New Year's Eve Hopes

The new year will bring some big changes in my personal life. After thirteen and a half years, I'm parting ways with the law firm where I have been office sharing and providing services on an "of counsel" basis as a substantial part of my case load (in my situation, I'm basically an independent contractor as opposed to being in an employee or partner relationship).

My core solo practice remains, at least for now, but with a collection of cases and clients that is mostly new. I'm at a minimum looking at a very different business model. I will probably get certified as a mediator. But I've been continuously employed since I graduated from law school thirty years ago, and I have both valuable legal skills, and valuable soft skills not specific to a profession. So, I'm not overly worried about landing on my feet.

In the next little bit there are nuts and bolts to work out. My old office needs to be emptied, and I swear that my law books and banker's boxes full of files are twice as heavy as they were when I put them in my office in the first place. At a certain point, age does not improve your strength or stamina. Filings will need to be made in all of my active cases to alert the courts and the other parties to the new arrangements. A couple of outstanding financial relationships will have to be closed out. Clients will need to be told how this will affect them. A TBD venue (probably some sort of virtual office arrangement based someplace closer to my home than my current office) will need to be put in place. One or two new vendor arrangements for things like legal research accounts will have to be worked out.

This big change is both sudden and a long time coming. It has been clear for a long time that a major shift was overdue. But thinking it is one thing, and doing it is another. The daily rhythm of my life will change more than it has for a long time.

It certainly helps to be at a place in my life where I have a cushion. The mortgage used to buy our home twenty-five years ago has steadily gotten smaller, and with re-financings to a 3.65% interest rate, the payment, even with taxes and insurance, it is smaller than my Denver based daughter's one bedroom apartment rent in a less pricey neighborhood than Washington Park. I have enough cash in the bank to cover at least ten months of expenses, more if I'm careful. Other than the mortgage, I have no debt. I pay off my credit cards in full every month. I have no student loans. I'll pay off my $54 parking ticket from the City of Manitou Springs a couple of years ago, as soon as I can talk to a human being to resolve a glitch in their collection agency's computer system (which will probably take several hours or more of my time). I suspect that their computer system can't handle hyphenated names or something like that.

My children are grown adults who have finished college, have good jobs, have apartments of their own, have their own serious romantic partners, and no longer need meaningful financial support. My health insurance covers two people instead of four. My household will soon have only one fully paid off fuel efficient car with myself as the sole driver that I've driven 6,000 miles a year on average and will probably drive less in the coming year with less of a commute. There is no deferred maintenance on the car, only one modest project (a 25 year old swamp cooler to replace) for the house, and no deferred dental work or health care.  I don't have any pets at the moment. 

I've avoided taking on golden handcuffs. My home and car are modest. My most expensive hobby is buying books with Amazon rewards credits. I don't ski or have a boat or a plane or have a vacation house or play golf or belong to an athletic or country club with high monthly dues. I don't get season tickets to pro sports. I'm price conscious when I buy things. I don't even have cable or satellite TV. Aside from business trips and family visits, I only go on a real major vacation every five years or so and just finished the most recent one, a 30th anniversary trip to the Bahamas.

This isn't to say that my life isn't comfortable. I don't keep the thermostat at 65º. I have a couple of video streaming services and a Spotify account and high speed internet access. I have a smart phone, although not the latest and greatest one. I have a decent laptop that I use all day long for both business and pleasure. I live in a good neighborhood in a house that is tastefully well finished on the inside without being over the top. I got a lawn service when my kids were no longer available to mow it for free. I shop for deals when I get groceries, but get ample amounts of good quality food. I don't drink bottom shelf wine and liquor any more. I don't have to make choices between buying medicine or getting health care and buying food or paying utilities. Now and then, I go out to eat someplace nice, or see a play or opera or concert, or plan a weekend getaway. I buy art now and then, although nothing super expensive. I've had a few pieces of heirloom jewelry custom made for my wife over two and a half decades. I have a decent work-life balance. 

But the bottom line is that my "monthly nut" is modest, and I'm healthy enough to work as much as I need to in order to cover it. My life style choices and tastes and attitudes are closer to upper middle class than middle class, but my budget is not. So, I don't have to make a huge amount from self-employment to continue to grow rather than to drain my savings, and I can get away with shifts to new business models that are base hits rather than home runs economically without breaking the bank. I could probably break even at twenty fully collected billable hours a month. 

I am optimistic that I'll be able to shift the way that I make a living in a way which will be a positive change and work out economically over the course of the next year and beyond, even though, as someone in the business of warning my clients about worst case scenarios, I know that nothing is promised.

