[No, not that Tesla, this Tesla.]
I was meaning to run something topical today (probably something that will run later in the week), but for now, here's another trip through the Scientific American archives.
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
When we say the Mars/Tesla connection goes way back, we mean way back
[No, not that Tesla, this Tesla.]
I was meaning to run something topical today (probably something that will run later in the week), but for now, here's another trip through the Scientific American archives.
Monday, October 23, 2017
Baum miscellanea
A few weeks ago, while working on a blog post (I don't remember which one) something (I don't remember what) brought to mind a detail from an Oz book. As has become more or less a compulsion with me, I looked up the specifics which inevitably led to a random Wikipedia walk, in this case through the articles on L Frank Baum. Here are a few bits of trivia that struck me as worth sharing and/or filing away for future reference.
For starters, there's this sly bit of gilded age satire from the Sea Fairies (1911):
This description of what we might now call a multimedia show from 1908 demonstrates that the desire for cutting-edge sounding names goes back a long time.
We even have a genuinely disturbing example of what we would now call body horror from the 1912 sequel to the Sea Fairies.
I was about to add a final section on the 1901 fantasy science fiction novel, the Master Key, but I think that one deserves a post to itself.
For starters, there's this sly bit of gilded age satire from the Sea Fairies (1911):
"Let's go," said Trot. "I don't like to 'sociate with octopuses."
"OctoPI," said the creature, again correcting her.
"You're jus' as horrid whether you're puses or pies," she declared.
"Horrid!" cried the monster in a shocked tone of voice.
"Not only horrid, but horrible!" persisted the girl.
"May I ask in what way?" he inquired, and it was easy to see he was offended.
"Why, ev'rybody knows that octopuses are jus' wicked an' deceitful," she said. "Up on the earth, where I live, we call the Stannerd Oil Company an octopus, an' the Coal Trust an octopus, an'--"
"Stop, stop!" cried the monster in a pleading voice. "Do you mean to tell me that the earth people whom I have always respected compare me to the Stannerd Oil Company?"
"Yes," said Trot positively.
"Oh, what a disgrace! What a cruel, direful, dreadful disgrace!" moaned the Octopus, drooping his head in shame, and Trot could see great tears falling down his cheeks.
"This comes of having a bad name," said the Queen gently, for she was moved by the monster's grief.
"It is unjust! It is cruel and unjust!" sobbed the creature mournfully. "Just because we have several long arms and take whatever we can reach, they accuse us of being like--like--oh, I cannot say it! It is
too shameful, too humiliating."
"Come, let's go," said Trot again. So they left the poor octopus weeping and wiping his watery eyes with his handkerchief and swam on their way.
This description of what we might now call a multimedia show from 1908 demonstrates that the desire for cutting-edge sounding names goes back a long time.
The films were colored (credited as "illuminations") by Duval Frères of Paris, in a process known as "Radio-Play", and were noted for being the most lifelike hand-tinted imagery of the time. Baum once claimed in an interview that a "Michael Radio" was a Frenchman who colored the films, though no evidence of such a person, even with the more proper French spelling "Michel", as second-hand reports unsurprisingly revise it, has been documented. It did not refer to the contemporary concept of radio (or, for that matter, a radio play), but played on notions of the new and fantastic at the time, similar to the way "high-tech" or sometimes "cyber" would be used later in the century. The "Fairylogue" part of the title was to liken it to a travelogue, which at the time was a very popular type of documentary film entertainment.
We even have a genuinely disturbing example of what we would now call body horror from the 1912 sequel to the Sea Fairies.
Sky Island is another split-color country in Baum's fantasy universe, like the Land of Oz. Divided in two-halves, blue and pink, Sky Island supports two separate races of beings, the Blues and the Pinkies. The two halves are separated by a region shrouded in fog, which both peoples are reluctant to enter. The three travellers land on the blue side of Sky Island, which is a grim country ruled by a sadistic tyrant, the Boolooroo of the Blues. In Sky Island, as in Oz, no one can be killed or suffer pain, but that doesn't mean one is safe: the Boolooroo's method of punishing disobedience in his subjects is to slice two of his victims into halves using a huge guillotine-type knife, and then join the wrong halves back together, creating very unhappy asymmetrical mixed people. This is called "patching."
I was about to add a final section on the 1901 fantasy science fiction novel, the Master Key, but I think that one deserves a post to itself.
Friday, October 20, 2017
When I said retro-TV...
This guy actually made a version of a 19th century television by fashioning an old vinyl LP into a Nipkow disk.
This one works a little better.
This one works a little better.
Thursday, October 19, 2017
The content bubble -- when reality sinks in
[Couple of small edits. Fixed title and added a link I'd forgotten.]
Quick refresher, the content bubble refers to the explosion in scripted series being produced for various channels, services and platforms. We've spent a lot of time on the drivers of the bubble and the economics of why it's not sustainable, but probably not enough on the reactions of people on the inside.
Ken Levine (who either wrote, directed or produced about half of the sitcoms you aren't ashamed to mention knowing) recently made the following observation in a post about the experience of working on a show that had just hit big. [emphasis added]
I suspect in most bubbles, there comes a point when the conflict between the desire to believe and the cold, hard, inescapable numbers becomes so pronounced that the consensus of smart sensible people in the field becomes "this just can't go on much longer." In this case, the realization is sinking in that the handful of winners can't possibly begin to balance out the huge number of losers (particularly when you factor in the rapid growth in PR costs).
Just to be clear, Levine's role in is not analogous to that of an investor in a stock market bubble. He's more like one of the tradesmen who sells high-end goods to the suddenly cash rich investors. The talent behind and in front of the camera is currently benefiting from the bubble and will probably pay much of the consequences for the claps, but they are not the ones green lighting a remake of "One Day at a Time."
