I happened to read my millionth tweet this evening about how wildly inept the federal government is, and that suddenly got me curious: how do we compare with our peer countries? I'm talking about non-tiny, non-poor countries.
There's no concrete measure of this, but the World Bank has a measure of government efficiency that they keep up to date. They're a reasonably reliable bunch, so I used their scores. I had no idea how this would turn out before I did it, but here it is:
For some reason the World Bank doesn't rate Taiwan, so they aren't included even though they qualify.
In the end, 16 countries made the cut and the US ranked 6th. There's no reason that we should do especially well since we're comparing ourselves to other first world countries. But we did, placing at the very high end of average.
I have no idea how the World Bank calculates this. As Rod Serling said, I'm just presenting it for your consideration. There are plenty of things we could improve, but apparently our federal bureaucracy isn't quite the hellhole Elon Musk thinks it is.
I was reading a book on Indian history, and the author referenced the Morley reforms of 1909. I did not know what those were, and so I posed a question and received a very good answer, read those here. I simply asked “What were the Morley reforms done by the British in India in 1909?”
I would treat this with at least a bit of skepticism. The reason is that when I ask ChatGPT about something I'm familiar with I often find that its answers are lacking. How do I know the same isn't true of topics I'm not familiar with?
Now, I'll admit that the iffy answers are usually about recent events and include quantitative data. For routine historical and biographical questions ChatGPT is probably pretty reliable. Generally speaking, though, if the details of an answer are really important, you should probably verify them.
Here's a nerdy puzzle for you. See if you can figure out the answer before I tell you.
"Checkable" deposits represent money you can get your hands on quickly—like a checking account—as opposed to things like CDs, which you can access only when they mature. Here are checkable deposits per household:
During the pandemic, what happened? It looks like people transferred lots of money into accounts where they could get to it more readily in case of an emergency. Right? Maybe it would help to show you M1 money supply, which is just checkable deposits plus physical currency in circulation:
Total M1 increased by $11 trillion in a single week! What's going on?
The answer is that this has nothing to do with the pandemic. That's just a weird coincidence. What happened is that on April 24, 2020, the Fed ended its rule that you could withdraw money only six times a month from savings accounts. This made savings accounts effectively checkable, so a few days later the funds in saving accounts got added to M1 all at once. Banks were allowed to redesignate accounts at their own pace, which is why the checkable deposits chart takes several quarters to show the full change.
So the increase in checkable deposits didn't represent anything real. It was just due to a change in definitions. The moral of the story is that it's not enough to look at data and invent plausible stories. Sometimes you need to know the hidden guts of where the data comes from.
But the number varies with work arrangement. Only 6% of engineers who work at the office do nothing, compared to 14% of those who work from home.
Case closed, right? Bring 'em all back to the office! Not so fast:
The average productivity of engineers who work at home is indeed low. But the absolute tippy top ranks of engineers also work at home, where they're free of most distractions.
So is it worth it to accept some shirking from remote workers in return for getting higher performance from your stars? That's not necessarily an easy decision.
Of course, the best thing would be to identify all the ghosts regardless of where they work. I confess I don't quite get why this is hard. My experience is that programmers are generally given specific tasks as part of a larger project, and if they literally do nothing they'll get caught eventually when their chunk of the project never appears. There must be some piece of this that I'm missing.
Right now, the probability of getting caught across the United States is low and falling. Clearance rates — in simplified terms, the number of arrests per reported offenses — were just 41 percent for violent crimes (including homicide) in 2023.
This is true, but I doubt it has anything to do with the number of police officers, which has been steadily rising even as crime rates have fallen by more than half:
My suspicion is different. Here are clearance rates for violent crime:
The clearance rate starts out fairly stable at around 50%, then drops and recovers between 2000-13. The first decline after that is in 2014, and the clearance rate dropped sharply in the decade after that. This means it could be related to Ferguson (2014), but probably not since the decline lasted so long. And it predates both George Floyd (2020) and the pandemic (2020-21), so they aren't likely at fault either.
So what could it be that started around 2014 and kept going for a decade? My guess is NIBRS, the FBI's new and improved crime reporting system. The number of police departments using NIBRS first reached a critical level around 2012 and continued to increase through 2022, when usage reached 80% and started to flatten out. My guess is that NIBRS tightened the criteria for "cleared" in some way, and as more police departments made the switch their official clearance rates went down even though they weren't doing anything different.
In other words, it's all a statistical artifact, one of many that NIBRS introduced. I don't think that FBI crime data is entirely worthless these days, but you have to be very careful with it. The decade-long switch to NIBRS has really bollixed things up.
Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, has announced plans to incorporate an artificial intelligence-powered “bias meter” into the newspaper’s coverage.
....The “bias meter”, Soon-Shiong said, will be integrated into articles so that “somebody could understand, as they read it, that the source of the article has some level of bias”.... “And what we need to do is not have what we call confirmation bias, and then that story automatically, the reader can press a button and get both sides of that exact same story based on that story and then give comments,” he added.
Let's see if I understand this. Soon-Shiong apparently thinks his own reporters are presenting only one side of the story, so he's introducing a tool that will—what? Produce a competing story? Merely rate quoted sources on his bias meter? Provide links to the "other side"?
It's not clear. But this sure seems like a peculiar way to tell the public you don't trust your own staff. I for one can't wait to see it in action.
President-elect Donald Trump said members of the now-defunct House select committee tasked with investigating the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol should be in jail.
....In the interview with Kristen Welker, Trump also claimed he would not appoint a special prosecutor to investigate President Joe Biden.... “I’m not doing that unless I find something that I think is reasonable,” Trump said. “But that’s not going to be my decision, that’s going to be Pam Bondi’s decision and, to a different extent, Kash Patel’s.”
....Trump also said he would let Bondi “do what she wants to do” regarding an investigation into Jack Smith.... “I think he’s very corrupt but I want [Bondi] to do whatever she … wants to do.”
He added, “I’m not going to instruct her to do it.”
Gee, I wonder if Trump will find something "reasonable"? I wonder if Pam Bondi and Kash Patel already know what Trump wants them to do even if he doesn't give them explicit instructions?
Biden should pardon everyone Trump or his team has ever mentioned. Does it set a bad precedent? Of course it does. It's a toxic precedent. But the real precedent buster is an incoming president who threatens to prosecute political opponents over and over and over. In the face of that, practically anything would be a bad precedent.
Is Trump just blowing hot air? I think he probably is. But why take chances?
In the same way that Afghanistan suddenly collapsed in 2021, it looks like Syria has suddenly collapsed in 2024. The insurgent group HTS, which for the past few years has effectively ruled a small province in the north near the border with Turkey, took over Aleppo and then headed south along the conveniently located M5 motorway to Hama, Homs, and finally Damascus, encountering more or less no resistance along the way. The Syrian army was apparently just a hollowed-out shell after years of civil war.
Bashar al-Assad, Syria's barbarous longtime dictator, has reportedly fled the country; Sednaya Prison (the "Human Slaughterhouse") has been captured and all the regime's prisoners released; and both the Russians and Iranians have pulled out their military forces. This means that in the space of a year Iran has lost its proxies in Syria, Hamas, and largely in Hezbollah as well. But I guess they still have the Houthis in Yemen.
There's no telling what comes next. The transition to new leadership seems to be proceeding remarkably civilly, all things considered, and HTS claims they plan to rule moderately. That is to say, Syria will be a harsh Islamic theocracy, but there won't be Sharia law everywhere or women forced to wear head-to-toe burkas. We'll see.
According to, um, everyone, the murder of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson has sent corporate executives into shock. After all, anyone could be next:
Those who advise companies on security issues say threats against executives are rising.... “The environment is explosive right now,” said former Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis, who now consults with large companies on how to mitigate security risks. “The threats are evolving and getting more violent.”
....Corporate executives have been targets of violence in the past, including during social upheaval in the early 20th century. In the early 1990s, Exxon executive Sidney Reso was kidnapped outside his New Jersey home as part of what authorities called a ransom plot that led to his death. Theodore Kaczynski, dubbed the Unabomber, sent exploding packages to airline executives and others over two decades, killing three people and injuring more, before he was arrested in 1996.
Go to the website of any security firm and you'll find confirmation of this. Threats are rising. People hate corporate executives. Social media makes everything more dangerous. You and your family are at risk.
But I have a genuine question: Is there any evidence, even a shred, that this is true? Security firms have been widely quoted about threat levels in news articles over the past few days, but of course they say threats are rising. They're trying to sell protection. They've been saying this for as long as they've existed.
And virtually no corporate executives have been killed by terrorist-style violence in the past half century. In the Wall Street Journal article above, they came up with only two examples: one targeted by the Unabomber in 1994 and another who was kidnapped and accidentally killed in 1992. Neither was a CEO.
Now, maybe I'm missing a few instances. Maybe the murder rate of executives is low because lots of them hire bodyguards. And I have little doubt that social media has made random threats more common.
But are corporate executives in any more actual, physical danger than before? I'd like to see some evidence other than a sales pitch from a security company or a private poll saying people are more scared than they used to be. Is there any?
For some reason the World Bank doesn't rate Taiwan, so they aren't included even though they qualify.
