Kevin Drum

This morning I went in to get the first adjustment to my new eyes. By tomorrow I should have better near and far vision and I'll be ready in another week for adjustment #2. The adjustments will continue until we're all happy with the results.

However, my doctor really, really wanted my eyes dilated for this procedure. So we dilated them. Then some more. Then I went into the lab that has the big machine that does the UV adjustment. My doctor came in and declared himself still dissatisfied. "Go get the super duper dilating solution," he said, so some of that got squirted into my eyes. Then some more just for good measure. Then we did the adjustment, which is a matter of staring into a machine for two minutes while it performs some kind of computer-operated process to change the shape of the lenses that were implanted a few weeks ago.

By the time we were done I could hardly see a thing. My eyes were so dilated the whole world was fuzzy. So I waited a while, then killed some time over lunch, and then drove home, squinting madly the whole time.

But about a mile before I got home a small tanker truck in front of me blew a tire, careened across two lanes of traffic, smashed into the concrete median barrier, and flipped over on the other side of the freeway. And I have to say that this showed off American manhood at its best. I stopped to see if I could help, and I was joined by half a dozen other men, most of them youngish and burly and more able to actually help than I was. A couple of them climbed onto the truck—which was leaking fuel—and managed to pull the driver out. He was unharmed, as was a women in a car that his truck flattened on its way over the median.

So it all turned out fine for everyone. Except for many thousands of dollars in vehicle and freeway damage, that is. And my eyes are slowly undilating. It was an exciting day.

Spring has sprung, and that means pictures from the garden. You've seen this pink rose before, and you'll probably see it again, but this is the 2022 version. It's an especially good one, I think, because I caught it at the perfect moment in its unfolding.

From Chad Orzel, writing about the overproduction of PhDs by American universities:

This is a topic where I’m so worried that something I write will be taken the wrong way that I often end up hedging so much that nobody finds it worth a response.

Hah hah, do you really think that hedging will prevent people from misreading you? That's adorable.

I, however, won't hedge: I think the overproduction of PhDs is fundamentally harmless and can go on forever. After all, nobody thinks the overproduction of college basketball players has any limit. Ditto for aspiring actors, hedge fund managers, and presidential candidates. There are lots of fields where the competition for a small number of highly desirable jobs is enormous—and has been forever. So why should PhDs be any different? The ones who don't get tenure-track teaching jobs are just like the cagers who don't get drafted by the NBA. They'll find something else to do.

A few days ago the LA Times published security camera video of a sheriff's deputy who knelt on the head of a handcuffed inmate for about three minutes. The circumstances are a little murky, but luckily the sheriff is ON IT:

Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva said he is launching a criminal investigation to find out who leaked security video of an incident in which a deputy knelt on the head of a handcuffed inmate for more than three minutes....In an interview with Fox 11 News, Villanueva said the disclosure of the video to The Times amounted to a theft of investigative material. He did not respond to questions from The Times.

It's good to see that Villanueva, as usual, has his priorities straight.

Sam Levin reports on the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill passed in early 2021:

As part of the American Rescue Plan Act (Arpa), the Biden administration’s signature stimulus package, the US government sent funds to cities to help them fight coronavirus and support local recovery efforts. The money, officials said, could be used to fund a range of services, including public health and housing initiatives, healthcare workers’ salaries, infrastructure investments and aid for small businesses.

That sounds nice. But Levin reports that most of the money went instead to police:

San Francisco received $312m in Arpa funds for fiscal year 2020 and allocated 49% ($153m) to police, 13% ($41m) to the sheriff’s department....Los Angeles spent roughly 50% of its first round of Arpa relief funds on the LAPD....Fresno spent $36.6m of its Cares funds on the police, making up 67% of Cares spending on city salaries....San Jose allocated roughly $27.8m of its Cares and Arpa funds to police salaries....Long Beach allocated the majority of its $135.8 million Arpa funds to police....Oakland allocated $5m (13.5%) of its Cares funds to police salaries; Sacramento allocated $2.2m (2.5%) of Cares funds to police; and San Diego spent roughly $60.1m (64%) of its Cares funds on police in fiscal year 2020, and $52.6m (33%) in fiscal year 2021.

