Kevin Drum

The US is energy independent, but for economic and strategic reasons we continue to import a moderate amount of crude oil. Most of it comes from Canada, followed by Mexico. Here are imports from OPEC, nearly all of it from Saudi Arabia these days.

Let's do some arithmetic. On October 3rd I received an 80 gram dose of Talvey. It has a half life in the body of 8.4 days. So the effective amount remaining is:

• October 3: 80 grams
• October 11: 40 grams
• October 20: 20 grams
• October 28: 10 grams
• November 6: 5 grams
• November 14: 2.5 grams
• November 23: 1 gram

How low does it have to get before the side effects go away? I figure 5 grams in the best case, 1 gram in the worst. Then add a couple of weeks for my taste buds to regenerate and we get a target recovery date of November 20 - December 7.

Fuck. I hope my adventure in playing amateur doctor turns out to be wrong.

The 2024 CES pre-election survey, based on a huge sample of nearly 80,000 adults, puts Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump 51-47% among likely voters. She's ahead 52-46% among very likely voters. Here's their breakdown by age and gender:

Harris is tied or ahead with every single group except one: old men, where she's behind by 12 points. But what can you do about that? This is the core Fox News demographic, and they've been told for years that Kamala Harris is a radical leftist fanatic who's determined to let in a ravaging horde of Mexicans who will destroy America. There's not much hope of ever getting through to them.

For the past week I've had a houseguest, an old friend who inherited a big pile of old tickets to Disneyland a few years ago. So on Thursday that's where we went.

This was a mistake. The day before I walked around for an hour and felt fine. I took this to mean that plain old walking was OK and wouldn't tire me out. What it actually meant was that walking for an hour was OK and wouldn't tire me out. As it turned out, after two hours at the park I was dragging badly and after three hours I was about ready to collapse. This was thanks to the combination of my stupid cancer med and a cold I was getting over.

So we weren't there for long and I didn't get to take many pictures. But here's one of the ones I did. It's a long exposure shot of the teacups. As you can see, everyone is whirling around merrily except for the the lazy guy in the orange cup who's just sitting there looking bored.

NB: For those who've never been to Disneyland, there's a wheel in the center of each cup. The harder you turn the wheel, the more the cup spins. If you do nothing, it just sits there.

Taylor Telford has a piece in the Washington Post today about office workers no longer knowing how to act at work:

More than two years after employers began urging white-collar workers back to offices, Americans are still reckoning with the ripple effects of pandemic-induced disruption when it comes to workplace behavior. The years spent apart from colleagues have rusted workers’ social skills, and new ways of working have spawned a host of fresh etiquette issues.

I initially met this with my usual skepticism. Am I really supposed to believe that basic social skills atrophied in a mere year or two? I haven't gone into an office for more than 20 years, but I'm pretty sure my social skills are about the same as always (for better or worse).

But I kept reading and got interested despite myself. For example:

Workers who had substantial professional experience before the pandemic, including managers and executives, still need help adapting to hybrid and remote work, Senning said. He has been coaching leaders on best practices for such things as communicating through your calendar and deciding whether to call, text or use Slack to reach an employee.

Establishing etiquette for video meetings has also been a challenge for many firms.... “If I had a magic button that I could push that could get people to treat video meetings with 50 percent of the same level of professionalism they treat an in-person meeting, I would make a lot of HR, personnel managers, and executives very, very happy,” Senning said.

Huh. I guess I have to admit that I might be a little rusty on the fine points of not committing a faux pas by calling instead of Slacking—or presumably worse yet, emailing. And while Zoom etiquette seems fairly obvious to me—join on time, pay attention, don't jerk off while your camera is on—maybe there are details I'm not aware of. There's also this:

Richey, for instance, has noticed younger workers struggling with both verbal and nonverbal forms of communication, whether through eye contact, greetings or basic conversation. “This younger generation has been used to such an informal communication style with texting and social media,” Richey said. “It definitely has had an impact.”

Kelly Rownd, director for career readiness at North Carolina State University, said that young professionals today generally get more opportunities for skill-building than previous generations. But they’re not always experienced when it comes to the social elements: drafting emails, networking, knowing how to behave in a meeting vs. at a client dinner. Meanwhile, companies increasingly rely on colleges and universities to provide this instruction, she added.

Eye contact? We're talking about kids who have been through four years of high school and four years of college, mostly in-person. That's a lot of ordinary social interaction even if you text a lot. What the hell?

Now, as near as I can tell, business executives have been complaining forever that new hires straight out of college lack real-world skills. Which, almost by definition, they do. So maybe this is just the usual kvetching about thekidsthesedays.

Or not. I suppose I'll never know for sure.

Haul out pretty much any front page and the political news is nearly identical every day now:

• Donald Trump said something repellent again.
• Voters are still mad about inflation.
• The race is a toss-up.

There's nothing new, no October surprise, and virtually no change in the polls.

Is Kamala Harris doing something wrong? I don't really know her strategy in the first place, so I don't know. But I still think she's going to win. Like everyone, I have Reasons™, but in the end I guess I'm just hanging desperately onto my hope that the American public isn't irredeemably foul and lost. Fingers crossed.

I mailed my ballot yesterday. Can you guess who I voted for?

Naturally Donald Trump himself gets the final MSG post. But it's not for any single thing he said, since he just repeated all his greatest hits from the past. Instead, it's for his full body of work.

Elon gets a whole post to himself. Not because he said something racist, but because he said something so massively dumb.

Elon used to be smart enough to do simple addition, but he thinks we can cut "at least" $2 trillion from federal spending—which amounted to $6.7 trillion in FY2024, not $6.5 trillion.

The arithmetic here is simple. If you add up Social Security + Medicare¹ + defense² + veterans pensions + interest on the debt³ you get $4.4 trillion. There's only $2.3 trillion left.

So Elon is claiming we should literally zero out the entire rest of the federal budget. Everything. The FBI, national parks, food stamps, Medicaid, education, NASA, the EPA, farm support, the NIH, all federal R&D grants, embassies worldwide, the FAA, the Department of Justice, the VA, the weather service, the border patrol, etc. etc. Everything.

What is it that didn't just move Musk to the right, but turned him into into a screaming, drooling lunatic with the effective IQ of a squirrel? I won't say I've never seen anything like it, but I've never seen it quite so unhinged from a basically sane and brilliant starting point.

¹Trump has promised not to cut either one.

²Trump has promised to increase defense spending.

³Both are legally obligated.

UPDATE: I originally wrote this post using 2023 spending numbers. I've updated it to 2024. Nothing changed about the conclusion, though.

Apologies for dropping the ball on this. I had to make an urgent IT house call on my mother, so I spent the afternoon in Garden Grove. But it's not too late to catch up now with Donald Trump's racism fest at Madison Square Garden.