Happy Labor Day

Look for the Union Label

The ILGWU sponsored a contest among its members in the 1970s for an advertising jingle to advocate buying ILGWU-made garments. The winner was Look for the union label.[9][10] The Union's "Look for the Union Label" song went as follows:

    Look for the union label
    When you are buying a coat, dress, or blouse,
    Remember somewhere our union's sewing,
    Our wages going to feed the kids and run the house,
    We work hard, but who's complaining?
    Thanks to the ILG, we're paying our way,
    So always look for the union label,
    It says we're able to make it in the USA!

The commercial featuring the famous song was parodied on a late-1970s episode of Saturday Night Live in a fake commercial for The Dope Growers Union and on the March 19, 1977, episode (#10.22) of The Carol Burnett Show. It was also parodied in the South Park episode "Freak Strike" (2002).

Townsville has always been a hub of evil science innovation

From Gizmodo:

There’s a certain allure to the geoengineering approach, particularly from the techno-optimist mindset that’s in vogue in Silicon Valley. Keeping the planet at an optimum temperature while humanity gets its shit together with carbon emissions can feel somehow more attainable than doing the hard work to cut emissions. A giant space mirror to reflect sunlight—something Yang said was among his top choices for cooling the planet because it’s reversible if something goes wrong on Earth—is a lot sexier than a closed coal plant.

“If you were to launch a satellite with expandable mirrors and you can make it so that you can bring a satellite back down if you want,” Yang said. “If you find that it’s effective, then great or if you find that is useless, then you don’t use it but then there’s no harm done.”

One of the contradictions of Silicon Valley visionaries (of which Andrew Yang is at least an honorary member) is how often the absolute faith in science and engineering to solve problems is associated with a surprisingly weak grasp of the subjects. The initial reaction to this phenomena is to assume there has to be more to it than that, some cool detail like a Lagrangian point, not enough to make the proposal feasible but at least enough to make it interesting.

But there is seldom more than meets the eye, the big, wildly ambitious ideas generally come down to nothing more than tired old sci-fi movie tropes.

If we are going to talk about giant space mirrors, we might as well do it right. Thank god for the comment section.

This is a lot of money for an awfully short suborbital flight.

From Space.com

SpaceShipTwo is designed to be lofted by a carrier plane called WhiteKnightTwo. At an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15,000 meters), the space plane separates from the carrier; then, SpaceShipTwo engages its onboard rocket motor to make its own way to suborbital space.

Passengers aboard the vehicle will experience a few minutes of weightlessness and get to see the curvature of Earth against the blackness of space before coming back down to Earth for a runway landing.

A ticket for this ride currently costs $250,000, and more than 600 people have put down deposits to reserve a seat, Virgin Galactic representatives have said.

With all the hype, it's important to remember how little there is here. Technologically there's nothing groundbreaking while as a business model, it does offer a spectacular view and a few minutes of weightlessness, but there are other options for the latter and plenty of spectacular views closer to home, all available at a fraction of the cost. The main selling points appear to be novelty and bragging rights, both of which are likely to fade well before the investors (at least those at the back of the line) see any returns.

Bethany McLean made her name covering Enron, which is never a good sign

There's a major expose out from Vanity Fair on SolarCity. Give a read. We'll talk more later.

Until then, here are some rules I suggested a couple of years ago for dealing with reporting on Musk. There are a few points I might sharpen a bit if I were writing this today, but nothing I'd care to retract.

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

A few points to keep in mind when reading any upcoming story about Elon Musk

First, a quick update from the good people at Gizmodo, specifically Ryan Felton:

Elon Musk awoke on Thursday with the intention of sending Twitter into a frenzy by declaring that he received “verbal govt approval” to build a Hyperloop in the densest part of the United States, between New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington D.C. This is dumb, it’s not how things work, and requires, uh, actual government approval.

Felton goes on to contact the government agencies that would absolutely have to sign on to such a project. Where he was able to get comments, they generally boiled down to "this is the first we're hearing of it." The closest he came to an exception was the federal Department of Transportation, which replied

We have had promising conversations to date, are committed to transformative infrastructure projects, and believe our greatest solutions have often come from the ingenuity and drive of the private sector.

This is a good time to reiterate a few basic points to keep in mind when covering Elon Musk:

1.    Other than the ability to make a large sum of money through some good investments, Elon Musk has demonstrated exceptional talent in three (and only three) areas: raising capital for enterprises; creating effective, fast-moving, true-believer corporate cultures; generating hype.

