I have to admit, I did not expect us to get to impeachment and deportation by Thursday.

 [Dictated to my phone late at night then proof read by ChatGPT. Apologies in advance.]

Pretty much every Musk watcher I know expected it to get ugly eventually. From the very first days of the administration, it was obvious that two vindictive narcissists with Messiah complexes would not make for a stable co-governing arrangement. We even expected things to fall apart fairly quickly when the cracks started to show, but damn...

Still, other than the speed, none of this is surprising. The first thing you have to remember is that both of these men have anger issues, but Elon's are far more extreme. Journalists who have followed him closely (setting aside those inclined to softball questions and puff pieces) have been telling stories of random rage firings and unpredictable tantrums going back for decades. I assume everyone here remembers how, in response to a mildly critical comment, Elon accused a heroic diver of pedophilia, and how, a few years later, he responded to a drop-off in advertising at his newly purchased Twitter by sitting on stage in a crowded auditorium and telling those businesses to “go f*** yourself.”

Musk is also, like Trump, notoriously thin-skinned, and the past couple of weeks have seen all sorts of insults and injuries—from the New York Times piece (with obvious WH sources) exposing his heavy drug use to the proposed budget virtually guaranteeing that Tesla will never again be a profitable car company. It was probably inevitable that he would lash out and that Trump and his allies would reply in kind, but the escalation has been something to see.

Other than the speed, perhaps the most remarkable thing about this flame war is how exhaustive it has been. I’ve been following these stories way too closely for my own mental health, and I’m having trouble thinking of any major stone left unturned. In addition to calling for his deportation, Trump and his allies have threatened to destroy Musk’s business empire and turn the investigative force of the government against him. Musk has been even more thorough—in addition to calling for impeachment, he has gone after the budget, used Trump’s own language against him, suggested that the tariffs were about to cause a recession, and even briefly threatened to sut off the space station.

The part about impeachment is particularly interesting given JD Vance's role in the White House. Vance was always the princess in the arranged marriage, there to seal the alliance between Trump and the PayPal Mafia. Though it would be extremely difficult to force him out of office, it's hard to imagine him not being frozen out of the administration for the rest of the term.

[Quick question for the audience. While there have been cases of presidents and vice presidents being rivals and having ideological differences—think Reagan-Bush or Kennedy-LBJ, going all the way back to Adams and Jefferson—I'm trying to think of a situation quite this extreme. Does anyone have any suggestions?]

We will see how this plays out and whether or not things calm down over the weekend. It's difficult to imagine them maintaining this intensity, but it's also hard to see how some of these bridges can be unburned. If Musk loses his security clearance, if we are seeing the bubble finally pop with Tesla, or if the budget talks—which are already incredibly unpopular with voters—fall apart, things will not be going back to the way they were.

 

  

 Ahem...

 

'Sore subject': White House confirms physical brawl between key Trump allies 

A physical altercation between Elon Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent precipitated the Tesla founder's quick ouster from the Trump administration, according to a report.

The incident was previously reported as a "screaming match" between the two men, but the physical aspect has since been confirmed by The White House.

The U.K.'s Daily Mail interviewed former Trump adviser Steve Bannon about the DOGE-related scuffle.

"'Scott Bessent called [Musk] out and said, 'You promised us a trillion dollars (in cuts), and now you're at like $100 billion, and nobody can find anything, what are you doing?'' Bannon recounted. "And that's when Elon got physical. It's a sore subject with him. It wasn't an argument, it was a physical confrontation. Elon basically shoved him."

The altercation was confirmed by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Friday, the Mail reported.

 

I'm sure that's all the reassurance Trump will need. 

 

Tesla is a small and imploding car company, overvalued by at least a factor of 20. The only reasons to buy it, other than a stunning faith in the greater fool theory, are the belief that some combination of three things will happen: robo-taxis will largely replace driving and Tesla will dominate the market despite being far behind on the technology; people will spend trillions of dollars on humanoid robots, and once again, Tesla will dominate that market despite again being far behind on the technology; the Trump administration will dump unprecedented amounts of money into the company. Up until recently, the third possibility was the only halfway realistic one. Now there is no rational reason for buying the stock.

Musk vs. Trump is class Godzilla vs. Rodan

You can't really root for either, but it's still fun to sit back and enjoy the spectacle.

One aspect that everyone seems to be missing is the timing. Musk went after Trump's bill shortly after someone in the White House fed The New York Times damaging details about his drug use.

The Trump White House has always been a snake pit with various factions battling for the limited attention of the addled president. Musk made more than his share of enemies, all of whom have the private numbers of various NYT reporters.

Musk is every bit as vindictive, erratic, prone to anger, and narcissistic as Trump, and with Musk, all of those things are amplified by heavy drug use. He has a long history of viciously and recklessly going after people who cross or insult him. What we're seeing is absolutely in character.

