Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
Wednesday, May 8, 2024
Dispatches from Georgia
Tuesday, May 7, 2024
Six years ago in the blog, but probably more relevant with the rise of the techno-optimists
This is the one thing you always need to remember about tech visionaries: if you go back far enough, you can find some actual geniuses, but even their stories are mostly lies.
Monday, January 29, 2018
Tesla and the New York Times – – adding a historical component to the hype-and-bullshit tech narrative
The standard tech narrative is one of great men leading us into a period of extraordinary, unprecedented progress, sometimes exciting, sometimes frightening, but always unimaginably big and just around the corner. In order to maintain this narrative, the magnitude and imminence of the recent advances is consistently overstated while the technological accomplishments and sophistication of the past is systematically understated. Credit for those advances that did happen is assigned to a handful of visionaries, many of the tragic, ahead-of-their-time variety.
These historical retcons tend to collapse quickly when held up against actual history. This is especially true here. Tesla always generated a great deal of sensationalistic coverage (more often than not intentionally), but more sober contemporary sources consistently viewed him as both a brilliant and important innovator and also an often flaky and grandiose figure, a characterization that holds up well to this day. This was the man who invented the induction motor; he was also the guy who claimed to hear interplanetary radio messages in his lab.
John F. Wasik plays the ahead-of-their-time card extensively throughout the article.
He envisioned a system that could transmit not only radio but also electricity across the globe. After successful experiments in Colorado Springs in 1899, Tesla began building what he called a global “World System” near Shoreham on Long Island, hoping to power vehicles, boats and aircraft wirelessly. Ultimately, he expected that anything that needed electricity would get it from the air much as we receive transmitted data, sound and images on smartphones. But he ran out of money, and J. P. Morgan Jr., who had provided financing, turned off the spigot.
…
Tesla’s ambitions outstripped his financing. He didn’t focus on radio as a stand-alone technology. Instead, he conceived of entire systems, even if they were decades ahead of the time and not financially feasible.
Tesla failed to fully collaborate with well-capitalized industrial entities after World War I. His supreme abilities to conceptualize and create entire systems weren’t enough for business success. He didn’t manage to build successful alliances with those who could finance, build and scale up his creations.
Tesla’s achievements were awesome but incomplete. He created the A.C. energy system and the basics of radio communication and robotics but wasn’t able to bring them all to fruition. His life shows that even for a brilliant inventor, innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It requires a broad spectrum of talents and skills. And lots of capital.
The trouble with this part of the narrative is that Tesla's Great White Whale (long-distance wireless power transmission) was simply a bad idea. It was not financially feasible because it was not feasible period. We've had over a century to consider the problem, not to mention more powerful tools and a far greater understanding of the underlying physical forces, and we can say with near absolute confidence that, even if long-distance wireless power transmission is developed in the future, it will not use Tesla's approach. No amount of funding, no degree of public support would have changed the outcome of this part of the story.
Just to be clear, even bad ideas can require brilliant engineering. That was certainly the case here, just as it was with other dead ends of the era such as mechanical televisions and steam powered aircraft. Even to this day, demonstrations of Tesla's system are impressive to watch.
Just as the if-only-he'd-had-the-money argument collapses under scrutiny, so does the lone-visionary-ahead-of-his-time narrative. If you dig through contemporary accounts, you'll find that Tesla was very much representative of the scientific and research community of his time in most ways. Both in terms of the work he was doing and the ideas he was formulating about the role of technology, he had lots of company.
Wasik consistently downplayed the work of Tesla's contemporaries, sometimes subtly (saying that the Supreme Court ruled in his favor in a 1943 patent dispute when in fact, he was one of three inventors who had their prior patents restored by the decision), sometimes in a comically over-the-top fashion as with this description of Tesla's remote-controlled torpedo.
Shortly after filing a patent application in 1897 for radio circuitry, Tesla built and demonstrated a wireless, robotic boat at the old Madison Square Garden in 1898 and, again, in Chicago at the Auditorium Theater the next year. These were the first public demonstrations of a remote-controlled drone.
An innovation in the boat’s circuitry — his “logic gate” — became an essential steppingstone to semiconductors. [This is a somewhat controversial claim. We'll try to come back to this later – MP]
Tesla’s tub-shaped, radio-controlled craft heralded the birth of what he called a “teleautomaton”; later, the world would settle on the word robot. We can see his influence in devices ranging from “smart” speakers like Amazon’s Echo to missile-firing drone aircraft.
Tesla proposed the development of torpedoes well before World War I. These weapons eventually emerged in another form — launched from submarines.
Just to be clear, Tesla was doing important and impressive work, but as one of a number of researchers pushing the boundaries of the field of radio.
From Wikipedia:
In 1894, the first example of wirelessly controlling at a distance was during a demonstration by the British physicist Oliver Lodge, in which he made use of a Branly's coherer to make a mirror galvanometer move a beam of light when an electromagnetic wave was artificially generated. This was further refined by radio innovators Guglielmo Marconi and William Preece, at a demonstration that took place on December 12, 1896, at Toynbee Hall in London, in which they made a bell ring by pushing a button in a box that was not connected by any wires. In 1898 Nikola Tesla filed his patent, U.S. Patent 613,809, named Method of an Apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving Vehicle or Vehicles, which he publicly demonstrated by radio-controlling a boat during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. Tesla called his boat a "teleautomaton"
The part about proposing the "development of torpedoes well before World War I" is even stranger. The self-propelled torpedo had been in service for more than 30 years by 1898, and remote-controlled torpedoes (using a mechanical system based on trailing cables, but still having considerable range and speed) had been in use for over 20.
It makes for a good story to credit Tesla as the lone visionary who came up with robotics and remote control by himself but was just too far ahead of his time to sell the world on that vision, but the truth is that lots of smart people were working along these lines (like Leonardo Torres y Quevedo) and pretty much everybody saw the potential value.
Tesla's ideas about remote-controlled torpedoes would take years to be implemented because it would take years for the technology to catch up with his rhetoric. You can read a very good contemporary account from Scientific American that spelled out the issues.
