The coming of Trump -- what we were saying about journalistic decline and Republican dysfunction here at the blog in 2013 [Part 1]

With few exceptions, the failure to recognize the viability of Trump was directly tied to the failure to acknowledge the decline and, in some cases, near collapse of various political and journalistic institutions. We've been making this point for a while now.

First, why the party didn't decide.  



Tactics, Schmactics -- why I don't buy the latest trope on the government shut down

[I haven't seen anyone frame the discussion in the following way, but a lot of the points I want to make in this thread have been made recently by Josh Marshall and Jonathan Chait. Both are on my fairly short list of daily reads and both have a rare gift for, to paraphrase Orwell, seeing what's in front of their noses.]

You've been hearing it everywhere from Paul Krugman to the National Review: the growing rift in the Republican Party is strictly over tactics -- everyone on the right agrees on what they want; they're just fighting over how to get there -- but having looked carefully at this (and I've stared into this abyss longer than I should have), I'm convinced that it's not just wrong but wrong on multiple levels. I don't think it fits the facts but, more importantly, I don't even think it answers a meaningful question.

Here's a rough analogy. Let's say you're standing in a subway station and a man next to you has a seizure, falls to ground and rolls off of the platform. In that situation, "Why would he want to do that?" is not a meaningful question. The idea of explaining actions through desires only make sense if we make certain assumptions about rationality, vantage and control.

When we're talking about groups, particularly groups large enough not to be able to form fully connected graphs, checking similar assumptions becomes even more important. We have a tendency to anthropomorphize institutions. "The business community wants this." "The Tea Party is trying to do that."   Of course, we know this isn't true. The most you can say is that there's a strong consensus or that the group is following the lead of an individual. This doesn't mean that it can't be useful to analyze groups as if they were individual actors; it can often be the best approach, but only if certain conditions are met. The first of these is that the groups have to be, for lack of a better word, functional.

To be functional, the group has to have certain mechanisms in place and working reasonably well:

Mechanisms to bring information into the system, analyze it and make appropriate decisions based on it;

Mechanisms to disseminate instructions for implementing these decisions, and gathering feedback from members to allow adjustments in strategy;

Mechanisms to check those personal agendas when they threaten the overall goals of the group.

My take is that for quite a while now, the Republican party and the conservative movement have not been functional by these standards. I'm not saying that conservatives are stupid or unbalanced or are acting in an irrational or erratic manner. I am saying that the mechanisms needed for functional operation have broken down and, furthermore, they have broken down in entirely predictable ways, as long as you apply the right principles (game theory, social and individual psychology, voting "paradoxes," collective action and principal agent problem, organizational theory, etc.).

For example, the Romney campaign's inability to process poll information clearly indicates a breakdown in the way that information is suppose to flow through a system. More recently, many of the statements being made by prominent conservatives are clearly cathartic; They can only be seen as the actions of people seeking emotional release without regard to the larger strategic goals of the group.

I've got some suggestions as to why this is happening that I will try to flesh out more later (with the caveat that I have no special expertise in any of these areas and I will invariably get in over my head). I've got first drafts of the next couple of posts, but just to restate the underlying thesis, when it comes to recent developments in the GOP, I think that we are less likely to find useful analogies in the Art of War and more likely to find them in When Prophecy Fails.

We haven't done one of these for a while

A few points on the latest Success Academy controversy:

While supporters of no-excuses charters like Success frequently argue that these schools shouldn't be held to the same rules and oversight as other schools, I've seldom seen the case made in such plain terms;

Eva Moskowitz frequently portrays criticisms of her schools and opposition to her plans as attacks on parents, teachers and/or children;

Between Michael Bloomberg, Joel Klein, and, more recently, Andrew Cuomo, the Success Academies spent their first eight years in the most sympathetic administrations imaginable. Adapting to a reform skeptic like Bill de Blasio has not been easy.


From Chalkbeat:

Success Academy Charter Schools won’t offer pre-kindergarten classes next year after losing a high-profile fight with city and state officials.

