Friday, May 8, 2020

Weekend


I don't actually have a corner that looks that good. I go to the patio for my meetings.



When Andrew commented on The Untouchables being Mamet in Hemingway stupid profundities mode, my first thought was "No, that would be the Edge." According to Les Stroud, the stupidity goes beyond the dialogue.

(And though "the Chicago way" is a contender, the best speech in a bad movie is Roscoe Lee Browne's prayer before hanging in the Cowboys [Originally left out the title, sorry -- MP].)



I never thought about money being heavy.




Now You See Me was also a stupid movie but in the opposite way, thinking it was being clever.





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Thursday, May 7, 2020

Kevin and the Stegosaurus -- special Thursday tweet post


 

  

 

 

 

 


 

  

 




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Wednesday, May 6, 2020

"Not like those bumbling polynomial people"


We ran a piece on Monday that made the point that not only ignoring the track records of clowns like Kevin Hassett, but actually putting them in positions of responsibility was a really bad idea. I wrote the post over the weekend, before this story broke.

From Josh Marshall.
One of the most depressing and least surprising developments in the last 36 hours is that the White House is apparently relying on a “cubic model” of the COVID19 epidemic prepared by White House economist Kevin Hassett to craft its crisis response. I have not seen any statisticians or epidemiologists who know precisely what “cubic” refers to the in this context – though there are some promising speculations based on simply plugging in one of the default trend lines (third degree polynomial) in Microsoft Excel. The more relevant point is that, according to The Washington Post, the model predicts the number of people dying of COVID19 in the US will fall to close to zero by May 15th – a scenario that seems all but impossible.

Here I can’t help but note a basic point. Hassett is not a health care economist, let alone someone at the crossroads of behavioral economics and epidemiologists. Indeed, his record as an economist is rather notorious.

Perhaps Hassett’s biggest claim to fame is coauthoring a 1999 book entitled Dow 36,000: Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market. The book argued that traditional metrics for evaluating stock prices were outdated and that the stock market was dramatically undervalued. The Dow, then a bit over 10,000, would rise to 36,000 over the next three to four years. These are the kinds of predictions one often hears at the top of a bull market. And indeed the market hit its peak within months of the book’s publication and continued to fall for almost the next four years. Needless to say, that was two and a half market collapses ago. 21 years later the Dow stands at 23,749, though it did approach 30,000 before the COVID19 collapse.





Just to be clear, this all happened after the Washington Post broke the story of Hassett's bungling at the beginning of the pandemic. Nothing was learned. It just got worse. On the bright side, if Hassett was able to correctly apply the trend line option, that speaks well for the easy of use of MS Office






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Tuesday, May 5, 2020

Tuesday Tweet Dump -- double Bayesian edition



 
You should read the whole thread, but I wanted to call it this tweet in particular.

  

We may disagree on the meaning of contained.

  


 


 


  


 


 


 


 


 


 

The teen years will not be easy in this household.


  
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Monday, May 4, 2020

"Kevin (Dow 36,000) Hassett" should be more than just a cheap shot. It needs to be a reminder. UPDATED


I'm supposed to start this with the standard nobody's perfect/we've all made mistakes boilerplate, but I'm not going to. I have never screwed up as badly as Hassett. I very much doubt that anyone reading this has either. And yet, other than a few jokes at his expense, he seems to have paid no price. His post Dow 36,000 career seems to have been one long concatenation of sinecures.

That's a problem.

There needs to be a consequence for being wrong, a penalty, a demotion or at the very least a loss in credibility until we see proof that a lesson was learned. If we don't demand that damaged reputations have to be rebuilt and lost trust has to be regained, the screw-ups will just get bigger and more dangerous.

Incredibly depressing case in point.from Philip Rucker.

So the White House considered its own analysis. A small team led by Kevin Hassett — a former chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers with no background in infectious diseases — quietly built an econometric model to guide response operations.