We've talked a lot here at the blog about about the mythologizing and bullshit that are pervasive in the 21st century technology narrative. It's worth noting that those same popular but dangerously false narratives color our perception of the past as well.
Monday, May 6, 2024
Waze Hallucinations
]Kaiser Fung WAZE weighs in here.]
I suspect everyone reading this has had moments while driving where their phone has taken them off what seemed to be the quickest and most obvious route. The natural assumption at those times is that the navigation system knows something that we do not, such as a traffic slowdown just beyond the next hill.
For a long time, I thought that way too, until a few years ago when, while still looking for an apartment close to work, I found myself making the daily drive from South Central LA to an office building across from the Burbank Airport.
I was living just off of the 110 interstate, so the shortest and generally fastest route was to take it up to the five then take that to Burbank. Not only was that the most obvious route, it was generally what my phone would recommend when I first got in the car. Occasionally, though, particularly going through downtown, my phone would tell me to get off of the interstate and jump onto surface streets. This can be a smart move under certain circumstances, there has to be a substantial loss in highway speed to justify the detour onto surface streets when you have a more or less direct shot on the freeway.
Rather than fighting my way across lanes of traffic to make an exit under these circumstances when there appeared to be no slowdown in traffic ahead of me, I started ignoring these suggestions, and I discovered that in pretty much every case, there was no slowdown, my original time to arrival remained more or less accurate, and I almost certainly would have lost time doing what I was told.
Since then, I will start out a trip by checking the times on the different routes according to my phone or laptop and pick the one the algorithm recommends, but if I am familiar with the streets between me and my destination, I will usually ignore these last minute suggestions.
I'm not saying the navigation systems are always wrong or even that simple and intuitive routes consistently beat them. Sometimes it turns out that my phone was right and I was wrong, that traffic that was moving fine suddenly snarls up and I probably would have been better off jumping on residential streets for a weird double dogleg.
What I am saying is the algorithms are sometimes clearly wrong, and, more importantly, wrong in an interesting way. It's not hard to imagine a system producing sub-optimal routes due to a lack of data or the need to reduce complexity and computation time, but those things should tend to produce very different mistakes than the ones we're seeing. In the cases I described, the algorithm is generating convoluted routes sending us to streets with little (and sometimes virtually no) real-time data, routes that would be difficult to justify without plugging major slowdowns into the algorithm, slowdowns we know don't exist. That's the part that raises the cool questions.
I know we have someone in the audience who has worked with these or some other related system. What's going on?
Friday, May 3, 2024
Should we take Goldwater seriously but not literally?
As I said before, I don't want to make too much of this
analogy, but you could do multiple of these ads just on Trump's abortion
quotes.
Thursday, May 2, 2024
Thursday Tweets -- "Where's Cricket?"
Kristi Noem: The politician who has the guts to tell you to kill your dog. https://t.co/u68uxR3b4o
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 27, 2024
Trump VP contender Kristi Noem defends shooting her puppy to death, saying it makes her “tough” pic.twitter.com/BofGjW41Wh
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) May 2, 2024
We'll start with a few for the cheap seats.
Oh dear. https://t.co/sQsrvc6Ema
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 29, 2024
Anyone else old enough to remember this one?
Campaign season is heating up pic.twitter.com/Z4EOblYFXL
— Hank's Old Man (@BarcoDeTontos) April 26, 2024
And my personal favorite.
Kristi Noem should stop whining about her media treatment after killing a dog in a gravel pit. When I did that, I was forced to have a really boring meeting with my parents and the school psychologist.
— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) April 29, 2024
by Stephen Miller
What's more important about this story (and let's be honest with ourselves, perhaps more entertaining) is the way it illuminates the intra-party hatred in the GOP.
Who can we do next? Maybe Kari Lake? Marge Greene? Boebert? Comer? Surely another unifying scandal can’t be too far on the horizon. pic.twitter.com/i3zRfEohwV
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 29, 2024
There it is. All the Noem rivals for Trump’s affection are dancing on her political grave now. pic.twitter.com/P3TixmoQiG
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 28, 2024
Noem is so done.
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 26, 2024
Toast.
Finished.
Over. pic.twitter.com/6ni0S1RmN9
All of Kristi Noem’s dirty laundry getting aired today as Tim Scott and Elise Stefanik light up victory cigars. pic.twitter.com/QAasiOvVaJ
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 26, 2024
I’m struggling to find anyone who sides with Noem on this one. Maybe Ted Nugent. pic.twitter.com/6YBXeueaGI
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 27, 2024
Have I told you how much Desantis and Noem despise each other? pic.twitter.com/xAlvbPeaHV
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 26, 2024
Top Trump advocate Dan Bongino: Republicans are eating ourselves alive. We spent two weeks going after operatives on our own side, we had our own people going after our own people, then we spent a week going after Kristi Noem. I love dogs, don't shoot dogs pic.twitter.com/FrTRORFWrt
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) May 2, 2024
That last one joins a number of other right-wing figures who seem to be getting nervous about the election.
Trump operative Charlie Kirk: How much longer can we blame Joe Biden for our problems when Republicans are making it all possible? pic.twitter.com/oxB4djoUHC
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) May 2, 2024
Bit of irony given the source here.
Ramaswamy: The polls are nonsense. The Biden campaign has been one step ahead of us consistently. Remember that red wave that never came? We are at risk of that again this year pic.twitter.com/UzY4sTIq3z
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) May 2, 2024
More Dems in relative array tweets...
Matt Gaetz now has a Republican primary challenger who is rumored to be backed by Kevin McCarthy as his revenge tour continues. Story … https://t.co/QQgApLCT2i
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 29, 2024
Trump is complaining to people that Kari Lake is spending too much time hanging out in FL at Mar-a-Lago instead of AZ, and is worried having her at top of ticket statewide will cost him the state. https://t.co/bEtYWAXAfv
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 29, 2024
Ron Desantis claims to have enacted the toughest anti-squatting laws in the country but Trump can’t get Kari Lake out of his house.
