I'm not looking for agreement, just a little conversation.

Daniel B. Poneman is clearly an advocate for the industry and, as previously mentioned, I’m inclined to view nuclear energy as a useful and probably necessary tool in turning back climate change, but even if  I were skeptical, I believe I’d find some of these points persuasive.

All of this goes back to the broader issue of the fundamental unseriousness of the way we discuss serious problems such as global warming, income inequality, the resurgence of fascism, racism and sexism, the systematic undermining of democracy, and the general rise of bullshit.

This is not a question of disagreements. If anything it’s the opposite. We treat clowns and charlatans as important thinkers based on their positions, not on the weight of their evidence or the force and logic of their arguments. We’ve lost all respect for the process, the idea that it is more important to contribute to an honest, factually grounded, productive debate than to reach the “right” conclusion.




In a serious discussion of climate change, prematurely shutting down our leading source of carbon-free energy would be a major topic.


From Scientific American:

Nuclear energy is the largest source of carbon-free energy in the U.S. by a huge margin and it has a major role to play in confronting the global climate challenge. But we must also be vigilant about the prospect of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists or rogue regimes.

The threat of nuclear proliferation abroad should not lead us to abandon nuclear energy at home. Indeed, American nuclear leadership has always been critical to guiding the safe, responsible use of civilian nuclear energy around the world.

For example, a number of American companies are developing advanced generation-reactor technologies that offer a host of safety and nonproliferation advantages. These advanced designs would have “walk away” safety, meaning they do not need any backup power or external cooling systems in the event of an accident. And since many of the new reactor designs would rarely if ever need to be refueled, the risk of diversion of fuel from uranium-enrichment or plutonium-reprocessing plants to a bomb program would be greatly diminished.
...

The 98 reactors in our nuclear fleet are the workhorse of the clean-energy sector. They provide one fifth of our electricity. Unfortunately, over the past few years six reactors have been prematurely shut down, and another 12 are set to close in the next seven years.

...

Nuclear plants are not only emissions-free and carbon-free, they are by far the most reliable assets in our power generation mix, operating 93 percent of the time—even during extreme weather events when some fossil fuel plants may be forced to shut down or curtail their operations. Under current rules, electricity markets are not allowed to value these attributes, even though they are clearly valuable.

...

Preserving existing reactors may not sound exciting, but it is a critical first step if we take the climate challenge seriously. Consider that for every reactor that prematurely shuts down, our carbon dioxide emissions rise by about 5.8 million metric tons per year. According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Equivalencies Calculator, that equals the emissions from burning more than 648 million gallons of gasoline—the equivalent of filling up an NFL stadium with gasoline and setting it on fire. To offset those carbon emissions, we would need to plant over 95 million trees. Or we could install solar panels on one million homes and figure out a cost-effective way of storing the electricity so it is available day and night.

We'll come back to Elektro the Moto-Man

The Atlantic has a beautiful photo spread on the 1939 World's Fair. If ever there was a period when pessimism was justified, this was it, which makes the whole thing that much more extraordinary.

From Wikipedia.

The 1939–40 New York World's Fair, which covered the 1,216 acres (492 ha) of Flushing Meadows–Corona Park (also the location of the 1964–1965 New York World's Fair), was the second most expensive American world's fair of all time, exceeded only by St. Louis's Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. Many countries around the world participated in it, and over 44 million people attended its exhibits in two seasons.[2] It was the first exposition to be based on the future, with an opening slogan of "Dawn of a New Day", and it allowed all visitors to take a look at "the world of tomorrow". According to the official pamphlet:

    The eyes of the Fair are on the future—not in the sense of peering toward the unknown nor attempting to foretell the events of tomorrow and the shape of things to come, but in the sense of presenting a new and clearer view of today in preparation for tomorrow; a view of the forces and ideas that prevail as well as the machines.

