Old Suits

In a long period of disuse during the pandemic, almost all of my suits, many of them favorites that I'd had for many years, became unusable for anyone. Even an extremely poor person going to a thrift store for a suit (and lots of people could use my rather large sized suits) can't use one that moths have eaten the crouch out of.

Still, it is a shame to see a beloved item of clothing, worn often for important things, go, especially when it has huge amounts of remaining good fabric. A friend of my wife sometimes donates to a charity, similar to Thread Up, that may have use for the fabric, so that's probably where it will go.

I've been gradually replacing them, with about three new ones in the last year or two, now that people are going to court and depositions and even mediations in person on a regular basis again. But it will take time fore me to become sentimentally attached to the new ones.

I've invested is cedar for the closet, in an attempt to prevent a recurrence of this tragedy, although I'm cautiously pessimistic. It's worth trying, but I don't have high hopes.

Perceptions Of Crime

Crime going into the 2024 election was at the lowest level since 1969. But Republicans and independents didn't know that, because their political leaders lied to them and third-parties weren't emphatic enough and trusted by them enough to counteract that.

Also from Kevin Drum: "The 2020 Murder Spike Was COVID all along."

New Year's Eve Hopes

The new year will bring some big changes in my personal life. After thirteen and a half years, I'm parting ways with the law firm where I have been office sharing and providing services on an "of counsel" basis as a substantial part of my case load (in my situation, I'm basically an independent contractor as opposed to being in an employee or partner relationship).

My core solo practice remains, at least for now, but with a collection of cases and clients that is mostly new. I'm at a minimum looking at a very different business model. I will probably get certified as a mediator. But I've been continuously employed since I graduated from law school thirty years ago, and I have both valuable legal skills, and valuable soft skills not specific to a profession. So, I'm not overly worried about landing on my feet.

In the next little bit there are nuts and bolts to work out. My old office needs to be emptied, and I swear that my law books and banker's boxes full of files are twice as heavy as they were when I put them in my office in the first place. At a certain point, age does not improve your strength or stamina. Filings will need to be made in all of my active cases to alert the courts and the other parties to the new arrangements. A couple of outstanding financial relationships will have to be closed out. Clients will need to be told how this will affect them. A TBD venue (probably some sort of virtual office arrangement based someplace closer to my home than my current office) will need to be put in place. One or two new vendor arrangements for things like legal research accounts will have to be worked out.

This big change is both sudden and a long time coming. It has been clear for a long time that a major shift was overdue. But thinking it is one thing, and doing it is another. The daily rhythm of my life will change more than it has for a long time.

It certainly helps to be at a place in my life where I have a cushion. The mortgage used to buy our home twenty-five years ago has steadily gotten smaller, and with re-financings to a 3.65% interest rate, the payment, even with taxes and insurance, it is smaller than my Denver based daughter's one bedroom apartment rent in a less pricey neighborhood than Washington Park. I have enough cash in the bank to cover at least ten months of expenses, more if I'm careful. Other than the mortgage, I have no debt. I pay off my credit cards in full every month. I have no student loans. I'll pay off my $54 parking ticket from the City of Manitou Springs a couple of years ago, as soon as I can talk to a human being to resolve a glitch in their collection agency's computer system (which will probably take several hours or more of my time). I suspect that their computer system can't handle hyphenated names or something like that.

My children are grown adults who have finished college, have good jobs, have apartments of their own, have their own serious romantic partners, and no longer need meaningful financial support. My health insurance covers two people instead of four. My household will soon have only one fully paid off fuel efficient car with myself as the sole driver that I've driven 6,000 miles a year on average and will probably drive less in the coming year with less of a commute. There is no deferred maintenance on the car, only one modest project (a 25 year old swamp cooler to replace) for the house, and no deferred dental work or health care.  I don't have any pets at the moment. 

I've avoided taking on golden handcuffs. My home and car are modest. My most expensive hobby is buying books with Amazon rewards credits. I don't ski or have a boat or a plane or have a vacation house or play golf or belong to an athletic or country club with high monthly dues. I don't get season tickets to pro sports. I'm price conscious when I buy things. I don't even have cable or satellite TV. Aside from business trips and family visits, I only go on a real major vacation every five years or so and just finished the most recent one, a 30th anniversary trip to the Bahamas.

This isn't to say that my life isn't comfortable. I don't keep the thermostat at 65º. I have a couple of video streaming services and a Spotify account and high speed internet access. I have a smart phone, although not the latest and greatest one. I have a decent laptop that I use all day long for both business and pleasure. I live in a good neighborhood in a house that is tastefully well finished on the inside without being over the top. I got a lawn service when my kids were no longer available to mow it for free. I shop for deals when I get groceries, but get ample amounts of good quality food. I don't drink bottom shelf wine and liquor any more. I don't have to make choices between buying medicine or getting health care and buying food or paying utilities. Now and then, I go out to eat someplace nice, or see a play or opera or concert, or plan a weekend getaway. I buy art now and then, although nothing super expensive. I've had a few pieces of heirloom jewelry custom made for my wife over two and a half decades. I have a decent work-life balance. 

But the bottom line is that my "monthly nut" is modest, and I'm healthy enough to work as much as I need to in order to cover it. My life style choices and tastes and attitudes are closer to upper middle class than middle class, but my budget is not. So, I don't have to make a huge amount from self-employment to continue to grow rather than to drain my savings, and I can get away with shifts to new business models that are base hits rather than home runs economically without breaking the bank. I could probably break even at twenty fully collected billable hours a month. 

