Friday, February 18, 2022

A self-driving car rant surprisingly not about Tesla

From Jason Torchinsky writing (for the moment) in Jalopnik:

A New York Times writer named Farhad Manjoo — who I’m sure is a fantastic person in many rich and varied ways — recently found a way to, under the cover of journalism, snag a sweet, comfortable Cadillac Escalade for a family road trip. No shame there, I’ve done basically the same thing.

I too am certain that Manjoo is a great guy in many ways, but I've seen him screw up pieces about autonomous vehicles, climate change. housing, electoral data, and the butterfly effect or, in other words, pretty much everything of his I've read in the NYT.

None of which has had any adverse effects on his career. Like David Brooks, Manjoo is a slick writer who, while often wrong, is generally wrong in the right way as far as his superiors at the NYT are concerned. The paper is notorious for turning a deaf ear to critics, particularly when they like the stories you're telling and the tone you maintain.

With this story, though, Manjoo failed to read the room in a big way. Serious automotive and technology writers (not to mention regulators) including the NYT's own very good Neal Boudette have gotten increasingly concerned about autonowashing, exaggeration of "self-driving" capabilities leading to dangerous abuse of driver assistance systems. Elon Musk is the biggest offender here, but he's been helped by countless puff pieces over the years. Recently, however, the tide has been turning.

There’s a problem, though. The article about this road trip that appeared in the NYT today is absolutely jam-packed with mischaracterizations about GM’s Level 2 semi-automated driver assist system, Super Cruise, and, really, all L2 driver assist systems, that I think the result is genuinely dangerous.

The problems start right from the title of the article, “My Big Fat Self-Driving Road Trip,” which I guess is a reference to those My Big Fat Greek Wedding movies, but I don’t really get why, as there’s nothing Greek or matrimonial or even fat involved here. But that’s not the real problem with the headline; the real problem is the use of the term “self-driving.”

This term is a huge problem because it’s not just wrong, it’s dangerously wrong. That Escalade was very much not a self-driving car. While there were clearly many times when it seemed like a self-driving car, it in no way at all is.

Look, a Furby may seem like its trying to communicate with you, but if you extrapolate that to believe that it’s alive and capable of reciprocating your love, then you’ll be very disappointed. An Escalade with Super Cruise is similar, in that it seems like it’s driving itself at times, but if you extrapolate that to believe it really is, then you could end up in a really bad situation that could leave people dead.


Manjoo's story prompted a big negative reaction, and we all know how well the New York Times deals with criticism.

More from Torchinsky:

Let’s just pull that quote out of the tweet there so we can really drink it in, why not:

“In short, although the auto industry may distinguish between advanced driver-assistance systems and autonomous or self-driving vehicles, most people do not, and we do not expect them to.”

This approach is, to couch it in genteel terms, fucking terrible. Okay, NYT, even if you “do not expect” people to know the difference between advanced driver-assistance systems and self-driving vehicles, isn’t kind of part of your whole point of being to, you know, inform people?

...

I get that it’s the Opinion page, and the NYT Opinion page has a rich, proud history of being composed of compressed blocks of absolute sewage. But this is is not a matter of simple semantics. The differences between a full self-driving system and an advanced driver assist system are not a matter of opinion.

If you work for the NYT and you’d like to know what the actual distinctions are—so as to you know, not put people in mortal danger — then let me help by clarifying the differences between a full self-driving system that you will find on precisely zero (0) cars for sale to day, and an Advanced Driver Assist System (ADAS) that you’ll find on many vehicles today, from Ford to Cadillac to Volvo to Tesla and more.

Here’s the key piece of information: an ADAS (Advanced Driver Assist System) does not allow the car drive itself. With these systems, also called Level 2 semi-automated systems, the person in the driver’s seat is in constant control of the car. It’s like cruise control.