2.    Though SpaceX appears to be doing all right, Musk does not overall have a good track record running profitable businesses. Furthermore, his companies (and this will come as a big slap in the face of conventional wisdom) have never been associated with big radical technological advances. SpaceX is doing impressive work, but it is fundamentally conventional impressive work. Before the company was founded, had you spoken with people in the aerospace community and asked them "what is closest to being Mars ready, who has it, and who are the top people in the field?", the answers would have been the type of engine SpaceX currently uses, TRW (which sued SpaceX for stealing their intellectual property), and the chief rocket scientist SpaceX lured away from TRW. By the same token, Tesla is pretty much doing what all of the other major players in the auto industry are doing in terms of technology.

3.    From the beginning, Musk has always had a tendency to exaggerate and overpromise. Smart, skeptical journalist like Michael Hiltzik and the reporters at the Gawker remnants have taken any claim from Elon Musk with a grain or two (or 20) of salt.

4.    That said, in recent years things have gotten much, much worse. Musk has gone from overselling feasible technology and possibly viable business plans to pitching proposals that are incredibly unlikely then supporting them with absurdly unrealistic estimates and sometimes mere handwaving.

5.    The downward spiral here seems to have started with the Hyperloop. This also seems to be the point where Musk started trying to do his own engineering rather than simply taking credit for the work of those under him. On a related note, it is becoming increasingly obvious that Elon Musk has no talent for engineering.

6.    Musk’s increasingly incredible claims have started to strain the credulity of most of the mainstream press, but the consequences have been too inconsistent and too slow-coming to have had much of a restraining influence on him. Even with this latest story, you can find news accounts breathlessly announcing that supersonic travel between New York and DC is just around the corner.

7.    Finally, it is essential to remember that maintaining this “real-life Tony Stark” persona is tremendously valuable to Musk. In addition to the ego gratification (and we have every reason to believe that Musk has a huge ego), this persona is worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Musk. More than any other factor, Musk’s mystique and his ability to generate hype have pumped the valuation of Tesla to its current stratospheric levels. Bloomberg put his total compensation from Tesla at just under $100 million a year. When Musk gets tons of coverage for claiming he's about to develop telepathy chips for your brain or build a giant subterranean slot car race track under Los Angeles, he keeps that mystique going. Eventually groundless proposals and questionable-to-false boasts will wear away at his reputation, but unless the vast majority of journalists become less credulous and more professional in the very near future, that damage won’t come soon enough to prevent Musk from earning another billion dollars or so from the hype.

Tuesday Tweets

Charlie Daniels has become the kind of right winger Charlie Daniels used to chase around parking lots. https://t.co/yXXU7wlcPI

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) August 24, 2019

Every streaming service is a bundle. You pay for all the shows whether you watch them or not. https://t.co/XeTbZ7FxLJ

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) August 25, 2019

 

This is extremely dangerous.

Let’s be clear about something: widespread “geo-engineering” of our climate by reflecting sunlight away from the Earth is, at best, untested and, at worst, dangerous as hell. https://t.co/kcqKzzsrRG

— Dr. Jonathan Foley (@GlobalEcoGuy) August 24, 2019

  

With all due respect to the indispensable work of @Sulliview and @jayrosen_nyu , this is the most important critique of current journalistic business models you'll read this year.

The Adults In The Room https://t.co/E1jqekvYiB via @deadspin

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) August 24, 2019

  

(Aug 15 2007) "Clinton continues to hold a commanding lead over Obama, 45 percent to 25 percent, among those planning to vote in a Democratic primary.... Clinton is also seen as being more electable than Obama." https://t.co/xqvKioXKyE

— Anil Kalhan (@kalhan) August 24, 2019

 

this was one of the paragraphs that seemed mindblowing to me "the presidency had grown somewhat stale under the old norms as its occupants increasingly stuck to carefully crafted talking points and avoided spontaneity, Mr. Trump has brought back a certain authenticity" 🤦🏽‍♀️

— Valdivia (@TheCorollary) August 24, 2019

Hillary beat trump by 2,868,686 votes.

78,044 in 3 states tipped the Electoral College.

Flipping 39,023 —0.000285% of 136,669,237 total cast— she’s in.

2 ways to analyze:

1. Banal: ‘Hillary didn’t go to Wisconsin’

2. Less Stupid: Many factors are to ‘blame’ (aka learn from).

— Philippe Reines (@PhilippeReines) August 21, 2019

The hyperloop is a masters' class in controlling the narrative

Here's how you do it.


