Kevin Drum 🕸

American Airlines announced yesterday that it planned to buy 20 planes from Boom Supersonic, whose Overture supersonic plane—currently in development and not scheduled to carry passengers until 2029—is alleged to fly about twice as fast as today's commercial jets. That sounds great, of course, if they can pull it off, but then there's this: Boom ...continue reading "Are supersonic flights in our future, eventually?"

Our nation's statistical agencies were busy today, so instead of writing half a dozen posts with half a dozen charts, how about if we just collect them all in one big post? Starting us off today is the Census Bureau with its advance retail sales report for July: Normally I would chastise everyone reporting about ...continue reading "Charts of the day from our nation’s statistical agencies"

This is a midnight picture taken from Les Halles of the Palais Royale with the moon rising behind it. The camera is obviously on full telephoto. I was out with the tripod that night, which led to an unfortunate incident. A pair of Italian teenagers saw that I was taking a picture of la luna ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Ben Friedman is unhappy about the Washington Post's deep dive into President Biden's influence during the runup to the Ukraine war: The Post just can't keep this kind of credibility voodoo / domino theory out of news stories.https://t.co/lFdlv17ji6 pic.twitter.com/7p8DFO5DGo — Ben Friedman (@BH_Friedman) August 16, 2022 It's worth noting first that the Post story clearly ...continue reading "We spent 20 years in Afghanistan and it’s supposed to show weakness that we finally got out?"

The Census Bureau reported today that housing starts dropped 10% in July. But that's a misleading number all by itself. Here it is broken into single-family homes vs. apartment buildings with five or more units: Apartment buildings have been on an upward trend for more than a year and are up 3% since the beginning ...continue reading "Single-family housing starts are plummeting"

Here's our usual start-of-Tuesday post. Gasoline prices were down yet again last week from $4.04 to $3.94: Adjusted for inflation, the price of gasoline is down 23% since its June peak. Hooray for President Biden! Likewise, the price of oil was down a couple of bucks too. As of today, West Texas Intermediate is at ...continue reading "Gasoline prices are down again"

One of the most fascinating parts of Mar-a-Lago-gate, or whatever we're calling it, is why Trump left the White House with stacks of classified documents. I can think of lots of reasons, but none of them really make any sense: Trump just took anything he wanted to have around, refusing to admit to himself that ...continue reading "Why did Donald Trump take all those classified documents?"

In the Financial Times this weekend, Janan Ganesh is music to my ears: This is as good a time as any to make a non-exhaustive list of things that I read in 2020 [which supposedly] had little future. Nightlife. The handshake. Buildings tall enough to need lifts. Casual sex (ha ha). Pret A Manger. The ...continue reading "COVID-19 hardly changed anything"

Scary times in Dana Point this weekend. As her father looked on frozen in terror, a little girl on a bodyboard was scrutinized by a hideous alien monster looking for a snack. In this high-resolution photo, you can even see the toxic venom dripping from its dreadful maw. You will not see this in the ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Over the weekend Vox published about the millionth article informing us that our response to monkeypox is a total clusterfuck and bears an uncanny resemblance to our infamous COVID-19 clusterfuck. Sure. Maybe. Generally speaking, though, I sometimes wonder how fast these newly-minted critics think a country should be able to roll out a massive testing ...continue reading "No, monkeypox is not a repeat of COVID-19"

China's housing bubble is catching up to them: A raft of data released Monday showed economic activity slowed across the board in July, including factory output, investment, consumer spending, youth hiring and real estate, highlighting the breadth of the economic challenge facing policy makers in a politically sensitive year for leader Xi Jinping, who is ...continue reading "Raw data: The Chinese economy"

On its first anniversary, Doyle McManus writes about our withdrawal from Afghanistan: It was Biden’s worst foreign policy failure, and prompted warnings that more catastrophes would follow: not only the tragedy of Taliban rule over 38 million Afghans, but a resurgence of international terrorism and a collapse of U.S. influence around the world. Ah yes, ...continue reading "McManus: Our withdrawal from Afghanistan wasn’t so bad after all"

I didn't know this, but apparently there's a huge divide in our nation over the question of whether to use a flat top sheet as part of our bedding: Ariel Kaye, 38, the founder and CEO of Los Angeles company Parachute, had never slept with a top sheet....Because of her business, the top-sheet discourse follows ...continue reading "So many arguments"

Very roughly, our knowledge of the search warrant debacle has proceeded like this: FBI searches Mar-a-Lago and removes about a dozen boxes of documents. Donald Trump immediately suggests the FBI planted evidence against him. Republicans almost unanimously back Trump and accuse the FBI of a partisan fishing expedition. Parts of the search warrant and the ...continue reading "The evolution of the search warrant"

Friday was an unusually clear night, so I hauled out my camera for a couple of quick photos. This is one of the sharpest pictures of the moon I've ever gotten. FYI, my track record over the past week is: overcast skies at night, except when the moon is up and shining so brightly that ...continue reading "The moon’s a balloon"

Enough of this. Just stop: The bill’s success shows how the politics of climate change have shifted profoundly since scientists began warning about global warming On Friday, a dozen years after a sprawling climate bill passed the House but failed to move ahead in the Senate, Democrats successfully muscled the United States’ most ambitious climate ...continue reading "Please stop with the deep dives on the climate bill"

Here's the rental vacancy rate since 2005 for the ten largest metro areas in the country: The average vacancy rate for the top 75 metro areas has declined from 10.1% after the end of the Great Recession to 7.1% just before the pandemic to 5.7% in 2022.

The news of the day is that, among other things, the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago turned up boxes of documents that contained "nuclear" secrets classified at stratospherically high levels. But what kind of nuclear secrets? Nobody knows, of course, but I started getting curious about what the broad possibilities were. Here's a back-of-the-envelope list: Engineering/design ...continue reading "Sure, nuclear secrets, but what kind of nuclear secrets?"

Here are Charlie and Hilbert stretched out for a snooze on a warm day. Aren't they adorable?

Somebody at the Wall Street Journal got a peek at the list of stuff the FBI took from Mar-a-Lago on Monday: The Federal Bureau of Investigation agents took around 20 boxes of items, binders of photos, a handwritten note and the executive grant of clemency for Mr. Trump’s ally Roger Stone, a list of items ...continue reading "Trump took super-duper-top-secret files from the White House"