Kevin Drum

Here is the Wall Street Journal commenting yet again on the economy:

As the holidays approach and America’s full-time workers feel pinched by inflation, some are turning to second jobs to supplement their incomes. The October jobs report shows the number of Americans working part-time jobs in addition to their full-time jobs has increased 6%, year-over-year, to 4.5 million people, according to statistics from the Labor Department.

Nearly three-quarters of workers said they need additional work to make enough income due to inflation, according to an October survey of more than 1,700 U.S.-based employees by job search website Monster.com. A separate survey of more than 4,700 people conducted by Prudential Financial Inc. found 81% of Gen-Z and 77% of millennial workers said they have pursued gig work or are considering additional side work this year to supplement their income.

Part-time work increased 6% in October! Let's take a look at that:

First off, the number of people taking part-time jobs increased 8% in June, 10% in July, 10% again in August, and 10% yet again in September. The 6% increase in October is, if anything, an indication that the number of people looking for side hustles is easing.

And then there's this:

The number of people with multiple jobs is going up, as it always does during economic expansions, but is still well below its pre-pandemic trendline.

Why does the Journal do this? They are constantly either misrepresenting statistics or else not bothering to present them at all, relying instead on idiotic surveys from the likes of Monster.com that mean nothing at all. In what world of honest journalism do you write that the number of workers with multiple jobs has gone up 6% without (a) noting that this is below the recent average (b) the previous three months were all at 10%, and (c) we're still way below our pre-pandemic level?

Or they could have put up a chart. They have a whole department for that. But that would have given the game away instantly.

Everyone at the Journal who touched this article knew this. Everyone. The article is worded too carefully to draw any other conclusion.¹ But by god, they wanted a trend piece, so they got it. And if they had to do it by deliberately misleading their readers, so be it. Disgraceful.

¹There is never any flat statement that the number of part-time workers is at a record level, or even that it's up from normal. Merely a carefully curated set of statistics designed to give a strong implication. Take it from me, that doesn't happen by accident.

For all of you traditional Tuesday voters—the ones in California, anyway—here's a repeat of my recommendations for how to vote on all of our ballot initiatives. Keep in mind a couple of things:

• I don't like ballot initiatives because they lock things into the state constitution that shouldn't usually be locked in. So my standards are high for a Yes vote.
• I especially hate ballot-box budgeting. It's a cancer.
• I believe the point of ballot initiatives is to give grass roots activists a chance to pass legislation opposed by moneyed interests. However, modern initiatives are largely the handiwork of corporations and the ultra-wealthy. I will almost never vote for an initiative sponsored primarily by businesses or billionaires.

That noted, here are my recommendations:

Proposition 1: YES. This initiative places certain abortion and other reproductive rights into the California constitution. I doubt it makes much difference, but you never know. And to me it qualifies as something I'd like to have locked in forever.

Proposition 26: NO. This is one of a pair of initiatives regarding sports gambling. Prop 26 adds sports gambling, dice games (such as craps), and roulette to the menu of games allowed at tribal casinos. Four privately owned horse racing tracks (Santa Anita, Del Mar, Los Alamitos, and Golden Gate Fields) would also be allowed to provide in-person sports gambling. This is the last thing that needs to be locked in forever via constitutional amendment, and my preference anyway is for California to simply legalize online sports gambling with no strings attached.

Proposition 27: NO. This one allows online sports gambling, but only if it's affiliated with a California tribe. That's completely ridiculous.

(Note that these two propositions are sponsored by different tribal groups, which has turned them into wars between big and small tribes. Also, both allocate some of the profits to various good causes, which is getting a lot of attention even though it's hardly a central issue. One thing they have in common is that both initiatives provide money to problem gambling programs, which is pretty damn cynical if you ask me.)

Proposition 28: NO. This proposition requires the state to provide funding for arts education that's equal to at least 1% of the funding required for public schools. It's the worst kind of ballot box budgeting.

Proposition 29: NO. This is the third time that health care unions have placed a measure on the ballot requiring dialysis centers to have physicians or physician-equivalents on the premises during all opening hours. It's unnecessary and everyone knows it. Are they ever going to give up on this?

Proposition 30: NO. California has a goal of selling only electric vehicles by 2035:

For cars in general, California's goal is to have 100% of sales of new cars be electric by 2035. A complete switchover probably won't happen until 2050 or so as older cars bought before 2035 are gradually junked and replaced with new electric cars.

However, the goal is far more stringent for rideshare companies: their fleets are required to actually complete 90% of the switchover by 2030. But where will the money come from to do this?

