Tuesday Tweets

I've probably said this before, but I wonder how much of the postwar futurism that seems wildly optimistic today would have been viable if nuclear thermal rockets and fusion reactors had progressed as expected.

Weather Control was a big, seriously discussed topic for decades that seemed to drop off the radar at the close of the 20th Century. Any thoughts as to the decline? https://t.co/jntlg9cdo2

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) June 22, 2019

Here's one for the social scientists in the audience.

We could survey economists on whether they agree if only we had those tools

— Chris Blattman (@cblatts) June 21, 2019

I took survey design at UChicago with an expert at NORC, he said out of all the disciplines he works with economists were the hardest explain survey design effects to (sometimes he'd force them to watch people take the survey so they'd see people's confusion)

— Jeff Mosenkis (@mosenkis) June 23, 2019

Keep this in mind when we come back to the voter suppression thread.

Its definitely awkward to say that "we don't want college students to vote because they will probably vote against us", but holding yourself out as the champion of parking rights over voting rights is a weird position. pic.twitter.com/O1nrovs4qA

— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) June 21, 2019

When studies favor the predictions of social psych crowd over the economists, people are always surprised, even though that seems to be how things generally break.

It's as if people care about anonymous strangers, or have principles (or something). But, this varies dramatically across societies. https://t.co/zOXugxLMl3

— Joe Henrich (@JoHenrich) June 20, 2019

Presented without comment.

"The Tesla manual says the driver should hold the wheel at all times"... so where are people getting the idea that it is safe to use Autopilot with their hands off the wheel?

What a mystery. I guess we may never know. pic.twitter.com/anUi8thkXW

— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) June 20, 2019

The smarter commentators (Pierce, Marshall) are starting to point out that, while you can never entirely dismiss the election chances of a sitting president and a lot can happen in a year and a half, the odds against Trump pulling off a legitimate (or even semi-legitimate) win in 2020 are looking pretty high. More on this soon.

I don't make predictions, but it sure seems like Trump could get trounced in 2020: https://t.co/unFOMHKt3U

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) June 21, 2019

There's even a Gwyneth Paltrow connection

There's a lot to unpack in this piece by Reeves Wiedeman, but here are a few points I want to highlight.

Its core business is simple: lease offices from landlords — the company owns hardly any real estate — slice them up, and rent them out in smaller portions with an upcharge for cool design, regular happy hours, and a more flexible short-term lease. There are hundreds of co-working companies around the world, but what has long distinguished WeWork is Neumann’s insistence that his is something bigger. In 2017, Neumann declared that WeWork’s “valuation and size today are much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue.” He has long maintained that categorizing WeWork as a real-estate concern is too limiting; it is a “community company” with huge ambitions. “We are here in order to change the world,” Neumann said that same year. “Nothing less than that interests me.”

We've seen a lot of tech messiahs promising disruptive transformation over the past few years, but I can't recall a case where this level of grandiosity rested on a business plan as mundane as subletting office space. Say what you will about Elon Musk, he could promise big.

Here, it's almost like we've moved past the need to ground the god complexes in even the suggestion of a viable argument.

And what Neumann has accomplished is staggering: WeWork now has 466,000 members working out of 485 locations in more than 100 cities in 28 countries. Its revenue has grown from $75 million in 2014 to $1.8 billion last year. Three years ago, it had 1,000 employees; today, it has 12,000 and is adding 100 every week. It has installed 22 million square feet of the glass partitions that have defined an era of workplace aesthetics, and last fall, it became Manhattan’s largest tenant. (In Central London, it is second only to the British government.) In the wake of Uber’s (disappointing) debut on the New York Stock Exchange, the We Company is now America’s most highly valued start-up, at $47 billion — at least for the moment. At the end of April, Neumann announced that the company had filed paperwork to begin the process of an IPO.

