Saturday, August 29, 2026

The economists get it backward

at No comments:

Ukraine War News

Meanwhile, on the Ukraine war:

Now, it hires local criminals through messaging apps, pays them in cryptocurrency, and the perpetrators often don't even realize which side they're on.

The geography of this outsourcing is impressive. On the night of August 15th, a fire broke out at Milrem Robotics in Tallinn, a company that manufactures ground drones for Kyiv. Latvian authorities detained three suspects.

On August 10th, a fire erupted at EMCO in Bulgaria, a company that supplies 155mm artillery to Ukraine. The fire conveniently started in a truck near the warehouse.

Three days later, there was an "unexplained fire" at the KNDS gunpowder factory near Rome. Earlier this year, a Czech plant that produced drones and thermal imaging devices burned down.

The Baltic states and Poland are confidently pointing towards Moscow. Italy and Bulgaria are looking down and muttering about short circuits. Article 5 (of NATO) is hanging on the wall, like an axe in a glass case, "to be used in wartime," and no one is daring to touch the glass. The head of Latvian counterintelligence honestly clarifies: GRU officers do not travel to Latvia; they are doing well enough in Moscow.

It would be nice if that were true. That somewhere in a Moscow kitchen, two men in tracksuits are drinking tea from coasters, looking at a map of Europe instead of a tablecloth, and systematically and carefully shutting down factories that are filling Ukrainian warehouses with ammunition. That each fire in a European gunpowder factory is not a "human factor," but the calm work of specialists at the right address.

The truth is probably less exciting. The European defense industry, which has been living on peaceful contracts and pipeline energy for decades, has suddenly switched to war mode.

And it has discovered that gunpowder factories, under intense pressure, are perfectly capable of catching fire on their own, simply from exhaustion. Without any outside help. However, admitting this out loud is much more embarrassing than admitting that, once again, they missed a trick from those who appreciate beautiful spires.
at No comments:

Sacramento County's Jail System Master Planning Update continues...

(c) by Mark Dempsey

Sacramento County conducted a "listening" session on August 27th about the future of its jail. Eric Jones and Laura Foster from the County's Public Safety and Justice Agency conducted this session, which occurred because the County lost a federal lawsuit--the Mays Decision--for mistreating prisoners. The mistreatment reportedly continues; for one example, jailers have denied inmates their prescribed medications. 

A recent state Supreme Court decision restricting the use of cash bail is a significant change in California's incarceration policies. The Bee reports 74% of the inmates in County jail are not convicted of anything except being unable to afford bail, so reducing bail could potentially make the jail a lot less crowded and might discredit any advocacy for increasing its size to accommodate more prisoners. 

Said the Bee, the defendant in the Supreme Court suit, Gerald Kowalczyk, "challenged the ruling while in custody, but by the time the courts got around to it, he had already been in jail, waiting for his day in court, for six months." Kowalczyk was homeless and indigent, but was jailed because he couldn't pay bail when he was arrested for using a found credit card to purchase a cheeseburger. 

The state Supreme Court ruled in Kowalczyk's favor, and since that ruling, the Bee reports that average bail has already gone from $5,000 to $1,000 in San Mateo County.  

The Bee adds, "In [this] ruling, the California Supreme Court cast the state's existing use of bail as a criminalization of poverty [validating this study] and declared, 'a court that intentionally sets objectively unattainable bail inevitably does so for the purpose of detention.'

"The court ruled that judges cannot use money bail as a de facto detention mechanism. It also said lower-level offenses can be dealt with through alternative means like monitoring, mandatory check-ins and 'reasonably attainable' money bail."

When asked about this decision's local impact, Ms. Foster, one of the facilitators for the "listening" session, replied it had only reduced the Sacramento County jail's population by 10%, so we couldn't count on it reducing the need for more jail capacity. The Supreme Court reached the Kowalczyk decision April 30, 2026, so the County has had four months to integrate the decision into its practices. Perhaps the County is waiting for its "day in court" to revise unaffordable bail amounts still in force. 