1. Set the topics

For a brief window a few weeks after the initial white paper, boosters of the hyperloop completely lost control of the narrative. Papers like the Washington Post published devastating takedowns which left no stone upon stone of the original proposal and the whole thing seemed dead in the water.

The lull would prove temporary and when the story returned, the pro hyperloop camp pretty much got everything they wanted in terms of setting the agenda. There were speculative pieces about what life would be like in a world of supersonic ground transportation. Stories about new startups and impressive-sounding rounds of funding. Breathless accounts of demonstrations that were limited strictly to the parts of the system that were already widely in use elsewhere. Skeptics were relegated to a paragraph or two, almost always will below the fold.


2. Create the laws-of-physics standard

Promoters of the hyperloop have managed to introduce what is almost certainly the ultimate in low bars for infrastructure proposals, the assertion that it does not violate the laws of physics.

This takes on an added degree of absurdity when applied to a maglev vactrains,  an idea that engineers have been playing around with for at least 100 years, longer if you break it down to its component parts. 

With no one in all that time seriously questioning its theoretical foundations.

Nonetheless, it has become one of the standard tropes of the here-comes-the-hyperloop article to haul out a physicist who assures the readers that magnetic levitation works and that vehicles traveling in vacuums don't have a problem with air resistance.




3. Work the people covering the story.

The supporters played on the press's weaknesses for tech messiahs and opinions differ journalism. There is a intense desire to believe that things like supersonic trains and Mars colonies and immortality formulas are not just possible but are right around the corner. If anything the Press is particularly susceptible to this, especially when the idea was associated with some Silicon Valley savior.

Most of the reporters on this beat were also notably weak on the subtleties of engineering. Even the best of them tended to think in terms of principles to be explained rather than problems to be anticipated, understood, and solved. Issues that would be top-of-mind for any mechanical or civil engineer like thermal expansion were almost entirely off of their radar unless one of the experts they consulted brought it up.

4. Wait out the critics

Of all the weapons in the promoter's arsenal, patience was perhaps the most valuable. With only occasional exceptions, they ignored their critics and eventually the reporters did too.

5. Keep funding "private" until actual money is involved

At first, the hyperloop was supposed to be so cheap to build and maintain that it was hardly worth talking about. Just charge passengers twenty bucks a head and you'd break even in no time. The development costs were all being handled privately. Even if the plans never came to fruition, what was the harm?

The suggestion that little or no tax dollars would be involved further shielded the proposals from scrutiny, letting them gain credibility simply by going unquestioned for so long in the public discourse. Then, slowly but inevitably, the idea of public funding started to ease its way into the conversation. Now it's public-private partnerships.  Care to guess what the next point on the line will be?

Let's kick the weekend of right

Cabell "Cab" Calloway III was one of the most dynamic entertainers of the 20th Century, but this was one time he couldn't dominate the stage.

Not sure why this Nicholas Brothers number came to mind or how I can tie it into any of our threads, other than with the all-purpose reason that everyone should see this at least once.

"A public-private partnership" ... nothing ominous about that phrase

Just so we're clear. We are edging closer to see hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of tax dollars go to highly dubious projects, not because the promoters have introduced major technological breakthroughs or have proposed well thought-out plans, but because they managed to wait out their critics, counting on reporters' eagerness to believe a too-good-to-be-true story and reluctance to do the hard work of digging into the complex engineering details.  Yes, there have been exceptions, but by now they are all but drowned out by the hype and bullshit.

Ryan Kelly, Head of Marketing and Communications for Virgin Hyperloop One, told CU that the next major step is to build what the company calls a “certification track.”

That track would be a little over seven miles long and would enable the company to go beyond what it has achieved at its privately-funded test track. That means putting people in the pods for the first time, developing a switching system that would allow multiple pods to travel in the tube at the same time [I'm not sure about this part. I think the switching system may be for allowing the pods to take different forking paths. -- MP], and seeing if a pod can safely travel through the tube at a much greater speed than it has so far (to achieve the kind of travel times the company has promised, pods would have to travel more than twice as fast as the XP-1 did in Nevada).

...

Officials in India recently announced that a proposed Virgin Hyperloop One project connecting Pune and Mumbai will be moving into the procurement phase, although Kelly said that the company has not yet decided where to build the certification track.

“Whether India is going to be able to provide the support in order to certify globally (is still unknown)…the U.S. I think has a better opportunity to potentially do that and so that’s why states are kind of vying for that now,” he said, adding that the company estimates the cost of building the track in India at “about $500 million.”