"40+ years there's been no Dem-disarray remotely comparable to Trump/Musk/Leo/etc fratricide." -- James Fallows

Prometheus Unbound and the Great Pumpkin Theory of Technological Innovation

[I wrote this back in 2023 and only came across it recently, but it still feels relevant, particularly now that Klein is on the talk show circuit hawking Abundance.]

The following is a bit of an unfair oversimplification of the techno-optimist philosophy, but not that unfair. Stripped down to its basics, the pitch we see again and again from Mark Andreessen, Noah Smith, and even to a degree from as Ezra Klein is that we are on the verge of an age of unimagined prosperity where all of our problems will be solved and all we have to do is set free Great Men and destined forces and then simply keep the faith. Think Ayn Rand by way of Silicon Valley with the added requirement that we all need to clap our hands to show that we really and truly believe in the Übermensch (or, as they are known in the valley, founders).

We've previously hit on the apparent contradiction of having a class of visionaries/innovators/entrepreneurs/ technologists who are capable of solving all of the major problems that face us, from global warming to colonizing the planets and yet who can be brought to their knees by almost any obstacle we put in their way, be it regulation or progressive taxation or even mild criticism. 
 
The weirder part is the theory that technological innovation has ground to a halt because we have lost the capacity to dream big. This is the hypothesis that has launched a thousand TED Talks and made untold fortunes for various motivational speakers. From Klein:

We have lost the habit of imagining what we could have; we are too timid in deploying the coordinated genius and muscle of society to pull possibilities from the far future into the near present.

This has been a fundamental part of  the basic pitch for every credulously reported the-future-is-now story of the 21st century. Mars One, hyperloops, Theranos, the end of aging, and countless other promises that we were about to "pull possibilities from the far future into the near present," all of which turned out to be costly frauds and failures. 

These "we need to dream again" talks and think pieces take as a given the less-than-shocking observation that people were more excited by technology when technology was doing more exciting things, and flip the arrow of causality in the counterintuitive direction.

Despite not making a lot of sense and lacking historical support, this theory has continued to gain popularity over the past few years until it is more or less conventional wisdom by this point. We are all sitting in the pumpkin patch with Linus being told that if we show any sign of doubt the great venture capitalist will not bring us fusion reactors and space elevators.

The Unlikely Return of the "Progressives Should Be Nicer to Musk" Narrative

[Apologies for the gaps. Twitter no longer plays nice with Blogger, which is probably the least of its issues.]

 

The arguments here aren't even interesting enough to mock. It is, however, a reminder of how reluctant the establishment press is to let go once they've dug their teeth into something. 

 

Monday, April 26, 2021

It actually takes some effort to devise arguments this conventional and this wrong 

It is rare that you come across a comment that is so ill-informed in such an informative way.

Environmentalism is supposed to be pain and sacrifice. Because Musk offers an environmental vision that is fun, futuristic and coded with all sorts of “bro” aspects, he is deeply suspicious and must be stopped.

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) April 25, 2021

Barro is such a creature of the standard narrative that not only does he form his opinions based on the carefully crafted persona of Musk; he assumes that everyone else must be doing the same. If someone disagrees with his take, it has to be due to their reacting differently to that narrative.

E.W. Niedermeyer's response to that same initial tweet could be read as a rebuttal to Barro. 

98% of the Elon-Rheorical Complex is just making criticism out to be hatred of him. If it's a referendum on his image, he wins (so far). Dig into the facts, and many of his ideas fall apart. If he actually delivered on most of his brainwaves, this would be much more obvious.

— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) April 25, 2021

It's safe to say that no one who has been seriously following Musk and Tesla in the Financial Times,  the LA Times, Business Insider, Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Edmunds.com or Wired would attribute the criticism to "fun, futuristic and coded with all sorts of “bro” aspects." 

If anything, it is this reputation as a playful visionary (along with the cultivated misimpression that he is some kind of natural engineer) that has largely shielded Musk from his critics for so long. While it might be possible to find people who like their environmentalism dreary, the vast majority desperately want to live in the kind of world Musk promises and couldn't care less about the bro culture trappings. 

The trouble is, most people paying attention have realized that the man is a habitual liar.

Specifically on the question of climate change, here's a reminder of one reason why environmentalists have been falling out of love with Tesla recently.


Jamie Powell writing for FT Alphaville.

From "Tesla: carbon offsetting, but in reverse"

We’re not the first to point this out by any means, but bitcoin is dreadful for the environment. Still don’t believe it? Well Bank of America published an excellent report last week (which can be found on David Gerard’s blog), on the dominant digital coin. And, in particular, its carbon impact. 

 Here are a few choice stats. 

 Bitcoin -- or to be more precise, bitcoin mining -- currently consumes more energy than Greece, and a touch less than the Netherlands. In theory, it wouldn’t be so much of an issue if mining was powered by renewable energy, but 72 per cent of mining is concentrated in China, where nearly two-thirds of all electricity is generated by coal power. 