An ADAS system may require the driver to take total control at any time, possibly with no warning at all. As a result, the driver’s attention needs to remain focused on the road, what the car is doing, the overall situation at all times, just like they were driving, only that task has been changed from the usual active task of driving into a vigilance task of monitoring how the machine is driving, and remaining ready to intercede.

This sort of vigilance task is, by the way, the kind of things humans generally suck at doing.

I reached out to the same @NYTopinion copy chief myself asking them to talk about this, but have yet to get a response.

So, New York Times Opinion page, I’ll just tell you what I was going to say right here: you have to do better than this. You are correct that the general public is confused about the differences between ADAS systems and full self-driving, and part of why is because sloppy bullshit about these technologies keeps getting written and published, some of it right on your pages.

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Thursday, February 17, 2022

Thursday Tweets

NFTs and company






Political Round-up














O Canada







I don't have a name for it yet but I want to come back to the idea that we're approaching the level of grift that threatens a movement.



NYT lifestyle porn



And miscellanea 





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Wednesday, February 16, 2022

Canadian truckers continue onwards

This is Joseph

The blockage of the Ambassador Bridge, which was starting to hurt the US, is over but there are still blockades in place at the US border:
The Emerson MB border blockade is costing $73 million, daily.

$73 million. Every. Single. Day. 

This is devastating for Manitoba businesses, large and small.

Enough politics. Support our economy, not just your base.

The truckers at the Alberta Coutts blockade had some impressive firepower:

 


Meanwhile the chief of the Ottawa police has resigned. The replacement is focused on building up citizen trust after weeks of occupation:

The good news is that the federal government is finally enacting a state of emergency, as a response to all of this. But at some point you cannot have a minority veto the policies of the majority. They should be allowed to protest but it has been weeks. The slow increase in weapons is also concerning; the latest being 2000 stolen guns in Ontario. It could definitely be a coincidence, but it is not a well timed coincidence for people worried about black market firearms filtering over to a protest.

Now by the time this is posted, it wouldn't be shocking if everything has been peacefully resolved; one of the hardest parts of this process has been seeing the lack of state capacity. Everyone has been puzzled by how bad the response has been, including people who focus on it:
Your Line editors remain somewhat baffled by the inability or unwillingness of the police to do their jobs. In Ottawa's specific case, Line editor Matt Gurney offered some possible explanations in a dispatch last week, but his sources only spoke to the challenge once the protesters were dug in. We can’t explain why they were able to dig in in the first place. Nor does Ottawa’s uniquely awful scenario apply to the blockades at the border crossings. It has seemed clear to us that while the tactical situation in Ottawa seems to have quickly forced the police into a shell-shocked defensive posture, there was more they could have done initially to contain the protest, and lots more that police could have done elsewhere. But they haven't been doing so, and it is not clear why. Is the problem that they need more powers? And if so, has Trudeau now given them what they actually needed? Or was something else missing that the Emergencies Act now gives them?
Nor does anybody seem to care about the economic costs of the blockades, either in terms of money or in terms of the reliability of Canada as a trading partner. 

So stay tuned to see if a G7 nation can really be trying to handle an armed insurrection with traffic tickets and noise complaints. 


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"The biggest problem in California right now is that we don't have enough fires" -- everything we said before but more so

We are finally getting another winter storm -- rain in the valleys, snow on the mountains -- so I'm reposting this. Everything in it is as or more relevant now than it was in December. We've already let too many opportunities pass this year and the fires we didn't set in January and February will come back on their own at a much worse time. 

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

The biggest problem in California right now is that we don't have enough fires

It's raining as I type this, snowing not that far from here. We've gotten lucky in the past couple of weeks and we are supposed to have another major storm before New Year's Day. All of this means that we desperately need to start planning as soon as possible for teams to go out into the forest and start some fires.

