Cats, charts, and politics
It's hard to believe that I find myself rooting for Tom Brady in the Super Bowl, but there you have it. There's just something I can't resist about old folks proving they still have it.
Speaking of, Serena Williams isn't quite in her 40s yet, but she'll be looking once again for her 24th grand slam singles title starting tomorrow at the Australian Open. Hooray for us fall chickens!
Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 6. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
How much government debt is too much? This is once again a live subject because President Biden's coronavirus bill will cost $1.9 trillion—on top of the $3.5 trillion we've already spent—and at least a few economists worry that we're adding to our debt too fast, which could bring on a bout of high inflation.
Now, even the cautious economists mostly agree that the risk of doing too little is greater than the risk of doing too much. So if we're unsure, then the full $1.9 trillion is the way to go. Progressive pundits pretty unanimously agree.
And so do I. On the other hand, I'm a little nervous about the seemingly casual attitude among some progressives about government debt. It's one thing to (maybe) overspend during an unprecedented pandemic, but it's another thing to shrug your shoulders and basically say that debt doesn't matter and we should all get over it. And if inflation heats up, hey, all we have to do is engineer a recession to show it who's boss, just like Paul Volcker did. This all seems just a little too world-weary to me.
On the third hand, there's this:
Japan has had massively higher debt than the US for the past two decades, and the price they've paid for this is . . . close to nothing. Japan, like the US, issues its own currency, which helps, and they have a culture of saving that supports their debt. The US, however, has not just its own currency, but the best, most desirable currency in the world. Also, our debt service is low; we have no trouble selling all the treasury bonds we want; and not only is inflation low, but inflationary expectations are low too. So, if anything, it seems we're even better placed than Japan to support a far higher debt load than we currently have.
Beyond this, there are lots of econometric arguments about what levels of debt are sustainable, and obviously I don't have the chops to referee this. Still, while I retain an old-school feeling that we should take the national debt seriously, there's always Japan sitting around telling me not to worry so much. We have a very long way to go before our national debt becomes a serious problem.
There are at least two or three people out there who crave a detailed explanation of every aspect of my blog design. Right? I aim to please, so here it is.
First off, longtime readers will note that the design is very old school: two-columns, with miscellaneous stuff in the right-hand column like RSS feeds, a blogroll (!), and other things. This is very deliberate. I figured that if I was circling back to my roots, I should do a full job of it.
But if I'm so old-school, why didn't I revive the Calpundit name? There were two reasons. First, even back in the day I thought it was a dumb name and was annoyed that I had foolishly chosen it before I knew what I was doing. Second, the calpundit.com URL has long since been purchased by someone else, so I couldn't register it.
The body font for blog posts is Palatino 17 pt. I have literally been using Palatino as my go-to body font since 1985, and I wanted to use something different this time around. I found several I liked, and they all had four versions: regular, italic, bold, and bold italic, each of which is necessary for decent looking bolds and italics. However, for some reason, when I actually tested them on the blog only the regular font displayed properly. I don't know why. I finally gave up trying to figure this out and went back to Palatino, which displays properly in all its versions.
The title font is Hammersmith One 28 pt. I wanted something that was basically pretty normal but with a little bit of a different and recognizable look. Hammersmith fit the bill.
The main page title and the sans serif font in the right column are Noto Sans. It's a nice font, and I just felt like using something besides the usual Helvetica.
The header images are all pictures of Orange County that I've taken over the years. They change every time you load the blog, allegedly at random—though I have some doubts about the quality of WordPress's random number generator. Soon I will have at least one picture from every city in Orange County.
The main column is a little narrower than the one I had at Mother Jones. This means that charts and pictures are a little bit smaller than they used to be.
There is no header picture for every post, as there was at MoJo. This was never something I was thrilled with, so I've gone back to my old habit of using inline pictures when I need them and leaving it at that.
There's a menu bar at the top of the blog, so I decided to make use of it. One menu contains some of my favorite photos; another contains some of my favorite magazine pieces; and the third one answers a question I get frequently: what are the data sources I use most often?
Blog posts are now timestamped as they should be, using Pacific time. Perhaps the only time I was disappointed with MoJo was when they caved in to New York elites and switched their timestamps to Eastern time.
Commenting is done via the stock WordPress comment system, with Akismet handling anti-spam duties. This finally abolishes the much-loathed Coral comment system, and we'll see how it goes. Akismet does have an algorithm that will hold comments on occasion, or block them entirely on others, but this shouldn't come into play very often.
Why didn't I follow the crowd and move to Substack instead of creating my own blog? There were two reasons. First, Substack is primarily useful because it allows writers to charge readers on a monthly basis without a lot of hassle. However, I'm now semi-retired and I don't need money from my readers. Second, I like the blog format and I don't especially like the newsletter format, where you feel obligated to come up with a specific amount of content on specific days.
What's with the jabberwocking.com URL? Well, it turns out that pretty much every URL you can think of is already taken. Eventually I decided it was best just to choose a nonsense word, but even lots of those were already taken. Finally I thought of jabberwocky, which of course was taken, and then tried out a few variations. It turned out that jabberwocking was available, so I took it. It seemed appropriate because blogs are all about jabbering, but that's all. There's nothing more to read into it.
What about bugs and requests? I don't have an IT department anymore, so I'm responsible for handling all this. Leave a comment or (better yet) send me an email if you notice something. One thing to note is that early on I browsed through the various WordPress themes available for free and chose one I liked. It turns out this theme is no longer actively managed, which means it's possible that future updates of WordPress will bollix it. I sure hope not, though, since I doubt I'd know how to fix it.