Inside the company, however, employees and executives describe an environment that can be marked by the chaos, churn, and misbehavior that have come to characterize hypergrowth start-up life, not to mention questions about its business: WeWork lost $1.9 billion last year. But WeWork has already reshaped the commercial real-estate world, and it has its eyes on the rest of our lives. As Neumann recently told a person close to the company, he believes that WeWork’s size and scale could put it in a position to help deal with some of the world’s largest problems, like the refugee crisis, saying, “I need to have the biggest valuation I can, because when countries are shooting at each other, I want them to come to me.”

I probably shouldn't have to say this, but hitting $1.8 billion in revenue when you're losing $1.9 billion isn't actually  all that staggering an accomplishment.

During the dot-com boom, a company called Regus became a stock-market darling by offering similar but much blander flexible offices. In 2000, Fast Company published a story about Regus titled “Office of the Future,” highlighting its efforts to bring “community” to the workplace. But the bubble burst and Regus went bankrupt. The company recovered and rebranded as IWG, but its existence presents another conundrum for WeWork. IWG currently has roughly 3,000 locations and 2.5 million customers worldwide, numbers that dwarf WeWork’s. IWG is profitable and now has a hipper, WeWork-ish offering. It is publicly traded and worth around $3 billion.

I'm just going to stop now.

"Start your day a little bit better"

A fun piece of marketing history from a magazine that's consistently better than it ought to be.

 In many ways, the cereal flake is the perfect consumer product. It's easy to produce, easy to sell, and surprisingly lucrative. To this day, cereal comes with an eye-popping profit margin of 50 percent. These merits became clear to Charles Post, a failed suspender salesman who moved to Battle Creek in 1895. Post began selling knock-off versions of Kellogg's products with a twist of his own—advertising. At the time, advertising was associated with snake-oil salesmen and con artists. But Post, who had a background in sales, didn't mind drizzling a little snake oil on his product. He published pamphlets with titles such as "The Road To Wellville" and claimed his cereal, Grape-Nuts, could cure appendicitis, improve one's IQ, and even "make red blood redder." By 1903, he was clearing $1 million a year.

Across town, Dr. Kellogg refused to sully The San's reputation with heathen advertising, and his profits suffered as a result. W.K., however, had no such qualms and set out to emulate Post. In his first national campaign, he told women to "Wink at your grocer, and see what you get." (Answer: a free box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes.) Within a year, he'd sold 1 million cases of cereal. With the leading cereal makers embracing such unabashed hucksterism, it was clear that cereal's connection to its fundamentalist roots had come to an end.
...

But the real winner was a cereal called Force. Its mascot, Sunny Jim, was a strutting, top-hatted gentleman who became so popular in newspapers and magazines that other cereal makers rushed to create their own mascots. For a cereal called Elijah's Manna, Charles Post even tried putting a picture of the prophet on the label. Although the product was eventually pulled, one industry ground rule had been established: Every box needs a character.

Before long, cereal makers had an insatiable appetite for finding the right mascot, regardless of the cost. During the Depression, Post Toasties decided to use cartoon animals on its boxes and paid its cartoonist $1.5 million in the first year. That artist was Walt Disney, and he used the earnings to build the Disney empire.

Cereal's total reliance on advertising meant that it was essential for companies to keep up with new forms of media. Quaker Oats, for example, hitched its sales to the rise of radio in a Dennis the Menace type who frequently interrupted his adventures to extol the virtues of Wheaties, Skippy was the first cereal character directly marketed to children. As it turned out, kids ate him up, and cereal producers learned an important lesson: Children are suckers. The flood of kid-friendly, cereal-shilling characters that followed reads like a Who's Who of American iconography, including the Lone Ranger, Dick Tracy, and Buck Rogers. By the 1960s, cereal advertisers were devoting 90 percent of their budgets to reaching children.

Repost -- We'll be revisiting this again

Thursday, March 2, 2017

There will be safe seats. There are no safe seats.

In 2017, we have a perfect example of when not to use static thinking and naïve extrapolation.

Not only are things changing rapidly, but, more importantly, there are a large number of entirely plausible scenarios that would radically reshape the political landscape and would undoubtedly interact in unpredictable ways. This is not "what if the ax falls?" speculation; if anything, have gotten to the point where the probability of at least one of these cataclysmic shifts happening is greater than the probability of none. And while we can't productively speculate on exactly how things will play out, we can say that the risks fall disproportionately on the Republicans.

