Here’s something I wish we’d see less of in 2018:

I get that when the president says something, it’s news. But Donald Trump’s random revenge tweets¹ really don’t rate coverage anymore, and certainly not front-page coverage. Just wait a day or two. If this turns into something truly newsworthy, like members of Congress agreeing that we should raise Amazon’s shipping rates, then run with it. Until then, it’s just more of Trump’s aimless blather, intended to keep people talking about him. It’s not the president of the Unites States truly proposing some kind of policy change. Ignore it.

¹In case you don’t get this: Trump hates the Washington Post. The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos is the CEO of Amazon. Therefore Trump hates Amazon.

Michael Evans/ZUMAPRESS

I’m running out of things to say this year, so how about this: We should stop blaming boomers for “ruining America.” Everyone is picking on the wrong generation.

• Start in the 60s and 70s. Boomers were in college then, and they played significant roles in the rise of the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the environmental movement, the sexual revolution, and the antiwar movement. Those are all good things, right?
• In the late 70s and 80s, the economic policies that would define the next several decades were put in place. But at this point, boomers were junior analysts and low-level aides. This stuff was put in place by Reagan conservatives, members in good standing of the Greatest Generation.
• In the 90s, Bill Clinton tried to reverse some of this stuff. It was only half-heartedly, true, but then again, Clinton was only barely a boomer. And he never had a chance anyway. The conservative take on the economy was set in stone by then.

There’s no question that boomers have benefited from all this stuff, but they’re not the ones who ruined the economy for millennials. You can chalk that up to the Greatest Generation. Maybe we should come up with a new name for these folks?

From the Washington Post:

For the second year in a row, life expectancy in the United States has dropped. It is not hard to understand why: In 2016, there was a 21 percent rise in the number of deaths caused by drug overdoses, with opioids causing two-thirds of them. Last year, the opioid epidemic killed 42,000 people, more than died of AIDS in any year at the height of the crisis.

In 2016, according to the CDC, 2.7 million people died in America. An extra 7,000 deaths from drug overdoses is a tragedy, but surely it’s not enough to move the needle on life expectancy? Besides, opioids are supposedly the “white” drug, and the age-adjusted death rate for whites was down in 2016. It’s the death rate of blacks that went up, especially black men.

This made me curious, so I looked around to see where this meme came from:

Here’s the abstract from a JAMA report: “Specific contributions of drug, opioid, and alcohol poisonings to changes in US life expectancy since 2000 are unknown.” Here’s a Scientific American synopsis of CDC data: “While the authors didn’t draw a direct link, another report also released Thursday by the CDC found an estimated 63,600 people died of opioid overdoses in 2016.” According to this chart, about 11,000 more whites died from opioid overdoses last year compared to 2015, but the white death rate went down. Obviously that didn’t contribute to lower life expectancy. Only about 1,200 additional blacks died of opioid overdoses, and that’s definitely not enough to move the needle on overall life expectancy.

Maybe I’m missing something in the subtleties of how death rates correspond to life expectancies, but the change in life expectancy seems like it’s being driven by blacks, especially black men. And the number of opioid overdoses among blacks is too small to impact the overall national life expectancy more than a hair. There’s something else going on, but what?

Aaron Chown/PA Wire via ZUMA

Michael Schmidt of the New York Times held an impromptu interview with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago yesterday, and there are takes galore lighting up the internet. Probably all of them are accurate, but for my money the main takeaway isn’t something you can illustrate with an excerpt from the interview. But I’ll try anyway:

SCHMIDT: What are you willing to do on infrastructure? How far are you willing to go? How much money?

TRUMP: I actually think we can get as many Democrat votes as we have Republican. Republicans want to see infrastructure. Michael, we have spent, as of about a month ago, $7 trillion in the Middle East. And the Middle East is worse than it was 17 years ago….And if you want $12 to fix up a road or a highway, you can’t get it…. I believe we can do health care in a bipartisan way, because now we’ve essentially gutted and ended Obamacare.

….Wait, wait, let me just tell you. … Also, beyond the individual mandate, but also [inaudible] associations. You understand what the associations are….So now I have associations….That’s gonna be millions and millions of people….Now I’ve ended the individual mandate. And the other thing I wish you’d tell people. So when I do this, and we’ve got health care, you know, McCain did his vote. … But what we have. I had a hundred congressmen that said no and I was able to talk them into it. They’re great people.

Two things: No. 1, I have unbelievably great relationships with 97 percent of the Republican congressmen and senators. I love them and they love me. That’s No. 1. And No. 2, I know more about the big bills. … [Inaudible.] … than any president that’s ever been in office. Whether it’s health care and taxes.

….I’ll tell you something [inaudible] … Put me on the defense, I was a great student and all this stuff. Oh, he doesn’t know the details, these are sick people….But Michael, I know the details of taxes better than anybody. Better than the greatest C.P.A. I know the details of health care better than most, better than most….I believe that because of the individual mandate and the associations, the Democrats will and certainly should come to me and see if they can do a really great health care plan for the remaining people.

This is a taste, but you have to read the whole interview to really get it. This simply is not a man in full control of his mental faculties. He’s always been narcissistic and blowhardish, but over the course of the interview he’s completely unable to stay focused on a topic for even a few seconds. He veers off into his Electoral College win constantly. He stops to insist there’s no Russian collusion at least a dozen times. He displays no knowledge of anything. It’s like talking to a third-grader.