Many White House aides interpreted the analysis as predicting that the daily death count would peak in mid-April before dropping off substantially, and that there would be far fewer fatalities than initially foreseen, according to six people briefed on it.

Although Hassett denied that he ever projected the number of dead, other senior administration officials said his presentations characterized the count as lower than commonly forecast — and that it was embraced inside the West Wing by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and other powerful aides helping to oversee the government’s pandemic response. It affirmed their own skepticism about the severity of the virus and bolstered their case to shift the focus to the economy, which they firmly believed would determine whether Trump wins a second term.

For Trump — whose decision-making has been guided largely by his reelection prospects — the analysis, coupled with Hassett’s grim predictions of economic calamity, provided justification to pivot to where he preferred to be: cheering an economic revival rather than managing a catastrophic health crisis.
__________________________________________

UPDATE:




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Friday, May 1, 2020

Transparency

This is Joseph

There is a good conversation about transparency going on right now. The gist of it is that the 2016 elections have created perverse incentives for being transparent. If you release information then the press hunts through it looking for a series of mini-scandals. If you release nothing then people quickly lose interest. This creates a serious incentive to minimize transparency.

When talking to people about this, it has been speculated that the 2016 election was rather unique. And so it was. But the pattern continues. It has been three and a half years since the 2016 election and the question of whether congress can see the president's taxes is still being litigated.  This includes attempts to source these records from third party sources, such as banks.

It would be less of an issue if people were not suddenly asking Joe Biden to make as many records available as possible. What I find perplexing here, is that people have lost perspective on the size of the offence (as well as their ability to blame their own conduct). The question of how separate business interests are from the presidency is a perfect area for transparency.

What we need is the press to stand above "false equivalency" and make lack of transparency carry a political price, via repetition of the issues and refusing to punish openness on the part of candidates.
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Weekend Morricone

I've been making extensive use of my local libraries' e-book collection. One recommendation is a collection from Dr. Seuss's stint as a political cartoonist for PM in the early forties. You've probably seen a few of these but it's worth going through the whole set for both the unmistakable art and cross-section of liberal but definitely not leftist views (the difference being very  sharp while the non-aggression pact was still in place).

Some of the recurring targets included isolationists, racial discrimination and especially Charles Lindbergh.














I have some writing to do over the weekend. Harlan Ellison used to listen to Ennio Morricone film scores while he worked, so I thought I'd give it a try. Morricone has over 500 IMDB credits (the latest in pre-production), so if I like the results I'm set for a while.







I hesitated for a moment on this one because it is, in retrospect, a really stupid film  that arguably manages to be less historically accurate than the TV show.


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Thursday, April 30, 2020

Lowering the line

This is Joseph

I want to follow up on Mark's post earlier today. I think that a major concern that we have all had for awhile was whether or not there would be forward planning in the epidemic. After all, early in the epidemic there were problems because pandemic response had been under-funded and epidemiologists were caught by surprise at how unprepared we are.

Now we are seeing the same lack of forward planning. There is a principle of marshalling resources, even when there are free markets, that is being ignored. Few countries are happy if they are far from being food sufficient (and, when they are, they have a lot of planning around this), In the same vein, the United States has an energy reserve to prevent oil disruption, despite oil being part of a free market.

Why is healthcare so different?

Clearly it makes no sense to be cutting capacity here. You want to develop a healthcare reserve to handle the risk of a covid-19 hospitalization surge, not shrink capacity so people later in the epidemic have even worse care. Like with food and energy, one presumes the only rational provider of this financing is the government.

Why is this a partisan issue? Starving and freezing are bad, so we have a reserve against a disruption, but dying of a virus isn't a bad thing?
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Did anyone see this one coming?

 When I said flattening the curve doesn't accomplish that much if you lower the line, I was wrong. It certainly does something.





