I haven’t mentioned it yet. Objectively the worst mayor in Chicago history is running for re-election. Her campaign ads are running and are enough to turn the stomach.

At this point the following are actively running:

Willie Wilson
State Rep. Kam Buckner
Paul Vallas
Ald. Roderick Sawyer
Mayor Lori Lightfoot
Ja’Mal Green
Ald. Sophia King
Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson
U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García

Since the latest date to file has already passed, those are our choices. To the best of my knowledge Gov. Pritzker has demurred from endorsing anyone at this point.

Another piece that disappointed me was this complaint about President Biden’s bland responses to the demonstrations in Iran and China by Michael Rubin at 1945:

The Biden administration’s response was weak. “We’ve long said everyone has the right to peacefully protest, in the United States and around the world. This includes in the PRC [the People’s Republic of China],” a National Security Council statement read.

Once again, political appointees and professional diplomats responded as if by a computer algorithm rather than with an appreciation of the ideological battle in which the United States finds itself, the outcome of which will shape the fate of the rules-based order over the remainder of the century. The tepidness of the statement undermines any meaning it might have.

The reason for the Biden administration’s weak response is no mystery. After all, many of the president’s top aides also occupied senior national security or diplomatic roles during the Obama administration when, in 2009, Iran also erupted into protest. At that time, protestors chanted “Obama, Obama, ya ba o na ya ba ma” [“Obama, Obama, you’re either with us or against us”] as the White House remained largely silent.

Here’s the meat of his complaint:

The reason for the Biden administration’s weak response is no mystery. After all, many of the president’s top aides also occupied senior national security or diplomatic roles during the Obama administration when, in 2009, Iran also erupted into protest. At that time, protestors chanted “Obama, Obama, ya ba o na ya ba ma” [“Obama, Obama, you’re either with us or against us”] as the White House remained largely silent.

President Barack Obama wanted a restrained reaction for three reasons. First, he argued, there was little the United States could do. Many in his inner circle further believed that to speak out in favor of the protestors might delegitimize them by playing into Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s accusation that they were foreign agents. Finally, Obama had secretly reached out to Khamenei and did not want the Iranian supreme leader to use statements against his regime as an excuse not to negotiate.

In each case, Obama was wrong. Unfortunately, Obama alumni in the Biden administration today repeat the same mistakes.

I think he dismisses the thought that rousing U. S. support for the demonstrations might actually be counter-productive too quickly:

This brings us to the idea that offering moral support to protestors delegitimizes them. This is simply wrong. Protestors around the globe carry signs in English because they want to communicate with and receive the acknowledgment of the outside world. At the same time, dictators try to tar them with the accusation of foreign support regardless about whether they receive it or not. To deny them support is to play into the dictatorships’ hands by helping Beijing and Tehran isolate the protests.

Another possibility is that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible “dialects” of Chinese and English functions as a lingua franca even within China. I use the quotation marks because IMO there is a Chinese language family just as there is an Arabic language family, conventionally referred to as a single language because there is or was a single literary language.

What I found disappointing about the piece is that Mr. Rubin never actually succeeds in providing a credible explanation for why the Biden Administration is maintaining such a low profile with respect to the demonstrations. Clearly, the administration has decided that there is little to gain (or much to lose) by making stronger statements. What?

There is one thing that many of the pieces I read this morning have in common: I found all of them disappointing. For example, this piece by Roy Disney’s granddaughter, Abigail, lamenting that “125 billionaires” could put an end to anthropogenic climate change by changing the policies of the companies in which they have major stakes.

What I found disappointing was how abstract it was. The bottom line was that they should behave better even if it cost them money. Maybe. Maybe not.

I did a little checking (and I mean a very little) and found that of them have carbon footprints a hundred times mine. Now that’s a concrete way they could reduce carbon emissions: stop doing things that emit so much carbon. The preferred strategy appears to be buying carbon offsets. IMO those are almost entirely cons.

Grant me fiscal prudence but not yet.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal declaim:

The GOP campaigned on a return to regular fiscal order, and why not start now? Democrats can threaten a government shutdown, but they’d own it as the party in control. If Republicans aren’t going to use their power to enforce some fiscal discipline, they might as well stay in the minority.

