Every state gets two statues as part of the Capitol building's Statuary Hall Collection. One of California's is Junipero Serra, who seems likely to be replaced in the near future. But with whom?
Patt Morrison provides a few guesses here, but leaves out my choice: John Steinbeck. Unfortunately, this would give us two white guys representing a state that's now two-thirds non-white. So probably it ought to be someone else.
One solution might be to put statues on a ten-year rotation instead of trying to find an "eternal" representative. That would put less pressure on each choice since it wouldn't be considered the last chance ever to get a favored choice immortalized in bronze. If that means I have to wait 20 or 30 years for a Steinbeck statue, I can live with that.
Why did Elon Musk tell the world that he would sell 10% of his Tesla stock based on the results of a Twitter poll? Scott Galloway says he knows the answer, and my response was "Yeah, yeah. I know the answer, not you."
But it turns out his answer is the same as mine! What a smart guy he is.
Using Twitter results as cloud cover to monetize $TSLA at prices he knows aren’t sustainable without outright telling the market he’s lost faith in its valuation https://t.co/sIaGKhk3Vt
This was my instantaneous thought when I heard about Elon's Twitter poll. But there may be a little more to it than just cover for selling off some stock at a high price. Most CEOs of large corporations sell stock on a schedule so that they avoid charges of insider trading. I don't know if Elon does that, but if he has reason to think that Tesla stock might tank in the near future, he could be in trouble if he "coincidentally" sells a $20 billion chunk of it right now to cover upcoming taxes.
Like I said, this was my guess almost instantly, so I assume that lots of other people are thinking the same thing. And Elon does have a board of directors to report to, which might look askance at a big stock sale that might get the company in trouble. Conversely, they seem to have infinite patience with Elon doing eccentric stuff, so the Twitter poll might not have bothered them.
Then again, who knows? Elon is both a very weird and a very smart guy. Maybe it was just another of his publicity stunts. Anything is possible.
The New York Times helpfully explains the biggest problem with our supply chain these days:
Well, sure. But there's always been a shortage of truckers. You can find a story like this practically every year for the past few decades. In fact, the claimed shortage this year of 80,000 truckers is less than the claimed shortage in many prior years. For example, here's a CNN piece from 2012 claiming a shortage of 200,000 truckers just in the long-haul business.
In any case, if there really is a shortage of truckers, it sure looks like no one is bothering to do much about it:
Back in the 1990s, blue-collar trucking jobs paid a little less than $1,100 per week. That figure then declined for years until finally rising a bit above $1,100 during the strong wage growth of the past few years.
Conversely, weekly earnings for the rest of the blue-collar workforce rose slowly but steadily during the same time. Roughly speaking, truckers earned about 44% more than other blue-collar workers in 1995 but now earn only 23% more.
So is there really a shortage of truckers? Maybe, but I trust wage data a whole lot more than I trust either anecdotes or claims from industry associations. If real wages are going down, both in absolute and relative terms, there's no shortage. It's all but impossible.
So what's really going on? The specific reason this is in the news right now is that we need trucks to haul away containers from our jammed ports. This means we need to dive a little deeper and look at what it means to be a driver for a dedicated port trucking company, the only ones who are in this business. Ryan Johnson explains one big problem:
I’m fortunate enough to be a Teamster — a union driver — an employee paid by the hour. Most port drivers are ‘independent contractors’, leased onto a carrier who is paying them by the load. Whether their load takes two hours, fourteen hours, or three days to complete, they get paid the same.
....So when the coastal ports started getting clogged up last spring due to the impacts of COVID on business everywhere, drivers started refusing to show up. Congestion got so bad that instead of being able to do three loads a day, they could only do one. They took a 2/3 pay cut and most of these drivers were working 12 hours a day or more. While carriers were charging increased pandemic shipping rates, none of those rate increases went to the driver wages.
There's much more of interest here, but it all comes down to the same thing: money. There are more drivers out there, but the port business has gotten so crappy that it's a money-losing proposition for a lot of these guys. Trucking companies could attract them back with higher wages, but that's considered beyond the pale. As with so many employers, they'll whine and complain and claim to be willing to do anything—except pay more. It's an old story.
UPDATE: Here's another factor, which is yet another subset of "money":
Kevin - bizarrely enough, I just got off a call about this exact issue with a client (I'm in PR). One of the big issues is the rise in insurance (400% or so in the last decade), making barriers to entry for new and younger drivers almost cost-prohibitive in many circumstances.
I've mostly kept a low profile on the whole CRT thing, largely because I think both sides are acting in bad faith and I don't feel like getting in the middle of it. But today Eric Levitz presents something worth a mordant chuckle from us oldsters.
Naturally this is about Virginia. It turns out that Loudoun County's public schools offered a teacher training unit on diversity last year and someone released the PowerPoint deck used in the class. Here's one of the slides:
It’s important to put this PowerPoint in context. Contrary to the insinuations of some anti-CRT agitators, this was not used as an instruction material for children. Nor was it meant to teach “that some races are morally superior to others.” Rather, it is a reductive summation of research on the ways that cultural insensitivity can impair educational outcomes for immigrant children.
It is also, by all appearances, racist.
