Kevin Drum 🕸

Big news today: San Francisco's $1.7 million bathroom finally opened and it ended up costing only about $700,000. What's more, the toilet itself is a prefab unit that was donated by a Nevada company, so the city's net cost clocked in at only $200-300,000. And it's a good thing it was donated. Nevada is one ...continue reading "Bay Area toilet comes in way under budget"

Do pro-Palestinian protesters support Hamas? Probably most of them don't, but the language they routinely use leaves room for doubt. This is from Students for Justice in Palestine: Settlers are not “civilians” in the sense of international law.... Resistance comes in all forms—armed struggle, general strikes, and popular demonstrations. "Resistance" includes armed struggle and Israelis ...continue reading "How strong is support for Hamas in the US?"

It's common knowledge that, on average, educated people live longer than less-educated people. But now a team of researchers says that even if you yourself are a high school dropout, you can reduce your chance of dying merely by living in a neighborhood with lots of educated people: There are several reasons this might be ...continue reading "Being around nonsmokers is good for you"

Today I have a mystery chart for you. Take a look at it: What do you see here? Obviously the trend changes around 2022, but when exactly would you say it changes? The beginning of 2022? The middle? Towards the end? My take is pretty simple: the trendline quite obviously starts to jump right at ...continue reading "Why I’m skeptical of interrupted time series"

This is the last of the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park. It's called Spruce Tree House because.......those are spruce trees nearby? All of these dwellings, by the way, were built in the 1200s after Puebloans had been driven from their previous homes by a long and destructive drought in the 1100s.

I smell a PhD dissertation in the works! But start collecting your data now.

Here in the People's Republic of California we like to keep things fair. And two of our legislators have had enough: A pair of Orange County state senators from opposing parties — who frequently fly between their districts and Sacramento — are both boosting a first-in-the-nation proposal critics say would ban the expedited security screening ...continue reading "California wants rich people to stop cutting the line in airports"

As you know, I've spent a long time arguing that the Fed's interest rate hikes aren't responsible for lower inflation. This is because inflation started to ebb within a few months of the hikes, and that's way too fast. It takes a year or two for interest rate changes to affect inflation. Well, it's been ...continue reading "Why is the economy so good?"

Test your knowledge: Q: How long does it take the FDA to approve new drugs? A: About seven or eight months on average. No, no, wait. It takes years. Everyone says it takes years. What nonsense is this? It's not nonsense. Once a New Drug Application is submitted, the FDA typically turns it around in ...continue reading "Do we still need Phase 1 clinical trials for new drugs?"

The House has finally passed three separate foreign aid bills. Here's how the money breaks down: Ukraine: $61 billion Israel: $17 billion Gaza humanitarian aid: $9 billion Taiwan: $8 billion In addition, the House passed a bill that sanctions Iran and Russia and would force the sale of TikTok. All of the bills go to ...continue reading "At last, Ukraine aid etc. passes the House"

Every year an outfit called Climate Action Tracker publishes an estimate of how much warming we're on course for by the year 2100. Cipher, a news site focused on climate change, has collected those estimates for the past decade and made a chart out of them: The projected amount of warming has dropped from 3.7°C ...continue reading "We’ve made surprising progress on climate change over the past decade"

I just saw a tweet about Groq, an AI chatbot that uses Meta's LLaMA-3 engine. It's incredibly fast! You should try it! So I did. And it is incredibly fast. But there are still problems. I asked it about myself and got five paragraphs in return. Four were basically fine, but there was also this: ...continue reading "I am now a physical chemist"

Over at Vox, Kelsey Piper lays down some stats on airline problems: Are more planes having incidents than ever before? Or are we just hearing about more incidents? It’s mostly the latter.... The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which investigates aviation incidents and accidents, lists 12 incidents on commercial aircraft in the United States so ...continue reading "Vox takes a look at all those Boeing stories"

According to the latest Harvard Youth Poll, liberals outnumber conservatives among college educated young people by 3:1. The precise split is 58%-21%. In other words, among those who profess any ideology at all, only a quarter are conservative.

Do we have a housing shortage? How is that possible if the number of housing units per capita is at an all-time high—which it is? Kevin Erdmann has a long, complicated post explaining that this is all about families having fewer children, but he never takes this to its logical conclusion. To recap: we don't ...continue reading "Another look at America’s housing shortage"

The jury has been chosen for Donald Trump's hush money trial and the judge has moved on to what's called a Sandoval hearing. This is where the prosecution explains the kinds of questions it would like to ask Trump if he decides to take the stand. For my own amusement and yours, here's a selection ...continue reading "Prosecution says jury should know that Trump is a big fat liar"

Here is Charlie using his IEEE-standard petabit-per-second NoseLink to gather information about his brother. Apparently everything checked out.

This week the Economist wrote about the way American trust in institutions has collapsed over the past couple of decades. This is not news. However, this is a very interesting comparison: Collapse of trust in government is a purely American phenomenon. Why? Because we have Fox News and the others don't. Oh, they have tabloids ...continue reading "Fox News has destroyed American confidence in itself"

The Ukraine aid bill has finally passed the House Rules Committee so it can come to the floor for a vote: The House Rules Committee is pretty much what it sounds like: a committee that formulates the rules of debate before a bill is allowed on the floor. Back in the day, the chairman of ...continue reading "Democrats shatter the rules to pass Ukraine aid through the Rules Committee"

I want to highlight something I posted yesterday that might have gotten lost: Up through 2014, teen suicide among girls was no different from suicide among adult women. Then, in 2015, it suddenly shot up, opening up a huge gap in only three years. This is very unusual. Very often, when you see a sudden, ...continue reading "What happened to teen girls in 2015-17?"