Cats, charts, and politics
We sure do like to bitch about flying around in airplanes. Here's the data for the past four years:
We're up from about 1,000 complaints per month in 2019 to an average of 4-5,000 complaints per month in 2022. Is airline service really five times worse than it used to be? Most of the objective numbers don't support this, but according to you, the American flying public, the answer is yes!
I know that it's hardly worth commenting on whatever new inanity Tucker Carlson spews into the world each day. He's just this decade's Glenn Beck, and he'll disappear soon enough.
But today's inanity got me curious about a tiny thing. Tucker started out tonight by blathering for a while about the sabotage of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines off the coast of Sweden. He was apparently unaware that the pipelines are already out of operation, so he began his segment by expressing shock at the potential loss of marine life from the gas leaks and the catastrophic effect all this leaking methane will have on climate change. Crocodile tears flowed.
As it happens, neither of these things is even remotely an issue, but whatever. Next, Tucker rambled on to the question of who sabotaged the pipelines, and eventually concluded that it was probably the United States—which is crazy, but not entirely impossible to believe. Then he got to thinking about how Russia might hit back:
Why wouldn't Russia sever undersea internet cables? What would happen if they did that? What would happen if banks in London couldn't communicate with banks in New York? Just that one piece of it—leaving aside its potential effects on our power grid.
What is that supposed to mean? How would severing transatlantic internet cables affect our power grid? Does anyone have any idea what he's thinking here?
Yeah, yeah, I know this is about the least important part of what he said. But I'm still curious.
Here is today's news about China:
Growth collapse: The World Bank lowered its forecast for GDP growth in China to 2.8%, a big drop from last year's 8.1%.
Belt and Road: The B&R initiative was designed to spread Chinese influence and goodwill in the developing world. Instead, it's been badly managed and is now being reined in due to huge losses on loans that small countries can no longer pay back.
Currency woes: The yuan hit its weakest level ever against the dollar.
There is no magic to China. It has strengths and it has weaknesses. It is not an implacable foe and it will not bulldoze its way over the US anytime soon. Probably not anytime period.
I was noodling around some stuff this afternoon and happened to end up at the USDA website. Today they released their monthly meat report, and it gives you a pretty good idea of why hamburger is more expensive than it was last year:
The price of a 750 lb feeder steer has gone up 13%. The price of feed has gone up 30%. As you can see from the chart, these increases have far outpaced the rate of inflation (calculated as CPI excluding food).¹
Altogether, the total expense of raising a steer for market has gone up from $1,600 to $1,900 over the past year. That's an increase of 19%.
This is why everyone is unhappy. The price of hamburger has gone up about 10% over the past year, so shoppers are unhappy. But that increase doesn't cover the price of producing the hamburger, which has gone up 19%, so ranchers are unhappy. The Ukrainians have been invaded by Russia, so they aren't happy. And the Russians are losing, so they aren't happy either. That's a lot of unhappy.
¹All prices are nominal and are based on the USDA's High Plains Cattle Feeding Simulator.
This is the Fountain of Apollo in the gardens of Versailles. The top photo is the view from the palace side looking out toward the Grand Canal. The bottom photo is taken in the other direction, looking up from the fountain to the palace.
By early afternoon on Tuesday, Russia’s state news media had reported what it described as preliminary results showing gigantic levels of support for joining Russia. The RIA state news agency reported votes of 98.19 percent in favor in Zaporizhzhia and 96.97 percent in Kherson in the south, and 97.91 percent in Donetsk and 97.82 percent in Luhansk in the east.
What's up with Kherson? Less than 97% in favor of joining the motherland? What kind of unpatriotic bastards are these guys?
The Wall Street Journal reports that lumber prices have plummeted back to their pre-pandemic levels:
Lumber prices have fallen to their lowest level in more than two years, bringing two-by-fours back to what they cost
before the pandemic building boom and pointing to a sharp slowdown in construction.
....Two-by-four prices nearly tripled the prepandemic record in an early sign of the inflation and broken supply chains that would bedevil the economic reopening. But lumber has led the way down for commodities since the central bank took aim at rising consumer prices and the overheated housing market.
Please stop it. The Fed didn't start its aggressive rate hike campaign until June. Lumber prices had been falling since February and had already finished their descent by mid-year. The Fed obviously had nothing to do with it. In fact, the Fed's campaign to throw the economy into recession still hasn't had any effect and probably won't until the end of the year. Anything that happens between now and then most likely would have happened regardless of what the Fed has done.
