While I’m asking questions, does anybody remember the war in Ukraine? We haven’t been reading/hearing nearly as much about it lately as we did a couple of weeks or months ago.

Why aren’t we hearing so much about the war in Ukraine?

1. We’re hearing just as much; you just aren’t paying attention.
2. The news from Ukraine is so good, the western media aren’t reporting it.
3. It’s being crowded out by domestic news.
4. There is nothing new to report.
5. The news from Ukraine is so bad, the western media aren’t reporting it.
6. There’s a war in Ukraine?

Here’s what isn’t the answer: B.

I have a question. Is it possible that taking Adderall is a factor in many of the ills reportedly afflicting our young people? E.g. heart problems, anger, lower sex drive, various mental health problems.

I haven’t been able to work this into a post and I’m running out of time so I’m just dumping it here. One of the things that has struck me is that both of our mayoral candidates are operating under weak premises. I’ll start with Paul Vallas.

Vallas assumes that if you add more police officers the city will be more secure and have less crime. The evidence for that is weak. If it were true, Chicago would be the most secure major metropolitan area with the least crime: it has the most police officers per 100K population of any major metropolitan area. Whether you think crime is increasing, decreasing, or staying the same the relationship between police officers per capita and crime is weak. I’ve mentioned it before but there was a sort of controlled experiment on that some years back in Omaha IIRC. They found it didn’t make much difference.

He hasn’t mentioned it but it doesn’t make much difference what law enforcement officers are paid, either. Chicago is high on that list as well.

Brandon Johnson is basing his campaign on “addressing the root causes of crime” without being too explicit about what they are. Based on his public statements it’s not unreasonable to infer that he thinks that those perpetrating crimes are victims. He wants to spend more on education and on social workers.

The evidence either of those measures is effective is pretty weak as well. For one thing spending more on education doesn’t do a darned thing when kids won’t attend school and that remains a problem. The truancy rate in Chicago schools is stubbornly high.

I don’t have any data on the effectiveness of social workers in reducing crime but, as we say in my home state, you’ll have to show me. I just don’t believe it.

As I’ve said before I think that the factor that dare no speak its name is social dysfunction in the black community. While I also believe that is a leftover from slavery, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, and the loss of manufacturing jobs Eastern and Midwestern American metro areas, that doesn’t excuse it now. Slavery was banned more than 150 years ago; Jim Crow is long gone; the Great Migration ended 70 years ago. Blaming households headed by (mostly) single women and out-of-wedlock births on racial bias is a stretch.

What can be done? Again, as I’ve said before City Hall, the City Council, the Chicago Police, the States Attorney, and judges all need to be rowing in the same direction and that’s against crime. Punishment for crime should be swift and sure. If trials took place on a timely basis it would weaken the arguments against cash bail as well. The bail system is downstream from a dysfunctional system of law enforcement.

I don’t agree with everything in Jason L. Riley’s analysis of the Chicago mayoral run-off in his Wall Street Journal column but I did want to share this:

The good news for voters in the nation’s third-largest city is that they nevertheless have two clear choices on the ballot. Party affiliation is about the only thing the candidates have in common. Mr. Vallas is a white moderate backed by the police union. Mr. Johnson is a black progressive backed by the teachers union. Mr. Vallas has run hard on restoring public safety in a city that saw crime continue to rise in 2022 and that has long been the poster child for big-city mayhem. He also wants to expand school choice for low-income families. Mr. Johnson opposes the creation of additional charter schools and has called for cutting the police budget.

Theoretically, Mr. Vallas ought to win the race handily. But we elect candidates for office based not on theories but on how many votes they can muster. And in Chicago, where white (33%), black (29%) and Hispanic (29%) representation in the population is remarkably balanced, politics are about as tribal as they come.

Paul Vallas being Greek-American, I suppose we should expect John Kass to prefer him over Brandon Johnson but his remarks are harsh even for him:

Chicago is in a tight mayoral election centering on uncontrolled violent street crime and progressive Democratic Party resistance to upholding the law, I half expected raw and ugly race rhetoric from the candidate underperforming and under pressure.

And because this is Chicago, the city of tribes and unforgiven sins, the race rhetoric spewed out. But it didn’t come from some angry pink fellow.

It did not come from his opponent in the race for mayor, Paul Vallas.

Instead it came from one of the historical victims of ugly talk and ugly deeds. It came out in a torrent from the black leftist candidate for mayor Brandon Johnson, on the final days of the campaign, at a campaign debate.

“This is about Black labor versus white wealth. That’s what this battle is about,” Johnson said, explaining the mayoral campaign in the starkest and most limited terms.

It was a clear appeal to race, but the Chicago media hardly mentioned it.

Few if any of the political reporters bothered to note that the slogan Black Labor White Wealth, came from a Marxist book. It was to be studiously avoided. Why? Because there is nothing more malleable, more easily biddable than a fragile white reporter desperate to avoid the charge of racism.

Speaking of reports not getting much coverage, this seems to have disappeared with hardly a trace:

Chicago mayoral candidate Brandon Johnson owes more than $4,000 in unpaid bills and fines to the city.

Johnson owes $3,357 in water and sewer bills as well as $1,044 in unpaid traffic tickets dating back to 2014 and 2015.

He made a $91.08 payment to his water and sewer charges on Feb. 13, his first payment since June 22, 2022.