As Elizabeth Weil explains in her Pulitzer-worthy Propublica piece (which we discussed earlier here). [emphasis added]

Yes, there’s been talk across the U.S. Forest Service and California state agencies about doing more prescribed burns [a.k.a. controlled burns -- MP] and managed burns. The point of that “good fire” would be to create a black-and-green checkerboard across the state. The black burned parcels would then provide a series of dampers and dead ends to keep the fire intensity lower when flames spark in hot, dry conditions, as they did this past week. But we’ve had far too little “good fire,” as the Cassandras call it. Too little purposeful, healthy fire. Too few acres intentionally burned or corralled by certified “burn bosses” (yes, that’s the official term in the California Resources Code) to keep communities safe in weeks like this.

Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.

...

[Deputy fire chief of Yosemite National Park Mike] Beasley earned what he called his “red card,” or wildland firefighter qualification, in 1984. To him, California, today, resembles a rookie pyro Armageddon, its scorched battlefields studded with soldiers wielding fancy tools, executing foolhardy strategy. “Put the wet stuff on the red stuff,” Beasley summed up his assessment of the plan of attack by Cal Fire, the state’s behemoth “emergency response and resource protection” agency. Instead, Beasley believes, fire professionals should be considering ecology and picking their fights: letting fires that pose little risk burn through the stockpiles of fuels. Yet that’s not the mission. “They put fires out, full stop, end of story,” Beasley said of Cal Fire. “They like to keep it clean that way.”


Why is it so difficult to do the smart thing? People get in the way. From Marketplace.

Molly Wood: You spoke with all these experts who have been advocating for good fire for prescribed burns for decades. And nobody disagrees, right? You found that there is no scientific disagreement that this is the way to prevent megafires. So how come it never happens?

Elizabeth Weil: You know, that’s a really good question. I talked to a lot of scientists who have been talking about this, as you said, literally, for decades, and it’s been really painful to watch the West burn. It hasn’t been happening because people don’t like smoke. It hasn’t been happening, because of very well-intended environmental regulations like the Clean Air Act that make it harder to put particulate matter in the air from man-made causes. It hasn’t happened because of where we live. You don’t want to burn down people’s houses, obviously.

The term "controlled burn" is always at least slightly aspirational, and as the Western fire season gets longer and longer, our window for safe prescribed burns gets shorter and shorter. As a result, this may be the most urgent environmental action places like California need to take. If the weather takes a bad turn, a delay of two or three weeks can mean missing an opportunity to mitigate disaster in the Summer and Fall. 

We've missed too many already.

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Tuesday, February 15, 2022

If there's a company that should be associated with eating lightbulbs, this would probably be it.

 You just know they pitched it as 'edgy'... 


Uber Eats wants America to know that it delivers more than just food. So it delivers some not-food to celebrities including Jennifer Coolidge, Trevor Noah, Gwyneth Paltrow and “Succession’s” Nicholas Braun — who eat it. The bag says “Uber Eats,” after all. Coolidge munches on some paper towels. Noah bites a pencil and a lightbulb. Paltrow takes a hunk off her infamous “This smells like my vagina” candle.

It’s all set to the tune of that insidious TikTok earworm, “Oh No.”

“Fun” fact: Eating things that aren’t food is technically a disorder called pica. Though the commercial has small print at the bottom discouraging people from tasting their inedible Eats deliveries — no one wants to be responsible for the next Tide Pods challenge — the commercial was so cringeworthy that it prompted a response from a government agency: “Do not eat soap,” the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission tweeted partway through the game.

Cory Doctorow had an epic take-down of Uber and Lyft a few days ago, highly recommended and almost certainly the topic of a future post. Here's the section on Uber Eats.
The press also repeated claims that Uber's food delivery business had reached "break-even," something that is demonstrably untrue for anyone who actually looks closely at the balance sheet. The reality is that Uber is losing more money on food delivery than it is on its unlicensed taxi business – 63 margin points worse than taxis in 2019 and still 25 margin points worse in 2021.