“Our timeline here is that we want to have the certification track up and running by 2024, somewhere in the world, and we want (the Hyperloop) certified and ready to go,” Kelly added, explaining that, even if the track is not built in Ohio, the planning and procurement process for the Chicago route could continue for the next five years, and, once the technology is certified and approved, “we break ground.”

An estimate of the overall cost of a Hyperloop connecting Chicago, Columbus and Pittsburgh has yet to be released, but a study by the Colorado Department of Transportation put a $24 billion price tag on a 325-mile network in that state.

As for who would pay for the $500 million certification track needed to prove the technology works, Kelly said “we’re looking at a public-private partnership; (there will be) private investment, but whatever that public agreement looks like would have to be negotiated case-by-case…so, we’re also looking for, obviously, what’s the best offer that we’re going to get to make this happen?”

One more thing.

2017
"Virgin Hyperloop One ... says it wants to have three operating hyperloop systems by 2021"

2019
"Our timeline here is that we want to have the certification track up and running by 2024"

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) August 10, 2019

 

One of the advantages of having been blogging this long is that when someone says something really stupid, you've probably already written a rebuttal

For example, say that a Washington Post columnist/torture enthusiast/Manafort minion (or Stone crony -- I'm not entirely clear on that point) starts pontificating about kids these days...

Maybe @marcthiessen can share some of his war stories about sewers during his tour of duty at Black Manafort. It must have been harrowing.

— Iván Cavero Belaunde (@ivanski) August 10, 2019

 

I don't have to spend my evening writing a post explaining why you can safely skip all of these op-eds about millennials. I can just dip into the archives.

Thursday, December 22, 2016

Among living Americans, there are only two "generations"

 "The ________ Generation” has long been one of those red-flag phrases, a strong indicator that you may be about to encounter serious bullshit. There are occasions when it makes sense to group together people born during a specified period of 10 to 20 years, but those occasions are fairly rare and make up a vanishingly small part of the usage of the concept.

First, there is the practice of making a sweeping statement about a "generation" when one is actually making a claim about a trend. This isn't just wrong; it is the opposite of right. The very concept of a generation implies a relatively stable state of affairs for a given group of people over an extended period of time. If people born in 1991 are more likely to do something that people born in 1992 and people born in 1992 are more likely to do it than people born in 1993 and so on, discussing the behavior in terms of a generation makes no sense whatsoever.

We see this constantly in articles about "the millennial generation" (and while we are on the subject, when you see "the millennial generation," you can replace "may be about to encounter serious bullshit" with "are almost certainly about to encounter serious bullshit"). Often these "What's wrong with millennial's?" think pieces manage multiple layers of crap, taking a trend that is not actually a trend and then mislabeling it as a trait of a generation that's not a generation.

How often does the very concept of a generation make sense? Think about what we're saying when we use the term. In order for it to be meaningful, people born in a given 10 to 20 year interval have to have more in common with each other than with people in the preceding and following generations, even in cases where the inter-generational age difference is less than the intra-generational age difference.

Consider the conditions where that would be a reasonable assumption. You would generally need society to be at one extreme for an extended period of time, then suddenly swing to another. You can certainly find big events that produce this kind of change. In Europe, for instance, the first world war marked a clear dividing line for the generations.

(It is important to note that the term "clear" is somewhat relative here. There is always going to be a certain fuzziness with cutoff points when talking about generations, even with the most abrupt shifts. Societies don't change overnight and individuals seldom fall into the groups. Nonetheless, there are cases where the idea of a dividing line is at least a useful fiction.)

In terms of living Americans, what periods can we meaningfully associate with distinct generations? I'd argue that there are only two: those who spent a significant portion of their formative years during the Depression and WWII; and those who came of age in the Post-War/Youth Movement/Vietnam era.

Obviously, there are all sorts of caveats that should be made here, but the idea that Americans born in the mid-20s and mid-30s would share some common framework is a justifiable assumption, as is the idea that those born in the mid-40s and mid-50s would as well. Perhaps more importantly, it is also reasonable to talk about the sharp differences between people born in the mid-30s and the mid-40s.

There are a lot of interesting insights you can derive from looking at these two generations, but, as far as I can see, attempts to arbitrarily group Americans born after, say, 1958 (which would have them turning 18 after the fall of Saigon) is largely a waste of time and is often profoundly misleading. The world continues to change rapidly, just not in a way that lends itself toward simple labels and categories.