Prop 30 adds a 1.75% tax on income over $2 million, with the money dedicated to helping people and businesses make the switch to electric.¹ It's primarily funded by Lyft, which wants public money to fund electric rideshare vehicles instead of paying for them themselves. In addition to this sketchiness, California is already pushing the limits of taxing the wealthy and probably needs to stop. Then again, California's wealthy are pretty damn wealthy, so they can probably afford it.

¹It would also fund charging stations, and a bit of the money would go to wildfire prevention, which is getting a lot of play in ads even though it's only 20% of the program. Also worth noting: California already has a program to help low-income drivers buy new low-emission vehicles.

Proposition 31: YES. This is a referendum on a law passed a couple of years ago to ban the sale of flavored cigarettes. The law itself seems sensible to me, since flavored cigarettes are largely used to hook children, and in any case it's a law, not a permanent part of the constitution. Funding for the opposition comes, naturally enough, from Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds.

Over at Vox, Michael Bluhm interviews Jordan Schneider about President Biden's recent decision to ban exports of advanced computer chips to China. This is a very big deal that's gotten less attention than it deserves, something that Schneider calls "a point of no return for the relationship." And like everyone, he wonders how China will respond:

They could double down on manufacturing lagging-edge tech, which means well-established technologies that are still widely used in countless products. They could try to punish the US by retaliating against leading electronics firms. They could retaliate directly against the semiconductor supply chain by making moves on the rare earth minerals necessary to make chips, or on packaging — areas where China has a considerable place in the global market. They could do something as escalatory as a cyber-attack on some leading-edge American chipmaker.

But I'm also curious about this:

The new export controls ban the export to China of cutting-edge chips, as well as chip design software, chip manufacturing equipment, and US-built components of manufacturing equipment. Not only do the prohibitions cover exports from American firms, but also apply to any company worldwide that uses US semiconductor technology — which would cover all the world’s leading chipmakers. The new rules also forbid US citizens, residents, and green-card holders from working in Chinese chip firms.

I assume the Biden folks conferred with our allies about this, and I can't say that I've heard about any serious pushback from them. Still, as with so many other US sanctions, I wonder how long it's going to be before our allies get weary of this. Is there going to come a point where foreign companies tire of using American tech for fear that their sales to a major market could be cut off anytime at the whim of a US president? Why should the US be able to dictate the conduct of foreign commerce to all of its supposed friends?

This is hardly a new concern, but in the past it's usually been about small countries like Iran or Cuba. China is a whole different order of magnitude. Europe is already paying the lion's share of the price for US sanctions against Russia, and if China becomes a routine target it could cause problems on a much larger multilateral scale than ever before.

You may recall that a couple of weeks ago I was trying to use my telescope when it just stopped dead. I'm sure you're wondering what happened next, aren't you? Well, settle in.

I was pretty sure the problem was in the equipment, not the software, but I wasn't totally sure. For one thing, Device Manager didn't show any COM ports, and that seemed—

Wait. COM ports? Like serial ports? Who cares about those anymore?

Well, it so happens that my telescope mount was initially designed about 20 years ago and was fitted out with an RS-232 serial port. This was back in the day when most computers also had a serial port. But time passed, and eventually it was redesigned to ditch the RS-232 port and look like this:

But here's the thing: that RJ45 jack on the bottom might look like an RJ45 jack, but it's not. It's really a serial port with an odd connector. Later still the USB port was added, but that's also a serial port.

This is generally not a problem. The USB port connects to a virtual COM port created by software, and that's been working fine for me for months. But not only did it stop working, it also seemed like my virtual COM ports had gone away too.

After much fussing around, which resulted in everything being wrecked, I restored to an old restore point and voilà! My COM ports were back. But they still didn't work. So I finally bought a special cable that has an RJ45 plug on one end, a USB plug on the other, and a chip that provides the proper conversion of current levels. I also hauled out my old Radio Shack multimeter, which I bought 40 years ago and use about once every two or three years,

The multimeter confirmed that the USB port was dead¹ but the RJ45 port was active. So I plugged everything in, installed the drivers for the cable,² started up the software, and . . .

It still didn't work. Waah!

I was getting ready to throw in the towel and send the whole thing in for service when I happened to notice a Test button on the software interface. Hmmm. So I clicked it. It didn't really tell me much except that by default it was set to 9600 baud. Who sets anything to 9600 baud these days?

No one. But back in the days when the RJ45 jack was first added to the mount . . .