Quick refresher, the content bubble refers to the explosion in scripted series being produced for various channels, services and platforms. We've spent a lot of time on the drivers of the bubble and the economics of why it's not sustainable, but probably not enough on the reactions of people on the inside.
Ken Levine (who either wrote, directed or produced about half of the sitcoms you aren't ashamed to mention knowing) recently made the following observation in a post about the experience of working on a show that had just hit big. [emphasis added]
How many shows today are produced and aired in relative obscurity? And it takes the same amount of time and effort to produce a show only relatives watch on a network no one has ever heard of than to produce THIS IS US.
Even the first year of CHEERS, when we THOUGHT no one was watching, we averaged 20 million people a week. The show was slowly starting to catch on to where we thought we were an underground hit. 20 million viewers was considered “under the radar” back then. Now the landscape has become so fractured that certain shows on certain platforms shown nationally are seen by 100,000 people. I don’t understand the economics. How can they afford to shell out millions for shows that get way fewer views than cats coughing up fur balls on YouTube?
I suspect in most bubbles, there comes a point when the conflict between the desire to believe and the cold, hard, inescapable numbers becomes so pronounced that the consensus of smart sensible people in the field becomes "this just can't go on much longer." In this case, the realization is sinking in that the handful of winners can't possibly begin to balance out the huge number of losers (particularly when you factor in the rapid growth in PR costs).
Just to be clear, Levine's role in is not analogous to that of an investor in a stock market bubble. He's more like one of the tradesmen who sells high-end goods to the suddenly cash rich investors. The talent behind and in front of the camera is currently benefiting from the bubble and will probably pay much of the consequences for the claps, but they are not the ones green lighting a remake of "One Day at a Time."
Wednesday, October 18, 2017
The New York Times has a self-congratulations problem.
This isn't exactly a new complaint (you can find similar charges going back to the 19th century), but the frequency seems to be on the rise while the gap between self-image and reality grows more notable. Today's example comes from Farhad Manjoo, who has belatedly decided to join the techno-anxiety craze.
For starters, lots of people were making similar points in 2008. If you're going to drop a self-reference that implies prescience, you'd better be able to show you were well ahead of the curve.
More importantly, there is absolutely no reason to single out the New York Times for its skepticism and critical attitude toward 21st Century tech. I've been writing about this for years now and here are just some of the news organizations that I've cited for doing more notable work along these lines:
The New Yorker, Vox, the LA Times, Gawker, the Washington Post, the Atlantic and Cracked
This is not to say that the NYT is horrible on this – – if anything, they are probably a bit above average – – but they certainly haven't done anything worth this kind of reflexive self-congratulation, and that tendency toward patting themselves on the back represents a much greater (and previously mentioned) problem.
The NYT has fully internalized the idea that, in all things, it is the world's best paper. This can make for an intolerably smug editorial voice, but, more to the point, it can undermine journalistic judgment, encourage childish behavior and make it almost impossible for the institution to face and correct its own problems.
The NYT's cozy relationship with Thiel and thinly veiled schadenfreude at the fate of Gawker may or may not have had something to do with the gadfly site's habit of pointing out the grey lady's lapses. The paper's decision to force an incredibly unsupportable framework of “balance” on the last election was certainly a major factor in and possibly a necessary condition for Trump's victory.
The New York Times has become HAL in 2001. It can't admit its own fallibility, and the evidence of its mistakes is driving it to make increasingly bad and dangerous choices.
A lot of these worries aren’t new. Though Silicon Valley runs on heedless optimism, much of The Times’s coverage has long been properly skeptical and critical of the implications of new tech. Consider the evil of “revenge porn,” or the rise in accidents caused by drivers looking at their phones. I’ve shared other fears: In 2008, I wrote a book predicting that the internet would lead us into a “post-fact” world.
For starters, lots of people were making similar points in 2008. If you're going to drop a self-reference that implies prescience, you'd better be able to show you were well ahead of the curve.
More importantly, there is absolutely no reason to single out the New York Times for its skepticism and critical attitude toward 21st Century tech. I've been writing about this for years now and here are just some of the news organizations that I've cited for doing more notable work along these lines:
The New Yorker, Vox, the LA Times, Gawker, the Washington Post, the Atlantic and Cracked
This is not to say that the NYT is horrible on this – – if anything, they are probably a bit above average – – but they certainly haven't done anything worth this kind of reflexive self-congratulation, and that tendency toward patting themselves on the back represents a much greater (and previously mentioned) problem.
The NYT has fully internalized the idea that, in all things, it is the world's best paper. This can make for an intolerably smug editorial voice, but, more to the point, it can undermine journalistic judgment, encourage childish behavior and make it almost impossible for the institution to face and correct its own problems.
The NYT's cozy relationship with Thiel and thinly veiled schadenfreude at the fate of Gawker may or may not have had something to do with the gadfly site's habit of pointing out the grey lady's lapses. The paper's decision to force an incredibly unsupportable framework of “balance” on the last election was certainly a major factor in and possibly a necessary condition for Trump's victory.
The New York Times has become HAL in 2001. It can't admit its own fallibility, and the evidence of its mistakes is driving it to make increasingly bad and dangerous choices.
Tuesday, October 17, 2017
Apropos of absolutely nothing (I mean, seriously, I can't think of a single 21st century example of this), here's an excerpt from the Big Con.
Not the Jonathan Chait book but the classic 1940 study of confidence games, particularly the "long con." It's the book that launched a thousand screenplays, most notably the Sting. I've been meaning to read this for years. It's not easy to find and I had looked for it in a number of libraries until finally giving up and putting it out of my mind. Recently, though, someone mentioned it in an email and I realized that if I couldn't find it in one of the four large library systems I have cards for in LA County, it probably couldn't be found anywhere.