    To its visitors the Fair will say: "Here are the materials, ideas, and forces at work in our world. These are the tools with which the World of Tomorrow must be made. They are all interesting and much effort has been expended to lay them before you in an interesting way. Familiarity with today is the best preparation for the future.

Within six months of the Fair's opening, World War II began, a war that lasted six years and resulted in the deaths of 70–85 million people.

There's Elektro.

And finally, an imagining of the future of 1960.

America versus the rest of the world

This is Joseph.

All of the points in this piece are good.  But I am particularly struck by:

Of course Americans love their own children as much as any parents anywhere. But raising kids is seen as a private decision, freighted with hardship and annoyances that are to be entirely borne by the parents themselves. Enter many places in America with a preschooler and the unspoken message feels more like, "Please move quietly to the suburbs to suffer in silence. Don't bother the rest of us with your uncool offspring."

But the idea of making children an entirely private concern is culturally unusual.  We have a lot of laws and regulations around children, but a fear of having to contribute to making children viable.  Just look at the daycare expenses that some area have. 

I don't think that this attitude is necessarily wrong -- everyone has to make some trade-offs but it is odd to see this in any culture that frames itself as pro-family. 

Happy 4th

Some [reposted] music for the holiday.



































Listening to Cohan, it's easy to forget how controversial going to war in Europe was.

And Josh Marshall wins the award for best use of the word "Timesian"

Josh Marshall puts his finger on one of the issues I've long had with the New York Times. (emphasis added)

The New York Times has a rather lengthy and Timesian piece out this morning on the on-going mystery of Jerry Falwell Jr, his wife and family and this “pool boy” who they befriended and then put into the divey youth hostel business in South Florida. For those who’ve read the earlier reporting by Politico, Buzzfeed and Reuters, there’s no big new bombshell or piece of evidence in the new piece. (If anyone’s read it and thinks otherwise, let me know.) What there is is bits and pieces of more confirmation and nuggets of detail throughout. It’s a classic Timesian piece, the kind fellow journalists often grind their teeth over. The Times comes in late, largely with other people’s reporting and makes the whole thing official with splash of Times holy water. And yet, as usual, they’ve used their name and resources to unearth enough new details and additional confirmations to put the whole edifice on a rather firmer footing.

How much of this is insult and how much is injury? No institution in journalism is as relentlessly smug and as compulsive with its self-congratulation, but just being annoying isn't a crime, so does this go beyond the hurt feelings of a few competitors? I'd say yes for at least a couple of reasons.

I tend to be dismissive of charges of plagiarism partially because I'm far more concerned with crimes of content underneath the byline, but also because we only focus on a form that is minor and relatively rare. There are all sorts of ways of stealing other writers' work, ideas and style, and as long as you don't actually lift specific phrases, it is a crime without consequence. 

Writers for the New York Times routinely arrive late and build on the foundation of other journalists. They may mention the previous work, but it's the NYT story that gets the attention, even if it adds relatively little.

More importantly, the practice of automatically anointing any story from the paper "groundbreaking and definitive" status feds the rot that is already undermining the paper's culture.

In terms of quality, the New York Times is no longer our best paper (the Washington Post has been blowing it away ever since Marty Baron took over and certainly since they lost Margaret Sullivan). It may not break the top five. It is still, however, the paper that matters.

Self-examination has never been a strong suit of the New York Times, but since its disastrous handling of the 2016 election, it has doubled down on the denial and has become openly hostile to its critics. The reception that stories like this get help the paper maintain the fiction that nothing is wrong, and that's the worst possible outcome.

"He changed me"

North Carolina in 2019:

There are quite a few clergy members at the picnic. Another is the Rev. Jerry Miller, whose son came out as gay four decades ago. At first, it wasn't easy for Miller to reconcile his faith with his son's identity.

"My wife and I basically went in the closet because I was a pastor of a Baptist church at that time. And I prayed that God would change my son someday," Miller says. "God didn't change him; he changed me."

Thursday, May 7, 2015

An Arkansas Tea Party group plans an anti-equality rally. Guess what happens next...

