2) "The company formally notified the FCC earlier this month [May 2018] that it still won’t be seeking Connect America funding for Starlink."
Continue below to get a load of SpaceX VP's arrogance back in 2018...— Scot, EV Customer Advocate (@ghost_scot) April 23, 2020
4) Two years later and SpaceX is now seeking 16 billion dollars in subsidies for this project.https://t.co/knUrmSDo8f— Scot, EV Customer Advocate (@ghost_scot) April 23, 2020
For years, government has been a nuisance to Elon Musk. It's slowed him down. It's required him to spend his valuable time lobbying his Twitter followers for support in the New York legislature instead of building rockets. It's required him to explain his mind-bending technical innovations to grayhairs in Congress as if he were speaking to schoolchildren. Over and over, the public sector has convinced Musk that it is hopelessly lost when it comes to matters of innovation, and that anything truly revolutionary must spring from the ambitions of the private sector.
Los Angeles entrepreneur Elon Musk has built a multibillion-dollar fortune running companies that make electric cars, sell solar panels and launch rockets into space.
And he's built those companies with the help of billions in government subsidies.
Tesla Motors Inc., SolarCity Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support, according to data compiled by The Times. The figure underscores a common theme running through his emerging empire: a public-private financing model underpinning long-shot start-ups.
"He definitely goes where there is government money," said Dan Dolev, an analyst at Jefferies Equity Research. "That's a great strategy, but the government will cut you off one day."
The figure compiled by The Times comprises a variety of government incentives, including grants, tax breaks, factory construction, discounted loans and environmental credits that Tesla can sell. It also includes tax credits and rebates to buyers of solar panels and electric cars. [It does not, however, include the more than $5 billion in government contracts that keep SpaceX in business -- MP]
A looming question is whether the companies are moving toward self-sufficiency — as Dolev believes — and whether they can slash development costs before the public largesse ends.
Tesla and SolarCity continue to report net losses after a decade in business, but the stocks of both companies have soared on their potential; Musk's stake in the firms alone is worth about $10 billion. (SpaceX, a private company, does not publicly report financial performance.)
Musk and his companies' investors enjoy most of the financial upside of the government support, while taxpayers shoulder the cost.
The payoff for the public would come in the form of major pollution reductions, but only if solar panels and electric cars break through as viable mass-market products. For now, both remain niche products for mostly well-heeled customers.
...
Subsidies are handed out in all kinds of industries, with U.S. corporations collecting tens of billions of dollars each year, according to Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that tracks government subsidies. And the incentives for solar panels and electric cars are available to all companies that sell them.
Musk and his investors have also put large sums of private capital into the companies.
But public subsidies for Musk's companies stand out both for the amount, relative to the size of the companies, and for their dependence on them.
...
California legislators recently passed a law, which has not yet taken effect, calling for income limits on electric car buyers seeking the state's $2,500 subsidy. Tesla owners have an average household income of about $320,000, according to Strategic Visions, an auto industry research firm.
Competition could also eat into Tesla's public support. If major automakers build more zero-emission cars, they won't have to buy as many government-awarded environmental credits from Tesla.
In the big picture, the government supports electric cars and solar panels in the hope of promoting widespread adoption and, ultimately, slashing carbon emissions. In the early days at Tesla — when the company first produced an expensive electric sports car, which it no longer sells — Musk promised more rapid development of electric cars for the masses.
In a 2008 blog post, Musk laid out a plan: After the sports car, Tesla would produce a sedan costing "half the $89k price point of the Tesla Roadster and the third model will be even more affordable."
In fact, the second model now typically sells for $100,000, and the much-delayed third model, the Model X sport utility, is expected to sell for a similar price. Timing on a less expensive model — maybe $35,000 or $40,000, after subsidies — remains uncertain.
It's about making sure people can't file unemployment. It isn't about saving lives, certainly. It's not about the peak of the curve. I think lots of people are going to ignore the governor and stay home regardless. This isn't a decision being driven by epidemiology. It's the rawest and most lethal of political decisions, and it will kill people.