Meta Note 

Between this blog and its sister blog, I've made 450 blog posts in this 366 day long year, despite a hiatus for my anniversary trip, and more than six weeks combined of being sick successively with a "generic" but serious respiratory infection, and then with COVID.

New Year's Eve Fears

I don't have high hopes for 2025.

* Trump.

* H5N1. Trump makes this a much, much more serious and more likely to be lethal risk. This is one mutation away from mass pandemic status and may be much more deadly than COVID-19.

* The war in Ukraine continues. It will be three years old in two months. Trump is eager to abandon Ukraine and please Russia. The rest of NATO will continue to support Ukraine. Russia's capacity to fight a conventional ground war has been dramatically degraded and its conventional naval forces have been revealed to be more vulnerable than widely believed beforehand. While Russia is incrementally gaining territory, longer range Ukrainian strikes and covert operations have put targets deep inside Russia's borders at risk. Russia continues to lose soldiers and hard to replace military equipment on a daily basis. Russia's economy is straining. It's secrets about how to conduct a war and its weaknesses have been broadcast to the world. Troops sent by North Korea to support it are getting slaughtered by the thousands.

* We will see what kind of regime emerges in Syria with the fall of Assad's regime.

* Israel's multi-front war with Iran and its proxies continues and it has indefinitely occupied some Syrian territory on its border in the wake of the fall of Assad's regime there.

* Gaza has been leveled.

Millions of Palestinians are still in Gaza because they have no way to go anywhere else. But this is unsustainable. It is basically impossible to make this a place that can sustain life for millions of people without mass deaths before this is done, and no one has the will and money to make that happen anyway.

At this point there are really only two possibilities: Either the number of deaths surges from a few tens of thousand to many hundreds of thousands or more, or many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are exiled indefinitely from Gaza, a burden that no one has been willing to accept in the necessary numbers. Still, my assumption is that sooner or later, hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza will be relocated, willingly or unwillingly. The West Bank, Egypt, and Jordan would be the most obvious places to move them, but there are endless possibilities. Iran, which created this problem by encouraging the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas is the country that should take in the people of Gaza, but it probably won't.

* The civil war in Sudan continues to be a shit show. Nobody even has more than a rough estimate of how many have died or been injured in the conflict. Neither side is good, but the side that is backed by the perpetrators of the Darfur genocide is worse and backed by Arab monarchies. There are no signs of short term improvement in this catastrophic war.

* Because Trump took office, a massive global trade war is imminent. It will drive up prices in the U.S. at the expense of U.S. consumers, and destroy the economy. It will do almost nothing to help U.S. companies.

* Trump's promise of mass deportations promises to destroy the U.S. economy (especially agriculture, construction, and hospitality), to be a humanitarian nightmare, and to test once again the rule of law in the U.S.

* Trump's threats of conquest directed at our allies poses a risk of war.

* Trump's extreme weakness, stupidity, and hostility towards China could encourage more warlike action by China against Taiwan and the Philippines. 

* Trump's promise to pardon the thousand plus people convicted or facing charged from January 6 will lead to a surge in right-wing terrorism in the U.S. and undermine democracy.

* Maybe, if we are lucky, Trump won't live to complete his term. He isn't young, he isn't healthy, he isn't careful, all of which could lead to his death from natural causes, and he seems to have advancing dementia as well. Also, lots of people would like to assassinate him and there were two serious attempts to do so in 2024 already. If Trump died from natural causes before January 20, 2025, this could save the United States as a country.

* We can expect a surplus of serious natural disasters and extreme weather in 2025 that will probably surpass 2024, due to global warming.

* We are close to the internal combustion engine/electric vehicle tipping point. If it isn't in 2025, it will happen soon, even though Trump's policies may delay it in the U.S.

* While the left and the middle of the American political spectrum agrees that health care in the U.S. needs sweeping reforms, if anything, the Trump administration will only make things worse.

* The political right in the U.S. is increasingly opposed to education and libraries at all levels. We've seen a preview with book banning efforts, anti-intellectual Florida mandates for educators, and the effective ruin of New College in Florida already. An all out attack on academia and education, which is particularly intense in red states, is likely to get worse during the Trump administration.

* It isn't at all clear what the future looks like for reproductive rights. Dobbs was a catastrophe, but referenda and courts in many states have clawed back some of the losses. Other states, like Texas, for example, are absolutely horrible, with the quality of women's healthcare generally destroyed.

* MAGA's efforts to scapegoat transgender people continues and is gaining ground. Fleeing red states and conservative controlled institutions look like the only options for now.

* MAGA has rekindled racism in the U.S. and made it more strident. This seems likely to continue.

* Right wing Christianity's hate and sexism seem likely to continue the exodus from Christianity which came to a brief pause.

