Our take from three years ago: "a propaganda-fed base has no capacity to self correct, rather it continues follow unsustainable paths that only gain momentum"

The next time someone asks why the GOP doesn't veer away from stands that look increasingly likely to end in electoral disaster, we have a post for that.

Thursday, November 2, 2017

Russians, Straussians, soft landings, and hamburger emojis

Since February, we've been discussing the curiously stable dynamic that keeps the GOP aligned with Trump even as his poll numbers slip. We've also argued that, at this point in time, this alliance holds the danger of an extraordinarily hard landing for the party. At the risk of overextending the metaphor, the Republicans are desperately hoping for a soft landing but are, at the same time, doing everything they can to maintain altitude.
As many have observed, the GOP of the 70s was able to minimize the long-term damage of Watergate by distancing themselves from Nixon and very publicly refusing to impede the investigation. The response of the party now has been just the opposite. It is as if the Republicans had responded to Watergate by doubling down their defense of Nixon, insisting there was nothing to the accusations, and calling for hearings into the crimes of McGovern, Humphrey, and LBJ.

Obviously, the decision to go all in on Trump is partially motivated by a desire to achieve as many policy goals as possible while still firmly in control of all three branches of government, but there's another factor which might be as large and which is possibly doing even more to eliminate the possibility of a soft landing.

.

If some poli-sci PhD candidate out there is looking for a thesis topic, you could do worse than the breakdown of Straussian communication matrices, or as I've put it, "drinking from the wrong pipe." The conservative movement was essentially a three-legged stool built on money, prioritizing strategic offices and elections, and misinformation. This last one was arguably the most important; it is also the one that has proven the least stable.

The initial purpose of this "noble lie" approach was to use the propaganda to keep the base sending money and showing up for the polls through of a combination of rage and fear. As with all Straussian systems, it was assumed that those in power would be in on the joke while the people who believed the lies would simply serve as electoral cannon fodder.

At some point though (I suspect inevitably), a couple of things happen. First, the believers become leaders. This is become blindingly obvious with Trump, but the children of Fox News have been in control of the party since at least 2010 and the roots go back further. Remember how Dick Cheney insisted while traveling that all hotel televisions be tuned to Fox News?

The second, and possibly more dangerous problem is that a propaganda-fed base has no capacity to self correct, rather it continues follow unsustainable paths that only gain momentum, often exacerbated by ratcheting mechanisms. Soon you reach a point where, even if the leaders accurately perceive the situation and realized the best solution, they can no longer reconcile that reasonable course of action with what the vast majority of their supporters have been told to believe for decades.

One of the essential steps for achieving a soft landing is getting your core supporters to face just how dire the situation is. Fox News et al., however, has simply lost the capacity to do this.

I hate to spoil another blogger's joke...

So just click over to the Financial Times and read this cautionary list of red flags to watch out for when trying to avoid companies likely to leave a multi-billion dollar hole in the market. Make sure to read the last paragraph.

We’ll wait.

Who’s going to be the next Wirecard?

Tesla context -- Why the red flags matter

It may seem like we've been picking on Tesla quite a bit lately. Sure, Musk is annoying, but the SpaceX stuff is cool, and we can all get behind electric cars and solar cells. Aren't there things  more worth complaining about in 2020?

The trouble with that framing is that the things you hear about -- the often cool, sometimes just goofy technology, the outrageous claims, the nerd as rock star lifestyle --  are a small part of the story, while the big parts of the story are more than big enough to worry about. This is especially true when you're living in Jengaville where one of the biggest, most precarious towers is a stock market bubble in the middle of an economic collapse.

Both columns in the table below show reasons for concern (discussed further here). Tesla has grown since 2017, but its revenue is still a fraction of the others below. This is a seventeen year old company that has turned a profit only intermittently.

Think about that for a moment and remember...

... Tesla's market cap is around three times that of GM and Ford, combined.

The other column is a stark reminder of the issues with corporate governance. The board, of course, provides no oversight. Musk has flagrantly attempted to manipulate the stock price. Many of the accounting practices appear fishy. All of this may or may not be connected to a mysterious and conveniently timed spike in the stock price that earned Musk a bonus worth three quarters of a billion dollars.

