Tuesday, December 3, 2019

Which could explain why it looks like a DeLorean hatchback -- Tuesday Tweets






Always enjoy it when Josh Barro weighs in on a nepotism debate.


 


Worth it just for the use of the phrase "controlled detonation."





Good quote.




We'll be revisiting this.


For the cult of personality thread.






My question is how big is that 1/3 next to Trump's thin margin of victory?









Posted by at No comments:

Monday, December 2, 2019

Perhaps the part about the laws of economics not applying should have been a tip off.


Excellent article by Gabriel Sherman who is definitely the kind of writer you'd want on this beat. There is, however, one theme I'd like to push back on. We hear a lot about how powerfully charismatic and incredibly persuasive company co-founder Adam Neumann was.  How else would he convince men like Jamie Dimon that a laughably bad business plan was not only viable but would justify a valuation of almost fifty billion dollars?

The trouble with that explanation is that we've seen a remarkably large number of these masters of mesmerism recently. Think of all the companies which, in the past decade or so, have raised huge amounts of money based on pitches that collapsed immediately under even mild scrutiny. They can't all be the work of superhuman salesmen.

As an alternative, is it possible that the combination of a Randian worship of the wealthy,  conditions that made it easier than ever to luck into great fortunes and the rise of the credulity driven hype economy have all made it easier to find gullible people with way too much money?


WeWork executives had long grown accustomed to Neumann’s belief that the laws of economics—even reality itself—didn’t apply to him. It was in the nature of unicorns that they bent reality, and that certainly had been true of WeWork. Fueled by $12 billion of venture capital and debt, Neumann grew WeWork in less than a decade from a single coworking outpost in SoHo into a 12,500-employee company with 500,000 users in 111 cities across 29 countries. But in 2018, WeWork had lost $2 billion and had a highly questionable business model—the company signed long-term leases and sublet space to freelancers and corporations on a short-term basis. Its valuation somehow kept rising.

The company’s valuation put Neumann’s net worth at $4.1 billion—and his spending more than kept pace. “It was Succession craziness,” a colleague said. Neumann was chauffeured around in a $100,000-plus Maybach sedan and traveled the world on a $60 million Gulfstream G650. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, he and his wife, Rebekah Paltrow Neumann—Gwyneth’s first cousin—spent $90 million on a collection of six homes that included a 6000-square-foot Gramercy condo, a 60-acre estate in Westchester County, a pair of Hamptons houses and a $21 million mansion in the Bay Area that features a room shaped like a guitar. They employed a squadron of nannies for their five children, two personal assistants, and a chef. “Adam went through money like water,” a former executive said.

In a way, the spending made sense, because Neumann himself was the product. He pitched himself to investors as a gatekeeper to the rising generation. A new way of working. A new way of living. Work was 24/7, coworkers were friends, office was home, work was life. For baby boomers who experienced office life as cubicles and bad coffee, his message was irresistible. “Every investor who walked through was sold,” a WeWork executive told me. They saw Neumann as a millennial prophet who did shots of Don Julio during meetings while preaching about the dawn of a new corporate culture, one in which the beer and kombucha flowed and MacBook-toting employees would love coming to work. After sitting with Neumann in his office, outfitted with a Peloton bike, infrared sauna, and cold water plunge, Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson told Fast Company that Neumann reminded him of the Apple cofounder. Neumann later told colleagues that Isaacson might write his biography. (Isaacson never considered writing such a book.)

Through a combination of egomaniacal glamour and millennial mysticism, the Neumanns sold WeWork not merely as a real estate play. It wasn’t even a tech company (though he said it should be valued as such). It was a movement, complete with its own catechisms (“What is your superpower?” was one). Adam said WeWork existed to “elevate the world’s consciousness.” The company would allow people to “make a life and not just a living.” It was even capable of solving the world’s thorniest problems. Last summer, some WeWork executives were shocked to discover Neumann was working on Jared Kushner’s Mideast peace effort. According to two sources, Neumann assigned WeWork’s director of development, Roni Bahar, to hire an advertising firm to produce a slick video for Kushner that would showcase what an economically transformed West Bank and Gaza would look like. (Bahar told me he only advised on the video and no WeWork resources were used.) Kushner showed a version of the video during his speech at the White House’s peace conference in Bahrain last summer.