* Tax cuts are likely to undermine infrastructure in the U.S.

* If the right's battle against Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other public benefit programs is successful, we are going to see tens of millions of new poor people struggling for survival (and sometimes failing). The Trump recession will make it even worse.

U.K. To Regulate Many Online Forums Out Of Existence

I don't like the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and this is worse.

This, from Techcrunch, seems like a good summary of a bad situation facing this blog: Death Of A Forum: How The UK's Online Safety Act Is Killing Communities.

This blog is just that: my personal blog, with comments.

Over the past two decades a lively community has evolved in the discussion threads. However, the Online Safety Act threatens to impose impossible hurdles on the continuation of open fora in the UK. The intent is officially to protect adults and children from illegal content, but ... there's no lower threshold on scale. A blog with comments is subject to exactly as much regulatory oversight as Facebook. It applies to all fora that enable people in the UK (that would be me) to communicate with other people in the UK (that's a whole bunch of you), so I can't avoid the restrictions by moving to a hosting provider in the US. Nor am I terribly keen on filing the huge amounts of paperwork necessary to identify myself as the Trust and Safety officer of an organization and arrange for commercial age verification services (that I can't in any event integrate with this ancient blogging platform). And the penalties for infractions are the same—fines of up to £18M (which is a gigantic multiple of my gross worth).

And it comes into effect on March 15th.

Accordingly ...

The blog will continue to exist.

However the comment threads may be closed for good after March 14th.

(I don't know for sure yet. It's very late in the day but the ICO may see sanity and provide some sort of sanity clause for hobbyist sites.) 

. . . 

Update: According to this in-depth article about the Act there appears to be a limited exemption for "limited functionality services" that covers blog comments—"but it may not include them if users can reply to each other - this is unclear". Ofcom are expected to clarify their regulations in January, so we can live in hope for a little longer. 

Also: "The OSA puts obligations on the service provider, so if you host a community on a platform such as Discord or WhatsApp, the OSA doesn't directly affect you." (So I may be able to open a forum on Discord instead.) 

Also: my quick first pass risk assessment per Ofcom guidelines is that this blog is, to put it mildly, at low risk for priority illegal content, if only because it doesn't provide most of the types of communication channel Ofcom is concerned with (eg. generating and hosting video and images, enabling direct 1:1 private communication between users).

From Sci-Fi author Charlie Stross's blog.

Most Viewed Posts Of 2024

Most of my most viewed posts this year are from prior years, but the four most viewed posts at this blog from this year were:

4. Statistics About This Blog And Its Sister Blog (June 5, 2024),

3. Hamas, The Houthis, Hezbollah, Iran, And ISIS-K (April 2, 2024),

2. Active Defenses Are The Future Of Warfare (October 15, 2024), and

1. It Wasn't About The Price Of Eggs (November 8, 2024).

Quote Of The Day

I love the ocean, but I'm not trying to be a fish.

- Echo Wu, "Jentry Chau vs. the Underworld" (Episode 5).

TFR In The EU

The replacement "total fertility rate" which is what is being described below, is 2.1 children per woman per lifetime. So far, the demographic transition towards fewer children that comes with economic development, knows no bounds.

Official statistics show Germany’s birth rate fell to 1.35 children per woman in 2023, below the UN’s “ultra-low” threshold of 1.4 — characterising a scenario where falling birth rates become tough to reverse.

Estonia and Austria also passed under the 1.4 threshold, joining the nine EU countries — including Spain, Greece and Italy — that in 2022 had fertility rates below 1.4 children per woman.

With young people reaching milestones, such as buying a house, later in life, the average age of EU women at childbirth rose to 31.1 years in 2023, a year later than a decade ago.

…Austria reported a fall to 1.32 children per woman in 2023, down from 1.41 in the previous year. In Estonia, the rate hit 1.31 in 2023, down from 1.41 in the previous year.

Birth rates have fallen across Europe — even in countries such as Finland, Sweden and France, where family-friendly policies and greater gender equality had previously helped boost the number of babies. In Finland, the birth rate was above the EU average until 2010, but it dropped to 1.26 in 2023, the lowest since the record began in 1776, according to official data.

France had the highest birth rate at 1.79 children per woman in 2022, but the national figures showed it dropped to 1.67 last year, the lowest on record.

From the Financial Times.

Impeachment in South Korea And Political Prosecutions In Spain

In South Korea, the impeachments are tried not by an upper house of a legislature, but by the Constitutional Court, which must convicted by a six votes out of nine in the case of the President (it currently has three vacancies, so a unanimous vote is required) and by five votes out of nine in other cases. Specifically:

For passage, the [impeachment] motion must receive the support of a two-thirds majority if it concerns the president and a simple majority for any other office. Once the impeachment motion passes the National Assembly, the Constitutional Court adjudicates the impeachment, and until the Constitutional Court renders a decision, the impeached official is suspended from office and unable to exercise power.

