Kevin Drum 🕸

This is a seagull on the Seal Beach pier. I can't think of anything else to say about it.

Here we go again with yet another fretful look at our delicate global supply chain: "Far more vulnerable than many imagined." Indeed. Why, all it took was a deadly and unprecedented global pandemic and suddenly our supply chains developed a few minor hiccups and then were unable to fully keep up with a sharp and ...continue reading "Global supply chains handled the pandemic with flying colors"

A new Fed paper tries to estimate the difference in unemployment benefits between Black and white workers. Here's the raw data: Fewer Black workers are eligible for UI benefits compared to white workers. However, even among those eligible for UI, Black workers receive UI benefits at a much lower rate than white workers (42% vs. ...continue reading "Black workers receive unemployment benefits at systemically lower rates than white workers"

A friend sent me a link to a Catalist analysis of what happened in the Virginia governor's election last year. There are lots of takeaways, but here's one of them: Between the presidential election of 2020 and the gubernatorial election of 2021, youth turnout dropped 34 percentage points. Among boomer adults it dropped only 17 ...continue reading "In Virginia, young voters stayed home as usual"

This morning I had Rice Krispies™ for breakfast. All is well again.

As long as we're on the subject of California gasoline, here's an update on the ever-swelling difference between the price of gasoline in California vs. the Lower Atlantic: When I last checked in on this in 2019, the California premium was a little over a dollar. Three years later it's continued rising and is now ...continue reading "The California gasoline premium continues to soar"

This is the Hollywood/Highland station on the LA subway's Line B. I'm not sure what it's supposed to look like. Does anyone know?

Gasoline prices are up in California: Experts attributed the rise in local prices to recent trouble at a handful of California oil refineries. PBF Energy refineries in Torrance and Martinez as well as a Valero refinery in Benicia outside San Francisco have experienced problems in recent weeks that caused a hit to gasoline production, driving ...continue reading "Spring refinery shutdowns are back in California"

I spent the afternoon today up in LA visiting the Kaiser Permanente bone marrow transplant team to discuss getting the Carvykti CAR-T treatment for my multiple myeloma. These are the same doctors who did my stem cell transplant back in 2015, and the procedure would once again be done at City of Hope in Duarte. ...continue reading "Health Update"

This is a foggy autumn morning near Jeanerette, Louisiana. It could probably be a better picture, but I've dicked around with it enough already. I just don't feel like starting over.

Last year home prices increased about 17% according to the Case-Shiller 20-City composite. That's an increase of 12% when adjusted for inflation. After you account for the drop in 30-year fixed mortgage rates, monthly payments—which are what really matter—were up 10%. That's . . . a lot. Still, payments in 2021 remained lower than pre-housing-boom ...continue reading "Home prices are headed for a big drop in 2022"

Exciting news, word nerds! My copy editor and I got interested in the most widely used spelling of terra cotta, so I went to the Google Ngram Viewer to take a look. Here are the results: For some reason terra cotta soared in popularity, peaking in 1910, and then plummeted. Terracotta started rising in 1945 ...continue reading "The Ngram viewer gets an update!"

Over the past year I've gotten interested in the steady decline of children's mental health. I haven't looked into it in any depth, though, so I was interested in a survey of the topic by Judith Warner in the Washington Post Magazine yesterday. First off, she takes on the possibility that the crisis is an ...continue reading "Why do today’s kids have such big mental health problems?"

The redoubtable Eliot Cohen surveys the evidence that Russia is doing poorly in its war against Ukraine and then laments that too few people are willing to admit that Ukraine is winning: The West’s biggest obstacle to accepting success [] is that we have become accustomed over the past 20 years to think of our ...continue reading "No one doubts the massive global superiority of NATO and the US military"

You've all heard of the famous terracotta army assembled by the Qin dynasty emperor Qin Shi Huang at his imperial capital in Xianyang. Well, this is the not-quite-as-famous terracotta rabbit army assembled by the Drum dynasty empress Marian in her imperial capital of Irvine. Someday these two armies will have it out. My money is ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

News from Ukraine: NEW: Russia has launched more than 300 sorties into Ukraine the last 24 hours: senior U.S. defense official. 🇷🇺 sorties are not "venturing very far and very long" into 🇺🇦 airspace, the official said. Russia still has more than 60 percent of fixed wing and rotary wing capability. — Jack Detsch (@JackDetsch) ...continue reading "Russia has a little more than half its air force left"

What's the deal with all those loud allegations about biological laboratories in Ukraine? Do they exist? Are they making bioweapons? Are they dangerous? The answers are yes, no, and yes. The best short piece about them that I've read was in the Wall Street Journal yesterday: The allegations have shocked those who are most familiar ...continue reading "Ukraine has biolabs. Ukraine is not making bioweapons."

Here is 60 Minutes on housing: Nicely done @FairweatherPhD. Time to build! https://t.co/qw5zaNxdVK — Adam Ozimek (@ModeledBehavior) March 21, 2022 I don't get it. People keep saying stuff like this, but: There are housing shortages in California and in specific cities that are hot destinations right now, but overall the US has been building houses ...continue reading "We are still building lots of new housing"

Temperatures have soared wildly over Antarctica during the past week, with the eastern part of the continent experiencing temps about 70 degrees above normal (i.e., about 10°F instead of -60°F). That sounds pretty spectacular, but the technical description is even more spectacular: The warm conditions over Antarctica were spurred by an extreme atmospheric river [that] ...continue reading "Thanks to climate change, we now live in a five sigma world"

Wait. Is it now conventional wisdom on the Fox News right that masks just flat-out don't work? I know they've always hated masks and mask mandates—and think liberals are weenies for constantly wearing masks just to show off—but when did they decide masks had literally no value at all? What did I miss?