Somewhat paradoxically, chaos and uncertainty can make certain strategic decisions easier. Under more normal (i.e. stable) circumstances it makes sense to expend little or no resources on unwinnable fights (or, conversely,  to spend considerable time and effort deciding what's winnable). The very concept of "unwinnable," however, is based on a whole string of assumptions, many of which we cannot make under the present conditions.

The optimal strategy under the circumstances for the Democrats is to field viable candidates for, if possible, every major 2018 race. This is based on the assumption not that every seat is winnable, but that no one can, at this point, say with a high level of confidence what the winnable seats are.

Running out of snarky Musk titles

I know we've covered this before, but this is such an apt example of how Elon Musk still doesn't get engineering, despite being surrounded by some of the most brilliant people in the fields of aerospace, transportation and artificial intelligence. They spend endless hours briefing him on technical subjects, and as long as he stays on script, he seems to grasp the concepts. The moment he starts to ad lib, however, his lack of comprehension becomes painful to watch.

There is a certain mindset that you find in pretty much all fields of applied mathematics (engineering, statistics, computer science, etc.), at least among the competent. It's a tendency to think in terms of complex systems, ranges,constraints,  trade-offs. Musk does exactly the opposite. He seems to believe that evaluating a design is done by taking a bunch of numbers, picking the best ones and shoving them together.

That compares an average speed with a top speed, and a real-world number with a theoretical number. One input: what's the throughput of an exit? You can't squirt those pods onto a street one a second at 155 mph.

— Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) June 4, 2019

This wouldn't be so bad if Elon Musk were just another clueless CEO, but the myth of the real life Tony Stark has been so internalized by journalists, investors and politicians that it has started to warp our discourse and decision making.

Tuesday Tweets

I've been going back and forth on posting this for years. It makes more sense in periods of high unemployment. Maybe I'll dust it off for the next recession.

Back in the recession, I wondered about sending a new CCC out to thin overcrowded forests. make charcoal of the trees and plow it into the ground. It didn't seem scalable but it might make for an interesting conversation.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) June 14, 2019

For a long time now, we've been pointing out that the culture of education reform movement left it vulnerable to abuses.

"Home school charters" let families use state $$ to buy Disneyland tickets, horseback riding lessons & more. Even if one claims individual kids benefit from this exposure, implausible to say $ wouldn’t go further & do better in public school classroom. https://t.co/f5dyfOfHk0

— Ed Law Blog (@DerekWBlack) June 16, 2019

If more journalists had actually listened to Margaret Sullivan, journalism (and the country as a whole) would be in better shape.

Kudos to @Sulliview: "The truth is that journalists and pundits are bad at predictions. They should have learned that when Trump — a candidate so manifestly unsuited to be president that he couldn’t possibly win — blew their minds by doing just that." https://t.co/uUfYDgFXG8

— Walter Shapiro (@MrWalterShapiro) June 16, 2019

Another one I'd like to revisit.

@trnsprtst
Is anyone looking at the energy and infrastructure implications of one-day? The shorter the turnaround, the more difficult it is to optimize logistics. That means fewer full loads, less direct routes, less freedom to favor reverse commutes and avoid peak traffic.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) June 16, 2019

When you can get your summary down to four letters.

Cash https://t.co/oyqltY5Lkg

— Russ Mitchell (@russ1mitchell) June 15, 2019

No one knows the subtleties of this stuff like Silver.

One interesting fact is that Rasmussen had Republicans winning the popular vote for the US House last year and Democrats actually won it by **9** points, which makes for about twice as bad a fuck-up as any pollster had in 2016. https://t.co/I2nZaoWOnc

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) June 16, 2019

TBH, not a bad racket to have polls that are consistently skewed toward the GOP. Maybe once per 3 or 4 elections (2016), R's beat their polls, you look like geniuses. The rest of the time, your polls suck, but you BS your way thru it & criticize people who evaluate poll accuracy.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) June 16, 2019

The sad part is I'm sure this isn't the first time the worlds of cryptocurrency and Perlstein's "the Long Con" have collided

From Madison Malone Kircher writing for New York Magazine.

