Kevin Drum

My mother has a black and white cat named Luna. But she's also been adopted by another cat that comes around for dinner every night. That makes it hers de facto, and it looks just like Luna. So its name is Fake Luna. Here's a rare picture of Fake Luna, who is not especially sociable and does not often sit still for the camera.

The Washington Post has a nice piece today about an underappreciated part of the recent surge in illegal immigration: the transition of smuggling operations from inefficient amateurs to large-scale professionals who operate with military precision. It's big business:

With revenue estimated at $4 billion to $12 billion a year, the smuggling of migrants has joined drugs and extortion as a top income stream for groups like Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, increasing their economic clout throughout the hemisphere.

Ironically, one of the big drivers of this transformation was America's obsession with hardening the border:

Migrant smuggling has been around for decades, with “coyotes,” or guides, a fixture in many Central American and Mexican villages. Only recently has it ballooned into a transnational, industrial-scale activity, involving sophisticated criminal groups, fleets of tractor-trailers, and hotels and warehouses that can hold hundreds of migrants a night.

U.S. policy, in part, explains the change. In the 1990s, as illegal immigration mounted, Washington began a major buildup on the Mexican border, doubling the number of Border Patrol agents, building walls and barriers, and adding sensors. Yet the incentives for migration remained unchanged. American employers were hungry for cheap labor. Mexicans and Central Americans were fleeing poverty and violence.

And smugglers connected the two.

Kamala Harris and Attorney General Merrick Garland were the first to seriously attack this problem, starting shortly after Joe Biden took office. But it was obviously a long-term effort with little immediate effect. As US job demand grew after the pandemic, the big gangs ramped up their efforts and moved hundreds of thousands of migrants from places like Guatemala to the US border and then to safe houses, all for a single package price of about $10,000.

This is why I endlessly harp on things like E-Verify: Walls and border fortifications just don't work. Supply and demand won't be denied so easily, and as long as the demand is there, supply will find a way.

Of course, maybe E-Verify wouldn't work either. It wouldn't affect demand, after all, just make it harder for employers to fill that demand. If demand is strong enough, it might not matter.

But it's the only option with any chance of success—which is precisely why it gets so little attention. The business community in the US doesn't mind border theater, but it does mind things that might work. So they oppose E-Verify on specious anti-regulation grounds and Republican leaders go along with a wink and a nudge. The cynicism is sort of jaw dropping.

The American economy gained 12,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at -78,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate stayed at 4.1%.

The jobs survey is in the field early each month, and October's survey may have been affected by Hurricane Milton. However, the BLS says data collection was fairly normal, so the October numbers were most likely just an extension of the downward trend that's been obvious for years.

The good news is that the Fed certainly has no reason to hold back on further rate cuts anymore. In fact, they should do another big one.

Over at Tablet, Park MacDougald has a piece called "The Democrats’ Insanity Defense." The gist is that Democrats do such unhinged stuff that people won't believe you if you just describe it truthfully.

MacDougald starts out with Kamala Harris's (now) famous statement in 2019 that she supports access to transgender surgery for prisoners. Fair enough. She really did say that, and now she's paying for it. I'm nauseated by Donald Trump's relentless anti-trans campaign, but the prisoner remark isn't something you could really expect him not to exploit.

But then MacDougald moves on to Harris's "disturbingly close relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran":

Like the Obama administration, of which it is a continuation, the Biden-Harris administration has attempted to realign the United States away from Israel and other traditional allies and toward a revisionist-Islamist bloc led by Iran but also including Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood, and various Palestinian radical groups. This orientation is reflected at the level of policy—including nonenforcement of Iranian oil sanctions, flooding Hamas and Hezbollah with cash through cutouts, and, since Oct. 7, the relentless undermining of Israel’s war against Iran and its proxies—as well as at the level of personnel.... The Iranian regime has repaid the Biden-Harris administration for its generosity, hacking the emails of Trump campaign employees and handing them off to a Democratic PAC, which published them last week.

These are all demonstrable matters of fact. Yet many Americans still have trouble accepting them, because the underlying predicate—that our country is purposefully allying with a terror-sponsoring, America-hating theocracy in its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Where does this stuff come from? I get that some people are even more hawkishly supportive of Israel than Joe Biden, and I get that lots of conservatives didn't like Obama's deal to halt Iranian development of nuclear weapons. But this guy literally thinks that Obama, Biden, and Harris hate Israel and are "purposefully allying" themselves with Iran.

And then he's surprised that most non-MAGA folks have trouble accepting this. He blames the liberal media, when, of course, the real reason is that people have trouble accepting it because it's loony tunes. Biden and Harris have given Israel literally everything it wants despite a lot of resistance from the Democratic base, and have protected it from Iran on every occasion. But because they have the gall to work toward a ceasefire and occasionally suggest that Israel should maybe consider not starving Palestinian civilians, this means they're cozying up to the ayatollahs.

This is so demented I don't even have a word for it.