In the bigger picture, the US currently incarcerates people at five times the world's per capita average, seven times more than Canada. And Canadians have lower crime rates than the US. In any case, reducing the jail population by 80% would normalize US detention, compared to the world's average. Meanwhile, the World Population Review says, "The US crime rate is higher than most other developed nations." 

So all that incarceration doesn't produce the "safety" this Master Planning session cited as a motivation to consider expanding the jail itself. There's no sign the County considers bigger jails may even generate more crime.

Meanwhile, the public's appetite for "safety" appears to be infinite, but not necessarily sensible. One example, from Shankar Vedantam's The Hidden Brain:  

"...researchers Arthur Kellermann and Donald Reay once examined all gun-related deaths over a lengthy period of time in King County in the state of Washington. They were trying to find evidence for the common intuition that gun owners are safer because they can protect themselves and their families should someone break into their homes. Kellermann and Reay identified nine deaths during the period of the study where people shot and killed an intruder. These are the stories that gun advocates endlessly relate to one another. In the same period, guns in people's homes were implicated in twelve accidental deaths and forty-one homicides--usually family members shooting one another. The number of suicides? Three hundred and thirty-three."

Vedantam compares this counterfactual appetite for safety to driving 70MPH on the freeway without a seatbelt. As long as your hands are on the wheel, you may feel safe, especially compared to how you feel sitting in a plane piloted by someone else through turbulent air. But the feeling is deceptive. The reality is that you're safer in the plane. Appealing to perceived "safety" is marketing, not reality.

Since modern politics focuses on marketing rather than facts, cops, courts, and cages will likely continue to produce more criminals, and scare the public into timid compliance with the political class until inconvenient reality inevitably asserts itself. 

Given the public's gullibility, Sacramento's reliance on ever more draconian penalties, unpayable bail, and homeless "sweeps" is likely to continue, criminalizing the poverty that is at the root of the largest homeless population since the Great Depression. Count on Sacramento's public officials crying crocodile tears over their helplessness to solve the same problem the New Deal solved roughly a century ago. 

For more information about the Jail System Master Planning effort and to review previous presentations and materials, visit the Public Safety and Justice Agency's Reports and Resources webpage. To see the August 27 webinar, see it on YouTube. 

at No comments:

Today's Cool Tweets

 


[translated from French]
I find it fantastic, these editorialists and economists who can only talk about the "Chinese danger," and who are incapable of seeing that China owes much of its power precisely to the unapologetic use of its monetary weapon. Its central bank directly refinances its public development banks at preferential rates, for trillions of yuan. It has been practicing differentiated rates for years: subsidized refinancing for green credit, for SMEs, for industry. It has had the bad debts of its public banks absorbed by state bad banks whenever it suited it, which amounts exactly to a cancellation of public debts since its banks are directly controlled by the State, and it has just launched the largest local debt buyback program in its history. In short, everything we're told in Europe is impossible, dangerous, or inflationary, China does it, and that's what allows it to finance electrification, rail, batteries, solar, and to eat our lunch on every market while we wonder what expenditures, what economic supports, we're going to cut next. We can fear China. We would at least need to understand the weapons at its disposal.

 

Another long one:

In the 1920s, a Stanford psychologist tracked genius children for 50 years.

Malcolm Gladwell breaks down what he discovered:

Rich families → successful. Poor families → failures.

Not average. Failures. Genius-level IQs that produced nothing.

He spent 60 minutes at Microsoft explaining why we're wrong about success:

The psychologist was named Terman. He gave IQ tests to 250,000 California schoolchildren.

He identified the top 0.1%. Kids with IQs of 140 and above.

His hypothesis: these children would become the leaders of academia, industry, and politics.

He tracked them. And tracked them. For decades.

The results split into three groups:

The top 15% achieved real prominence. The middle group had average, moderately successful professional lives.

And the bottom group? By any measure, failures.

The difference wasn't personality. Wasn't habits. Wasn't work ethic.

It was simple: the successful geniuses came from wealthy households. The failures came from poor families.

Poverty is such a powerful constraint that it can reduce a one-in-a-billion brain to a lifetime of worse than mediocrity.

There's a concept called "capitalization rate."