To a passel of geezer capitalists, this was too big to miss, even if they didn’t fully understand it—possibly, not understanding it was the point. Rupert Murdoch, Sir Martin Sorrell, and Larry Silverstein all took meetings. Mort Zuckerman, the billionaire cofounder of developer Boston Properties, told a real estate executive shortly after WeWork launched that Neumann was creating the future of work. Zuckerman soon offered to buy WeWork for $500 million. (Neumann declined the deal but accepted a $2 million investment from Zuckerman.) “Adam was probably the best salesman of all time,” a former WeWork executive told me.

Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, November 30, 2019

Flaky New Age conspiracy theories are becoming more relevant. Here's some historical context [repost]

Monday, June 18, 2018

The idea of ancient astronauts is a bit more ancient than I realized.



Another interesting nugget I came across while researching the technology project. We've already discussed how the fundamentals of what we would now call new ageism – – mysticism, extraterrestrial civilizations, psychic phenomena – – were largely a product of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I had always assumed that the belief in ancient astronauts was a fairly recent addition, something that people came up with in the 1960s. Apparently, though, the notion that aliens visited her thousands of years ago and left their mark through mythology and monuments actually dates back to at least the 1890s.

From Wikipedia:

Edison's Conquest of Mars is an 1898 science fiction novel by American astronomer and writer Garrett P. Serviss. It was written as a sequel to Fighters from Mars, an unauthorized and heavily altered version of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. It has a place in the history of science fiction for its early employment of themes and motifs that later became staples of the genre



Emphasis added:

The humans reach Mars, but in spite of their superior forces they have lost half their men to the Martians' overwhelming numbers. The Martians envelop the planet in a smoke screen, and the humans retreat to the moon Deimos. During a raid on Mars for supplies, the earth men find Aina, the last of a population of human slaves whose ancestors were captured from Kashmir in a Martian raid 9,000 years before. During this raid, the Martians also constructed the Great Pyramids and the Great Sphynx in Egypt, the latter of which is a statue of their leader. Aina advises Edison that meeting the Martians in battle would be fruitless, and that they should instead attack the dams that channel water from the polar ice. Since most of Mars' cities are under sea level, the flood spreads rapidly, killing most of the Martians and destroying their civilization. Edison and company force a peace with the surviving Martians, and return home to great celebration.

Posted by at No comments:

Friday, November 29, 2019

Our annual Toys-for-Tots post

A good Christmas can do a lot to take the edge off of a bad year both for children and their parents (and a lot of families are having a bad year). It's the season to pick up a few toys, drop them by the fire station and make some people feel good about themselves during what can be one of the toughest times of the year.

If you're new to the Toys-for-Tots concept, here are the rules I normally use when shopping:

The gifts should be nice enough to sit alone under a tree. The child who gets nothing else should still feel that he or she had a special Christmas. A large stuffed animal, a big metal truck, a large can of Legos with enough pieces to keep up with an active imagination. You can get any of these for around twenty or thirty bucks at Wal-Mart or Costco;*

Shop smart. The better the deals the more toys can go in your cart;

No batteries. (I'm a strong believer in kid power);**

Speaking of kid power, it's impossible to be sedentary while playing with a basketball;

No toys that need lots of accessories;

For games, you're generally better off going with a classic;

No movie or TV show tie-ins. (This one's kind of a personal quirk and I will make some exceptions like Sesame Street);

Look for something durable. These will have to last;

For smaller children, you really can't beat Fisher Price and PlaySkool. Both companies have mastered the art of coming up with cleverly designed toys that children love and that will stand up to generations of energetic and creative play.

*I previously used Target here, but their selection has been dropping over the past few years and it's gotten more difficult to find toys that meet my criteria.

** I'd like to soften this position just bit. It's okay for a toy to use batteries, just not to need them. Fisher Price and PlaySkool have both gotten into the habit of adding lights and sounds to classic toys, but when the batteries die, the toys live on, still powered by the energy of children at play.
Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, November 28, 2019

"As God as my witness..." is my second favorite Thanksgiving episode line [Repost]





If you watch this and you could swear you remember Johnny and Mr. Carlson discussing Pink Floyd, you're not imagining things. Hulu uses the DVD edit which cuts out almost all of the copyrighted music. [The original link has gone dead, but I was able to find the relevant clip.]

