Individual health insurance premiums are set to rise by an average of 6% on the state marketplace next year amid rebounding demand for medical care and uncertainty surrounding federal financial assistance, Covered California said Tuesday....Each year from 2020 to 2022, rates in the state rose by less than 2%.
Covered California was almost apologetic about this, but they shouldn't be. It's true that federal premium assistance from the American Rescue Plan is likely to go away, but there's no reason to overthink this. You just need to account for inflation, which is very high this year and therefore affects premiums next year:
After you account for inflation, today's announcement is good news: It represents the second best premium growth of the past four years, not the worst. Instead of a 6% increase, it's really a 2.3% decrease.
Ballgirls exchange a look behind Madison Keys and Taylor Townsend during a changeover in the second round of women's doubles at the French Open. Keys and Townsend won the match but then lost in the semifinals to Coco Gauff and Jessica Pegula.
Last night was dex night, so I spent some time hanging around Twitter. At one point I ended up writing something that I've hinted around at here but have never quite come out and said outright. So let's take care of that.
I've been watching the climate change fight for 20 years now, waiting and waiting for evidence that the public takes it seriously enough to do something about it. Not just say it's important when a pollster calls, but demonstrate a real-world willingness to make lifestyle sacrifices that would make a difference. By chance, Paul Krugman wrote about this today:
It has long been painfully obvious that voters are reluctant to accept even small short-run costs in the interest of averting long-run disaster. This is depressing, but it’s a fact of life, one that no amount of haranguing seems likely to change.... Emission taxes are the Econ 101 solution to pollution, but realistically they just aren’t going to happen in America.
Needless to say, I agree with Krugman. Two years ago I wrote a long piece for Mother Jones based on exactly this observation, and I'd add that it's true of other countries as well. Neither Chinese nor Indian voters have any interest in freezing or lowering their standard of living at a quarter of our level just because we happened to get rich first. And it's hard to blame them. Nevertheless, it just adds to the mountain of evidence—which I outlined in my article—that the public simply can't be counted on to support any serious action.
The fact of climate change will become undeniable. The effects of global warming, discernible today mostly in scary charts and mathematical models, will start to become obvious enough in the real world that even the rightest of right wingers will be forced to acknowledge what’s happening.
I was only half right. The effects of climate change are becoming undeniable, but it hasn't made even a lick of difference. The Republican Party remains unanimously opposed to clean energy because they oppose anything that raises the possibility of corporate regulation. This is very unlikely to change by 2024.
How obvious can it get?
At the time I wrote about all this two years ago, my conclusion was that we needed massive funding of R&D in hopes of finding a miracle technology that would fix our climate problem. Even then I acknowledged that this was a long shot, but at least it was better than nothing.
But the truth is that I always believed it was a real long shot. When you combine the slim possibility of getting the needed funding with the slim possibility of someone inventing a breakthrough, the odds of success are very small. I'd put it at 10%. Maybe 5%.
This leaves us with only one possible solution: geoengineering. This has pros and cons. The main upside is that the most likely version of geoengineering involves seeding the stratosphere with sulfur aerosols. This blocks sunlight and reduces the temperature, in the same way that eruptions of sulfur from large volcanoes do this on a temporary basis (usually a year or two). We pretty much know it would work, and we also know that it's cheap. Current estimates suggest $10 billion per year, but even if that's off by a factor of ten, it's still chicken feed.
The downside is that everyone hates it. Scientists hate it because it's potentially dangerous—and we have no idea how dangerous. Conservatives hate it because it would force them to acknowledge climate change as an actual problem. And liberals hate it because they believe it would reduce support for more conventional solutions (solar and wind buildouts, better insulation, etc.).
But we're running out of time, and we have to acknowledge that before long we may have no choice but to start cooling the planet by force majeure. This means we need to start up massive research projects on a few of the most promising approaches to geoengineering so that a decade from now we know a lot more about how likely they are to work, how best to implement them, and what risks we'd be taking if we did.
But by "massive" I'm not talking about the $700 billion I suggested for a sweeping R&D program. I'm talking about a few billion per year. That's nothing.
And it doesn't bind us to anything. It just gives us options. No harm is done if a decade from now we're making real progress and it looks like maybe we can hit zero carbon emissions by the middle of the century. We just keep the research quietly humming along in case we ever need it.
Needless to say, we should continue pushing solar and wind and nuclear and anything else that will reduce our carbon emissions. Maybe it will work! But even if it doesn't, it will make a big difference. And one thing's for sure: if we end up bombing the stratosphere with sulfur, the less the better. If conventional methods get us 50% of the way to carbon neutrality, that means 50% less sulfur to close the rest of the gap. These solutions don't conflict, they complement each other.
Marian and I flew to France in mid-May and came home in early June. Everything went smoothly: the flights were on-time, everything was hassle free, and lines were short. Were we just lucky? Or did we pick the right time to go to Europe? Whatever it was, the Wall Street Journal reports that things sure seem to be fairly catastrophic right now:
This year, carriers starved of revenue planned big capacity increases for the spring and summer. But some of the steps they took to shrink in 2020 have proved to be hard to reverse.