The risk here is that retiring GOP appropriators like Alabama Senator Richard Shelby see the omnibus as a last chance to pave his Birmingham streets in earmark gold. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—a spender at heart—emerged from a Tuesday meeting with Washington leaders to declare “widespread agreement” on the need for an omnibus. Cue the Democratic high-fives.

Augustine of Hippo famously wrote: “God grant me chastity and continence but not yet”, explaining his profligate youth. It’s always springtime in the Congress. I don’t expect anybody to show fiscal prudence.

Of all of the reforms that are urgently needed high on the list is a “single-subject amendment” which would require federal legislation be limited to a single subject. Omnibus spending bills are an abomination but Congress finds them an irresistible abomination. It would have to be shoved down Congress’s throat. Any Congress.

Matt Taibbi gets it. What do you call people who don’t believe anything unless it’s published in the New York Times? Democrats. What do you call people who believe everything broadcast on Fox News? Republicans.

We don’t do that now. The story is no longer the boss. Instead, we sell narrative, as part of a new business model that’s increasingly indifferent to fact.

When there were only a few channels, the commercial strategy of news companies was to aim for the whole audience. A TV news broadcast aired at dinnertime and was designed to be consumed by the whole family, from your crazy right-wing uncle to the sulking lefty teenager. This system had its flaws. However, making an effort to talk to everybody had benefits, too. For one, it inspired more trust. Gallup polls twice showed Walter Cronkite of CBS to be the most trusted person in America. That would never happen today.

After the Internet arrived and flooded the market with new voices, some outlets found that instead of going after the whole audience, it made more financial sense to pick one demographic and dominate it. How? That’s easy. You feed the audience news you know they will like. When Fox had success targeting suburban and rural, mostly white, mostly older conservatives – the late Fox News chief Roger Ailes infamously described his audience as “55 to dead” – other companies soon followed suit.

Now everyone does it. Whether it’s Fox, or MSNBC, or CNN, or the Washington Post, nearly all Western media outlets are in the demographic-hunting business. This may be less true in Canada, where there’s a stronger public media tradition, but in the U.S., it’s standard.

The problem with that, of course, is that the truth isn’t necessarily what you like or what your preferred outlets publish. And the truth is important. Policies founded on false assumptions and phony facts can’t work.
Eternal verities remain. People engage in purposeful action. They respond to incentives. They don’t always do so instantaneously and their responses sometimes are not effective but the incentives do matter. People have different preferences and act to further those preferences in different ways.

I thought this post at Heisenberg Report about the shakeup in the cryptocurrency industry raised some interesting point.

In the wake of the FTX fiasco, much of the breathless crypto coverage emanating from the financial media (mainstream, alternative and otherwise), seems to intentionally avoid addressing the elephant in the room. If that’s the case, it’s understandable. Because to address it would be to concede that nearly everyone — from large media conglomerates to the most respected venture capitalists on the planet to storied hedge funds — was duped into believing that all it took to make the private money business viable was a single innovation.

That’s plainly absurd. For one thing, some experts offer trenchant arguments against the idea that blockchain constitutes a “technology” at all, if technology is supposed to be synonymous with true innovation. Even if it is an innovation, many skeptics argue it’s not an especially useful one. In the interest of brevity, I won’t walk through those arguments, but you can certainly do so yourself if you have Google and half an hour to spare.

Beyond that, though, the notion of private money at scale, and, more to the point, the notion of private money at scale as an investable proposition, is stupid. Not “misguided,” not “misplaced” and not any other more generous adjective either. Just plain old stupid.

Bitcoin as a digital form of “outside money” (so, like gold, only not tangible) makes some measure of sense. The rest of it not so much.

Here’s my question. Let’s assume that what’s going on right now is an actual shakeup in the sector, more than just a blip on cryptocurrency’s blast into the stratosphere. Does it have broader implications?

To some degree that depends on the degree to which cryptocurrency has been attracting participants (I hesitate to say “investors”) who wouldn’t have participated in anything else. If all of the participants were uniquely attracted to cryptocurrency then, no, the shakeup wouldn’t have ramifications beyond the sector itself.

However, if cryptocurrency managed to attract investment that would otherwise have gone somewhere else, a general loss of confidence in cryptocurrencies might will have ramifications throughout the technology sector. Furthermore, the number of developers working actively on cryptocurrency projects is estimated as something between 8,000 and 11,000. That’s not a large number in the total scheme of things but those developers need to be considered another cadre of developers out of work along with the layoffs announced at Amazon, Meta, Twitter, Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft, etc.