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 30, 2024
Which brings us back to Arizona and finding a nontoxic message on abortion.
Kari Lake has removed the heading “Pro-life” from her campaign website, and also the language that previously said that “life begins at conception.” Story …https://t.co/JvotD3yMFy
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 29, 2024
Trump says he wants to let states “monitor women's pregnancies so they can know if they've gotten an abortion” pic.twitter.com/q8ICiZ5eRc
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 30, 2024
Trump: Ending Roe v. Wade has been an amazing process. It was very important to get done pic.twitter.com/BMs7cUZ3rL
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) May 1, 2024
this isn’t bad enough pic.twitter.com/nIcnA0pm3c
— the listener & the reader (@thelistenerthe2) April 30, 2024
But not just abortion.
and this was just the beginning pic.twitter.com/wJEcbuddI6
— the listener & the reader (@thelistenerthe2) April 30, 2024
I moved the Gaza tweets to another post, but this one is really more about the MAGA mindset.
The invincibly stupid @charliekirk11 says something very stupid again -- this time about Jews. https://t.co/dookyLhlJC
— Joe Conason (@JoeConason) April 30, 2024
Not actually breaking, but worth repeating.
BREAKING: Donald Trump just said he would not defend NATO allies if Russia attacks. Retweet so all Americans know Trump is going to support Vladimir Putin if elected President. pic.twitter.com/eYnIxH5wiL
— Biden’s Wins (@BidensWins) May 1, 2024
Lisa Rubin explains the various methods Trump’s lawyers have been using to try and keep him from falling asleep but nothing is working. pic.twitter.com/6iG723XvIW
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 30, 2024
Jason Miller has tweeted every month since 2019 that Hillary Clinton is running for president. He can’t stop thinking about her. pic.twitter.com/OzISaUKZ7s
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 28, 2024
The conservative movement did a chilling job co-opting evangelicals, but there are a few principled hold-outs.
Charlotte evangelical pastor in national spotlight, called Trump Bible ‘disgusting’https://t.co/xMIDv6LDYD
— Joe Trippi (@JoeTrippi) April 29, 2024
Every headline in the form of a question has the answer "No."
— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) April 30, 2024
(From WaPo today.) pic.twitter.com/1whQ5PHAJP
New official beverage of the RFK jr. campaign.
It's starting to look like pasteurization inactivates #H5N1 #birdflu viruses in milk. But people who drink raw milk are playing with fire right now. https://t.co/gzZ8CU3CKt
— Helen Branswell 🇨🇦 (@HelenBranswell) April 29, 2024
Trump’s campaign team understands that the way they need to go at RFK Jr is to point out his most liberal positions over the years to their base. Instead, their uncontrollable idiotic psychopath candidate goes around then to attack him on the thing MAGA agrees with RFK most on.
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 28, 2024
Remember when we warned you about Musk?
Yeah, Patriot Front is totally FBI. They dress up 100 FBI agents like white nationalist incels and march them around the country. Sometimes they even get arrested. It’s a government plot. (Many of them have been identified in the media, but don’t let me interrupt the crazy). pic.twitter.com/LA9jzwNKx1
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 28, 2024
And the other population collapse tech-bros?
Maybe someone can help me with today's Wordle. I've got 7 out of 8.
— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) April 28, 2024
_ U G E N I C S https://t.co/P8J6CgZQAn
Enough of that. Let's talk about some more interesting things for a while.
Simple life on our planet originated some 3.8 billion years ago, and since then trillions of organisms across billions of species have lived and have died, the vast majority of them representing evolutionary dead ends. Currently, Earth is home to almost nine million different…
— Grady Booch (@Grady_Booch) May 1, 2024
Deep learning, yes. Transformers, maybe. LLMs, no, not directly. Though LLMs could always be a tool available to an intelligent agent. https://t.co/nJ3EcTJzew
— François Chollet (@fchollet) May 2, 2024
In 1977, the inventors of RSA presented a challenge ciphertext and offered $100 to anyone who could decipher it
— Fermat's Library (@fermatslibrary) May 1, 2024
The decryption involved factoring a 129-digit number, which they predicted would take 40 quadrillion years
By 1994, the challenge was solved
📝https://t.co/9IQRMdzIzw pic.twitter.com/BWGampYG0P
This got me to thinking about films where virtually the entire cast was nominated for an Oscar, particularly Sleuth (though Alec Cawthorne was totally screwed by the nominating committee).
Astrophysicist and Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar used to travel 80 kilometers every week from the Yerkes Observatory to the University of Chicago, where he taught a course attended by only two students. When asked why he spent his time this way, the professor replied… pic.twitter.com/KI1b3CwCgw
— Andriy Burkov (@burkov) May 1, 2024
If you ever think that philosophy classes are useless in this day and age, remember that Claude Shannon took an elective class on logic at the University of Michigan, and because of that he made the connection between Boolean algebra and electrical circuitry, a discovery that…
— Grady Booch (@Grady_Booch) May 2, 2024
Dear Steven, I don’t think you were paying attention.
— Grady Booch (@Grady_Booch) May 2, 2024
Many of us knew from the start that EA was and remains a sham. https://t.co/obnnLFD5Uk
Wednesday, May 1, 2024
Anti-tax mania
Under the proposal, the inclusion rate for annual capital gains realized above $250,000 for individuals would be taxed at a rate of two-thirds, up from the current 50 per cent. Any gains under that bar would continue to be taxed at the 50 per cent rate.
It is projected to affect 0.13% of Canadians. Keep in mind that this means you pay the marginal tax rate on an extra 16% of the capital gains tax. So for a person in Ontario, with a top marginal tax rate, that'd be an extra $85K on a $1.25 million capital gain.
This has a lot of exclusions:
The tax system also provides a lifetime capital gains exemption in the instance of an individual selling their small business or a qualifying farm or fishing property. That exemption will remain and budget 2024 proposes expanding it to $1.25 million of eligible capital gains, up from just over $1 million currently.