I am optimistic that I'll be able to shift the way that I make a living in a way which will be a positive change and work out economically over the course of the next year and beyond, even though, as someone in the business of warning my clients about worst case scenarios, I know that nothing is promised.

Meta Note 

Between this blog and its sister blog, I've made 450 blog posts in this 366 day long year, despite a hiatus for my anniversary trip, and more than six weeks combined of being sick successively with a "generic" but serious respiratory infection, and then with COVID.

The Day After

So, Trump won the Presidential election. The exact electoral vote count isn't certain, probably 301 unless he wins Arizona, the only state whose actually vote totals were close to a toss up and which is still too close to call, in which case it is 312. He also won the popular vote by about four point five percentage points (subject to modest adjustment when the complete results are final).

Harris will win Maine. Trump will win Alaska, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada.

The outcome of the election won't be contested (except perhaps with a renewed attempt to invoke Section 3 of the 14th Amendment). It wasn't that close.

The average anti-Trump bias in the national polling estimates and in the average swing state and lean state polls was about 4 percentage points, roughly the same as in 2016 and 2020. There was also a fair amount of ticket splitting with Democrats running for Governor (e.g. in NC) or U.S. Senate (e.g. in AZ) often outperforming Harris at the top of the ticket. 

Trump did significantly better in many states than he did in 2020, despite the fact that he was a convicted felon, has other pending felony prosecutions, was found civilly liable for rape and for fraud, was four years older, showed more marked signs of dementia in his campaign, can't speak in complete sentences, has the vocabulary of a fifth grader, is a former porn star and is marrieds to a porn star in his third marriage, had no significant support from family and was denounced by many of his former inner circle, is easily triggered and baited, lost the only debate with his opponent, and employed more deplorable rhetoric and more blatant lies which were routinely pointed out publicly. No candidate has so openly pledged to defy the U.S. Constitution and U.S. law, to abandon democracy, to urge political violence and sedition, to embrace foreign dictators hostile to the U.S., to persecute his personal and political opponents, and to welcome racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and homophobia. The man is an incompetent but evil monster.

He also improved his winning margin despite the fact that the economy was remarkably strong, crime was near 55 year lows, teen pregnancy was near record lows, and we were not at war, and despite the fact that he cost at least 300,000 American lives as a result of his mishandling of the COVID pandemic. 

The Republicans also gained a majority in the Senate (the exact partisan divide is not yet certain, it could be as many as 55-56 Republican Senators). Democrats lost the only Senate race forecast to be truly close, in Ohio, by several percentage points more than the polls had forecast. It is unlikely that Republicans will preserve the filibuster under Trump's leadership.

The U.S. Supreme Court has a conservative 6-3 vote majority, three of whom are ultra-conservative.

The races for the House are very close. If every race not called yet is resolved as it is trending as I write, the Democrats will have a one seat majority in the House, but it is too close to be sure at this point. If the Republicans maintain control of the House, their majority may be cut from four seats to one to three seats.

If the Republicans manage even a single vote majority in the House, there will be essentially no checks and balances on Trump of any kind. Trump is likely to be able to prevent the internal divisions that have plagued the GOP's thin majority in the House over the last two years.

All of this is despite the fact that Trump is far and away the worst candidate for President in all of U.S. history, and shouldn't have been constitutionally permitted to run for the office at all. 

A majority of Americans are evil, stupid, or both. There is really no other explanation. Trump myriad flaws and shortcomings were screamed from the rooftops, but a majority of U.S. voters didn't care. Interviews with Trump supporters made clear that many or most of them were well aware of his shortcomings. Even while being elected President, Trump has a net nine percentage point unfavorable rating in polling (significantly worse than Harris).

There was a seventeen percentage point gender gap (men favored Trump, women favored Harris). There was twenty-nine percentage point gap between voters with college degrees and voters with no college (college educated voters favored Harris). The gap between men without college degrees and women with college degrees was forty-three percentage points. These gaps surged in Trump's three campaigns.

As usual, white Evangelical Christians strongly backed Trump for reasons that are inexplicable through logic, while non-whites and non-Christians backed Harris. Few candidates less exemplify christian virtues or even familiarity with Christian doctrines.

Basically no mainstream media outlet, other than Fox News, supported Trump.

It is a day to mourn. There is no reason to expect anything but the worst possible scenarios going forward.

As I noted before, there is real doubt over whether Trump will be able to complete his term. He is 78 years old. His dementia has advanced perceptibly during the current Presidential campaign. He is not a particularly healthy man, and is obviously quite obese. Time will tell. If he doesn't complete his term, J.D. Vance will become the acting President, and it isn't clear how he will act if he isn't in Trump's shadow.

There were other results at the state and local level, but those pale to the point of triviality compared to these results. One exception to that may be the abortion related ballot issues summarized below (the outcome of these ballot issues isn't available yet, however, in several of these states).

Much more trivially:

Messaging And The Last Seven Weeks

Yesterday, seven weeks before the 2024 Presidential election, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris had a Presidential debate, that, by all accounts, Harris performed well in (in stark contrast to the debate between Trump and President Biden that triggered Biden's withdrawal from the Presidential race).

Harris used this rare moment with the eyes of the nation on her and Trump to go on the attack and to show, as much as tell, the audience that Trump is a weak and small man who has lost his marbles, by baiting him into rants that prove this point.

The Race Is Close

Terrifyingly, this Presidential race is extremely close. Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona are all polling within one percentage point of a tied race. Harris has a 1.7 percentage point lead in Michigan and a 2 percentage point lead in Wisconsin. Trump leads by 4.4 percentage points in Florida. One candidate or the other leads by at least 5.3 percentage points in every other state or electoral vote granting Congressional District.