The charter network has refused to sign the city’s pre-K contract, arguing that it includes inappropriate regulations about how charter schools manage their time and design their curriculum. But neither Mayor Bill de Blasio nor State Commissioner MaryEllen Elia has allowed Success to bend the rules, and both have insisted that Success sign the contract or lose funding.

In recent months, Success officials have continued their fight in court. But with no resolution in sight, the city’s largest charter-school network will close its three existing pre-K programs and will not open two more planned for next school year, CEO Eva Moskowitz announced Wednesday.

“It is unbelievably sad to tell parents and teachers that the courts won’t rescue our pre-K program from the mayor’s war on Success in time to open next year,” Moskowitz said.

I always tried to do my best on tests. Now I learn the real money is in bombing them

... or more precisely, making the school think you're going to bomb them.

We've been writing a lot about the various often subtle and unanticipated ways that selection effects can affect educational metrics. I don't think we ever considered the possibility of schools paying the students at the bottom of their classes not to take certain tests.

From Paul Campos:

Bar-passage rates at the InfiLaw schools are now in a free fall. (The following percentages are for first-time takers of the July exam in the schools’ home states.) Florida Coastal’s bar-passage rate has fallen from 76 percent to 59 percent, Charlotte’s has fallen from 78 percent to 47 percent, and Arizona Summit’s has gone from 75 percent to an astonishing 30.6 percent.

This collapse has taken place despite the fact that, according to allegations in a lawsuit filed by a former Arizona Summit administrator, all three schools have been offering money to graduates who the schools identified as being at especially high risk for failure, to get them to hold off on taking the bar exam. Indeed, in July Arizona Summit’s dean confirmed that she had called various graduates the night before the exam, imploring them to consider the “opportunity” to withdraw from the test, in exchange for a $10,000 living stipend, that would be paid to them if they enrolled in enhanced bar-preparation courses provided by the school.

The rule for distinguishing the serious Hyperloop articles from the BS

Good reporting on the Hyperloop spends most of its time on infrastructure and cost (mainly infrastructure). Bad reporting spends most of its time on other aspects of the story, such as the technology of the pods, the personality of Elon Musk, and the widely discussed but never specified regulatory obstacles. There may be exceptions to the rule or caveats I should add to it, but I've been digging into this topic extensively and I haven't come across any.

You can make similar criticisms of much, perhaps most writing about supposedly world-changing technology. Issues like infrastructure and implementation costs are routinely glossed over or omitted entirely. The Hyperloop, however, is especially problematic both because of the exceptionally large role infrastructure plays in serious discussions of the proposal and because accepting Musk's cost estimates at face value requires pushing aside consensus opinion on some well established points.

Here's how I put it in an earlier comment thread.

It's useful to step back and think of this in terms of knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. There are a lot of aspects of building an intercity vactrain that are so far outside of our range of experience that any cost estimate has to be highly speculative -- independent experts tend to think Musk is being highly optimistic in these parts of his proposal but they can't say conclusively that he's wrong – but when it comes to things like putting large structures up on pylons or down in tunnels, we have a lot of relevant experience.

Remember this one?

[Michael L. Anderson, an associate professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Berkeley.] said that while some of the infrastructure is novel, the elevated guideway was not unlike existing structures such as the Bay Area Rapid Transit's aerial tracks. For the Hyperloop's tracks, that alone would cost in the tens of billions. As for the pipeline for the cars, he said, oil pipelines are $5 million to $6 million per mile, and they are seven times narrower than the Hyperloop's would need to be. In addition, the Hyperloop track could not change direction abruptly the way an oil pipeline could.

"It really has to be built to much higher standards than anybody has ever built a pipeline to," Anderson said.

As a general rule, elevating structures greatly adds to the cost. Building something to exceptionally tight tolerances (such as those required to maintain a near vacuum over hundreds of miles of track) greatly adds to the cost. Doing something big for the first time usually has the same effect. The third is a known unknown. The first two are pretty much knowns. Engineers have been dealing with these questions for a long time.

Unlike pure science, I don't think it's possible to write about technology effectively without seriously addressing issues like cost and implementation and, in general, viability. Implicit in pretty much every story on new tech is the promise of impact in the near future, and if the tech isn't viable that promise is deeply misleading.