The person facing impeachment is suspended from office once the National Assembly votes to impeach.

According to Article 65 Clause 1, if the President, Prime Minister, or other state council members violate the Constitution or other laws of official duty, the National Assembly can impeach them.

Clause 2 states the impeachment bill must be proposed by one third and approved by a majority of members of the National Assembly for passage.

By the Constitutional Court Act, the Constitutional Court must make a final decision within 180 days after it receives any case for adjudication, including impeachment cases.

From here.

While this system potentially has its own problems, it is better than the partisan vote in the Senate that is used in the U.S.

This is why many countries follow this practice:

Constitutions in 9 democracies give a court—often the country's constitutional court—the power to begin an impeachment; another 61 constitutions place the court at the end of the process.

Indeed, while bicameral national legislatures aren't uncommon, in many countries, unlike the U.S., they aren't co-equal. The lower house can overrule objections of the upper house, for example, in the case of the U.K. House of Lords, and in the case of the Canadian Senate. 

Meanwhile, "in Spain, possible criminal cases against protected people (aforados) are sent immediately to a higher tribunal (Tribunal Suprempo) in order to minimize rogue judges moving baseless cases forward. If that tribunal does actually charge the aforado, then it asks the Parliament to remove the immunity, and the affected person has the opportunity to make his case before the Parliament and try to convince it that immunity should not be lifted because the case is just a political witch hunt."

I'm not a huge fan of Spain's approach, but it does at least, insure that a politician's immunity is not absolute.

What To Abolish?

Republicans want to abolish the Department of Education and the IRS. Both are horrible ideas. 

What should be abolished?

1. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

2. The Office of National Drug Control Policy.

3. The Alcohol And Tobacco Tax And Trade Bureau.

4. The Alcohol and Tobacco parts of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

5. The Article I Immigration Court system (transfer this duty to Article III courts).

6. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) (as opposed to the separate border control agency).

7. The Employment and Training Administration in the Labor Department.

8. The Export-Import Bank of the U.S.

9. The National Indian Gaming Commission.

10. Criminal and civil forfeiture enforcement of copyright and trademark violations (a similar statutory stand alone crimes).

11. Federal pornography possession enforcement.

12. Diversity jurisdiction in the federal courts.

13. Federal question jurisdiction in the federal courts in most cases involving private parties. 

14. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (merge into the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit)

15. The Federal Arbitration Act.

16. Federal grand juries (would require a constitutional amendment).

17. Criminal punishment of illegal entry into the United States.

18. Federal enforcement of bank robbery laws.

19. Federal enforcement of intrastate controlled substance violations.

20.  Most federal agency law enforcement agencies.

21.  Merge the Commodity Futures Trading Commission into the SEC.

22. Slow speed, long haul passenger rail lines at AMTRAK.

23. Door to door rural mail delivery (replace it with P.O. boxes).

24. The Jones Act.

25. Grants to for profit colleges and universities.

26. Federal civil forfeitures.

27. For profit federal prisons and detention centers.

28. The Medicaid Estate Recovery program.

29.  FEMA grants to people suffering disaster losses after rebuilding in stupid zones.

30. The Office of the Director Of National Intelligence.

31. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (enforce the laws in regular Article III courts).

32. The Selective Service System.

33. Most tanks in the U.S. Army (transfer them to allies who want them like Ukraine and Taiwan).

34. New destroyers (of existing designs) for the U.S. Navy.

35. The U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay.

36. Bomber aircraft in the Air National Guard.

37. Canon artillery in the Army National Guard.

38. The Space Force (which should be merged into the Air Force).

39. The Air Force (which should be merged into the Army).

40. Stealth fighters in the Air National Guard.

41. The Next-Generation Intratheater Airlift (NGIA) program in the Air Force (it duplicates a more advanced Army Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft program).

42. Foreign aid to Saudi Arabia.

43. The amphibious assault mission of the U.S. Marine Corps.

44. The U.S. Navy's nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N) program.

45. Most U.S. military VIP transport aircraft.

46. The Armored Multipurpose Vehicle (AMPV) procurement of 522 M1283 General Purpose Vehicles, 993 M1286 Mission Command Vehicles, and 386 M1287 Mortar Carrier Vehicles. This would leave the AMPV program with 790 M1284 Medical Evacuation Vehicles and 216 M1285 Medical Treatment Vehicles.