Well, even then 9600 baud was a thing of the distant past. But long story short, that was the key. When I set the COM port speed to 9600, everything lit up and the software said it was good to go.

What a clusterfuck. But at least I think it's working now. I haven't actually tested it fully yet, but I'll do that in the next few days. It'll be a couple of weeks before the moon is back down and I can do any kind of serious imaging.

¹Yeah, the USB port had just suddenly gone dead. I don't know why. It was added to the mount a couple of years ago by popular demand, and my guess is that it was kludged in by connecting it to a little circuit board of its own that was connected to power separately from the other stuff. Most likely, the power connection came apart.

²I had to install drivers for a cable? Yes indeed. These are the drivers that create a virtual COM port that's assigned to the cable.

It's been a while since I've updated everyone on our various pandemics, so let's do that. Here's monkeypox:

Roughly speaking, monkeypox is over. In the US we administered about 1 million doses of the vaccine compared to a few hundred thousand in Europe for a similar sized population. Despite the difference, both had almost identical experiences and the FDA recently approved a one-fifth dose, which apparently works just as well. In the end, it's not clear how much impact the vaccine had vs. simple immunity buildup among those who were infected.

COVID-19 isn't really trackable by case rates these days, so instead here's the ongoing fatality rate:

The United States is at 1 death per week per million, or roughly 300 deaths per week. That puts us right in the middle among peer countries.

Seth Masket is tired of stale old stories about why Democrats lose elections:

What are the narratives going to be Tuesday night? It’s fairly easy to know these ahead of time....In all circumstances, Democrats will be advised to moderate.

Republicans interpret election losses very differently from Democrats....Democrats are constantly trying to downplay their more liberal members’ desires....Contrast this with the behavior of Republicans, who largely ignore abhorrent statements from the likes of Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene and downplay attempts to undermine democratic elections by Trump supporters.

It sure doesn't sound like Republicans interpret election losses differently from Democrats. Masket himself says here that both parties try to downplay and ignore their own most extreme members—which they do, since this makes obvious sense.

At the same time, it's also true that Democrats tend to lose more than Republicans do when they're perceived as extreme. Maybe that's unfair, but it's reality. The reason for this, as always, is that the United States is a center-right country. I know you're tired of hearing that too, but I don't care. It's true:

The good news here is that liberals are taking share away from moderates. The bad news is that conservatives are still well ahead, 36-25%. In every election, liberals begin in a deep hole compared to conservatives.

And that's not all. It's also a simple truth that centrist voters tend to be more scared by extreme liberalism than by extreme conservatism. The reason, once again, is obvious: if you feel sort of cautious about change, it's always safer to vote for a conservative—even an extreme one, since they'll just keep things extremely the same. You can always change your mind later, after all. But if some extreme liberal manages to pass Medicare for All, you're stuck with it forever.

All of this means that, yes, Democrats need to moderate if they want to win over centrist voters. And like it or not, there are things centrist voters don't like about us liberals:

• They think we're too lax on crime.
• They think we're constantly making up stupid new rules.
• They think we want to let in too many illegal immigrants.
• They think we want to spend money endlessly and drive up the debt.
• They were appalled by the looting and rioting during the BLM protests of 2020 and think Democrats should have denounced it more vigorously.
• They think wokeness is ridiculous. They want us to stop talking like academics from another galaxy.
• They do not like being called racist.

You don't need polls or long treatises to understand these concerns. All you need is a few center-right friends—assuming you have any. And remember: it doesn't matter whether these concerns are legitimate or whether they're based merely on ignorance or Fox News demagoguery. They exist no matter what.

Now, if Democrats end up doing poorly on Tuesday, the real reason is that the party in power always does poorly in midterm elections. But the secondary reason will indeed be that Democrats have spent the past few years moving to the left and allowing folks like Bernie and Elizabeth and Alexandria and Katie to become the best known faces of the party—all the while convincing centrists that good ol' Joe Biden is little more than a captive of these progressive do-gooders.

That's OK with me. In this household we all love Katie (Porter) and would vote for her multiple times if we could. But I'm not a centrist. I think Medicare for All is a great idea and I'm not opposed to funding social programs with higher tax rates on the rich. Democrats already have my vote.

But my center-right friends? They're kind of scared of us these days, and that's enough to keep them voting for Republicans even though they agree that Republicans have gone nuts. How hard is this to understand?