"Life as seen in Dickens' fiction"

Mark Evanier points us to a site-relevant tune from the Austin Lounge Lizards.

Proposed* Hyperloop** connecting Austria*** to Slovakia to Hungary***

Not sure what to make of this (from back in March):

HTT CEO Dirk Ahlborn announced that his company has reached an agreement with the Slovakian government. The plan is to set up the Hyperloop from Vienna, Austria, to Bratislava, Slovakia, and from Bratislava to Budapest, Hungary. These are three of the biggest cities in the area, and traffic between the three of them can be quite a drag. The company announced:

    “Slovakia is a technological leader in the automotive, material science and energy industries, many of the areas that are integral to the Hyperloop system,” Ahlborn said in a press release. “With our project in Quay Valley, this agreement with Slovakia, and future developments with other regions of the world, HTT truly has become a global movement.”

...

    “Hyperloop in Europe would cut distances substantially and network cities in unprecedented ways. A transportation system of this kind would redefine the concept of commuting and boost cross-border cooperation in Europe,” said Vazil Hudak, Slovakia’s economic minister, said in a statement. “The expansion of Hyperloop will lead to an increased demand for the creation of new innovation hubs, in Slovakia and all over Europe.”

The total costs for this project are somewhere between $200 million and $300 million, but if you consider that the project can transport 10 million people every year and the entire system is almost self-sustainable with solar panels, it’s really not that high of a cost.

This announcement got a fair amount of press when it came out, then everyone (including HTT) seems to have gone silent.

And there are some other things that make me nervous about the company:

 

* The specific word used was 'exploring' which covers a wide range of sins.

** Not actually a hyperloop since it scraps the biggest change that Musk made to the original Robert Goddard proposal.

*** It appears that only Slovakia has made a public statement.

Squandering journalistic reputations on the Hyperloop, the Economist edition

I know I've been hammering at this point for more than long enough to wear out my welcome, but when a respected journalistic institution publishes bullshit, the damage takes multiple forms: the illegitimate is legitimized; bad reporting becomes more acceptable ("if ____ can do it, why can't we?"); and valuable reputations are eaten slowly away.

Which takes us to the Economist's initial reaction to the Hyperloop, which managed to get pretty much everything important wrong both in terms of frame and focus, despite coming out at about the story despite coming out after transportation wonks and  conscientious journalists had largely debunked the fundamental claims.

If you read those first, you can make a fun little game out of catching the screw-ups here.

The Hyperloop would carry passengers across California at more than 1,200kph—faster than a jet airliner—allowing them to zoom between San Francisco and Los Angeles [No, from Hayward to Sylmar. Getting the route wrong is a telling indicator of what's to come -- MP] in little over half an hour, compared with more than two-and-a-half hours for CHSR. It would be solar-powered, would take less land than a high-speed railway [and have a fraction of the capacity -- MP], and would be cheaper to boot. Mr Musk’s notional budget is around $6 billion, less than a tenth of what the high-speed train is supposed to cost. [Almost no independent experts agree with this. Their estimates are higher by one to two orders of magnitude. -- MP]
...

That, at least, is the theory. There are doubters, of course. Some worry that passengers will not like the prospect of hurtling through a steel tube, in a cramped capsule [Let's not forget, probably reeking of vomit -- MP], at almost the speed of sound. And there are inevitable questions about safety, though the pods would have wheels that could be deployed if needed, allowing them to limp to their destinations using batteries if the power failed. [just to be clear, if you experience cascading failure traveling through a near vacuum in a pressurized pod at over 1,200kph, having wheels won't be much of a factor -- MP] But, its breathtaking audacity aside, the thing does look feasible as an engineering project. [We need to talk about what feasibility means in an engineering context -- MP]

The tube would be held above ground, on pylons, reducing the amount of land it consumed [the route mainly goes through the Central Valley farming country where the the relatively low cost of land would be small compared with the expense of building hundreds of miles of high tech elevated structure -- MP], and would follow existing roads, which should simplify construction and make maintenance easier. The proposed route features only gentle curves. [That a relative term at these speeds, particularly when you factor in the vertical (anyone else here familiar with the Tejon Pass?) -- MP] And the air cushion surrounding each pod should ensure that the ride is smooth. Moreover, although unexpected engineering problems would be bound to crop up, Mr Musk’s experience—and that of his engineers—with space flight and car design would bode well for overcoming them. [note that none of that experience involves large infrastructure -- MP]

...