The budget also proposes a new carve out for entrepreneurs, protecting the sell-off of some shares in specific instances. This incentive would apply to up to $2 million in capital gains per individual over a lifetime, and would see proceeds taxed at an inclusion rate of 33.3 per cent.
Selling a primary residence will remain excluded from capital gains taxes under the proposal.
So it doesn't apply to an owner-occupied house or the first lifetime million dollars of a small business (like a medical practice). So basically a way to make capital gains a much less tax protected vehicle for very wealthy Canadians. The case that most people give is cottages that were bought 30 years ago when they were inexpensive and now they will sell for over $250,000.
To be honest, is this a big deal? I don't know -- buying a rapidly appreciating asset with great timing seems like a really good example of a public good to tax. Further, the real issue is the huge cost of real estate in Canada. California has 181K people without housing. Canada has 235K people without housing. Maybe the issue is the high cost of real estate and making it a slightly worse investment seems to only help?
But it is impressive how loud the complaints have been. Now I agree Canada is a high tax country with a lot of bad tax policy, but it is curious how a tax razor focused on the wealthy gets so much blowback. And, yes, if you are generating more than $250K in capital gains, after the lifetime exemption of $1 million, it is unlikely that you are in any other category.
Tuesday, April 30, 2024
Trump on Trial - - as always, keep an eye on the secondary and tertiary effects
For around two years now, we've been hammering the point that much of the political impact of Dobbs would be from the secondary and tertiary affects the ruling. Secondary and tertiary is mainly where the unintended consequences lurk, women with miscarriages being denied urgent medical care to prevent serious permanent injury and even death, women who aren't even pregnant losing access to drugs because they might serve as abortifacients, pregnancy care being severely limited because OB-GYNs are leaving states with Draconian anti-abortion laws.
With the election interference trial in New York, something similar appears to be playing out, though probably not to the same degree. The interesting stuff is mainly on the tertiary level. Whether or not Trump is convicted, whether or not the coverage changes voter's Minds about Trump's guilt or innocence, the trial is already having a notable impact on his persona and on his ability to campaign.
Most presidents visibly age in office. Clinton, Obama, even George W. Bush (who was never mistaken for a workaholic) looked far more than 8 years older when they left office. With Trump, it appears to be the trial that does the aging.
Outside of the conservative media bubble, the dominant Trump narrative at the moment is one of a sleepy old man. Whether you get your news from legacy publications, social media, or late night talk and comedy, you have probably heard about the former president repeatedly falling asleep during his own trial, and there's a good chance you've heard the jokes about flatulence as well.
A number of political commentators I trust have been saying for a long time that when everyone finally accepts that this is a Biden versus Trump race, the issue of Biden's age will tend to fade. This new narrative actually threatens to flip it. It is worth noting that while Trump tried to push the insulting nickname Sleepy Joe, it has been the lines about Trump that have recently gone viral.
Probably more important, the trial has effectively paused the Trump campaign just as we are going into the height of the season. Before it started, Donald Trump was averaging 6 days a week of golf and one day a week of campaigning. Almost everyone assumed that would change when the election heated up and they were right. Now, he is spending 3 days a week playing golf and effectively no time campaigning.
Trump has had 4 of the last 6 days off from court. Not one campaign event on any of the 4 days. Now he is getting on his plane to fly to Trump Tower so he can cry in the courthouse tomorrow that the judge isn’t letting him campaign. Don’t see Melania here either. pic.twitter.com/CAddH4CHNe
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 29, 2024
The essential context here is that, in terms of campaigning, Donald Trump is, for all intents and purposes, a one-man show. Joe Biden has the money to dominate the advertising market, can send Kamala Harris to Arizona to campaign on the abortion issue, and has numerous field offices in all of the swing states. Donald Trump has none of these things. No running mate, no field offices, no cash to spare for TV spots. If he chooses to forgo rallies and other events in favor of golf, his campaign goes silent.
And it's not just Democrats who are talking about the imbalance.
Trump operative Charlie Kirk: They‘re saying Joe Biden has a superior ground game to Trump and they’re right. Biden has over 600 full-time staff in battleground states and 44 offices in Wisconsin alone. I do not know if Republicans have the infrastructure to win this election pic.twitter.com/YGkHbessxP
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 30, 2024
There is no way to quantify the impact this is going to have or to say whether the current state of affairs will continue, but, as with so many other aspects of this campaign, it's important to remember that from a predictive analytics standpoint, it's not clear what if any old data generalizes and the more confident the prognosticators are, the less you should listen to them.
Monday, April 29, 2024
Six ago at the blog -- Old Tech April (and why we care)
But there's another more substantive reason. I honestly believe that any conversation about our present day attitudes towards technology, progress, and what we expect from the future basically starts somewhere in or near that 30-year range. The way we think about these things, the narratives, the imagery, the language, the assumptions all largely formed around that time. Add in a few refinements from the post-war era (stretching it a bit to include Hiroshima) and you have the foundation of the vast majority of conversations on the subject you hear today. Listen to a future-focused TED Talk, or an Elon Musk interview, or an effective accelerationist manifesto and you will find almost all of the ideas are over 50 years old and many if not most are over 100.
Knowing the context of these ideas is useful, perhaps even essential for an informed conversation. It can also make you a bit jaded, which might not be a bad thing.
Friday, April 27, 2018
..."and we'll visit the Man in the Moon"
Alberto Santos-Dumont; 20 July 1873 – 23 July 1932, usually referred to as simply Santos-Dumont) was a Brazilian inventor and aviation pioneer, one of the very few people to have contributed significantly to the development of both lighter-than-air and heavier-than-air aircraft.
...
In 1904, after Santos-Dumont complained to his friend Louis Cartier about the difficulty of checking his pocket watch during flight, Cartier created his first men's wristwatch, thus allowing Santos-Dumont to check his flight performance while keeping both hands on the controls. Cartier still markets a line of Santos-Dumont watches and sunglasses.
From Scientific American, 1905/10/14
And from Wikipedia (circa 1900)
When I started on this post, I immediately thought of a song a friend of mine named Jerron had introduced me to, so I did a quick Google search for the title and guess what popped up...
