Tesla has built an impressive network of EV charging stations in the US, but marketing has made it seem bigger than it really is:
Public charging ports currently outnumber Tesla ports by 6:1—though the Tesla chargers are often higher performance. But even in the high-performance realm, the times they are a' changing. Tesla has slowed its expansion while public expansion is about to explode thanks to funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. By 2030, public chargers will probably account for more than 90% of all EV chargers in the US.
China makes up 13% of the total. Here are exports:
What is the Netherlands doing at #4? What do we export to them?
Nothing special, it turns out. Lubricants, machinery, chemicals, and miscellaneous manufactured articles make up 90% of it. I'm not sure why the Dutch are such big importers of US goods relative to their size, but we thank them for their patronage.
Over at Vox, Anna North has a piece about the disappearance of the school bus thanks to widespread budget cuts. However, it was all anecdotal and I got curious about whether the data backs up the story. For starters, it looks like the cost issue is very real:
The cost to transport a single student on a school bus has gone up 40% over the past couple of decades. Why? There are some obvious possibilities like improved safety or a growing preference for small buses, but neither of those seems like it can explain a 40% increase. Moving on:
Sales of new school buses seem basically healthy. We haven't yet made up for the pandemic slowdown, but we're pretty close. Here are school bus drivers:
Same thing here: generally a steady increase, but we haven't yet recovered fully from the pandemic. Some of that may be due to a reported shortage of school bus drivers. Finally, here's the actual number of students who ride school buses each day:
This figure does show a steady decrease since 2006, well before the pandemic. At the same time, it's pretty small: a decline of about 0.3% per year. It's affected fewer than a million kids over the past 20 years.
None of this is definitive; it's just a quick data dump. My insta-take is that the school bus infrastructure looks pretty healthy but fewer kids are using it. In other words, the buses are generally still there. Most of the kids who aren't taking the bus anymore are probably doing it by choice.
I'm still at the hospital, but last night I had the mother of all dex crashes. I only wakened for good about half an hour ago.
Also, I caught a cold. In the hospital! I feel pretty crappy.
Also also, I caved in on the IV line, but with a compromise: the line is in, but it's not connected to anything. So I'm still untethered.
And now the news: Inflation is down! This is PCE inflation, the Fed's favorite, and the core rate (i.e., everything except food and energy) is down to 1.6%.
On a conventional year-over-year basis, headline PCE is down to 2.2% and core PCE is down to 2.7%.
Here's a closeup portrait of Charlie to go along with last week's portrait of Hilbert. This one was also taken indoors with the little flash unit, and the autoexposure ended up choosing an ISO level of 28800. This is remarkable for two reasons. First, it must mean the flash provided hardly any extra illumination. Second, with an ISO that high the picture should be a noisy mess. But it's not bad! My old camera didn't go higher than 12800, and even at that level the noise was terrible. So: good job from the camera, not so good job from the flash.
The Great Recession produced a sudden and permanent reduction in the growth rate of labor productivity:
Productivity today is 20% lower than it would have been if it had kept growing at its rate of the previous few decades.
But what was the cause of the slowdown? The recession itself? Our tepid response to it? Or was the old growth rate a bubble that we were simply never going to be able to keep up forever?
Whatever the answer, it left a vast amount of wealth on the table. If the old growth rate had continued, median household income would probably be cracking six figures this year instead of just the $80,00 we actually ended up with.
Male red admirals are territorial and perch during the afternoon until sunset....Males patrol their territory by flying around the perimeter between 7 and 30 times per hour. On average, territory holders interact with intruders 10 to 15 times per hour.
When another male encroaches on a red admiral's territory, the resident chases away the intruder, often in a vertical, helical path to disorient or tire out the intruder while minimizing the horizontal distance it travels from its perch. The red admiral immediately returns to its territory after chasing off encroaching males. Time spent patrolling increases as number of the intruder interactions increases.
Female red admirals will mate only with males who have a territory. It's important!
It turns out that the long awaited indictment against New York City mayor Eric Adams doesn't involve embezzlement or fraud or anything like that. It's just old-fashioned bribery. But very weird bribery.
The Feds allege that for the past decade Adams has been accepting lavish free travel and related luxury entertainment from . . .
A union? The mob? Fox News? Bzzz. The correct answer is the government of Turkey Türkiye.
The fuck? What does Türkiye want from the mayor of New York? Nothing in particular, it turns out. The bribes were just a retainer against possible future favors. They eventually called in their chits by asking Adams to kick the fire department's ass for holding up construction of a new consular building. Apparently Adams kicked the right asses and the building opened on time.
They also asked him to please not mention the Armenian genocide on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day—which must have been quite a trick if he said anything at all. I mean, what else do you talk about on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day?
There's other related mopery and dopery involving piles of cash from business moguls, all related to Türkiye. But as amusing as this penny ante corruption is, it's not the funniest part of the story. Investigators got hold of a telephone call where a Turkish Airlines manager is arranging a trip for Adams. "We can do it for 50 bucks," the manager says. No no, an Adams staffer says shrewdly. That's too obvious. Make it a thousand. No one will ever figure out that's a bribe.
Anna Merlan has a complete rundown of the hilarity here. We all knew Adams was a weird dude, but who knew he was such an incompetent and comical bribe taker?¹
¹Alleged bribe taker. Adams says he can explain everything.
The average for all workers in 2024 was 3.9 years. I chose to chart a single age group since older workers have held their jobs longer and therefore changes in age composition over the years can affect the numbers even if there's been no underlying change.
Every once in a while everybody in the country should look at this chart and be agog. We're the biggest country in the G7 by far and the fastest growing by far. That's not a combination you see very often.
Public charging ports currently outnumber Tesla ports by 6:1—though the Tesla chargers are often higher performance. But even in the high-performance realm, the times they are a' changing. Tesla has slowed its expansion while public expansion is about to explode thanks to funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. By 2030, public chargers will probably account for more than 90% of all EV chargers in the US.