Building it alongside existing roads would certainly cheapen things as well as simplifying them, but critics who are poring over Mr Musk’s cost estimates, for everything from land permits to the construction itself, doubt the numbers stack up (though to be fair, both his electric cars and his space rockets have come in on budget).

I'm going to drop the brackets now because this one demands its own paragraph. The level of misrepresentation and understatement here is stunning. The critics aren't poring over the cost estimates; they're looking only at the big stuff, putting in optimistic assumptions and still coming to the conclusion that it doesn't "pencil out," and that Musk's numbers are between one and two orders of magnitude too low.  As for the parenthesis at the end, budget is inextricably intertwined with schedule and, more generally, with delivering what you promised when you promised it. As previously mentioned, Musk is notorious for over-promising. Furthermore, it's not entirely clear how much credit you get for coming in on budget when you've never made a profit despite raking in billions in subsidies.

Quote of the day

From Charles Pierce [emphasis added]:

Implicit in this, of course, is the notion that the truth of an attack is entirely subordinate to whether or not that attack works.

This is how a "post-truth" politics is developed. Tactics uber alles. And Trump's constant presence on our airwaves isn't due to "his ability to garner" free airtime, or some magical Jedi mind-tricks that only he possesses. It's due to conscious decisions by various important people in the electric teevee business to use a larval dictator to boost their ratings. Conscious decisions, therefore, made without conscience.

I have a dreadful feeling that going forward, the coverage of He, Trump will consist in large part of the elite political media dodging blame for their part in his rise. Not that anybody predicted this three years ago or anything.

Let me go a bit further. We have already seen and will continue to see critical (in both senses) coverage of the GOP candidate seriously hindered because journalists are working around the role their publications played in the process. You simply can't have a thorough discussion of the rise of Trump without mentioning the decline of journalism.

Donald Trump as stressor – – Phase 2

Way back in August, I argued that

[T]he Donald Trump candidacy is providing the kind of stress that highlights flaws in our journalistic system.

On the right, we have seen a blatant alliance of the Republican Party and right-wing media in an attempt to force out a popular but embarrassing candidate. On the center/left, we have seen newspapers like the New York Times loudly point out that the emperor has no clothes while carefully avoiding the fact that he is standing in the middle of a nudist colony. (The bizarre alliance between Fox News and the New York Times on derailing the Donald Trump candidacy is a fascinating topic that will have to wait for another post.)

On the analytic side, where we are supposed to be above this sort of thing, more and more of the coverage is sliding into drunkard's light post territory: using data for support but not illumination.

Last summer and fall we were still in phase 1 -- pre-nomination -- which was focused about one third on opposition and two thirds on denial. Now, with the possible exception of Bill Kristol, everyone has accepted the obvious. The question is how the press will deal with it.

The primary problem journalists face in this phase comes from various bad habits the profession has fallen into. These habits relied heavily on symbiotic relationships with their subjects, particularly on the right. Reporters developed various methods for avoiding confrontation while their subjects found ways to help them avoid responsibility.

Now journalists or screwed on both sides . They obviously need to confront Trump but have lost the tools to do so. This would look bad under any circumstances, but since Trump refuses to give them any cover whatsoever, they are completely left out in the cold.

There were a handful in the press who emerged from phase 1 with their reputations not only intact but enhanced. Perhaps the most notable of these was Josh Marshall, whose phase 2 work is turning out to be every bit as good.

Today while taking questions after announcing belated donations to veterans groups, CNN's Jim Acosta pressed Trump on his criticisms of Judge Curiel. Toward the end of the exchange, in which Trump repeated his claims about bias and unfairness, Acosta asked Trump: "Why mention that the judge is Mexican?" Trump answered: "Because I'm a man of principle. Most of the people who took those courses have letters saying they thought it was great, essentially."