Friday, April 26, 2024
This has been building for a long time, but...
... things are suddenly starting to pop. I'm not going to try to make sense of all. For now, I'm just going to share some quotes and links and a few quick observations.
For years now, lots of people have been getting fed up with the New York Times. I'm not talking about bomb throwers and ideologues, but smart, sober, thoughtful journalists and commentators, people like Josh Marshall, Norm Ornstein, John Harwood and James Fallows who have earned a tremendous amount of respect for both their bodies of work and their judgment. Peers at other major publications are increasingly showing their annoyance. Even at the NYT itself, reporters are expressing their unhappiness off the record. Though n = 1, a high-ranking reporter for the New York Times told me in a private conversation that he was nervous about having publicly made a mildly critical statement about the paper.
While a number of former employees have spoken out after leaving the paper, as far as I can tell, the last high-profile person at the paper who was willing to seriously engage with and address criticisms was Margaret Sullivan about a decade ago. Losing her was devastating and the paper has never regained its internal compass. It has bee a long slide into self-parody ever since but things came to a head today.
I genuinely feel for that reporter. As mentioned before, the NYT is a top down, narrative driven paper and second tier people basically have to write what they're told.The White House's critiques of NYT coverage as described in the Politico article are completely legitimate. And yes, as I wrote here, it is publisher AG Sulzberger's fault: https://t.co/GMu73gJe7C https://t.co/RoMCTTLjsR
— Dan Froomkin (PressWatchers.org) (@froomkin) April 25, 2024
2/ I mean if it weren't for AG basically riding the "shit on biden" button up nonstop in the C suite where would pitchbot be?
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 25, 2024
This quote is buried towards the bottom of this Politico piece. This confirms what many had theorized for quite some time, and further undermines the credibility of the NYT's coverage of this election. https://t.co/QWe3ARAY9v
— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) April 25, 2024
God, the arrogance of a man whose one real accomplishment was being born with the right name.
"In Sulzberger’s view, according to two people familiar with his private comments on the subject, only an interview with a paper like the Times can verify that the 81-year-old Biden is still fit to hold the presidency." https://t.co/Gq4PFkDm1RHarwood, whose work and reputation put him on par with anyone at the NYT, is one of the many counterexamples to the paper's complaints about Biden.
— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) April 25, 2024
Norm Ornstein feels the blame should fall mainly on the editors. Fortunately there's enough blame to go around.Gee John, apparently you, Scott Pelley, Jonathan Capehart, Judy Woodruff, Fareed Zakaria, Enrique Acevedo, David Muir, Stephanie Ruhle, Nicole Wallace, etc. etc aren’t ‘experienced reporters’. 🙄 pic.twitter.com/1qMNYtPdjp
— Maudi63 🌼🌸🪻🌺💐 (@maudi63) April 25, 2024
Publishers do not dictate news coverage, so I take the criticism of AG with some skepticism. Editors do. That is why I slammed Dean Baquet for the emails fiasco and even more for the “FBI sees no evidence of Russian involvement” headline days before the 2016 election. And I would… https://t.co/B74BpjwtXN
— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) April 25, 2024
What I've noticed is that Times honchos often feel free to bully Democrats (and sometimes enjoy it) -- but seem fretful and even fearful about irritating Republicans https://t.co/QZ5yHcvzJK
— Joe Conason (@JoeConason) April 25, 2024
NYT’s Elizabeth Bumiller on covering President Joe Biden vs NYT’s Elizabeth Bumiller on covering President George W. Bush https://t.co/CssVYKklME pic.twitter.com/QpOrIdKdsU
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) April 25, 2024
Someone in a position of authority at the New York Times actually thought that this was a good idea, that when credibly accused of serious journalistic lapses and abuses of power in reaction to a candidate not giving them an interview, the best response was to whine about that candidate not giving them an interview.
Pierce, as usual, puts it best.A free and independent press fills a vital role in a democracy. See our statement on @nytimes and our coverage of the president. https://t.co/msymF8x6xa
— NYTimes Communications (@NYTimesPR) April 25, 2024
Oh, shut up. https://t.co/0oniOjaTCX
— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) April 25, 2024
it is weird. felt more like a statement on behalf of the publisher.
— Laura Rozen (@lrozen) April 25, 2024
A statement which would have carried more weight if not for the previously mentioned "why won't he talk to us?!?" statement.In a statement to @semafor, a New York Times spokesperson pushes back on this, saying "the notion that any line of coverage has been ordered up or encouraged in retaliation for declining an interview, or any other reason, is outrageous and untrue." https://t.co/ALy9CKkk1u pic.twitter.com/oPzRxLkXfV
— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) April 25, 2024
Seems only appropriate to close with Pitchbot.
Kudos to Politico for not using “perceived” to modify “its often euphemistic-laden, soft focus coverage of Trump.” pic.twitter.com/JtBBEnbnPR
— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) April 25, 2024
I have never been a supporter of Donald Trump, but if Joe Biden is unable to placate the New York Times' nepo baby publisher, I will have no choice but to vote for him for the third time.
— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) April 25, 2024
Thursday, April 25, 2024
Dobbs is forcing reality on the abortion narrative
Exceptional call-a-spade-a-spade reporting by TPM's Kate Riga
On Wednesday, the right-wing justices really preferred the safe world of legal abstraction, where they could pretend that Idaho’s abortion ban — which only has an exception to save the woman’s life — won’t inevitably leave women to gruesome suffering.
The Court’s conservative wing tried with increasing and atextual persistence to convince listeners that Idaho’s strict ban still allows emergency room doctors to provide abortions to women in varying states of medical distress, and not just when doctors are sure the patient is facing death. They crafted a kind of anti-abortion fantasyland where not only do exceptions work, but that the narrowest ones will amenably stretch to cover all the sympathetic cases.
They pushed this vision, even while hospital systems in Idaho attest that they are airlifting pregnant women in crisis across state lines, or waiting for them to painfully “deteriorate” before treatment, cowed by the fact that prosecutors could come after them with punishments including mandatory prison time for violating the state ban.