In more normal times, I'd add something here about Tesla being a bad employer and bad corporate citizen, but at the moment, I'm mainly thinking about what a stock market collapse would do to a fragile economy, the pocketbooks of retail investors and the emotional well being of a country that's already under just a bit of stress.

Some thoughts on recent reporting on Tesla

This is Joseph

One thing that I have not talked a lot about on the blog is Tesla (usually Mark's beat -- Mark is reporting on Tesla on Twitter). Tesla is becoming much bigger news now that a business insider story raises some safety concerns:

Leaked emails from 2012 reveal that Tesla knew its Model S battery had a design flaw that could lead to break downs and fires, but it sold the cars anyway. It's unclear when the design flaw was fixed.

Now, in one way this is quite normal -- cars have manufacturing issues all of the time. What makes this bad is that it is a mission critical component (the battery) and on a very high end vehicle. It's old, but it can be hard to report on a defect without a great inside source. I can think of no faster way to undermine a high end brand then to have failures on key components and the battery is heart of the electric vehicle. I think only the brakes being defective would worry me more, and even then the flammable piece is definitely not ideal.

You need to out-compete vehicles like the Volt, which itself is discontinued. While the Tesla generally scores better than the Volt did, it does so at almost twice the price point the Volt was offered at. The differences in overall size, features, and ratings are not large (and the back-up fuel tank on the Volt is maybe even a plus). So the prestige brand has to bring something to the table and an obvious choice would be reliability. It is not helpful, as Mark has tweeted, that JD Power found Tesla had the lowest quality score among 32 brands.

Here is hoping that more information comes out that makes this look like an outlier and not a common issue with Tesla vehicles.But the idea of Tesla, becoming a luxury electric vehicle car brand, really does depend on getting the key pieces of the top of the market right. At the moment the cars are hard to get (scarcity = good) but at some point you need to successfully scale up unless you plan to remain a niche player. It's an awfully expensive company for a niche . . .

There are some more things to consider about the corporate structure itself (accounting and governance) which may impede Tesla's ability to adapt tho these challenges, but this is probably a separate post topic.

The standard journalistic definition of bias is absurdly narrow but at least it’s self-serving.

Consider the following hypothetical.

 Upon reviewing the records of a male professor, we find a consistent pattern of his giving lower grades to female students based on comparable work. When accused of bias, he replies that he obviously can’t be since most women are Democrats and he’s a Democrat.

Or let’s say he has a record of giving high grades to children of people who can advance his career, department heads, committee members, editors of prestigious journals, etc.

Or what if the professor was known to give high marks to students who sucked up to him and grade more harshly when one challenged him?

In virtually every job you’ll find, discussions of bias will center around race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, conflicts of interest, and playing favorites. Outside of government, the only place I can think of where party affiliation and position on the ideological spectrum makes the list, let alone dominates it, is in journalism.

If you went back 100 years or so, this made a little more sense. All major cities and most medium, even small, towns had at least two papers, one Democrat and the other Republican. Giving the opposing party a chance to air its views actually was a good indicator of how seriously editors and publishers took fairness. Obviously this is no longer the case.

The nature of the messaging coming from the two parties has also changed (and more to the point diverged) even more sharply. Conservative movement Straussianism combined with the Nixon administration's young McLuhan-spouting media advisers (including Roger Ailes and, believe it or not, the head writer from Laugh-In). Republican messaging became more disciplined and planned out, always focused on partisan objectives with two tiers, one aimed at the base and the other explicitly designed to play on the weakness of the mainstream press.

The result of holding onto this now profoundly flawed definition of fairness and objectivity is a system where journalists are actually rewarded for engaging in bad behavior. They can indulge their worst biases and bigotry, stroke sources, back away from stories requiring genuine courage, and they will be praised for balance as long as these biases were nominally nonpartisan or the slant favored Republicans over Democrats. Add to that how adept conservatives became at employing both carrot and stick and you have a situation that makes terrible journalism all but inevitable.