 For the moment then, bitcoin has carbon emissions that sit comfortably between American Airlines’s output, the world’s largest airline which currently carries 200m passengers per year, and the entire US Federal government. 

 Perhaps the most relevant stat of all, however, is this one:

 

 ____________________________________________

(Have I mentioned Google hates us?)

 

_______________________________________________

 

Monday, May 3, 2021

Josh and the toasty warm take

 Following up on a comment by Andrew Gelman, I was going to open this post with a discussion of hot takes, but going through the Twitter feed around this topic, and I saw that lots of mainstream media and political thinkers had the same take, greatly reducing its hotness.

If you'll remember, this started with the following tweet from Josh Barro:

Environmentalism is supposed to be pain and sacrifice. Because Musk offers an environmental vision that is fun, futuristic and coded with all sorts of “bro” aspects, he is deeply suspicious and must be stopped.

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) April 25, 2021

Before we go on, I think it's useful to break down the implicit and explicit points Barro is making. Here's my attempt:

a. Musk is fighting climate change

b. But many environmentalists dislike him

c. Because they disapprove of his style and image

The first two points establish a mystery to be solved; the third offers an explanation. While Barro may have intended this conclusion to be provocative, he treats the premise as axiomatic, as do many others.

Well also he’s very rich, which a small but vocal group thinks is per se bad.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 25, 2021

Exactly https://t.co/33kVqRwvlC

— Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) April 25, 2021

I don't claim to speak for the left, but:
-union busting
-poor workplace conditions/safety
-SWATing whistleblowers
-repeated environmental violations (really)
-market manipulation
-unsafe automated driving development/deployment, even by the standards of an unregulated industry https://t.co/gavkrYrkKV

— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) May 1, 2021

And a whole damned essay by James Pethokoukis.

More deeply, Musk is offering an attractive techno-optimist vision of the future. It's one in stark contrast with that offered by anti-capitalists muttering about the need to abandon "fairy tales of eternal economic growth," as teen climate activist Greta Thunberg has put it. Unlike the dour, scarcity-driven philosophy of Thunbergism, Muskism posits that tech-powered capitalism can solve the problems it causes while creating a future of abundance where you can watch immersive video of SpaceX astronauts landing on Mars while traveling in your self-driving Tesla. As journalist Josh Barro neatly summed it up recently, "Environmentalism is supposed to be pain and sacrifice. Because Musk offers an environmental vision that is fun, futuristic and coded with all sorts of 'bro' aspects, he is deeply suspicious and must be stopped."

You'll notice that that these examples include liberals, conservatives and centrists. This is one of the many cases where trying to approach this with an ideological filter not on fails to help, but actually obscures what's going on. The distinction we need to focus on isn't left vs. right but close vs. far.

I don't know of another case where the standard narrative and the story told by reporters on the front lines diverge this radically, and the gap has only grown larger. In one version Musk is a visionary and spectacularly gifted engineer who, though flawed, is motivated only out of a passion for saving the planet. He does amazing things. In the other, he is a con man and a bully who, when goes off script, inevitably reveals a weak grasp of science and technology. Outside of the ability to get money from investors and taxpayers, his accomplishments range from highly exaggerated to the fraudulent.

While this view may not be universal among journalists covering the man, it is the consensus opinion. 

The explanations of Barro et al. are not all that reasonable, but they are probably as good as you can get when you start with the assumption that the standard narrative is right.

____________________________________________________

 

[A year later, they were still at it.]

Friday, April 29, 2022

Updated: A year ago at the blog we were talking about about the disconnect between Musk pontificators and the reporters on the beat. Let's see how that's going

As soon as I run a post, perfect examples start showing up.

NEW: Why, of all the world’s billionaires, do progressives love to hate Elon Musk, whose fortune comes from taking electric vehicles mainstream? https://t.co/Jpi7Okj9Kg

— Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) April 29, 2022

barely scratched the complex surface

— Lora Kolodny (@lorakolodny) April 29, 2022

___________________________________________

Picking up from Wednesday and Noah Smith's misinformed defense of the non-founder of Tesla and PayPal. 

While Musk's attempt to buy Twitter has focused the attention of many in the press and a lot of disturbing stories have come out since last year, many commentators are still perplexed at the hostility toward Elon, particularly among liberals who, according to conventional wisdom, should be the ones who hold him in the highest regard. 

An example from an associate editor of Reason (I assume center-right politically).

Elon Musk is left-leaning, is a card-carrying member of the ACLU (and one of its biggest donors), and is in charge of a company that has helped revolutionize clean energy & climate-friendly transportation.

But some people despise him because…he has a lot of money?

— Billy Binion (@billybinion) April 25, 2022

Worth noting that by 2021, Tesla had largely dropped out of the clean energy business.