Harris leads in national polling by 2.8 percentage points, which given the inherent bias of the Electoral College against Democrats relative to the popular vote, is just barely enough, or maybe not quite enough, to win.

Worse yet, polling was consistently and decisively biased against Trump in both 2016 and in 2020, mostly because of low response rates from Trump supporters relative to supporters of the Democratic candidates. So, notwithstanding the narrow lead in the polls that Harris has, and the efforts of pollsters to address this problem, Harris may be doing worse than the polls are letting on.

This makes no sense.

If you look at the race from a rational, logical perspective, as Democrats are prone to do, this makes no sense.

The fundamentals of the U.S. economy and the state of the union are strong.

- Unemployment has been low on a sustained basis for a record length of time.

- Wages have been rising.

- Gas prices are below average and the current rate of inflation is low.

- The stock market and the gross national product have been growing tremendously.

- Crime rates are at close to record lows.

- The teen birthrate has never been lower.

- Opioid overdose rates have finally stabilized after growing relentlessly for decades.

- We are a nation as close to at peace has we have been for decades. The war in Afghanistan is over. The Iraq War is over.

Trump should be a uniquely weak candidate.

- Trump lost the 2020 election and a lot of Americans are sick of him.

- Trump's speeches are routinely rambling, almost incoherent word salad that are riddled with multiple factual assertions that are not true every single minute, alternating with just bizarre, inexplicable claims.

- Trump is a former Democrat, who lived most of his life in New York City, is married to an immigrant, and claims to be a billionaire who started out in life with a $400 million inheritance back when that was worth a lot more than it is today. He has very little in common with his based in any way.

- The departure from Afghanistan was chaotic and ugly because Trump cut a deal with the Taliban shortly before he lost the 2020 election, that undermined the U.S. backed regime there, Afghans who backs U.S. forces, and U.S. forces.

- Roe v. Wade was overturned, in an immensely unpopular decision, because he appointed three ultra-conservatives to the U.S. Supreme Court. Public confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court has never been lower.

- Trump has taken the side of long standing U.S. enemies like Vladimir Putin and King Jung-Un, and has shown open admiration of China's authoritarian leader.

- Trump stands convicted of 34 felonies for which he will face sentencing after the election and before the inauguration.

- Trump is still dealing with three more criminal cases where he was indicted, all of which are tangled up in appeals unrelated to the merits of whether he committed the crimes.

- While the Colorado Supreme Court's decision that Trump was not allowed to run for office because he engaged in an insurrection was not upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, this decision was reversed without disturbing the determination of the Colorado courts that Trump had engaged in an insurrection.

- Several dozen of Trump's senior close associates have been convicted of felonies.

- No living former Republican President endorsed Trump, and only a handful of senior officials from his administration have done so, while many former official in his administration have endorsed Harris.

- Trump's personal lawyer has been disbarred and is bankrupt from sanctions imposed upon him for his misconduct fighting the 2020 election results. Many other lawyers who helped him in connection with that were also disbarred or had their licenses to practice law suspended. Some of the people who pushed that losing fight are in prison.

- About a thousand people involved in the January 6, 2021 attack on the capital to overturn his losing electoral vote outcome have been convicted of crimes, many of which were serious.

- Fox News had to settle a defamation case related to its election outcome fraud for about $800 million. Several other conservative news commentators who backed him have lost defamation suits that sent them to bankruptcy and/or lost their jobs.

- Trump's Truth Social conservative social media outlet has seen its stock market price tank.

- Trump lost a civil fraud lawsuit resulting in a judgment against him for hundreds of millions of dollars.

- Trump lost a pair of defamation and civil sexual assault lawsuits, resulting in a civil finding that he sexually assaulted a woman.

- Trump is 78 years old and starting to show strong signs of dementia in his public speeches.

- The media not longer hesitates to call out Trump for his non-stop lying about every factual matter under the sun.

- Trump's mismanagement of the COVID epidemic cost hundreds of thousands of Americans, disproportionately Republicans, their lives.

- Trump ran up the deficit tremendously, and not just from COVID related spending. A lot of that deficit comes from huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich that did little or nothing to help the economy.

- The fact that Trump had an affair with a prostitute while his wife was pregnant with his youngest child, and then paid her $100,000 of hush money.

- Trump has had five children with three wives and indisputably cheated on all three of his wives, including his current one.

- Both Trump and his wife are former pornography actors.

- Trump rarely, if ever, attends church and lacks even surface level understanding of the Bible or Christian doctrine.

- Trump's older children have profited handsomely from selling their relationship to him for the corrupt reason of their apparent political influence and Trump himself received immense improper personal financial gain during his Presidency. Their misconduct with a charity that they were involved in has caused them to be barred from running charities in New York State.

- Trump's businesses, have gone bankrupt six times, including a casino.

- Trump University was a dismal failure that he had to settle for a huge sum because he personally participated in fraud promoting it.

- Trump has a long history of losing or having to settle racial discrimination lawsuits and his father was a literal Nazi and KKK member.

J.D. Vance isn't helping his ticket.

- Trump's running mate, J.D. Vance, has also repeatedly put his foot in his mouth, and plays to the MAGA base, not to swing voters.

Biden's departure should help.

- Joe Biden's advanced age had been a major talking point in the Presidential race. Now that talking point has been turned on its head with Harris replacing him in the race.

- Joe Biden did little campaigning, wasn't very effective at it when he did, and did miserably in the first debate.

