expand a bit on this, and why not?
The nickel answer is that China is an ascendant power that's often a bad actor on the world stage, but it's also a country with a lot of weaknesses that make it less dangerous than it seems at first. So here's a brief rundown of China basics, both the scary and benign. When you add them all up, I'd say there's reason to be concerned about China but no real reason to panic.
Manufacturing
This is the big one, and there's no question that China massively dominates the world manufacturing scene these days:
But there's more to the story. First, manufacturing has become steadily less important to global output, and countries like Vietnam and India are starting to eat into China's labor advantage. In a sense, China has hinged its future on a dying sector. There's also this:
This is a measure of a country's capability to produce goods and services. China has made impressive strides, but the US still ranks highest in the world.
Military
China has spent a lot to upgrade its military in recent decades, but it still doesn't spend as much as us:
China's navy is technically larger than ours, but we lead substantially in cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and aircraft carriers. You might reasonably wonder what else there is, and it turns out the answer is that China has lots and lots of frigates, corvettes, and auxiliaries. But those don't add up to much:
Needless to say, there's considerable disagreement about what this really means. Is the huge US lead in capital ships relevant, or is it actually a disadvantage in an era of drones and highly accurate cruise missiles? And what about China's widespread practice of building dual-use civilian ships?
There are lots of ifs here, and it's hard to come to a firm conclusion. China is certainly a peer military competitor with enormous productive capacity, but on most metrics they're still well behind the US—and even further behind if you count US allies.
Military intentions
This is a different subject. China may be expanding its military aggressively, but what do they intend to do with it?
A lot of people scoff at this, but I remain influenced by China's recent history on this score: They really don't seem to be an expansionist power. Aside from Korea in the '50s and Vietnam very briefly in the '70s, they've never shown much interest in military adventurism beyond their own borders.
What they have shown is an extreme dedication toward protecting territory they view as within their borders. This has produced border clashes with India; repression of Tibet; crackdowns in Hong Kong; endless gunboat bullying in the South China Sea; and, most famously, threats against Taiwan.
The hostility here is real, but it's limited. What's more, aside from Taiwan, China has virtually no capacity to project power beyond its immediate borders and has shown no intention of building one.
All of this is of dubious importance in a potential future of drone and AI warfare, but that's a much broader subject than just China. At the moment, China simply doesn't seem to have designs on any territory it doesn't already consider its own.
Taiwan
After Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in 2022, China made its displeasure extremely visible. They increased exercises designed to simulate an invasion; they shot lots of missiles over Taiwan; they began a series of reckless encounters with US and allied forces; and they ramped up intrusions into Taiwanese airspace.
At the same time, there's little evidence that China has made any recent plans to do anything more. They don't appear to be any closer to an invasion or blockade than they've ever been.
One thing that influences my thinking on this subject is Taiwan itself: they just don't seem all that concerned. They continue to spend a modest 2.2% of GDP on military defenses, which is not much for a country supposedly at high risk of attack. Even South Korea spends more, and they've never truly been in much danger from North Korea. Places under serious military threat, like Israel, Russia, Lebanon, Ukraine, and others, spend twice as much or more.
Economy
China's economic growth has been spectacular over the past few decades. There's no questioning that. But it's still way, way behind the US:
China is growing faster than the US on a percentage basis, but over the past decade absolute GDP per capita has increased $30,000 in the US compared to only $15,000 for China. They have a lot of catch-up to do, and despite everything, China is still stuck in the doldrums of other mid-tier countries. They just aren't going to be a rich country anytime soon:
And another thing: Chinese growth has been wildly uneven. GDP per capita may be a respectable $25,000 these days, but only in a few rich coastal provinces. Its vast interior is still desperately poor:
Strategic exports
China really has only two truly strategic exports: minerals and pharmaceuticals. They can hurt us with both, but not in the long run. China's strategic minerals (rare earths and others) have built up world dominance not because only China has them, but because China supplies them cheaply and doesn't much care about environmental safety. The West has already begun to restart mining and refining of strategic minerals and will most likely become self sufficient within the next 5-10 years.
As for pharmaceuticals, China has no special advantages at all. The rest of the world still has huge manufacturing capacity that can be ramped up if necessary, and low-income countries like India and Malaysia are increasing their production. This is a paper tiger at most.
2017
I don't have a better name for this category, but something went suddenly wrong in China around 2017-18. Youth unemployment doubled:
And fertility rates plummeted:
Fertility rates have been dropping worldwide, but China's decline has been truly extraordinary. Taken together, these two trends point to some kind of serious disillusionment among China's young people. I have no idea what's behind it, but it's real.