Uber has been blowing an absolute fortune on trying to corner the food-delivery market. It bought Postmates, Drizzly and Gopuff and tried to merge them into a competitor for Doordash, a money-losing food-delivery company that bought out 12 of its own competitors. Neither company has managed to explain how they can make money while losing money on every delivery, though their evident strategy is to kickstart their businesses by forcing otherwise profitable restaurants to sell below cost. When they have drained these restaurants dry, they'll replace them with "ghost kitchens" – badly ventilated shipping containers where misclassified employees churn out meals for delivery.

There's one way in which food delivery is good for Uber's business: it allows the company to continue to trumpet its "growth," and keep hope alive for the suckers who bought out the company's early investors. The company touts its food delivery runs as "trips," and thus shows the number of trips as rising.



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Monday, February 14, 2022

FOMOAOBLD -- Fear of missing out and of being Larry David

I generally hate the focus on Superbowl commercials. It's a cynical, astro-turfed ploy to up the advertising multiplier, made worse by the fact that most of the ads are generally pretty crappy. Add that to a bad game and you have an unparalleled exercise in pointlessness.

This year we had a good game and the commercials were both not too bad and genuinely interesting (though often not in the way intended). We learned that:

The Soprano kids made it out of the diner (possibly not canon);

Automakers are starting to pour some serious marketing money into EVs;

Elon Musk is moving into safe target range;

The crypto pump and dumps are getting into the big money territory (though we did have some hints in 2021). 





Of the four crypto related ads debuting, the FTX one achieved an impressive purity of FOMO.




While the WTF award goes to the floating QR code which cost its company $14 mil and didn't even work.




Comparisons are being drawn to the dotcom era, but while that was a time of wretched excess and terrible business plans, the underlying industry really was on track to become something huge and hugely important. With crypto, there is no there there other than scams and money-laundering. The sole purpose of these ads is to convince people to put their savings into a gigantic, fraudulent bubble so that the people taking a cut can max out before the crash.

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Friday, February 11, 2022

Sorry about another tweet-post, but toiletgate just couldn't wait

Earlier today, some big revelations about the mishandling and illegal disposal of documents by the former president made the news, partly because of one colorful detail.

Remember Trump's fixation on having to flush toilets multiple times?



And this

Among journalists and press critics on Twitter, this started a heated debate about how Haberman (when threads collide) handled the story.

And brought up memories of how the press and the NYT in particular, handled another story.












Note: when the New York Times asks for comment, they don't mean comment that makes the New York Times look bad.

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Thursday, February 10, 2022

We'll give Cartman the last word

[For those not familiar with the layered awfulness of Web3, see here, here, here, and here]


You might have expected people to come out of 2008 more cautious about scams and too-good-to-be-true investments, but for whatever reason (Joseph has some ideas), exactly the opposite happened. Unicorns with laughable business plans can lose hundreds of millions and still be held up as models for their industries. Rumors and pump-and-dump schemes can send the stock of even bankrupt companies through the roof. In this world, crypto seems the next logical step with NFTs the inevitable conclusion. 

After money laundering, the thing NFTs are best at is monetizing fame. The profit potential is huge and since the press, including supposedly sober and responsible publications like the NYT, have largely decided to play along, there is little to no reputational hit for celebrities like Reese Witherspoon, and Jimmy Fallon, and of course, Gwyneth Paltrow joining in on the grift. 

At least we still have South Park.


Sonia Rao writing for the Washington Post.

Gwyneth Paltrow, who promises a better life through items sold by her luxury wellness brand [I would have changed "items" to "dangerous new-age snake oil" but that's just me -- MP], is now promoting digital artwork of a blinking cartoon ape. Matt Damon pops up during commercial breaks to compare the act of investing in cryptocurrency to scaling Mount Everest or exploring space. Reese Witherspoon recently took a break from chatting about her book club and production company to share an ominous prophecy.

“In the (near) future, every person will have a parallel digital identity,” Witherspoon tweeted from her personal account in January. “Avatars, crypto wallets, digital goods will be the norm. Are you planning for this?”