47. The M10 Booker Mobile Protected Firepower program.

48. Retire the B1-B bomber (or transfer it to the U.S. Navy as a patrol aircraft).

49. The ban on travel by Americans to Cuba.

50. The U.S. Army Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC), which is a high school pre-ROTC program.

Military Quick Hits

* The Navy has put the Light Amphibious Warship a.k.a. Landing Ship Medium program to build a new class of Marine transport ship on hold because the initial bids were far more costly than the Navy had expected. 

“We had a bulletproof – or what we thought – cost estimate, pretty well wrung out design in terms of requirements, independent cost estimates,” Assistant Secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition Nickolas Guertin said at an American Society of Naval Engineers symposium last week.

“We put it out for bid and it came back with a much higher price tag,” he added. “We simply weren’t able to pull it off. So we had to pull that solicitation back and drop back and punt.” . . .

The idea was for the Navy to buy a smaller, less expensive amphibious ship that could shuttle Marines around islands as they set up ad-hoc bases on islands and fire weaponry like anti-ship missiles in a potential conflict and quickly move to new locations. The Marines Corps has converted two of three planned Marine Littoral Regiments that would rely on the LSMs to move across the Pacific.

At a lower price point, the Navy could buy more ships, and current requirements call for 18 to 35 LSMs. The Congressional Budget Office projected the lead ship in the class costing anywhere from $460 to $560 million, according to an April report. If the Navy buys the 18 to 35 ships according to current plans, each hull could cost $340 to $430 million. Initial plans in 2020 called for each ship to cost $100 to $150 million. . . .

Last fall, the Navy put out a request for proposals to the shipbuilders after finalizing requirements for the Landing Ship Medium earlier in 2023, USNI News reported at the time. Those requirements called for a platform that could haul 75 Marines and 600 tons of equipment, and have a cargo area of about 8,000 square feet, a helicopter pad, a 70-person crew, spots for six .50-caliber guns and two 30mm guns.

“Specific configuration details will be determined during the detailed design phase, but generally the ship will be less than 400 feet long, have a draft of less than 12 feet, an endurance speed of 14 knots, and roll on/roll off beaching capability,” Naval Sea Systems Command told USNI News at the time.

* One of the main driver's of new weapons developments in the U.S. military is the termination of the Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2019. This has driven a host of intermediate range missile programs.

* It would be interesting to see what could be done for aircraft and drones that rather than primarily having a low radar threshold, would be quiet and hard to see in visible light (perhaps with a so called "invisibility shield"), possibly with a fairly slow moving, small drone that with only modest attention to reducing a radar signature would blend in with the bird background. Locating targets stealthily is increasingly key.

* A key issue in drone warfare is jamming of GPS signals and of control signals. High quality inertial guidance, AI driven multi-domain sensors (radar, sound, heat, visual), satellite mediated rather than ground sourced communications (possibly with lasers), and AI driven controls to reduce the need for communication, as well as interference hardened shells for drone avionics and electronics, could all play a part in these developments.

* Active defenses for ground vehicles, ships, and point defense seem to have made a lot of progress, but active defenses for warplanes from anti-aircraft missiles and shells, less so. This seems like an area where there is room for technological progress. One step further - imagine a suicide drone, basically a cruise missile, with active defenses against missile defense interceptors.

* What is the smallest ship that could be sea worthy in high seas and travel blue sea distances? Could it get smaller than the roughly 3,000 tons of a frigate? Could it be smaller if it were unmanned? Could it be as small as say a 100-500 ton missile boat?

* Should the Navy switch to bidgets to reduce the need to resupply with TP? Likewise, should it use air flow based hand dryers instead of paper towels to dry hands?

* One plausible way to reorganize the U.S. military would be based upon the anticipated capabilities of the opposition. One component of the force could be optimized to deal with low end counterinsurgency type conflicts efficiently, while another could be optimized to deal with so-called "near peer" conflicts. The conventional wisdom seems to be that if you can deal with the "near peer" conflicts that you are equipped to handle anything, but that encourages asymmetric warfare tactics in which inexpensive opposition forces drive our force to spend extreme amounts of money to counter them resulting in a losing war of attrition.

U.S. Military Spending Since 1900

U.S. military spending in 2024 was at or very near its lowest percentage of GDP since 1940 (an 84 year low). It declined incrementally during the Biden administration.

 From here.

In 2022 it was 3.45% of GDP. The all time low on this chart was 3.09% in 1999. The percentage is probably a lower in 2023 and 2024 with a projected 3.3% in 2023, and 3.0% in 2024.

From here.

From here.

The number of active duty U.S. military personnel is also at or near a record low since 1940 (without adjusting for population which has grown 2.54 times since then). There are currently 1,288,549 active duty U.S. military personnel.