Xi Jinping
It's easy to make the mistake of confusing Xi Jinping's aggressiveness for strength and smarts. It's neither. Xi is a paranoid nationalist who has sent China down a rabbit hole of bad policies.
The reality: Xi has united practically the entire world against China. He has adopted shortsighted economic policies that protect state power—and his own—at the expense of difficult but essential market reforms. He fights America and the West even though productive cooperation was always on the table. His behavior during the COVID pandemic displayed all the usual feckless Chinese hypersensitivity to perceived criticism. He has wasted endless resources on his dream of panopticon surveillance and the Great Firewall to keep his people under tight control. He has ramped up China's pointless excesses of commercial espionage and cyber warfare. The Chinese property sector remains a massive shitshow that he seems helpless against.
No country can take on the whole world, and building a few ports in Africa and South America don't change that. China hasn't a single friend among its neighbors, and I include both Russia and North Korea in that assessment. Rich countries are increasingly united against China's economic belligerency. And even poor countries that were the supposed beneficiaries of Xi's Belt and Road initiative have turned against him when their loans came due.
China is unquestionably powerful and ascendant, but it's also alone and struggling. Once you account for that, "on the fence" over the Chinese threat is probably about the right place to be.
Iran is experiencing an energy crisis. But this isn't something new. It's the culmination of long-term trends that have finally gotten out of hand:
These numbers are approximate, but it hardly matters. Over the years Iran has encouraged massive and wasteful household consumption of natural gas, while sanctions and mismanagement have prevented production from catching up. And Iran's production woes were recently made worse when Israel bombed a couple of their pipelines.
Iran makes up for this by importing gas from Turkmenistan and, more recently, Russia, and by using fuel oil in place of gas. Unfortunately, the fuel oil tradeoff has become more difficult. Iran needs to re-inject gas into its aging oil fields to keep up production, and when they cut back on re-injection to preserve gas supplies they end up with less fuel oil. It's Catch-22.
This juggling act has long produced regular shortages, especially in winter, but it's finally caught up with them and Iran now has a massive year-round shortfall of gas compared to consumption. This forced a choice: cut back gas to households or cut back gas to electric power plants. They chose to keep households happy and instead shut down electric generation, so they now have rolling blackouts throughout the country.
There's no short-term answer for this. Iran's gas infrastructure needs massive investment, which will take years at minimum. Nor can Iran easily produce more fuel oil to substitute for gas. Nor, thanks to sanctions, can they afford to import more gas. At this point, there's little they can do aside from risking revolt by limiting gas supplies to households. Or they can pray for a mild winter.
How dangerous is the United States? We certainly have far more homicides than most comparable countries, but homicides are quite rare and don't really have a big impact on overall safety. For that you need to look at violent crime more broadly.
Unfortunately, as with so many things American, you also have to look at race. The US is far more dangerous for Black people than white people. Very roughly, the violent victimization multiplier for Black people is nearly 2x the overall average. For white people it's three-quarters.
Here's how this looks internationally. Numbeo estimates violent crime rates via survey data, and I have my doubts that it's super reliable. But it seems to be approximately right, and for our purposes that will do. Here's what Numbeo's crime index looks like if we apply our race multipliers to their overall US estimate of 49:
For Black people, America is wildly dangerous, even worse than the otherwise #1 country of Venezuela. For white people, conversely, America is safer than average, sitting in between Germany and Spain. Safety, it turns out, depends as much on who you are as where you are.
Politico has a story today about Democrats being doomed, more or less. That's fine, I guess, if a little tiresome, but it turns out this conclusion is based on three focus groups. Check it out:
The focus groups — held immediately after the 2024 election and conducted by GBAO, a Democratic polling firm — featured three kinds of voters: young men in battleground states who voted for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024; voters in battleground states who voted for Biden in 2020 but didn’t vote at all in 2024; and voters in blue states who had previously voted for Democrats, a third party candidate or didn’t vote in 2020 but voted for Trump in 2024.
So this story is based on—and only on—voters who explicitly abandoned Democrats in 2024. It's like interviewing the 1% of people who don't like chocolate and then declaring that chocolate is in big trouble.
Come on. Democrats obviously have some problems, but this is ridiculous. Kamala Harris received a 1.4% lower share of the presidential vote than the recent Democratic average while House members did 0.97% worse. And this is entirely due to losses among Hispanic voters.