...

Of course, wealthier celebrities have little to lose, as the dollar-sign appeal of these endorsements is the same as any other. The price of bitcoin is surely a small fraction of what Damon took home to place crypto investors on a pedestal beside the Wright brothers. But influential figures attaching their names — and finances, in some cases — to the burgeoning form of currency carries implications beyond their own padded wallets, physical or digital.

...

Now, back to Matt Damon. His one-minute spot for Crypto.com, the company after which the Staples Center was renamed, frames investing in cryptocurrency as a holy crusade. Its YouTube description paints Web3 — the vague concept of a decentralized World Wide Web, based on the blockchain — as our inevitable future. “Fortune favors the brave,” the actor pronounces, tracing the proverb back to the ancient Romans.

Damon is a storyteller by trade; his job, in many ways, is to sell ideas to the public. But many considered it ludicrous and unsettling for a man with such deep pockets to place himself on an even playing field with the average viewer — as he does while referring to historic figures as “mere mortals, just like you and me” — before encouraging them to direct their money toward what his grandiose calls for courage imply is a risky investment.

Even “South Park” made a mockery of Damon’s endorsement in its season premiere this week.

“What does Matt Damon say on that bitcoin commercial? Fortune favors the brave,” Cartman says in an effort to get classmates to join him in rebelling against their school principal. Clyde notes that his father “listened to Matt Damon and lost all his money,” which Cartman quickly brushes off.

“Yes, everyone did! But they were brave in doing so!”


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Wednesday, February 9, 2022

Wednesday Tweets (and a few quick thoughts on Twitter)

There is a lot about Twitter that falls in the bad to indefensible range. You could make a pretty good case that we'd all be better off without it, but since that point is moot, I might as well get what I can out of it while avoiding the really nasty spots.

Twitter is a badly designed platform and the search functionality sucks, but it's still a reasonably good place to jot down ideas or to make a note of interesting article and apt anecdotes in a form that's more or less permanent and is easy to share or embed in a post.

I follow around fifty people. That's a manageable number. When I see a tweet, I know the person who wrote it (or at least retweeted it). I know their areas of expertise and their biases. For retweets, if I'm interested and unfamiliar the writer, I check out the profile, look at the replies, possibly do a quick Google search before I pass anything on. The filter isn't perfect but it catches most misinformation and almost all disinformation. 











Big corporations are historically hotbeds for leftists.



Fun week on the Tesla beat.










Politics





I supposed we should be grateful it wasn't a chance to win Miller Lite NFTs.


And a few to lighten the mood.





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Tuesday, February 8, 2022

Ten Years ago at the blog

Just to be clear, things are very different now. The Straussian model no longer applies. Things have gone feral. The Conservative Movement has lost all control of the process and is just trying to hold on to the tail of the beast, but the seeds of our current situation, especially the distrust of reliable sources of information, were planted by the Straussians. 


Sunday, November 4, 2012

Strauss and the war on data

The most important aspect of Randianism as currently practiced is the lies its adherents tell themselves. "When you're successful, it's because other people are inferior to you." "When you fail, it's because inferior people persecute you (call it going Roark)." "One of these days you're going to run away and everyone who's been mean to you will be sorry."

The most important aspect of Straussianism as currently practiced is the lies its adherents tell others. Having started from the assumption that traditional democracy can't work because most people aren't smart enough to handle the role of voter, the Straussians conclude that superior minds must, for the good of society, lie to and manipulate the masses.

Joseph and I have an ongoing argument about which school is worse, a question greatly complicated by the compatibility of the two systems and the overlap of believers and their tactics and objectives. Joseph generally argues that Rand is worse (without, of course, defending Strauss) while I generally take the opposite position.

This week brought news that I think bolsters my case (though I suspect Joseph could easily turn it around to support his): one of the logical consequences of assuming typical voters can't evaluate information on their own is that data sources that are recognized as reliable are a threat to society. They can't be spun and they encourage people to make their own decisions.

