Kevin Drum

Unemployment has plummeted everywhere:

Unemployment rates were lower in July than a year earlier in 383 of the 389 metropolitan areas, higher in 5 areas, and unchanged in 1 area, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

Well, almost everywhere. So who are the five unlucky areas that managed to beat the odds and show an increase in unemployment?

• Yuma, AZ
• Bloomington, IN
• Elkhart-Goshen, IN
• Columbus, IN
• Lafayette-West Lafayette, IN

Yuma is the true outlier here, rising 1.7 percentage points from 16.6% to 18.4%. What the hell is going on out there?

The other four cities are all in Indiana. Their joblessness increases were small, but still, aside from our friends in Arizona no other state had even one area with increased unemployment. What the hell is going on out there?¹

As for the other 48 states, good job. Unemployment is down in every single area. My own metropolitan division, Anaheim-Santa Ana-Irvine, dropped a stunning 3.6 points from 6.4% to 2.8%. Hooray for us.

¹Indiana as a whole managed to eke out a 0.2% decrease in unemployment. This was the worst performance in the nation. The best performance was turned in by California, which had a 3.9% drop in unemployment. You can check out your neck of the woods here.

Republicans in swing districts are running scared:

At least nine Republican congressional candidates have scrubbed or amended references to Trump or abortion from their online profiles in recent months, distancing themselves from divisive subjects that some GOP strategists say are two of the biggest liabilities for the party ahead of the post-Labor Day sprint to Election Day.

“The Dobbs decision has clearly energized Democratic voters to the point where they have closed the enthusiasm gap with Republicans,” said Whit Ayres, a longtime GOP pollster, referencing the Supreme Court ruling that ended the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. Asked whether it hurts the GOP to have Trump back in the news, Ayres replied, “The best case for Republican candidates in the midterms is making the upcoming election a referendum on the Biden administration.”

Republicans in purplish districts or states are caught in a vise: they can either piss off Trump or piss off voters. I suspect there will be something of a panicked stampede toward voters over the next couple of months.

This might well be my last M-protein test:

It's been flat for the past three months, which is fine. It would be a little worrisome under normal circumstances, but since I'm now off the chemo regimen and just waiting for the CAR-T treatment, all that matters is that I'm not getting worse. And I'm not!

In other news, my blood is clotting just fine; my glucose is only slightly higher than it should be; my electrolytes are in great shape; I have the proper amount of magnesium, phosphate, and uric acid; my immune system is good; and I don't have HIV, Epstein-Barr, or any form of hepatitis. Bottom line: aside from the whole cancer thing, I'm in great shape.

This was taken in the Saint-Martin neighborhood near the Place de la Bataille de Stalingrad. This is apparently a guy whose wife/partner/whatev really, really doesn't want him smoking indoors.

It's Tuesday, so it must be gasoline day:

Down another nickel! Thanks to Joe Biden's hard work, gasoline now costs less than it did 40 years ago.¹

¹Adjusted for inflation, of course.²

²Also, 40 years ago was 1982, the aftermath of the Iranian oil embargo. Still, gasoline is less expensive now than it was then. Facts are facts. Suck on that, Glenn Kessler.

The snowy peak in this photo is Iron Mountain, part of the San Gabriel range. It may not look like much, but here is Wikipedia's description:

While this mountain is far lower in elevation than other Southern California summits, it is the most difficult mountain to climb in the entire region. There are no water sources on the mountain, unless one finds snow. There are no maintained trails, the summit is seldom visited, and the climb is of about 6000 vertical feet (1,800 m), much of it at a 30° to 50° angle on loose soil, decomposed rock, or through brush. Some approaches to the summit require high degrees of rock-climbing skill. One route over the ridgeline from nearby Mount San Antonio (Mount Baldy) is long, difficult, and dangerous. The south mountain slopes in summer are directly exposed to the sun....There are no facilities of any kind on the mountain.

Hold on. In the same sentence Mt. Baldy is "nearby" but the route from Baldy to Iron Mountain is "long." Which is it? And is this really Iron Mountain anyway? I think it is, but perhaps some local hikers can either confirm or correct this.

We now have booster shots aimed at the Omicron strains of COVID-19, and suddenly conservatives are realizing there's a downside to their endless yammering about how the FDA moves too damn slow. Michael Brendan Dougherty fills us in on the FDA's rapid approval of the Omicron boosters:

There’s a catch though: These boosters have been tested only on mice, not on humans.