Democrats have some issues to address, but 2024 was a fairly routine loss, not a world historical realignment. Let's get a grip here.
You have to hand it to Donald Trump: no matter what kind of shit sandwich he happens to be eating at any given time (currently on the menu: getting played on the CR and the debt ceiling), he comes up with some kind of freakish distraction. Tonight it's a rant about how we're getting screwed by exorbitant tolls on the Panama Canal.
The Panama Canal! How did that pop into his febrile brain? And are tolls really up?
This is impossible to answer with precision because there's no such thing as "the toll" for transiting the canal. Rather, there's a dizzying array of tolls, fees, tariffs, and surcharges that depend on the size of the ship, the time the transit reservation was made, how busy the canal is, etc. etc.
With that understood, you can say a little bit in very rough terms. A decade ago new, bigger locks opened on the canal to accommodate new, bigger "neopanamax" behemoths. At that time, the biggest ships paid maybe half a million dollars to transit the canal.
In 2016 new locks opened on the Panama Canal to accommodate bigger ships.
Time passed and Panama suffered through a drought that severely cut back on traffic through the canal. By 2024 the biggest ships were paying upwards of a million dollars per transit.
Eventually the canal authorities decided to ditch the basic tariff book and move to an auction system. You and I, of course, have no insight into what effect this has had, but big shippers have been bidding for transit slots for a few months now. They know, and the upshot is that they've announced cargo surcharges that amount to half a million dollars for the biggest ships. So figure they're now paying in the neighborhood of $1.5 million per neopanamax.
Is this unfair? Well, it's an auction, so presumably it represents the true value of transiting the canal vs. the other available options (either a longer sea route or multimodal transport across the US). That's the free market at work.
But it's also a foreign country Trump can blame our troubles on, and there's nothing he loves more. Plus it has the added advantage that conservatives to this day haven't entirely gotten over the fact that Jimmy Carter gave up the canal to Panama. Remember Ronald Reagan's "we built it, we paid for it, it’s ours"?
Anyway, I look forward to a gaggle of conservative pundits suddenly becoming outraged over LoTSA and last-minute booking surcharges. Should be fun.
The post-revolt CR passed by the House performatively cut off both funding for pediatric cancer research and the transfer of RFK Stadium to DC. Why? Who knows. It demonstrated toughness from fiscal conservatives, I guess?
But it was just a show. It turns out both of those things had been passed by the House months ago. All the Senate had to do was pass them too, so they did by unanimous consent. I guess even Rand Paul wanted to get home for the holidays.
The all-new Musk-approved CR has passed and there will be no government shutdown. Huzzah.
But I'm curious. The CR still contains farm aid and hurricane relief—which accounted for the vast majority of new spending. It fully funds the Francis Scott Key bridge. It extends funding for Columbia and Virginia-class subs.
It killed the transfer of RFK Stadium to DC, but that involved no money. It killed the reform of pharmacy benefit managers, which would have cut spending by a couple billion dollars. It cut pediatric cancer research, saving $190 million. It killed $6 million in congressional pay raises. It killed restrictions on Chinese investment; disclosure of junk fees; and criminalization of some deepfake images—all of which had no cost.
So my question is: When everything is netted out, did cutting down the CR actually save any money? CBO, oddly, has published estimated spending under both the old September CR ($1.777 trillion) and Friday's new CR ($1.834 trillion), but never published an estimate for the in-between bipartisan CR on Tuesday that provoked Elon Musk's revolt. So there's no good comparison of the previous CR and the shiny new one. It may be a thousand pages shorter, but that doesn't necessarily mean it cost any less. I'll bet it didn't.
OpenAI’s new artificial-intelligence project is behind schedule and running up huge bills. It isn’t clear when—or if—it’ll work. There may not be enough data in the world to make it smart enough. The project, officially called GPT-5 and code-named Orion, has been in the works for more than 18 months....
I get that competition is stiff in the AI biz and that vast sums of money are involved. But it's a sign of how sky-high our expectations have gotten that taking 18 months for a major upgrade is considered something of a crisis. Hell, routine major releases of Windows take twice that long.
I suspect we should temper our optimism a little bit anyway. My super-duper-oversimplified history of AI goes like this:
Neural networks
Deep learning
Transformers
???
I figure we're still one major innovation away from true AI. There's no telling when we'll get that, and in the meantime AI will make spectacular progress but won't quite make it to the promised land of AGI. That's still a little ways away.
Democrats have some issues to address, but 2024 was a fairly routine loss, not a world historical realignment. Let's get a grip here.