After all this time, I half expected the book to be a letdown, but I've been very pleasantly surprised. One passage in particular jumped out at me:
From the Big Con by David W Maurer
After all this time, I half expected the book to be a letdown, but I've been very pleasantly surprised. One passage in particular jumped out at me:
From the Big Con by David W Maurer
Most marks come from the upper strata of society, which, in America, means that they have made, married, or inherited money. Because of this, they acquire status which in time they come to attribute to some inherent superiority, especially as regards matters of sound judgment in finance and investment. Friends and associates, themselves social climbers and sycophants, helped to maintain the solution of superiority. Eventually, the mark comes to regard himself as a person of vision and even of genius. Thus a Babbitt who has cleared half 1 million in a real estate development easily forgets the part which luck and chicanery have played in his financial rise; he accepts his mantle of respectability without question; he naïvely attributes his success to sound business judgment. And any confidence man will testify that a real-estate man is the fattest and juiciest of suckers.
Monday, October 16, 2017
Originally I was joking when I compared this to a hyperloop
But the more I think of it, the more serious the comparison becomes.
We are, after all, talking about another "marvelously impracticable" train, but reading through the description from this 1909 edition of Scientific American, it is difficult not to notice other similarities. Like the Hyperloop proposals, this turn-of-the-century air train (at least based on the account here) has the same odd combination of detail and vagueness, carefully spelling out parts of the system while largely passing over the obvious problem areas. There are also the same highly optimistic estimates about speed, capacity, and cost. In the case of the last, the proponents of the zeppelin train even rely on the same argument that elaborate elevated structures would more than pay for themselves through reduced land costs.
The zeppelin train does offer a few notable advantages over the Hyperloop. The passenger comfort is much greater, even including a rest room in each car. The ride would also be far more scenic than a ground level train, let alone a ride inside a metal tube. Perhaps most important of all (since we are comparing imaginary modes of transportation), the zeppelin train looks way, way cooler.
We are, after all, talking about another "marvelously impracticable" train, but reading through the description from this 1909 edition of Scientific American, it is difficult not to notice other similarities. Like the Hyperloop proposals, this turn-of-the-century air train (at least based on the account here) has the same odd combination of detail and vagueness, carefully spelling out parts of the system while largely passing over the obvious problem areas. There are also the same highly optimistic estimates about speed, capacity, and cost. In the case of the last, the proponents of the zeppelin train even rely on the same argument that elaborate elevated structures would more than pay for themselves through reduced land costs.
The zeppelin train does offer a few notable advantages over the Hyperloop. The passenger comfort is much greater, even including a rest room in each car. The ride would also be far more scenic than a ground level train, let alone a ride inside a metal tube. Perhaps most important of all (since we are comparing imaginary modes of transportation), the zeppelin train looks way, way cooler.
Friday, October 13, 2017
"How College Loans Got So Evil"
Warning to video viewers, thanks to the pivot to video, things are about to get really ugly really quickly. The trouble is that while the volume is going to increase sharply, the supply of people with the ability to make good videos is not going to increase significantly. that means the ratio of quality to crap is going to drop even further (and it's not like we're in double digits to start with).
To make matters worse, video viewing is more linear and less, for lack of a better word, interactive than reading. With text, you can skim, reread, jump around on the screen. All of this makes it easier to determine whether something is worth your time.
My advice (which I follow myself) is to stick with trusted referrals and proven content producers. Recommendation algorithms aren't very good now and they will only get worse as average quality drops.
Fortunately, even the most selective viewers can find enough to fill their time. I have a special fondness for what might be called the Daily Show kids, millennials who came of age wanting to be Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert. Smart, funny, irreverent but socially conscious (sometimes lapsing into preachy). They also embrace Stewart's and Oliver's emphasis on solid research and often take it a step further (check out the corner of the screen in the video below).
This segment from Adam Conover is a good example of what happens when everything works: the topic is important; the information is clearly but entertainingly presented ; and the central conceit is skillfully executed and perfectly apt.
And if you do run out of video, trying reading something. That's what the young people are doing.
To make matters worse, video viewing is more linear and less, for lack of a better word, interactive than reading. With text, you can skim, reread, jump around on the screen. All of this makes it easier to determine whether something is worth your time.
My advice (which I follow myself) is to stick with trusted referrals and proven content producers. Recommendation algorithms aren't very good now and they will only get worse as average quality drops.
Fortunately, even the most selective viewers can find enough to fill their time. I have a special fondness for what might be called the Daily Show kids, millennials who came of age wanting to be Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert. Smart, funny, irreverent but socially conscious (sometimes lapsing into preachy). They also embrace Stewart's and Oliver's emphasis on solid research and often take it a step further (check out the corner of the screen in the video below).
This segment from Adam Conover is a good example of what happens when everything works: the topic is important; the information is clearly but entertainingly presented ; and the central conceit is skillfully executed and perfectly apt.
And if you do run out of video, trying reading something. That's what the young people are doing.
Thursday, October 12, 2017
You probably never thought of a hobbyist market for x-ray machines
Couple of points.
For starters, wow! I knew people were way too nonchalant about the potential dangers of radiation in the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries, but wow!
Second (and, yes, I know I've been hitting this point a lot), it is almost impossible to imagine how amazing and world-changing the technological innovations of this period were. Adults who picked up this copy of Scientific American in 1896 would probably remember the first time they saw a light bulb or a telephone or a moving picture. While being born in a horse-and-buggy age is an overused cliché, it is also very difficult to avoid. For these people, the world was not only suddenly invaded by incredible machines, strange sights, and even new foods, it was also permeated by invisible rays that could actually show you the inside of your body.
1896 was also the year that a fellow named Marconi got a patent on one of his inventions, but that's a story for another time.
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
Repost 3: The Republicans' 3 x 3 existential threat
[Given recent events and their accelerating pace, I think there’s a good chance in the next few days we’ll be discussing the implications of intraparty war in the GOP. In the meantime, I decided to bump our regularly scheduled programming (which, consisting of late 19th/early 20th century technology stories, was not particularly topical) and repost a thread we ran a while back on the dynamics of the relationship between Trump and the Republican Party. Obviously, there are things I would treat differently if writing these today, but I’m still willing to stand by the general points, and they should serve as a good starting point for the next conversation.]