...
“Is there any condition you’re aware of where the solicitor general says EMTALA requires abortion be available in an emergency circumstance where Idaho law, as currently stated, does not?” Justice Brett Kavanaugh lobbed to Idaho’s lawyer Joshua Turner, trying to prompt him to say that Idaho’s ban can coexist with federal mandates.
After trying to prod the struggling Turner to repeat the argument back, Kavanaugh got frustrated.
“You’re the one who said it in your reply brief, that there’s actually no real daylight here in terms of the conditions, so I’m just picking up on what you all said,” he grumbled, rhetorically throwing up his hands.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett heroically tried to salvage the effort, asking Turner: “What’s the conflict?”
“Why are you here?” she pressed.
...“I’m kind of shocked,” Barrett said after Turner struggled under Sotomayor’s gruesome litany. “You’re hedging,” she accused, insisting that his briefs said that the grim emergencies recounted by the liberals would allow patients to get abortions under Idaho’s law.
...
The conservatives’ pique tracks with the grim underbelly of the abortion ban regimes that has been laid entirely bare in the post-Dobbs world. The anti-abortion movement long premised its case on a notion, implicit or explicit, that abortion was the provenance of young, irresponsible, promiscuous women.
That’s always been a lie, but now it’s a lie that’s obvious to everyone: Abortion restrictions have always hurt everyone who can get pregnant, including women desperate to carry their pregnancies to term — the kind of women anti-abortion activists purport to support. And Wednesday’s case in particular centers on the suffering of those women, women who are fairly far into their pregnancies, whose loss is often a personal tragedy as well as a medical emergency.
“Leave it to the states” is the kind of messaging anti-abortion activists and their judicial helpmates love: It sounds clean, neat, reasonable. But when states enact near-total bans, when the federal government somehow loses its authority to block those bans even when they threaten women with serious illness — as Idaho is pushing for here — the reality for all to see is women bleeding out in emergency rooms, pregnant women loaded onto helicopters, doctors sitting back and watching patients writhe in pain until death is closer.
The dog that caught the car has become the cliche du jour, but the Producers may be more apt. For decades, the Republicans had a perfect arrangement with the anti-abortion segment of the party. They quietly gave them wins on the state level that entailed almost no political costs while dangling big politically costly promises (like fetal personhood) they had no intention of delivering. As long as they had a fairly tight majority on the court with at least one good soldier, they could keep their hand out to the evangelicals without ever having to come through. It's possible that getting that sixth justice will prove to be the costliest mistake either party has made in recent memory.
Not to make light of the tragic consequences of Dobbs, but in strictly political terms, McConnell's machinations may turn out to be the ultimate in political poetic justice, a Machiavellian triumph that turned into a Pyrrhic victory for the entire GOP.
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
I remain a YIMBY skeptic -- granny flat edition
[For those who came in late, here's a checklist for (most) of our YIMBY/NIMBY thread.]
One of the main points in our voice-in-the-wilderness housing thread was that, with many of the YIMBY movement's highly touted solutions, the sign was almost certainly right but the promised magnitude was very probably high.
With that in mind, check out this report from Erin Baldassari reporting for Marketplace.
Since 2018, a number of U.S. cities and states have changed their laws to allow more housing in most single-family neighborhoods. Among them are Minneapolis; Austin, Texas; and Oregon and Washington states. All now allow two or more homes on lots that used to just house one.
In California, a similar law, SB 9, was hailed as a way to spur housing construction in a state that has a dire shortage of it — but it was also decried as a threat to the character of suburban neighborhoods.
In the roughly two years since the law’s been in effect, it hasn’t really done either of those things. But that may soon change. For homeowners with space to spare, a few new companies have emerged with an offer: cash for your backyard.
...
But, despite a major housing shortage across the state, the law hasn’t produced much in the way of new supply.
“These types of projects are really costly and complicated for a homeowner to take on,” said Ben Bear, CEO of BuildCasa, the company that bought the Tremaines’ lot. “They’re basically asking the homeowner to be a developer.”
Bear wants to make it easier for homeowners to benefit from the law without having to do all the work themselves. “Homeowners can get anywhere from $50 to $400,000 in cash while keeping their existing home and mortgage,” he said.
Bear said his clients make, on average, just over $100,000.
In exchange, they get a closer neighbor and smaller backyard, and potentially lose up to 10% of their existing property’s value. That’s according to Bear and another company that does these deals.
...
That’s what these companies are banking on: that they can entice more homeowners to sell their backyards. And hopefully make a dent in California’s housing crisis.
There's an unspoken caveat we should probably say out loud, people who have a suitable yard and decide to go for the deal and to whom offers are made, get, on average, just over $100,000. That amount suggests to me that the supply of suitable lots and willing sellers isn't that big.
Houses on small lots are ruled out. Houses in less desirable neighborhoods may not bring in enough money to justify the trouble. Owners of more expensive homes may decide that the potential hit in resale value isn't worth it. Many homeowners moved to the city specifically for the backyard. People with small children or large pets tend to make heavy use of the space, and even those who don't do much with it usually like having it back there.
Obviously, the more housing, the better, but I've always been skeptical of the potential of granny flats to be more than a trivial part of the solution.
Tuesday, April 23, 2024
Tuesday tweets -- politics, math, fun with creepy chickens
To Russia with Love...
We start out with, I kid you not, a MAGA letter of apology to Moscow.
I originally was 80% to 90% certain that Eagleman was a parody account like Three Year Letterman, but I checked and -- God help us -- this is real.
Same shit, different day. pic.twitter.com/8aeHXG1PqZ
— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) April 21, 2024
Gaetz says that he thinks that at least 1-3 of his “corrupt Republican colleagues” will take a bribe and vote for Hakeem Jeffries once a motion to vacate is successful. pic.twitter.com/cT7XlW7rkj
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 19, 2024
Whoa if true.