It asks a simple question: what percentage of people who are capable of doing something actually end up doing that thing?

In inner city Memphis, only 1 in 6 kids with athletic scholarships actually go to college.

If our capitalization rate for sports in the inner city is 16%, imagine how low it must be for everything else.

Here's something stranger.

Gladwell read the birth dates of the 2007 Czech Junior Hockey Team:

January 3rd. January 3rd. January 12th. February 8th. February 10th. February 17th. February 20th. February 24th. March 5th. March 10th. March 26th...

11 of the 20 players were born in January, February, or March.

This isn't unique to the Czechs. Every elite hockey team in the world shows the same pattern. Every elite soccer team too.

Why?

The eligibility cutoff for youth leagues is January 1st.

When you're 10 years old, a kid born in January has 10 months of maturity on a kid born in October. That's 3 or 4 inches of height. The difference between clumsy and coordinated.

So we look at a group of 10 year olds, pick the "best" ones, give them special coaching, extra practice, more games.

We think we're identifying talent. We're just identifying the oldest.

Then we give the oldest more opportunities, and 10 years later they really are the best.

Self-fulfilling prophecy.

The capitalization rate for hockey talent born in the second half of the year? Close to zero.

We're leaving half of all potential hockey players on the table because of an arbitrary date on a calendar.

Kids born in the youngest cohort of their school class are 11% less likely to go to college.

11% of human potential squandered because we organize elementary school without reference to biological maturity.

Now here's the part about math.

Asian kids dramatically outperform Western kids in mathematics. The gap is enormous and consistent across decades of testing.

Some people say it's genetic. It's not.

It's attitudinal.

When Asian kids face a math problem, they believe effort will solve it.

When Western kids face a math problem, they believe the answer depends on innate ability they either have or don't.

Here's the proof.

The international math tests include a 120-question survey. It asks about study habits, parental support, attitudes.

It's so long most kids don't finish it.

A researcher named Erling Boe decided to rank countries by what percentage of survey questions their kids completed.

Then he compared it to the ranking of countries by math performance.

The correlation was 0.98.

In the history of social science, there has never been a correlation that high.

If you want to know how good a country is at math, you don't need to ask any math questions. Just make kids sit down and focus on a task for an extended period of time.

If they can do it, they're good at math.

Why do Asian cultures have this attitude?

Gladwell's theory: rice farming.

His European ancestors in medieval England worked about 1,000 hours a year. Dawn to noon, five days a week. Winters off. Lots of holidays.

A peasant in South China or Japan in the same period worked 3,000 hours a year.

Rice farming isn't just harder than wheat farming. It's a completely different relationship with work.

There's a Chinese proverb: "A man who works dawn to dusk 360 days a year will not go hungry."

His English ancestors would have said: "A man who works 175 days a year, dawn to 11, may or may not be hungry."

If your culture does that for a thousand years, it becomes part of your makeup.

When your kids sit down to face a calculus problem, that legacy of persistence translates perfectly.

Now consider distance running.

In Kenya, there are roughly a million schoolboys between 10 and 17 running 10 to 12 miles a day.

In the United States, that number is probably 5,000.

Our capitalization rate for distance running is less than 1%.

Kenya's is probably 95%.

The difference isn't genetic. The difference is what the culture values and where it spends its attention.

Here's the most fascinating finding.

30% of American entrepreneurs have been diagnosed with a profound learning disability.

Richard Branson is dyslexic. Charles Schwab is dyslexic. John Chambers can barely read his own email.

This isn't coincidence. Their entrepreneurialism is a direct function of their disability.

How do you succeed if you can't read or write from early childhood?

You learn to delegate. You become a great oral communicator. You become a problem solver because your entire life is one big problem. You learn to lead.

80% of dyslexic entrepreneurs were captain of a high school sports team. Versus 30% of non-dyslexic entrepreneurs.

By the time they enter the real world, they've spent their whole life practicing the four skills at the core of entrepreneurial success: delegation, oral communication, problem solving, and leadership.

Ask them what role dyslexia played in their success and they don't say it was an obstacle.

They say it's the reason they succeeded.

A disadvantage that became an advantage.