The Army at 443,444 is at the lowest level since 1940. 

The Navy is at 328,774, and was lower in 2012-2015 and in 2017-2018, when it fell to as little as 321,300 in 2013, but is close to the bottom.

The Air Force is 326,065, and was lower in 2015-2018, when it fell to as little as 312,195 in 2015 (it was also lower in 1941 as part of the Army), but is still close to the bottom.

The Marine Corp was 168,032. It was lower for some period between 1945 and 1955, with a force of 74,279 in 1950.

Adjusting for population, the current number of U.S. active duty personnel is equivalent to 507,303 in 1940, when the actual number of active duty military personnel was 508,274.

Foreign Born Population At Record High

Immigration was a central part of Trump's Presidential campaign. His arguments that immigration was linked to crime or terrorism or a net fiscal burden on governments or economic harm were just purely untrue. His claim that illegal immigration amounts to an "invasion" of the United States in a constitutional sense is also far outside the mainstream of legal interpretation.

But, there has indeed been a lot of immigration in the post-pandemic period (some of just replacing people who left for the pandemic and are now coming back). 

The percentage of people residing in the United States who are foreign-born is record high. It is roughly three times as great as it was when I was born (when it was at an all time low).

I'm not in the least troubled by this surge in immigration, which is on balance a good thing for the country, even the undocumented immigration, although our nation's immigration laws are definitely broken.

The combined increases of legal and illegal immigration have caused the share of the U.S. population born in another country to reach a new high, 15.2 percent in 2023, up from 13.6 percent in 2020. The previous high was 14.8 percent, in 1890.

Source: Analysis of data from the Congressional Budget Office and U.S. Census Bureau

The rate at which people immigrated to the U.S. in the last four years has also been a record high, and according to the Goldman Sachs analysis found in the New York Times article (dated today) that all of the quotations and charts in this post derive from, about 60% of net immigration in the last four years has been undocumented.

Annual net migration — the number of people coming to the country minus the number leaving — averaged 2.4 million people from 2021 to 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Total net migration during the Biden administration is likely to exceed eight million people.

That’s a faster pace of arrivals than during any other period on record, including the peak years of Ellis Island traffic, when millions of Europeans came to the United States. Even after taking into account today’s larger U.S. population, the recent surge is the most rapid since at least 1850:

The numbers in the Times analysis include both legal and illegal immigration. About 60 percent of immigrants who have entered the country since 2021 have done so without legal authorization, according to a Goldman Sachs report based on government data.

The story also analyzes the reasons behind this surge in immigration:

Several factors caused the surge, starting with President Biden’s welcoming immigration policy during his first three years in office. Offended by Donald J. Trump’s harsh policies — including the separation of families at the border — Mr. Biden and other Democrats promised a different approach. “We’re a nation that says, ‘If you want to flee, and you’re fleeing oppression, you should come,’” Mr. Biden said during his 2020 presidential campaign.

After taking office, his administration loosened the rules on asylum and other immigration policies, making it easier for people to enter the United States. Some have received temporary legal status while their cases wend through backlogged immigration courts. Others have remained without legal permission.

Outside causes have also played an important role in the surge. Turmoil in Haiti, Ukraine and Venezuela caused desperate people to flee their home countries. The growth of smuggler networks run by Mexican drug cartels allowed more people to reach the U.S. border. 

But the Biden administration’s policy appears to have been the biggest factor: After Mr. Biden tightened enforcement in June, the number of people crossing the border plummeted.

A Clean Slate For Property Rights, Entities, Federalism, And Related Matters

There are some economic and legal reforms which are hard to make now, but starting with a clean slate would have been better to have made differently, or which are just structural reforms.

Mineral Rights And Water Rights

* All mineral rights should be owned by the government and merely leased by firms exploiting them.

* The rights of surface owners of land over mineral rights leased by the government should follow the Colorado rule (which requires underground mining that preserves the rights to support of the surface owners) and not the Wyoming rule (which permits strip mining).

* All water rights should be owned by the government and leased annually to water users. All water users in the same watershed would pay the same lease rate based upon an auction. Market failures and transaction costs cause inefficient overallocation of water at very cheap prices to agricultural users to the detriment of fishing, recreational use, and municipal water use.

* Grazing land would be primarily publicly owned with the right to graze cattle on open ranges leased.

Wildlife Management

* To the extent possible, management of wildlife populations with natural predators, like bears, wolves, and mountain lions, would be preferred to hunting.

Real Property Rights

* Legal life estates and other present and future interests in real property should not be permitted. Someone wishing to create the equivalent to a life estate could establish a trust in which some beneficiaries had equitable life estates and others had equitable remainder interests. Existing legal life estates could be deemed to be trusts in which the present interest holder is the trustee for the benefit of themselves and all future interest holders.