From August 22, 2017.
I've argued previously that Donald Trump presents and existential threat to the Republican Party. I know this can sound overheated and perhaps even a bit crazy. There are few American institutions as long-standing and deeply entrenched as are the Democratic and Republican parties. Proposing that one of them might not be around 10 years from now beggars the imagination and if this story started and stopped with Donald Trump, it would be silly to suggest we were on the verge of a political cataclysm.
But, just as Trump's rise did not occur in a vacuum, neither will his fall. We discussed earlier how Donald Trump has the power to drive a wedge between the Republican Party and a significant segment of its base [I wrote this before the departure of Steve Bannon. That may diminish Trump's ability to create this rift but I don't think it reduces the chances of the rift happening. – – M.P.]. This is the sort of thing that can profoundly damage a political party, possibly locking it into a minority status for a long time, but normally the wound would not be fatal. These, however, are not normal times.
The Republican Party of 2017 faces a unique combination of interrelated challenges, each of which is at a historic level and the combination of which would present an unprecedented threat to this or any US political party. The following list is not intended to be exhaustive, but it hits the main points.
The GOP currently has to deal with extraordinary political scandals, a stunningly unpopular agenda and daunting demographic trends. To keep things symmetric and easy to remember, let's break each one of these down to three components (keeping in mind that the list may change).
With the scandals:
1. Money – – Even with the most generous reading imaginable, there is no question that Trump has a decades long record of screwing people over, skirting the law, and dealing with disreputable and sometimes criminal elements. At least some of these dealings have been with the Russian mafia, oligarchs, and figures tied in with the Kremlin which leads us to…
2. The hacking of the election – – This one is also beyond dispute. It happened and it may have put Donald Trump into the White House. At this point, we have plenty of quid and plenty of quo; if Mueller can nail down pro, we will have a complete set.
3. And the cover-up – – As Josh Marshall and many others have pointed out, the phrase "it's not the crime; it's the cover-up" is almost never true. That said, coverups can provide tipping points and handholds for investigators, not to mention expanding the list of culprits.
With the agenda:
1. Health care – – By some standards the most unpopular major policy proposal in living memory that a party in power has invested so deeply in. Furthermore, the pushback against the initiative has essentially driven congressional Republicans into hiding from their own constituents for the past half year. As mentioned before, this has the potential to greatly undermine the relationship between GOP senators and representatives and the voters.
2. Tax cuts for the wealthy – – As said many times, Donald Trump has a gift for making the subtle plain, the plain obvious, and the obvious undeniable. In the past, Republicans were able to get a great deal of upward redistribution of the wealth past the voters through obfuscation and clever branding, but we have reached the point where simply calling something "tax reform" is no longer enough to sell tax proposals so regressive that even the majority of Republicans oppose them.
3. Immigration (subject to change) – – the race for third place in this list is fairly competitive (education seems to be coming up on the outside), but the administration's immigration policies (which are the direct result of decades of xenophobic propaganda from conservative media) have already done tremendous damage, caused great backlash, and are whitening the gap between the GOP and the Hispanic community, which leads us to…
Demographics:
As Lindsey Graham has observed, they simply are not making enough new old white men to keep the GOP's strategy going much longer, but the Trump era rebranding of the Republican Party only exacerbates the problems with women, young people, and pretty much anyone who isn't white.
Maybe I am missing a historical precedent here, but I can't think of another time that either the Democrats or the Republicans were this vulnerable on all three of these fronts. This does not mean that the party is doomed or even that, with the right breaks, it can't maintain a hold on some part of the government. What it does mean is that the institution is especially fragile at the moment. A mortal blow may not come, but we can no longer call it unthinkable.
From August 22, 2017.
I've argued previously that Donald Trump presents and existential threat to the Republican Party. I know this can sound overheated and perhaps even a bit crazy. There are few American institutions as long-standing and deeply entrenched as are the Democratic and Republican parties. Proposing that one of them might not be around 10 years from now beggars the imagination and if this story started and stopped with Donald Trump, it would be silly to suggest we were on the verge of a political cataclysm.
But, just as Trump's rise did not occur in a vacuum, neither will his fall. We discussed earlier how Donald Trump has the power to drive a wedge between the Republican Party and a significant segment of its base [I wrote this before the departure of Steve Bannon. That may diminish Trump's ability to create this rift but I don't think it reduces the chances of the rift happening. – – M.P.]. This is the sort of thing that can profoundly damage a political party, possibly locking it into a minority status for a long time, but normally the wound would not be fatal. These, however, are not normal times.
The Republican Party of 2017 faces a unique combination of interrelated challenges, each of which is at a historic level and the combination of which would present an unprecedented threat to this or any US political party. The following list is not intended to be exhaustive, but it hits the main points.
The GOP currently has to deal with extraordinary political scandals, a stunningly unpopular agenda and daunting demographic trends. To keep things symmetric and easy to remember, let's break each one of these down to three components (keeping in mind that the list may change).
With the scandals:
1. Money – – Even with the most generous reading imaginable, there is no question that Trump has a decades long record of screwing people over, skirting the law, and dealing with disreputable and sometimes criminal elements. At least some of these dealings have been with the Russian mafia, oligarchs, and figures tied in with the Kremlin which leads us to…
2. The hacking of the election – – This one is also beyond dispute. It happened and it may have put Donald Trump into the White House. At this point, we have plenty of quid and plenty of quo; if Mueller can nail down pro, we will have a complete set.
3. And the cover-up – – As Josh Marshall and many others have pointed out, the phrase "it's not the crime; it's the cover-up" is almost never true. That said, coverups can provide tipping points and handholds for investigators, not to mention expanding the list of culprits.