Walz helps his ticket.

- Governor Walz from Minnesota is a very decent guy and a military veteran (like Vance) who is moral in all of the ways that Trump and Vance are not.

Republicans in Congress are dysfunctional.

- The Republican Party holds a razor thin majority in the U.S. House but has been plagued with infighting, struggled to elected a speaker in the first place, replaced their speaker, and struggles to pass even basic appropriations bills without Democratic party backing.

- Maverick gadflies in the House GOP have more power than they should because the GOP majority is so thin, and they have repeatedly embarrassed their party on a national stage, while undermining their own majority coalition.

- There is a real possibility that the government will shut down on October 1, 2024, a little more than a month before the election, because House Republicans can't agree on a continuing resolution to keep the government functioning.

- In the U.S. Senate, a rogue Senator from Alabama has single handedly impaired the functioning and good order of the U.S. military by blocking defense department related appointments.

- The Republicans have not been very effective in achieving their goals in the U.S. Senate despite the fact that two Democratic Senators have left their party midterm (and will not be re-elected in 2024).

- For example, Biden has appointed new federal judges at roughly the same rate that Trump did.

Why is Trump so greatly over performing in face of all of the factors that should make this race a landslide for Harris?

* At the federal level at least, partisan divides have never been bigger. There is not a single Democrat who is more conservative than a single Republican in Congress. There are very few moderates of either party in Congress. The magnitude of the gap between the parties is as big as it has ever been since the eve of the U.S. Civil War.

* The amount of split ticket voting in 2020 was a record low and all but about 8% of voters have a clear partisan preference which they always back in every election.

* The deep partisan divide reflects a deep economic and cultural divide between "red counties" and "blue counties". Biden won less than 54% of the popular vote in 2020, but the counties he won account for 71% of the nation's GDP. Trump won a little more than 46% of the popular vote, but the counties he won account for only 29% of the nation's GDP.

* Red America is less educated, less affluent, more religious, less diverse, and more rural, than Blue America. Red America has participated very little in the last 50 years of economic growth.

* The economic weakness of less educated white men in Red America has caused them to fail as economic providers resulting in them less often getting married, usually having children out of wedlock, and getting divorced when they do get married early and often at unprecedented rates. Their failure as providers has also driven deaths of despair, and caused many of them to have their parental rights terminated for abuse or neglect, or to have their parental rights marginalized in custody fights, and driven lots of domestic violence criminalizing them.

* Red America has interpreted its failing families as caused by moral failure, gay rights, abortion, and feminism resulting in backlash against "wokeness", when the real problem is that the economy no longer needs many uneducated, unskilled, socially rough around the edges men, leaving them with regular bouts of unemployment and low wages.

* White religious people, living in an increasingly secular society in which they are not thriving economically, and are constantly losing out to educated knowledge workers (an increasing share of whom are non-white women), have ceased to trust the mainstream media, educational institutions at all levels, and the government. Together with the rise of social media and niche Internet media sources, this has left them exposed to ridiculous lies about almost everything going on in the world, which they embraced, initially, to protect their religious worldviews that are at odds with science and reality.

Trump's Messaging

- Trump's campaign has tried, with considerable success, to blame Biden for the short but intense period of high inflation post-COVID, even though it was driven by factors beyond Biden's control (like Ukraine War driven oil price surges and big corporate profit taking greed). This, and Biden's failure to regularly tout his economic successes, means that many conservatives don't realize how strong the economy is doing.

- Trump did his best in the debate, and has in all of his campaigns, tried to demonize immigration and hasn't hesitated to resort to bald faced lies to back that effort. In part this is playing to economic fear, that Red America sees waves of low skilled workers as competing with them in a zero sum game for unskilled work. But more than that, he is focusing on immigrant driven crime (which is contrary to reality because crime is low and because even undocumented immigrants commit less crimes than native born Americans) and on immigrants undermining a white Evangelical Christian nationalist vision for America and its culture. He's also tried to fan completely unsubstantiated claims that fraudulent voting by immigrants who aren't allowed to vote is depriving his backers, the "true Americans" of their rightful control of their country. Never mind that immigrants are particularly scarce in many of the places where Trump's message is most warmly received, like West Virginia.

- The MAGA movement isn't about governing. Trump himself is mostly only weakly interested in policy despite the nefarious and terrifying Project 2025 agenda that has been prepared for him by right wing think tanks. Conservative wonks in think tanks want to govern in a way that transforms the nation with hard core conservative policies to fit their minority vision for the country. But, the MAGA movement and Trump himself, are about persecuting their enemies for disloyalty and out of spite, and about burning down the entire institution of the federal government (and a lot of state and local government) which they believe has failed them and they don't trust.

- A fair amount of the MAGA movement is about older, disgruntled white people in places that have failed economically who mostly aren't thriving themselves, trying to hold onto white male Christian hegemony in an economy where you can be prosperous without education or skills, as the nation steadily becomes less Christian, less white, more educated, and has given more power and rights to women. They want to roll back cultural change including gay rights and feminism. They want to deny the existence of things like climate change.

- They want everyone to buy American and forego international trade. Trump is pushing big new tariffs in his tax proposals. His vision for America is isolationist and anti-globalist. 

-They are attracted by the certainty and manliness of authoritarian leaders internationally. Trump touted support from far right Hungarian leader Mr. Orban in the debate.

- Trump's message is a message of fear and division. Harris is trying to go back to Obama's message of hope and unity.