There is a big and largely untold story here about cultural and political shifts south of the Mason Dixon Line. They don't get much coverage but I've been noticing items like this.

RUSSELLVILLE, AR -- Hundreds of people marched down Main Street in Russellville for the definition of marriage in Arkansas just three days before the U.S. Supreme Court considers the fundamental question of whether same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry.

The rallies were on the same street at the same time, but were on opposite sides of the street because of people's opposing views on same-sex marriage.

The march started off calm. Nearly 80 people walked on Main Street to the Pope County Courthouse holding signs that read, "One man + one woman = marriage and family" and other signs that supported heterosexual marriage and disagreed with homosexual marriage. The group, which included members of the Tri County Tea Party, headed its own march with a separate march trailing behind.

...

All while hundreds of people rallying at the other march chanted "marriage equality" across the street.

...

That was the message speakers at the original rally tried to get out, but struggled because of the loud chants across the street.

Even though March for Marriage was the first march formally announced, supporters were outnumbered by the crowd across the street.

Outnumbered is a bit of an understatement.

Because I've heard conflicting numbers regarding the folks on both sides of the two rallies in Russellville this weekend, I asked Travis Simpson, a reporter at the Russellville Courier, who was there on the scene on Saturday.

He said the crowd supporting marriage equality was the larger of the two, "no contest." Simpson said he estimated there were perhaps 30 rallying against same-sex marriage, but around 200 on the pro-equality side.

Nor was that the end it.

On Saturday, a group called Pope County for Equality organized a rally in Russellville to show support for marriage equality and LGBTQ civil rights in Arkansas. More than 300 people showed up — quite a significant turnout for a community of under 30,000. Klay Rutherford, an organizer of the event and an undergrad at Arkansas Tech University, sent this report to the Arkansas Times. All pictures are courtesy of Pope County for Equality's Facebook page.

Residents of Pope County gathered in Russellville at 3 p.m. on Saturday, May 2 for a march and rally for marriage equality. Over 300 attendees marched through downtown and congregated at a stage near the historic Missouri-Pacific train depot.

The event was sponsored by Pope County for Equality, an online organization that advocates for the equal treatment of all individuals, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity. Speakers included Dr. MarTeze Hammonds, Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion at Arkansas Tech University; Jeannie Fowler Stone, a proud Christian and an accepting mother of a transgender son; and, James Bittle, a retired sergeant in the U.S. Army who is gay and recently married. Hammonds, Stone and Bittle are all residents of Russellville.

Event organizers said, “Our goal is to be an overwhelming presence of love and acceptance. We aim to lift people up, start discussions, and show our community that we are more than a stereotype. We simply want to bring our community closer together in a setting of love and peace.”

An impromptu marriage proposal took place on stage as Russellville resident Morgan Walker got down on one knee, surprising the crowd and her new fiancé, Silvia Harper (also of Russellville). The band Sad Magick provided entertainment.

The rally was held in part as a response to an event the previous weekend (Saturday, April 25) organized by an Arkansas River Valley Tea Party group in support of defining marriage as between one man and one woman. Protests that weekend were organized by pro-equality individuals not affiliated with Pope County for Equality. While many media outlets downplayed the presence and role of the protesters at the April 25 event, we estimate that there were at least 250 pro-equality protesters and no more than 50 participants among the the anti-equality crowd.

Pope County for Equality would like to thank the Russellville Police Department for their unbiased approach in handling both marches. Despite the surprising turnout at both events, they occurred without incident or injury.

In the fairly near future, I'm planning a deep dive into how the culture and politics of the South are shifting in ways that our standard metrics tend to miss. For now though, just remember that Russellville is in the most Republican part of the state.

Primary polls, noise and path dependency

As with rational actors and efficient markets, the strong form of the wisdom of crowds theory is too silly to bother with -- a collection of motivated reasoning and epicyles -- but the weak form stands up fairly well and, at the very least, serves as a very useful rule of thumb. Under the right conditions, more heads really are better than one.