Kemp is looking forward to the fiscal discussion in 2021 and 2022, when all of this really starts to hit. He got elected by out-yahooing the field. His base has been trained to view government spending as a crime, and he knows that he becomes politically vulnerable to an attack if he raises taxes. He is not capable of delivering a nuanced message around necessity, because his base doesn't know how to hear it.and
Georgians did the Kansas thing a couple of years ago and instituted a hard constitutional limit on income taxes of 6 percent. It cannot go higher without amending the state constitution. What that means is that there's no easy mechanism for the state to accommodate an extraordinary expense, like this, without somehow telling Republican reactionaries that they must raise taxes.I really do look forward to the day that the right-wing has ideas other than "cut taxes" and "taxes bad". It is not that anybody likes taxes. I don't like many things that are necessary: queues, licenses, car service visits, etc . . . But there is a real lack of any idea of how to respond to an emergency; imagine a war today with the fear that raising taxes might be needed to win.
We can use our prevalence estimates to approximate the infection fatality rate from COVID-19 in Santa Clara County. As of April 10, 2020, 50 people have died of COVID-19 in the County, with an average increase of 6% daily in the number of deaths. If our estimates of 48,000-81,000 infections represent the cumulative total on April 1, and we project deaths to April 22 (a 3 week lag from time of infection to death), we estimate about 100 deaths in the county. A hundred deaths out of 48,000-81,000 infections corresponds to an infection fatality rate of 0.12-0.2%. If antibodies take longer than 3 days to appear, if the average duration from case identification to death is less than 3 weeks, or if the epidemic wave has peaked and growth in deaths is less than 6% daily, then the infection fatality rate would be lower. These straightforward estimations of infection fatality rate fail to account for age structure and changing treatment approaches to COVID-19. Nevertheless, our prevalence estimates can be used to update existing fatality rates given the large upwards revision of under-ascertainment.Now, we all do "back of the envelope" calculations. This is me doing some. But we need to be careful. In a press release, the senior author pointed out that this calculation made the IFR of covid-19 about that of the flu. Like these are actual headlines. But this would be a massive issue, if true, as the decisions we are making depend on a higher IFR. But there are concerns with this research and there is a second study that appears to be only via press release.
The first ventilators that were produced by General Motors and Ventec Life Systems are being delivered to hospitals in the Chicago area, per General Motors. The hospitals were chosen by FEMA.— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) April 17, 2020
We have extra FDA-approved ventilators. Will ship to hospitals worldwide within Tesla delivery regions. Device & shipping cost are free. Only requirement is that the vents are needed immediately for patients, not stored in a warehouse. Please me or @Tesla know.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 31, 2020
California hospitals say Elon Musk sent them biPAP, CPAP machines, not ventilators | TheHill https://t.co/8kBh7Z5XEj— Russ Mitchell (@russ1mitchell) April 17, 2020
Hey, I just wanted to weigh in to say that CNN reporters (including me) have reached out to Tesla multiple times to ask about ventilators over the past several weeks, and we never got a response. This latest story reports what Gov. Newsom said.https://t.co/wsVkc3w0W4— Jackie Wattles (@jackiewattles) April 16, 2020
Happy #ElonMuskDay everyone! To celebrate, I'm going to donate these ventilators to my local hospital pic.twitter.com/ZaVBPbbr2b— Rebecca Watson (@rebeccawatson) April 20, 2020
Tesla actually sent out ResMed, Philips & Medtronic units. Latter is fully intratracheal. My personal opinion is that some ICUs are jumping the gun on intubation & setting PEEP & O2 too high. High pressure, pure oxygen increases risk of lung damage. pic.twitter.com/2IUnS5DPOg— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 16, 2020
At which point, Elon Musk abruptly left the conversation.Hi @elonmusk. Appreciate your interest!— Vatsal Trivedi (@VatsalTrivediMD) April 17, 2020
What do you mean by "lung strength"? Diaphragm TF? Pocc? P0.1? Compliance?
What do you mean by "natural lung pressure"? PEEP? PEEPi? Pmus? Elastance? Chest wall or lung?
Not familiar with your terms.