Here's what Gladwell wants you to understand:

When we see differences in success, our default explanation is differences in ability.

We forget how much poverty, stupidity, and attitude constrain what people can become.

We refuse to admit that our own arbitrary rules are leaving talent on the table.

We cling to naive beliefs that our meritocracies are fair.

The capitalization argument is liberating.

It says you don't look at a struggling group and conclude they're incapable. It says problems that look genetic or innate are often just failures of exploitation.

It says we can make a profound difference in how well people turn out.

If we choose to pay attention.

at No comments:

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

How to build a livable (high density) city

Here's the article.

Excerpt:

Fine-grained urbanism depends on managing boundaries rather than eliminating them through consolidation.

In the absence of a good system for managing boundaries, consolidation is the path of least resistance. For roughly one hundreds years, cities have taken this path, allowing developers to merge multiple parcels and build one large project.

at No comments:

The Bee's Private Equity-Infused Bad Judgment

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

Proving once again that the private equity purchase of McClatchy papers didn't exactly improve their editorial judgment, in the Bee (Sacramento Bee 8/24/26 from p.B10):

First, there's an editorial denying what Israel is  conducting a genocide in Palestine. The editorialist, a Rabbi emeritus, says "no." Kevin Kiley says "no," and Richard Pan, his political opponent in an upcoming congressional election, doesn't give a clear answer. The clear answer would be "yes," but the Rabbi, who lives in the US, is unconvinced. 

Nevertheless: a UN study in 2025 concludes Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip

It doesn't take too much effort to find articles like How the Media Sells Genocide from Chris Hedges. Excerpt:

"The Western media manufactures consent for genocide. It normalizes Israel’s decades-long military occupation and apartheid. It erases Israel’s flagrant violations of international law. It perpetuates the fallacy of Israeli victimhood. It betrays, discredits and demonizes the work of Palestinian journalists and media workers in Gaza, at least 220 of whom have been killed by Israel between Oct. 7, 2023, and August 2025. It supinely accepts draconian Israeli censorship. It acquiesces with tepid letters of protest at Israel’s refusal to allow foreign reporters in Gaza — an effort by Israel to mask its war crimes. It amplifies Israeli lies, from beheaded babies to widespread sexual assault of Israeli women on Oct. 7, to obfuscate the truth.

"When writing about Gaza, verbs are in the passive tense. There is no subject. No one is accountable. Genocide, it seems, is an act of God. No different from an earthquake or tsunami. Clichés and opaque adjectives such as the “cycle of violence” or “clashes” distort and falsify reality.

"'If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought,' George Orwell warned.

Finally, continuing the Bee's private-equity-informed bad editorial judgment... 

Next to the denial of Israel's bad behavior, "The Baltimore Sun Editorial" supplies a piece entitled "Politicians suffer from a deficit of answers about national debt." Excerpt: 

"Every new federal benefit, subsidy or program eventually has to be financed by taxes, borrowing, reductions elsewhere or some combination of the three."

The premise of this declaration is that dollars grow on billionaires and federal programs need some external input to mobilize resources. Most people know that the source of non-counterfeit dollars is the federal government. 

The accounting for national debt is like your bank account. That's your asset, but the bank's debt. Reducing the debt would just make your account smaller. Reducing national debt sucks the private sector's dollar financial assets out of the economy. 

The public has fallen for the "Fiscal Responsibility™" scam, leading to seven significant reductions of national debt since 1776. One hundred percent of the time the reductions are followed shortly by an economic downturn. The Coolidge and Hoover administrations diligently reduced national debt shortly before the Great Depression.

Perhaps the most significant debt reduction occurred thanks to Andrew Jackson. The Jackson administration paid off the debt entirely. That meant there was no public currency--yes, dollars are part of national debt.  People did their business with monetized gold ("specie") and over 7,000 varieties of private banknotes of varying reliability. It was a business nightmare, and shortly led to an economic downturn, a wave of asset forfeitures and foreclosures called the "Panic of 1837."

Of course the oligarchs with spare cash can pick up assets cheaply when they're distressed, so there's a constituency rooting for "disaster capitalism." It's called the "billionaires." The agenda of austerity is to enrich a few at the expense of most of the population, and concentrate owner in a small oligarchy. 