- The Democratic party's left wing has to some extent fallen for the trap that Trump has created for them, threatening to back third-party candidates due to disillusionment with Biden over issues like Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians that isn't salient to many voters, and focusing on the negative long term perspective on the economy rather than the good news from Biden's administration compared to Trump's administration.

Military Quick Hits

* The assumption that a large scale amphibious assault in a hostile entry, like the D-Day invasion, remains an important capability of the U.S. military, is unfounded. There hasn't been a significant amphibious assault anywhere in the world since the Korean War in the 1950s. What country would the U.S. invade that way? China? North Korea? Russia? Iran? It is hard to come up with plausible scenarios to motivate the need for this capability.

* Republicans in Congress are pro-disinformation. The U.S. Defense Department shamefully spread anti-vax disinformation about Chinese vaccines during the COVID epidemic.

* The U.S. Air Force isn't sure if it will move forward on building a "Next Generation Air Dominance" warplane, basically a successor to the F-22 and F-35. There is speculation that this may be driven by dissatisfaction with Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the only domestic defense contractors capable of building such a plan. Cost and viable alternatives are also factors:

Paying for this next-gen fighter, which is expected to cost about $300 million a pop, will be tough as the service expects to spend increasing amounts of money in the coming years on F-35s, the new B-21 Raider, and the next-gen Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile. And in addition to budget constraints, new technology developments and drones have the service rethinking the future of air dominance.

NGAD may be the only place the Air Force can take a reduction, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, given all the other programs the Air Force needs to pay for, and the desire to grow its new collaborative combat aircraft program.

The service also may be rethinking its overall concept of operations to rely on B-21, CCAs, and stand-off weapons [i.e. long range missiles] rather than a traditional aircraft, Clark said. But given emerging technologies, it’s still unclear what air dominance is exactly going to look like in the future.

The collaborative combat aircraft program, sometimes called the "loyal wingman" program, is a drone aircraft that supports a manned jet fighter. 

* In the short run it looks like naval warfare between China and the Philippines is more likely than war between China and Taiwan.

NoVID No More

So, upon flying back to Denver from Las Vegas where a three family gathering related to their half-marathon had concluded (don't worry, I was in a sag wagon capacity and the two races I've run in recent history were a 0.5 km race with donuts halfway and a 1 mile race mostly against preschoolers and elementary school aged kids and their mom's carrying them), on a Monday night redeye (we got home to our house at 3 a.m. on Tuesday), I was seated next to an old lady who refused to mask despite the fact that she was at peak coughing from COVID and my efforts to mask didn't help.

Symptoms started to appear at 5 p.m. on Wednesday. I was feverish, shivered for three hours straight the first day, was mentally confused to the point of delirium, aching all over, persistently having wet deep chest coughs to distraction, weak, having intense headaches and sore throat, runny noise and congestion, etc. that left me awake and coherent for only about 2-3 hours from 8 p.m. that day until 11 a.m. on Thursday. It stayed bad. I spent Friday mistaking a lot of fever dreams for real and bumbling into things, and at noon on Friday, I tested positive for COVID.

I'd held out for almost four years during which I'd gotten vaccine or booster shots six times, and was the last family member in my extended family to get it, but my time ran out.

Kaiser managed to get me hooked up with Paxlovid, the COVID anti-viral drug, in time to get my first dose less then seven hours after testing positive, and I'm half way though that five day course of drugs. This helps. Still, I only managed to stay awake and not delirious for about ten hours today and eight hours yesterday and six hours on Friday and maybe four hours on Thursday. And my attention span is totally shot. I'm having trouble staying focused on anything for even fifteen minutes. I'm still coughing, but not as bad. To spare the rest of the family, on the same flight but further away from Typhoid Mary, I've spent the whole time in isolation, either in my bedroom alone, or wearing a mask elsewhere in the house.

Lots of work has been pushed to the side which will have to be caught up. But you can't work when the highest level activity you can manage half the time is to stare at the ceiling. Today and yesterday, I've managed brief Facebook reel sessions, and listening to three or four songs at a time before not being able to follow it.

Still between the vaxes and the promptly Pax, I'm pretty sure that I won't die, won't have to be hospitalized, and probably won't even get long COVID, despite having more than one pre-existing condition and being over age fifty, which might otherwise put me in a higher risk group. And, I've followed all doctors orders about hydration, OTC painkillers, etc. I'll probably even manage to do some work tomorrow, although very likely not a full day's work and not the most demanding tasks yet. 

By the time I get better, my blisters from my foolish choice to spend four days in Las Vegas wearing brand new shoes, might heal as well.

County Level Population Change

From Slow Boring which observes that: "almost all of West Virginia, Louisiana, and Mississippi are losing people." It also notes that: "Fully 47% of counties lost population between July 2021 and July 2022."

A one year map with the rebound from the pandemic isn't a perfect gauge, however. A ten year map avoids static and random variation, as well as the one time shock of COVID-19:

What seems significant also looks different looking at changes in numbers of people per county rather than percentages:

As noted here:

Rural areas in the United States, often referred to as rural America, consists of approximately 97% of the United States' land area. An estimated 60 million people, or one in five residents (17.9% of the total U.S. population), live in rural America.

The post then muses about the divide, closely related to this population trends, between places where the market price of homes is above or below replacement value:

Here’s a 2,700-square-foot two-story home sitting on a 5,600-square-foot lot not far from the Clarendon Metro Station, but just far enough that the area is strict single-family zoning. It’s a nice house, but the $1.7 million price is mostly due to the expensive land. Absent that zoning rule, you might redevelop a parcel like that as a six-story building featuring ten 2,000-square-foot units (two on each floor) plus a 4,000-square-foot penthouse. The total value of the whole parcel would be much larger, but the individual units might be 50% of the price of the old house at 75% of the size. That redevelopment is possible because $1.7 million is so much higher than the replacement value of the house — regulation ensures that the price of housing is dominated by the price of land.