Arguably the worst offender and certainly the one that did the most damage due to its reach and reputation is the New York Times.

I had a chance to see this up close in the 90s when I was living in and around Arkansas. I knew that critics had been accusing the New York Times of class bigotry pretty much constantly since the 19th century, but I was totally unprepared for the openness and the nastiness of the bias. The national press, very much led by the gray lady, was horribly offended by the thought of a piece of poor white trash getting this far above his place. The 90s was also when we learned that the mere mention of Hillary Clinton tapped into a stunning pool of misogyny in the national press corps.

(To get a small but telling glimpse at the underlying misogyny of the time, go google Spy magazine covers featuring Hillary Clinton. If you want to defend the magazine and the press at large from charges of sexism, make sure you have a defense ready for the one where they added the penis.)

Whitewater also demonstrated the distaste for and disinterest in the rest of the country displayed by the NYC/DC press. Reporters routinely confused the Fulbright and Faubus camps, and treated probably the state's worst segregationist of the civil rights era as a trusted source.

When looking for bias, you should also ask yourself who is in a position to do something for the reporter or the organization. While all journalists rely on access, no publication has as much or depends on it as heavily as does the New York Times.The desire to please or at least avoid angering sources explains a great deal about the career of Judith Miller, the uncritical acceptance of Paul Ryan as series policy wonk, and the embarrassing puff pieces on figures like Hope Hicks and Jared/Ivanka.

We also need to mention the paper‘s extraordinary willingness to carry a grudge. Along with the misogyny, this was a major factor in the coverage of the 2016 campaign. Hillary is not the only example.

Gawker had a long history of humiliating the New York Times by pointing out sycophantic coverage of Silicon Valley and other lapses. When Peter Thiel, a figure so far out of mainstream thought as to criticize women’s suffrage, engineered a lawsuit expressly to kill the publication, the NYT, rather than standing up for journalism and pushing back against a dangerous precedent, actually gave Thiel a spot on the op ed page to tell his side of the story.

Sometimes the press corps simply takes a dislike to someone, particularly if an influential peer like Maureen Dowd sets an example. As long as the subject is Democratic, the result can be unchecked viciousness. Given the closeness of 2000, it's reasonable to argue that the biased coverage of Gore decided the election. Add to that the work of Judith Miller and the New York Times bears a great deal of responsibility for the Iraq War.

Any definition of fairness that turns a blind eye to these things is so flawed as to be dangerous to democracy.

Tuesday Tweets

Some guy out there actually named Seymour Butz is about to get a ton of mailers from the Trump campaign.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) June 21, 2020

 

Hard to say from the outside. But no question, Trump admin departments are softies on white collar crime. https://t.co/H7TZznpf1E

— Russ Mitchell (@russ1mitchell) June 21, 2020

Objectively speaking, the NTSB issued a blistering report on Autopilot safety flaws while the NHTSA has remained silent on the subject. https://t.co/6z8OzoSFzI

— Russ Mitchell (@russ1mitchell) June 21, 2020

Wirecard bulls brought to earth: Heike Pauls of Commerzbank, who has repeatedly and aggressively dismissed criticisms of Wirecard, set her €230 target price in mid-May. Friday close: €25.33.https://t.co/Mu1BvJ0Sds via @financialtimes

— Lionel Barber (@lionelbarber) June 19, 2020

For once, I don't know whether he's deliberately lying or just uninformed bc the people around him won't tell him things he doesn't want to hear.

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) June 19, 2020

This is undeniably true. But coming from @peterbakernyt, who is possibly the single leading perpetrator of the normalization of Trump's deviancy, it is jawdroppingly ironic, self-exonerating, and ridiculous. Does no one edit this man? https://t.co/vmeXW9YGdl pic.twitter.com/1YKBM1G4V0

— Dan Froomkin/PressWatchers.org (@froomkin) June 19, 2020

Hey, @stoolpresidente, I’ll be on @CNBC next week with @BeckyQuick. Would you care to join us?