 



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Wednesday, April 29, 2020

A GOP strategy that asks seniors to sacrifice themselves for the economy may, in electoral terms, have a subtle flaw

You know that horribly overused news genre of voters supporting positions that hurt their own interests? This isn't one of those stories.

Josh Kraushaar writing for the National Journal:
Going against the tide of public opinion carries serious political consequences. This column has pointed out the downward trajectory of Trump’s approval ratings as he struggles to demonstrate competence in this crisis while failing to offer clarity about the path forward. But he risks doing greater damage by going against the interests of his own voters.

For a preview on how things could get worse for the president, look at the evolving political views of seniors, one of Trump’s most supportive constituencies in the previous election. They are also the most concerned about the coronavirus, given they have a much greater risk of dying if they become infected.

The latest Morning Consult poll found that 65-and-older voters prioritized defeating the coronavirus over healing the economy by nearly a 6-to-1 ratio. And over the past month, they’ve become the group most disenchanted with Trump’s handling of the crisis. In mid-March, seniors were more supportive of Trump than any other age group (plus-19 net approval). Now, their net approval of the president has dropped 20 points and is lower than any age group outside of the youngest Americans.

Those findings were matched by a new NBC/WSJ poll, which tested the presidential matchup between Trump and Joe Biden. Among seniors 65 and older, Biden led Trump by 9 points, 52 to 43 percent. That’s a dramatic 16-point swing from Hillary Clinton’s showing in the 2016 election; she lost seniors by 7 points to Trump (52-45 percent).

Seniors are among the most engaged voters in the country (71 percent went to the polls in 2016), and were critical to Trump’s victory. They’ve remained supportive of him for much of his presidency. And they’re counting on the president to protect them at a particularly precarious moment. If Trump’s desire to quickly reopen the economy ends up backfiring, they’ll be the first to abandon him and deal his reelection prospects a crippling blow.

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Tuesday, April 28, 2020

The Onion hires Nostradamus and other Tuesday Tweets







Explaining Elon.


 

   




Meanwhile...






Does this mean he's started telling people to drink Mercury?




 

And, no. It's not your imagination. The New York Times used to be a better paper.




("Who funds the Federalist?")

  


As noted before, there may be a subtle flaw in the GOP pushing the seniors-are-expendable line.


 
From the "standards are for other people" file.








 


You're just lucky this wasn't a rererepost.


 




And finally a damn good quote from Fallows.

  
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Monday, April 27, 2020

Flattening the curve doesn't accomplish that much if you lower the line

In a lot of ways, social distancing is a delaying action, an attempt to buy time (more or less literally) so that we improve our treatments and ramp up our capacity. Instead we're gutting our health care system.


Sue Dremann writing for Palo Alto Weekly:

Employees of Stanford Health Care, including doctors, nurses and technicians who are caring for COVID-19 patients, will have their pay reduced by up to 20% starting Monday, April 27, for 10 weeks, according to a tip sheet the organization sent to workers on April 21.

The medical center briefly stated it was making the cuts due to the economic impacts of COVID-19 on the organization instead of laying off employees. The "temporary workforce adjustment" program was created as part of the hospital's "cost-saving measure and initiatives," hospital administrators stated. The pay reductions will apply to all employees at Stanford Hospital, Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford and, in the East Bay, Stanford-ValleyCare. Asked if the cuts included to doctors' salaries, hospital spokeswoman Lisa Kim reiterated the cuts are "across the board." 


Paul O'Donnell and Kevin Krause writing for the Dallas News:

Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare is furloughing about 3,400 of its hospital workers nationally, citing lost revenue from elective surgeries being halted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tenet, one of the nation’s largest investor-owned hospital operators, announced the actions in a letter to employees Wednesday. CEO Ronald Rittenmeyer described the furloughs as temporary and resulting from the virus’s “acute” impact on the company’s business.

“These are difficult but necessary decisions in navigating near-term uncertainty that will eventually come to an end,” he wrote in the letter. “We remain ready to resume vital elective care in our communities once government restrictions are lifted.”

