There are websites and, apparently, maps for everything these days. You can find out what the favorite Halloween costume in your area is at a site called “FrightGeist“. I’m doing a mouseover of Chicago and, apparently, a lot of people like Stranger Things costumes here.

The Dinosaurs are apparently the favorite costumers in Washington, DC. There’s a joke in there somewhere.

Assume that the Democrats lose the House as most of the analyses suggest. Who will be blamed?

1. Putin
2. Biden
3. Trump
4. Pelosi
5. the Federal Reserve
6. COVID-19
7. the voters
8. All of the above

I’m guessing H, followed by D, followed by B.

I think that this piece by Hayley Smith at the Los Angeles Times via Yahoo News bears some consideration.

By now, it is clear that water independence is the best path forward for the 4 million residents of the city of Los Angeles, and for the county and region as a whole. Imported supplies from the State Water Project are heavily dependent on annual snowpack and rainfall in the Sierra, which are no longer a guarantee under the state’s shifting climate regime. What’s more, long-reliable federal supplies from the Colorado River are rapidly drying up, with the river’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead, nearing dangerously low levels.

In certain ways, the city is in better shape than some other major metropolitan areas because of the Los Angeles Aqueduct system, two pipelines that deliver water from the Mono Basin and Owens River hundreds of miles away. But even that supply — much of it secured by stealth and deception more than 100 years ago — is heavily reliant on Sierra snowmelt.

and

Pierce said San Fernando Valley groundwater has long been an untapped resource in Los Angeles.

“It used to be way too expensive and we had cheaper options [than remediation],” he said. “But now it’s finally here because there are no cheaper options, and because the technology has gotten there, so I think now is the time. DWP has already begun cleaning that up, and that’s going to be really useful for the city.”

He also underscored that current conservation efforts should become permanent in the face of water uncertainty. So far, Angelenos have more than risen to the challenge — achieving record-low demand in June, July and August this year, according to the DWP.

Cortez-Davis noted that the city has kept its water use at roughly 1970 levels despite growing by more than a million people since then.

I’ve been visiting Southern California fairly frequently over the last 60 years, sometimes for personal and sometimes for business reasons. I was just there again last week.

California’s population was around 10 million in 1950; by 1970 that had grown to 20 million; now it’s pushing 40 million people. The fundamental problem facing California is too many people and not enough water.

But California has multiple problems all of which need to be addressed and identifying their relative priorities is a major political problem. California’s economy is more dependent on housing than that of most state—nearly 17% of its state product according to the NAR. That’s higher than most Midwestern or Eastern states but lower than other Western states. It’s higher than Southern states other than South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia. In other words not only does California need water it needs people. See the problem?

California has an advantage that Colorado or Utah don’t: it could get more water by desalinating ocean water but that takes energy and California is already importing energy. That’s the price of its “green energy” initiatives.

While I’m completely in favor of conservation (not to mention lifestyle changes), I’m skeptical that California’s way forward is through conservation. At least not without reducing its population to something more in line with the state’s ability to produce water.

Note, too, that developing solar power is in conflict with California’s need for more land on which to build houses.

So there you have it. Water, population, housing as too-large a percentage of the state’s economy, competition with other Western states for the Colorado’s water, energy production, and land use. That’s quite a basket of problems.

Among the many food items that have shot up in price, at 32% year-on-year butter and margarine are among the biggest. You might find Greg Iacurci’s explainer at CNBC interesting:

The sharp rise is partly attributable to the same factors nudging up prices across the grocery aisle, such as elevated costs for labor and distribution, according to economists.

But it’s also due to global geopolitical events — like the war in Ukraine — as well as weather and other phenomena affecting the dairy industry and the market for vegetable oils, a key input for margarine.

“All the costs that go into producing a stick of butter, all those costs have risen,” said Matt Herrick, a spokesman for the International Dairy Foods Association, a group representing dairy producers.

It’s also a good primer on the economic concept of substitution. For making margarine canola oil, soy oil, palm oil, and…sunflower oil may be substituted for one another in producing margarine. The first margarine was made from beef tallow—practically any fat can be used. Between them Ukraine and Russia produce ten times as much sunflower oil as the next largest producer, basically more than all other countries combined.