....There was a libertarian and conservative vision of how the FDA should operate: more liberally, and faster please. They viewed the slow pace of the regulators as an impediment to discovery, innovation, and iteration....But there is another side to the story, which is trust. The faster that medicines are rolled out, and the less oversight they receive, the more room you have to make for public mistrust and doubt.

A very short time ago, it was nearly unthinkable to approve new vaccines without human trials. Now, we live in a world where ongoing booster mandates in some localities would oblige citizens to take a medicine that was never tested on humans or forfeit their access to public accommodations.

First off, Dougherty is wrong: Every year we all get flu vaccines that have never been tested on humans. It is assumed (correctly) that since the basic vaccine is safe, every possible combination of the vaccine against various strains of the flu is also safe. This is the same logic that's driving the fast approval of the Omicron boosters.

More to the point, though, is that everyone who's not an idiot already knew about the tradeoff between speed and safety. Am I being harsh? You damn well bet I am, and it's because the public reaction to the original vaccine approval pissed me off so much. Conservatives (mostly) could hardly shut up about how the FDA was a broken agency and there was no excuse for its sludge-like approval of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. But you have to run trials and analyze the data, and that takes time, we said. Bah, we heard back. A month earlier there was zero chance the vaccine wouldn't be approved. So why not just approve it then?

Does everyone now get it? In the case of the Omicron boosters, we're skipping the human trials and getting the vaccine out fast. Are you happy? Or are the dissenters on the FDA approval panel¹ suddenly going to become conservative heroes, leading to endless yammering about how reckless the FDA is? You can't have it both ways.

¹Yes, there is one.

This is just a "hello, world" post. There's nothing very interesting happening at the moment, and I have to leave soon to submit myself to a truly astonishing array of blood tests.¹ So just to let everyone know that I'm alive, awake, and on the job, here's the cost of natural gas since the war in Ukraine started:

A few years ago it was three bucks. Now it's over $50. In the US it's around $10.

Bottom line: European countries are sacrificing a lot to prosecute the war in Ukraine. In the US it's no big deal. It's good to keep that in mind.

¹Creatinine, white blood count, syphilis, hep A, B, and C, HIV, Epstein-Barr, blood type, glucose level, electrolytes, calcium, bilirubin, phosphorous, magnesium, immunoglobulins, M-protein, uric acid, quantiferon-TB, PTT, etc. etc. Also an EKG and an echocardiogram. And a brain MRI. Next week we do a spinal biopsy, which is really painful. Have you ever had one of those?

UPDATE: 18 vials of blood! Then they chased me down as I was leaving to tell me they'd forgotten one. 19 vials!

The Washington Post says that fusion power is finally getting close to reality:

Scientists are mere years from getting more energy out of fusion reactions than the energy required to create them, they said. Venture capitalists are pumping billions into companies, racing to get a fusion power plant up and running by the early 2030s. The Biden administration, through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Department of Energy, is creating tax credits and grant programs to help companies figure out how to deploy this kind of energy.

Yet challenges remain, according to nuclear scientists. The U.S. energy grid would need a significant redesign for fusion power plants to become common. The price of providing fusion power is still too high to be feasible.

The grid may be a problem, but I'm also interested in the idea of standalone fusion plants that are purpose-built for specific projects. Take water, for example. California is running out, but we have the Pacific Ocean right next door and it's brimming with water. The problem is that desalination plants require huge amounts of power to run and have never been worth the cost.

So what are the possibilities of building a fusion plant designed from the start to run a desalination plant and not connect to the grid at all? Water for everyone!

I dunno. Maybe it's still too expensive. But that's just a general problem. Even if the boffins get fusion to work, it still has to be cost effective or else no one is going to use it. And if it does become cost effective, why not use the technology to build some self-contained desalination plants for California?

The Wall Street Journal warns us yet again about the woes of retailers:

From Walmart Inc. to Nordstrom Inc., retailers have a glut of inventory and are discounting items to clear out space for holiday goods. Many have already lowered profit expectations for the year and are working to cut costs as consumers are pulling back spending in categories such as apparel and home goods ahead of the key year-end shopping season.

Maybe so, but before you start feeling too sorry for these guys you should take a look at the big picture:

Retail profits have fallen for a couple of quarters in a row, but they're still well above their trend growth from before the pandemic. Nothing unexpected is happening here.

At least, it's not unexpected for those of us who don't think the pandemic changed the course of human history and forever altered human nature. Which would be me. This is why I figure that returning to trend should be the default expectation for most things.