I found this research from Duke University, reported on by Dan Vahaba at Duke Today interesting:

While being or becoming overweight during pregnancy can have potential health risks for moms, there are also hints that it may tip the scales for their kids to develop psychiatric disorders like autism or depression, which often affects one gender more than the other.

What hasn’t been understood however is how the accumulation of fat tissue in mom might signal through the placenta in a sex-specific way and rearrange the developing offspring’s brain.

To fill this gap, Duke postdoctoral researcher Alexis Ceasrine, Ph.D., and her team in the lab of Duke psychology & neuroscience professor Staci Bilbo, Ph.D., studied pregnant mice on a high-fat diet. In findings appearing November 28 in the journal Nature Metabolism, they found that mom’s high-fat diet triggers immune cells in the developing brains of male but not female mouse pups to overconsume the mood-influencing brain chemical serotonin, leading to depressed-like behavior.

In mice the male offspring of mothers on a high-fat diet experienced a depression-like condition while the female offspring were “less social”. The finding has been confirmed in human, at least after a fashion:

To see whether this may be true of humans as well, Ceasrine teamed up with Susan Murphy, Ph.D., a Duke School of Medicine associate professor in obstetrics and gynecology, who provided placental and fetal brain tissue from a previous study. Just as the researchers observed in mice, they found that the more fat measured in human placental tissue, the less serotonin was detected in the brains of males but not females.

An article in Financial Times by Simon Kuper reveals the conundrum in which the Netherlands finds itself. For the Netherlands, probably the most country most keyed into a globalized economy, to keep growing it needs more workers and the country has nowhere to put more people.

With hindsight, the Netherlands was too well-suited to the era of globalisation. The trading nation with Europe’s biggest port experienced 26 years of unbroken economic growth until 2008, then a world record. Now it tops ETH Zurich’s KOF Globalisation Index as the world’s most globalised country.

And so its population mushroomed. When the counter hit 14 million in 1979, Queen Juliana said, “Our country is full.” In 2010, Statistics Netherlands said the population would probably never reach 18 million. Today it’s 17.7 million and rising. The country has 507 people per sq km, nearly five times the EU’s average. Worse, the quantity of liveable land will shrink due to a paradoxical mix of rising seas and droughts damaging the foundations of houses.

But the Dutch economy’s demand for new workers seems insatiable. Eighty-four per cent of employers report labour shortages, one government study found. Recruitment signs are almost standard in shop windows. Employers even offer new recruits free holidays. 

The mode age in the Netherlands appears to be around 50. With 60% of the labor force working part-time or in temp positions it seems pretty clear that its government policies have had some perverse consequences.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency has released its report of the year-on-year changes in housing prices for the third quarter of 2022. Here are some snippets:

House prices rose in all 50 states and the District of Columbia between the third​ quarters of 2021 and 2022. The five areas with the highest annual appreciation were: 1) Florida 22.7 percent; 2) South Carolina 18.4 percent; 3) Tennessee 17.9 percent; 4) North Carolina 17.4 percent; and 5) Georgia 16.7 percent. The areas showing the lowest annual appreciation were: 1) District of Columbia 1.8 percent; 2) Oregon 7.6 percent; 3) California 7.6 percent; 4) Minnesota 7.7 percent and 5) Louisiana 8.3 percent.

and

House prices rose in all but two of the top 100 largest metropolitan areas over the last four quarters. Annual price increase was greatest in North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton, FL, where price increased by 29.2 percent. Two metropolitan areas that experienced price declines are San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City, CA and Oakland-Berkeley-Livermore, CA, where prices decreased by 4.3 percent and 0.6 percent, respectively.

Since the annualized inflation rate is 8.5%, that means that the five areas showing the lowest appreciation are all showing real price declines. Note, too, that this report does not reflect the impact of major technology sector layoffs. Those will certainly influence The San Francisco-San-Mateo-Redwood City and Oakland-Berkeley-Livermore metropolitan areas. Translation: expect more declines to come. Perversely, since in California changes in real estate tax rates don’t take effect until a house changes hands, not only may that make houses harder to sell it will increase tax revenues on those that do sell.