A week ago, Vote Common Good released an ad narrated by Julia Roberts telling women they could vote for anyone they wanted and their husbands would never know:
Today, the Washington Post reports that the ad was inspired by a grassroots campaign carried out via sticky notes posted in women's restrooms:
In swing states and Republican strongholds, on college campuses and in sports arenas, sticky notes have appeared reminding women that their votes are confidential — kept private even and especially from the men in their lives.
The origins of the trend are unclear, but the co-founder of Women for Harris-Walz, a grassroots group supporting the vice president’s campaign, says her members have been sticking notes in bathrooms and similar spaces for months, encouraging women to vote their own minds and reminding them that their ballot is secret.
But Clara Jeffery tells us that this samizdat network goes back much further:
The first story I ever wrote—for City Pages— was prompted by a list at my college, which led to a story of four women who'd been raped by fellow students. Time picked up the story, put on cover. Others followed. Issue became huge. It was 1990-91— the #metoo of the time.
This is news to me—but it would be, wouldn't it? Maybe this is why it was only men who were surprised or offended by the TV ad. Women already knew it all along.
So with literally nothing to lose, the manager of the station decided to convert it into a pure AI production: no human announcers, just AI generated hosts. Among other things, they created a show in which an AI host interviewed an AI reconstructions of famous dead people. The audience grew to 8,000 overnight, but:
Less welcome than the audience surge, however, has been a barrage of abuse directed at the public broadcasting system and accusations that it was sacrificing humans on the altar of technology.
“I have been turned into a job-killing monster who wants to replace real people with avatars,” said Mariusz Marcin Pulit, the editor in chief of Radio Krakow and of niche stations operating under its umbrella, like Off Radio Krakow.
....An online petition drafted by Mr. Zaleski, the terminated culture show host, and Mateusz Demski, a fellow presenter who also lost his job, warned that “the case of Off Radio Krakow is an important reminder for the entire industry” and a “dangerous precedent that hits us all.”
The use of A.I.-generated presenters, the petition warned, “is opening the door to a world in which experienced employees associated for years with the media and people employed in creative industries will be replaced by machines.”
The station was so small it had hardly any hosts to begin with—and they were all part-timers with other day jobs. But public outrage was strong enough that the experiment was quickly ended and the station returned to playing ordinary music written and performed by humans.
Is this a sign of things to come? It's one thing when taxi drivers lose their jobs, but quite another when creative types with big megaphones are the ones whose ox is being gored. This is all going to start playing out sooner than most people think.
On January 20, the Trump White House will advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water. Fluoride is an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease. President…
This probably seems like just more crankery from RFK, but it's not.......quite. The science around fluoride is currently in flux.
Some background: The EPA already places a limit on fluoride in drinking water of 4 mg per liter. The level recommended by HHS for tooth protection is well below that at 0.7 mg/l. The Safe Drinking Water Act requires EPA to review its standards every six years, and the most recent review was published three months ago. It recommended no changes.
However, a long-awaited report from the National Toxicology Program was finally released a couple of months ago, and it concluded that fluoride levels above 1.5 mg/l might be associated with IQ losses in children. It came to no conclusions about levels of 0.7 mg/l.
A federal judge took note of this last month and ordered the EPA to address it. The judge also took note of a separate small metastudy suggesting fetal IQ losses at low fluoride levels among pregnant mothers. This metastudy examined three primary studies. Two of them, from Canada and Mexico, showed an IQ loss of 2-3 points at a fluoride level of 0.7 mg/l. The third, from Denmark, showed nothing. Previous studies have also been equivocal about effects at low fluoride levels.
So things are in flux. There's good reason to think that fluoride levels above 1.5 mg/l are probably dangerous, but the research is more ambiguous about typical levels of 0.7 mg/l. In other words, RFK Jr. is being hyperbolic but, that said, things are not quite open and shut. There are legitimate reasons to think this is worth more research.
Yesterday I wrote about E-Verify, the website that allows employers to quickly and easily make sure new hires are legally allowed to work. Today¹ Don Lee at the LA Timeswrites all about it:
Even though E-Verify is free for employers, with more than 98% of those checked being confirmed as work-authorized instantly or within 24 hours, the program is significantly underused.
....In its earlier years E-Verify was riddled with errors, but today is seen as highly reliable. Of the 10 million employees checked through E-Verify in the first quarter of this year, fewer than 2% were flagged as mismatches. Of those, about 18,000 employees, or only 0.2% of the total, were later confirmed as work-authorized.
In other words, it's 98% accurate within 24 hours and 99.8% accurate overall. And it's easy to use. Despite this, few businesses use it and it's not mandatory. Why?
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), with Republican colleagues including Ohio Sen. JD Vance, former President Trump’s running mate, in June introduced a bill to make E-Verify mandatory across the country. But similar efforts in the past have repeatedly failed to win enough bipartisan support.
....In Washington, many Democrats have indicated they will support a national requirement only if it is part of an overall reform that includes legalization of undocumented immigrants currently in the U.S., which most Republicans oppose.
Republicans also face resistance from some employers and special interest groups, whether farming or construction or other service sector that relies on immigrant labor. For them, it’s a bottom-line issue.
The not-so-secret truth is that nobody really wants to get rid of undocumented workers:
One key reason: There are simply not enough “legal” workers to fill all the jobs a healthy, growing U.S. economy generates. And that’s especially so in low-wage industries.