I propose a wager:
I believe Berkshire shares will outperform your portfolio over the next five years

Loser donates a million dollars to a charity of the winner’s choice. Are you in? https://t.co/9otgQjEKnA

— Warren Buffett 🕙 (@Mrs_Skilling) June 19, 2020

Daddy knows how to make you happy #HappyFathersDay2020

pic.twitter.com/iDg9spYyHC

— jay arnold 🎬 (@jadedcreative) June 21, 2020

To misplace one billion dollars may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.

Just to get everyone up to speed.

Wirecard shares plunged more than 60% on Thursday as the German payments giant postponed its annual results once again and said auditors could not confirm the existence of 1.9 billion euros ($2.1 billion) in cash on its balance sheet.

The Munich-headquartered company said in a statement Thursday morning that auditor EY couldn’t find the cash balances — which represent roughly a quarter of its balance sheet. There were indications that “spurious balance confirmations” had been made by a trustee to “deceive the auditor and create a wrong perception of the existence of such cash balances,” it added.

“The Wirecard management board is working intensively together with the auditor towards a clarification of the situation,” the firm said. It added that failure to provide its 2019 financial statements by Friday could result in loans of around 2 billion euros being “terminated.”

...

The Financial Times has published a series of reports on its investigation into Wirecard’s accounting practices. According to those reports, which began back in January 2019, Wirecard’s Singapore office tried to inflate revenue through forged and backdated contracts. Another story in October claimed that Wirecard’s staff appeared to conspire to inflate sales and profits at subsidiaries in Dubai and Dublin and mislead EY. 

Is the a SoftBank connection? Do you even have to ask? (From April of last year)

The investment by the world’s biggest private technology company is a vote of confidence in Wirecard’s business as it defends itself against allegations of fraud, and will allow the Munich-based firm to expand its operations in Asia.

Shares in Wirecard jumped 10 percent to the top of Germany’s blue-chip index by 1240 GMT.

Wirecard, founded in 1999, ousted Commerzbank from Germany’s leading share index last year as it benefited from an accelerating global trend towards digital payments driven by e-commerce.

The two companies also unveiled a strategic partnership in which Softbank will help Wirecard expand in Japan and South Korea, and provide opportunities to work with other companies in its portfolio in areas such as data analytics, AI and digital financial services.

Other Softbank investments in its Vision Fund range from ride-sharing giants including Uber, DiDi, Grab and Ola to new financial and business services such as WeWork. Analysts said the partnership could provide further growth opportunities for Wirecard.

“Wirecard has a strong track record in pioneering innovation in digital payments and has been at the forefront in reshaping modern consumer behaviors,” a spokesman for Softbank said.

“We are excited to partner with the company and see huge potential to deploy this technology at scale across new markets and sectors within SoftBank’s global technology portfolio.”

Jengaville -- "The culture that produces $2B of fake revenue doesn’t produce ‘isolated’ frauds."

It is inevitable. The money isn’t missing. IT DIDN’T EXIST. The culture that produces $2B of fake revenue doesn’t produce ‘isolated’ frauds. The entire thing is a giant fraud. $WDI https://t.co/hMOIUWp5Od

— TC (@TESLAcharts) June 21, 2020

Long but exceptionally good interview with podcaster Tesla Charts. Worth the price of admission for the cash register analogy alone. What's perhaps most notable is that TC, whose whole shtick was built around pointing out Tesla red flags, spends most of his time here listing companies that are way worse than Tesla.

Welcome to Jengaville

I've been following a lot of big stories that involve what would seem to be increasingly unstable dynamics like a market bubble in the middle of an economic collapse or a pandemic response based on trying to spin anything under a quarter million American deaths as a win. and I'm starting to imagine a city of closely packed and sometimes interconnected Jenga towers.

I read about Wirecard and I see one tower swaying. I read about Berman and I see another tower listing to one side. I look closer and I see blocks the towers have in common.

I'm not predicting when things will fall and how they'll land, but if I had to bet, my money would be on soon and hard.

Friday blogging -- lots of big posts coming next week, but for now I'm kicking back

I'm a sucker for this sort of thing.

(h/t to Adam Tooze)





This one's as remarkable for its cast as for its look at modern living circa 1933.