The short-term agenda is to defund Social Security and Medicare. Those two items and the military comprise 85% of federal outlays. When complaining "Eeek! We're out of money!" the deficit hawks never suggest cutting spending on the military, or for that matter raising taxes on the wealthy. 

Do we need to cut the social safety net programs because they're "unsustainable" and we're running out of money? Even Alan Greenspan won't go that far.

I'm not defending current federal spending policy. As Corbin Trent says "Now the deficit hawks are stirring, after hibernating through Republican rule, and they’ll tell us the only way out is austerity. We must cut spending. We have a spending problem. But what we have is a really bad purchasing problem. It isn’t so much that the American government spends too much money, as it is that we buy stupid things at extortionate prices." 

This is the kind of nonsense the private equity blinders at the Bee and "Baltimore Sun Editorial" support.

Stuff like this gives credibility to the phrase "fake news." 

at No comments:

Good-ish News from the Sacramento Bee: No Cash Bail

(c) by Mark Dempsey 

The Sacramento Bee's 8/23/26 front page (!) headline: "Did California Supreme Court end unaffordable money bail?" (my response: We'll see...)

This article recounts the stories of those detained with unpayable bail, like the homeless man who found a credit card and tried to buy a cheeseburger with it. He was then arrested and jailed. The man, Gerald Kowalczyk, "challenged the ruling while in custody, but by the time the courts got around to it, he had already been in jail, waiting for his day in court, for six months." The court ruled in his favor.

In better news: since the Supreme Court's ruling, the Bee reports that average bail has already fallen from $5,000 to $1,000 (in San Mateo County). 

"In the Kowalczyk ruling, the California Supreme Court cast the state's existing use of bail as a criminalization of poverty [validating this study] and declared, 'a court that intentionally sets objectively unattainable bail inevitably does so for the purpose of detention.'

"The court ruled that judges cannot use money bail as a de facto detention mechanism. It also said lower-level offenses can be dealt with through alternative means like monitoring, mandatory check-ins and 'reasonably attainable" money bail."

Previously, "California has tried its hand at restricting cash bail and reforming the pretrial process, most notably [with] SB 10, which was signed into law by then-Gov. Jerry Brown in 2018. The bill eliminated cash bail in California's criminal justice system and replaced it with risk assessment tools..."

"But before SB 10 took effect, it was shot down by the American Bail Coalition...[which] funded a successful veto referendum, Proposition 25....Judges took subsequent rulings not as instruction to evaluate a person's financial circumstances more closely, but to order pretrial detention by default..."

"...in 2022...74% of people in California jails were still unsentenced and awaiting trial. And California continued posting bail at five times the national average[!]

"... Defendants are typically only offered 10 to 15 seconds to discuss financial circumstances with their appointed attorney."

The ability of public defenders to monitor compliance with the Kowalczyk decision varies greatly from County to County. Public defenders are seldom as well-funded as posecuters. There are already reports of bail amounts affordable only when Bail Bondsmen participate and the defendant sells a car to pay the 10% cost of a bail bond.

Meanwhile, Santa Clara County's Pre-Arraignment Representation and Review unit is the only independent, non-law enforcement agency in California. They conduct interviews with clients who have been booked into the county jail the night before on the morning of their arraignment hearing, collecting information that could help the judge decide a reasonable bail, if any.

A reminder to readers: this is encouraging news, but we're not out of the woods yet. Remember the fate of SB10. Sabotage, and even assassination, are part of the US system of implementing public policy, and politics ain't beanbag. 

US public policy seldom moves in a straight line, too. Slavery was supposed to be over after the Civil War, but we got Jim Crow and debt peonage for the South, both of which are a little different from slavery, but not exactly liberating.

The end of cash bail is politics moving in the right direction, though, so a bit of good news. After all, only the US and the Phillipines still have cash bail.

Update: 

 

 

at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

The economists get it backward

All central bankers doing monetary operations know they can't conduct a reserve drain without a prior reserve add- the CB has to credit ...