As for my favorite line, it comes from the Buffy episode "Pangs" and it requires a bit of a set up (which is a pain because it makes it next to impossible to work into a conversation).

Buffy's luckless friend Xander had accidentally violated a native American grave yard and, in addition to freeing a vengeful spirit, was been cursed with all of the diseases Europeans brought to the Americas.

Spike: I just can't take all this mamby-pamby boo-hooing about the bloody Indians.
Willow: Uh, the preferred term is...
Spike: You won. All right? You came in and you killed them and you took their land. That's what conquering nations do. It's what Caesar did, and he's not goin' around saying, "I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it." The history of the world is not people making friends. You had better weapons, and you massacred them. End of story.
Buffy: Well, I think the Spaniards actually did a lot of - Not that I don't like Spaniards.
Spike: Listen to you. How you gonna fight anyone with that attitude?
Willow: We don't wanna fight anyone.
Buffy: I just wanna have Thanksgiving.
Spike: Heh heh. Yeah... Good luck.
Willow: Well, if we could talk to him...
Spike: You exterminated his race. What could you possibly say that would make him feel better? It's kill or be killed here. Take your bloody pick.
Xander: Maybe it's the syphilis talking, but, some of that made sense.



Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, November 27, 2019

In LA, we're dreaming of a white Thanksgiving


From the Los Angeles Times:

A “broad swath of precipitation” is expected to blanket Los Angeles County and surrounding areas starting early Wednesday, said Kathy Hoxsie, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. The heaviest rain and snow are predicted to fall on Wednesday from the morning to the afternoon. Lighter showers are forecast for Thursday and Friday and could extend into the weekend. Rainfall estimates for this week’s storm call for about 1 to 2 inches for the coast and valleys, and 1.5 to 3 inches for the foothills and at lower elevations of the mountains. A foot or more of snow is possible at higher elevations.

Snow levels are expected to plummet from 4,000 feet on Wednesday to about 2,500 feet by Thursday. This means the 5 Freeway over the Grapevine, along with Highway 14 and Highway 33, will likely see a significant dusting of powder — and with it, the seemingly inevitable traffic snarl, said David Sweet, also a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. 

 For you Easterners out there, the highest elevation in the city is around five thousand feet while the highest point in LA County around ten thousand. A snow level of  2,500 feet will cover a good chunk of land.

Of course, the real action is a ways north of here.
Dangerous winds in the Sierra toppled a semitrailer truck, downed power lines and closed a stretch of highway in Southern California on Monday ahead of a winter storm expected to bring up to 2 feet of snow to mountain tops around Lake Tahoe. U.S. Highway 6 was closed due to downed power lines south of Yosemite National Park near Bishop. A wind gust of 94 mph was reported Monday morning at Mammoth Lakes Airport.

Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, November 26, 2019

Tuesday Tweets


There was a brief period twenty-plus years ago when graphing calculators made some pedagogical sense, but that period is long over.



Talking Points Memo has become, unsurprisingly, my go-to site for impeachment analysis.  


The relationship between Trump and the GOP is another thread we'll be returning to. 



The punchlines just write themselves.




And to close.












Posted by at 2 comments:

Monday, November 25, 2019

Worst moral hazard argument ever (and that's a competitive field)

One of the more amusing subnarratives (in a schadenfreude way)  of the impeachment story has been the efforts of what we might call the Brooksian wing of reality-based conservatives. In contrast with the Rubin wing, which is perfectly willing to let the chip fall...
... the Brooksians also acknowledge the obvious with Trump but then look for a way of playing things out that minimizes the damage to the GOP and the larger conservative agenda. This usually involves arguing against impeachment, since as previously argued,  the trial represents a no win scenario for the GOP.

Jim Gergaghty of the National Review does, however, deserve credit for being the first to make the case against impeachment on moral hazard grounds.