In the fourth quarter of 2017, Tesla reported a 43% drop in solar deployments compared with when it purchased SolarCity. The company ended up losing its market-leading position in 2018 and now hovers around 2% of the residential solar market, according to Wood Mackenzie. In the first and second quarters of 2021, Tesla installed 92 and 85 megawatts of solar, respectively. That’s less than half of what SolarCity was installing per quarter before the acquisition.

Tesla moved some solar employees to work on building the company’s electric cars and batteries, fired other solar employees, and moved others who had been doing new installations to work on repairs and remediation.

And that Musk's relationship with the ACLU is... complicated.

For too long, the media has painted a halo over the head of the ACLU. https://t.co/IvhKQoW25S

— Russ Mitchell (@russ1mitchell) April 29, 2022

The ACLU helped Amber Heard draft the Washington Post article accusing Johnny Depp of abuse after the organization was promised a $3.5m donation – though at least $500,000 of it eventually came from a fund connected to Tesla founder Elon Musk https://t.co/hVDmhces3j

— Eric W. Dolan (@EWDolan) April 29, 2022

Beyond that, notice that Binion's they-hate-him-because-he's-rich is the same one used by center-left Matt Yglesias a year ago. (see below.)

Like Yglesia, NYT columnist Farhad Manjoo is also generally center-left (though he is also the paper's goto guy for blame everything on liberal hypocrisy stories) 

 

what is this, teslarati? https://t.co/NCa84H2HNz

— Lora Kolodny (@lorakolodny) April 28, 2022

Quick side note: All justifications of Tesla's valuation start with the assumption that it will have a virtual monopoly in the near future, so I guess he's just an aspirational monopolist. 

I cannot think of an example of a major journalist working this beat who has posted one of these "why is everybody mean to Elon?" tweets. Even at Manjoo's own paper, reporters like Neal Boudette are far more likely to point out false statements from Musk and serious safety issues with Tesla's FSD, even when it means dealing with one of the nastiest troll armies on the internet.

 

Why the humanoid robot story matters

 I realize we've had a lot of robot content on the blog recently, and a lot of readers—particularly those who don't follow us regularly—may be wondering what's going on, so this might be a good time for a quick overview.

This really is a big story—no, strike that—this is two or three really big and important stories, all of which interlock around a familiar cast of characters.

It was Elon Musk who drew me into this, so let's start with him.

Musk is, at least on paper, the richest man in the world, but his fortune is mainly based on the wildly inflated stock of a small and imploding car company. The bull case for owning Tesla at this point comes down almost entirely to the supposed potential of two products: robotaxis and humanoid robots—with the latter being probably the bigger driver.

That qualifier is essential for understanding this discussion. Unlike Boston Dynamics, arguably the leader in the field, Tesla is not developing a line of robots designed for various tasks and environments. Instead, Musk has a very specific pitch. He is developing one product—a humanoid robot named Optimus—that, he insists, will be able to do anything and will therefore usher in a new age of prosperity and abundance (Musk’s messianic tendencies are especially notable when he talks about this subject).

We've already talked about how small the market for humanoid, bipedal robots is likely to be and how far behind the pack Tesla is in terms of technology, but perhaps the most striking fact to keep in mind is that it probably doesn't matter. The market cap for the company is insanely high, with a P/E ratio that has scraped—and possibly briefly broken—200. If Tesla were to start trading on any kind of reasonable basis tomorrow, the valuation of the company would drop by one and probably closer to two orders of magnitude. Between here and there, Elon Musk would experience numerous margin calls, since we know he has been using that stock to secure loans. If the market were to suddenly become rational, Musk might very well find himself with a negative net worth.

The valuation is so inflated that Musk is in the position of the gambler who needs to hit the trifecta just to get out of the hole. 

The second story, because this is 2025, involves AI 

The humanoid robot hype bubble has a symbiotic relationship with the larger AI hype bubble. The narrative of the latter is a key part of the viability arguments for the former, while the humanoids provide a potential market for AI companies. (One of the dirty little secrets of the AI bubble is that, so far, no one has come up with a business model where revenue—let alone profit—justifies the current level of investment and excitement.)

In many cases, the people pumping AI are the same ones pumping humanoids, often as part of the same pitches. This is partly due to the previously mentioned symbiosis and partly due to the compatibility of the narratives. Both pitch a world based more on science fiction tropes than on actual technology.

This leads to the third big narrative that humanoids play into: techno-optimism and the coming abundance utopia. The idea being pushed by a wide array of prominent “thinkers” (with varying degrees of sanewashing, ranging from the reasonable-sounding Ezra Klein to the off-his-meds delusional Elon Musk) is that we are about to enter a golden age where machines will meet our every need and fulfill our every desire, as long as we trust our tech overlords and give them anything they want. 

Abundance is definitely having a moment...

 ... but only those who've been following closely realize the movement grew out of Marc Andreessen's techno-optimism, and if you scratch the surface, you'll soon hit LLMs, tech messiahs and, yes, humanoids.