With the agenda:
1. Health care – – By some standards the most unpopular major policy proposal in living memory that a party in power has invested so deeply in. Furthermore, the pushback against the initiative has essentially driven congressional Republicans into hiding from their own constituents for the past half year. As mentioned before, this has the potential to greatly undermine the relationship between GOP senators and representatives and the voters.
2. Tax cuts for the wealthy – – As said many times, Donald Trump has a gift for making the subtle plain, the plain obvious, and the obvious undeniable. In the past, Republicans were able to get a great deal of upward redistribution of the wealth past the voters through obfuscation and clever branding, but we have reached the point where simply calling something "tax reform" is no longer enough to sell tax proposals so regressive that even the majority of Republicans oppose them.
3. Immigration (subject to change) – – the race for third place in this list is fairly competitive (education seems to be coming up on the outside), but the administration's immigration policies (which are the direct result of decades of xenophobic propaganda from conservative media) have already done tremendous damage, caused great backlash, and are whitening the gap between the GOP and the Hispanic community, which leads us to…
Demographics:
As Lindsey Graham has observed, they simply are not making enough new old white men to keep the GOP's strategy going much longer, but the Trump era rebranding of the Republican Party only exacerbates the problems with women, young people, and pretty much anyone who isn't white.
Maybe I am missing a historical precedent here, but I can't think of another time that either the Democrats or the Republicans were this vulnerable on all three of these fronts. This does not mean that the party is doomed or even that, with the right breaks, it can't maintain a hold on some part of the government. What it does mean is that the institution is especially fragile at the moment. A mortal blow may not come, but we can no longer call it unthinkable.
Repost 2: The nuclear moose option
[Given recent events and their accelerating pace, I think there’s a good chance in the next few days we’ll be discussing the implications of intraparty war in the GOP. In the meantime, I decided to bump our regularly scheduled programming (which, consisting of late 19th/early 20th century technology stories, was not particularly topical) and repost a thread we ran a while back on the dynamics of the relationship between Trump and the Republican Party. Obviously, there are things I would treat differently if writing these today, but I’m still willing to stand by the general points, and they should serve as a good starting point for the next conversation.]
From July 28, 2017.
[Just to be clear, I am not claiming that any of the following is inevitable or even likely, but I do think it falls in the category of things to consider.]
We've been arguing for quite a while now that the conservative movement's social engineering experiment has achieved its considerable success over the past few decades at the cost of exposing the party to genuinely existential threats. I had meant to precede this post with a bit more foundation, but events seem to be accelerating and I need to get this down.
Political parties have survived major rifts before. We could find numerous notable examples for both Democrats and Republicans, and, in all of those cases, the wounds were real but temporary. However, these divisions, though bitter, took place in broad-based relatively healthy political parties, I would argue that the Republican Party of 2017, though nominally controlling most of the government, is perhaps uniquely fragile and cannot survive a nasty internal conflict.
Here is a scenario of how such a conflict can arise and grow into an existential threat. I won't say that it is probable, but I think each link in the chain is definitely plausible. This is certainly true for the first link since between the time I outlined the concatenation of events and the time I sat down to write this, the first one had already happened. (That's why this is something of a rush job.)
First, a bit of background from our game theory post back in February (Charles Schumer predicted a break between Trump and the party in three or four months. I said a year of two. Perhaps we should have split the difference):
With that in mind, consider the following possible developments:
1. Trump fires Reince Priebus. Keep in mind, the choice of Priebus was (probably accurately) seen as an early indicator that, for all of his outsider talk, Trump intended to run a partisan administration with close ties to the Republican establishment. The firing has to be seen as a weakening of that relationship;
2. After ever increasing harassment, Jeff Sessions jumps or is pushed out of the administration;
3. This, along with other transgressions, prompts Graham and a few other Republican senators to start actively pushing for investigations into and greater accountability from the White House;
4. The strongest remaining link between the administration and the GOP establishment, vice president Mike Pence, is finding it increasingly difficult to keep his skirts clean from the Russia scandals. He does his best to distance himself and, as a result, further marginalizes his role;
5. Further developments in the Russia scandal exacerbate existing tensions;
6. While Trump does have his loyalists and the number of Republicans willing to publicly attack him remains fairly small, the majority of the party starts to see the president as a dangerous liability and attempts to distance itself from him, whenever possible refusing to take sides;
7. Angry at the lack of loyalty and feeling pressure from the investigations, Trump escalates his attacks on the GOP;
8. (Any of the following)
a. Trump fires Mueller
b. Mueller or some other investigator uncovers a major criminal conspiracy involving Trump, his family, or his business
c. Polls start showing serious erosion in support for Trump and the GOP in the conservative base
d. Things just keep getting ugly
9. At some major events such as a large rally or even the state of the union address, Donald Trump announces that, in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt, he has realized that both parties are hopelessly corrupt and the only way to drain the swamp is by starting a third-party. So it is his intention to run in 2020 as the candidate for the MAGA Party and to field candidates in every major statewide contest.
Now, I want to be careful about how we frame this. Trump forming a third party remains unlikely, but it would not that unlikely if we hit events 1 through 8 and, taken individually, none of these events seem all that improbable.
I should probably polish this post a bit more, but given the pace of things these days, you have to make your predictions as quickly as possible.
From July 28, 2017.
[Just to be clear, I am not claiming that any of the following is inevitable or even likely, but I do think it falls in the category of things to consider.]
We've been arguing for quite a while now that the conservative movement's social engineering experiment has achieved its considerable success over the past few decades at the cost of exposing the party to genuinely existential threats. I had meant to precede this post with a bit more foundation, but events seem to be accelerating and I need to get this down.