In other words, Trump didn't answer the question and Acosta seemed not to have a chance to follow up or chose not to.

As we've noted, quite apart from the policies he's embraced, Trump has shown himself over the course of the campaign to be an emotionally needy, pathological liar. Here we see that he also not only happily launches defamatory racist attacks on a federal judge but impugns the patriotism of an entire ethnic community in the United States.

As I write, the issue is being discussed on the cable nets in terms of why Trump thinks it's a good idea to attack a judge hearing his case, whether there's any evidence that Curiel is "biased" or "unfair." (It's worth noting that Curiel did Trump the inestimably valuable favor of acceding to his lawyers' request to push the trial back until after the November election - this despite the fact that 'elder abuse' infractions put a premium on conducting an expeditious trial.) But handicapping the wisdom of Trump's attack or analyzing them in substantive terms is an immense dereliction of journalistic duty.

The press routinely goes into paroxysms - often rightly so - about innuendos or phrasings that might in some way be racist or suggest racial animus. Here we have it in the open, repeated and showing itself as basically Trump's first line of attack when he is in anyway threatened. That's infinitely more dangerous than most things that routinely focus all the media's attention. Any reporter who gets a chance to ask Trump to justify his actions and doesn't is not doing his or her job. Few cases show more vividly how dangerous a person Trump is.

That's a lot of weather to be immune to

I'm still getting a handle on all the problems with the coverage of the Hyperloop, trying to stake out the boundaries of the journalistic toxic spill by posting items that might be relevant, such as the weather conditions a massive, high tech, precision-built infrastructure project would encounter connecting Sylmar and Hayward.

In the initial proposal for the system, Elon Musk said the Hyperloop would be "immune to weather." Presumably this also means resistant to weathering over what Musk assures us will be decades of service. We are talking about a track built to tight tolerances suspended on pylons ranging from 20 to 100 feet tall. It may be too early in the conversation to go into things like material fatigue but it is at least worth noting that the stretch of the 5 north of Sylmar is subject to some fairly extreme conditions.

Pretty much every year, we get stories like this [emphasis added]:

Interstate 5 Along Grapevine Closed Due to Ice, Wind, Snow
By Jonathan Lloyd

A section of the 5 Freeway north of Los Angeles is closed Monday morning due to potentially dangerous travel conditions caused by ice, wind and snow.

...

The snow level is expected to descend to between 2,000 and 2,500 feet this morning, [the elevation of the Tejon Pass is over 4,000 feet -- MP] with moderate snowfall expected on north slopes in the San Gabriels and in the northwestern corner of the Antelope Valley. Up to eight inches could accumulate in the northwest foothills in the Antelope Valley, and between three and seven inches could pile up on the 5 Freeway near Gorman and The Grapevine amid icy conditions and winds blowing at between 25 and 40 miles per hour and gusting at 60 mph.

There was no estimate when the freeway would be reopened

...

Dangerous driving conditions are also expected in the Antelope Valley, including on Pearblossom (SR 138) Highway, amid snowfall and winds of between 30 and 45 mph, gusting to 65 mph, it said.

These are, of course, surmountable engineering problems, but we're not hearing a lot from the proponents of the system that suggests they've even started to address them.

Journalistic Betrayals -- Is the NYT experimenting with Pinteresque alternate chronologies?

Just so everyone's up to speed on the allusions:

Betrayal is a play written by Harold Pinter in 1978. Critically regarded as one of the English playwright's major dramatic works, it features his characteristically economical dialogue, characters' hidden emotions and veiled motivations, and their self-absorbed competitive one-upmanship, face-saving, dishonesty, and (self-)deceptions.

...

Pinter's particular usage of reverse chronology in structuring the plot is innovative: the first scene takes place after the affair has ended, in 1977; the final scene ends when the affair begins, in 1968; and, in between 1977 and 1968, scenes in two pivotal years (1977 and 1973) move forward chronologically.