Over at Mother Jones, Kiera Butler says that Florida is "flirting with an anti-vaccine apocalypse." Naturally I wanted to see it in chart form:

Shazam! I suppose the big drop in 2020 can be chalked up to COVID-19. Hospitals were jammed and both patients and doctors were reluctant to schedule in-person visits. But the coverage rate stayed way down in 2021 even after those problems had eased.

Note that these are figures for the so-called 4:3:1:3:3:1:4 series of childhood vaccines. That doesn't include COVID-19 and it doesn't include HPV, which has gotten a lot of resistance, especially in conservative regions. These are just the usual measles/polio/diptheria/etc. vaccines.

In 2019, when Gov. Ron DeSantis took office, Florida had an enviable childhood immunization rate. Today they're probably not even average. What an unbelievable waste of years of hard work.

NOTE: Just in case anyone notices, the official numbers from Florida are based on immunization rates as of January 1. For example, the 2022 number is for January 1, 2022, which means it's really the rate for 2021. I've used the real years in the chart above.

How do you persuade an 18-year-old Samoan kid with a howitzer for an arm to move from Southern California to Tennessee for college? If he's a 5-star quarterback, it's easy:

Since committing in March to Tennessee — signing a name, image and likeness deal with a school booster collective rumored to be worth $8 million — Iamaleava has been a recruiter and a promoter for the program, garnering a large platform on social media with his pajama-wearing appearances at 7-on-7 passing tournaments.

Nico Iamaleava is the fourth highest ranked quarterback recruit in the country. Fourth.

Once again I have a chart-a-rama for you. Here are four charts all related to the employment rate:

All of these metrics are in agreement: Starting around January employment growth started to fall steadily. Since then, the number of job openings has dropped by nearly 2 million; the growth of the employment level has declined from 8% to nothing; and the number of industries that are expanding their workforce has fallen by 20 percentage points.

My point here is the usual one: these are signs that the economy is cooling, and all of them started well before the Fed began raising interest rates. We didn't need those big increases—maybe a slow and steady series of small ones instead—but we got them anyway and now they're starting to produce a headwind against an already slowing economy. Remember the big shortage of computer chips, for example? All gone:

Chip companies in recent weeks have instituted hiring freezes and layoffs, slashed capital spending plans, reduced factory output and warned investors of a stark reversal in their customers’ buying habits....Many chip executives don’t see a near-term reprieve. “We are planning for the economic uncertainty to persist into 2023,” Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said on an earnings call last week. “It’s just hard to see any points of good news on the horizon.”

Buckle up, folks, the flight is about to get bumpy.

You remember James Bennet, don't you? He was the editor of the Atlantic who got hired to run the New York Times editorial section in 2016. One of his goals was to diversify the range of opinion on the op-ed page, which in practice meant hiring a bunch of conservatives. Needless to say, this didn't go down well with lots of liberal Times readers.

Bennet kept his job, but he exhibited some misjudgments here and there and apparently by 2020 his position was a bit tenuous. That was when the Times published an op-ed by right-wing Sen. Tom Cotton. The op-ed caused an uproar, and a few days later Bennet was gone.

It was all a bit fuzzy, though. The op-ed was published online, but never in print. It was handled by an assistant editor and Bennet wasn't involved. I read it at the time and don't recall thinking it was anything out of the ordinary for a publicity seeking twit like Cotton.

Eric Wemple of the Washington Post brought all of this back to light by writing a column a few days ago provocatively headlined "James Bennet was right." So I went back and read Cotton's op-ed again to see what I thought with the passage of time.

My response, yet again, was "meh." It was written during the BLM protests over George Floyd's death and Cotton was upset about the rioting and destruction that accompanied them:

Some elites have excused this orgy of violence in the spirit of radical chic, calling it an understandable response to the wrongful death of George Floyd. Those excuses are built on a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters. A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants.

....Some governors have mobilized the National Guard, yet others refuse, and in some cases the rioters still outnumber the police and Guard combined. In these circumstances, the Insurrection Act authorizes the president to employ the military “or any other means” in “cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws.”

Cotton wanted the president to authorize military intervention in cases where "rioters and looters" were beyond the control of local police. In particular, he proposed an "overwhelming show of force," which sounds like a bad idea to me but an entirely normal one for a right-wing Republican. In any case, it's an idea to disagree with, not to put beyond the pale of even discussing. I continue to see the case for arguing with Cotton, but I still don't see the case for the entire Times newsroom going nuts and Bennet ending up out on his ear.

But no worries on that score. Bennet is now "Lexington," the columnist who writes about America for the Economist. So he landed on his feet.