For a moment, try to ignore the specific recommendations on this slide. They might be right or wrong, and they might be expressed in problematic ways. Instead, just consider the overall objective here: to help teachers become "culturally competent professionals" who are aware of their "assumptions about human behavior, values, biases, preconceived notions, personal limitations, and so forth."
Those of you who are my age—or close to it—will recognize this. Back in the '80s and '90s this kind of thing was considered state-of-the-art advice for corporations and school districts who wanted to fight racism. Managers were taught to recognize that many of the things white people took for granted weren't actually universal. If a Black job prospect didn't make eye contact, for example, it wasn't because he was shifty; it was because Black people consider it rude to lock eyes on someone.
I have no idea if this is actually true, but it might be. Regardless, most of the stuff in these training courses was urged on white managers by Black activists. They were the ones who wanted to educate white folks about the cultural norms of Black people so that they weren't taken as signs of sullenness or low intelligence.
But now a couple of decades have gone by. Lefties consider this sort of guidance to be reductive and racist. Right wingers view it as a sign of wokeness run amok even though it's not even remotely new. And the poor schmoes who wrote this PowerPoint deck are caught in between, confused about why they're suddenly getting beat up from all sides over something that's been commonplace for years with the best of intentions.
But times change. Cultural norms change. Acceptable discourse changes. And not everyone keeps up. Nevertheless, it's useful to at least understand the context and history behind things like this.
I didn't put up any pictures of my Louisiana trip last week, so I think this week will be all Louisiana all the time.
First up is a broad view of a swamp. This turned out to be more difficult than I anticipated because any shot that takes in lots of swamp has so much fiddly little detail that nothing really stands out. It's just a mishmash of trees and plants, which might work on a 2' x 3' enlargement but not so much on a 600 pixel web display.
Still, I took about half a dozen wide shots that I'll share over the next few months. The best of the bunch is probably the one below, which was taken off the shore of Lake Martin and features a resting egret to provide the eye with something to focus on.
November 4, 2021 — Lake Martin, St. Martin Parish, Louisiana
It's been weeks since the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles announced they were moving to a 24/7 schedule in order to clear up backlogs, but so far nothing much has happened. There are still upwards of 60 or 70 container ships anchored offshore waiting a turn to offload their cargo.
Over the weekend a reader emailed to ask me what's going on. I don't really know, but I can at least point out that there are various choke points in play:
Docks: Ships can't unload unless there's berthing available for them.
Trucks: Berthing space can't open up faster than usual unless there are trucks available 24/7 to move the containers.
Warehouses: Even if there are enough trucks, they have to have someplace to take the containers. If warehouses are full, trucks have no place to take their loads.
The problem, fundamentally, is that people are spending lots of money and that's caused a big spike in trade with Asia. This is a good thing, but it's also caused a crunch at the LA/LB ports since nearly 100% of their trade is with Asia.
Look at all those container ships puttering around offshore while they wait their turn at the port.
Nobody is willing to build anything permanent to deal with this, since the backlog is obviously temporary. But the bottom line is that somehow, some way, we need more warehousing space so that there's someplace to put all the containers; more trucks running 24/7 to speed up cargo offloading at the docks; and 24/7 operation at the ports.
Any one of these things is useless without the others. The problem is that you can't just whistle up more trucks or more warehouses. It takes a while.
It's time for my sorta-weekly look at the COVID-19 pandemic, but this time I want to focus on something a little different. If you take a look at the case rate, the US has been doing pretty well for the past couple of months, falling from 500 per million to 200 per million. Meanwhile, countries like Germany and the Netherlands are skyrocketing, and others are increasing too, though at more normal rates.
But if you look at fatality rates, the picture is totally different. The US rate has declined to 3.5 deaths per million—which is good news—but that's still three times higher than most other European countries.
To get a better sense of this seeming paradox, we need to look at the case fatality rate, which tells us the percentage of COVID-19 cases that eventually turn into deaths. Here it is:
CFR is an imperfect measure, but the differences are so stark that this hardly matters. Over the past couple of months the CFR has doubled in the US and is now twice as high as in Germany and four times as high as the UK.
The case fatality rate tends to bounce up and down a lot, and the US rate hasn't always been higher than everyone else. Still, it's generally been pretty high, and lately it's spiked to a point pretty near its all-time peak.
Why? Why are so many more people dying of COVID-19 in the US than in other large peer countries?
Things are pretty good for America's workers these days. Wages are strong, lots of new jobs are being created, and the unemployment rate is a low 4.6%. What's more, families have plenty of savings socked away and debt levels are low.
And yet surveys show that a big majority of people think the economy is in lousy shape. So what's going on? Neil Irwin dives into this puzzler:
The reasons seem to be tied to the psychology of inflation and the ways people assess their economic well-being....“The major issue is rising inflation and falling confidence in economic policies,” said Richard Curtin, who has overseen the University of Michigan survey for decades. “Consumers see rising prices, and they see no policies that would correct it.”
Well, golly, what could account for this? Why would people be spooked by high inflation that's only been around for a few months and isn't really all that bad anyway? Especially when wages have been keeping up with—and sometimes even exceeding—price inflation?