In the name of the father, the son, and the HODL spirit … amen. Rick Santorum — former Pennsylvania senator, two-time failed Republican presidential candidate, conservative Catholic — is getting into cryptocurrency. He’s an adviser on the board of a new company called Cathio, which says it “provides Catholic organizations with a payments platform that aligns with Catholic values, provides the tools necessary to increase donations and connect with both local and global Catholic communities.” Santorum’s son-in-law is Cathio’s CEO.

From the Financial Times’ Alphaville blog:

There are some other big hitters on the board too, including former US ambassador to the Vatican Jim Nicholson, and former head of the US Mint Ed Moy, who also happens to have been an adviser for “bitcoin IRA”, an investment fund that encourages people to put their retirement savings into crypto (what could possibly go wrong, etc). Also on the board — and co-founder of Cathio — is Cameron Chell, chairman of ICOx Innovations, the company that ran Kodak’s infamous “Kodakcoin” ICO, which managed to raise less than 7 per cent of its target.

And in case you never read Rick Perlstein's essential essay...

Opossum is a real mood killer of a safe word

More solid work from the Last Week Tonight team.

And if we committed to tithing to Uber, the company would break even within the decade

You always have to be careful reading too much into an anecdote, particularly one that came to your attention via social media, but they can be instructive. As Jason Torchinsky of Jalopnik puts it:

I know there’s sort of a stereotype about a certain sort of painfully obsessed Tesla fan/Elon Musk worshipper that is, likely, an unfair categorization of most Tesla fans. But then you see something like this recent discussion on Reddit’s r/TeslaMotors forum, and you remember that, oh yeah, sometimes stereotypes do come from somewhere.

uhh.... which stage of capitalism is this again? pic.twitter.com/iSHfZ2x6cf

— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) June 12, 2019

Once you're on the list, you're pretty much set.

Parul Sehgal has a devastating review of the latest from Naomi Wolf, but while Sehgal is being justly praised for her sharp and relentless treatment of her subject, she stops short before she gets to the most disturbing and important implication of the story.
There's an excellent case made here that Wolf's career should have collapsed long ago under the weight of her contradictions and factual errors, but the question of responsibility, of how enablers have sustained that career, and how many other journalistic all-stars owe their successes to the turning of blind eyes.

For example, Sehgal's review ran in the New York Times. One of, if not the most prominent voice of that paper is David Brooks. If you'll recall, Brooks got his sinecure (and if NYT opinion writer doesn't qualify, I don't know what does) in part because of a widely read article based largely on fabrications. There were no consequences for Brooks when this came out, or when similar complaints were raised later.

That her advice can contradict itself from book to book doesn’t appear to distress her (she fluctuates between regarding women as all-powerful sorceresses and abjectly dependent). The method has worked too efficiently, and at every stage of her life — as a young woman protesting beauty standards (“The Beauty Myth”) through motherhood (“Misconceptions”) and, later, the aging of her parents (“The Treehouse”), as she has grappled with her ambition (“Fire With Fire”) and her sex life (“Vagina”). Always the books are lit by a strange messianic energy, shored up by dubious data and structured around a moment of crisis and revelation as some veil — some long-held notion — falls away.

Recently, we had the opportunity to witness such a revelation in real time. Wolf was a guest on a BBC radio program, publicizing her new book, “Outrages,” a study of the criminalization of same-sex relationships in the Victorian era. She spoke passionately about discovering “several dozen executions” of men, including teenagers, accused of having sex with other men.

“Several dozen executions? I don’t think you’re right about this,” the host, Matthew Sweet, said, very politely filleting one of Wolf’s central claims. What Wolf regarded as evidence of executions — the notation of “death recorded” on court records — indicated, in fact, the opposite, that the judge had recommended a pardon from the death sentence. Sweet said he could find no evidence that anyone had ever been executed for sodomy in Victorian Britain, and furthermore, that Wolf mistakenly regarded sodomy in the court records as referring exclusively to homosexuality when, in fact, it was also used for child abuse. “I can’t find any evidence that any of the relationships you describe were consensual,” he pointed out.