— Charles Gaba ✡️ (@charles_gaba) April 19, 2024
In fact, whoa if not true but she’s still saying this publicly. https://t.co/aNVMo6dVhL
Russian state TV praises Marjorie Taylor Greene for opposing aid to Ukraine pic.twitter.com/UpxPpwNvDI
— DNC War Room (@DNCWarRoom) April 19, 2024
Marge Greene actually wrote this piece of Putin propaganda into legislation. Directly from Putin’s mouth into the U.S. Congress. pic.twitter.com/IMumU26rAe
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 19, 2024
Russian State TV praising Marge: “Greene is a real beauty. She is a blond who wears white coats with a fur collar. She’s demonstrably heterosexual.” https://t.co/v9HQU5BJCi pic.twitter.com/aZVj23RTN4
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 21, 2024
Rep. Eric Burlison: “Johnson has become - his reputation, his history, his legacy, will be the Speaker who got things done with Democrats. Unfortunately, that’s a fact. I don’t even recognize the person that I once called a friend.” pic.twitter.com/NpDlptY37m
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 19, 2024
I've heard that China was lobbying hard for aid to... [checks notes]... Taiwan
One of Trump’s old pals weighs in on Johnson. pic.twitter.com/NdqIDG0Pgt
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 20, 2024
🔥 @RepTonyGonzales on CNN SOTU: “It's my absolute honor to be in Congress but I serve with some real scumbags. Look, Matt Gaetz — he paid minors to have sex with him at drug parties. Bob Good endorsed my opponent, a known neo-Nazi. These people used to walk around with white…
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) April 21, 2024
This might be my favorite headline of the week. pic.twitter.com/ROYOql70mg
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 22, 2024
The Senate should say NO to the warmonger wishlist pushed through by Speaker Johnson. pic.twitter.com/OJgJx2kHvC
— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) April 20, 2024
If you traveled back in time and told me Michael Steele would become a political voice of reason, I'd say "you have a time machine?!?!?"
Andrea Mitchell-
— BetoMedia (@BetoMedia) April 15, 2024
“If you saw Donald Trump behind bars…”
Wouldn’t his fundraising and polls go up?
Michael Steele-
“Well let’s do it and find out.
Why are we concerned with how much money he raises off of a perp-walk?”@MSNBC (4/15/24) pic.twitter.com/KfBLJs60BT
The other funny part about this is that the hardcore MAGA people in the House and Senate are denouncing the aid package to Ukraine as treasonous while Lindsey is trying to give all the credit for it to Trump. pic.twitter.com/Xk8vKjXgbX
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 21, 2024
In case you were wondering, there really are people on the far right who make Alex Jones look like the sane one.
Alex Jones says Hitler is bad and his fans are...not happy.
— Carl (@HistoryBoomer) April 21, 2024
He's getting ratioed on these replies. Madness. pic.twitter.com/Ljs2fvxcWp
The Republican Senate candidate from Arizona continues to spin like a weather vane in a tornado on the biggest issue of the campaign.
Kari Lake calls on Arizona county sheriffs to enforce 1864 abortion ban https://t.co/7Trl0oEBbT
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 22, 2024
Kari Lake says she is concerned that Hillary Clinton may be plotting to send a hit man after her to take her out. Story …https://t.co/xxU2rpmtlz
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 22, 2024
As we've been saying for about two years now, keep an eye on the secondary and tertiary impact of Dobbs (like preventing women from getting prompt and appropriate treatment for miscarriages).
Reading between the lines here, hospitals appear more afraid of criminal and civil charges for providing abortions to patients in a medical emergency than they are of federal penalties for turning those patients away. https://t.co/y9iUGY0GRj
— Alice Miranda Ollstein (@AliceOllstein) April 19, 2024
“It is shocking, it’s absolutely shocking,” said Amelia Huntsberger, an OB/GYN in Oregon. “It is appalling that someone would show up to an emergency room and not receive care -- this is inconceivable.”https://t.co/3l9Mb3ZAjY
— Harris Meyer (@Meyer_HM) April 19, 2024
In case you were wondering if the Republican establishment was planning on backing away from reproductive issues until after the election.
Adopting a pro-contraception strategy would be a significant unforced error for the GOP. Women are increasingly displeased with birth control, and there’s little evidence it decreases abortion rates. My latest for NR magazine: https://t.co/BnvnWGfqqs
— Alexandra DeSanctis Marr (@xan_desanctis) April 19, 2024
Republicans also continue staking out other notable positions on health care.
Republicans in New Hampshire are moving to remove its requirement for children in child care to get the polio vaccine.
— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) April 21, 2024
It would be the first state in the nation to do so. https://t.co/1KKQnDkb7f pic.twitter.com/zTUjJdqLjQ
Peter Thiel has invested in a “period tracking app that dissuades users from taking birth control” (It was Thiel who bankrolled JD Vance’s last campaign. Vance is on Trump’s VP short list.) 10/31/22 1/ https://t.co/e4OpSuWBF0 pic.twitter.com/rOTE3uYrGk
— jennycohn@toad.social ✍🏻 📢 (@jennycohn1) April 22, 2024
Every candidate's supporters will tell themselves the occasional lie,
but this is like Democrats in '38 telling themselves what a great
mountain climber FDR is.
Editor’s note - There is a 0.0% chance he will testify.
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 20, 2024
I try not to rely too much on these crazies in the crowd. It's too easy
to cherry pick to make the other side look bad, but you'll notice it's
RSBN doing the cherry picking.
This guy at Trump rally in NC today has some kind of conspiracy that a lot of US dollars are worthless but Trump has made sure that his are real and will let him redeem his dollars for gold when he is president. pic.twitter.com/3BVuJtwpfV
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 20, 2024
Dems in disarray...
Remember when we said the money story went from Biden/Harris all the way down to the state house races?
Holy shit, Michigan Dem Party + Michigan House Dems are reserving $18m+ in ads for the state House elections https://t.co/vwhB3hzqKP pic.twitter.com/9DWYw3ZM6v
— Ben McAdams Memorial Acct (@purrtah) April 20, 2024
Lots of Republicans seem to be getting nervous.