The 12-week furloughs affect 3% of Tenet’s 113,000 employees. It follows an earlier furlough of 500 corporate employees, as well as reductions in surgical center staffing at facilities closed or operating on a limited basis. The company said pandemic-related staffing cutbacks now affect about 10% of its workforce.

Dylan Scott writing for Vox
  • The Cookeville Regional Medical Center in Tennessee will be furloughing 400 of its 2,400-person staff, and a few hundred others will see a cut in their hours, Fox 17 Nashville reports.
  • Boston Medical Center is furloughing 10 percent of its staff, about 700 people, according to the Boston Globe.
  • Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic, which runs five hospitals in the Philadelphia area and employs 125,000 people there, will furlough an unspecific percentage of its staff, per the Philadelphia Inquirer.
  • Mercy Health, the largest health system in Ohio, is temporarily laying off 700 workers.
  • Two hospital systems in West Virginia are furloughing upward of 1,000 employees combined, Metro News reports.
  • The largest hospital system in eastern Kentucky is laying off 500 workers, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader.
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Friday, April 24, 2020

Media and editorial judgement

This is Joseph

The New York Times has been accused lately of too much false equivalence. This deleted tweet is probably a high water mark:


The phrase "in the view of some experts" refers to injecting bleach into one's lungs as being actually dangerous. Yes, injecting bleach into lungs really was mused about. Yes, there is video. Who are these experts and can they go first?

The most amazing part was this:
“I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen,” Trump said in the Oval Office, according to a pool report.
Neither explanation is good. On one hand, the president pondered the idea of people injecting lethal poison into their lungs. On the other hand, the president is so cynical about false equivalence that he set a trap to humiliate the media about their inability to apply editorial judgement. I don't think either explanation looks good.

Now, to be fair, the New York Times did eventually hear Donald Trump's explanation and update the story:


But surely better judgment can be used here? This isn't like hydroxychloroquine where there was actually some debate inside the biomedical community and an actual researcher, Didier Raoult, providing (weak) evidence. There was still some real risks with community use of hydroxychloroquine, but I can at least understand a political news correspondent not wanting to wade into a difficult debate.

But washing one's lungs with bleach? Here even the reporters covering it were asking a science advisor if it was really serious advice or not. This seems like a nitpick but surely this was one case where the NYT could have avoided this trap?


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Think of this as your weekend starter








I read quite a bit of mockery of Stephen Moore's Rosa Parks comment, but they left out the funniest part, where he delivered the comments from. (for more on Moore, click here)





Also impressed by the impressive work still being done by John Oliver.




Chipman has also been pumping out tons of thoughtful, literate video essays.




And a nice bit of accompaniment to your weekend by Thomas Newman.




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Thursday, April 23, 2020

At least, it's under $21 billion

 Another news story about our favorite real life Tony Stark.


 


Elon Musk has a real talent for selling himself as an exemplar of independence and champion of the public sector. Musk's promises of wondrous technology always come with amazingly low price tags. There's little if any reason to bother the taxpayer. All Elon asks is for the government to stay out of his way.

You may ask yourself why journalists would continue to fall for this. Perhaps it's because it appears to be a good career move.

Tuesday, May 31, 2016


At least it's under $5 billion...

As mentioned before, I'm working on a longer piece on the journalistic failure around the “proposal” for a supersonic passenger train called the Hyperloop (sorry about the scare quotes, but they really can't be avoided). It's a story of hype overwhelming the good work of some serious journalists.

The hype around the Hyperloop grows directly out of the carefully cultivated persona of Elon Musk. Here's a representative sample from the credulous Kevin Roose writing for New York Magazine:
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.

At the risk of a bit of Gawkeresque snark, Roose apparently has a rather unusually definition of “nuisance.”

Here is the far less credulous Jerry Hirsch writing for the Los Angeles Times:

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.


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