Tuesday Tweets

Kudlow is as close as you'll find to a human knight/knave puzzle.

Point 1/ https://t.co/PdX0Qe2VPn

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) August 18, 2019

that latter one was from Dec. 2007. Of course we all make bad predictions — but Kudlow is *always* wrong 3/

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) August 18, 2019

No matter how many experts try to inject a note of reality, the narrative always reverts to a standard post-war sci-fi fantasy. @torstenkathke

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) August 13, 2019

The case for addressing climate change is so overwhelming that exaggeration can't add much to the support; it can only erode our credibility. @Sheril_

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) August 15, 2019

The "we're all doomed" crowd is not only undercutting serious efforts to fight climate change, they're also dabbling in bad science (like anti-vaxxer talking points).https://t.co/BjqZfSuJV9

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) August 15, 2019

The essential takedown of the Mars delusion

If you have followed this story at all, you have to read this article by George Dvorsky.

The Red Planet is a cold, dead place, with an atmosphere about 100 times thinner than Earth’s. The paltry amount of air that does exist on Mars is primarily composed of noxious carbon dioxide, which does little to protect the surface from the Sun’s harmful rays. Air pressure on Mars is very low; at 600 Pascals, it’s only about 0.6 percent that of Earth. You might as well be exposed to the vacuum of space, resulting in a severe form of the bends—including ruptured lungs, dangerously swollen skin and body tissue, and ultimately death. The thin atmosphere also means that heat cannot be retained at the surface. The average temperature on Mars is -81 degrees Fahrenheit (-63 degrees Celsius), with temperatures dropping as low as -195 degrees F (-126 degrees C). By contrast, the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was at Vostok Station in Antarctica, at -128 degrees F (-89 degrees C) on June 23, 1982. Once temperatures get below the -40 degrees F/C mark, people who aren’t properly dressed for the occasion can expect hypothermia to set in within about five to seven minutes.

Mars also has less mass than is typically appreciated. Gravity on the Red Planet is 0.375 that of Earth’s, which means a 180-pound person on Earth would weigh a scant 68 pounds on Mars. While that might sound appealing, this low-gravity environment would likely wreak havoc to human health in the long term, and possibly have negative impacts on human fertility. 
...

Pioneering astronautics engineer Louis Friedman, co-founder of the Planetary Society and author of Human Spaceflight: From Mars to the Stars, likens this unfounded enthusiasm to the unfulfilled visions proposed during the 1940s and 1950s.

“Back then, cover stories of magazines like Popular Mechanics and Popular Science showed colonies under the oceans and in the Antarctic,” Friedman told Gizmodo. The feeling was that humans would find a way to occupy every nook and cranny of the planet, no matter how challenging or inhospitable, he said. “But this just hasn’t happened. We make occasional visits to Antarctica and we even have some bases there, but that’s about it. Under the oceans it’s even worse, with some limited human operations, but in reality it’s really very, very little.” As for human colonies in either of these environments, not so much. In fact, not at all, despite the relative ease at which we could achieve this. 

It goes on from there, demolishing the whole ridiculous sham. If we had a functional discourse, this would kill the topic of imminent Martian colonies and let us move on to a serious conversation about the exploration of space.

Of course, we don't have a functional discourse.

This won't kill the topic.

We won't move on.

Respectable publications like the Atlantic will continue to run articles like CSI:Mars. Elon Musk will continue to be treated as a tech messiah. Actual breakthroughs like airbreathing rockets will go largely unnoticed.

And we will all continue getting dumber by the day.

3 Martini Shots from Rob Long

After following Uber and Lyft, it's almost refreshing to find a tech company that's competent at being evil

Back in Arkansas, we used to talk about Wal-Mart "killing a town twice." The company would open a store in a small town, drive the local merchants out of business, then close that location so that the residents would have to do their shopping at the Wal-Mart in the next town ten or fifteen miles down the road.

The underlying logic remains the same. If you have market dominance and deep pockets, your quickest path to higher profit margins is to drive the little guys out of business. The complete lack of shame does, however, seem to be a bit of a 21st Century innovation.

From Gizmodo.

Citing interviews with merchants of the e-commerce giant, as well as internal sent alerts to those individuals, Bloomberg reported Monday that Amazon is effectively penalizing its sellers if it finds that their products are being offered for a lower on rival websites. If it finds competitive pricing elsewhere, Amazon alerts a merchant with price comparisons between the two marketplaces and informs them that their product has essentially been demoted by Amazon’s system and will be more difficult to find or purchase on its site, according to the report.