The fortunes and political power of Elon Musk

The biggest hype bubble since Web 3 and the metaverse 

The trendy solution that Democratic leadership is jumping on.

All pretty good reasons to follow this story.

I'm as tired of the snark as you are. Let's do a fun robotics story.

Here's to a cool toy (with very clever engineering) that got a lot of kids interested in robotics back in the day. 

How a 1980s toy robot arm inspired modern robotics
Jon Keegan

Described as a “robot-like arm to aid young masterminds in scientific and laboratory experiments,” it was the rare toy that lived up to the hype printed on the front of the box. This was a legit robotic arm. You could rotate the arm to spin around its base, tilt it up and down, bend it at the “elbow” joint, rotate the “wrist,” and open and close the bright-­orange articulated hand in elegant chords of movement, all using only the twistable twin joysticks. 

Anyone who played with this toy will also remember the sound it made. Once you slid the power button to the On position, you heard a constant whirring sound of plastic gears turning and twisting. And if you tried to push it past its boundaries, it twitched and protested with a jarring “CLICK … CLICK … CLICK.”

It wasn’t just kids who found the Armatron so special. It was featured on the cover of the November/December 1982 issue of Robotics Age magazine, which noted that the $31.95 toy (about $96 today) had “capabilities usually found only in much more expensive experimental arms.”

...

I needed to know the story of this toy. I reached out to the manufacturer, Tomy (now known as Takara Tomy), which has been in business in Japan for over 100 years. It put me in touch with Hiroyuki Watanabe, a 69-year-old engineer and toy designer living in Tokyo. He’s retired now, but he worked at Tomy for 49 years, building many classic handheld electronic toys of the ’80s, including Blip, Digital Diamond, Digital Derby, and Missile Strike. Watanabe’s name can be found on 44 patents, and he was involved in bringing between 50 and 60 products to market. Watanabe answered emailed questions via video, and his responses were translated from Japanese.

 ...

The bold look and function of Armatron made quite an impression on many young kids who would one day have a career in robotics.

One of them was Adam Borrell, a mechanical design engineer who has been building robots for 15 years at Boston Dynamics, including Petman, the YouTube-famous Atlas, and the dog-size quadruped called Spot.

...

Borrell had a fateful reunion with the toy while in grad school for engineering. “One of my office mates had an Armatron at his desk,” he recalls, “and it was broken. We took it apart together, and that was the first time I had seen the guts of it. 

“It had this fantastic mechanical gear train to just engage and disengage this one motor in a bunch of different ways. And it was really fascinating that it had done so much—the one little motor. And that sort of got me back thinking about industrial robot arms again.”

 ...

Eric Paulos, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, recalls nagging his parents about what an educational gift Armatron would make. Ultimately, he succeeded in his lobbying. 

“It was just endless exploration of picking stuff up and moving it around and even just watching it move. It was mesmerizing to me. I felt like I really owned my own little robot,” he recalls. “I cherish this thing. I still have it to this day, and it’s still working.”

No one understands and explains the Age of the Business Idiot better than Ed Zitron

Zitron is one of the essential critics of the AI bubble. He is the essential critic of the business and finance side of the story which is where the really egregious stuff is going on. His newsletter is smart, angry, fearless and free.

We will be coming back to this and discussing how the story Zitron is telling about the AI bubble is intertwined with our humanoid robot thread (with many of the same names popping up in both contexts).

Society berated people for "quiet quitting," a ghastly euphemism for “doing the job as specified in your employment contract,” in 2022 because journalism is enthralled by the management class, and because the management class has so thoroughly rewritten the concept of what "labor" means that people got called lazy for literally doing their jobs. The middle manager brain doesn't see a worker as somebody hired and paid for a job, but as an asset that must provide a return. As a result, if another asset comes along that could potentially provide a bigger return — like an offshore worker, or an AI agent — that middle manager won’t hesitate to drop them. 

Artificial intelligence is the ultimate panacea for the Business Idiot — a tool that gives an impression of productivity with far more production than the Business Idiot themselves. The Information reported recently that ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott — the chief executive of a company with a market capitalization of over $200 billion, despite the fact that, like SalesForce, nobody really knows what it does  — chose to push AI across his whole organization (both in product and in practice) based on the mental consideration I'd usually associate with a raven finding a shiny object:

When ChatGPT debuted in November 2022, McDermott joined his executives around a boardroom table and they played with the chatbot together. From there, he made a quick decision. “Bill’s like, ‘Let me make it clear to everybody here, everything you do: AI, AI, AI, AI, AI,’” recalled Tzitzon, the ServiceNow vice chair.

To begin a customer meeting on AI, McDermott has asked his salespeople to do what amounts to their best impression of him: Present AI not as a matter of bots or databases but in grand-sounding terms, like “business transformation.