To coin a phrase, if the masses can't handle the truth and need instead to be fed a version crafted by the elite to keep the people happy and doing what's best for them, the public's access to accurate, objective information has to be tightly controlled. With that in mind, consider the following from Jared Bernstein:
[D]ue to pressure from Republicans, the Congressional Research Service is withdrawing a report that showed the lack of correlation between high end tax cuts and economic growth.

The study, by economist Tom Hungerford, is of high quality, and is one I’ve cited here at OTE. Its findings are fairly common in the economics literature and the concerns raised by that noted econometrician Mitch McConnell are trumped up and bogus. He and his colleagues don’t like the findings because they strike at the supply-side arguments that they hold so dear.
And with Sandy still on everyone's mind, here's something from Menzie Chinn:
NOAA's programs are in function 300, Natural Resources and Environment, along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and a range of conservation and natural resources programs. In the near term, function 300 would be 14.6 percent lower in 2014 in the Ryan budget according to the Washington Post. It quotes David Kendall of The Third Way as warning about the potential impact on weather forecasting: "'Our weather forecasts would be only half as accurate for four to eight years until another polar satellite is launched,' estimates Kendall. 'For many people planning a weekend outdoors, they may have to wait until Thursday for a forecast as accurate as one they now get on Monday. … Perhaps most affected would be hurricane response. Governors and mayors would have to order evacuations for areas twice as large or wait twice as long for an accurate forecast.'"
There are also attempts from prominent conservatives to delegitimize objective data:
Apparently, Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric, is accusing the Bureau of Labor Statistics of manipulating the jobs report to help President Obama. Others seem to be adding their voices to this slanderous lie. It is simply outrageous to make such a claim and echoes the worrying general distrust of facts that seems to have swept segments of our nation. The BLS employment report draws on two surveys, one (the establishment survey) of 141,000 businesses and government agencies and the other (the household survey) of 60,000 households. The household survey is done by the Census Bureau on behalf of BLS. It’s important to note that large single-month divergences between the employment numbers in these two surveys (like the divergence in September) are just not that rare. EPI’s Elise Gould has a great paper on the differences between these two surveys.

BLS is a highly professional agency with dozens of people involved in the tabulation and analysis of these data. The idea that the data are manipulated is just completely implausible. Moreover, the data trends reported are clearly in line with previous monthly reports and other economic indicators (such as GDP). The key result was the 114,000 increase in payroll employment from the establishment survey, which was right in line with what forecasters were expecting. This was a positive growth in jobs but roughly the amount to absorb a growing labor force and maintain a stable, not falling, unemployment rate. If someone wanted to help the president, they should have doubled the job growth the report showed. The household survey was much more positive, showing unemployment falling from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent. These numbers are more volatile month to month and it wouldn’t be surprising to see unemployment rise a bit next month. Nevertheless, there’s nothing implausible about the reported data. The household survey has shown greater job growth in the recovery than the establishment survey throughout the recovery. The labor force participation rate (the share of adults who are working or unemployed) increased to 63.6 percent, which is an improvement from the prior month but still below the 63.7 percent reported for July. All in all, there was nothing particularly strange about this month’s jobs reports—and certainly nothing to spur accusations of outright fraud.
We can also put many of the attacks against Nate Silver in this category.

Going back a few months, we had this from Businessweek:
The House Committee on Appropriations recently proposed cutting the Census budget to $878 million, $10 million below its current budget and $91 million less than the bureau’s request for the next fiscal year. Included in the committee number is a $20 million cut in funding for this year’s Economic Census, considered the foundation of U.S. economic statistics.
And Bruce Bartlett had a whole set of examples involving Newt Gingrich:
On Nov. 21, Newt Gingrich, who is leading the race for the Republican presidential nomination in some polls, attacked the Congressional Budget Office. In a speech in New Hampshire, Mr. Gingrich said the C.B.O. "is a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated."