....The pressure points include too few ground handlers to load and unload luggage, a long training period for new or rehired pilots, continued absences from Covid-19 and shortages of the air-traffic controllers crucial for safe flying.
....The biggest bottleneck involves the new-employee background checks required for airport staff. The process takes 60 days on average, but up to three months in some jurisdictions.
....Pilots need training at their new airlines, which with so many coming aboard means long waits for time with the limited number of flight simulators and instructors.
I'm beginning to wonder if CEOs of big companies are idiots. You may recall, for example, that American car companies cancelled their orders for computer chips when sales plunged at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. Then, apparently, they decided this low demand would last forever so they never put in new orders—and by the time they realized that people would eventually start buying again it was too late. Other companies had snapped up the chips and the Americans were out of luck.
The same thing seems to be happening here. Background checks? Oh yeah, I forgot about those. Pilot retraining? I guess we should have planned for that a while ago. Baggage handlers? Maybe we ought to pay more than starvation wages if we want them to return to airport work.
Beyond that, there's the question of whether there's really a pilot shortage in the first place. The pilots union says that the number of multi-engine licenses issued each year has more than kept up with demand:
This particular fight has been going on forever, with carriers insisting there's a shortage and the union saying there are plenty of pilots available if airlines would agree to hire greater numbers of experienced pilots even though they cost more. There's nothing new here.
[Marie Marivel] is among those who say such conditions are no longer sustainable. Her monthly take-home pay is around 1,500 euros (about $1,560), she said, and her monthly rent is €900. Rising prices for energy, gasoline and food now eat up her paycheck before the next payday comes around.
....Aéroports de Paris, which runs the Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports, said in a statement that it still needed to find at least 4,000 workers....During a recent campaign to hire 400 people from an unemployment center near the airport, only 20 people took a job.
Marivel is a security agent in France who belongs to a union, many of which are threatening strike actions. But the situation is much the same here: baggage handlers in the US, who mostly work for contractors who pinch pennies because they work for airlines that demand it, aren't paid much more than burger flippers at McDonald's.
There's a simple solution to this particular problem, of course, but airlines don't seem willing to plan for that either. The result is a shortage of pilots, flight attendants, baggage handlers, and practically everyone else in the airline business who are victims of crappy planning.¹ And that's not to mention us, the flying public.
Am I being too harsh? Should airline CEOs (and auto CEOs) have done a little bit better at forward planning? Or were they caught in a situation that no one handled well?
The region’s six-county median sale price was $750,000, down from $760,000 in May....Although median prices tend to peak in the summer, the average increase from May to June was 1.78% over the last decade....The last time prices fell from May to June was in 2010.
This is an interesting statistic. The average May-June increase is 1.8% but this year it was -1.3%. That's a pretty substantial difference: about $23,000 less for the average home seller. Adjusted for inflation, my horseback guess is that it's more like $32,000.
On the other hand, we just sold a house out in San Bernardino, and it got an offer $30,000 above our asking price within three days. So who are you going to believe: CoreLogic or your own eyes? Data or anecdata?
Anyway, I'd love to see this May-June statistic for the the past decade, and for various metro areas. I'd also like to see it adjusted for inflation. As usual, though, since I'm not a subscriber to any of these services I don't have any way of getting it.
But this is still interesting as the first statistic I've seen that suggests an absolute decline in housing prices. It was bound to come.
Are Hispanic voters abandoning the Democratic Party? Fox News and the Wall Street Journal want you to think so, but Gallup disagrees:
Gallup's best mechanism for tracking political inclinations over time is political party identification, a measure included in all Gallup surveys for decades....The results show that Americans' party identification swung dramatically toward the Republican Party in the last six months of 2021....With these national numbers as a context, what about party identification among Hispanic Americans?
Gallup says that between the first and second halves of 2021, overall party ID shifted 9 points away from Democrats while Hispanic party ID shifted only 4 points. Here are the annual party ID averages for the past decade:
This is net advantage. For example, in 2021 Hispanic voters were 56% Democratic and 26% Republican.
Overall, there's no indication that Democrats are shedding Hispanic voters. The annual trend is positive and in the last half of 2021 they bucked the national trend significantly.
Of course, what we're really interested in is seeing party ID among Hispanic voters right now. Gallup has this number but hasn't published it. Perhaps someone who's a subscriber can persuade them to do so.
POSTSCRIPT: When you're looking at something like this, you really need to look at the same statistic over time. You can't look at party ID for one year and the generic congressional ballot another. You can't compare a Washington Post poll in 2018 with a Gallup poll in 2022 that might have different question wording and different demographic weighting. Nor can you compare, say, presidential support in one year with party ID in another.
This is all cherry picking and it can provide you with pretty much any trend that appeals to whatever point you'd like to make. If, on the other hand, you really want to know what's going on, you need to compare the same thing year over year. This is what makes the Gallup results so valuable.
