One of the things on my photographic bucket list is a good picture of our local mountains. This is difficult because they’re basically pretty ugly: just dull, brown monoliths that look drab even on a clear day and aren’t high enough to get any decent looking snow in winter.

But with all the rain we got this year, I figured this was going to my best chance. All I had to do was find a place to get a nice view. This is much harder than you’d think, but eventually I found a place and got these nice shots, setting the lovely green of the nearby foothills against a dramatic, shadowy background of the mountains themselves. With the right light I might be able to do better someday, but for now this is about as good as it gets.

Everybody around here just calls these “the foothills,” but they are actually the Santa Ana Mountains, an itsy bitsy range that’s part of the Peninsular Range, which stretches from Orange County down to Baja Mexico.¹ The mountains you see on TV during Rams games or the Rose Bowl are the San Gabriel Mountains, part of the Transverse Range, which runs east-west. Both of these ranges are part of the Coast Range, which runs from Alaska down to Mexico.

¹I’ve lived here 60 years and never knew what these mountains were called. I had to look it up to write this post.

Things are getting real:

Facebook bans Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, InfoWars’ Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos and other high-profile people from its platforms https://t.co/Jm11J1x52y pic.twitter.com/aqriaRlLAu

— CNN (@CNN) May 2, 2019

I dunno, folks. These three add nothing to planet Earth by their existence, so I don’t mind banning them. But who made this decision?

Legally, there’s no First Amendment issue here since Facebook is a private company. Still, freedom of speech is an American tradition, not just a legal concept, and social media is where people speak these days. If you get banned from Facebook and half a dozen other big platforms, you’ve been effectively silenced.

Do we want a few faceless committees at Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram deciding on these things? If Facebook had been around in the 60s, would Huey Newton have been banned? David Duke in the 80s? Pat Buchanan in the 90s? Ayaan Hirsi Ali today? Should they? Once you start banning people, you’re inviting public pressure to ban even more people, and profit-seeking companies are pretty sensitive to public pressure.

We’ll see how this plays out, but I’m not sure that banning high-profile nutballs is the right way to go here. It invites endless trouble and it’s really not the biggest problem that social media has anyway. It’s the armies of flamers and trolls that really need to be brought under control.

In any case where speech is curtailed, the question to answer is: Who decides? This doesn’t mean that speech is never curtailed. We already do in some ways. But you should always ask: Who decides?

I really love this story. It’s an “alleged Russian spy whale”! And they’re petting its nose!

Republicans have long championed high-deductible health plans, and it looks like they’re getting their wish. Employer coverage, long considered the gold standard among health insurance plans, has undergone a revolution over the past decade:

The LA Times teamed up with Kaiser to conduct a poll that examines the effect this has had:

The explosion in cost-sharing is endangering patients’ health as millions, including those with serious illnesses, skip care….Half said costs had forced them or a close family member to delay a doctor’s appointment, not fill a prescription or postpone some other medical care in the previous year….Hardest hit in the cost shift are lower-income workers and those with serious medical conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer — who are more than twice as likely as healthier workers, according to the Times/KFF poll, to report problems paying medical bills and to say they’ve cut back on spending for food, clothing and other household items.

Here in California, the maximum allowed deductible for a standard silver-level Obamacare plan is $2,500. For an enhanced Silver 87 plan it’s $650. In other words, employer insurance is no longer much better than Obamacare, and in some cases worse. And if you qualify for subsidies, Obamacare might even be cheaper.

Now tell me again why Americans are dead set against ever giving up their employer insurance and moving to Medicare for All?

Last night I read a story quoting Steve Moore saying he was “all-in” and wouldn’t withdraw his nomination for a seat on the Federal Reserve. Naturally my first thought was: he’s toast. I just didn’t think it would happen only 12 hours later:

Steve Moore, a great pro-growth economist and a truly fine person, has decided to withdraw from the Fed process. Steve won the battle of ideas including Tax Cuts….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 2, 2019

It pains me that Moore wasn’t forced to withdraw by a unanimous, bipartisan backlash against the prospect of a hack sitting on the Fed, but these days I’ll take what I can get. At least he’s gone.

Rudy Giuliani and his pal, the mayor of Kiev.Alex Edelman/CNP via ZUMA

Check this out. Joe Biden’s son used to sit on the board of a Ukrainian company that was under investigation by the corrupt chief prosecutor of Ukraine. The United States, along with all of Europe, wanted the corrupt prosecutor gone, and eventually Ukraine complied. Biden, as a representative of the US, was involved in this effort. This all happened years ago, but now the current Ukrainian prosecutor is reopening the case. Why? Take a guess:

The Trump team’s efforts to draw attention to the Bidens’ work in Ukraine, which is already yielding coverage in conservative media, has been led partly by Rudolph W. Giuliani, who served as a lawyer for Mr. Trump in the investigation by the special counsel….Mr. Giuliani has discussed the Burisma investigation, and its intersection with the Bidens, with the ousted Ukrainian prosecutor general and the current prosecutor. He met with the current prosecutor multiple times in New York this year. The current prosecutor general later told associates that, during one of the meetings, Mr. Giuliani called Mr. Trump excitedly to brief him on his findings, according to people familiar with the conversations.

….Mr. Trump, in turn, recently suggested he would like Attorney General William P. Barr to look into the material gathered by the Ukrainian prosecutors — echoing repeated calls from Mr. Giuliani for the Justice Department to investigate the Bidens’ Ukrainian work and other connections between Ukraine and the United States.

