Here in California’s 45th congressional district, the heart of Reagan country and home of The OC, congresswoman Mimi Walters went all-in on Donald Trump. You can hardly blame her for that, I suppose, but today at 5 pm, on the seventh day of counting votes, it officially backfired:
Good. I have nothing against Walters aside from the usual (Republican, conservative, etc.), but this is precisely what needed to happen. One way or another, Republicans have to learn that this is the price they pay for allying themselves with a vicious bigot like Donald Trump. As votes continue to trickle in and more and more Republicans go down to defeat, they might finally be getting the message.
By the time this is over, Orange County will most likely be 100 percent blue. Nice work, Donald.
I’m willing to put my money on the table and say that driverless cars are finally here for real:
The head of Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo unit said it plans to launch its first commercial self-driving car service in the next two months…. Waymo’s John Krafcik said the new service will charge individual passengers for rides as well as businesses…. Last year, Waymo began testing its self-driving vans with nonemployees in Chandler, Ariz., through its so-called Early Rider program to learn how potential customers might use and interact with the service.
….Mr. Krafcik also highlighted the progress of Waymo’s commercial trucking business, which has begun delivering freight in Atlanta. In commercial trucking, “you could anticipate a material contribution to the world from Waymo over the next couple years,” he said.
Forget Tesla. Forget Uber. Forget Ford and GM and Toyota. All of those guys will have driverless cars eventually, but they’re far too prone to talk too big and deliver too little.
Waymo is just the opposite. They’re the company that’s been working on driverless technology the longest. They’ve driven by far the most miles. They have the most sophisticated modeling and test software. And they don’t make endless promises they can’t keep. They speak softly but carry a big stick. If they say they’re opening a real live driverless car service by the end of the year, then they probably are. And it will probably work.
This doesn’t mean they won’t have problems. Of course they will. This is massively complex technology. Nor does it mean driverless cars will be on showroom floors next year. But Waymo has always been the bellwether. If their service goes well—and I’ll bet it will—it means that driverless cars are no longer vaporware. We’re probably no more than two or three years away from being able to own one ourselves if we want to.
POSTSCRIPT: To be more precise, I’m pulling in my prediction of when driverless cars will be available for purchase or lease by ordinary customers from 2025 to 2022.
During the summer and fall, the ski slopes at Snow Summit are repurposed as bike runs. I guess I didn’t really know this was a thing until our visit last month, but it seems to be pretty popular. In fact, somebody I was talking to said the bikes run upwards of $3,000 or so. Is that really true?
In any case, here’s a biker on a downhill run coming around a corner toward me.
Miami-born challenger Fabiano Caruana during a press conference after the first round of the World Chess Championship in London.Fredrik Varfjell/Bildbyran via ZUMA
The World Chess Championship is currently being played in London, pitting Magnus Carlsen, the three-time defending champion from Norway, against Fabiano Caruana, the challenger from the United States. The fourth game ended in a draw a couple of hours ago, just like all the games so far. The tournament score is 2-2.
Right now chess has a lot going for it. Carlsen is an affable, young, insanely talented prodigy. Caruana is even younger and is the first American to play for the world championship since you-know-who. But that doesn’t seem to be doing it any good.
Google Trends is hardly the final statement on what people do and don’t care about, but it sure seems to suggest that chess is becoming even less popular than it used to be:
Worldwide, interest in chess is perhaps eroding even more quickly than it is in the United States. Even in Norway interest has slackened since Carlsen won his first world championship in 2013. In Russia, interest has cratered since the era of endless Russian dominance ended about a decade ago. The only country where it seems to be on an upswing is China, for reasons that escape me.
Anyway, the fifth game will be played Thursday at 10 am Eastern if you want to watch over the internet. Caruana will be playing white.
You all know that the ballooning cost of the LA-San Francisco bullet train is one of my hobbyhorses. Well, it’s ballooned again:
The cost of constructing the Southern California section of the state bullet train could jump by as much as $11 billion over estimates released earlier this year…Over the three sections, the potential costs amount to a 50% surge from the business plan estimates released in February….The project has undergone a series of cost increases over the last decade from an original estimate of $33 billion to the current $77 billion.
….Civil engineering experts said they were astounded by the differences in the estimates, which they said they had never seen in other projects. “I can’t understand why they have cost estimates that are so different,” said William Ibbs, a UC Berkeley civil engineering professor who has consulted on high speed rail projects around the world….James Moore, director of USC’s transportation engineering program, was similarly skeptical about the rationale for the differences. “We are talking about the same project,” Moore said. “The differences should not be that large. It is an attempt to normalize the numbers and get them into the public discourse.”
That’s an $11 billion increase since February. The rail authority folks have a bunch of excuses for this. My favorite is that this isn’t so much a higher estimate as merely a different estimate.
I’m curious. Have any bullet train supporters dropped their support as costs have skyrocketed over the past few years? Nobody comes to mind. I guess they just don’t care. The train is a good idea, full stop, no matter how much it costs. And I hardly need to tell you that $77 billion is hardly the last overrun we’ll get. After all, we’ve barely even begun building the thing.
We were making slow but steady progress all the way through the Obama administration. Then in 2015 Donald Trump rode down the escalator in Trump Tower and declared that Mexicans were all a bunch of rapists. Hate crimes spiked up after that, and then spiked up again in 2016 and 2017.