Another week, another 17¢ decline in the price of gasoline. We are now down 60¢ from the June peak, a yearly savings of about $300 per driving-age adult:
Kudos for President Biden, right? After all, he was allegedly responsible for the big increase, so he must be responsible for the big decrease too.
Question #1: Do you know what the following acronyms stand for?
MRA
FDA
EMA
GMP
For the record, they are: Mutual Recognition Agreement, Food & Drug Administration, European Medicines Agency, and Good Manufacturing Practices.
Question #2: If you didn't recognize all four of these acronyms, did you nonetheless have a strong opinion about whether the United States should automatically accept European approvals of European pharmaceutical facilities instead of always requiring its own?
Hmmm. Readers of this blog will probably not be surprised to learn that just because they haven't heard of something, that doesn't mean nobody is doing something about it. Various agencies, because they are not staffed with idiots, have been aware of this issue for more than two decades and have been working on it the entire time. And guess what? We do have a reciprocity agreement regarding pharmaceutical facility inspections with the EU (and Britain). Here's the history:
1998: First attempt at an agreement.
2001: Attempt fails. Everyone gives up for a while.
2012: Congress passes a law allowing the FDA to try again.
2014: Negotiations begin, mainly between the FDA and the EMA, but also with every national regulatory authority in the EU.
2017: An MRA is agreed to. The plan is to implement it for most ordinary facilities by July 2019; for veterinary facilities (which are under the authority of the USDA) at a later date; and for facilities that manufacture vaccines and plasma-derived pharmaceuticals by July 2022.
2019: The MRA is implemented as planned after the FDA reaches agreement with Slovakia, the last of the EU countries to gain US approval. By the end of 2020, agreement is reached in principle for veterinary facilities but is not implemented.
2020: The COVID-19 pandemic puts negotiations on hold. Both the FDA and the EMA are putting every spare resource to work on COVID.
July 2022: Because of the pandemic delay, there is still no MRA today for either veterinary facilities or vaccine factories. Without this, it is not legal for the FDA to accept the results of an EMA inspection for something like the monkeypox vaccine. It must verify GMP itself.
This is the basic timeline and it doesn't seem unreasonable to me. In 2017 there was no special reason to hold up the main MRA for vaccines, so they didn't. Then, when COVID hit, the vaccine MRA was put on the back burner in order to expedite cooperation on COVID. That's also reasonable. The downside of all this is that when the monkeypox outbreak hit us earlier this year, there was no MRA in place for vaccine facilities.
The cost-benefit on these decisions is sky high. On the benefit side we have an MRA in place for nearly all human medicines. On the cost side we have a short delay in approval for a single vaccine aimed at a disease that's extremely mild. Monkeypox needs to be dealt with, but it's simply not a high priority compared to a killer like COVID.
Would any of you have done things differently given the resources available to you?
POSTSCRIPT: Whenever there's a panic over something like this, it spawns a widespread sentiment that (a) Agency X is moving too slowly, (b) they obviously aren't taking this seriously, (c) this is an emergency and they should ignore the rules, and (d) WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON WITH THESE STUPID BUREAUCRATS AND THEIR STUPID RULES???
My advice: STFU unless you really, genuinely know what you're talking about.¹ The rules might or might not make sense, but they aren't stupid. And if we routinely cave in to Twitter mobs and discard them whenever public pressure gets heavy, someday we will pay a big price. And I wonder who will get the blame?
¹This does not include generic knowledge about the deficiencies and regulatory capture of Agency X. I'm talking about the nuts and bolts here.
I spent so much time mucking around with this chart that I'm no longer quite sure what I was looking for in the first place:
What it shows is that since 2012 the number of housing units per adult has declined by about 1% and the number of rental units per adult has increased by about 3%. In other words, the changes over time have been minuscule.
But rent has been steadily increasing the entire time regardless of whether the housing supply was going up a little or down a little. Adjusted for inflation, rent is now more than 40% higher than it was a decade ago. In the previous decade, housing supply also moved up and down slightly and rent stayed dead flat the entire time.
That seems odd, doesn't it? Shouldn't rent be a little more responsive to changes in housing supply?
When we were in Paris the opera house became a bit of a joke. It was something both of us wanted to see, and it was only about ten minutes from our apartment, but for some reason we kept missing it. Finally, a couple of days before we left, we made it over on a rainy day.
And we got lucky. A sign outside said the main auditorium was closed for rehearsals, but about five minutes after we went in rehearsals were apparently over. It's a pretty magnificent theater, so I'm glad we got to see it.
I have four pictures of the opera house for you today. From top to bottom:
The auditorium.
The main staircase.
A side room used (I assume) for milling around during intermissions.
A view from the balcony looking out on Avenue de l'Opera.
All except the last one are massive panoramas that were stitched together in Photoshop.
After you account for inflation, today's announcement is good news: It represents the second best premium growth of the past four years, not the worst. Instead of a 6% increase, it's really a 2.3% decrease.