Bloomberg said the practice began in 2017, but added that alerts have been more frequent as Amazon works to maintain its dominance in the e-commerce space.

The way that Amazon works to undermine sales for merchants of competitively priced products is to remove the “Buy Now” button that appears to the right of products on its platform, Bloomberg reported. While the product can still technically be purchased, it makes the product more difficult for shoppers and can hurt a seller’s bottom line. It also means that sellers are being forced to adjust their prices on rival marketplaces, which can be a blow to any attempts to offset the huge chunk of change that Amazon takes for itself just to list merchant products on its site.

“Amazon works hard to keep prices low for both customers and sellers. We have very competitive fees for sellers and we make significant investments on their behalf to continually improve our store and empower their businesses,” a spokesperson told Gizmodo in a statement by email. “In our store, we feature the offer that predicts the best shopping experience for the customer based on a number of factors including price and delivery speed. Sellers have full control of their own prices both on and off Amazon, and we help them maximize their sales in our store by providing them insights on how to be the featured offer.”

Of course, Amazon controlled just under half of the e-commerce market as of last year, and it only gets bigger every day—meaning online sellers have few places to go to find a customer. And with online markets hollowing out the brick and mortar space, online sellers don’t really have a choice to not be online. This kind of practice might keep prices down for consumers and users glued to Amazon dot com, but it does not create healthy competition or a sustainable marketplace for sellers.

Agent-based simulations and horse-race journalism

[This was never my area of expertise, and what little I once knew I've mostly forgotten. Since lots of our regular readers are experts on this sort of things, I welcome criticism but I hope you'll be gentle.]

I tried a little project of my own back in the early 2000s. One of these days, I'd like to revisit the topic here and talk about what I had in mind and how quixotic the whole thing was, but for now there's one aspect of it that has become particularly relevant so here's a very quick overview so I can get to the main point.

Imagine you have an agent-based simulation with a fixed number of iterations and a fixed number of runs. You randomly place the agents on a landscape with multiple dimensions and multiple optima and have them each perform gradient searches. Now we add one wrinkle. Each agent is aware of the position of at least one other agent and will move toward either the highest point in its search radius unless another searcher it is in communication with has a higher position in which case it heads toward that one.

What happens to average height when we add lines of communication to the matrix? At one extreme where each searcher is only in contact with one other, you are much more likely to have one of them find the global optima but most will be left behind. At the other extreme, if everyone is in contact with everyone, there is a far greater chance of converging on a substandard local optima. Every time I ran a set of simulations, I got the same U-shaped curve with the best results coming from a high but not too high level of communication.

It is always dangerous to extend these abstract ideas derived from artificial scenarios to the real world, but there are some fairly obvious conclusions we can draw. What if we think of the primary process in similar terms? Each voter is doing an optimization search, bringing in information on their own and trying to determine the best choice, but at the same time, they are also weighing the opinions of others performing the same search.

Given this framework, what is the optimal level of communication between voters via the polls? At what point does the frequency of polling reach a level where it makes it more likely for voters to converge on a sub-optimal choice? I'm pretty sure we've passed it.

Tuesday Tweets

These seem to stand on their own.

Humans love to socialize, it is a basic human need. When new technologies facilitate it, suddenly we call it an addiction. https://t.co/YuzjQJ8E4E

— Pessimists Archive (@PessimistsArc) August 10, 2019

I know we've been over this one before, but I keep coming back to the traffic cop question. True level five should be able to handle a human directing traffic but it remains a tremendously challenging problem for AI.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) August 10, 2019

Here in Charleston it really doesn't matter when restaurants open or close because one day the entire city will be underwater, nothing will exist, and all our pain and suffering will disappear.

Eat Bubba Gump Shrimp.

Or don't. Because it's gone.https://t.co/0PLZm4Wk2s

— The Post and Courier (@postandcourier) August 9, 2019

Spoiler alert: they mostly don't exist, despite Elon Musk talking about them constantly. https://t.co/LpbhwFHKPr

— Timothy B. Lee (@binarybits) August 10, 2019

It still amazes me that we did any programming at at before we could look up code on Google.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) August 8, 2019

Since I'm now getting "there was never any hype" revisionism in my comments, some handy (but far from exhaustive) screenshots pic.twitter.com/OGI22iJiY5

— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) August 6, 2019

Are we entirely certain he was joking? https://t.co/rXk4P94FhH

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) August 10, 2019