When, however, we try to determine how much better, we run into a paradox, or at least a tricky caveat.      We are often most likely to rely on collective opinions when we should trust them the least. This is especially true in cases of limited information.

When reasonable people want to understand something or make a decision, they generally seek out both objective information and informed opinions. Furthermore, being reasonable, they constantly try to gauge the quality of that input and give more weight to the good and reliable. Unfortunately, our ability to judge the information other people are using is less than our ability to judge the information we’re using. This leads to a big problem when everyone is using the same basic set of facts.

If I feel ignorant on a subject, I’m more inclined to rely on your take. If you feel ignorant on a subject, you’re more inclined to rely on mine. Extend this out to a large number of people and limit their ability to share their uncertainty and you can see where this is going.

Which brings us to primary polls, noise and path dependency.

Supporting a candidate partially because other party members support her is not necessarily a bad thing. In a democracy, agreement is a positive and if you believe elections have consequences, it is only ration to consider electability (with the caveat that much of the conventional wisdom about electability is demonstrable bullshit). Six months from now, ignoring the polls when deciding who to support will border on irresponsible.

At the moment, though, the focus on polls and horse race coverage actually damage the democratic process, amplifying noise and creating the illusion of information. With all due respect to Nate Silver and his peers, if they would all just take the next few months off, the country would be better off.

Believe it or not, if I had more time, I'd tie Chucky in with the Joe Biden campaign

I've been meaning to do a thread about how we have come to put irrationally high value on name recognition and known IP. Chipman's argument here -- that this is a clever premise clumsily tied to a deserving cult classic in a way that does disservice to the old and ruins the new -- would be a great fit.

Unfortunately, I don't have time to write that now, so I'm just going to post this and go to bed. Maybe next week.



...

OK, NOW I;m going to bed, but first I stayed up a little longer and checked out this deep dive by Chipman into why there are two ongoing Chucky franchises. If you're into both pop culture and the strange world of intellectual property law (which sadly puts me in the center of the target audience), it's definitely worth your time.

You know the writers are running out of ideas when they start doing cross-overs

From Steve Moore’s New Crypto Start-up Is Dumb Even by Crypto Start-up Standards by Josh Barro

Here’s how Moynihan and Gasparino describe the proposed venture:

“Decentral,” as it is known, will attempt to perform Fed-like duties in terms of regulating the supply of crypto in the same way as the Fed controls the supply of money for the U.S. economy, they contend. It will exchange its own new token for other cryptos; the supply of the new cryptocurrency will be tied to the value of the dollar or some other “stable” valuation method and will be strictly controlled by an algorithm, company officials tell Fox Business.

You may have some questions. Like “What?” or “Why?” or “What could that possibly even mean?” When I read that paragraph, I also had these questions. It sounds like announcing you’re going to start a private “central bank” that trades in gold in order to control the supply and price of gold. How would that possibly work? It wouldn’t, is the short answer.

So I spoke with Moore’s business partner, Sam Kazemian (a 2015 UCLA graduate whose previous venture, Everipedia, is a blockchain-based competitor to Wikipedia), to ask what it would mean for a crypto start-up to “perform Fed-like duties” and “regulate the supply of crypto.” Having spoken with him and gotten more detail on the proposed business plan, I think the “central bank” branding is distracting and it’s most accurate to say that Kazemian and Moore hope to issue a fiat stablecoin. Let me explain what that means. (Spoiler: It’s still not a good idea.)

   

Before we go on, let's pay a quick visit to Everipedia.

The closer you look at Everipedia, which didn’t respond to questions or a request for a list of its most visited pages, the less substantial it appears. Almost every page on the site is copied verbatim from Wikipedia — although not updated as frequently as Wikipedia — and the trickle of entries posted by Everipedia users relate almost exclusively to sensational topics including YouTube trolls, the “meme war of 2017” and the hip hop producer who tattooed an image of Anne Frank onto his face. Other recurring subjects are activists, white supremacists, and people who were shot and killed by police — all topics that seem engineered to capitalize on trending search terms.