There’s a war on which has resulted in price increases for sunflower oil. When the price of sunflower oil rises so do canola oil, soy oil, etc. And, of course, margarine is a substitute for butter. When the price of margarine increases, it raises the price of butter.

In one of his more interesting recent analyses George Friedman declaims that the world is still unipolar and the United States remains the sole global superpower:

It’s no surprise, then, that Putin sees the U.S. as a force trying to create a unipolar world, because in some notable ways, it is a unipolar world. The U.S. is the largest economy in the world, its current problems notwithstanding. It also has a sophisticated military, able to bring overwhelming force to bear, train an army at war in new weapons, and use subtle force to shape the world. American power isn’t absolute, and it can be outstripped. But it is sufficiently mobile to act sequentially when simultaneous action is impossible. Put simply, the United States is the most powerful economic and military force in the world – when it chooses to act. Inaction can be confused by men like Putin as weakness. The U.S. has learned that with its inherent power it has time to react.

The American public often sees the United States as weak and mismanaged. There’s a tendency to label Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as criminals or morons or both. The same charges were levied against Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Contempt for the commanders-in-chief is a prerequisite, to prevent tyranny, even if it has its drawbacks. The America First movement opposing U.S. participation in World War II interfered with Roosevelt’s ability to make decisions. It had a direct impact on Pearl Harbor and caused a painful initiation for the U.S. into war by the Japanese, which of course ended in catastrophe for them.

The perception of American weakness is a global one, shared even among Americans. Being underestimated has its uses, as does sporting a public that doesn’t trust its president. But only enormously powerful nations can afford the contempt. The past few months haven’t taught us that the United States is finagling a new world order. It’s taught us that Russia is weakening, that China is managing its relationship with the U.S. carefully, and that the international architecture created after World War II, though more complex, essentially remains in place. It is a unipolar world.

We’re not the only power capable of deploying force far from our shores. Countries capable of doing that include Russia, China, and France. Britain? Used to be but I’m not so sure at this point. I don’t think any other country is capable of deploying force from its shores at scale. Other than using intercontinental ballistic missiles that is. If you add that the club includes (at least) Russia, China, Britain, France, and, forsooth, North Korea.

Read the whole thing. His analysis of the differences between the Russian and Chinese postures is interesting (TL;DR is that Russia has flubbed but China hasn’t).

I’m seeing lots of breathless predictions about the outcome of the midterm elections. It’s far too early to tell. So far about 2 million ballots have been cast nationwide that we know of. See also here. In general it is illegal to count votes until election day.

That’s about 1% of registered voters and a greater percentage of likely voters.

If I had to guess I’d say that the Republicans will capture the House but the Senate is too close to call. It could go either way.

There’s no formal definition of a “wave election”. My definition would be an election in one party or the other captures all of its leans, likely, or safe districts plus all of the “too close to tell” districts and some of the other party’s leans, likely, or safe districts. That’s not how the media tend to define it. Roughly, their definition is a “big seat change”. By their definition it is likely to be a wave election but I’ll be surprised if it turns into a wave election by my standards. I’ve been surprised a lot lately.

In theory it’s not too late for a change in, say, the inflation or unemployment rates to cause a change in the trajectory election but in practice I suspect it is.

Fifty years ago there were several major grocery chains here in Chicago. Jewel-Oslo. Dominicks. Aldi. And there were dozens of small, independent stores and small chains.

Now Walmart and Target have gotten into the grocery biz. And there’s also Whole Foods. But most of the small independents have vanished.

Back in 1999 Albertson’s acquired Jewel-Osco. A dozen or so years ago Bob Mariano left Fazio Foods (Dominicks) and started Mariano’s. Then Fazio Foods shut down the Dominicks chain. It wasn’t acquired. They just shut it down. A couple of years ago the Mariano’s stores were acquired by Kroger.