And when they turned on the radio, they might have heard something sophisticated, like...



Just Googled 1933 to see what else was going on and one of my favorites popped up.

If only the government would get out of the way of these Silicon Valley visionaries.

From the Waco Tribune-Herald:

Fresh from making history by sending a manned craft to the International Space Station, SpaceX is asking Waco and McLennan County for money to grow.

The rocket company launched by billionaire Elon Musk will spend $10 million on infrastructure improvements at its rocket-testing facility in McGregor. The upgrades will include “noise suppressors,” which should prove welcome to those within earshot of SpaceX’s rumbling, window-rattling rehearsals.

Waco City Council and McLennan County Commissioners Court will vote Tuesday on sending SpaceX $2 million from the Waco-McLennan County Economic Development Corp. fund, with each entity allocating $1 million.

...

“It’s good that we continue to invest in this site,” said Melett Harrison, city of Waco economic development director. “We want SpaceX operations to come through McGregor and Central Texas.”

SpaceX leases 4,280 acres in McGregor’s industrial district, where it employs about 500 people, McGregor City Manager Kevin Evans said Monday.

Harrison said SpaceX will spend no less than $10 million in infrastructure improvements with an eye toward making water and electric service more reliable and upgrading 1 Rocket Road, which serves the test site.

“We don’t have specifics on which buildings would be affected,” Harrison said. “We received a general request and were told SpaceX proposes spending at least $10 million on these improvements, and wondered if the Waco-McLennan County Economic Development Corp. could help.”

[Important to note that "will" and "proposes" aren't quite the same thing -- MP]

Harrison said SpaceX previously received a $3 million allocation from the city-county fund. She said improvements included a new rocket test stand.

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.

Deferred Tuesday Tweets -- "Let's you and him fight."

I never miss a chance to quote the great E. C. Segar.

pic.twitter.com/SASAtK2Gkj

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) June 16, 2020

(For a bit more context. Ted Cruz is 49. Ron Perlman is 70.)


We'll be coming back to Quibi.

Quibi is burning a truly heroic amount of cash. It raised $1.75 billion from investors, expects to have spent *a billion* of it by *October* and will need to raise at least $200 million more by the middle of next year to keep going. https://t.co/FV7LZeZpsj

— Tom Gara (@tomgara) June 14, 2020

Success in the context of failure. https://t.co/jgwT0O4nDY

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) June 16, 2020

Excellent @washingtonpost magazine profile of @ericgarcetti by @PostScottWilson https://t.co/ki4bJq4nj5

Treats LA and its issues as real (rather than canvas for talking about national politics), and (apart from its title) piece is free of “California exoticism.”

— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) June 14, 2020

There's a variant (or maybe just a 1st cousin) of the Lake Woebegone effect here. If you get a better deal with A and I get a better deal with B, both companies can run "customers who switched from A/B to B/A saved 20%" ads. https://t.co/lclrRBG36Q

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) June 15, 2020

 

sometimes you just need to let a poll age for a while. Any pro will tell you that

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 16, 2020

  

I'd put quotation marks around "Gawker" but otherwise...https://t.co/YCp28GkE9Q

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) June 16, 2020

 

Tesla shares soar past $1,000 after Elon Musk seizes on Nikola hype with Semi truck production memo https://t.co/wPi2VOG6ur via @fpinvesting

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) June 15, 2020

 

Fox News is using fiery images from Minneapolis and photoshopped armed guards to make the largely peaceful Seattle occupation appear violent https://t.co/vrlUfM2srE

— Jon Passantino (@passantino) June 13, 2020

And some notes from the pandemic.

Rebekah Jones says she was fired from her job at the Florida Health Department for refusing to manipulate data on its coronavirus dashboard so the state would appear to meet its target to reopen.

