SPOILER ALERT: I think that the United States and Israel are different countries. Although there is some overlap our national interests are different than Israel’s national interests and that situation will persist. We ignore that at our peril.

The editors of the Washington Post have some thoughts on keeping the United States and Israel “on the same page”:

As the war in Gaza grinds on into its sixth month, cracks are showing in the once unequivocally united front between Israel and the United States. Meantime, hunger threatens Gaza’s civilians, who, through displacement, disease and death, have already paid a horrible price.

If Israel and the United States do not resolve their differences and agree on a viable approach to Gaza’s next phase, including on how to alleviate Gazans’ suffering and to sideline Hamas, only Hamas itself might emerge as anything like a victor, after starting this war by massacring Israelis on Oct. 7. Such a result could threaten not only Israel’s stability but also the region as a whole.

I think that the editors are conflating the Biden Administration’s political problems with a program for Israel. IMO the Biden Administration is viewing the war in Gaza primarily through the prism of domestic electoral politics. The Biden campaign faces an unenviable conundrum. As they see it they need to retain the support of Jewish voters and Muslim voters and those camps are drifting apart, pulling them in opposite directions. If Michigan and Minnesota are “must win” states for President Biden, the statements of the Biden White House WRT the war in Gaza make perfect sense.

I continue to have no idea of what Israel’s actual objectives are in the war. If their intention were to eliminate Hamas while minimizing civilian casualties, I believe they’ve made some serious mistakes. If their intention were to exterminate the population of Gaza, they would certainly have herded the civilian population into a tiny corner of the territory as they’ve done but they’re proceeding with a very light hand. That sounds conflicted to me.

I also think there’s a lot of fantasizing going on from all sides. Fantasizing about an Israel that does not, in fact, exist. Fantasizing that Gazans who voted to make Hamas their government have no responsibility for the repercussions of that choice. Fantasizing about the viability of a “two-state solution”. Who would govern the Palestinian state? Hamas? Fatah?

At the Foundation for Economic Education Jon Miltimore says that the consequences of California’s new $20/hr fast food minimum wage are already being felt: it’s reducing the number of jobs paid to minimum wage employees in fast food.

Records submitted to the state show Pizza Hut and Round Table Pizza plan to sack nearly 1,300 delivery drivers. Other chains are taking similar actions, and many restaurants have stopped hiring new workers.

This is not unexpected. Critics of the law predicted it would result in less employment, and that’s exactly what has happened.

“California had 726,600 people working in fast-food and other limited-service eateries in January,” the Wall Street Journal reports, “down 1.3% from last September, when the state backed a deal for the increased wages.”

This is not the only way restaurants will reduce labor costs, of course. Benefit cuts, fewer hours, and a shift toward automation are also on the table. But the layoffs at California restaurants are what is currently generating the most attention, and for good reason.

I can only speculate what California lawmakers intended to accomplish with their fast food minimum wage. A key issue is that the margins at fast food franchises are quite tight, they are limited in their ability to raise prices, and even when they do raise prices it a) may cause a loss in business and b) the price increases will fall hardest on the poor.

However, it their intention was to swell the rolls of the unemployed, mission accomplished!

We’ve made Ars Technica! There Celia Ford reports:

Brace yourselves, Illinoisans: A truly shocking number of cicadas are about to live, make sweet love, and die in a tree near you. Two broods of periodical cicadas—Brood XIX on a 13-year cycle and Brood XIII on a 17-year cycle—are slated to emerge together in central Illinois this summer for the first time in over two centuries. To most humans, they’re an ephemeral spectacle and an ear-splitting nuisance, and then they’re gone. To many other Midwestern animals, plants, and microbes, they’re a rare feast, bringing new life to forests long past their death.

From Nebraska to New York, 15 broods of periodical cicadas grow underground, quietly sipping watery sap from tree roots. After 13 or 17 years (depending on the brood), countless inch-long adults dig themselves out in sync, crawling out of the ground en masse for a monthlong summer orgy. After mating, they lay eggs in forest trees and die, leaving their tree-born babies to fall to the forest floor and begin the cycle anew. Cicadas don’t fly far from their birthplace, so each brood occupies a distinct patch of the US. “They form a mosaic on the landscape,” says Chris Simon, senior research scientist in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut.

It isn’t just cicadas. Entomologists, too, will be descending on us, well, like a swarm of cicadas:

Entomologists around the world already have their flights booked for May. “We’re like cicada groupies,” Lill says. He promises that this once-in-a-generation spectacle will be even better than April’s total solar eclipse. During 2004’s Brood X emergence, Lill remembers walking outside at midnight. “For two seconds, I was like, ‘Wow, I didn’t know it was raining,’ because I saw water flowing down the street. As my eyes focused, I realized it was literally just thousands of cicadas crawling across the street.”