It was a surprisingly cordial interaction, however. Wolf took the news on the chin, and later expressed her gratitude: “It’s such an important story and I welcome the chance to correct these two out of hundreds of citations and make it perfect.” Her publishers regretted the error but stated they believed the overall thesis still held.

…



Her first, career-making book, “The Beauty Myth,” is well-known for exaggerating the number of women who died of anorexia (Wolf stated that anorexia kills 150,000 women annually; the actual figure at the time, in the mid-1990s, was said to be closer to 50 or 60). One academic paper found that fully 18 of the 23 statistics about anorexia in the book were inaccurate and coined a term — “WOLF” (Wolf’s Overdo and Lie Factor) — to determine the degree to which Wolf was wrong: “On average, a statistic on anorexia by Naomi Wolf should be divided by eight to get close to the real figure.”

…


Throughout it all, she remains impervious to criticism. “I’m lucky,” she said in a recent profile in The Guardian. “I had a good education. I know my books are true.”

Not accurate or factual, but true. This is a key to understanding why charges of sloppiness or misrepresentation don’t seem to stymie, or even embarrass, writers like Wolf (or Jared Diamond and Annie Jacobsen, who have both been involved in similar scandals in recent weeks, facing them with the same blithe indifference). The issue isn’t simply that publishers don’t spring for fact-checking and leave writers vulnerable to making such errors. These writers see themselves in service of something larger than grubby reporting. “The important thing is that these stories are told,” Wolf recently told The Times of London. They are the emissaries of great stories, suppressed stories, and if they take liberties or eschew careful research — as consistently as Wolf has done — it is because they believe they have a right to them, that the story, the cause, somehow sanctions it.

Tuesday Tweets

Some comments on Hyperloop https://t.co/Q8ndOz9ixf

— David M. Levinson (@trnsprtst) June 10, 2019

As Ryanair moves to publish its emissions data, data show it emitted 1.2m tonnes of carbon dioxide in May, roughly the same amount that New York City produces in a week = roughly the same pa as one of Europe’s larger lignite-fuelled powerplants @lesliehookhttps://t.co/urwcereThW pic.twitter.com/v2WOHtdeqn

— Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) June 7, 2019

“...the company that runs the digital learning platform... takes a 60% cut of online tuition... the contract... contains a so-called poison tail that requires the university to continue handing over its revenue share for two years after canceling” https://t.co/qkVisilYaI

— Ethan Plaut (@ethanplaut) June 8, 2019

Lol probably higher

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 10, 2019

And a thoughtful thread.

In general, these kinds of divergences tend to happen near turning points. As Jason notes, the last time we had a comparable divergence between GDP and GDI was at the start of the Great Recession. NOT calling recession now, but things may be weaker than they appear 3/

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) June 8, 2019

Repost: Phoenix Interruptus -- just ashes

Disney can certainly take the hit, but still:

According to Box Office Mojo, Dark Phoenix tanked with $33 million in its first three days, domestically. That is by far the worst opening in the franchise, finishing well below The Wolverine's $53.1 million back in 2013. It's more than $20 million less than the original X-Men from 2000, even though there have been nearly 20 years of ticket price inflation and premium formats such as 3D. Dark Phoenix finished second for the weekend, trailing The Secret Life of Pets 2 ($47.1 million).

It goes without saying this is a disaster for Fox. While it's true Dark Phoenix was something of a lame duck from the get-go since the Disney/Fox deal made a hard reboot inevitable, everyone involved was still hoping for the film to be successful. Dark Phoenix was even one of the more expensive X-Men movies, with a budget of $200 million. Odds are, it won't turn a profit for the studio; X-Men: Apocalypse, which opened with $65.7 million in 2016, earned $543.9 million globally. That's a figure Dark Phoenix is unlikely to match or surpass, especially with how low interest was at the start. This decidedly was not a must-see cinematic event, and due to the bad reviews, it's not going to have strong legs.

