The reaction of the editors of the Washington Post to the recent intelligence leak was similar to my own (just later):

The trove of roughly 100 leaked U.S. classified documents, some marked “top secret,” is a sensational intelligence breach and, according to some sources, a highly damaging one. But more than the juicy tidbits contained in the material, much of which involves detailed information pertaining to the war in Ukraine, the most sensational, and damaging, aspect of the story might be the fact of the leak itself. And on that score — how and why the documents came to see the light of day — very little is known.

If most of the documents are genuine, as they appear to be — with apparent alterations intended to exaggerate Ukrainian casualty estimates and minimize Russian ones — then U.S. authorities will urgently need to trace the leak’s provenance. The Justice Department has launched an investigation intended to do just that. The Biden administration will also be faced with some damage control based on information that was contained on some leaked briefing slides suggesting Washington has been spying on its own allies, including South Korea and Ukraine itself.

However, I thought they were being bafflingly discreet in their editorial. As I noted the fact of the leaks reflect incredible sloppiness on the part of U. S. intelligence. With even barely competent handling of those materials no investigation should be necessary. They should already know the source the leaks and dealt with him or her, presumably by prosecution. If so many people had access to all of those document as to make it impossible to determine, that itself is problematic.

I’m confused. Is occupying and disrupting the seats of legislations right or wrong? Democratic or undemocratic? Son of the lawyer that I am I’m predisposed to think it’s always wrong and undemocratic. Does it depend on circumstances?

This snippet from Matt Yglesias’s Bloomberg column is thought-provoking:

I’ve spent most of the past three weeks in Chicago, and the thing I heard depressingly often from supporters of both candidates was a kind of double-negative argument: Not that their guy would be able to put his best ideas into practice, but that he wouldn’t be able to implement his worst ones. Then they made the opposite case for their opponent.

Johnson fans assured me that a relatively pro-business city council would not let him pose a new “head tax” on downtown businesses that could scare off employers and impede efforts to get companies to bring people back to work. But they warned me that a mayor squarely aligned with the police union and national conservative forces really could cover up police misconduct without improving public safety. Vallas supporters, by contrast, told me that it was absurd to imagine that the city council or the state legislature would allow conservative policy ideas to take root in Chicago. Meanwhile, they said, Johnson could easily frighten corporate leaders and induce a police pullback.

These are both pretty good arguments as far as they go — making large-scale policy change is always much harder than candidates let on — but the debate was a depressing reflection of the impoverished state of the city’s politics.

Johnson doesn’t really have much of an agenda for urban reform, just a list of things he’d like to spend money on. It’s almost as if it was copy-and-pasted from a progressive agenda developed in the pre-Covid era for a much richer coastal city.

It’s probably true that he won’t, in fact, be able to impose big new tax increases. So then what will he do? Only 20% of Chicago high school students are at grade level in reading or math proficiency. Chicago teachers walked out on the job over Covid protocols as late as January 2022, by which time schools were fully operational almost everywhere else in the US. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to further empower a union this proud of its own militance and disregard for its public responsibilities.

Contrary to what MY is suggesting it isn’t the City Council that will prove Mr. Johnson’s biggest barrier. Chicago, whether City Hall or the City Council, doesn’t have the authority to do what he proposes. He would need to roll over the City Council, Springfield, and Washington to do what he wants. I can’t see how everybody pulling in different directions can possibly be good for the country or the state let alone Chicago.

You may have forgotten about the Silicon Valley Bank failure but the Wall Street Journal hasn’t. This quote is from Aaron Klein’s WSJ op-ed:

The deposit-insurance limit didn’t cause this crisis. Silicon Valley Bank’s management caused their bank to fail. The Fed failed as the bank’s supervisor. The bank’s auditors and credit-rating agencies didn’t catch the problem. SVB’s creditors, including the businesses that banked with them, ignored warning signs such as a Journal story five months ago flagging SVB’s problems.

There will always be some banks that fail. Government’s job is to protect the vulnerable, and existing deposit-insurance limits do that. When banks fail, losses should go to those who had their money at risk. Capitalism doesn’t work if the wealthy can never lose their money.

I honestly don’t see how extending FDIC protection to all deposits will work. If you raise the FDIC fees to the level that it will produce enough revenue to cover all deposits against all risks, I suspect that will be high enough to increase the number of the “unbanked” and most of those will be individual depositors and small companies. If you just cover defaults out of what is blithely called the “general fund”, it will effectively subsidize risk-taking to an intolerable level.

It seems to me that the failure was one of oversight. Nobody, not bank employees, board members, large depositors, the FDIC, the Federal Reserve, or anyone else who actually has a fiduciary responsibility was exercising it. Tighter regulations won’t help. Who guards the guards?

Here’s an interesting passage from a Wall Street Journal piece by Bob Tita on the employment situation faced by the construction industry:

About one-fifth of construction workers are older than 55 years old and are often the most skilled workers or supervisors on a job site, the builders-and-contractors group said. As older, higher-skilled workers retire or leave for other jobs, many contractors haven’t been able to quickly replace them with younger workers with the same skill levels.

