Cats, charts, and politics
Here you go:
Over the past two years, an S&P 500 index fund has been a far better investment than Bitcoin. But even for those who got in early five years ago, Bitcoin has done only a bit better than the S&P.
Where's the fun in that? If you're going to end up in the same place as the most boring stock index in the world, why not just buy the index and be done with it?
It's a been a week and we still don't know the final status of my personal electoral shitlist. But things are looking good!
Alex Villanueva is 18% behind with 67% of the vote counted.
Scott Baugh is 2.6% behind with 70% of the vote counted.
Kari Lake is 1.1% behind with 93% of the vote counted.
Dr. Oz lost.
Ron Johnson won.
I suppose that four out of five isn't bad.
What did Democrats do this year to get such unexpectedly good results? Before we all get too attached to our favorite theories, let's take a look at just how well they actually did:
The Democratic share of the two-party House popular vote in 2022 was one of the worst of the past two decades. This is going to change as more votes are counted, but California is the only state with a lot of outstanding votes and they're split fairly evenly between D and R districts. So don't expect the national popular vote percentage to change much.
My point here is that although Democrats managed to eke out a decent result in terms of seats won, they didn't do well when it comes to the expressed preferences of the American public. They somehow managed to win by razor-thin margins in a key set of swing districts, and it's worth asking how that happened. But taken as a whole, America voted for Republicans by a 5% margin, the GOP's third-biggest win of the century.
We won! Hooray!
This is an extremely rare picture of Hilbert keeping his eyes open while I take a flash photo of him. It's a bounce flash aimed at the ceiling, so it barely even registers when I press the shutter button. But Hilbert doesn't like it anyway. It's just another annoyance that humans can't seem to be trained out of.
KFC’s German branch has apologized for seeming to encourage its customers to mark the anniversary of Kristallnacht — the notorious Nazi pogrom against Jews — by eating chicken, saying that a promotional message was sent in error as a result of an automated push notification.
Say what? A promotional message was "sent in error"? I'm sure it was, but how did the message ever get created in the first place?
KFC Germany apologized again in a statement to news outlets, saying that its “obviously wrong, insensitive and unacceptable” message about Kristallnacht resulted from an automated push notification that had been sent by accident. The statement added that the company has a “semi-automated content creation process linked to calendars that include national observances.”
OK, so the idea is that it's always a good idea to eat chicken, which KFC's marketing computer interpreted as "especially on important dates marked on the calendar." But what calendar would include Kristallnacht in the first place? I looked around and obviously didn't find it on any calendar that marked holidays, but I did find it on a long calendar of 119 "Holidays and Observances":
So I assume that KFC in Germany fed in a calendar like this, flipped a switch, and special messages were automatically pushed out for a third of the days in the year. If that's the case, I have some advice for our German Hühnerliebhaber: this is coming up in a few weeks.
This observance would also be a bad justification for promoting chicken—though it's certainly fine if you just happen to want some chicken on that day. I mean, it's not in bad taste, as far as I know.
And while you're at it, you might want to do a quick scan of your whole calendar and maybe make a few other deletions. Just a thought.
The student loan forgiveness program has run into another speed bump:
A federal judge in Texas has struck down President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, declaring it illegal.
....“The program is [] an unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s legislative power and must be vacated,” wrote Judge Mark Pittman, who was nominated by then-President Donald Trump. “In this country, we are not ruled by an all-powerful executive with a pen and a phone,” he continued.
Hmmm. A Texas judge nominated by Donald Trump. Who could have guessed such a person might rule against a Democratic president?
I am, myself, not that worried about the loan forgiveness program being possibly illegal. But I have to admit that Republicans have a stronger case here than they usually do in their assorted gripes about anything that helps non-Republicans. The various laws the Justice Department has used to justify the program seem like fairly thin reeds to me. I wouldn't be very surprised if nobody ever sees a dime from it—and there might even be one or two liberal Supreme Court justices who agree.
Atrios comments today on racism and the toleration of racism within the Republican Party:
I do think one of the political journalist beliefs is that Republicans are too gentlemanly to go full racist (and similar), but they always CAN and if they do the Dems are totally screwed.
....The Republican extended universe is actually quite weird. Because of the way political journalism is, it all sounds "normal" but actually these people are the weirdos! Enough people are like "what the fucking fuck" when you claim kids are shitting in litterboxes in schools because of pronouns.
I think there are more nuances here than you might think at first glance. True, some Republicans (and some Democrats!) are just plainly racist. They'd love it if Donald Trump and his acolytes were even more open about it.
But then, as Atrios says, there are the normie Republicans. These folks don't care much for the bizarro memes or the straight up racism, but many of them nonetheless have related fears of anti-racism. They're afraid of saying not quite the right word and being publicly called out for it. They don't like the whole pronoun thing. They're afraid of being falsely accused of sexual harassment. They want to rein in illegal immigration and don't want to be accused of racism for it. Ditto for fear of crime.
You may well wonder if this collection of fears means these people are just plain racist even though they'd deny it. That's a tricky question, and I'm not sure I'm ready to take a side on it. Politically, though, what it means is that there are lots of fairly conventional Republicans who aren't actively racist in the sense of not wanting a Black couple to move next door, but are, let's say, anti-anti-racist because modern liberal anti-racism makes them afraid of falling afoul of norms they think have gone too far. And of course they also like all the usual Republicans positions on taxes and regulations and policing and so forth. So they keep voting Republican even if they're contemptuous of Donald Trump.
I don't know what, if anything, Democrats should try to do about this. But there are things they could do if they wanted. They could take illegal immigration more seriously—especially since loose borders don't even appeal all that strongly to lots of Hispanics these days. They could loosen up on the wokeness and stop being afraid of crossing the most progressive folks in the room. They could give up on the pronouns since they're confusing and hard to remember and, let's face it, sound kind of silly most of the time.
This is mostly "lead by example" stuff, not major legislation. And maybe it's a bad idea. I'm genuinely on the fence about much of it, although I'm pretty sure we've screwed up badly on immigration by pandering too much instead of adopting some serious policies like E-Verify and a massive change in how our courts deal with asylum claims.
On the other kinds of things, I'm pretty sure that being a little less doctrinaire would help Democrats considerably and probably wouldn't do much harm to people of color. But maybe I'm wrong.
It's been raining around here, so here's a picture of a raindrop in our front yard garden.
If you don't follow Kieran Healy, you should:
Today is Exit Poll Crosstab Storytime day.
— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) November 10, 2022
I used to do this, but not anymore. Even back in the day, I knew that exit polls were probably not good enough to rely on, but I shut my eyes and did it anyway. Gotta have something to write about on the day after!
But over the past few years it's just become way too obvious that the initial releases of exit polls are all but meaningless. I mean, if they show a 10% shift in something or other, it probably means there really was a shift. But most of the time exit polls deal in shifts of 3 or 4%, and that's just pure noise.
So you won't see much in the way of exit poll storytelling from me anymore. I love the genre, but if it's facts you're after it's best to ignore them.¹
¹But if you wait a few months for the later releases of exit polls, after they've been reweighted and fitted to actual numbers, they're probably still useful. You should assume a largish margin of error, but that's all.
I know nobody wants to wait. We want to set narratives now! But facts is facts, and narratives based on initial releases of exit polls should be treated with the contempt they deserve.