During the push to grow AI, McDermott has insisted his managers improve efficiency across their teams. He is laser-focused on a sales team’s participation rate. “Let’s assume you’re a manager, and you have 12 direct reports,” he said. “Now let’s assume out of those 12, two people did good, which was so good that the manager was 110% of plan. I don’t think that’s good. I tell the manager: ‘What did the other 10 do?’”

You'll notice that all of this is complete nonsense. What do you mean "efficiency"? What does that quote even mean? 110% of plan? What're you on about? Did you hit your head on something Bill?

I'd wager Bill is concussion-free — and an example of a true Business Idiot — a person with incredible power and wealth that makes decisions not based on knowing stuff or caring about his customers, but on the latest shiny thing that makes him think "line go up." No, really, that's Bill McDermott's thing. Back in 2022, he said to Yahoo Finance the metaverse was "real" and that ServiceNow could help someone "create an e-mall in the metaverse" and have a futuristic store of some sort. One might wonder how ServiceNow provided that, and the answer is it didn't. I cannot find a single product that it’s offered that includes it.

 

Well, you have to admit, he can make things disappear.

Unfortunately, the link to Smith's article no longer works, but Ed Zitron posted this excerpt. Along with Qatar, SoftBank was, of course, among the investors.

Gotta love that last line.

Trump, the Court and the Calculation: They will do anything for love, but they won't do that.

When I try to guess how Republicans—excluding True Believers and those who have left the party on principle—will react to Donald Trump, I always think in terms of the calculation.

The dilemma for smart Republicans has always been that Trump is likely to do long-term damage to the party (and to the country, though that seldom seems to figure here), but forcing him out would also do considerable damage. Therefore, the question has always been: which would be worse? You could see this in 2015, when the party establishment wavered between trying to squelch his campaign and simply hoping that he would go away. In the immediate aftermath of the insurrection, you saw it again—briefly. When it looked like Trump was a spent force, a large number of party leaders stepped forward to condemn his actions. As soon as it became apparent that he was, in fact, still in control of the party and would be difficult to dislodge, this opposition completely evaporated.

We are seeing something along very similar lines with the recent Supreme Court decision on presidential power—especially with the notable carve-out for the Fed.

Every sane Republican knows that Trump going after Powell would almost certainly be disastrous for the country—and, more to the point in this case, for the GOP. The last time something comparable happened, the party was locked out of the White House for 20 years.

Even for a Jim Steinman/Michael Bay collaboration, this video is ... something.

Memorial Day Repost

A good day for a recommendation

There is, of course, no such thing as the military perspective -- no single person can speak for all the men and women who have served in the military -- but if you are looking for a military perspective, my first choice would be Lt. Col. Robert Bateman who writes eloquently and intelligently on the subject for Esquire. Here are Bateman's recent thoughts on Memorial Day.

When the guns fell silent in the Spring of 1865, they all went home. They scattered across the country, back across the devastated south and the invigorated north. Then they made love to their wives, played with their children, found new jobs or stepped back into their old ones, and in general they tried to get on with their lives. These men were no longer soldiers; they were now veterans of the Civil War, never to wear the uniform again. But before long they started noticing that things were not as they had been before.

Now, they had memories of things that they could not erase. There were the friends who were no longer there, or who were hobbling through town on one or two pegs, or who had a sleeve pinned up on their chest. There were the nights that they could not shake the feeling that something really bad was about to happen. And, aside from those who had seen what they had seen and lived that life, they came to realize that they did not have a lot of people to talk to about these things. Those who had been at home, men and women, just did not "get it." A basic tale about life in camp would need a lot of explanation, so it was frustrating even to talk. Terminology like "what is a picket line" and "what do you mean oblique order?" and a million other elements, got in the way. These were the details of a life they had lived for years but which was now suddenly so complex that they never could get the story across to those who had not been there. Many felt they just could not explain about what had happened, to them, to their friends, to the nation.

So they started to congregate. First in little groups, then in statewide assemblies, and finally in national organizations that themselves took on a life of their own.

The Mid-1860s are a key period in American history not just because of the War of Rebellion, but also because this period saw the rise of "social organizations." Fraternities, for example, exploded in the post-war period. My own, Pi Kappa Alpha, was formed partially by veterans of the Confederacy, Lee's men (yes, I know, irony alert). Many other non-academic "fraternal" organizations got their start around the same time. By the late 1860s in the north and south there was a desire to commemorate. Not to celebrate, gloat or pine, but to remember.

Individually, at different times and in different ways, these nascent veterans groups started to create days to stop and reflect. These days were not set aside to mull on a cause -- though that did happen -- but their primary purpose was to think on the sacrifices and remember those lost. Over time, as different states incorporated these ideas into statewide holidays, a sort of critical legislative mass was achieved. "Decoration Day" was born, and for a long time that was enough. The date selected was, quite deliberately, a day upon which absolutely nothing of major significance had occurred during the entire war. Nobody in the north or south could try to change it to make it a victory day. It was a day for remembering the dead through decorating their graves, and the memorials started sprouting up in every small town in the nation. You still see them today, north and south, in small towns and villages like my own home of Chagrin Falls -- granite placed there so that the nation, and their homes, should not forget the sacrifices of the men who went away on behalf of the country and never came back.