Now, she has launched her own dashboard. https://t.co/cuZ5kZpSZz

— NPR (@NPR) June 14, 2020

Fauci said US government held off promoting face masks because it knew shortages were so bad that even doctors couldn't get enough #SmartNews https://t.co/P4DsBPspzX

— Cheri Jacobus (@CheriJacobus) June 16, 2020

If you find a mask oppressive you are really going to hate an endotracheal tube

— Mark Lewis (@marklewismd) June 13, 2020

Daycare

This is Joseph

This point rather illustrates the issues going forward:

If a bunch of the local elementary schools address social distancing by going to split days in the fall -- whether by hours of the day, days of the week, weeks of the month or whatever -- they will immediately create massive local childcare crises. The mismatch of the length of the school day (and year) with adult workplaces is bad enough already; add some sort of hybrid delivery and you’re putting extreme demands on parents and local daycare options. Given the income levels of many of our students, some of the arrangements are likely to be far worse than most of us would like to believe. And that’s assuming no second wave that abruptly closes the schools.

Basically, for the past three months we've ended the public (and private!) provision of childcare with rather extreme results for everyone with young children. I am not saying that this may not have been worthwhile in terms of lives saved, but the implications are . . . growing.

Several features of note are worth being highlighted.

The first is that, even when it works ok (e.g., teenagers), doing schooling from home massively increases the privilege of having a quiet workspace (large house, separate rooms) and good technology access (everyone has a computer, internet bandwidth is adequate). Same issue with food security and safe spaces. So for long periods of time this is rough.

The second is that we completely lack the ability to compensate parents for childcare. Many historical societies saw raising children as an important public good. It is unclear when that drifted to a form of conspicuous consumption instead. Small children cannot be left alone safely for a workday and require attention in a pattern that defies schedules.

The third is that this will rapidly exacerbate gender inequality, perhaps in unexpected directions. Years of trying to both raise children and do full time jobs is going to get parents to think about whether two incomes are necessary. Regardless of which parent gives up on market income, that's a power imbalance right away in the relationship.

Most of the "take time off" ideas are daft. Minimum wage in the US is $15,000 a year or so. It can be very challenging to live on that little with children. And single parents exist too. Many jobs are difficult to get and not easily replaced at the end of an epidemic when there is a major recession going on.

As this period of restricted social gathering evolves from short-term to long-term (probably right call now that covid-19 is a leading cause of death in the US), failing to grapple with this is a huge hit to working parents. There has been speculation that covid-19 could cause a rise in births -- I see the contrary as an issue. How many parents will want more children if this could happen again?

If the next generation of Teslas turns out to be a line of hovercrafts, I’ll have to retract this post.

[I was going to open this post with a brief discussion of concerns with treating the pandemic as a natural experiment, but I have stat professors who read this and they can be picky as hell.]

I read the whole thing and was surprised to find zero references to the 19 pending Clean Air Act violations at Tesla's Fremont plant https://t.co/QWTph1Af03

— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) June 10, 2020

Despite Elon Musk‘s suggestion I did not read the whole thing, but I did spot one interesting bit of slight of hand.









While the engineering behind diesel engines is really cool (especially the reason they don’t need spark plugs), they do have a problem with particulate pollution. There is, of course, clean diesel technology but the pros and cons there are probably better handled by experts. Besides, it’s not all that relevant to our central point.

With standard gasoline powered cars, however, the kind most of us drive, you start looking at tires and brake pads as major sources of particulate pollution. While Teslas do have a better carbon footprint than internal combustion cars, they are hardly green technology in this respect.

By the standards of Musk and Tesla, this isn't a big deal, but it is part of a pattern. Tesla frequently suggests that its success is interchangeable with the future of EVs, or that the company has plans to solve all of the problems associated with cars.

Another Friday post -- this probably fills our Ernie Bushmiller quota for a while.

Obviously no suggestion of plagiarism here, but compare this 1943 strip to the closing gag of the Monk reunion.

Warning, next time this tune gets stuck in your head (and it will), you'll have to deal with some disturbing images.

I illustrated the classic song “Windy” and it got stranger than I anticipated. pic.twitter.com/4LW3J9k9X9

— Andrew Farmer (@thatsajellyfish) May 12, 2020

Or this




Here's a catchy alternative earworm (speaking of Monk) to give you some Windy relief.



Which reminds me of Django and that's a good note to start the weekend.