If you enter Yosemite National Park from the west via Highway 120 or 140, it eases up on you gradually. It’s sort of like watching a jigsaw puzzle being put together, with Yosemite Valley slowly taking shape in front of you until finally it all comes together. However, if you come in via Highway 41, it looks like this:

This is the Wawona tunnel, and it looks just like any other workaday tunnel until you get near the end and you suddenly burst out into the Valley, with El Capitan looming over you, Bridalveil ahead of you, and Half Dome in the distance. Unless it’s winter and the road is closed, this is the way to enter the park.

SIPA Asia via ZUMA

President Trump mad! President Trump smash bad Canadians! Tariffs start at midnight:

Chuck Bradford, a U.S.-based metals analyst, said there would be “no effect” on Canadian steel producers, who will “just charge more for the steel.”

Their U.S. customers, he said, “may not have any choice: there may not be any steel available of the grades they need.” And even if there is, Bradford said, they may be most comfortable sticking with their previous supplier. “Even steel of the same theoretical design or same type may not be the same from different mills….And if you’re an automaker…you’d like the supplier that you have, because you know your equipment works well with their type of steel,” he said.

Trudeau describes this as “a turning point in the Canada-U.S. relationship.”

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) May 31, 2018

Jean Simard, president of the Aluminum Association of Canada, said it is “impossible” for American aluminum producers to step in and fill the demand….“It’s a big sleeper; it’s the kind of thing that happens, you don’t feel it and at some point in time you look at the statistics and you’ve destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs.”

If this is true, then Trump’s temper tantrum will have no effect except to damage everyone’s economy a bit. And if it does have an effect, it will mostly just damage everyone’s economy a bit—but with the added bonus that American steel and aluminum companies will become a little more profitable and their executives will make more money.¹

Oh, and ordinary Americans will pay more for their cars and their soup. But who cares about them?

¹What, you thought it might create more jobs for steelworkers? It might create a few. But mostly it will just allow US companies to raise their prices. Ka-ching! It’s reward time for the corporate wing of the Republican Party that Trump really cares about.

Good boy!Nir Alon via ZUMA

Apparently Donald Trump told French president Emmanuel Macron that he wants more than just high tariffs on German cars. He wants to ban them entirely. Exciting! This is nonsense, but it provides a chance to test Google Translate in the wild. Here is the machine-translated story from Wirtschafts Woche:

Trump wants to lock Daimler out of the US market

US President Donald Trump has announced to French President Emmanuel Macron to exclude German premium car makers from the US market. On Macron’s visit to Washington in April, Trump said he would maintain his trade policy until no Mercedes models rolled on Fifth Avenue in New York.

….Trump’s grudge against the German automaker — and especially against Mercedes models in New York — is not new….The fact that American cars in Germany are usually shelf-wardens has, for the US president, a simple reason: A car from American production is duty-paid at the EU with 10 percent, while a car from EU production at the import into the United States US is only occupied at three percent duty. But what Trump forgets: The tariffs apply regardless of the manufacturer. Popular SUV models such as the BMW X5 or Mercedes GLE are built in the US, according to them, the import duty is due — yet these models are not in Germany to the store wardens.

Hmmm. That gets the main point across, but there’s still progress to be made. “Shelf warden,” I assume, is an idiom, and presumably means something that sells poorly and collects dust on the shelf. As for “store warden”—well, I could use the help of a native speaker on that.

But let’s move on. We also get the following sidebar:

Even if US President Donald Trump enforces low tariffs on US cars in Europe, hardly anyone will buy them — for a simple reason.

Because who converses with the sellers of American cars in Germany, quickly realizes: The price is certainly not that the Germans persistently refuse the imported mobile from overseas. Cars with Kampfhundblick have it for quite different reasons hard in the land of nuclear power opponents and Easter marches.

Kampfhundblick? Struggle dog view? I guess attack-dog looks is the best translation. American cars look mean, but they have lousy gas mileage and so most Germans don’t want them.

All in all, not too bad. The gist of these stories is pretty comprehensible, even if the translation is gramatically awkward and hard to make out in places. I guess we’re not quite ready for implanted language chips yet.

UPDATE: It turns out that the word Ladenhüter was used twice in the original text, but was translated once as shelf-warden and once as store-warden. This is odd. In any case, they both mean the same thing: an item that sells poorly. What’s even odder is that if you type just the word itself into Google Translate, it correctly translates it as non-seller. I suppose the weird and divergent translations at separate points within the text must have something to do with differing tenses and genders and cases and other stuff that I don’t understand in German.

A couple of months ago it looked like maybe the inflation rate would finally poke its head above the Fed’s “target” rate of 2 percent. But no. It remains as quiet as ever. It’s now spent six consecutive years under the “target.” It kinda makes you think that maybe the target is really 1.5 percent or so, with the actual rate bouncing around a bit on either side of that—as it should. Alternatively, the Fed has no idea how to manage inflation upward even if it wants to. I think it’s a little of both.

John Marshall Mantel/ZUMA

Not just a pardon, but a Full Pardon!

Will be giving a Full Pardon to Dinesh D’Souza today. He was treated very unfairly by our government!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2018

Has any president ever used the pardon power with such gleeful naked partisanship as Trump? It’s a gnat compared to everything else he does, but it might be the perfect metaphor for Trump’s petty, transactional approach to everything in life, which very much includes the presidency of the United States. What a putz.

Steven K. Doi via ZUMA

Unless, in the end, this turns out to be a joke after all, visionary entrepreneur Elon Musk is getting ready to ship 20,000 flamethrowers to waiting customers next week. It’s not clear why Musk decided to market flamethrowers as “fun” toys for the masses, but that’s how it goes with visionaries. They see things that you and I don’t, and they see around things—brush fires, third-degree burns—that ordinary humans view as obstacles.