In a scenario of population decline, though, the market value of a house falls below the replacement value of the structures. You can see this by looking at statistics, but it’s pretty easy to eyeball where it’s taking place because the signature is a neighborhood with more vacant lots or vacant buildings than ongoing construction projects. Huge swathes of Detroit are, infamously, like this. But it’s also true of Cleveland and St. Louis and Milwaukee and Baltimore and other cities. Abandoned or vacant buildings are a source of blight — negative amenity value to the neighborhood. And each city with a significant amount of vacant property has its own policy apparatus for dealing with it and its own local discourse about the merits of that apparatus and whether the problem should be handled some other way. In years of reading about this, though, I’ve never heard of a city that has a magic formula to deal with vacant lots and blight. What I have seen is the vacant building problem vanish in my own neighborhood in D.C. due to robust market demand for housing. I’ve also seen in Chicago that a city can be capacious enough to support a lot of construction activity in the West Loop, even while significant swathes of the South Side look a lot like Cleveland.

Generally speaking, counties with declining populations tend to lean Republican and counties that are growing, even a little, tend to lean Democratic, although there are exceptions, driven by race, religion, age, education, and the relative importance of fossil fuels and tourism in the local economy.

How Many Deaths Did COVID Cause In U.S. Prisons?

Prison inmates of all ages had significantly increased COVID-19 death rates relative to the general population.

U.S. prisons were especially susceptible to COVID-19 infection and death; however, data limitations have precluded a national accounting of prison mortality (including but not limited to COVID-19 mortality) during the pandemic. Our analysis of mortality data collected from public records requests (supplemented with publicly available data) from 48 Departments of Corrections provides the most comprehensive understanding to date of in-custody mortality during 2020. 

We find that total mortality increased by 77% in 2020 relative to 2019, corresponding to 3.4 times the mortality increase in the general population, and that mortality in prisons increased across all age groups (49 and under, 50 to 64, and 65 and older). COVID-19 was the primary driver for increases in mortality due to natural causes; some states also experienced substantial increases due to unnatural causes. 

These findings provide critical information about the pandemic’s toll on some of the country’s most vulnerable individuals while underscoring the need for data transparency and standardized reporting in carceral settings.

Naomi F. Sugie, et al., "Excess mortality in U.S. prisons during the COVID-19 pandemic", 9(48) Science Advances (December 1, 2023) (open access).

From the results section:

Across 49 DOCs (including 47 states, the Federal BOP, and Washington, D.C.), the number of people who died in U.S. prisons was substantially higher in 2020 (6088 deaths) than in 2019 (4206 deaths). This comparison of total deaths does not account for changing custody populations, which decreased during the 2020 pandemic; therefore, rates of in-custody deaths were even higher in 2020. For DOCs with information about manner of death in 2020 (N = 41 DOCs, N = 5134 deaths), 4118 deaths (80%) were due to natural causes, 534 deaths (10%) were due to unnatural causes, and 482 deaths (9%) were due to unknown causes. For DOCs with information about COVID-19–related deaths (N = 19 states, N = 1714 total deaths), 496 deaths (29%) were related to COVID-19.

The COVID Vaccines Saved Many Lives

Leveraging the staggered rollout of vaccines, we find that the vaccination campaign across 141 countries averted 2.4 million excess deaths. . . . We also find that an equitable counterfactual distribution of vaccines, with vaccination in each country proportional to its population, would have saved roughly 670,000 more lives.

From an NBER Working Paper.

According to the World Health Organization there have been 6,974,473 COVID deaths to date, worldwide. So, vaccines prevented about 25% of COVID deaths that would have occurred without them.

Biden World

Welcome to Biden world.

Inflation is modest (3.4%). Economic growth is high (4.9% annualized, seasonally adjusted). Unemployment is low (3.8%).

Teen birth rates in the U.S. are at an all time historic low.

Violent crime was near a 25 year low before the pandemic in 2019, and is returning to the trend line after a pandemic surge:

The murder rate in big cities that bounced up in the pandemic (2020-2021) has fallen again (down 5% in 2022 and down another 12% so far this year compared to the same time period in 2022) to return to almost pre-pandemic levels.

The war on marijuana is almost over and Biden is working to remove its Schedule I controlled substance status (which would end punitive federal taxation of the industry and allow marijuana businesses to use banks):

Russia's conventional military might has crumbled and NATO is stronger. The U.S. is out of Afghanistan. Israel's continued existence is not seriously threatened. China has not invaded Taiwan.

COVID deaths are way down.

More than a thousand people have been held criminally accountable for the January 6, 2021 attempted self-coup and even the people at the top are being held accountable.

Bad cops are being held accountable at much higher rates in recent years.

Coal consumption in the U.S. is down more than 50% from its 2008 peak, and continues to fall. Renewable generation surpassed coal and nuclear in the U.S. electric power sector in 2022:

According to J.D. Powers & Associates:

Sales of electric vehicles (EVs) in the United States rose by two-thirds in 2022, comprising 5.8 percent of all new vehicles sold. This represents a significant increase from the 3.2 percent market share in 2021.

This is expected to increase substantially again in 2023. 

Why Do DOD Schools Have Good Test Scores?

Schools run by the Department of Defense have very good test scores compared to the public schools in pretty much every U.S. state.

Why is this so?