The big news here is that Kroger is acquiring Albertson’s. Unless they close some stores (I assume they will) that means that they’ll have several hundred stores in the Chicago area, dwarfing everybody else. Indeed, probably more than all of the others combined.

So instead of having two mediocre major chains (Albertsons’s and Kroger), we’ll have one superchain which I assume will be worse than mediocre. I honestly don’t see how that would pass antitrust muster.

Update

Consumer Reports’s reviews of supermarket chains and, sure enough, they echoed my views of both Kroger’s and Alberton’s—they’re both mediocre. Trader Joe’s is one of their top-rated picks. Sadly, none are convenient to me but I shop at Trader Joe’s occasionally. They also seem to like Aldi’s which is convenient to me. I guess I’ll need to give Aldi’s another chance. I was unimpressed the only time I shopped in one. Besides I’m wary of multi-national chains (Aldi’s is actually ALDI’s and it’s a German chain).

I won’t bother commenting on the WSJ’s editorial on President Biden’s claims that 1) the COVID-19 pandemic is over and 2) there is a COVID-19 emergency. Alternatively, I’ll just point out that maintaining emergencies as long as possible has become a very bad habit of the federal government.

It reminds me of the late Mayor Daley’s angry response to the charge that the Chicago Police had created the disorder that made the 1968 Democratic convention one for the record books: “The Chicago Police were not there to create disorder; they were there to preserve disorder”.

The editors of Bloomberg second the observations I made in my post of a week or so ago. Here’s it’s opening:

Florida’s home-insurance business was in trouble even before Hurricane Ian tore across the state last month. Big insurers were taking their business elsewhere, smaller ones were going broke, costs due to litigation and fraud had soared, and so had premiums. The private market was pulling back as the risk of weather-related damage mounted, leaving homeowners to buy protection from the state-backed Citizens Property Insurance Corp. and the federal National Flood Insurance Program — or else to go uninsured.

This creaking system could be flattened altogether by Ian. Expect an epidemic of new litigation as insurers and policy holders fight over what destroyed their homes. (Standard policies cover damage from wind but not from flooding.) Costs to private insurers alone could reach $63 billion. This worsening mess proves, for the umpteenth time, that rebuilding homes and other structures isn’t good enough: The public and private treatment of weather-related risks needs to go back to the drawing board.

and here are a few more nice snippets:

Insurance is a crucial part of the problem. Correctly priced protection for buildings in high-risk areas would be unaffordable for many low-income households. This squeezes the private market and leads the federal government to cover flood-related risks, often charging premiums lower than they should be. Put that another way: The federal government helps families live in places that jeopardize their own (and everybody’s else’s) wealth.

There are some places in the continental United States that are more costly and risky to live in than others. Traditionally, those areas have had lower populations. For the last fifty years the populations of those areas have been rising sharply and I would claim that the subsidies being provided to live there are among the reasons why.

Here’s their conclusion:

Layer upon layer of hidden subsidy pushes the same way, separating choices and their consequences. Mortgage securitization, for instance, obscures differences in location-based risks attached to particular loans, meaning that borrowers in low-risk places end up supporting those inclined to gamble. (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, taxpayer-supported quasi-government entities, helped develop this model.) Another example: When infrastructure is rebuilt after a hurricane, the cost isn’t confined to those who like the odds of living in a high-risk area. The list is endless. Despite its narrow focus, one recent study counted numerous actual or proposed federal policies on weather-related disasters that invite added risk.

No doubt, the political obstacles to better aligning risks and incentives are daunting. A pattern invariably repeats itself: Disasters strike, public funds (understandably) flow to help the victims, and the underlying problems only get worse. Still, policy makers owe it to voters to look beyond relieving the immediate hardships and attend to fundamentals. An approach that prioritizes rebuilding and carrying on as before, rather than reducing risk and improving resilience, is a formula for continually escalating harms.

Nearly a third of the U. S. population lives in just three states. That was true 200 years ago, too, but the states with the largest populations back then had large populations before Columbus and as long as anyone can determine. The three states with the largest populations now had small populations 200 years ago. Only modern society and technology have made them livable.