COI: Anesthesiologist and Intensivist
But the conversation did not leave him.He deleted but I got the receipt lol pic.twitter.com/C4HzmPOSd4— Castles 666 (@McNukes) April 18, 2020
Here's a hint for @elonmusk. If you don't want to go "much above their natural lung pressure," this is your only option. By definition, positive pressure ventilation is well above "natural lung pressure.”🤦🏻♂️ https://t.co/5sDMqhavkX https://t.co/UWegvnhCst— David Gorski, MD, PhD (@gorskon) April 18, 2020
Surprising how social distancing makes for strange bedfellows. In 2020, Bill Kristol is voting Democratic and I'm retweeting a New York Post columnist. https://t.co/BYLj8rWDon— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) April 18, 2020
Based on results of the first round of testing, the research team estimates that approximately 4.1% of the county's adult population has antibody to the virus. Adjusting this estimate for statistical margin of error implies about 2.8% to 5.6% of the county's adult population has antibody to the virus- which translates to approximately 221,000 to 442,000 adults in the county who have had the infection. That estimate is 28 to 55 times higher than the 7,994 confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported to the county by the time of the study in early April. The number of COVID-related deaths in the county has now surpassed 600.Methods are not yet out, but there are several points of concern. One, such small percentages are vulnerable to a lot of errors in specificity (see Andrew Gelman and Thomas Lumley). They don't say in the press release (I cannot even find the study yet) but another press release says:
In L.A. County, researchers on April 10-14 sampled the blood of a random population of 863 area residents at six testing sites.So we are talking maybe 30 or positives.
The economic impact of the Swedish strategy is also unclear. The government certainly thinks it’s going to be pretty bad. According to the National Institute of Economic Research, an agency that reports to the Finance Ministry, its baseline scenario has Swedish real GDP growth declining by 3.4 percent this year, worse than its 2.9 percent forecast for the United States. It also sees a 6 percent contraction in the second quarter, comparable to the annualized US forecasts by Wall Street of a 25 percent to 30 percent contraction here from April through June. From the NIER: “Concern about infection and official advice on limiting social contact are putting a major damper on household demand, and delivery problems are disrupting production in parts of the business sector. … However, there is extreme uncertainty about future developments.” It doesn’t seem the light-touch approach provides immunity from severe economic hardship.
A seroprevalence study led by Stanford researchers estimates that the number of COVID-19 cases in Santa Clara County was 50 to 85 times higher than the number of confirmed cases by early April — meaning that the true case numbers could range from 48,000 to 81,000 people infected. The county has reported 1,870 confirmed cases as of Friday.
Medicine professor and study co-lead Jay Bhattacharya said in a Friday press conference that the study results put coronavirus’ fatality rate “about on par with the flu,” but he warned that the lack of a vaccine means the two situations aren’t equivalent.And
Out of the 3,330 samples analyzed, 50 came back positive, indicating a crude prevalence rate of 1.5%. The researchers adjusted the initial results both by demographics — to account for the zip code, sex and race of study participants — and by test accuracy. The antibody test misses between 10 and 30% of those who have COVID-19 antibodies, according to Bendavid.The problem of course is what is the specificity of the test. The authors estimate it:
A combination of both data sources provides us with a combined sensitivity of 80.3% (95 CI 72.1-87.0%) and a specificity of 99.5% (95 CI 98.3-99.9%)But 3330 samples would have 17 false positives at the center of the point estimate and 56 at the bottom of the interval (e.g. the entire sample size could be false positives based on this data making the true prevalence ZERO) (and 3 at the top of the interval). This sort of low prevalence population is dangerous for making conclusions.
A hundred deaths out of 48,000-81,000 infections corresponds to an infection fatality rate of 0.12-0.2%.A 50 to 85 times under-count would mean 63% to 107% of New Yorker residents are infected. That is for the entire state, not just NYC. If Stanford researchers think this level of under-count is plausible then it should be immediately apparent with a quick NY based study.
But I ask you, where are the numerous cases of leading epidemiologists screaming bloody murder to the press, or on their blogs, or in any other manner, that the most commonly used model for this all-important policy analysis is deeply wrong and in some regards close to a fraud?So we did have blog material on this, here, here, and here. But it is a fair critique that we should have been more aggressive in blogging about this issue. Andrew Gelman was ahead of the curve here, way back on March 29th:
I have a few thoughts on this model. First, yeah, it’s curve-fitting, no more and no less. Second, if they’re gonna fit a model like this, I’d recommend they just fit it in Stan: the methodological appendix has all sorts of fragile nonlinear-least-squares stuff that we don’t really need any more. Third, I guess there’s nothing wrong with doing this sort of analysis, as long as it’s clear what the assumptions are. What the method is really doing is using the second derivative of the time trend on the log scale to estimate where we are on the curve. Once that second derivative goes negative, so the exponential growth is slowing, the model takes this as evidence that the rate of growth on the log scale will rapidly continue to go toward zero and then go negative. Fourth, yeah, what Dorman says: you can’t take the model for the asymptotic limit seriously. For example, in that methodological appendix, they say that they use the probit (“ERF”) rather than the logit curve because the probit fits the data better. That’s fine, but there’s no reason to think that the functional form at the beginning of the spread of a disease will match the functional form (or, for that matter, the parameters of the curve) at later stages. It really is the tail wagging the dog.