Removing President Trump from office would say to the American people, “Don’t worry if you make a choice that turns out bad. We will save you from the consequences of your actions.” If you want the American people to exercise better judgment in future elections, you need to make them live with the consequences of their bad decisions. The lesson of a successful impeachment of Trump would be that Americans should vote for whoever they want and not worry about electing a seriously flawed president, because if he ever got too bad, Congress would step in and take him out. The narrative is clear: The will of the people matters, until the stakes get really high, and then the grown-ups will step in, reverse decisions, and put out the fires.
Posted by at No comments:

Friday, November 22, 2019

A couple of thoughtful video essays by Bob Chipman

To be a good popular art commentator in 2019 you have to have a deep understanding of nerd culture combined with strong critical detachment. It is difficult to find writers who can manage both at once and I don't think anyone does it better than Chipman.







Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, November 21, 2019

When your opponents face a no-win scenario, it's in your interest to see that they finish the game

Picking this up from Tuesday...

One of the reasons the impeachment is such a dilemma for the GOP is that it requires officials to take a position that will piss off either a majority of the country or a key block of the Republican base that is personally loyal not to the party but to Trump. If the first group really does exceed 70% and the second stays above some threshold (let's call it 15%), the situation can become almost impossible to navigate.

One of the main implications of this is that the saner conservatives out there have done these calculations and that's why they are desperately looking for a way out. The corresponding implication on the other side of the aisle is that, regardless of how the vote goes, it's in the Democrats' best interest to not only have it, but to make it as public and binding as possible.

I think I'm pretty much in line with Josh Marshall on this (which is generally a good place to be).
The Democrats’ job is to lay out the evidence in a public setting and get elected Republicans to sign on the dotted line that this is presidential behavior they accept and applaud. That won’t be difficult. They have one last chance to change their answer. Democrats real job is to clarify and publicize that that is their answer.
Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

Another example of Left/Right convergence

One of these days, I’m going to write a big bomb-throwing post proposing that political scientists should completely abandon the use of the left-right spectrum in serious research. It is an innately multivariate concept that cannot be reduced to a scalar. Attempts to create an operational definition have ranged from inadequate to disastrous. On top of all that, since everyone thinks they know what “left” and “right” mean, any use of the terms in a supposedly scientific context inevitably produces more confusion than illumination.

One of the indications that a Euclidean framework won’t work is the existence of beliefs and positions that tend to attract people from the extremes of both the left and the right. We’ve already discussed conspiracy theories and alternative medicine. Perhaps we should add certain segments of anti-war movements.

I’m not talking about strange bedfellow scenarios like the one that temporarily aligned the left with the reactionaries against FDR liberals. This is something more paradoxical, where people supposedly on opposite ends of the spectrum gravitate to the same point not out of convenience or strategic alignment (such as the apocalyptic evangelical wing’s support of Israel).

This isn’t to say that there aren’t differences between the anti-war movement on the left and on the right, but I suspect when you start going through the crowd at a Gabbard rally, it might not be easy to tell which direction a given supporter came from.

From Fresh Air:

GROSS: So Enoch is anti-Semitic, racist and promotes those thoughts on his blog and podcast. Did he support Donald Trump during the election? Does he support President Trump now? Did he play any role in promoting Trump?

MARANTZ: Yeah. So he and the rest of the alt-right definitely supported Trump during the campaign and saw him as the best they were ever going to get from a plausible presidential candidate. I mean, they saw him as someone who would give voice to their kind of white identity movement in a tacit way but still in a way that sounded very clear to them.

After he became president, he started to alienate them by being erratic and inconsistent - also by being a little too hawkish. A lot of these people came out of anti-war organizing, either from the left or the right or both. So when he started dropping bombs on Syria, a lot of the alt-right stopped being Trump supporters. And then also when he failed to build the wall and failed to enact what they wanted, which was essentially a proto-white nationalist agenda, he lost a lot of their support, too.

But a lot of them - you know, in a way the anti-Semitism, it's not just a kind of purely irrational - I mean, it's obviously irrational, but it doesn't come out of nowhere. A lot of it for them comes out of what they perceive as libertarian or anti-war politics.

GROSS: So if Trump were to run again, do you think he'd have the support of Mike Enoch or other people that you've written about in the book?

MARANTZ: Yeah, it's a really good question. A lot of them have moved on to other people like Tulsi Gabbard. A lot of people in my book are really into Tulsi these days.
Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, November 19, 2019

Tuesday Tweets

Lots of topics I need to revisit one of these days.



Describing your own paper's work as "deeply reported" is so New York Times.