Also unlike Wikipedia, a collaborative nonprofit encyclopedia launched in 2001, Everipedia has its eye on revenue. The site offers a service in which individuals and businesses can pay an annual fee in exchange for a custom-made Everipedia entry that receives “full-time monitoring for updates and preventing vandalism,” starting at $299 per year. Its home page claims that it is “free from ads,” but ads periodically appear on the site, and a link at the bottom of every page labeled “Advertise” links to information for prospective sponsors. Maghodam has trumpeted the site’s growing traffic, but its Alexa score indicates limited popularity.

Which these days is enough to net you $30 million.

Now back the main stage.

For a number of reasons, Moore and the founders of Decentral would like to avoid backing their stablecoin 1:1 with traditional currencies. The premise behind their venture: What if you could have a coin that was stable but that wasn’t backed by a whole bunch of stable assets? What if, like a central bank, you found a way to issue currency and achieve a stable price not through backing by valuable reserves but by fiat — that is, through reliance on a reputation for stability plus certain open-market operations designed to influence the value of the currency you have issued?

Of course, there are some problems with this idea.

...

Sovereign governments fail at this despite having advantages that Decentral will not. For example, they can levy taxes. They regulate banks that take deposits and issue loans in the fiat currency and adjust the supply of that currency by telling them how much they must hold in reserve. They also preside over economies in which people are likely to feel compelled to hold and use the local currency — because they have to pay taxes in it, for example. Nobody will need to pay taxes in Decentral’s coin.

Kazemian told me he understands these concerns, and that is why Decentral will begin its operations with a more traditional stablecoin model, achieving a stable price by holding other stablecoins in full and equal value to the coins Decentral itself will issue.

He said a key reason the company brought Moore onboard was to help understand how big it would need to get in order to successfully behave like a central bank and issue a stable fiat currency. “When it is big enough, when it’s the kind of self-fulfilling prophesy of the Fed,” Kazemian said, they would pivot to a model similar to the Fed’s, in which the currency isn’t fully backed by reserves.

That's right, Moore is supposed to be the economic brains of the operation

Paul Krugman is just scratching the surface here, but it's a valuable scratch

In fairness, this is only a prelude to a longer talk, but even if he stopped here, Krugman would deserve credit for clearly laying out points that are vitally important and should be obvious but are all too often ignored. Part of the problem, I think, is that the mainstream centrist press, especially the paper Krugman writes for, tends to be overwhelmingly deferential toward the rich and the powerful. That, however, is a topic for another post.

While popular discourse has concentrated on the “1 percent,” what’s really at issue here is the role of the 0.1 percent, or maybe the 0.01 percent — the truly wealthy, not the “$400,000 a year working Wall Street stiff” memorably ridiculed in the movie Wall Street. This is a really tiny group of people, but one that exerts huge influence over policy.

Where does this influence come from? People often talk about campaign contributions, but those are only one channel. In fact, I’d identify at least four ways in which the financial resources of the 0.1 percent distort policy priorities:

1. Raw corruption. We like to imagine that simple bribery of politicians isn’t an important factor in America, but it’s almost surely a much bigger deal than we like to think.

2. Soft corruption. What I mean by this are the various ways short of direct bribery politicians, government officials, and people with policy influence of any kind stand to gain financially by promoting policies that serve the interests or prejudices of the wealthy. This includes the revolving door between public service and private-sector employment, think-tank fellowships, fees on the lecture circuit, and so on.

3. Campaign contributions. Yes, these matter.

4. Defining the agenda: Through a variety of channels — media ownership, think tanks, and the simple tendency to assume that being rich also means being wise — the 0.1 percent has an extraordinary ability to set the agenda for policy discussion, in ways that can be sharply at odds with both a reasonable assessment of priorities and public opinion more generally.

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.