The Interior Department is spending nearly $139,000 to upgrade three sets of double doors in the office of Secretary Ryan Zinke….The work also includes new locks to improve security.
For the record, Zinke says he had nothing to do with this and that preservation requirements and procurement rules raised the cost. So you know. There’s that.
After a week of furious lobbying and a burst of last-minute internal debates and confusion, Mr. Trump agreed to exempt, for now, Canada and Mexico and held out the possibility of later excluding allies such as Australia….“The actions we are taking today are not a matter of choice; they are a matter of necessity for our security,” Mr. Trump said in a ceremony at the White House.
….Canada and Mexico would be exempt pending discussions with both countries….Mr. Trump indicated that the tariffs would go into effect on Canada and Mexico “if we don’t make the deal on Nafta and if we terminate Nafta because they are unable to make a deal that’s fair.” During a cabinet meeting earlier in the day, Mr. Trump singled out Australia as an example of another country that could be excluded, citing the trade surplus that the United States maintains with Australia, which imports more from America than it exports to the country.
Wait a second. First Trump says that these tariffs are being put in place as a national security measure. But then he says that Canada and Mexico will be exempt if they cave in on NAFTA, and Australia might be exempt because we have a trade surplus with them. So which is it? Are we doing this because the US needs a domestic steel industry to build F-35s and Ford-class aircraft carriers? Or do we actually have plenty of steel for that, and we’re doing this to punish countries that we have a trade deficit with? Inquiring minds want to know.
And since I know you want to stay current on your memes, here’s the latest one:
President Trump: “Your father … is looking down, he’s very proud of you right now.”
Local steel worker union president: “Oh, he’s still alive.”
Yosemite National Park, North Dome. I took this picture as we were coming down the Vernal Fall trail. The late afternoon sun provided a lovely bit of color and our height gave me a nice angle to shoot from. Five minutes later the sun had dropped enough that North Dome was just a gray rock again. Light comes at you fast sometimes.
The Trump administration is asking Beijing for a plan to cut the annual U.S. trade deficit with China by $100 billion, according to people familiar with the matter….According to the people, Trump administration officials made the request to Liu He, the main architect of China’s economic policy, last week when he was in Washington.
I dunno. Maybe Trump can talk China into buying a billion tons of American coal each year. Alternatively, he could talk to an economist, who would tell him that the most effective answer is to weaken the dollar. That’s easier said than done, though, and doesn’t have the same appeal as being able to crow about beating China at its own game. In the end, I assume this whole affair will amount to nothing, although Trump might be able to persuade China to make a few face-saving concessions in return for real-life concessions from the US. That’s how Trump’s dealmaking usually seems to go.
Body panel gaps are inconsistent, reflecting a lack of attention to detail….After we brought ours home, we discovered it also had a cracked vanity mirror and a broken driver’s seat shell. In our first six weeks, we’ve had to do the equivalent of a Windows PC’s Ctrl-Alt-Del reboot of the all-important touchscreen about a dozen times.
We’ve called a Tesla service center about the problems, but have had difficulty getting an appointment. Drive-ups were not welcome, so our parts were ordered based on photographs alone. Weeks later, we’re still waiting for word and it’s hard to get answers.
The touchscreen controls almost literally everything aside from steering and the foot pedals. If it decides to go belly-up, you have no windshield wipers, no radio, no headlights, no nothing. If it dies every 250 miles, that’s a problem. Elon Musk better get this fixed pronto.
You were all pretty excited about my post yesterday suggesting that home sales weren’t really all that seasonal. Admit it. You were enthralled.
Unfortunately, I only had data for new home sales, not the much larger number of existing homes sold each month. Well, today I have it. Here it is:
It appears that there’s a bit more seasonality in sales of existing homes than in sales of new homes. I’d guess that this is a supply-side thing: builders want to sell new homes whenever they’re finished, while homeowners wait until spring to sell their homes. Is this because most of us don’t want to sell in winter? Or because realtors tell us that markets are terrible in winter, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy? I don’t know. But perhaps realtors don’t like trudging around in the snow any more than the rest of us.
In any case, if you add up both new and existing homes, here’s what you get:
Spring: 26.5 percent of all home sales
Summer: 29.6 percent
Autumn: 24.1 percent
Winter: 19.8 percent
In other words, winter sucks, but spring, summer and autumn are all about the same.
Republicans hate regulations. Donald Trump hates regulations. OMB chief Mick Mulvaney hates regulations. So it must have killed him to publish the most recent report to Congress on the costs and benefits of major regulations. Unfortunately, there’s a regulation that requires it, so the report was submitted once again. Here are the estimated net benefits (benefits minus costs) of major regulations over the past decade:¹
The thing to note here is that the net benefits are all positive: that is, the benefits far outweigh the costs. This is because federal agencies don’t generally adopt regulations that have a net cost. The people being regulated may hate all these regulations, but they aren’t the target for this stuff. You and I are.
Of course, the people being regulated now have the ear of the White House. A year from now, I wonder if Mick Mulvaney will have figured out some way to issue this report without making regulations look so damn beneficial?
¹Costs and benefits are always given as a range of values. I used averages for these charts.
Look, we know the Trump administration is full of liars.
That’s pretty much all the answer anyone needs these days to anything the Trump administration says.
But as long as we’re on the subject of Jerry Brown: Has any politician ever changed as much as he has over the course of a career without changing their basic values? The 79-year-old Jerry Brown sure isn’t anything like the 36-year-old Jerry Brown who slept on a mattress and dated Linda Ronstadt during his first tour as California governor. Over the last eight years, he’s done an outstanding job of maintaining liberal values but leavening them with a pragmatism that California sorely needs. I suspect we’re going to miss that pragmatism when he retires.
The Wall Street Journal reports that this could be one of the weakest spring homebuying seasons in a while. But this paragraph caught my eye:
The next few months are a critical test of the housing market, as buyers look to get into contract on a home before summer vacations and the new school year. About 40% of the year’s sales take place from March through June, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Wait. They’re saying that 40 percent of sales take place in 33 percent of the months. That doesn’t make spring sound all that critical. But it got me curious, so here’s a chart of average new home sales since 1963:
March-June is indeed the busiest period of the year. But not by much, really. The holiday season is obviously a laggard, but the entire rest of the year hovers between 50-60 thousand new homes per month. Since 1963, the March-June period has accounted for 37.5 percent of the year’s sales and July-October has accounted for 33.4 percent.
Now, this is sales of new homes only. Perhaps sales of existing homes are more seasonal? I’m not sure why they would be, but it’s possible. Unfortunately, that data is available only from the National Association of Realtors, which distributes only seasonally adjusted figures. That’s not of much use when you’re looking for seasonal trends.
This is a backlit tree at UC Irvine. But what kind of tree is it? I got a few suggestions from the local brain trust, but none of them panned out. So now I turn to you, the denizens of lunchtime photo. What is this, anyway?
UPDATE: Everyone’s first guess was a gingko tree, but I had already ruled that out. However, Jorge Velasquez IDed it as a Chinese tallow tree,Triadica sebifera. I believe that’s our winner.
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