* The race-notice statute should be modified so that a person with an interest in real property created by a written instrument could only benefit from the notice provisions for up to four months from the date of the instrument to gain priority over a recorded instrument creating rights in land. Written instruments creating an interest in real property that are more than four years old would be subordinate to the rights of the owners and encumbrances of record.

* Judgment liens would be possible to record against all real property in the state owned by a debtor in a single state filing.

* Ancillary probate of real estate would be replaced with a requirement to give full faith and credit to an executor, personal representative, or administrator appointed in the place of domicile, subject only to state homestead exemptions.

Property Taxes

* Education would be funded through state income, sales, and gifts and estate taxes, not through local property taxes.

* Non-profits, including churches and state government property, would not be exempt from property taxes, but state government property would be assessed at the state level rather than at the local level.

* Property tax assessors, and state and county treasurers, would be civil service appointments, not elected.

Limited Liability Entities and Judgment Liens

* Ownership interests in entities would have to be recorded with a state registrar, although this information would only be available to interested parties. 

* Trusts would be registered with the state registrar rather than with courts of probate jurisdiction.

* Trusts and estates would be treated as entities for state law purposes.

* Judgment liens should be possible to record against all interests in entities in a state with a single state filing.

* All limited liability entities would be required to be bonded against the claims of trade creditors and insured to standards established by regulation, with the bonding agent and insurers made a matter of public record. The directors, officers, managers, and partners of the entity would have joint and several personal liability for any failure to do so, guaranteed by the owners if they, collectively, were unable to satisfy any debts of the company that should have been bonded or insured.

Local v. State Authority

* Occupational licensing in the construction trades, and building codes, should be regulated at the state level, rather than the local level.

* Local governments should not be permitted to have their own courts and instead would enforce their rights, including ordinance violations, in the appropriate state courts.

* Local governments should not be permitted to enact ordinances for which incarceration is a penalty, other than contempt of court punishments for violations of injunctions previously imposed against a particular defendant in a state court proceeding brought by the local government against that particular defendant.

* Zoning and use regulation by local governments would be limited at the state level.

Copyrights and Intellectual Property

* Copyrights should have a much shorter term, such as the pre-1976 rule of 26 years from publication and an additional 26 years if a copyright registration is renewed, which a separate regime protecting the exclusive right of the authors to publish and register unpublished works. Works not published within 26 years of the death of the author would be in the public domain. This might be accomplished with a one time buyout of existing copyrights more than 52 years old at fair market value or a nominal amount for unmarketed and unappraised copyrights.

* There would be mandatory licensing of copyrighted works, handled by one or more non-profits for performances of all musical works, all orphan works, translations of works for which had not been translated into a particular language pursuant to a license within some designated period of time after the publication of the work in its original language, and almost all other derivative works.

* The scope of the derivative work right for copyrights would be greatly narrowed.

* Statutory damages for copyright violations would be abolished. Economic damages for copyright violations would be limited to unjust enrichment relative to licensing the work, or lost profits relative to licensing the work, whichever was greater.

* Common law trademark rights in trademarks not registered in the principal register under the Lanham Act (including rights under state trademark filings) would be exclusively a matter of federal law.

* Rights of publicity would be exclusively a matter of federal law.

* Royalty income from intellectual property would be taxable where the sale giving rise to the transfer takes place, not where the owner of the intellectual property is domiciled.

Federal Court Jurisdiction

* Federal court diversity jurisdiction not involving international diversity would be abolished.

* Federal question jurisdiction in cases between private parties not involving other specific grants of federal court jurisdiction (e.g. in the cases of intellectual property, civil rights, certain class actions, and election law cases) would be abolished.

* Federal crimes for matters that can be prosecuted under state law, like bank robbery, intrastate controlled substances violations, and most murders, would be repealed.

* Felonies committed in Indian Country would be governed by new Indian Country District Courts and a U.S. Court of Appeals for Indian Country, and a related Indian Country law enforcement agency, rather than by the relevant U.S. attorney's office and the FBI.

* The lowest level immigration offense of illegal entry would be made a civil offense governed primarily by the immigration courts, and decriminalized (this makes up a significant share of the total criminal docket in many U.S. District Courts).

* The immigration courts would be reformed and made Article III courts. A right to an attorney at public expense would be established in the immigration courts.

Super Deadly Cow Flu Is One Mutation Away From Causing Mass Human Death

We are one random mutation away from a strain of cow flu that could kill 30% of the people who get it.