And  with  a nod to Andrew Gelman's Class Foghorn Leghorn

"The Betrayal" is the 164th episode of the NBC sitcom Seinfeld. This was the eighth episode for the ninth and final season. It aired on November 20, 1997. The episode is colloquially referred to as The Backwards Episode due to its use of reverse chronology, starting with the final scene and playing in order backwards.

While reading this New York Times piece on the reaction of Silicon Valley to Thiel's machinations, it struck me that, while the story as written was notably biased against Gawker, it was possible to rearrange the paragraphs so as to have a much more balanced account.

For example, what would have probably made the best lede:

Twenty-five years ago, tech coverage was the domain of geeks and trade reporters — people who understood their way around a motherboard, were excited by it and wouldn’t dream of crossing certain boundaries. Now, with tech at its zenith, much of the coverage of the industry is still done by enthusiasts. Combine this with the need to get the power players to come to the media’s conferences and there is a real reluctance to look behind the scenes.

was buried very near the end of the piece.

That, in turn, called to mind our earlier discussion of the twenty paragraph gap in a NYT piece between a GOP claim about the danger of voter fraud and a summary of the overwhelming evidence refuting the assertion. The serious flaws in the article could all have been fixed by cutting and pasting.

I initially thought of this as some kind of literary joke where the articles were told backwards like something from a Harold Pinter play. As I started to write the post, however, I realize that we've seen this sort of thing a lot from this paper. Above the fold we get the standard narrative; below the fold, we get all the pertinent details that undercut it. This is pure speculation on my part, but it feels as if some stories are being reworked after-the-fact in order to conform to conventional wisdom and the papers editorial stances.

Or maybe I just watched too many episodes of Seinfeld.

Too busy to talk about these now but...

Check out Marshall on McArdle on Gawker

and

Krugman on bad election narratives.

p.s. and this from Hamilton Nolan in Gawker on pay and working conditions for adjuncts.

At least it's under $5 billion...

As mentioned before, I'm working on a longer piece on the journalistic failure around the “proposal” for a supersonic passenger train called the Hyperloop (sorry about the scare quotes, but they really can't be avoided). It's a story of hype overwhelming the good work of some serious journalists.

The hype around the Hyperloop grows directly out of the carefully cultivated persona of Elon Musk. Here's a representative sample from the credulous Kevin Roose writing for New York Magazine:

For years, government has been a nuisance to Elon Musk. It's slowed him down. It's required him to spend his valuable time lobbying his Twitter followers for support in the New York legislature instead of building rockets. It's required him to explain his mind-bending technical innovations to grayhairs in Congress as if he were speaking to schoolchildren. Over and over, the public sector has convinced Musk that it is hopelessly lost when it comes to matters of innovation, and that anything truly revolutionary must spring from the ambitions of the private sector.

At the risk of a bit of Gawkeresque snark, Roose apparently has a rather unusually definition of “nuisance.”

Here is the far less credulous Jerry Hirsch writing for the Los Angeles Times:

Los Angeles entrepreneur Elon Musk has built a multibillion-dollar fortune running companies that make electric cars, sell solar panels and launch rockets into space.

And he's built those companies with the help of billions in government subsidies.

Tesla Motors Inc., SolarCity Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support, according to data compiled by The Times. The figure underscores a common theme running through his emerging empire: a public-private financing model underpinning long-shot start-ups.

"He definitely goes where there is government money," said Dan Dolev, an analyst at Jefferies Equity Research. "That's a great strategy, but the government will cut you off one day."

The figure compiled by The Times comprises a variety of government incentives, including grants, tax breaks, factory construction, discounted loans and environmental credits that Tesla can sell. It also includes tax credits and rebates to buyers of solar panels and electric cars. [It does not, however, include the more than $5 billion in government contracts that keep SpaceX in business -- MP]

A looming question is whether the companies are moving toward self-sufficiency — as Dolev believes — and whether they can slash development costs before the public largesse ends.

Tesla and SolarCity continue to report net losses after a decade in business, but the stocks of both companies have soared on their potential; Musk's stake in the firms alone is worth about $10 billion. (SpaceX, a private company, does not publicly report financial performance.)

Musk and his companies' investors enjoy most of the financial upside of the government support, while taxpayers shoulder the cost.