Tyler Cowen points me to a paper from OpenAI that tests how well their AI does at answering simple, factual questions. These are questions that have a single, indisputable answer, like "What are the names of Barack Obama's children?"

The answer, it turns out, is that GPT4 suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect: it doesn't know how dumb it really is. Here's how well it provided correct answers compared to how well it thought it was doing:

As you can see, even when it has 100% confidence in its answer it's still only 60% correct. At every point along the curve its confidence is higher than its actual ability to answer questions.

On all questions combined, GPT4 correctly answered 38% of them while the o1 preview correctly answered 43%. The rest they mostly got wrong, although on a few they admitted they didn't know.

Not so good! Keep this in mind if you use AI to answer simple but slightly obscure questions. They're frequently wrong but, like your fabled conservative uncle, will never admit it.

I've noticed lately that my Google searches deliver a lot of hits for Reddit groups. John Herrman explains why:

The backstory here is a bit fuzzy and contested, but the basic outline is this: Late last year, Google began prioritizing certain sources of user-generated content in Search in an effort to surface more “first-person perspectives” in response to queries. This, among other less clearly explained changes, seemed to result in more visibility for forumlike sites like Quora and especially Reddit.

....The source of Reddit’s growth is also evident in its official numbers, although it doesn’t break out Google or search traffic specifically. For example, its logged-in daily active-unique-visitor numbers are up 27 percent globally, while its logged-out daily active-unique-visitor numbers are up 70 percent.... This is consistent with growth driven by people tapping on Reddit links in Google rather than organic growth from people seeking out Reddit specifically.

In his letter to investors, CEO Steve Huffman mentions how important Reddit has become to Google — “Reddit was the sixth most Googled word in the U.S.,” he notes — but is somewhat more oblique in talking about how important Google has become to Reddit.

Sure enough, Google Trends suggests that Reddit is now the second-most searched for social media site behind longtime powerhouse YouTube:

Other social media sites like BeReal, Nextdoor, TikTok, and Snapchat barely even register.

Anyway, now you know.

Did you know that over the past decade the amount of rail freight has declined even if you don't include the plummet in the number of coal trains? It's true:

Why is rail freight down down even though the economy has expanded by a third over the same period? It's not because freight charges have gone up:

Freight charges declined steadily after railroads were deregulated in 1980, turned upward in 2004 for some reason, but have been flat over the past decade.

In fact, the decline of rail freight is a long-term phenomenon. Overall rail networks peaked in the early 1900s and then declined thanks to passenger losses caused by the growth of cars, planes, and intercity buses—and the Great Depression. Both freight and passenger traffic declined when the interstate highway system was built, and the freight network fell off a cliff during the financial troubles of the early '70s. After deregulation freight operators were allowed to close unprofitable routes, and they did so with a vengeance until total track mileage was down to about 90,000 miles, where it's stayed ever since.

These figures are for the six big Class I rail freight carriers. Some of their decline has been made up by smaller regional carriers that sprung up after deregulation, but not all of it. Whether you measure by carloads, tonnage, or track mileage, rail freight is down.

Some of this is due to PSR—Precision Scheduled Railroading—which was pioneered in the '90s but only truly caught on about ten years ago. The idea behind PSR is to reduce operating costs by (a) running trains on fixed schedules, (b) running longer trains, (c) concentrating on only the most profitable long-haul routes, and (d) routing trains more efficiently so they pass through fewer transfer points where cars have to be moved around. Here are the results of PSR over the past decade:

The result of all this has been less rail freight and fewer cities served, but higher profits. This in turn has fueled a huge binge in dividends and stock buybacks.

And that's the story of freight trains.

Not that it matters to anyone, but here's a way to look at today's inflation report:

Inflation right now is within a hair of Donald Trump's average before the pandemic. The pandemic created the surge and the pandemic ended it. It's over. Everyone can relax.

This is a Francois' langur at the LA Zoo. There are fewer than 2,500 left in the world. He looks very venerable, no?

RFK Jr. is a crackpot. He spent years as a left-wing crackpot and has recently transformed into a MAGA-loving right-wing crackpot, but the through-line is that he's been a certifiable crank for more than 20 years.

So when Donald Trump says he's going to let his pal "go wild" on health and medicine if he wins, it's cause for concern. But maybe not too much concern. Trump says a lot of stuff, after all, and never follows up on most of it.

But what if Trump's putatively sane transition director says much the same thing?

"He's not trying to do anything but things that make sense," Lutnick says. "I think it would be pretty cool to give him the data and see what he comes up with."

The "data" in question is a little fuzzy, but apparently comprises studies that have been "withheld" and would prove that vaccines are unsafe. This is some kind of weird fever dream, since vaccines all go through normal clinical trials and the data is publicly accessible to anyone who wants to see it.

In any case, it's . . . disturbing that someone other than Trump himself—someone with real influence over administration staffing—has become an RFK Jr. groupie.