I suspect the biggest challenge for me will be keeping my dogs from chasing and eating cicadas (and vice versa). Maybe I’ll just surrender and reduce their diets commensurately.

Almost two weeks after the polls closed, the 2024 primary election which also included referenda, judges, and, importantly, the Cook County States Attorney is over. For States Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke narrowly defeated the candidate endorsed by the Cook County Democratic Party, Clayton Harris III, who has conceded. ABC 7 Chicago reports:

CHICAGO (WLS) — Eileen O’Neill Burke has defeated Clayton Harris III in the Democratic primary race for Cook County state’s attorney, the Associated Press projected on Friday afternoon.

ABC7 Political Reporter Craig Wall has learned that Harris called O’Neill Burke to concede, and his campaign manager says they will not seek a recount.

The mail-in ballot count has been closely watched by the campaigns of both candidates. But the amount of mail-in votes expected to be received before the April 2 deadline is unlikely to flip the results.

In a statement praising Harris, O’Neill Burke sought to unify Democrats, saying in part, “While we may have had our differences in this election, we share a love for our beautiful city and Cook County.’

One paragraph in States Attorney-elect O’Neil Burke’s official statement is key:

The State’s Attorney’s office has a noble mission to represent victims and uphold the law. It’s a solemn obligation that I will take on with humility and dedication.

That is a view drastically different from that espoused by the outgoing States Attorney, Kim Foxx, who has rarely seen upholding the law as a key part of the office. That was also a factor in the many resignations among her staff that have taken place in recent years.

Make no mistake, this election has been a repudiation of the Cook County Democratic Party organization. Not all of the candidates it endorsed were rejected but many of them were. The tax referendum submitted by the mayor and on behalf of which the CTU expended substantial efforts was rejected.

There’s a reason for this. Crime is up sharply all over the city but the increase has fallen most heavily on the South and West Sides. Over Easter Weekend nine people were killed and 27 injured, mostly on the South and West Sides. That’s the largest number in the last ten years despite declines in the city’s population. Although this is partially a policing problem it is not only a policing problem but a problem that goes from end to end of Cook County’s law enforcement operation from police to states attorney to judges.

In the Wall Street Journal economist David Neumark comments on the “fast food minimum wage” going into effect in California:

Advocates claim that a higher fast-food minimum wage (and higher minimum wages generally) will reduce poverty. Again, they are highly selective in citing research, relying on a single study published in 2019 by Arindrajit Dube that contradicts most other work in finding a large poverty reduction effect from higher minimum wages. But Richard Burkhauser and co-authors have evaluated this work and found that its conclusions were highly sensitive to the period studied and the factors controlled for (or not) in the analysis.

The best evidence much more decisively shows that minimum wages don’t reduce poverty. Minimum wages obviously raise wages for some workers. But most minimum-wage workers aren’t poor, and in a very large share of poor families nobody works, so the minimum wage, even under the best of circumstances, can’t help poor families much. And the job-loss effect of minimum wages only makes things worse.

California’s fast-food minimum wage will make a bad policy even worse. It will reduce employment at fast-food restaurants, while failing to lift families out of poverty. Other research shows that it will raise fast-food prices and suggests these price increases are borne disproportionately by low-income families.

It’s unclear to me how you can increase the number of unskilled workers and increase the minimum wage even for a segment of the labor force without it having perverse effects. They’re increasing the supply of labor and simultaneously pushing up the support price.

I wanted to bring this article at The Hill by Alexander J. Motyl to your attention:

Analysts of Russia differ about many things, but the most important difference concerns their interpretation of the roots of Russia’s ongoing aggression. One side argues that Russian history and political culture are to blame — or, to put it more simply, uniquely Russian characteristics are the cause of Russian aggression. The other side argues that the causes are not uniquely Russian, but typical of the behavior of certain kinds of states, regimes, societies and leaders.

Unsurprisingly, historians of Russia and Ukraine tend to fall into the first camp, while political scientists with a comparative bent tend to fall into the second camp. Equally unsurprisingly, the first camp sees no easy solutions to Russia’s current behavior, precisely because it’s just a continuation of an age-old pattern of Russian behavior inspired by the inalterable Russian soul.

Dr. Motyl goes on to explain how the first is the most likely explanation. As should be no surprise I agree with him.

The implication of this is that the emphasis on Putin is mistaken. When Putin ultimately leaves the scene his successor may be even worse. The alternatives for dealing with this are limited. The present strategy appears to be to divide Russia into warring enclaves. Another alternative, one that I would prefer, would be containment. However, unlike Dr. Motyl I think the borders of that containment would be the Polish border and the borders of the Baltic states. For that to happen those countries would need to spend a considerably larger proportion of their GDP on defense than is the case at present. I don’t see their relying on U. S. funding to support Russian containment as a winning strategy.