POSTSCRIPT: The real explanation, of course, is that the housing market started to droop at the beginning of the year and that affected the lumber market. There might also be some international trade issues involved. But not the Fed.
Yesterday, the attorney general of Texas—the top law enforcement officer in the state—made an idiot of himself trying to avoid a process server who was delivering a subpoena for a federal court hearing today. Ernesto Martin Herrera, the process server, tells the story. Be sure to read to the end.
When Herrera arrived at Ken Paxton’s home in McKinney on Monday morning, he told a woman who identified herself as Angela that he was trying to deliver legal documents to the attorney general. She told him that Paxton was on the phone and unable to come to the door. Herrera said he would wait.
Nearly an hour later, a black Chevrolet Tahoe pulled into the driveway, and 20 minutes after that, Ken Paxton exited the house.
“I walked up the driveway approaching Mr. Paxton and called him by his name. As soon as he saw me and heard me call his name out, he turned around and RAN back inside the house through the same door in the garage,” Herrera wrote in the sworn affidavit.
Angela Paxton then exited the house, got inside a Chevrolet truck in the driveway, started it and opened the doors. “A few minutes later I saw Mr. Paxton RAN from the door inside the garage towards the rear door behind the driver side,” Herrera wrote. “I approached the truck, and loudly called him by his name and stated that I had court documents for him. Mr. Paxton ignored me and kept heading for the truck.”
....On Twitter, the attorney general said his sudden departure was motivated by concerns for his family's safety. “It’s clear that the media wants to drum up another controversy involving my work as Attorney General, so they’re attacking me for having the audacity to avoid a stranger lingering outside my home and showing concern about the safety and well-being of my family,” he wrote in a tweet.
The fact that Paxton ran from a process server is unremarkable. Lots of crooks run from process servers, and Paxton has been under indictment for securities fraud since 2015. Paxton probably thought that Herrera was trying to deliver documents related to that, and accepting them might actually cause his trial to finally start after years of delays.
Or they might have been documents related to whistleblower complaints of improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other crimes.
Or it might have been related to a different complaint from some of the whistleblowers, who claim that Paxton fired them in retaliation for blowing the whistle on him.
In other words, there are lots and lots of crimes these documents might have been about. How was Paxton to know that they were just innocent subpoenas to testify in a case about abortion law? Of course he ran.
Oh, and about that final paragraph of the Texas Tribune story. Gotta love it, right? It's as good as Trump himself could have pulled off.
Which of these headlines seems more informative to you?
The top one just gives you a number with no context. Is it a big number? A small one? Is it for one year? How does it compare to the rest of the budget?
The other two headlines give you context: the loan program will amount to about ¼% of the total federal budget and will increase the annual deficit by 1-2%. That's enough to give you some idea of whether you think it's worth it or not.
So why did the New York Times run the top headline? As it happens, this is a 30-year estimate, and averages about $15 billion per year compared to a total federal budget of about $6 trillion. But you wouldn't know this unless you already know how big the budget is, how big the deficit is, and how it changes over time. But how many people know that? Even I had to look it up.
So why not skip the meaningless big numbers and write headlines and stories that provide context for this stuff? The easiest way is to use simple percentages, but there are other ways too. All of them are better than the big meaningless number.¹
¹Or, hereafter, BMN.
I've been off my chemo regimen for the past six weeks, but it doesn't seem to have done me any harm:
The last time I was tested was four weeks ago. Since then, I've gone from 0.76 to 0.79. That's nothing. And in this case, no news is good news.
Now that I'm back on the waiting list for the CAR-T treatment, I'll also be getting back to my old chemo regimen until they find a Carvykti slot for me. Unfortunately, that also means getting back on the Evil Dex. But the reason that's unfortunate is a little different than usual and has nothing to do with my sleep, which is already so disrupted that I'm not sure the dex will have much effect.
No, the reason it's unfortunate is that long-term use of dex raises your A1C level and makes you diabetic. I asked my doctor to run an A1C test last week as long as we were checking a bunch of other stuff, and after six weeks off the dex (and a modest diet change over the past few months) my A1C has declined from 10.6 to 6.4. Hooray! I'm sure it will go back up when I start taking the dex again, but this result suggests that it will go down considerably when I finally get the CAR-T treatment and (cross your fingers) am off the dex for good.
And when will that be? No one knows. Probably another 2-4 months.