K-12 school test performance consistently tracks parental education and socio-economic status, etc. It has little to do with how the education process is conducted as opposed to who the kids the system has to teach are. In U.S. military base schools: 

(1) none of the service member parents are in the bottom 30-40% academically and none of the service member parents are high school dropouts – few of the non-service member parents are either due to assortative marriage trends, 

(2) none of the parents have serious criminal records (disciplinary problems are far more hereditary than you think); 

(3) the proportion of kids with very low academic potential/IQ and learning disabilities are far below the general population and that means that teachers don’t have to devote disproportionate time to meeting the needs of these kids, 

(4) few kids are “gifted” (since few parents are selective college material) and “gifted” kids also takes disproportionate time from teachers away from meeting the needs of “regular” kids in regular comprehensive schools, 

(5) the share of kids from married two parent households is much greater than in the no college parents demographic generally, even if the service member parent is absent for prolonged period of time, because military pay strongly incentivizes marriage and having kids; 

(6) no kids lack health care, are homeless, lack food, or are in sustained poverty (basically, the U.S. military is a socialist economy, with both the good things and the bad things that come with that); 

(7) few older kids have to work, or can even find work with all the moving around that they do, 

(8) all kids have at least one fluent English speaking parent and most have two and all have predominantly native English speaking peers in school, and 

(9) most kids will eventually have at least one parent with some college.

These factors are much more important than anything having to do with the Department of Defense school's methods of instruction. One should not take seriously, given this fact, the claim that it matters much that:

Consistent with military culture, they set high standards and create a disciplined classroom culture. In 2015, the schools overhauled their curriculum using principles from the Common Core, a national program that many other districts have abandoned after criticism from both the political right and left. But the approach seems to benefit students. “Unlike the Common Core, which was carried out haphazardly across the country, the Defense Department’s plan was orchestrated with, well, military precision,” Sarah writes.

The fact that these schools are reasonably well funded doesn't hurt but probably isn't pivotal. 

Likewise, the fact that they are racially and economically integrated aren't bad, but probably isn't a key factor. And, while DOD schools are indeed racially integrated, a key to their success is actually, as noted above, that they aren't really economically integrated. They are far fewer children from poor families than public schools do, and have fewer children from very affluent families than public school do. Disproportionately few children educated in DOD schools are in "the 1%" or even the top 5% of income or wealth.

I do believe that it is likely that the good performance of DOD schools in the face of the difficulties of the COVID pandemic may have something to do with how they were run at that time, however. DOD schools improved or held steady at a time when public schools saw declining test scores due to instructional glitches caused by the pandemic. If you want to use DOD schools as a model for anything, look at that aspect of  their instructional approach.

Surveys About Know Facts

One of the interesting kinds of media story is one that looks at survey responses to questions that aren't opinions and instead are matters that can be determined to be factually true or not from sources not reasonable subject to question. The Washington Post chart above from today is an example of that kind of story.

These stories make people who know the truth feel good about themselves and feel a bit of contempt for the ignorant because mostly they are willfully ignorant about those facts. The people who are willfully ignorant about those facts, however, don't read the Washington Post or other reliable sources of information that would report that news. The fact that a survey on a question like this was done at all may also cause Republican supporters to believe that the matter asked about must be a matter of opinion, although, of course, that isn't the case any more than the law of gravity.

Extremely solid scientific evidence establishes that there is a new wave of COVID-19 dominated by a particular new strain underway in the United States. When people say that there is no new wave in answer to the survey, they don't just have a difference of opinion, they are factually wrong. I could cite to data that shows that they are factually wrong, but the existence of a new COVID wave or not this autumn and winter isn't the point of this post.

As noted in another recent post, conservative Republicans are the most likely to have factually wrong beliefs about the world. For example, more than 75% of Democrats correctly answer that there is a new COVID wave underway, while a thin majority of Republicans deny the truth.

One commentator to that post noted, this GOP base that no longer believes truthful and accurate information about reality got there, in part, because they have the losing hand in our economy and society, while the sources of truthful and accurate information about reality have prospered, so they figure that the intellectual elite is the source of their woes and doesn't trust them.

But of course, it is a vicious cycle. If you don't believe truthful and accurate information, you are more prone to make bad decisions, and that leaves you even worse off. In this case, not believing in the threat has made Republicans anti-vax.

This, in turn, will causally, and almost certainly, lead to Republicans being disproportionately likely to get more seriously sick and being disproportionately likely to die during the next COVID wave. Many tens of thousands of mostly elderly conservative Republicans will die as a result during this COVID wave.

Worse yet, this anti-vax sentiment among Republicans is not confined to the COVID vaccine anymore, even though it was once rare among Republicans except members of very extreme religious sects and hard core left wing Hippie vegan types, and wasn't nearly so partisan.

So, not only are Republicans going to suffer and die more from COVID-19 this fall and winter, they are also going to suffer more from RSV (a severe respiratory virus for which a new vaccine is being released for the first time this fall), and the flu. This will disproportionately kill many thousands of additional, mostly elderly conservative Republicans.

And, in proof that people aren't just cynical self-maximizers out for their own good, this will make lots of Democrats very sad. This is so even though this will give Democrats a slight political edge in the 2024 election on the margins, since elderly conservative Republican voters have very reliable voter turnout. The impact is spread out widely so the electoral effect will be  barely noticeable statistically, but it could tip a close political race or two, which in a closely politically divided nation that is close to 50-50 in national elections, could be a big deal.