Marjorie Taylor Greene to Alex Jones: I’m not so sure that Trump is going to be able to win this election against Joe Biden pic.twitter.com/NxjPCY7PJ8
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 22, 2024
Fox host: President Biden is busy, he's gone to battleground Pennsylvania again and again and again. Nearly 20 trips over just the past 6 weeks pic.twitter.com/4J1iqxOjIA
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 19, 2024
Disappointing...
John Oliver's piece, which reportedly took months to assemble, was superficial both-sides-ism more concerned with complaining skeptics are "killjoys" and facts are "boring as fuck" than in providing the kind of deep-dive factual analysis @LastWeekTonight is typically known for. https://t.co/jlQXoUfVpI
— Jason Colavito (@JasonColavito) April 22, 2024
I find it interesting that @nytimes covered many pronouncements from the Future of Humanity Institute and seemed to take their ideas somewhat seriously. But for coverage of its closure, I must look to the Guardian or the Oxford Student newspaper: pic.twitter.com/SrGmySY1rY
— Critical AI : first issue out! https://read.dukeup (@CriticalAI) April 22, 2024
😧 How on earth could you say this, @mustafasuleyman @microsoft?
— Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) April 22, 2024
LLMs and related techniques have been used to
• influence elections
• influence markets
• generate nonconsensual deepfake porn
• generate so much child porn the NCEMC is overwhelmed
• write fake books,… https://t.co/eoMgaiuInl
"I got past the guard rails."
"Did you hack the system?"
"No, I just used auto-complete."
MetaAI won't create images of real people. But it will create images in real time as you type the prompt. That means it will start to draw someone named "Taylor Sw" but it won't draw "Taylor Swift." pic.twitter.com/NbE6n8fHLv
— Jane Rosenzweig (@RosenzweigJane) April 21, 2024
Here is the only number that cannot be written as x² + 2y² + 7z² + 11w² pic.twitter.com/YuQ4n9MP8s
— Fermat's Library (@fermatslibrary) April 20, 2024
Fun with chickens.
All kidding aside, this self-described Alabama redneck is an engineer with one of the smartest and most thoughtful science channels on YouTube.
When just the name of the jpeg is enough.
Airplane_with_dots.jpg https://t.co/kFWckMVHnx
— Steve McCormick (@Quasilocal) April 18, 2024
Monday, April 22, 2024
If a google search of "finger guillotine" and your product's name calls up multiple videos, you may have a PR problem
At the end of last week, Tesla was Trading under $150 a share, down over 40% for the year and almost two thirds from its two year high, and yet the company is still trading at an inflated price to earnings ratio far higher than any other major player in the industry (including BYD). This, despite a small and aging product line and a development pipeline that seems to have all but dried up.
The latest drop was probably driven largely by this.
Tesla is recalling all 3,878 Cybertrucks that it has shipped to date, due to a problem where the accelerator pedal can get stuck, putting drivers at risk of a crash, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The recall caps a tumultuous week for Tesla. The company laid off more than 10% of its workforce on Monday, and lost two of its highest-ranking executives. A few days later, Tesla asked shareholders to re-vote on CEO Elon Musk’s massive compensation package that was struck down by a judge earlier this year.
I don't remember who it was but I heard a podcaster comment that it almost looked like Tesla had added a nook specially designed to hold the tip of the loose pedal. Judge for yourself.
Tesla's recalling nearly every Cybertruck it's delivered so far
— Morning Brew ☕️ (@MorningBrew) April 19, 2024
Drivers discovered last month that the accelerator pedal could get stuck pic.twitter.com/axmkGEljXx
This was the latest in a stream of what you might call bad press for the enormous vehicle. (Note: exposing your Cybertruck to a stream will void the warranty).
If you buy a lame-named Cybertruck and have small kids (and or a small penis) best to keep them all away from the razor sharp edges (and get a tetanus shot 💉) … unless you fancy getting Bobbitted
— Facts Chaser 🌎 🤦🏻♂️ (@Factschaser) February 4, 2024
(source: https://t.co/tGmuRufvng) pic.twitter.com/hGWk24UP6W
Hidden feature on the cybertruck: vegetable chopper/finger guillotine! pic.twitter.com/1AxpfJTmXn
— Elai (@elaifresh) January 12, 2024
If you must wash your CYBERTRUCK, please do so when rain is imminent.pic.twitter.com/aVd4mDkzQL
— Damion Schubert - @ZenOfDesign.com on bsky (@ZenOfDesign) April 19, 2024
That being said, we cannot stress enough that your CYBERTRUCK will look like shit if you don't wash off dirt as soon as it possibly appears. Just, for the love of god, don't use water or any form of physical contact when doing so.pic.twitter.com/KBl90L07IB
— Damion Schubert - @ZenOfDesign.com on bsky (@ZenOfDesign) April 19, 2024
Please ignore the fact that safety experts warn that the CYBERTRUCK'S lack of crumple zones may make them not only a danger to themselves but also to well-engineered cars with crumple zones, who will be forced to take greater impact force.https://t.co/gP2j2JmeBo
— Damion Schubert - @ZenOfDesign.com on bsky (@ZenOfDesign) April 19, 2024
Please be cautioned that the supercool death metal wheel on your CYBERTRUCK covers may be destroying the tires.https://t.co/QcN54ipehQ
— Damion Schubert - @ZenOfDesign.com on bsky (@ZenOfDesign) April 19, 2024
Be advised that tinting the windows of your CYBERTRUCK may void your warrantee.https://t.co/CDMC39uHuN
— Damion Schubert - @ZenOfDesign.com on bsky (@ZenOfDesign) April 19, 2024
And for the love of god, please don't take your CYBERTRUCK off-roading.https://t.co/5cQdcldJGm
— Damion Schubert - @ZenOfDesign.com on bsky (@ZenOfDesign) April 19, 2024
By all indications, other than a few wild promises (robo-taxis, humanoid robots) that even the cult members are starting to question, Elon Musk bet the company on this monstrosity which has been beaten to market by clearly superior competitors. At this point, the question isn't why Tesla's stock has dropped so much; it's why is it still so high?