Any excuse to post this video

The dirty little secret of the generative AI bubble is that no one has come up with a business model that justifies a fraction of a fraction of the money that's gone into it. At least not one that depends on the systems real rather than imagined functionality. 

People riding this bubble have an incentive to talk up AI-based humanoid robots and over-priced Ive designed personal devices because they create the impression of limitless new markets ("a trillion in value") while distracting from the truly ugly numbers.

When they really want to tell a story...

I'm going to have to be disciplined when discussing this story. There are so many aspects intersecting with so many of our ongoing threads that I could easily fill a long-form New Yorker article—which would be fine, except that I would almost certainly never get around to posting anything. (Ironically, I can't recommend the actual New Yorker article on this.)

For now, we're just going to talk about what happens when the establishment press—in this case, particularly the NYT/Politico/Axios—decides that they really want to tell a story.

As we've discussed many times, The New York Times et al., since late in the 20th century, have implicitly—and often explicitly—narrowed their definition of bias down to saying mean things about conservatives and Republicans. Notably absent is any consideration of the biases that come from fear of criticism and, even more importantly, the desire to make oneself and one's organization look good.

Put bluntly, the leadership class of the establishment press is vain, petty, vindictive, and devoid of self-awareness. This led to a mild to moderate level of dysfunctional coverage, with such notable failures as Bush v. Gore, the Iraq War, Swift Boating, and the rise of the birther movement, but on the whole, the system was still functional. That changed in 2015.

From the moment that Trump announced his bid for the presidency to the day of the election, the press engaged in a massive campaign of selective reporting, motivated reasoning, wishful analytics, and anything else they could come up with to support the idea that this man would never become president. They used this belief to justify childish score-settling with the Clintons. We discussed this at great length in real time here at the blog, and I feel pretty goddamn confident saying that the large majority of our posts stand up better than almost all of what The New York Times was writing at the time.

We saw a similar pattern in the run-up to the 2024 election, with publications like The New York Times assuring us that Trump was circling the drain and there was no stopping Ron DeSantis.

After it became apparent that Trump was not just the front-runner but had the overwhelming support of his party, the establishment press corps—for reasons better left to psychologists than to journalism critics—decided to double down on false balance and sane-washing. (Actually, that's not quite true. The publishers, editors, and a few of their more toadyish reporters decided to go along. There is considerable evidence that the rank and file were, in large part, very unhappy with the final versions of the stories that were coming out under their bylines.)

This time, however, whatever goodwill and reputational standing the NYT/Politico/Axios had possessed eight years earlier was gone, and prominent commentators—including some of the most distinguished names in American journalism, such as Margaret Sullivan and James Fallows—were very vocal with their criticisms. This led to tremendous hurt feelings and whining on the part of the press corps, arguably culminating in Maggie Haberman's Fresh Air interview, in which she complained of an "industry" out to get her and her colleagues.

If anything, the 2024 election and the events that have followed have only heightened the reputational damage, and the editors of these publications have been fighting back. Possibly the first major salvo was at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, where one of these editors gave a speech arguing that the press had failed not by ignoring Trump's cognitive decline, but by not having spent even more time discussing Biden's. This was a crude and spectacularly self-serving bit of rhetorical sleight of hand—the old "I'm sorry I didn't insist more strongly on doing things my way" argument.

Not long after that, we saw these organizations and their allies redoubling their efforts to push the narrative of Biden's decline. These stories were told in the most sensationalistic tone possible. There was a slew of stunningly dishonest "political analyses" framing this as an organic grassroots movement coming from the Democrats, rather than astroturf from the publications telling the story. Data points that undercut the narrative—such as Biden's personal negotiations of the incredibly complex hostage crisis while he was handing over the campaign to Harris—are nowhere to be seen.

This is also about conversations that the press corps really doesn't want to have. Perhaps one of the most notable things about this story is how tightly constrained the coverage has been. No historical context or discussions of how previous administrations (Wilson, FDR, JFK, Reagan) dealt with impaired presidents. No attempt to contrast these anecdotes with simultaneous cases where Biden was personally leading complex operations, such as the multinational hostage negotiations last summer. No comparisons with the cognitive state of Donald Trump. No explorations of how these anecdotes affected policy. All of these things would make for a better story, but it is not the story that the men (and we are overwhelmingly talking about men) who lead the establishment press want to talk about.

When the press wants to tell a story this badly—such as with Whitewater—ethical rules start to bend, and standards for things like sourcing start to lower. We are already seeing signs of that in this case.