In fact, I'll note for the record that modifying things in WordPress is a huge pain in the ass. I'm not afraid to dive into code and get my hands dirty, but at the very least I need some idea of the basic structure of the code elements and the names of the variables that control things like font type, colors, footer elements, and so forth. The best advice I've found for this is "start looking through every file in the theme until you find what you want." Thanks. Anyway, I eventually cobbled together nearly everything I wanted, but anything even remotely complicated is likely to be beyond my WordPress skills. Keep that in mind.
Any other questions?
Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 5. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
This is such a Trumpish move from our newly elected president:
President Biden said on Friday that he would bar his predecessor, Donald J. Trump, from receiving intelligence briefings traditionally given to former presidents, saying that Mr. Trump could not be trusted because of his “erratic behavior” even before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
....“I just think that there is no need for him to have the intelligence briefings,” Mr. Biden said. “What value is giving him an intelligence briefing?” Mr. Biden added. “What impact does he have at all, other than the fact he might slip and say something?”
Oh man, who knew that Biden had such serious game? He is trolling Trump so hard I'm surprised he didn't sprout green hair out of his ears. Trump will, of course, claim he doesn't care because the intelligence briefings are useless anyway, but you know this is going to stab him deeply in his vengeful little heart.
And while we're on the subject, Trump's best friend just got canceled:
Fox News Media has canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” the program hosted by television’s staunchest supporter of Donald Trump and of his assertions of voter fraud in the 2020 election, The Times has learned.
....The cancellation comes a day after voting software company Smartmatic filed a $2.7-billion defamation suit against Fox News and three of its hosts — Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro. The company claims the hosts perpetuated lies and disinformation about Smartmatic’s role in the election, damaging its business and reputation.
No word on what's going to happen to Bartiromo and Pirro.
For some reason Hopper has been hogging up my camera time lately. Sometimes Hilbert hasn't been around when I have my camera out, other times my pictures of him are blurred or out of focus. But obviously he deserves his moment in the sun, so I made sure to grab a quick pic of him this week. In this one he's lounging in a patch of sunshine and keeping a close eye on his sister.
I don't remember what inspired me to look at this, but it's been a while since I've plotted pandemic job losses separately for men and women. Here's a version of the chart I posted earlier this morning split up by sex:
As you can see, the lines cross each other several times, which means your conclusions depend a lot on your ending month. If I wrote about this in November, I'd say men had lost more jobs than women. In December I'd say it was about equal. This month it looks like women have lost more jobs than men.
Which they have. As of January, men have lost 4.1 million jobs while women have lost 4.5 million. What's more, over the past three months men have been trending (slightly) upward while women have been trending (slightly) downward. And the labor participation rate has dropped more for women than for men.
This is still too small and variable a change to call the pandemic a "women's recession" or anything like that, but we might be heading in that direction. It all depends on the nature of the recovery in the second half of the year.
This has gotten a lot of attention over the past couple of days:
Kia has approached potential partners about a plan to assemble Apple Inc.’s long-awaited electric car in Georgia, according to people familiar with the matter....The likelihood of a final agreement was thrown into question when Kia’s parent company, Hyundai Motor Group, said last month, then sought to play down, that it was in negotiations with Apple to cooperate on an electric driverless car.
....Hyundai has talked to Apple about investing more than $3 billion in a deal that would see its subsidiary Kia begin building cars under the tech company’s brand as soon as 2024, a person familiar with the matter said. Under such an agreement, up to 100,000 vehicles could be assembled in the first year in Georgia, where Kia has a factory, the person said.
For some reason, all the articles about this have focused on the production of physical cars, which is frankly not very interesting. There are already lots of cars on the market, and plenty of electric cars as well.
The only interesting thing about all this is that, apparently, Apple plans to bring a driverless car to market "as soon as 2024." That would be big news if it were true, but I've read nothing recently suggesting that Apple is anywhere near this far advanced in driverless technology. I'll grant that Apple is the master of secrecy, but there's a limit to how secret you can get with this stuff. You have to have trials, you have to get permits, and you need to collect mountains of data. A few test cars won't do the job; you need whole fleets of them—and needless to say, those fleets all have to be very public.
But then again, Apple has been working on this for years, and I suppose it's possible they're farther along than anyone thinks. What's more, a huge production deal with Kia certainly suggests they feel pretty good about their chances of success.
If Apple is serious about the 2024 launch date, they'll be joining a crowd of car manufacturers who are talking pretty publicly about having driverless cars in the 2023-2026 timeframe. Even assuming that everyone is being optimistic, it does suggest that by 2025 or so driverless cars at reasonable prices are finally going to hit the market. Like so many things related to AI, it will have taken way longer than anyone predicted back in the aughts, but that doesn't mean it was all claptrap. It just means it was harder than anyone thought.
The American economy gained 49,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate fell to 6.3 percent. Those numbers are fairly meaningless, however, so instead I'll show you this chart of job losses over the past year:
The feeble employment gains in January are being taken as bad news, but I don't think that's the right interpretation. Roughly speaking, what happened was a big disruption last March, followed by a stabilization at -10 million jobs. That's the basic job loss from the pandemic, and there's no special reason to think it's going to change until businesses fully open up following the widespread adoption of vaccines.
In other words, we're likely to stay where we are until the middle of the year, at which point we should start to see some progress as restaurants and other public-facing businesses fully reopen. By the end of the year we'll know whether some of the job losses are permanent, but right now it's just too early to tell.