I know we've been through all of this stuff about Leo Strauss and the conservative movement before so I'm not going to drag this out into great detail except to reiterate that if you want to have a functional institution that makes extensive use of internal misinformation, you have to make sure things move in the right direction.
With misinformation systems as with plumbing, when the flow starts going the wrong way, the results are seldom pretty. This has been a problem for the GOP for at least a few years now. A number of people in positions of authority, (particularly in the tea party wing) have bought into notions that were probably intended simply to keep the cannon-fodder happy. This may also partly explain the internal polling fiasco at the Romney campaign.
And besides, the first-term Republican told reporters at a briefing this month, “South Dakota is not New York City.”
But now South Dakota is home to one of the largest single coronavirus clusters anywhere in the United States, with more than 300 workers at a giant pork-processing plant falling ill. With the case numbers continuing to spike, the company was forced to announce the indefinite closure of the facility Sunday, threatening the U.S. food supply.
“A shelter-in-place order is needed now. It is needed today,” said Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken, whose city is at the center of South Dakota’s outbreak and who has had to improvise with voluntary recommendations in the absence of statewide action.
But the governor continued to resist. Instead, she used a media briefing Monday to announce trials of a drug that President Trump has repeatedly touted as a potential breakthrough in the fight against the coronavirus, despite a lack of scientific evidence.
It's all about the money. A nonprofit started by conservative billionaire Bernard Marcus (Home Depot) says plants are ready to produce the drug hydroxychloroquine but for “red tape.” The pesky red tape classifies it as unproven and possibly dangerous.
https://t.co/w47hLqwdCF— vlh (@coton_luver) April 6, 2020
“Mr. Trump first expressed interest in hydroxychloroquine a few weeks ago, telling associates that Mr. Ellison, a billionaire and a founder of Oracle, had discussed it with him.” https://t.co/s2vWdpm8nI— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) April 7, 2020
The story behind the premature hype of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin is rather strange and involves billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, program hosts at Fox News and various rather dubious characters.https://t.co/IG194MOLxJ— The Wire (@thewire_in) March 23, 2020
And here is a further paper on the IMHE model, by statisticians from CTDS, Northwestern University and the University of Texas, excerpt from the opener:This is all fair and part of what the Epidemiology community has been discussing. But the follow-up is:
In excess of 70% of US states had actual death rates falling outside the 95% prediction interval for that state, (see Figure 1)
The ability of the model to make accurate predictions decreases with increasing amount of data. (figure 2)
Again, I am very happy to present counter evidence to these arguments. I readily admit this is outside my area of expertise, but I have read through the paper and it is not much more than a few pages of recording numbers and comparing them to the actual outcomes (you will note the model predicts New York fairly well, and thus the predictions are of a “train wreck” nature).
So now really is the time to be asking tough questions about epidemiology, and yes, epidemiologists. I would very gladly publish and “signal boost” the best positive response possible.From "About IHME":
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) is an independent population health research center at UW Medicine, part of the University of Washington, that provides rigorous and comparable measurement of the world's most important health problems and evaluates the strategies used to address them. IHME makes this information freely available so that policymakers have the evidence they need to make informed decisions about how to allocate resources to best improve population health.Do you see the word Epidemiology anywhere? I think that the reason I bristle is not that we shouldn't ask hard questions about models. It is the need to ask whether weak models in a different field should cast doubt on a field of study. I dunno -- do bad IHME models make me ask hard questions about physics too?
Christopher J.L. Murray, MD, DPhil, is the Chair and Professor of Health Metrics Sciences and Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. His career has focused on improving health for everyone worldwide by improving health evidence. A physician and health economist, his work has led to the development of a range of new methods and empirical studies to strengthen health measurement, analyze the performance of public health and medical care systems, and assess the cost-effectiveness of health technologies.I see Health Economist but not Epidemiologist. There is a department of Epidemiology at the University of Washington and there are people in IHME affiliated with it, but it's hardly a large overlap. It's like blaming the Economics Department for economic forecasting models developed by the Business School. It's the right general disciplinary area and these people might talk, but they are not always going to agree with methodology. But there is definitely not a tight collaboration here and IHME has its own graduate programs in Health Metrics, which it is quite clear are distinct from Epidemiology. They even have their own PhD program in Health Metrics.