….The decision to reopen the investigation into Burisma was made in March by the current Ukrainian prosecutor general, who had cleared Hunter Biden’s employer more than two years ago. The announcement came in the midst of Ukraine’s contentious presidential election, and was seen in some quarters as an effort by the prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, to curry favor from the Trump administration for his boss and ally, the incumbent president, Petro O. Poroshenko.

These guys are a piece of work, aren’t they?  The short version of this story is that Trump and his allies are pressuring Ukraine to open an investigation tenuously linked to Joe Biden’s son because Biden is a political opponent. It’s like living in a banana republic.

And of course the New York Times takes the bait with a story that begins with nine paragraphs about the possibility of Joe Biden having a conflict of interest, and only getting to Team Trump’s involvement in the tenth paragraph. Nice work, guys.

It’s still May Day here in California, so let’s finish off the day with Tom Edsall’s paean to the labor movement. Well—not paean exactly. More like a stern warning to Democrats that they have fucked up badly over the past 50 years while Republicans—who know precisely how important unions are—have conducted a scorched-earth campaign against American labor:

Even as many Democrats appear to accept organized labor’s decline, Republicans recognize the crucial importance of unions and are determined to gut them further….The relentless Republican assault on unions in the industrial belt states during the first half of this decade was an unquestionable success, politically speaking. It resulted in decreased Democratic turnout, a crucial drop in the bankrolling of Democratic candidates and, more subtly but no less significantly, a debilitating sense of powerlessness among union members.

….Three scholars have produced a detailed analysis of the political effects of right-to-work laws which have been enacted in 27 states….The authors found “strong causal evidence” for the demobilizing “effects of right-to-work laws — examining state and federal elections from 1980 through 2016.” For Democrats, the demobilization after passage of such laws is devastating. “County-level Democratic vote shares in Presidential elections fall by 3.5 percentage points relative to bordering counties.”

Let me repeat that: in places with right-to-work laws, which effectively shut down unions entirely, the Democratic vote share drops by 3.5 percentage points. With that many additional votes, Democrats would have won every presidential election since 1992. This is why destroying unions is so important to Republicans.

Of course, it’s also important to the rich. The decline of union membership precisely matches the decline of working-class income:

Without someone to fight for them, workers will keep losing income to the rich. As union membership declines, so does the working-class income share. And as the working-class income share declines, the top 1% income share goes up by almost exactly the same amount. It’s a vicious circle: the rich get richer and Republicans get to keep winning elections. We should do something about that.

Dan Drezner mentions something today that’s close to my heart. It turns out that he’s been going to a lot of conferences lately and hearing a lot about AI:

There has been one constant running through all of them: people who want to sound savvy keep talking about artificial intelligence as the New New Thing….I confess to wariness about claims of technological game-changers. All too often, I hear colleagues reference AI the way that they would reference “globalization” or “Big Data” — terms so amorphous that there is no consensus about the definition.

On that question and many others, I strongly recommend perusing Michael Horowitz’s essay in the Texas National Security Review, which makes some very useful distinctions. Horowitz points out that AI is more of a continuum than a precise technology. He also acknowledges that the future of AI is far from clear.

This is important. As you all know, I’m a believer in the future of AI, but with a strong emphasis on future. That’s because AI doesn’t exist yet—at least, not in any form that deserves the name. There’s no question that progress is being made—computers writing sports reports, computers winning Jeopardy!, computers telling you where the nearest coffee shop is—but none of that is anywhere close to true human-equivalent intelligence.

To take one example of why this matters, economists often like to say that if AI were really going to put people out of work, we’d see it in the productivity statistics. After all, an economy with lots of AI would produces mountains of stuff without much human intervention, which means that productivity (stuff produced per person) would go up. But all you have to do is pull up the BLS statistics and you’ll see that productivity hasn’t gone up, which means that AI isn’t a threat to our jobs.

This is wrong because it’s backwards. What you should say is: productivity hasn’t gone up, which means there’s no true AI in the economy yet. And that’s correct. In fact, we don’t even have much in the way of “almost” AI. It’s more like “getting closer to almost” AI. As Horowitz says, AI exists on a continuum, and what we have today isn’t very far along.

This level of technology is still useful, but not likely to put many people out of work. Not yet, anyway. But it will. Driverless cars, for example, aren’t true AI either, but in a few years they’ll almost certainly start taking jobs away from a lot of truck drivers. It’s something to take seriously.

But it’s not here yet, no matter how many times you hear marketing boffins buzzing about it. We’ve still got a ways to go.

We know that President Trump hates note-takers, but Sen. Richard Blumenthal wonders if Attorney General William Barr took notes anyway during his conversation with Robert Mueller. You remember, the one where Mueller said Barr’s summary of the Mueller report was inadequate and he wanted Barr to publicly release the introduction and executive summaries.  Yeah, that one:

.@SenBlumenthal: Did anyone, either you or anyone on your staff, memorialize your conversation with Robert Mueller?

BARR: Yes.

RB: Who did that?

WB: There were notes taken of the call.

RB: May we have those notes?

WB: No.

RB: Why not?

WB: Why should you have them? pic.twitter.com/17YINB4ZQL

— CAP Action (@CAPAction) May 1, 2019

We can all come up with a few reasons, I think. Of course, we can also think of a few reasons that Barr might not want anyone to see them.

Here’s a lovely magenta red maid growing in the middle of a field of California popcorn flowers. Both the red maids and the popcorn flowers are common around here, and no, I don’t know why they’re called popcorn flowers.