Correlation is not causation. But in this case, I’m pretty sure it is. Anyone care to make a case for some other explanation?
Jesse Singal pointed me today to a new study of children who participated in the Tennessee STAR class-size experiment back in the 80s and 90s. I thought that STAR had already been mined for just about everything it could be, but it turns out a team of researchers has come up with something new. The STAR program was originally designed to test the effect of small class sizes, but the random assignment of children to classrooms meant they were also randomly assigned to different teachers. Does that make a difference? In particular, if black kids are assigned to black teachers, do they do better later in life? The researchers say yes:
Leveraging random student-teacher pairings in the Tennessee STAR class-size experiment, we find that black students randomly assigned to a black teacher in grades K-3 are […] 4 percentage points (13%) more likely to enroll in college than their peers in the same school who are not assigned a black teacher.
That sounds modest but promising. Unfortunately, Table 5 in the report tells us about more than just enrollment:
This is not so great. First, the effect was limited almost entirely to enrollment in community college. Second, although black children with black teachers were, overall, 4 percent more likely to enroll in college, they were only 2.7 percent more likely to stay past their first year—and this result was only marginally significant. Third, they were only 0.5 percent more likely to earn a degree. The authors confirm this in the text—”We find a near-zero, statistically insignificant effect on degree receipt”—but also offer up some gobbledegook to suggest this is no big deal: “However, given the very low rates of degree completion among non-matched students (8.5%), we cannot rule out degree receipt effects on the order of 1 or 2 percentage points. Effects in that range would suggest the marginal matched student induced into college persisting to degree receipt at around the same rate as the inframarginal, non-matched student.”
If I’m reading that correctly, it means the effect on earning a degree is about zero no matter what. That’s too bad, since this is really the only thing that matters. In fact, enrolling in college and not getting a degree probably does the kids no good and just leaves them with a bunch of student loans to pay off.
The authors spend a lot of time offering possible explanations for why having a same-race teacher in primary grades might help black kids, but I’m not sure this is worth speculating about unless there’s a larger, more convincing impact in the first place. For now, it looks to me like same-race teachers in primary grades have, at most, a tiny impact on children later in life, and most likely no real impact at all.
Let me get this straight. On Saturday Donald Trump skipped a memorial service for Americans killed during World War I at Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France. Today he’s not bothering to attend the Veterans Day wreath-laying at Arlington Cemetery even though he’s in Washington. And later this week he’ll be skipping both the ASEAN and APEC summits in Asia.
Trump won’t be leaving the White House today, per press office. No visit to Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day.
So what is he doing today? Stewing over his mammoth loss in the midterm elections? Trying to figure out a way to get partisan hack Matt Whitaker confirmed as attorney general? Trying to remember what’s actually in his income tax returns now that there’s a chance they might become public? Throwing temper tantrums over the possibility that Robert Mueller plans to indict Donald Trump Jr.? Watching CNN and shaking his fist a lot? Working up the nerve to fire Ryan Zinke? Thinking up new ways to insult the memory of Californians who died last week in the state’s worst wildfires in recent memory? Or maybe just nursing a cold?
Who knows? But whatever it is, it sure doesn’t look like anything presidential is on the horizon.
UPDATE: I misinterpreted the tweet above, thinking that it meant there was an official wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington Cemetery today and that Trump was skipping it. There isn’t. All it means is that Trump did nothing public either yesterday or today in memory of Veterans Day. Apologies.
The satellite images suggest that the North has been engaged in a great deception: It has offered to dismantle a major launching site — a step it began, then halted — while continuing to make improvements at more than a dozen others that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads. The existence of the ballistic missile bases, which North Korea has never acknowledged, contradicts Mr. Trump’s assertion that his landmark diplomacy is leading to the elimination of a nuclear and missile program that the North had warned could devastate the United States.
….“We are in no rush,” Mr. Trump said of talks with the North at a news conference on Wednesday, after Republicans lost control of the House. “The sanctions are on. The missiles have stopped. The rockets have stopped. The hostages are home.”…But American intelligence officials say that the North’s production of nuclear material, of new nuclear weapons and of missiles that can be placed on mobile launchers and hidden in mountains at the secret bases has continued. And the sanctions are collapsing, in part because North Korea has leveraged its new, softer-sounding relationship with Washington, and its stated commitment to eventual denuclearization, to resume trade with Russia and China.
Moreover, an American program to track those mobile missiles with a new generation of small, inexpensive satellites, disclosed by The New York Times more than a year ago, is stalled. The Pentagon once hoped to have the first satellites over North Korea by now, giving it early warning if the mobile missiles are rolled out of mountain tunnels and prepared for launch. But because of a series of budget and bureaucratic disputes, the early warning system, begun by the Obama administration and handed off to the Trump administration, has yet to go into operation. Current and former officials, who said they could not publicly discuss the program because it is heavily classified, said there was still hope of launching the satellites, but they offered no timeline.
In a nutshell, then:
North Korea has loudly dismantled one base while quietly making improvements to a dozen others.
They are continuing to produce large amounts of nuclear fuel.
They are evading sanctions by making soft, cooing noises to Trump, which he has eagerly returned.
Obama’s early warning system is in limbo thanks to “bureaucratic disputes” within the Trump administration.
On the bright side, at least Trump has gotten a greeting card from Kim that’s the size of an extra large pizza. That has to count for something.
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