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.

A long-term reader and commenter has notified me that Pat Lang has died. Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon him.

Pat was an acquaintance. I found him to be a courteous and delightful gentleman. He was a career soldier, stationed for a considerable part of his career in the Middle East, the first individual to teach Arabic at West Point, and a blogger. The obit on his blog is here. His blog will continue.

Pat was a paleocon. There are fewer and fewer of those left. As such he wasn’t very happy about Trump or what was happening in the Republican Party.

You might find this report by Sibi Arasu of the Associated Press interesting:

The coal fleet grew by 19.5 gigawatts last year, enough to light up around 15 million homes, with nearly all newly commissioned coal projects in China, according to a report by Global Energy Monitor, an organization that tracks a variety of energy projects around the globe.

That 1% increase comes at a time when the world needs to retire its coal fleet four and a half times faster to meet climate goals, the report said. In 2021, countries around the world promised to phase down the use of coal to help achieve the goal to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit).

“The more new coal projects come online, the steeper the cuts and commitments need to be in the future,” said Flora Champenois, the report’s lead author and the project manager for GEM’s Global Coal Plant Tracker.

China added 26.8 gigawatts and India added about 3.5 gigawatts of new coal power capacity to their electricity grids. China also gave clearance for nearly 100 gigawatts of new coal power projects with construction likely to begin this year

As I have been saying for the last 20 years, any effective effort to reduce carbon emissions must include China. Now add India to that prescription as well. Furthermore, buying solar panels and batteries manufactured using electricity generated by burning coal is counter-productive.

I wanted to make one last point today before turning to other subjects. The turnout in the Chicago mayoral runoff was about a third of the electorate. Of those 51% voted for Johnson and the remaining 49% for Vallas. Said another way about a sixth of Chicago voters have elected the next mayor. I believe the correct interpretation of this is that progressives were more energized than other Chicago voters but only just. There wasn’t a lot of excitement about either candidate.

Johnson won by doing exactly what I said he would: convincing blacks and Lakeside liberals to vote for him.

Here are some metrics we might consider in evaluating what’s going on: homicides, carjackings, one-way truck rental. Those are things less likely to be ignored or falsified. What are some other metrics that might be used?