The payoff for the public would come in the form of major pollution reductions, but only if solar panels and electric cars break through as viable mass-market products. For now, both remain niche products for mostly well-heeled customers.
...
Subsidies are handed out in all kinds of industries, with U.S. corporations collecting tens of billions of dollars each year, according to Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that tracks government subsidies. And the incentives for solar panels and electric cars are available to all companies that sell them.

Musk and his investors have also put large sums of private capital into the companies.

But public subsidies for Musk's companies stand out both for the amount, relative to the size of the companies, and for their dependence on them.

...

California legislators recently passed a law, which has not yet taken effect, calling for income limits on electric car buyers seeking the state's $2,500 subsidy. Tesla owners have an average household income of about $320,000, according to Strategic Visions, an auto industry research firm.

Competition could also eat into Tesla's public support. If major automakers build more zero-emission cars, they won't have to buy as many government-awarded environmental credits from Tesla.

In the big picture, the government supports electric cars and solar panels in the hope of promoting widespread adoption and, ultimately, slashing carbon emissions. In the early days at Tesla — when the company first produced an expensive electric sports car, which it no longer sells — Musk promised more rapid development of electric cars for the masses.

In a 2008 blog post, Musk laid out a plan: After the sports car, Tesla would produce a sedan costing "half the $89k price point of the Tesla Roadster and the third model will be even more affordable."

In fact, the second model now typically sells for $100,000, and the much-delayed third model, the Model X sport utility, is expected to sell for a similar price. Timing on a less expensive model — maybe $35,000 or $40,000, after subsidies — remains uncertain.

"Elon Musk does his best Donald Trump impression" -- the invaluable Michael Hiltzik

This one was sitting in the queue for a while, but recent events have bumped it to the high priority track.

There is possibly no one who plays to the press's problems covering technology the way Musk does. He seems almost genetically engineered to take advantage of journalists' weak grasp of science and engineering, their appetite for hype, their craving for great-man narratives.  Further complicating the issue is the way Musk alternates from laughably obvious bullshit to genuinely interesting accomplishments.

There are a few sharp observers who get Musk. The very smart Michael Hiltzik is a prime example.

Tesla brought down by 'hubris'? Who could have expected that?

Musk deserves admiration for his dedication to the cause of clean transportation and the battle against climate change, or at least to shifting emissions from auto tailpipes to electrical generation, which is increasingly fueled by renewable sources. His corporate mission was on display last week, when he unveiled Tesla's Model 3 sedan, which will be mass-marketed at a projected starting price of $35,000, to great acclaim. But declaring one's commitment to the climate and driving the auto press around in prototype cars is relatively easy (especially if you don't let anyone look under the hood) compared to mass-manufacturing actual vehicles.

There's no reason to gloss over some cold, hard facts. Monday's disclosure underscores several disquieting aspects of Tesla's business performance and Musk's management. One is Musk's tendency to overpromise results and make up the difference with hype when he comes up short. Another is the magnitude of the challenges facing the company as it attempts to ramp up manufacturing to meet demand for the Model 3 sedan, expected to hit the streets as early as year-end 2017. (We delved last week into the likelihood of that happening.)

...

Tesla's ability to cloud investors' judgments resembles that of some other subjects of intense media attention. In the business world, there's Apple, but in the broader context, the publicity bonanza Tesla reaped last week by unveiling a prototype automobile that won't actually be available for sale for at least another 18 months was almost Trump-esque. Musk even alluded to the phenomenon during the earnings call.

"Tesla does not advertise," he said. "We don't pay for any endorsements. We do not discount our cars for anyone, including me." Nor did he seem to think that any conventional advertising would ever be necessary: "I think I could see us doing advertising where that advertising was interesting, entertaining, and people don't regret seeing it, which unfortunately is not the case for most advertising."

Why pay for advertising when it comes for free? News organizations devoted reams of newsprint and untold pixels to covering the Model 3 introduction — The Times ran no fewer than eight articles from a few days before to a few days following the April 1 event, and most drew heavy readership.

Latest video in the Puzzler's Guide to Problem Solving series

Another look at doublets, but this time with completely different set of heuristics.