Political parties have survived major rifts before. We could find numerous notable examples for both Democrats and Republicans, and, in all of those cases, the wounds were real but temporary. However, these divisions, though bitter, took place in broad-based relatively healthy political parties, I would argue that the Republican Party of 2017, though nominally controlling most of the government, is perhaps uniquely fragile and cannot survive a nasty internal conflict.
Here is a scenario of how such a conflict can arise and grow into an existential threat. I won't say that it is probable, but I think each link in the chain is definitely plausible. This is certainly true for the first link since between the time I outlined the concatenation of events and the time I sat down to write this, the first one had already happened. (That's why this is something of a rush job.)
First, a bit of background from our game theory post back in February (Charles Schumer predicted a break between Trump and the party in three or four months. I said a year of two. Perhaps we should have split the difference):
The relationship between the Trump/Bannon White House and the GOP legislature is perhaps uniquely suited for a textbook game theory analysis. In pretty much all previous cases, relationships between presidents and Congress have been complicated by numerous factors other than naked self-interest--ideological, partisan, personal, cultural--but this time it's different. With a few isolated exceptions, there is no deeply held common ground between the White House and Capitol Hill. The current arrangement is strictly based on people getting things they care about in exchange for things they don't.
However, while the relationship is simple in those terms, it is dauntingly complex in terms of the pros and cons of staying versus going. If the Republicans stand with Trump, he will probably sign any piece of legislation that comes across his desk (with this White House, "probably" is always a necessary qualifier). This comes at the cost of losing their ability to distance themselves from and increasingly unpopular and scandal-ridden administration.
Some of that distance might be clawed back by public criticism of the president and by high-profile hearings, but those steps bring even greater risks. Trump has no interest in the GOP's legislative agenda, no loyalty to the party, and no particular affection for its leaders. Worse still, as Josh Marshall has frequently noted, Trump has the bully's instinctive tendency to go after the vulnerable. There is a limit to the damage he can inflict on the Democrats, but he is in a position to literally destroy the Republican Party.
We often hear this framed in terms of Trump supporters making trouble in the primaries, but that's pre-2016 thinking. This goes far deeper. In addition to a seemingly total lack of interpersonal, temperamental, and rhetorical constraints, Trump is highly popular with a large segment of the base. In the event of an intra-party war, some of this support would undoubtedly peel away, but a substantial portion would stay.
Keep in mind, all of this takes place in the context of a troubling demographic tide for the Republicans. Their strategic response to this has been to maximize turnout within the party while suppressing the vote on the other side. It has been a shrewd strategy but it leaves little margin for error. Trump has the ability to drive a wedge between a significant chunk of the base and the GOP for at least the next few cycles, possibly enough to threaten the viability of the party.
With that in mind, consider the following possible developments:
1. Trump fires Reince Priebus. Keep in mind, the choice of Priebus was (probably accurately) seen as an early indicator that, for all of his outsider talk, Trump intended to run a partisan administration with close ties to the Republican establishment. The firing has to be seen as a weakening of that relationship;
2. After ever increasing harassment, Jeff Sessions jumps or is pushed out of the administration;
3. This, along with other transgressions, prompts Graham and a few other Republican senators to start actively pushing for investigations into and greater accountability from the White House;
4. The strongest remaining link between the administration and the GOP establishment, vice president Mike Pence, is finding it increasingly difficult to keep his skirts clean from the Russia scandals. He does his best to distance himself and, as a result, further marginalizes his role;
5. Further developments in the Russia scandal exacerbate existing tensions;
6. While Trump does have his loyalists and the number of Republicans willing to publicly attack him remains fairly small, the majority of the party starts to see the president as a dangerous liability and attempts to distance itself from him, whenever possible refusing to take sides;
7. Angry at the lack of loyalty and feeling pressure from the investigations, Trump escalates his attacks on the GOP;
8. (Any of the following)
a. Trump fires Mueller
b. Mueller or some other investigator uncovers a major criminal conspiracy involving Trump, his family, or his business
c. Polls start showing serious erosion in support for Trump and the GOP in the conservative base
d. Things just keep getting ugly
9. At some major events such as a large rally or even the state of the union address, Donald Trump announces that, in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt, he has realized that both parties are hopelessly corrupt and the only way to drain the swamp is by starting a third-party. So it is his intention to run in 2020 as the candidate for the MAGA Party and to field candidates in every major statewide contest.
Now, I want to be careful about how we frame this. Trump forming a third party remains unlikely, but it would not that unlikely if we hit events 1 through 8 and, taken individually, none of these events seem all that improbable.
I should probably polish this post a bit more, but given the pace of things these days, you have to make your predictions as quickly as possible.
Repost 1: GOP Game Theory -- things are still different
From February 28, 2017.
[Given recent events and their accelerating pace, I think there’s a good chance in the next few days we’ll be discussing the implications of intraparty war in the GOP. In the meantime, I decided to bump our regularly scheduled programming (which, consisting of late 19th/early 20th century technology stories, was not particularly topical) and repost a thread we ran a while back on the dynamics of the relationship between Trump and the Republican Party. Obviously, there are things I would treat differently if writing these today, but I’m still willing to stand by the general points, and they should serve as a good starting point for the next conversation.]
"It's probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in."
LBJ on FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover,
Let's start with a prediction:
Ed Kilgore, however, points out that Trump may not be as toxic as many people think:
The relationship between the Trump/Bannon White House and the GOP legislature is perhaps uniquely suited for a textbook game theory analysis. In pretty much all previous cases, relationships between presidents and Congress have been complicated by numerous factors other than naked self-interest--ideological, partisan, personal, cultural--but this time it's different. With a few isolated exceptions, there is no deeply held common ground between the White House and Capitol Hill. The current arrangement is strictly based on people getting things they care about in exchange for things they don't.
However, while the relationship is simple in those terms, it is dauntingly complex in terms of the pros and cons of staying versus going. If the Republicans stand with Trump, he will probably sign any piece of legislation that comes across his desk (with this White House, "probably" is always a necessary qualifier). This comes at the cost of losing their ability to distance themselves from and increasingly unpopular and scandal-ridden administration.