Those twenty percent are Baby Boomers. Telling kids for more than a generation that there’s something wrong with working with your hands and a bright future means getting a college education has a price.

It isn’t just the construction industry. Of the top 20 box office movie stars six are Baby Boomers and one is Silent Generation (Harrison Ford). That’s a third and several of the others are older Gen Xers.

The more I hear about the intelligence leaks on the Ukrainian battlefield situation the more sloppy and undisciplined it makes our intelligence services look. The investigation they’ve announced had best identify the leaker(s) quickly, establish definitively that they’re fakes, or our intelligence services are likely to face repercussions.

An individual working for Allied Van Lines reached out to me in reaction to one of my earlier posts. AVL’s “US Migration Report” is here. The top five states from which people are departing are:

1. Illinois
2. California
3. New Jersey
4. Michigan
5. Pennsylvania

I suspect if that were per 100K population the situation would be even more stark and look worse for Illinois. The top five cities from which people are moving are:

1. New York
2. Anaheim
3. San Diego
4. Chicago
5. Riverside

Note that three of the top five are in California. The top five destination states are:

1. Arizona
2. South Carolina
3. North Carolina
4. Tennessee
5. Texas

I’ve visited all of those states, some recently. I don’t think you could pay me to live in any of them. Here’s a passage from the linked page:

Large cities struggled to attract new residents in 2022. Besides the five listed above, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. also saw major losses. Even Phoenix, the most popular inbound city in 2021, fell to number six this year.

While housing prices obviously played a role, so did the coronavirus pandemic, which led to more Americans working from home. (Many of the current migration patterns in the US can be traced back to the pandemic.) Now that they no longer need to come into the office, people are free to live where they prefer. Whereas previously they had to stay in the city, now workers can choose to live further out, in communities with cheaper housing and better access to nature.

Before the pandemic, most Americans bought houses 15 miles from their old homes. Today, they’re buying houses 50 miles and greater from their old homes, outside major metro areas. Suburbs are cheaper, greener, and offer more living space than cities, hence it’s not surprising consumers are taking advantage of the opportunity and moving out.

I suspect a lot of the moves today are part of the reverse Great Migration.

The editors of the Chicago Tribune take a tack similar to the one I have:

Since Brandon Johnson’s victory over Paul Vallas in the mayoral runoff Tuesday, pundits of every stripe have been trumpeting their post-race take on how a little-known Cook County commissioner crafted the right ground game and campaign playbook to defeat a household name in Chicago politics and governance.

But there’s another election post-mortem that needs exploration — one that is deeply disturbing, given the weighty challenges in store for our magnificent, troubled city.

Voter turnout in the mayoral runoff was a mere 35.98%. Out of the city’s 1,587,153 registered voters, only 571,095 Chicagoans made the effort to cast ballots. That means more than a million registered voters opted not to weigh in on one of the most crucial decisions they could make as Chicagoans.

As disheartening as that is, we’re not at all surprised. Over the last 20 years, usually a little more than a third of registered voters have cast ballots in either the city’s first round or runoff elections, according to the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners. Only twice in the last two decades did turnout top 40% — during the April 2015 runoff when Rahm Emanuel beat Jesús “Chuy” García, and in first round voting in February 2011, when Emanuel was first elected.

They suggest a number of reasons for the low turnout (weather, confusion, etc.) but finally settle on apathy. I’d like to suggest a couple they didn’t mention.

One of them is that Chicago might have 1.5 million registered voters without actually having that number of voters. Those registered may have moved or even died.

But my preferred if that’s the right word for it explanation is despair. They don’t think that it mattered which candidate got elected. The same old stuff would keep going on cf. “ComEd Four” most of it bad.

Tyler Cowen makes an interesting argument that there should be a non-proliferation treaty for artificial intelligence, analogous to the one for nuclear weapons:

One approach to AI risk is to treat it like nuclear weapons and also their delivery systems. Let the United States get a lead, and then hope the U.S. can (in conjunction with others) enforce “OK enough” norms on the rest of the world.

Another approach to AI risk is to try to enforce a collusive agreement amongst all nations not to proceed with AI development, at least along certain dimensions, or perhaps altogether.

The first of these two options seems obviously better to me. But I am not here to argue that point, at least not today. Conditional on accepting the superiority of the first approach, all the arguments for AI safety are arguments for AI continuationism. (And no, this doesn’t mean building a nuclear submarine without securing the hatch doors.) At least for the United States. In fact I do support a six-month AI pause — for China. Yemen too.

With the proviso that what is being referred to right now as “artificial intelligence” is a large language model full stop, I think there’s a fundamental problem with his proposal. You can’t create a nuclear weapon in your basement. If you had the fissile material, you might but getting the fissile material requires a state or an individual or group of individuals with the power of a state. AI isn’t like that.

As I’ve already said: the jinn has been released. There’s no putting it back.