Meanwhile, it will further aggravate the perception of the Republican base that their being persecuted (driving conspiracy theories with it). This is so even though this time, this Republican misfortune is basically their own fault.

Unfortunately, it is well known that presenting people with facts alone rarely causes people to change their factually false beliefs, if this is at odds with their overall partisan and cultural worldviews. Ultimately, if Republicans want their supporters to get sick and die less often, rather than simply pandering to them, they have to craft their messages from the inside rather than simply receiving them from non-Republican experts from outside their political and cultural circle. So far, very few Republican leaders are brave enough to attempt this feat. So, instead, they lead their supporters further along the vicious circle.

An Indirect Estimate Of COVID On The Labor Supply

A new study indirectly estimates the combined impact of long COVID, acute COVID hospitalization for more than week, and COVID deaths, on the U.S. labor supply.

COVID reduced the size of the U.S. labor force by about 500,000 people losing $9,000 of wages each, of which about $8,100 each was from absences after the first week of COVID related sick leave, an average of about 9 more weeks of lost earnings, although like any arithmetic mean, this can probably be broken into a minority who lost much more than ten weeks of work, and a majority who lost significantly less than ten weeks of work.

The abstract and citation for the study are as follows:

We show that Covid-19 illnesses and related work absences persistently reduce labor supply. Using an event study, we estimate that workers with week-long Covid-19 absences are 7 percentage points less likely to be in the labor force one year later compared to otherwise-similar workers who do not miss a week of work for health reasons.

Our estimates suggest Covid-19 absences have reduced the U.S. labor force by approximately 500,000 people (0.2 percent of adults) and imply an average labor supply loss per Covid-19 absence equivalent to $9,000 in forgone earnings, about 90 percent of which reflects losses beyond the initial absence week.

Gopi Shah Goda and Evan J. Soltas, "The impacts of Covid-19 absences on workers" 222 Journal of Public Economics 104889 (June 2023).

The Slow Death of God, Heaven, Hell, Angels, And The Devil

The percentage of Americans who believe in God, Heaven, Hell, Angels, and the Devil fell to record lows in 2023, following two decades of steady decline in the 21st century and significant declines before then.

The percentage of people who believe in God dropped by more than one-sixth of those who believed in 2001.

As usual, non-belief in these things was associated with less frequently attending church, not identifying as Christian (with Catholics less likely to believe in these things than Protestants), Democratic political party identity (and not being a Republican), higher household income, more education, younger age, and being male rather than female.

A majority of (1) less than monthly church attenders, (2) non-religious people, (3) Democrats, and (4) people 18-34 do not believe in the Devil, and less than 53% of college graduates or these demographics believe in either Hell or the Devil.  If the trend continues, majorities of all of these demographics will not believe in either Hell or the Devil by the year 2030. 

Belief in God is on track to fall below 70% by the year 2030 in the population as a whole.

Church attendance is at record lows (apart from a temporary steep decline due to the early part of the COVID pandemic when churches had to be closed in many places) too, although it is not dropping as rapidly since secularization has been greatest among people who didn't regularly attend church anyway.

A record high percentage of people (21%) now identify has having no religion.

The U.S. isn't a secular society by a long shot yet, but the trends are very promising.

How Likely Is A Catastrophe Or Extinction Level Event?

I trust superforecasters over domain experts, because a lot of evidence has shown that non-domain expert superforecasters have a better track record. 

While their assessments of risk to humanity from different sources differed, however, both indicate that AI turning on humans is a genuine concern that ranks high on the threat list.

Superforecasters predict a 9% chance of a catastrophe (defined as an event killing 10% of all humans or more in a five year period, which is about 100 times worse than COVID-19) by 2100 including a 1% chance of an extinction event (defined as an event reducing the human population to 5,000 people or less) by 2100. While lower than the percentages estimated by "experts" and the general public, these are still troublingly high.

The main differences of agreement were over the likelihood of a catastrophe by 2100 due to nuclear war (domain experts said 8%, superforecasters said 4% - about 2-1), due to a bioweapon (domain experts said 3%, superforecasters said 0.8% -about 7-1) and due to an artificial intelligence singularity in which artificial intelligences turn on humans (domain experts said 12%, superforecasters said 2.13% - about 6-1). This led to an overall risk of catastrophe by 2100 prediction of 28.95% from domain experts v. 9.05% from superforecasters - about 3-1.

They also differed in the rank order of the threats as well. Superforecasters saw a nuclear war catastrophe as twice as likely as an AI catastrophe. Domain experts saw an AI catastrophe as 50% more likely than a nuclear war catastrophe. But they both did agree that among the five possibilities presented, these two threats were the most serious. 

Domain experts saw the #3 risk as a bioweapon, while superforecasters saw a natural pathogen as more likely than a bioweapon. 

They agreed that a non-human caused catastrophe was the least likely to be caused by something not caused by humans (among the options presented) with domain experts estimated a 0.09% chance and superforecasters estimating a 0.05% chance. They both agreed that the overwhelmingly more likely threat of mass death was from human caused events.

The extinction risk (defined as the human population on Earth falling below 5,000 by 2100) was similarly split with the biggest divide again on nuclear war risk (domain experts 0.55% v. superforecasters 0.074% - about 7-1), bioweapons risk (domain experts 1% v. superforecasters 0.01% - about 100-1), and AI risk (domain experts 3% v. superforecasters 0.38% - about 9-1). This led to an overall risk of catastrophe by 2100 prediction of 6% from domain experts v. 1% from superforecasters - about 6-1.

Both superforecasters and experts, however, see an AI event as the single most likely potential cause of human extinction by the year 2100.

From here.