Mr. Gingrich's charge is complete nonsense. The former C.B.O. director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, now a Republican policy adviser, labeled the description "ludicrous." Most policy analysts from both sides of the aisle would say the C.B.O. is one of the very few analytical institutions left in government that one can trust implicitly.

It's precisely its deep reservoir of respect that makes Mr. Gingrich hate the C.B.O., because it has long stood in the way of allowing Republicans to make up numbers to justify whatever they feel like doing.

...

Mr. Gingrich has long had special ire for the C.B.O. because it has consistently thrown cold water on his pet health schemes, from which he enriched himself after being forced out as speaker of the House in 1998. In 2005, he wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Times berating the C.B.O., then under the direction of Mr. Holtz-Eakin, saying it had improperly scored some Gingrich-backed proposals. At a debate on Nov. 5, Mr. Gingrich said, "If you are serious about real health reform, you must abolish the Congressional Budget Office because it lies."
...                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Because Mr. Gingrich does know more than most politicians, the main obstacles to his grandiose schemes have always been Congress's professional staff members, many among the leading authorities anywhere in their areas of expertise.                                                                                                                                                                                                

To remove this obstacle, Mr. Gingrich did everything in his power to dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it. When he became speaker in 1995, Mr. Gingrich moved quickly to slash the budgets and staff of the House committees, which employed thousands of professionals with long and deep institutional memories.

Of course, when party control in Congress changes, many of those employed by the previous majority party expect to lose their jobs. But the Democratic committee staff members that Mr. Gingrich fired in 1995 weren't replaced by Republicans. In essence, the positions were simply abolished, permanently crippling the committee system and depriving members of Congress of competent and informed advice on issues that they are responsible for overseeing.

Mr. Gingrich sold his committee-neutering as a money-saving measure. How could Congress cut the budgets of federal agencies if it wasn't willing to cut its own budget, he asked. In the heady days of the first Republican House since 1954, Mr. Gingrich pretty much got whatever he asked for.

In addition to decimating committee budgets, he also abolished two really useful Congressional agencies, the Office of Technology Assessment and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. The former brought high-level scientific expertise to bear on legislative issues and the latter gave state and local governments an important voice in Congressional deliberations.

The amount of money involved was trivial even in terms of Congress's budget. Mr. Gingrich's real purpose was to centralize power in the speaker's office, which was staffed with young right-wing zealots who followed his orders without question. Lacking the staff resources to challenge Mr. Gingrich, the committees could offer no resistance and his agenda was simply rubber-stamped.

Unfortunately, Gingrichism lives on. Republican Congressional leaders continually criticize every Congressional agency that stands in their way. In addition to the C.B.O., one often hears attacks on the Congressional Research Service, the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Government Accountability Office.

Lately, the G.A.O. has been the prime target. Appropriators are cutting its budget by $42 million, forcing furloughs and cutbacks in investigations that identify billions of dollars in savings yearly. So misguided is this effort that Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma and one of the most conservative members of Congress, came to the agency's defense.

In a report issued by his office on Nov. 16, Senator Coburn pointed out that the G.A.O.'s budget has been cut by 13 percent in real terms since 1992 and its work force reduced by 40 percent -- more than 2,000 people. By contrast, Congress's budget has risen at twice the rate of inflation and nearly doubled to $2.3 billion from $1.2 billion over the last decade.

Mr. Coburn's report is replete with examples of budget savings recommended by G.A.O. He estimated that cutting its budget would add $3.3 billion a year to government waste, fraud, abuse and inefficiency that will go unidentified.

For good measure, Mr. Coburn included a chapter in his report on how Congressional committees have fallen down in their responsibility to exercise oversight. The number of hearings has fallen sharply in both the House and Senate. Since the beginning of the Gingrich era, they have fallen almost in half, with the biggest decline coming in the 104th Congress (1995-96), his first as speaker.