Johnson’s campaign released a statement to Fox 32 Chicago.

“Like many working and middle class Chicagoans, the Johnson household has received various fines and fees from the City of Chicago over the years. These fines and fees are on a previously established payment plan and are on schedule to be fully resolved before Brandon Johnson takes office as our next mayor,” Johnson’s campaign said.

If Johnson were to win the April 4 election, state law prohibits him from taking office until his debts are paid.

Johnson currently makes $93,500 as Cook County Commissioner and an additional $85,906 as legislative coordinator for the Chicago Teachers Union.

I found that report interesting in what it revealed about Mr. Johnson’s view of government.

The election is Tuesday and we are coming down to the wire. This election will largely turn on which candidate brings out his voters. I honestly have no idea who that will be. Vallas is favored to win the Northwest Side of Chicago which is where I live. Johnson is expected to carry the greater number with black voters on the South Side. The election may depend on Hispanic voters and their priorities.

Besides the impending arraignment of Donald Trump, I’m hearing a lot of fulminating about artificial intelligence including the letter, signed by such luminaries as Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and many others asking for a pause in training artificial intelligence systems more powerful than ChatGPT-4. Don’t they realize that it’s too late?

Knowledge is international now. There are excellent, capable technologists in many, many other countries, some of them not particularly friendly to the United States. Nothing we do here will have the slightest impact outside of the United States and, in all likelihood, not on all developers within the United States. Not only should we not have the hiatus they’re asking for, from a strategic standpoint we need it to continue.

One more thing that I don’t see being emphasized enough. There’s no guarantee that the guidance being given by these language engines is correct. I’ve been playing around with them and they are quite frequently, verifiably incorrect.

So, yes, ChatGPT-4 is amusing, interesting, and useful. Full steam ahead, O Brave New World!

For the last 30 years every administration, Republican or Democratic, that has gained control of the White House has emphasized the importance of a college education for a happy, secure future. I have been critical of that for several reasons, the most important being that only about 50% of the population can actually benefit from a college education. In the country with the most highly educated population in the world (Canada) about 56% of the people between 25 and 64 have completed some form of tertiary education.

But the worm may be turning. According to a survey taken by the Wall Street Journal and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC, an old client of mine) and reported on in the WSJ by Douglas Belkin, American popular opinion on college education has changed:

A majority of Americans don’t think a college degree is worth the cost, according to a new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll, a new low in confidence in what has long been a hallmark of the American dream.

The survey, conducted with NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization, found that 56% of Americans think earning a four-year degree is a bad bet compared with 42% who retain faith in the credential.

Skepticism is strongest among people ages 18-34, and people with college degrees are among those whose opinions have soured the most, portending a profound shift for higher education in the years ahead.

In 2013, 53% of Americans were bullish on college, and 40% weren’t. In 2017, 49% of Americans thought a four-year degree would lead to good jobs and higher earnings, compared with 47% who didn’t.

Why the change? Some of it is basic economics. The easy availability of college loans has increased the willingness to pay. For any good or service when you increase the willingness to pay while not correspondingly increasing the supply, all else equal the price goes up. As the price of a college education has risen faster than wages, the more difficult it becomes to find a job that college education will get for you that allows you to maintain a middle class lifestyle and pay off your loans. Importing large numbers of college grads from other countries or offshoring the work (particularly when they’re willing to work for less) hasn’t helped either. I would speculate that the United States has more young people saddled with educational loans who haven’t completed a tertiary educational program than any other country in the world.

But if not college, what? I think several things need to happen. First, local, state, and federal politicians need to change their rhetoric. College should be de-emphasized. College prep program in every high school should be phased out in favor of manual arts programs. Emphasis in state and federal policies should be on apprenticeship programs rather than college educations. And, as with so much else, we need to control our immigration and encourage our economy to shift away from low-skill minimum wage work to more skilled but nonetheless manual work. We need to give more respect to people who work with their hands.

I have little confidence that any of those things will happen so I expect the dissatisfaction to grow.

The journal Nature Human Behavior (affiliated with Nature) has published a study by economics doctoral student Floyd Jiuyun Zhang analyzing the effects of political statements and endorsements by scientific publications on opinion. The TL;DR version of the article is the endorsements didn’t do much to change people’s opinions about issues or politicians but they were effective in changing people’s opinions about scientists.

There’s a proverb that covers this pretty well: “Cobbler, keep to thy last”.

The slug in the editors of the Wall Street Journal’s reaction piece to the indictment of Donald Trump about which I posted yesterday is “The first indictment of a former U.S. President is a sad day for America.”. We’ve had a lot of sad days lately. I thought that Donald Trump’s becoming the Republican candidate for president in 2016 was a sad day for America since the very qualities his supporters liked in him would make it difficult for him to be a good president and, indeed, made this day inevitable. I agree with the editors’ conclusion:

Once a former President and current candidate is indicted, some local Republican prosecutor will look to make a name for himself by doing the same to a Democrat.

I would put it more bluntly. I think we should anticipate that every living former president with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter will indicted by somebody somewhere for something.

The news that President Donald Trump has been indicted by a Manhattan grand jury is practically everywhere. No details of the charges have been made public as of this writing.

Remember the old wisecrack? A good prosecutor can convince a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich if that’s what he wanted them to do. If no felony charges have been filed or if the case isn’t ironclad, I’m afraid that things will get very, very bad. They may get bad anyway.