Check out this extraordinary exchange:

Continued on Twitter.

Assuming CapitolHunters got the details right (and given that they're followed by some of the best journalists I know, I'm inclined to trust them), this is one hell of a tell.

This is being treated as one of the biggest stories in the country. Under those circumstances, shouldn't "eyewitness says incident in bombshell book never happened. Questions veracity of its anonymous sources." be a bigger part of the story? I can't find a single major news outlet that's even mentioned it, but I'd be lying if I said I were surprised. 

Humanoid robots are the blockchain of 2025

There are numerous reasons why a company will jump on a hype bubble. It tends to be good PR and projects an impression of forward thinking. Investors generally reward it and often punish companies that fail to jump on the bandwagon. Finally, CEOs are by no means immune to popular manias and fear of missing out; if anything, it's just the opposite.

The question that you need to keep asking yourself while reading any of these humanoid robot puff pieces (other than who stands to gain from another tech bubble) is: why bipedal? Wheels and treads are cheaper, simpler, more reliable, and generally more stable. If you do need to have a walking robot, it's generally best to go with: "Four legs good, two legs bad." Quadrupeds are simpler and more stable, which is probably why they have found their way into real-world applications while bipedal robots have not.

2025 Is the Year of the Humanoid Robot Factory Worker by Russell Brandom

Later this year, Boston Dynamics plans to put its all-electric humanoid Atlas robot to work in a Hyundai factory. The new version of the bot, evolved from the hydraulic Atlas model that’s been performing viral video demos since 2013, made its public debut last spring. But while the company’s dog-like Spot and warehouse robot Stretch are already deployed at industrial sites, the Hyundai pilot will be the first time Atlas is used in commercial manufacturing.

Boston Dynamics, which was acquired by Hyundai for $1.1 billion in 2021, is coy about how the robot will be used, but the general idea is that it’s designed to be stronger and more reliable than a human worker. “The robot is going to be able to do things that are difficult for humans,” Boston Dynamics spokesperson Kerri Neelon says. “Like pick up very heavy objects and carry things that are awkward for humans to carry.” [Doesn't the very fact that something is "awkward for humans to carry" suggest that a humanoid robot is not the way to go for that task? -- MP]

BD has great engineers and well-designed robots, but they (and Hyundai) have a huge incentive to see this hype bubble continue to inflate—both for the stock price and to promote their other, more useful robots.

 

Atlas will have friends: 2025 looks set to be the year that multipurpose humanoid robots, until now largely confined to research labs, go commercial. Some have already taken their first tentative robot steps into paid work, with Agility Robotics’ Digit moving items in a warehouse and Figure’s eponymous biped shipping out to commercial customers last year.

I'll try to comment on these in more detail later, but if you watch videos of Digit and Figure 02 working you'll notice three things:

1. There is no reason for them to be using legs rather than a cheaper and more efficient wheeled base.

2. They aren't doing anything all that impressive.

3. By comparison, the non-featured, non-humanoid robots seen in the background are really amazing.

Tech giants are also getting in on the trend: Both Apple and Meta are rumored to be working on some kind of consumer-facing humanoid robot. A 2024 Goldman Sachs report estimates that humanoid robots will represent a $38 billion market by 2035 —more than six times what the firm projected a year earlier.

Two things:

1. This is exactly what you'd expect in a bubble. Companies jumping on the bandwagon. Analysts suddenly pumping up their estimates in order to be part of the next big thing.

2.  Given the amounts being invested, that $38 billion market by 2035 (which is itself based on optimistic assumptions) doesn't seem like that big of a number, particularly with respect to Tesla, a company with a valuation of over one trillion dollars, much, possibly most of which is now based on the perceived potential of its robotics division.

The basic promise of humanoid robots is that they will be able to switch between multiple tasks, just like their human peers. It’s a fundamentally different approach from traditional assembly line automation, which builds an entire environment around the specific tasks required for manufacturing. Jonathan Hurst, cofounder and chief robot officer at Agility Robotics, expects its robots to sit alongside that process, not disrupt it.

For the 8,000th time... It has become embarrassingly commonplace to equate multipurpose robots with humanoids, despite the fact that there is absolutely no good reason— from an engineering or economic standpoint— to do so. In fact, it's just the opposite. There are any number of tasks that the human body is badly designed to tackle, including many—probably most—of those suggested for humanoid robots, such as the previously mentioned carrying of large, heavy packages.

“A purpose-built automation solution is always going to be higher performance and lower cost for that purpose,” Hurst says. “That’s great if you have 24/7 operations for that specific thing you want to do.” But for tasks that don’t need to run around the clock, a flexible robot could be more productive.

Hurst deserves credit for honesty here -- for a given task, purpose built will always be better and cheaper -- but he understates how small the segment of manufacturing labor is left, particularly once AI expands the number of tasks a purpose built robot can perform.