In short, Mr. Gingrich's unprovoked attack on the C.B.O. is part of a pattern. He disdains the expertise of anyone other than himself and is willing to undercut any institution that stands in his way. Unfortunately, we are still living with the consequences of his foolish actions as speaker.

We could really use the Office of Technology Assessment at a time when Congress desperately needs scientific expertise on a variety of issues in involving health, energy, climate change, homeland security and many others. And given the enormous stress suffered by state and local governments as they are forced by Washington to do more with less, an organization like the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations would be invaluable.






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Monday, February 7, 2022

Canadian Truckers, Tyler Cowen's views

This is Joseph

Tyler Cowen has his own set of thoughts on the Canadian Truckers
But the movement may well end up as the most consequential story of the year.

And about this we most definitely agree.  

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Canadian Truckers

This is Joseph.

As of Friday, Feb 4th, Truckers and assorted right wing persons have been holding an anti-vaccine blockade of the Canadian capital for a week. Some of the more extreme, if rare, symbols on display are Swastikas and Confederate flags. Insofar as Canada was involved in the Civil War, there were a 100 times more Canadians fighting on the union side than the Confederate. And I think it is well known that Canada was not a part of the Axis in world war 2. Like, so well known that I am not even including a link. So it is a little confusing why these symbols are a part of a protest, being part of neither Canadian heritage or historical vaccination policy (one might make an argument that pro-vaccine policy was associated with the US continental army, but I don't see Union Jacks in evidence). 

That said, it has been terrible for people who have the misfortune to live in Ottawa:
But as tensions rise between protesters and local officials, analysts say the recent events could signal the birth of a growing populist movement which could potentially reshape Canadian politics.
Despite the cold, Aubue said he’s been well taken care of by organizers and some residents who oppose public health measures. He says he’s received hot meals and fuel to run the truck’s generator for heat.
Another protester, Philip Grenier, said he would remain in Ottawa “for as long as it takes” for the federal government to repeal pandemic restrictions – although almost all such rules fall under provincial jurisdiction.
But local people say the protests – which have included honking truck horns, but also allegations of assault and intimidation – have left them frustrated, fed up and – at times – in fear of leaving their homes.
A local woman who gave her name as Jennifer said that she’d been harassed by a group of men wearing Canada flags as capes and shouting “Freedom!” before two other men in an idling truck called her a “dumb cunt sheep” for wearing a mask.
“I’m just done with these people,” she said.
When Tim Abray, a communications consultant, attempted to take a picture of the protests, he was confronted by three men who grabbed and shoved him. He said nearby police officers failed to intervene.

And they are being treated with kid gloves because, well, guns:

Police say that a number of blockade members are believed to armed, and amid growing calls for counter protests, there is growing of fear that violence could erupt
But the spectacle has caught the attention of influential far-right voices in the United States, including former president Donald Trump and his son, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Tesla founder Elon Musk also tweeted his support of the truck convoy. On Wednesday, Ottawa police said a “significant” amount of the funding and organizing was coming from the United States.

What I find most fascinating about this development is, in addition to showing that the rise of the extreme right is an international anglosphere phenomenon (US, UK, and Canada now), is just how much better I feel about the Jan 6th movement in the United States. It lasted a single day. There have been more than 700 arrests, with probably less significant property damage.  Nobody even considered building a fuel and food depot on public land to support the protest. Like seriously, there is a depot of fuel and propane tanks (look at pictures) being build to support a right wing protest and there is no police response (at least as of mid-day Feb 4th). 

In Washington DC there was no stockpile and it seems unimaginable that it would have been permitted to be built during a period of civil unrest. 

I must admit that this has made me greatly upgrade my assessment of US state capacity in the response to the Jan 6th insurrection (which was in favor of the current US president, whereas the Canadian truckers are opposed to Trudeau and Biden). It was a one day event and followed by significant engagement in dealing with the consequences (there is even a congressional committee investigating this event). I mean there is a website and everything including a tip line. 

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