Some of that distance might be clawed back by public criticism of the president and by high-profile hearings, but those steps bring even greater risks. Trump has no interest in the GOP's legislative agenda, no loyalty to the party, and no particular affection for its leaders. Worse still, as Josh Marshall has frequently noted, Trump has the bully's instinctive tendency to go after the vulnerable. There is a limit to the damage he can inflict on the Democrats, but he is in a position to literally destroy the Republican Party.
We often hear this framed in terms of Trump supporters making trouble in the primaries, but that's pre-2016 thinking. This goes far deeper. In addition to a seemingly total lack of interpersonal, temperamental, and rhetorical constraints, Trump is highly popular with a large segment of the base. In the event of an intra-party war, some of this support would undoubtedly peel away, but a substantial portion would stay.
Keep in mind, all of this takes place in the context of a troubling demographic tide for the Republicans. Their strategic response to this has been to maximize turnout within the party while suppressing the vote on the other side. It has been a shrewd strategy but it leaves little margin for error. Trump has the ability to drive a wedge between a significant chunk of the base and the GOP for at least the next few cycles, possibly enough to threaten the viability of the party.
The closest analogy that comes to mind is the Democrats and Vietnam, but that was a rift in a big-tent loosely organized party. The 21st Century GOP is a small tent party that depends on discipline and entrenchment strategies. It's not clear that it would survive a civil war.
Given that, I suspect the next year or two will prove Schumer wrong. There is some evidence that the president's polling has stabilized, perhaps even rebounded a bit, but even if the numbers go back into free fall, Republicans in the House and the Senate will be extremely reluctant to break from Trump with anything more than isolated or cosmetic challenges.
This isn't just a question of not wanting Trump outside the tent pissing in; this is a question of not wanting Trump outside the tent tossing grenades.
[Given recent events and their accelerating pace, I think there’s a good chance in the next few days we’ll be discussing the implications of intraparty war in the GOP. In the meantime, I decided to bump our regularly scheduled programming (which, consisting of late 19th/early 20th century technology stories, was not particularly topical) and repost a thread we ran a while back on the dynamics of the relationship between Trump and the Republican Party. Obviously, there are things I would treat differently if writing these today, but I’m still willing to stand by the general points, and they should serve as a good starting point for the next conversation.]
"It's probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in."
LBJ on FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover,
Let's start with a prediction:
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) predicted on Tuesday that Republicans will split with President Trump within months unless the administration changes course.0
"My prediction is he keeps up on this path...within three, four months you're going to see a whole lot of Republicans breaking with him," Schumer said during an interview with ABC's "The View."
Schumer argued while most GOP lawmakers aren't yet willing to break publicly from the White House, they are privately having "real problems" with Trump's policies in his first month.
"A lot of the Republicans, they're mainstream people. ... They will feel they have no choice but to break with him," he said.
GOP leadership are largely dismissing any early signs of discord between Congress and the White House as they slowly try to make progress on an ambitious agenda.
Ed Kilgore, however, points out that Trump may not be as toxic as many people think:
So while it is hard to deny that Trump is amazingly unpopular for a new president, unless his approval ratings trend farther down the way even those of popular presidents typically do, his party may not suffer the kind of humiliation Democrats experienced in 2010. For all the shock Trump has consistently inspired with his behavior as president, there’s not much objective reason for Republican politicians to panic and begin abandoning him based on his current public standing. But in this as in so many other respects, we are talking about an unprecedented chief executive, so the collapse some in the media and the Democratic Party perceive as already underway could yet arrive.
The relationship between the Trump/Bannon White House and the GOP legislature is perhaps uniquely suited for a textbook game theory analysis. In pretty much all previous cases, relationships between presidents and Congress have been complicated by numerous factors other than naked self-interest--ideological, partisan, personal, cultural--but this time it's different. With a few isolated exceptions, there is no deeply held common ground between the White House and Capitol Hill. The current arrangement is strictly based on people getting things they care about in exchange for things they don't.
However, while the relationship is simple in those terms, it is dauntingly complex in terms of the pros and cons of staying versus going. If the Republicans stand with Trump, he will probably sign any piece of legislation that comes across his desk (with this White House, "probably" is always a necessary qualifier). This comes at the cost of losing their ability to distance themselves from and increasingly unpopular and scandal-ridden administration.
Some of that distance might be clawed back by public criticism of the president and by high-profile hearings, but those steps bring even greater risks. Trump has no interest in the GOP's legislative agenda, no loyalty to the party, and no particular affection for its leaders. Worse still, as Josh Marshall has frequently noted, Trump has the bully's instinctive tendency to go after the vulnerable. There is a limit to the damage he can inflict on the Democrats, but he is in a position to literally destroy the Republican Party.
We often hear this framed in terms of Trump supporters making trouble in the primaries, but that's pre-2016 thinking. This goes far deeper. In addition to a seemingly total lack of interpersonal, temperamental, and rhetorical constraints, Trump is highly popular with a large segment of the base. In the event of an intra-party war, some of this support would undoubtedly peel away, but a substantial portion would stay.
Keep in mind, all of this takes place in the context of a troubling demographic tide for the Republicans. Their strategic response to this has been to maximize turnout within the party while suppressing the vote on the other side. It has been a shrewd strategy but it leaves little margin for error. Trump has the ability to drive a wedge between a significant chunk of the base and the GOP for at least the next few cycles, possibly enough to threaten the viability of the party.
The closest analogy that comes to mind is the Democrats and Vietnam, but that was a rift in a big-tent loosely organized party. The 21st Century GOP is a small tent party that depends on discipline and entrenchment strategies. It's not clear that it would survive a civil war.