But enough about that. The idiocy of this project is pretty obvious, and one of Musk’s flamethrowers will either be responsible for starting a huge forest fire or it won’t. We’ll have to wait and see.

UPDATE: This post originally continued with some stuff about an attempt to ban recreational flamethrowers in California. However, it was based on misreading a quote from Eugene Volokh by 180 degrees. It wasn’t salvageable in any way, so I’ve deleted the whole thing. Apologies to all involved.

It’s normally best to take pictures of flowers under overcast skies. This brings out texture and dimension without lots of harsh shadows—which are harsher on film (or pixels) than with the naked eye. Occasionally, though, I like a picture of a flower taken in bright, morning sunlight. This one was taken right after a rain shower, and the direct light provides an almost unnatural clarity without too much in the way of harsh shadows. There’s a bit of an artificial quality to it that isn’t really to my taste, but once in a while it makes for a nice change from my usual fare.

For those of you curious about how this would look in black-and-white, I’ve included a second version of the photo. I did this quickly, and there are lots of different ways of converting color to black-and-white, but this is an example of how black-and-white isolates form and shadow, if that’s what you’re after. I prefer the color version in this case, but tastes vary.

It’s been ten years since Wall Street destroyed the world, and apparently that’s plenty of time for them to have learned their lesson:

Federal bank regulators on Wednesday unveiled a sweeping plan to soften the Volcker Rule, opening the door for banks to resume some trading activities restricted as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law. The changes would give the largest banks significant freedom to engage in more complicated — and possibly riskier — activities by largely leaving it up to Wall Street firms to determine which trading is permissible under the rule and which is not.

The Federal Reserve, along with four other regulators, took steps on Wednesday to ease several parts of the Volcker Rule, which was put in place to prevent banks from making risky bets with depositors’ money. The rule, which took the agencies more than three years to write, has been criticized by Wall Street as onerous and harmful to the proper functioning of financial markets.

My guess is that banks found the Volcker Rule onerous and harmful to their profits, and that’s about it. I haven’t noticed that financial markets in general have had any serious trouble functioning lately.

Of course, I haven’t noticed that financial sector profits are in any serious trouble either. But if you’re in the financial sector, I guess no amount of profit is ever enough.

Tesla

Last week, Consumer Reports announced that they couldn’t recommend the Tesla Model 3 because it had lousy brakes:

The Tesla’s stopping distance of 152 feet from 60 mph was far worse than any contemporary car we’ve tested and about 7 feet longer than the stopping distance of a Ford F-150 full-sized pickup.

Today they changed their mind:

Consumer Reports now recommends the Tesla Model 3, after our testers found that a recent over-the-air (OTA) update improved the car’s braking distance by almost 20 feet.

….Last week, after CR’s road test was published, Tesla CEO Elon Musk vowed that the automaker would get a fix out within days….In an email to CR, a Tesla spokeswoman said that the company had improved the software for the Model 3’s antilock braking system to adapt to variations in how the brakes might be used and to respond to different environmental conditions.

Alex Tabarrok is impressed:

It’s quite astounding that Tesla is able to improve something as physical as braking distance with a software update and also astounding that they are able to update so quickly—even pure software firms don’t respond this quickly! Quite the win for Tesla.

Not so fast. The real issue here is not that Tesla can push out software updates quickly. That’s hardly dazzling technology. Nor is it the fact that Tesla’s brakes are computer controlled. Everyone’s brakes are computer controlled these days. The real issue is that Tesla apparently did a rushed and crappy job of calibrating their brakes before they released the Model 3 to the public. Why? How is it that they began shipping a car with emergency stopping “far worse” than any contemporary car CR has ever tested? Is it because:

• Tesla has a software culture instead of a car culture?
• Tesla cut testing corners because it was desperate to get the Model 3 out the door?
• Tesla has lousy programmers?
• Tesla doesn’t bother with rigorous testing because, hey, it can always be fixed with a patch?

I’d add a fifth option that was less damning if I could think of one. But the best I can come up with is that maybe this is just one of those things and doesn’t really reflect on Tesla one way or the other. Everyone occasionally has defects, after all.

That said, I’m more worried about the lousy microcode that produced this problem than I am impressed by the fact that the code could be updated over the air. To be honest, I’m not even all that impressed with the speed of the update. Is a week really enough time to properly test a significant change to the code that controls the brakes? I’m not so sure.

Even the usual suspects are getting a little fed up with Donald Trump’s conspiracy mongering:

In an unusual shift Tuesday, three voices on Fox News pushed back against the president’s most recent conspiracy theory. A Fox News guest, commentator and anchor all rebuked claims from the president and his allies that the FBI planted a “spy” in his campaign in an effort to undercut his candidacy.

Outgoing Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the House Oversight Committee chairman and a Trump supporter, said in an interview on Fox that the FBI was justified in using a secret informant to assist in the Russia investigation….“I think when the president finds out what happened, he is going to be not just fine, he is going to be glad that we have an FBI that took seriously what they heard.”

Yeah, I’m sure Trump will be thrilled. Here is Shep Smith with a comprehensive takedown:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqmC3zRxEzQ&t=27m14s

Meanwhile, Trump tweeted this morning about Gowdy’s explanation that Trump would have picked a different attorney general if he’d known that Jeff Sessions was going to recuse himself from the Russia investigation:

….There are lots of really good lawyers in the country, he could have picked somebody else!” And I wish I did!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018

Is this a first? Has a president ever publicly said outright that he wishes he could fire a cabinet member?