I want to commend to your attention this primer on container shipping and global logistics at Springer Link by professor of maritime economics Hercules E. Haralambides. It is full of worthy observations including:

It is doubtful if the economies of scale in shipping are passed on to the final consumer, as required by the block exception of consortia and alliances from the provisions of competition law in Europe.

and

Economies of scale in shipping, distribution and logistical systems have totally changed our lives to the better in the last quarter of a century. But transshipment, warehousing and distribution don’t come cheap, as our enthusiasm with logistics often assumes. It is good to know this and thus make sure that the costs (internal and external) of logistics operations are paid in full, including the costs of using public infrastructure. The latter because (to a large extent) infrastructure is no longer a public good and thus the user pays principle should apply.

One might counter-argue on this that, in this way, higher transport and logistics costs would be passed on to the final consumer, as it usually happens with privatization. This may or may not be so, depending on how competitive transport and logistics markets are.

The author asserts and provides evidence that, for example, economies of scale flatten at around 4,500 TEU capacity and that there may actually be an inverse relationship between economies of scale in liner shipping and economies of scale in port facilities.

The question that led me to this piece was who captures the economic surplus from the use of container ships? It probably isn’t consumers. Ultimately, the piece did not answer the question for me and I’m still wondering. I suspect that most of the surplus is captured by the owners of large shipping companies and their banks and companies who ship considerable tonnage of high value merchandise long distances, e.g. Apple.

While I agree that we should be modernizing our infrastructure, I think it’s completely reasonable to ask to what end? And who should pay? The primary beneficiaries should pay and that is not now the case. Federal spending will not meet that test as long as we’re borrowing 40% of the federal budget and payroll taxes (which are regressive as presently constituted) make up another 30%.

This article by Noi Mahoney at FreightWaves provides more insight into the economic impact of the collapse of the bridge in Baltimore:

The port is the deepest harbor in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, with five public and 12 private terminals. It handled over $80 billion worth of cargo in 2023. It serves more than 50 ocean carriers making nearly 1,800 annual port calls.

The port generated nearly $3.3 billion in total personal income and supports 15,330 direct jobs and 139,180 jobs connected to the port, according to state data.

and

According to recent data from Implan, the port’s 15,000-plus direct employees could lose an estimated $275 million in labor income if container operations are down for a month.

Implan is a Huntersville, North Carolina-based economic software and analysis firm.

“Before we even performed the analysis, we knew this event would have a negligible loss to the U.S. gross domestic product,” Candi Clouse, Implan’s vice president of customer success and education services, told FreightWaves. “The logistics and shipping will just shift to another U.S. port temporarily. However, the potential impact to Maryland is something to keep an eye on. Even if the port is only closed for 30 days, Maryland would be at risk for losing $550 million to its gross domestic product and $1 billion loss in total value of goods and services.”

So, although the port is characterized as one of Baltimore’s primary economic drivers (after Johns Hopkins), the collapse of the bridge, while serious to Maryland, is unlikely to have major national impact. That further raises the question of why other than politics the federal government should bear the entire cost of rebuilding the bridge as President Biden has pledged.

The lawsuits are lining up in the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. There will not only be suits brought for the damage to the bridge itself but no doubt by the people injured in the incident and the families of those killed.

The ability of claimants to recover will be limited by the Limitation of Liability Act. The act limits the liability of the owner of the vessel to the value of the vessel plus the value of its cargo as long as the owner lacked knowledge of the problem beforehand.

It seems to me that will be the critical issue. The value of the Dali, the container ship that struck the bridge, is probably in the tens of millions of dollars. It’s hard to guess at the value of the cargo.

Regardless, unless negligence known of by the owner can be proven which I doubt, the liability will be far less than the damages caused.

Update

Jeanne Eaglesham reports at the Wall Street Journal:

While the lawyers fight, most claims will likely get paid by the insurers, including money for the bridge’s reconstruction. Then they will duke it out among themselves. Other claims might take longer, including those by the families of the people killed in the crash.

Other big sources of claims include the loss of revenue for the port, for the vessels now stuck inside it, and for businesses affected by the resulting supply-chain snarl-ups.

The bridge part of this web of claims may be the simplest to resolve. The structure cost some $60 million to build in 1977, which is around $300 million today when adjusted for inflation.

The bridge is covered by the state of Maryland’s insurance. The policy, covering property damage and business interruption for bridges and tunnels, pays up to $350 million, documents show.

This incident is significant enough that it will be a serious blow to the insurance industry, particularly maritime insurance.