Keep in mind a good rule of thumb is that a film has to more than double its box office to break even, making this a big money loser for Disney/Fox.

The thinking in the film industry for a number of years now has been that the more you spend on these big franchise films, the more you'll make. For those versed in the history of the industry, this line of reasoning strikes a familiar note.

This isn't to say that we're looking at another late-sixties type crash, but the bigger budgets=more profits assumption never ends well.

Film history for fools -- box office disasters

Consider this a footnote to the previous Motley Fool rant.

There's an old and very common saying in Hollywood that the biggest money-losing film ever was the Sound of Music. The joke here is that though the film did rather well...

Upon its initial release, The Sound of Music briefly displaced Gone with the Wind as the highest-grossing film of all-time; taking re-releases into account, it ultimately grossed $286 million internationally. Adjusted to contemporary prices it is the third highest-grossing film of all-time at the North American box office and the fifth highest-grossing film worldwide.

... The films it inspired lost a lot of money. That's a bit of an oversimplification. Music was just the last of a string of hit musicals in the early Sixties ( West Side Story, The Music Man, My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins) but it was the biggest and it suggested an upward trend and, to the extent that it was responsible for what followed, it might well justify that money-losing title. 

The commercially and/or critically unsuccessful films included Camelot, Finian's Rainbow, Hello Dolly!, Sweet Charity, Doctor Dolittle, Star!, Darling Lili, Paint Your Wagon, Song of Norway, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Man of La Mancha, Lost Horizon and Mame. Collectively and individually these failures crippled several of the major studios.

I don't want to push the analogy with comic-book movies but there are similarities, particularly regarding the budgets and the stories executives told themselves to justify them. 

And I'm pretty sure if Motley Fool had been around in, say, 1967, these upcoming movies would have generated lots of optimistic exclamation points.

Repost -- engineers were ambitious back in the day

With all this discussion of the hyperloop, it's useful to remember just how long people have been thinking about the basic concepts.

THE PORTELECTRIC SYSTEM

If there's an engineer in the audience, I'd very much like to know what the relationship is between this very cool 1890 system and the history of linear induction trains.

If only it were underground...

Wait, even if they could go 155 mph and be spaced 1 every second (yikes), they eventually have to slow down and let people off right? So you can only do 57,600 passengers/hour/lane if nobody ever gets on, and nobody ever gets off. It’s like Schrödinger's subway system I guess. pic.twitter.com/uhbiCxK5Dr

— Costa Samaras (@CostaSamaras) June 4, 2019

From the good people at Closer than We Think:

Rollerways was published on this day in 1962 #365daysofRadebaugh

Rent or buy the film today! https://t.co/f7MEcTY1Ha pic.twitter.com/TlziJgnhn2

— Closer Than We Think (@CloserThanThink) June 3, 2019

"IEA: Nuke retirements could lead to 4 billion metric tons of extra CO2 emissions"

I know I'm wading into a fiercely heated debate here, but simply as a matter of consistency, it seems like the degree you take climate change seriously should correlate strongly with support for nuclear power, at least for the next 20 or 30 years.

From Ars Technica

A report released today by the International Energy Agency (IEA) warns world leaders that—without support for new nuclear power or lifetime extensions for existing nuclear power plants—the world's climate goals are at risk.

"The lack of further lifetime extensions of existing nuclear plants and new projects could result in an additional four billion tonnes of CO₂ emissions," a press release from the IEA noted.
...

Though politicians have said that nuclear power will be replaced by renewable energy, in practice that may be less likely to come to fruition. When New York state announced the closure of the Indian Point nuclear plant in 2017, Governor Andrew Cuomo said he believed its power could be easily replaced by low-carbon sources of power by its closing date in 2021. But Platts Analytics says that most of Indian Point's 2GW will be "replaced with output from the newly constructed 1,100MW Cricket Valley and 680MW CPV Valley gas-fired power plants."