Employers say that requiring E-Verify — without other overhauls to the immigration system, including easier ways to bring in workers — would be devastating.
“I think you would see a general overall collapse in California agriculture and food prices going through the roof if we didn’t have them do the work,” said Don Cameron, general manager at Terranova Ranch, which produces a variety of crops on 9,000 acres in Fresno County.
....It’s not simply a matter of not having enough workers to do the hard, often dead-end and low-wage jobs that most U.S. citizens don’t want to do. It’s the shortage of workers overall, experts say.
For decades, birth rates in the U.S. have been declining, as they have in most of the economically developed world. Today, the birth rate among American women of childbearing age has dropped below the level needed to meet the country’s replacement rate. California’s birth rate is at its lowest in a century. If the economy is to grow and prosper, as almost all Americans say they want it to, additional workers must come from somewhere else.
All of this could be solved relatively easily by a compromise that increased border security and increased legal immigration. But Republicans are dead set against it. It's too good a campaign issue.
¹Actually, the article is ten (!) days old, but only showed up in the print edition today. This is typical of the LA Times, for reasons I don't understand.
In August Waymo reported about 300,000 driverless taxi trips carrying 500,000 passengers in California. All (or nearly all) of this was in San Francisco.
This amounts to 10,000 rides per day. The average Waymo taxi ride is about six miles, fairly average for taxis.
Usage has been growing 30% per month over the past quarter. Waymo reported 55 minor collisions over the most recent reporting quarter (June-August) with no injuries or fatalities.
It's one thing when this nonsense comes from a crank or a fanatic. Every party has 'em. But it's now almost conventional wisdom among Republicans that the BLS is deliberately overstating job growth in order to make Joe Biden look good. It's both stupid and dangerous.
The BLS always reports three values for job estimates: an advance value, a revised value, and a final value. Sometimes the final value is higher than the advance value, sometimes it's lower. It all depends on the data.
The economy has been unusually volatile as it recovers from the pandemic, and revisions have been a bit higher than usual. But they plainly don't favor anyone in particular. Rubio should be ashamed of himself for promoting this crackpottery.¹
¹Needless to say, he won't be. The MAGA era has given every Republican a license to lie.
Donald Trump is getting raked over the coals for an interview he did yesterday where he mused about Liz Cheney being killed: "Let's put her with a rifle standing there, with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let's see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face."
By itself this quote is misleading, but it's getting all the attention anyway. That's politics. But it's too bad in a way, because the rest of Trump's long monologue is actually much more interesting.
Trump has long run on a weird combination of being anti-war while constantly threatening massive retaliation against our enemies. But he goes well beyond that in this clip.
Remember this? It's from Al Franken's 2003 book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them."
Trump portrays himself in the interview as no less than a gung-ho "No Blood for Oil" lefty. The whole point of his Liz Cheney remark was that she was a chickenhawk—a favorite lefty sneer during the runup to the Iraq War. "They're all war hawks when they're sitting in Washington in a nice building," he declared, "saying, 'Oh, gee, well let's send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.'"
Trump even says explicitly that he saw little point in invading Iraq if we weren't going to stick around and take all their oil. Check out these other excerpts:
"The reason [Liz Cheney] couldn't stand me is that she always wanted to go to war with people. I don't want to go to war.... Number one, it's very dangerous. Number two, a lot of people get killed. And number three, it's very, very expensive."
"We go in and bomb the hell out of [Iraq]...and then all of a sudden Iran has the whole Middle East to itself. Right now Iran has Iraq; Iraq is like a subsidiary of Iran."
"Anybody that went into the Middle East I thought was stupid."
"We spent $9 trillion bombing the hell out of the Middle East and what the hell did we get other than lots of dead people, including our people? Nothing."
This would fit right into a conversation with Noam Chomsky in the Guardian. And Trump gets cheers for this! From Republicans!
That's inexplicable. And the funny thing is that I don't think Trump is bullshitting about this. He truly is anti-war. When he was in office I always got the impression, in an odd way, that he didn't have the guts to go to war. He was afraid of it. He was afraid of sending soldiers to their death. Even his periodic retaliatory strikes, a staple of US presidents, tended to be small and cautious.
And good for him. War should be a last resort, not a routine part of foreign policy. Joe Biden feels much the same way, though, unlike Trump, probably more on an intellectual level than a gut level.
Remember this? It's also from 2003.
But I still wonder at the willingness of the Republican rank and file to go along with this. George W. Bush was literally deified as the greatest president in history for going into Iraq to get revenge for 9/11. Now, 20 years later, they cheer when Trump tells them they were all idiots and we should avoid war at all cost—especially war in the Middle East.
It's one thing for the Republican Party to flip on something like free trade at Trump's command. That's not a hot button issue for most people. But being anti-war? That's pretty visceral. Is this change of heart for real? Or is it just something Trump's fans are shrugging at because there's no particular war fever at the moment? It's a mystery.
This is very true. Most political polls have a margin of error around ±3 percentage points, but that's just the potential sampling error. When you account for model error, weighting errors, differential response rates, and so forth, the real MOE is probably closer to ±5-6 points.
So if a poll shows a race tied, there's a roughly one-third chance that the winning candidate will win by three points or more.
In other words, we just don't know. Anybody could win and there's nothing more that polls can tell us at this point. It might not even be close once all the counting is done.
