Just for the record, I'm not deliberately avoiding Trump news because I think it's stupid.¹ It's mostly because events like his arraignment today are already covered in minute detail by every news outlet on the planet and I don't have anything special to add.
I am curious to see what the charges are, just in case there's something interesting and unexpected. We should know shortly.
¹Although it is, of course.
UPDATE: It's just 34 counts of falsifying business records. Nothing unexpected. Given that, my view remains the same: these are fairly trivial charges and probably shouldn't have been prosecuted.
Let's review the recent history of human communication:
1876-2000: Telephones provide convenient and universal voice communication.
2000-2023: Thekidsthesedays decide they hate telephones and really, really hate voice messages, so instead they use phone infrastructure to send text messages.
Today: Kids realize that emojis don't actually represent the full range of human emotion, so they begin using text infrastructure to send voice messages.
2024-2025: New startup devises way to translate voice messages into specially notated text that passes along emotional cues.
2025: Even newer startup uses advanced AI to translate notated text into a better version of the voice message the sender would have sent if they'd been smarter.
2026: Old-school telephone calls make a comeback, but are mediated by AI so that everyone speaks and sounds better than they would in real life. Kids need only speak a few words for the AI to figure out what they were about to say and just say it for them.
Maybe you’ve noticed: Lately, they’re popping up in more group chats and one-on-one conversations. 62 percent of Americans say they’ve sent a voice message, and around 30 percent communicate this way weekly, daily, or multiple times a day.
Some are even communicating more with voice messages than texts....“I use voice messages every single day,” Kennedy Dierks, a 21-year-old student at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, told me. “I find it to be a lot more personal than a text.”
Dierks said voice messages have exploded in popularity on her college campus in the past year. As an example, she said she recently used the feature to give a friend the rundown about a date she’d just gone on, because it was easier to “hash it out” than via text. More broadly, voice memos are popular because they allow people to share the richness that comes with voice communication, like tone, mood, and humor — without the pressure of inconveniencing someone with a phone call.
Everything old is new again. Everything new is also new again. Oh, and everything new is old again. The only constant is that, one way or another, h. sapiens is built to gossip and will do so no matter the obstacles.
In today's release of economic news for February, job openings continued their yearlong fall and orders for durable goods continued their decline of the past few months (with a brief timeout for Christmas). It was against this backdrop that the Fed continued to raise rates a couple of weeks ago. Good job, Fed.
This is a bateau chugging downstream on the Seine. A few minutes after taking this picture I myself would be on one of the bateaux chugging along the Seine.
Over at Vox, Miles Bryan writes about a new study of crime in the downtown areas of New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Chicago. The study's conclusion? Actual crime has been pretty stable, but fear of crime has shot up. This, not a desire for remote work, is the biggest reason people give for not wanting to return to the office.
But why is fear of big-city crime so high in recent years? Bryan goes through several possibilities but somehow misses the obvious answer:
This should not be a surprise to anyone. If you marinated in Republican politics all day, you too would think that big cities have turned into hellholes under President Biden. Remember this?
Serious question: I have to go to New York soon and I'm trying to figure out where to stay. I have heard it's disgusting and violent there. But is it like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4?
Yuck yuck. And that's hardly the worst of it. To hear Fox News tell it, every city with a Democratic mayor is practically going up in flames. Only a fool would dare walk the streets of New York or LA.
But you hardly need any fancy studies to see that this just isn't true:
Roughly speaking, every city has its bad areas, and everyone knows where they are. Stay away from them and you'll be fine. This is not exactly new advice.
The key to the Mar-a-Lago documents case is not the bare fact that Donald Trump left the White House with classified documents in his possession. That might have been accidental. The bigger question is whether Trump refused to give up the documents even after they had been subpoenaed and Trump knew he had them.
Indeed, the Washington Post says today that the investigation "has come to focus on the obstruction elements of the case." And there's growing evidence that Trump deliberately tried to withhold documents even after the government asked for them back:
Federal investigators have gathered new and significant evidence that after the subpoena was delivered, Trump looked through the contents of some of the boxes of documents in his home, apparently out of a desire to keep certain things in his possession, the people familiar with the investigation said.
Investigators now suspect, based on witness statements, security camera footage, and other documentary evidence, that boxes including classified material were moved from a Mar-a-Lago storage area after the subpoena was served, and that Trump personally examined at least some of those boxes, these people said. While Trump’s team returned some documents with classified markings in response to the subpoena, a later FBI search found more than 100 additional classified items that had not been turned over.
....Investigators have also amassed evidence indicating that Trump told others to mislead government officials in early 2022, before the subpoena, when the National Archives and Records Administration was working with the Justice Department to try to recover a wide range of papers, many of them not classified, from Trump’s time as president, the people familiar with the investigation said.
The Post story adds some more detail to this, including evidence that Trump asked others for advice on how he could keep the documents he wanted.
And what were these documents about? The Post suggests they were related to Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who Trump turned against during the final weeks of his administration.
Needless to say, this is all sort of bizarre, even by Trump standards. And since the documents are classified, I suppose we'll never find out for sure what they were about.
POSTSCRIPT: This is yet another case of Trump being a moron. In the Stormy Daniels case, Trump should have delivered a suitcase of cash to her and kept everything anonymous. Instead, in order to save a pittance in taxes, he called the hush money "legal expenses," thus opening himself up to prosecution.
In the documents case, Trump could have photocopied the stuff he wanted to keep and given back all the originals. Why didn't he? Was he somehow under the impression that if he turned over the documents they'd become public record? Or what?
Life expectancy has been in the news lately, so yesterday I was diddling around with the state-by-state data. Here it is:
Generally, life expectancy increased through 1990, leveled out, and then began to drop in 2000. But the trend wasn't the same everywhere. Some states went up a little, while some dropped more than the others. Overall, the difference between the best and worst states increased by three years between 1960 and 2020. Even if you eliminate the top and bottom outliers the increase was still two years.
Here's what happened in the states with the worst trends in life expectancy:
They voted for Donald Trump in 2020. And this correlation looks nearly as strong if I eliminate the eleven Southern states.
There are all sorts of confounders here, ranging from income to race to diet. So don't make too much of it. Nevertheless, it's yet another indication that the states in the worst condition are the ones that turn to people like Trump to rescue them.
UPDATE:More here from Jeremy Ney. It's from a couple of years ago but happened to pop up in my Twitter feed just as I published this post.
My understanding is that there are two basic argument for banning TikTok:
There's a danger that they might tune their recommendation algorithm to favor content from the Chinese government.
China might be able to get access to the personal information of American users.
Genuine question here: Suppose both of these things happen. What's the worst case harm scenario? That American kids might be subtly brainwashed by Chinese propaganda? That China might learn the names of lots of American kids? I'm a little unclear about how much damage this could cause.
Generally speaking, I'm marginally in favor of banning TikTok simply because China bans nearly all American social media platforms. If they want access to our market, they need to give us access to theirs.
