The news of the day is that, among other things, the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago turned up boxes of documents that contained "nuclear" secrets classified at stratospherically high levels. But what kind of nuclear secrets? Nobody knows, of course, but I started getting curious about what the broad possibilities were. Here's a back-of-the-envelope list:
Engineering/design documents.
Intel about other countries' nuclear programs.
Old nuclear launch codes.
Nuclear protocols.
Defense plans for using nuclear weapons.
Budget information.
Storage and/or transportation plans.
Details about planned upgrades to nuclear weapons.
Wargame simulations.
Which of these is most likely? What broad categories am I missing? FWIW, I'd choose #2 if I were forced to guess. The others all seem like things that either wouldn't interest Trump or that he would never have access to in the first place.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation agents took around 20 boxes of items, binders of photos, a handwritten note and the executive grant of clemency for Mr. Trump’s ally Roger Stone, a list of items removed from the property shows....The list includes references to one set of documents marked as “Various classified/TS/SCI documents,” an abbreviation that refers to top-secret/sensitive compartmented information. It also says agents collected four sets of top secret documents, three sets of secret documents, and three sets of confidential documents. The list didn’t provide any more details about the substance of the documents.
Huh. That sounds harmless, doesn't it? And anyway, as Trump said, “The government could have had whatever they wanted, if we had it.”
I've avoided commenting on this whole fiasco since we have so little real information about what's going on, but I have to admit it's fascinating. Did Trump just gather up random stuff and take it with him without looking at it? Did he consider nuclear protocols and whatnot to be great keepsakes? Beats me. Even by Trump standards this is really hard to make sense of.
I was puttering around this morning looking for non-Trump-search-warrant news, and noticed that the Census Bureau had just released its latest data on new business formation.
Business formation was up a bit in July, but basically it's been fairly flat for the past year.
But it's been flat at a rate about a third higher than before the pandemic. What's up with that? Why have we created about 300,000 more new businesses than we would have predicted back at the beginning of 2020?
The answer, of course, is that we haven't: a new business application isn't the same as actually starting a business. It just means someone is feeling optimistic. Plus you need to take into account the number of businesses that closed. The BLS does this using a survey, but it's way out of date because this information is slow to filter through:
What you see here is closer to the truth: During the pandemic a bunch of businesses closed and fewer new ones opened than usual. We made up for that in late 2020 with a surge of new businesses and fewer business closures. If you look at the net number compared to the pre-pandemic average, it was down by about 125,000 during the first quarter of the pandemic and up by 125,000 over the next three quarters.
And since then? Business births were healthy through the end of 2021, and applications for new businesses are still high. But we don't yet know about deaths, and the BLS forecasting model seems to have been wrecked by the pandemic. More than likely the net number of new businesses is still in good shape, but not as good as the Census data suggests.
The Producer Price Index clocked in at -6% from June to July on an annualized basis. Core PPI remained positive, but declined to 2.3%. As with other inflation indexes, they both peaked in March and have been easing off ever since.
The biggest price increases were in eggs, beef, and construction. The biggest declines were in energy and grains. More generally, the decline in PPI was nearly all for goods, with PPI for services flat for the month.
PPI is generally considered a leading indicator for CPI. If this remains the case—and who really knows these days?—it's yet more evidence that inflation peaked in the first quarter of the year and has been slowly subsiding ever since.
Here are all the episodes of high inflation that we've had over the past 70 years:
The time frame for each episode is from trough to peak. I used core PCE as the measure of inflation since that's (allegedly) what the Fed uses.
So is our current inflationary episode big or small compared to those in the past? Assuming that it's reached its peak and will now start declining, the answer is probably "small." But it seems pretty big because 30 years of the Great Moderation has gotten us in the habit of thinking about nearly any bout of inflation as catastrophic.
As you may recall, I got cataract surgery several months ago even though I don't have cataracts. I just wanted to replace my natural lenses with artificial lenses that promised sharp eyesight both near and far. Here's how it went.
My original intent was to get multifocal lenses that are designed with two separate focus points, but the ophthalmologist I saw talked me into something different: RxSight lenses that can be adjusted after they've been implanted and have an extended focus range.