In 2021, a highly pathogenic influenza H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b virus was detected in North America that is capable of infecting a diversity of avian species, marine mammals, and humans. In 2024, clade 2.3.4.4b virus spread widely in dairy cattle in the US, causing a few mild human cases, but retaining specificity for avian receptors. Historically, this virus has caused up to 30% fatality in humans, so Lin et al. performed a genetic and structural analysis of the mutations necessary to fully switch host receptor recognition. A single glutamic acid to leucine mutation at residue 226 of the virus hemagglutinin was sufficient to enact the change from avian to human specificity. In nature, the occurrence of this single mutation could be an indicator of human pandemic risk.

Via Marginal Revolution (linking to another article calling it the most foreseeable catastrophe in human history).

Business Owners Hide Personal Expenses In Firms

The tax evasion caused by shifting personal expenses to businesses in Portugal is pretty severe. It also happens in U.S. firms, but my intuition is that the magnitude of this corruption is smaller.

I present evidence that firms serve as tax-free consumption vehicles. Drawing on a unique combination of data from an electronic invoicing program in Portugal (e-Fatura), I show that individuals who control firms shift 36% of their monthly personal expenditures to firms and 31% of their household expenditures. 

The effects are driven by owner-managers of small closely held firms through expenditure categories on the border between business and final consumption but are widespread among business managers across the whole income distribution. 

My results suggest that the government revenue losses due to consumption through the firm amount to 1% of GDP. Reallocating the tax savings and personal expenditures hidden within f irms to the reported household income of business managers increases the Gini by one percentage point and the top 1% income share by half a percentage point.

From David Leite, "The Firm As Tax Shelter" (September 2024).

MIT Students Make Up 80% of Putnam Competition Winners

One of the biggest national contests in math for college students in the U.S. and Canada is the Putnam competition. About 80% of the winners attend MIT. Many of the rest attend Harvard, a few hundred yards away. The prize is nominal, but the reputational benefits of winning and scholarships are immense for anyone interested in pursuing a career in mathematics and it can open the door to large merit scholarships as well. Per the Wikipedia link above:

It is widely considered to be the most prestigious university-level mathematics competition in the world, and its difficulty is such that the median score is often zero or one (out of 120) despite being primarily attempted by students specializing in mathematics.

The World Turns

You take a week off and the world turns.

South Korea has an attempted self-coup a.k.a. autogolpe, which failed within hours, probably irrevocably dooming the President's conservative leaning party. The attempt failed because in South Korea, even conservatives have some morals and respect the rule of law. Heads are starting to roll (figuratively) at high levels in the South Korean government, although the President has so far postponed an immediate impeachment or resignation. The brief and illegal imposition of martial law was trigged when the majority in parliament tried to impeach several corrupt prosecutors, challenged the President's personal scandals, and wouldn't agree to his budget proposals and the President wanted to shut down his legislative opposition. I fear that the U.S. will not perform as well in the near future when faced with a similar challenge. Republicans are spineless and no longer care about democracy or the rule of law.

In Syria, the thirteen year civil war has ended with the sudden collapse of the Assad regime, now that his two key sponsors, Russian and Iraq, are distracted, ending half a century of dictatorship. The U.S. continues to bomb ISIS forces in parts of Syria that neither the Assad regime, nor the main rebel groups, control.

Russia's economy is starting to seriously stumble two and three-quarters years after it restarted it war with Ukraine.

The Prime Minister of the Bahamas has rejected a request by President-elect and convicted felon awaiting sentencing, Donald Trump, to receive people he wants to deport from the U.S.

Trump has also admitted that his tariff plan will cause U.S. prices to surge, even though he was elected with a central campaign tenant of reducing inflation, and that he plans to carry out many baseless federal criminal prosecutions as a way of securing revenge against his enemies (something that President Biden could short circuit with preemptive pardons). 

Biden, of course, pardoned his son who was convicted of a federal charge, now that he is a lame duck, which is less honorable than trying to thwart Trump. If he has the guts he will commute the sentences of everyone on federal death row to life in prison, thwarting Trump's efforts to execute more people has he did in the final days of his first term. Of course, Trump won't officially be the President elect until the Presidential electors vote on December 17, 2024, although the outcome is a foregone conclusion.

Also, UnitedHealthcare's CEO was murdered in Manhattan. Murder is bad, but he surely deserved it. Behind every great fortune is a great crime.  Big health care companies murder people by spreadsheet every day.

Netflix has a new show called Jentry Chau vs. the Underworld described as follows:

But since Texas is basically hell already, and is already fully of creatures more terrifying than those in any myth, this appears to be basically an evil v. evil conflict, so it might not be all that interesting.

Quote Of The Day

 

From "A Terrified Teacher At Ghoul School" (Episode 9).