That's about $700 million just for those cities alone, which suggests that California spent upwards of a billion dollars in COVID money on police—and that was only for about half of 2021. If the rest of the country did the same, you can figure the total was on the order of $10 billion in six months or so.

So much for defunding the police. The next question is: what exactly was this money spent on? More cops? Higher paid cops? More overtime for cops? Cool new equipment? Or did it just make up for lost tax dollars that had been used to pay cops before COVID?

It turns out that cities are very reluctant to tell us. I wonder why?

web3 is bullshit.

NFTs are bullshit.

Crypto is bullshit.

DAOs are bullshit.

That's it. There's nothing more to say. It's time to move on.

Don't bother arguing about this or demanding an explanation from me. You either get this or you don't. If you don't, you might be one of the lucky ones who gets rich before the whole Jenga tower of bullshit collapses. But probably not.

Congress is currently trying to suss out why gasoline prices are so high. Here's the answer:

When the price of oil goes up, so does the price of gasoline. To get the price of gasoline, just divide the price of oil by 36 and then add 70 cents. That's the dashed gray line. The actual price of gasoline is shown by the red line. For you nerds out there, this regression has an R-squared of .95. For you non-nerds, this means that the price of oil explains 95% of the variation in the price of gasoline. It would probably be an even better fit if I were energetic enough to adjust everything for inflation.

Now, it's true that the price of gasoline at the moment is about 40 cents above the price it "should" be at. If this lasts more than a few weeks, there might be something shady going on. If not, it probably just means that the Ukraine war has introduced more than the usual amount of uncertainty into oil prices, which have bounced up and down considerably over the past month. We'll see.

UPDATE: I'm back from lunch and my energy level is up. Here's the chart using oil and gasoline prices adjusted for inflation:

The new formula is to divide the real price of oil by 38 and then add $1.10 to get the real price of gasoline. It looks like a better fit to me, though Excel tells me that R-squared is still .95.

However, this does get rid of the anomaly at the end, which turns out to be an artifact of inflation. After adjusting for inflation, the current price of gasoline is right where it should be, only a few cents higher than we'd expect given the current price of oil.

This is Corona Del Mar, a neighborhood of Newport Beach that's most famous for serving as the location of Arrested Development. This picture is a four-shot panorama that was stitched together in Photoshop.

Did the end of the expanded Child Tax Credit spell doom for Democrats?

NEW: Congressional Democrats had a 12-point generic ballot lead over the GOP in December among recipients of the expanded child tax credit.

That benefit has dried up, and now congressional Republicans have the advantage with this group of voters. https://t.co/IDFTls4Cc7 pic.twitter.com/tQxKkWIGSn

— Eli Yokley (@eyokley) April 6, 2022

Normally I'd be skeptical of this reasoning, but this drop in support wasn't matched across the board. It happened only among CTC recipients.

The reason is pretty obvious: the CTC is a highly, highly visible thing. One day you're receiving an extra few hundred dollars per month and the next day you aren't. Policy doesn't usually move voters a lot, but this is an exception. It's a policy that has a big effect on your personal life.

It's a well-known fact that in the United States rich people have much longer life expectancies than poor people. Much of this is attributed to our private health care system, which does a lousy job of treating the uninusured and underinsured.

That got me curious: do other countries with national health care systems do better? In a nutshell, not really:

The rich live about ten years longer than the poor in the US. In France it's about 12 years. The UK and Belgium are a little over 9 years. Only Sweden, at around 4 years, does significantly better.

The numbers in the chart above are taken from various sources, not all of which agree with each other, and in some cases are roughly extrapolated from education levels, which are a decent but imperfect proxy for income differences. Don't take any of them as gospel.

That said, they're in the right ballpark. The problem of low lifespans for the poor is universal and has little to do with the details of health care systems. It's much more foundational than that, and it's one reason why increasing retirement ages is a bad idea. It might help put pension systems like Social Security on a sounder footing, but it does so on the backs of the poor. Raising the retirement age to 68 takes a much bigger toll on someone who will live to age 76 than it does to someone who will live to age 88.