I don’t know what’s going on with the guy, but even by Donald Trump standards he’s not all there. This is not someone who should be occupying the Oval Office.

Kevin Drum didn’t get results after all:

Earlier today it looked like the peculiar streak of $10,000 low trades had finally come to an end. But no! The low trade for December 28 is now $10,000. Apparently the $10,000 trade comes at the end of each day.

This is very strange. Is it real? Is someone out there really willing to sell some bitcoin every day for $10,000? Is it an artifact of Coindesk’s tracking software? Something to do with the new futures market? Mind tricks from a Jedi trader? It’s pretty mysterious.

Look at this. It’s an outrage! At first it was just one or two seagulls. Then a few more. Now we have an entire flock of them camping out every day at our lake. What are they doing here? They’re seagulls, not lakegulls. They should go back to the sea.

The tiny town of Nipton, on the eastern edge of California in the Mojave Desert,¹ is about to become Marijuanaville:

The nation’s largest publicly traded marijuana company, American Green, recently bought the town for $5 million, with plans to develop a “cannabis-driven” resort on the edge of the Mojave….The company will double the size of the five-room Nipton Hotel, and the Whistlestop Cafe is being redone. Camping will be encouraged, and Shearin said the company will add to the half-dozen tents on raised platforms already in place….“Cannabis will be everywhere, if you want it,” Shearin said. “You want to smoke a fatty? You want to dab? You do that. But don’t blow smoke on a family that’s enjoying the scenery.”

So…they’re going to add five hotel rooms and a few tents in the middle of a desert? The cannabis folks really know how to party, don’t they? If we want a real cannabis resort, I guess we’re going to have to wait for the Indian gaming casinos to get into the biz. After all, free-flowing marijuana, like free-flowing alcohol, is great for their business model.

¹And, perhaps not coincidentally, about an hour from Las Vegas.

Kevin Drum gets results!

Yesterday I complained that for the past four weeks, the lowest trade for bitcoin has been exactly $10,000. Suspicious! Today, a reader emails to tell me that the low trade is $13,611.86. Interesting! I don’t know what happened, but I intend to take all the credit. You’re welcome, bitcoin folks.

Today, the LA Times presents a great example of the hack gap. They invited a conservative and a liberal to make a list of the top 10 under-covered stories of the year.

Adam Johnson, a media analyst for FAIR, mostly wrote about things that genuinely didn’t get a lot of coverage: the South Korean peace movement, starvation in Yemen, hate crimes against transgender people, the rise in deaths at the Mexican border, and the prosecution of inauguration protestors. His items are clearly left-wing—as they’re supposed to be—but they’re all fact-based and only two of them are explicitly anti-Trump.

Then there’s Sean Davis, former CFO of the Daily Caller and former aide to Sen. Tom Coburn. His list is a little different. The Russia investigation is ridiculous! The economy is booming! The stock market is booming too! Trump crushed ISIS! The FBI is in tatters! And that’s just the first five. He also tells us that the Iran deal has collapsed; ESPN is in big trouble thanks to its “seemingly nonstop left-wing politics”; and Betsy DeVos has restored the rule of law to college campuses. You can only call these under-covered if you’ve never watched Fox News.

Bottom line: the liberal writer mostly chose stories that truly didn’t get a lot of attention,¹ and they span the gamut of potential topics. Obviously you can argue with them, but they’re all essentially fact-based. The conservative writer, conversely, just rewrote President Trump’s Twitter feed—but with a little less restraint than Trump shows.² This, ladies and gentlemen, is the hack gap at work.

¹The main exception is item 3, “President Trump’s unprecedented non-Russia corruption.” I wouldn’t call that under-covered, but it sure doesn’t seem to have really sunk in yet.

²Also with one major exception: “We still know nothing about what motivated the Vegas shooter.”

New York City is on its way to crime rates lower than anyone could have imagined a couple of decades ago:

It would have seemed unbelievable in 1990, when there were 2,245 killings in New York City, but as of Wednesday there have been just 286 in the city this year — the lowest since reliable records have been kept. In fact, crime has fallen in New York City in each of the major felony categories — murder and manslaughter, rape, assault, robbery, burglary, grand larceny, and car thefts.

….The numbers, when taken together, portray a city of 8.5 million people growing safer even as the police, under Mayor Bill de Blasio, use less deadly force, make fewer arrests and scale back controversial practices like stopping and frisking thousands of people on the streets. “There is no denying that the arc is truly exceptional in the unbroken streak of declining crime,” said William J. Bratton, who retired from his second stint as police commissioner last year.

I should note that the lead-crime hypothesis predicted this. In fact, I did predict this four years ago. As long as lead poisoning rates stay low, there’s simply no reason to think that crime rates will change dramatically because of stop-and-frisk or anything else.

Lead is no longer significantly responsible for changes in crime rates. That happened between 1990-2010 as the number of lead-poisoned children plummeted. But everyone under 30 today was born in a low-lead environment, and there’s not much lower for things to go. So when you see crime spikes either upward (Chicago) or downward (New York) it has nothing to do with lead exposure. Other factors are now far more at play.

However, what you can say is that, generally, low crime rates are here to stay. Better or worse policing can change things at the margin, but we’re just not ever going back to the 70s and 80s. Thanks, EPA!