Sadly, the former was true but the latter wasn't. What I ended up with was two monofocal lenses. My left eye had good distance vision but terrible near vision. My right eye had good near vision but terrible distance vision. In some people this is OK because your brain will merge them together and produce good eyesight at all distances. My brain was not clever enough to do this.
After a few months to give the lenses (and my brain) a fair shot at working, I finally asked to have them replaced with the multifocal lenses I wanted in the first place. A few weeks ago we implanted a Synergy lens in my left eye.
The Synergy lens has good distance vision and so-so near vision. However, this works fine: with good near vision in one eye and OK near vision in the other, my reading vision is pretty good. And my distance vision is fine even though my right eye still has terrible far vision.
However, all was not perfect: the Synergy lens produces a sort of vague double vision as well as strong halos at night when I look at bright lights. This is tolerable, and might get better with time, but I wasn't willing to risk putting another one in my right eye. If I ended up with both double vision and so-so near vision in both eyes, I was afraid I'd lose my reading vision entirely.
So I canceled the surgery for my right eye and I consider myself done for now. I'll reassess at the end of the year depending on whether the Synergy lens improves by then.
This may all sound like bad news, and it has been a pain in the ass. However, I did meet my goal: I no longer wear glasses at all and my vision is acceptable at all distances.¹ I wish it were sharper, but it's sharp enough for all ordinary activities, and I hold out hope that my brain will eventually edit out the the halos and double vision.
Would I recommend this for others? I would definitely avoid the RxSight lenses, which I later learned aren't even recommended unless you have an eye condition that precludes the use of multifocal lenses (I don't, and my doctor never should have proposed them). If you have to have them, then go ahead, but you'll just end up with a very expensive pair of monofocal lenses.
The Synergy lenses are better, but their near vision is only OK, not great. I have some fuzziness too, but not everyone does. It's a bit of a crapshoot.
And it's expensive. My surgery cost a little over $10,000. If I had it to do over again, I'm on the fence. It did work, but only barely.
¹Oddly, there's a caveat here: I now wear sunglasses outdoors. I never did before, but the artificial lenses are clearer than my old natural lenses. In theory that's good, but in practice it means I now have to haul around sunglasses on bright days, though I can do without them if I have to.
The big climate change bill includes a provision allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. However, you'll be excused for being less than impressed when you learn that this applies to only ten drugs starting in 2026, increasing to 20 drugs by 2029.
But there's more! The other Medicare provisions in the bill haven't gotten as much attention but are probably more important. Here they are:
An annual cap of $2,000 on out-of-pocket spending on prescription drugs.
A limit on drug price increases to the rate of inflation. .
A cap on insulin copays of $35.
And for everyone else:
It extends the expanded subsidies for Obamacare. No one will have to pay more than 8.5% of their income for family coverage.
It's worth noting that the inflation cap on prescription drug prices is probably better than it seems. The overall inflation rate of prescription drugs is higher than inflation by a fair amount, though that's cooled down some since the start of the pandemic. However, that's an average of all drug prices. As KFF points out, there's a subset of about 20% of all drugs—including nearly all of the most popular ones— that have seen very high increases. Keeping those prices reined in will make a big difference to a lot of people.
None of the Medicare stuff applies to those of us on commercial plans because the Senate parliamentarian ruled that they didn't qualify for the 50-vote threshold of the reconciliation process. However, Democrats are likely to reintroduce the insulin cap as a standalone bill, so that has a chance of helping everyone. The inflation cap, however, is probably going to stay limited to Medicare for now.
Rather than spread them out, here are three views of the Roman Colosseum at dawn. The top photo was taken from the northeast corner with the Vittorio Emanuele monument in the distance.
The middle photo was taken from the south side looking east toward the rising sun.
The bottom photo is a forced-perspective shot taken from nearly the same spot as the top photo. From near to far, it shows a bit of the dome of the Basilica di Maxentius in the Roman Forum; the dome of the Chiesa Santi Luca e Martina martiri; the red brick of the Basilica di Santa Maria in Ara coeli; and finally the Vittorio Emanuele monument again.