One of the reasons the impeachment is such a dilemma for the GOP is that it requires officials to take a position that will piss off either a majority of the country or a key block of the Republican base that is personally loyal not to the party but to Trump. If the first group really does exceed 70% and the second stays above some threshold (let's call it 15%), the situation can become almost impossible to navigate.


As always, the question here is just how much of this Netflix Original does Netflix actually own.




We knew it was bad, but perhaps not this bad.









Leon G. "Lee" Cooperman (born April 25, 1943) is an American billionaire investor and hedge fund manager. He is the chairman and CEO of Omega Advisors, a New York-based investment advisory firm managing over $3.3 billion in assets under management, the majority consisting of his personal wealth.

In September 2016 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Cooperman and Omega Advisors with insider trading, more specifically for "trading stocks, bonds and call options of Atlas Pipeline Partners in July 2010 on information he obtained from an executive at the company." Cooperman's firm agreed to a $4.9 million settlement with the SEC in May 2017 but admitted no wrong-doing.

Cooperman through his Omega Charitable Partnership, along with Anthony Melchiorre owns American Media, Inc. (AMI), publishers of the National Enquirer, since August 2014





Remember earlier in the post when we were talking about supporters being personally loyal to Trump?


One of the more encouraging recent developments in journalism has been people in the industry finally starting to listen to Sullivan.


SF remains the go to example, despite not being even vaguely analogous to the cities in question.






The sad part is that Steyer might not end up being the most clueless and self-indulgent billionaire to run for president this year.


Posted by at No comments:

Monday, November 18, 2019

Fun with Political Trivia

This picks up on a recent thread (telling which one might be too much of a clue). The ones and zeros represent a trait of Democratic candidates from 1964 to 2004. Take a look and think about it for a moment. Here's a hint, the trait is something associated with each man well before he ran for president.

Johnson           1
Humphrey       0
McGovern       0      
Carter              1           
Mondale          0           
Dukakis           0           
Clinton            1                 
Gore                1                      
Kerry               0


As you might have guessed, the relationship between this trait and the popular vote didn't hold in the previous or following elections. The trait is not at all obscure. It was well known at the time and figured prominently into their political personas, This is not a trick question.

Read more »
Posted by at No comments:

Friday, November 15, 2019

Voting Referendum

From XKCD Highly recommend the ExplainXKCD for this one).



Plus a bonus cartoon



Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, November 14, 2019

"This strategy is cynical enough when the victim is something like Toys ‘R’ Us; it’s a societal crisis when it comes for journalism."

Glad to see that the New York Times ran this important op-ed by former Deadspin editor Barry Petchesky (as excerpted by Lawyers, Guns and Money), but you have to wonder how things might have been different if the NYT had stood with Gawker when these crimes against journalism first started rather than handing over a spot on their opinion page to noted women's suffrage critic, Peter Thiel.
    Why would anyone buy Deadspin to change Deadspin? It’s hard to understand why Great Hill Partners demanded that we “stick to sports” — especially at a time when the site was driving the conversation in sports coverage and had the highest traffic in its history — until you realize that this was most likely their plan.It’s the private equity model: Purchase an asset, strip it of everything of value, then turn around and sell the brand to someone else before they realize that what made the brand valuable in the first place has been lost and can never be recovered (the low-quality, un-bylined articles sweatily posted to the site after the mass resignations bear this out).

    This strategy is cynical enough when the victim is something like Toys ‘R’ Us; it’s a societal crisis when it comes for journalism.

    And come for journalism it has. In recent years, we’ve seen the deaths (and to varying degrees, the troubled rebirths) of the likes of Newsweek, The Denver Post, LA Weekly, Playboy and just last month, the granddaddy of all sports media, Sports Illustrated.It plays out the same way each time: The new owners come in, slash staff and costs and turn a once-proud publication into a content mill churning out bland and unimportant stories that no one wants or needs to read.

    It’s going to keep happening, faster than new outlets can rise up to replace the gutted old. For every refreshing new outlet, two will be zombified. Corners will be sanded down. Bitter pills puréed to a beige pap. Everything you liked about the web will be replaced with what the largest number of people like, or at least tolerate enough to click on and sit through three seconds of an autoplay ad. Unique voices will be muted, or drowned out altogether.
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)