Given that, I suspect the next year or two will prove Schumer wrong. There is some evidence that the president's polling has stabilized, perhaps even rebounded a bit, but even if the numbers go back into free fall, Republicans in the House and the Senate will be extremely reluctant to break from Trump with anything more than isolated or cosmetic challenges.
This isn't just a question of not wanting Trump outside the tent pissing in; this is a question of not wanting Trump outside the tent tossing grenades.
Tuesday, October 10, 2017
Questionable statistics alert – – Whole Foods Markets edition
From Yahoo finance:
Lots to unpack here, but in consideration of time constraints (both yours and mine), let's just focus on one aspect.
Possibly the most important and certainly the most underemphasized piece of context in the coverage of the acquisition is the size and distribution of Whole Foods Markets. This is a small player highly concentrated in a few areas (such as New York City, DC, San Francisco, and Los Angeles). These areas also tend to have a highly disproportionate representation of the people who write about and invest in business trends (which explains a lot about the coverage). These areas also (and this is important for this story) tend to have a disproportionately low number of Walmarts.
Because of its size and economic diversity, Los Angeles makes for an interesting case study (it also helps that I've been here for quite a while and have lived on both sides of the county). Keep in mind, when Angelenos talk about the town they are generally referring to the county and Los Angeles County has a land area of over 4000 square miles. There are a lot of good reasons for going from one side to the other, but picking up a few groceries is not among them.
If you know the town and you look at a map of LA Whole Foods Markets, it is immediately obvious that the stores are heavily concentrated in very upscale neighborhoods, particularly in the general vicinity of Santa Monica. Not only are you unlikely to find Walmarts in these neighborhoods; you are unlikely to find them anywhere in reasonable driving distance. Likewise, the parts of town are you are likely to find Walmarts have very few Whole Foods. It is also important to note that this relationship does not hold with Target stores, which have long done a remarkable job adapting their model to both sprawling suburbs and high density urban areas. Anywhere in LA will put you fairly close to a Target.
Obviously, there are exceptions (Austin comes to mind) and we would certainly expect some of the traffic from a WFM spike to come from regular Walmart shoppers, but any analysis that shows them making up the plurality must be viewed with suspicion, even more so when we consider the surprisingly low numbers for Target. These numbers are almost exactly the opposite of what we would expect.
I know what I'm about to say goes against everything you've been told, but when data and common sense diverge sharply, the first thing you should do is question the data. Yes, counterintuitive results can be the most interesting if true, but it is essential to remember that counterintuitive results are also far more likely to be untrue.
High-end grocer Whole Foods is already poaching new customers from Walmart (WMT) and other competitors as the result of its new owner Amazon (AMZN) cutting prices, according to a report from Thasos Group, a data intelligence firm founded at MIT.
Beginning Aug. 28, Whole Foods, which had earned the nickname “Whole Paycheck,” slashed prices on some of its best-selling staple items, including avocados, bananas, organic brown eggs, Fuji and Gala apples, almond butter, and farm-raised salmon and tilapia.
Whole Foods immediately experienced a 17% increase in foot traffic year-over-year for the week beginning Aug. 28, the Thasos report found.
For the week ending Sunday, September 3, the weekly YoY change in foot traffic to Whole Foods peaked at 17%. On August 28, the daily YoY change in foot traffic peaked at 31%.
Of that foot traffic, new customers came primarily from Walmart, accounting for 24% of the new shoppers that week, while Kroger (KR) shoppers accounted for 16% and Costco customers for 15%.
Some of the Whole Foods’ other competitors also saw significant defections during that time. Nearly 10% of Trader Joe’s daily customers shopped at Whole Foods during the first week of price cuts, while 8% of Sprouts (SFM) and 3% of Target (TGT) customers did so.
Lots to unpack here, but in consideration of time constraints (both yours and mine), let's just focus on one aspect.
Possibly the most important and certainly the most underemphasized piece of context in the coverage of the acquisition is the size and distribution of Whole Foods Markets. This is a small player highly concentrated in a few areas (such as New York City, DC, San Francisco, and Los Angeles). These areas also tend to have a highly disproportionate representation of the people who write about and invest in business trends (which explains a lot about the coverage). These areas also (and this is important for this story) tend to have a disproportionately low number of Walmarts.
Because of its size and economic diversity, Los Angeles makes for an interesting case study (it also helps that I've been here for quite a while and have lived on both sides of the county). Keep in mind, when Angelenos talk about the town they are generally referring to the county and Los Angeles County has a land area of over 4000 square miles. There are a lot of good reasons for going from one side to the other, but picking up a few groceries is not among them.
If you know the town and you look at a map of LA Whole Foods Markets, it is immediately obvious that the stores are heavily concentrated in very upscale neighborhoods, particularly in the general vicinity of Santa Monica. Not only are you unlikely to find Walmarts in these neighborhoods; you are unlikely to find them anywhere in reasonable driving distance. Likewise, the parts of town are you are likely to find Walmarts have very few Whole Foods. It is also important to note that this relationship does not hold with Target stores, which have long done a remarkable job adapting their model to both sprawling suburbs and high density urban areas. Anywhere in LA will put you fairly close to a Target.
Obviously, there are exceptions (Austin comes to mind) and we would certainly expect some of the traffic from a WFM spike to come from regular Walmart shoppers, but any analysis that shows them making up the plurality must be viewed with suspicion, even more so when we consider the surprisingly low numbers for Target. These numbers are almost exactly the opposite of what we would expect.
I know what I'm about to say goes against everything you've been told, but when data and common sense diverge sharply, the first thing you should do is question the data. Yes, counterintuitive results can be the most interesting if true, but it is essential to remember that counterintuitive results are also far more likely to be untrue.
Monday, October 9, 2017
I'd heard that "hello" as a salutation was popularized by the telephone, so I looked at the Ngram viewer.
Now I'm going to be distracted every time I hear someone say 'hello' in a Western.
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