Here is the suicide rate among teen girls age 15-19 going back to 1940. Values before 1968 are estimated from the age 15-24 suicide rate.
The suicide rate:
Declined for 17 years after the Great Depression.
Reached a low point in 1957.
Rose for 31 years.
Peaked in 1988.
Declined for 14 years.
Reached a low point in 2002.
Rose again for the next 15 years.
Peaked in 2017.
Has been declining since then.
NOTE: Dotted line data (1940-1978) is in HIST290_4049, HIST290_5059, HIST290_6067, and HIST290_6878 here. Solid line data (1968-1978) is here. Solid line data (1979-1998) is in HIST002R_1 here. Solid line data (1999-2020) is from the CDC WONDER database.
The Center for American Progress says that our recent big deficits are due to Republican tax cuts. Their explanation is a little complicated, but it's all pretty obvious if you just look at federal spending:
In 2019—the last year before the pandemic—the federal government spent almost exactly as much as it did in 1980. Spending was up a bit during the 1991 and 2000 recessions, and up a lot during the 2008 recession, but it always settled down afterward to around 20% or so.
So yes, if spending is the same as it was 40 years ago then consistent deficits are obviously due to tax cuts.¹ And here's a reminder of just who those tax cuts were for:
Everybody has gotten tax cuts, but the big winners were the super-rich. Not only have their incomes quadrupled since Reagan was president,² but their tax rates have gone down enough to save them some serious money on top of that. It's a sweet deal.
¹That is, average deficits over time. There are also temporary deficits during recessions, including the one we had during the pandemic recession. Those typically last a few years and then disappear.
Former ByteDance engineers say ByteDance is one of the most aggressive in executing a strategy known within the industry as “horse racing,” where multiple teams are assigned to build the same product or feature with slight variations. Once it becomes clear which version is performing better, the winning team is given more resources while the other versions are scrapped, these people say.
Not brutal enough! Multiple teams should compete on a yearlong series of product features, with the lowest ranked team at the end of the year being relegated to a lesser product. Meanwhile, the highest ranked team gets—
I don't know. What do winning soccer teams get? Just the thrill of victory? Or big cash bonuses?
Well, cash bonuses should do it. Along with the top team on the lesser product getting a promotion to the show. Now that's product development.
The winner is Washington DC! And this is strictly a survey of private businesses, so this has nothing to do with government workers. DC just has a lot of businesses that allow workers to work from home. California ranks 23rd, right at the national average.
By the way, this survey suggests that WFH was way down last year. The percent of establishments with any WFH was 27.5% in 2022, compared to 39.8% in 2021. That's a big drop.
As of September 2022, when the survey was conducted, the number of workplaces with any WFH was up only four percentage points from before the pandemic (27.5% vs. 23.3%). This suggests that WFH is already almost back to its pre-pandemic normal.
This is Hilbert roaming around the backyard after the rain finally stopped. He is on our teak bench looking for a place to scratch an itch, and eventually he decided to stick his nose into the camera and give that a try. It didn't work so well for him, but it worked great for me. Just look at those lovely whiskers.
Florida parents upset by Michelangelo’s ‘David’ force out principal
This story is all over the place. Why? A tiny charter school in Tallahassee fired its principal over some dumb thing. How does this become widespread national news?
For what it's worth, the Post's headline is typical even though the chair of the school's board says that David was only one among many issues involved in the firing. Furthermore, he says, the issue wasn't even with the sculpture itself:
We don’t have any problem showing David. You have to tell the parents ahead of time, and they can decide whether it is appropriate for their child to see it....No one has a problem with David. It’s not about David.
In previous years the school notified parents about their plans for teaching Renaissance art. This year they failed to do that. That's the school's side of the story.
I don't know who's telling the truth, of course. But if they've taught David before with no problem, it seems likely that notification really was the issue.
So here's what we've got: A few parents at a conservative school didn't want their sixth-grade children to see artwork of nudes. They wanted to be notified beforehand so they could pull their kids from that particular lesson. At about the same time, for this lapse and for other reasons, the board fired the school's principal.
In what way is this even much of a local news story, let alone a national one?
Total factor productivity is productivity growth after you've accounted for labor and capital. Roughly speaking, it's the share of productivity growth due to technological improvements:
TFP took a big jump in 2021 but then dropped in 2022. It is now back to its (sort of lousy) recent trendline.
Here's how much banks have borrowed from the Fed this month:
During the Great Recession, this number peaked at around $400 billion in October 2008. That's the highest it's been over the past 40 years. We're nowhere near that, but March 2023 is still in a strong second place.
FINDINGS: Study is limited due to motion artifact.
Small punctate T2 high signal changes 5 mm in the deep white matter region right frontal lobe, nonspecific, likely of small vessel ischemic changes. There is no evidence for intraparenchymal hemorrhage, midline shift or mass effect. No evidence for acute ischemia. There is no abnormal enhancing mass. Ventricles, sulci, and cisterns are age-appropriate in size and configuration. Major intracranial flow voids appear intact.
Motion artifact? And I thought I had stayed so still! Damn.
Anyway, everything is good. And for those of you who asked why I was getting a brain MRI, it's part of the routine set of pre-CAR-T workups. I never bothered asking why they needed an MRI in particular, but my guess is that it's related to the possibility of neurologic side effects from the treatment. If this occurs, I suppose they want the MRI as a baseline for comparison.
Unfortunately, the poll doesn't dig down on this question. Of the trans people who are less satisfied, is this because they think they made a bad choice or because they didn't realize how much crap they'd have to put up with? It's a big difference.
The suicide rate:
