Tuesday, March 8, 2022

Five years ago at the blog -- the Watergate debt



Monday, March 13, 2017

The Washington Press Corps and the "Watergate debt"

I don't want to exaggerate the magnitude of this, but I have come around to the notion that one of the factors, albeit perhaps a small one, that helps explain the bizarre behavior of mainstream journalists toward Republican scandal over the past quarter century is the sense that the press corps owes one to the GOP after Watergate.

The scandal was the one instance in American history where a president was forced to resign and investigative journalism was arguably the main driver. The press aggressively pursued the story and the coverage was, at the very least, sometimes colored by the personal dislike that many journalists felt toward Nixon.

As the years passed and the former president (deservedly or not) managed to rehabilitate some of his reputation, the idea seemed to take root in the press corps that they needed to balance the scales. The idea was nurtured by the Republicans and conservative media but I don't believe it was planted by them. Like its sister belief, the biased liberal media theory, it was an idea born of and trapped in the 70s.

The Iran Contra scandal was both symptom and aggravating factor.  There were hesitation marks all over the reporting, and while some of these can be attributed to the extraordinary popularity and charisma of Ronald Reagan, the timidity of the press is still notable. Nonetheless, despite the relatively gentle handling, it was still another case of journalists pursuing a Republican scandal.

By comparison, the election of Bill Clinton seemed to represent an almost perfect opportunity to balance things out. Not only was Clinton a Democrat, he also was an outsider (which threatened the livelihood of veteran reporters whose status rested on their DC Rolodexes) and a Southern boy from the wrong side of the tracks (which played on deep-seated regional and, more importantly, class prejudices).

I was in or around Arkansas through the 90s and I remember a constant sense of amazement. Perhaps it was just my naivety, but I was completely unprepared for how low supposedly respectable journalists were willing to go once they'd committed to a narrative, even if it meant crawling in bed with the remnants of the state's  segregationist movement (I still remember my revulsion seeing the Washington press corps elevate Jim Johnson to elder statesman).

I've argued before that the bad journalism that took root during Whitewater was a contributing factor and possibly necessary condition for the Bush presidency, the build-up to Iraq, and a general undermining of democracy that culminated with the election of Donald Trump. It would be ironicc if misplaced guilt over great journalism helped contribute to the decline of the profession.

For related oints, check out thee following from Charles Pierce and Frontline.
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Monday, March 7, 2022

"You say you want a revolution"

This was going to be part of an upcoming post but I decided it worked better freestanding. 

Back in the late sixties there was a surprising popular genre of apocalyptic dystopias inspired by fears of the youth movement. Countless examples in episodic television (three or four from Star Trek alone). The 1967 novel Logan’s Run (but not the 1976 movie which dropped the political aspects of the story). Arguably films If and Clockwork Orange (though in this case, not the book, which is more a part of the post-war panic over juvenile delinquency). Corman’s Gas-s-s-s. Certainly others I’m forgetting. 

Though not the best in the bunch, the most representative was Wild in the Streets.





Wild in the Streets figures prominently in Pauline Kael's essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies": [emphasis added]

There is so much talk now about the art of the film that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art. The Scalphunters, for example, was one of the few entertaining American movies this past year, but skillful though it was, one could hardly call it a work of art — if such terms are to have any useful meaning. Or, to take a really gross example, a movie that is as crudely made as Wild in the Streets — slammed together with spit and hysteria and opportunism — can nevertheless be enjoyable, though it is almost a classic example of an unartistic movie. What makes these movies — that are not works of art — enjoyable? The Scalphunters was more entertaining than most Westerns largely because Burt Lancaster and Ossie Davis were peculiarly funny together; part of the pleasure of the movie was trying to figure out what made them so funny. Burt Lancaster is an odd kind of comedian: what’s distinctive about him is that his comedy seems to come out of his physicality. In serious roles an undistinguished and too obviously hard-working actor, he has an apparently effortless flair for comedy and nothing is more infectious than an actor who can relax in front of the camera as if he were having a good time. (George Segal sometimes seems to have this gift of a wonderful amiability, and Brigitte Bardot was radiant with it in Viva Maria!) Somehow the alchemy of personality in the pairing of Lancaster and Ossie Davis — another powerfully funny actor of tremendous physical presence — worked, and the director Sydney Pollack kept tight control so that it wasn’t overdone.

And Wild in the Streets? It’s a blatantly crummy-looking picture, but that somehow works for it instead of against it because it’s smart in a lot of ways that better-made pictures aren’t. It looks like other recent products from American International Pictures but it’s as if one were reading a comic strip that looked just like the strip of the day before, and yet on this new one there are surprising expressions on the faces and some of the balloons are really witty. There’s not a trace of sensitivity in the drawing or in the ideas, and there’s something rather specially funny about wit without any grace at all; it can be enjoyed in a particularly crude way — as Pop wit. The basic idea is corny — It Can’t Happen Here with the freaked-out young as a new breed of fascists — but it’s treated in the paranoid style of editorials about youth (it even begins by blaming everything on the parents). And a cheap idea that is this current and widespread has an almost lunatic charm, a nightmare gaiety. There’s a relish that people have for the idea of drug-taking kids as monsters threatening them — the daily papers merging into Village of the Damned. Tapping and exploiting this kind of hysteria for a satirical fantasy, the writer Robert Thom has used what is available and obvious but he’s done it with just enough mockery and style to make it funny. He throws in touches of characterization and occasional lines that are not there just to further the plot, and these throwaways make odd connections so that the movie becomes almost frolicsome in its paranoia (and in its delight in its own cleverness).

It's easy to be dismissive of these fears fifty plus years later, but the revolutionary rhetoric of the movement was often extreme and was punctuated by the occasional bombing, bank robbery, etc.

But probably the biggest mistake people made when predicting the impact of the sixties youth movement was taking them at their word, believing that their commitment to radicalism (or even liberalism) would outlast the end of the Vietnam War. The post-war generation would change the country, but I doubt anyone in 1969 would have guessed how. 


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Friday, March 4, 2022

Horrible Children

I've been thinking a lot about infantilism and the alt-right, particularly the possibility that being immersed in that world might cause or at least contribute to the strange, childish behavior we've been seeing. It's a thesis one is reluctant to bring up for a number of reasons: it's dismissive and needlessly insulting; it frees one from the need to address other positions or understand where they come from; it seldom leads anywhere productive. 

Sometimes, though, a possibility becomes so unavoidable that ignoring it becomes an act of dishonesty.  We have grown men throwing literal tantrums over wearing a mask. We have Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene acting like spoiled twelve-year-olds at the State of the Union. We have Donald Trump.



This is not normal. The outbursts. The pouting. The contrariness. The substitution of "own the libs" attention getting devices for a political view.

And, yes, we can find examples in both parties, but in no way can this be considered symmetrical.
 
Bob Chipman has been thinking along related lines. Chipman is, as previously mentioned, one of our best critics/cultural commentators. Here he uses JoJo Rabbit as a stepping off point to explore the strangely childish quality of the Nazis. He even takes the connection between infantilism and Nazism further by bringing in a comparison to certain extreme reactionary segments of fan boy culture.
 




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Thursday, March 3, 2022

Two and a half threads worth your time (including a great Big Con reference)

Twitter has loads of issue and a potential for abuse arguably second only to Faceb-- sorry, Meta, but unlike whatever the hell it's called, Twitter (if used properly and that's a big if) can be one of the best places online for finding interesting and unexpected conversations with smart people. You have to be selective and pay close attention to who is recommending, speaking and replying, but if you stick with the informed and trustworthy, you can come across fascinating threads on topics like tire maintenance and the fate of nations. 



It turns out that for those invading certain parts of Ukraine in early spring, this is a big deal.


At this point another tire expert pops up with an equally fascinating divergent thread.


Remember what I said about paying attention to who's replying? Noah Smith falls in the trustworthy category.  



Some of these threads read like first drafts of blog posts. The choppiness can be distracting, but it can also have a staccato quality where each point lands distinctly and has a chance to stand on its own.

I've been talking about Twitter vs. blogs and other platforms, but the relationships are symbiotic. 

And I love the way Doctorow connects this to the classic book the Big Con.

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Wednesday, March 2, 2022

Ten years ago at the blog

 Friday, March 2, 2012

Bleeding heart Randians

Once again, Joseph has left it to me to play bad cop on the McArdle beat.

As you can see from the previous post, Megan McArdle has a piece up at the Atlantic complaining about the lack of sympathy for the wealthy when they find themselves in financial trouble.
Likewise, when middle class people take out a mortgage that's perfectly affordable on the income they've been enjoying for years, and then lose the house because they suddenly saw that income cut in half, we don't feel a delicious sense of joy because they finally got what was coming to them.

I keep getting the feeling that McArdle's default approach to complexity is to look at one dimension at a time until she finds a view she likes.

In this case the complexity lies in the way we see financial hardship. We generally react to news of other people's money troubles with a combination of sympathy and disapproval (read Charles Murray for an example of the latter). The level of sympathy is largely determined by where the fall leaves the victim while the level of disapproval depends on how avoidable the crisis seems to be. Both these factors tend to make us react somewhat more harshly to financial problems of the well-to-do.

And in the cases in question here, the avoidability level is up there. The Bloomberg story that McArdle was talking about concerned highly paid executives who are facing hardships because of smaller-than-expected bonuses. This is a very different situation than a drop in salary. Even for the very well paid a completely unexpected reduction in salary can cause problems. The possibility of a smaller bonus should always be expected.

These were financially literate professionals who failed to take into account the potential variability of their income stream and as a result made reckless decisions then failed to own up. This isn't to say that some of these families aren't facing painful disruptions. Of course we feel sympathy for them, particularly the children, but the adults in these situations got there because of bad decisions and now they have to take responsibility for their actions.

At least that's what McArdle used to believe.
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Tuesday, March 1, 2022

Gentrification and Chinatown





Roy Choi is one of the culinary stars of the 21st Century. You'd be hard pressed to find a chef who has done more to change the way people think about dining, particularly here in LA, but Choi himself has mixed feelings about the impact he had had. Trendy restaurants bring real benefits to a neighborhood, but these often come at a cost.

In this episode of Choi's Broken Bread.
Roy’s Chinatown restaurant Chego opened in 2013, which soon became the poster child for gentrification in the area. Roy explores what he would have done differently as he retraces his steps through some of the neighborhood’s beloved establishments like Hop Woo and Phoenix Bakery. He also meets newcomers to the neighborhood Pearl River Deli and Endorffeine.

While journalists discussing the housing crisis are contractually obliged to cite San Francisco, places like Chinatown go largely unnoticed which is the opposite of what would happen in any rational discussion. For reasons discussed before and certain to be brought up again, SF is one of the worst major cities in California to develop from an urban planning standpoint. Chinatown, on the other hand, is ideally situated.

Chinatown also provides a much more representative and sympathetic picture of the concerns over gentrification. Like Boyle Heights, Chinatown has already paid a disproportionate share of the price for LA's development. 
The first Chinatown, centered on Alameda and Macy Streets (now Cesar Chavez Avenue), was established in 1880. Reaching its heyday from 1890 to 1910, Chinatown grew to approximately fifteen streets and alleys containing some two hundred buildings. It boasted a Chinese Opera theater, three temples, a newspaper and a telephone exchange. But laws prohibiting most Chinese from citizenship and property ownership, as well as legislation curtailing immigration, inhibited future growth.

From the early 1910s, Chinatown began to decline. Symptoms of a corrupt Los Angeles discolored the public's view of Chinatown; gambling houses, opium dens and a fierce tong warfare severely reduced business in the area. As tenants and lessees rather than outright owners, the residents of Old Chinatown were threatened with impending redevelopment, and as a result the owners neglected upkeep of their buildings.[3] Eventually, the entire area was sold and then resold, as entrepreneurs and developers fought over the area. After thirty years of decay, a Supreme Court ruling approved condemnation of the area to allow for construction of a major rail terminal, Union Station. Residents were evicted to make room for Union Station without a plan for the relocation of the Chinatown community.

Chinatown was gradually demolished, leaving many businesses without a place to do business and forcing some to close. A remnant of Old Chinatown persisted into the early 1950s, situated between Union Station and the Old Plaza. Several businesses and a Buddhist temple lined Ferguson Alley, a narrow one-block street running between the Plaza and Alameda. The most notable of the surviving buildings was the old Lugo Adobe, having been built in 1838 by the prominent Californio family. Some decades later, the Lugo Adobe became the original home of Loyola Marymount University, and later, it was rented to Chinese-Americans who ran shops on the ground floor and a lodging house upstairs. Christine Sterling, who had brought to fruition the Olvera Street and China City projects, argued that remaining buildings of Old Chinatown were an eyesore and advocated successfully for the razing of all the remaining structures between the Plaza and Union Station.

We need more housing and places like Chinatown, Boyle Heights, and Watts are well-suited for development and densification. At the same time, residents of these neighborhoods have legitimate concerns. Framing the debate and a conflict between noble YIMBYs and villainous NIMBYs is not productive and it is enormously unfair. 
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Monday, February 28, 2022

Sartre on Trolls

Josh Marshall shares this extraordinarily sharp passage from John-Paul Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew, which seems to capture the essence of trolling. Trolls understand the asymmetry of reasonableness. They understand that when your opponents feel constrained by the need to engage seriously and responsibly, the willingness to be ridiculous and offensive can provide a great advantage.  

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” 

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No, Mr. Baquet, that wasn't what happened. We were there. We took notes.

Following up from last week's post. 

Dean Baquet speaking to the New Yorker. 

If I had to do that over again, oh, my God, I would do that very, very, very differently. I mean, we treated Trump seriously. We treated him as an investigative story. But I would have covered the country a lot differently in the months leading up to the election of Donald Trump.

The revisionism here is truly stunning. The NYT was widely criticized at the time for downplaying or ignoring entirely numerous Trump scandals (particularly compared to the Washington Post) while spending the majority of their time and energy on Clinton scandals, almost none of which really panned out. 

Charles Pierce described this as a war between the NYT and the Post. Baquet would now like you believe they were on the same side all along but we know better.

Because, like I said, we took notes. 


Wednesday, September 21, 2016

"Why do you hate us for caring too much?" – – Dispatches from a besieged institution

Public Editor
From Wikipedia

The job of the public editor is to supervise the implementation of proper journalism ethics at a newspaper, and to identify and examine critical errors or omissions, and to act as a liaison to the public. They do this primarily through a regular feature on a newspaper's editorial page. Because public editors are generally employees of the very newspaper they're criticizing, it may appear as though there is a possibility for bias. However, a newspaper with a high standard of ethics would not fire a public editor for a criticism of the paper; the act would contradict the purpose of the position and would itself be a very likely cause for public concern.

I don't want to impose a template, but generally one expects public editors to serve as the internal representative of external critical voices, or at least to see to it that these voices get a fair hearing. A typical column might start with acknowledging complaints about something like the paper's lack of coverage of poor neighborhoods. The public editor would then discuss some possible lapses on the paper's part, get some comments from the editor in charge, and then, as a rule, either encourage the paper to improve its coverage in this area or, at the very least, take a neutral position acknowledging that both the critics and the paper have a point.

Here are some examples from two previous public editors of the New York Times.


Clark Hoyt
The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not. But a more nuanced answer is that even a newspaper like The Times, with layers of editing to ensure accuracy, can go off the rails when communication is poor, individuals do not bear down hard enough, and they make assumptions about what others have done. Five editors read the article at different times, but none subjected it to rigorous fact-checking, even after catching two other errors in it. And three editors combined to cause one of the errors themselves.

Margaret Sullivan

Mistakes are bound to happen in the news business, but some are worse than others.

What I’ll lay out here was a bad one. It involved a failure of sufficient skepticism at every level of the reporting and editing process — especially since the story in question relied on anonymous government sources, as too many Times articles do.

…

The Times needs to fix its overuse of unnamed government sources. And it needs to slow down the reporting and editing process, especially in the fever-pitch atmosphere surrounding a major news event. Those are procedural changes, and they are needed. But most of all, and more fundamental, the paper needs to show far more skepticism – a kind of prosecutorial scrutiny — at every level of the process.

Two front-page, anonymously sourced stories in a few months have required editors’ notes that corrected key elements – elements that were integral enough to form the basis of the headlines in both cases. That’s not acceptable for Times readers or for the paper’s credibility, which is its most precious asset.

If this isn’t a red alert, I don’t know what will be.

But these are strange days at the New York Times and the new public editor is writing columns that are not only a sharp break with those of her predecessors, but seem to violate the very spirit of the office.

In particular, Liz Spayd is catching a great deal of flak for a piece that almost manages to invert the typical public editor column. It starts by grossly misrepresenting widespread criticisms of the paper, goes on to openly attack the critics making the charges, then pleads with the paper's staff to toe the editorial line and ignore the very voices that a public editor would normally speak for .


[Emphasis added]

The Truth About ‘False Balance’
False balance, sometimes called “false equivalency,” refers disparagingly to the practice of journalists who, in their zeal to be fair, present each side of a debate as equally credible, even when the factual evidence is stacked heavily on one side.

There has been a great deal of speculation as to what drives false equivalency, with the leading contenders being a desire to maintain access to high-placed sources, long-standing personal biases against certain politicians, a fear of reprisal, a desire to avoid charges of liberal bias, and simple laziness (a cursory both-sides-do-it story is generally much easier to write than a well investigated piece). Caring too much about fairness hardly ever makes the list and it certainly has no place in the definition.

Spayd then accuses the people making these charges of being irrational, shortsighted, and partisan.

I can’t help wondering about the ideological motives of those crying false balance, given that they are using the argument mostly in support of liberal causes and candidates. CNN’s Brian Stelter focused his show, “Reliable Sources,” on this subject last weekend. He asked a guest, Jacob Weisberg of Slate magazine, to frame the idea of false balance. Weisberg used an analogy, saying journalists are accustomed to covering candidates who may be apples and oranges, but at least are still both fruits. In Trump, he said, we have not fruit but rancid meat. That sounds like a partisan’s explanation passed off as a factual judgment.

But, as Jonathan Chait points out, Weisberg has no record of being a Hillary Clinton booster. The charge here is completely circular. He is partisan because he made a highly critical comment about Donald Trump and he made a highly critical comment about Donald Trump because he is partisan.

But the most extraordinary part of the piece and one which reminds us just how strange the final days of 2016 are becoming is the conclusion.

I hope Times journalists won’t be intimidated by this argument. I hope they aren’t mindlessly tallying up their stories in a back room to ensure balance, but I also hope they won’t worry about critics who claim they are. What’s needed most is forceful, honest reporting — as The Times has produced about conflicts circling the foundation; and as The Washington Post did this past week in surfacing Trump’s violation of tax laws when he made a $25,000 political contribution to a campaign group connected to Florida’s attorney general as her office was investigating Trump University.

Fear of false balance is a creeping threat to the role of the media because it encourages journalists to pull back from their responsibility to hold power accountable. All power, not just certain individuals, however vile they might seem.

Putting aside the curious characterization of the Florida AG investigation as a tax evasion story (which is a lot like describing the Watergate scandal as a burglary story or Al Capone as a tax evader), equating her paper's pursuit of the Clinton foundation with the Washington Post's coverage of Trump is simply surreal on a number of levels.

For starters, none of the Clinton foundation stories have revealed significant wrongdoing. Even Spayd, who is almost comically desperate to portray her employer in the best possible light, had to concede that “some foundation stories revealed relatively little bad behavior, yet were written as if they did.” By comparison, the Washington Post investigation continues to uncover self-dealing, misrepresentation, tax evasion, misuse of funds, failure to honor obligations, ethical violations, general sleaziness and blatant quid prop quo bribery.

More importantly, the Washington Post has explicitly attacked and implicitly abandoned Spayd's position. Here's how the Post summed it up in an editorial that appeared two days before the NYT column.
Imagine how history would judge today’s Americans if, looking back at this election, the record showed that voters empowered a dangerous man because of . . . a minor email scandal. There is no equivalence between Ms. Clinton’s wrongs and Mr. Trump’s manifest unfitness for office.


Charles Pierce's characteristically pithy response to this editorial was "The Washington Post Just Declared War on The New York Times -- And with good reason, too."

If is almost as if Spayd thinks it's 2000, when the NYT could set the conventional wisdom, could decide which narratives would followed and which public figures would be lauded or savaged. Spayd does understand that there is a battle going on for the soul of journalism, but she does not seem to understand that the alliances have changed, and the New York Times is about to find itself in a very lonely position.
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Friday, February 25, 2022

In memory of Raymond Smullyan

Smullyan's first career was as a stage magician, which is an almost perfect Chekhovian plot twist, surprising at first then nearly inevitable in retrospect. What else would he be? 

In the spirit of Smullyan, here are a math-themed magic trick and a magic-themed math lecture, both from Dr. Tori Noquez.






The Mathematics of 8 Perfect Faro Shuffles









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Thursday, February 24, 2022

When Threads collide -- the MAGAization of crypto

The public face of cryptocurrencies and NFTs may be liberal celebrities and trendy lifestyle journalists, but the political faction that has really embraced Web3 leans hard to the right.

 And this from the Verge:

But very little of that was discussed at today’s press conference. The event kicked off with three of the protest movement’s organizers, including Tamara Lich, a former fitness instructor and singer in an Alberta band called Blind Monday, who played a prominent role in organizing a GoFundMe campaign that raised about 10 million Canadian dollars ($7.8 million) for the anti-vaxx protest.

After spending several minutes disparaging “fake news” and praising supporters like Jordan Peterson, a philosopher whose work is admired by the right, the group turned to Bitcoin.

BJ Dichter, who introduced himself as “vice president and spokesperson for the Freedom Convoy,” said the group has been in touch with “some of the most prominent Bitcoiners on YouTube” to learn how to use cryptocurrency to raise money for their cause. (GoFundMe shut down the group’s fundraising campaign last week, citing “violence and other unlawful activity” during the demonstrations.)

Dichter turned the press conference over to a man named “Nick” who he described as the group’s “Bitcoin team lead for the Freedom Convoy.” Nick, sporting a thick beard and a black sweatshirt with the Bitcoin logo in the upper-right corner, started by setting expectations. “I wouldn’t call myself an expert,” he said. “But I am a liaison to the experts in the Bitcoin world.” Nick said the aim was to fight for the group’s freedom to raise money “without being shackled by the censorship put in place by our legacy financial system.”

After several minutes of a lecture on the advantages of a decentralized fundraising platform, supporters watching the livestream seemed flummoxed.

“This is not what I thought it would be, thanks guys but I’m thinking you will be losing some money support with this... anyway, have a good day,” wrote one commenter. Others implored the group to ditch the Bitcoin talk and get back to the issue at hand: truckers fighting against vaccine mandates.

“I get the safety of donating to Bitcoin… but why are we promoting digital currency?!” another wrote.

In some respects, the convergence of the anti-vaxx protests and Bitcoin was probably inevitable. Last month, the protests drew support from one of the biggest proponents of Bitcoin in the world, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who tweeted “Canadian truckers rule.” Former President Donald Trump has voiced support, and right-wing figures from Tucker Carlson to Ben Shapiro to Michael Flynn have seized on the trucker protests.

The group sees Bitcoin as a possible solution to its fundraising woes. And they may have some support, too. A group of Canadian Bitcoin supporters who go by the moniker “HonkHonkHodl” [Here's a quick intro to HODLing -- MP] have created a crypto crowdfunding campaign on the platform Tallycoin as an alternative funding portal for the Freedom Convoy.

In a less-than-surprising plot twist, the move to Bitcoin didn't work out that well for the truckers.

Conservatives and crypto is not just a North American thing.

Jemima Kelly writing for the Financial Times.

Long-time Alphaville readers will remember that back in 2018, after a certain cabinet minister — then a mere disgraced Tory MP — resigned from two appointments related to blockchain technology when we discovered a secret crypto pay deal, we saw it fit to initiate a series called “What’s the Tory crypto story?” (This title will resonate if you happen to be over the age of about 30 and British.)


After that slight embarrassment for now Transport Secretary Michael Green Grant Shapps, the Tory crypto train has kept on chugging merrily along. There was the spectacular flop of Tory Baroness Mone’s crypto project, EQUI; there was then-chancellor Philip “Spreadsheet” Hammond promoting blockchain as an easy solution for the Irish Borderproblem; more recently there was chair of the UK foreign affairs committee Tom Tugendhat preaching the virtues of crypto by deploying unforgettable syntax such as “when the queen’s head leaves the coin and goes on to the blockchain”. And before any of them, of course, there was David Cameron — a man known for his impeccable taste in all things financial.

It’s not just crypto; it’s blockchain too. In a November report entitled “BlockchainIndustry in the UK Landscape Overview 2021” by “Innovation Eye” and the “Big Innovation Centre”, the ruling party’s love affair with all things related to the distributed dream ledger over the past five years is charted. It’s a nice and politically informative chart:



Just look at that sea of blue! If you’re wondering about the block of red in the second line, well that’s Chi Onwurah, Labour MP for Newcastle Upon Tyne Central, who has a background in technology. But when she mentions blockchain, it’s to say things like: “For some, blockchain is a way of avoiding government”, and that the “libertarian idea that technology is the answer to everything has driven our regulatory approach for too long”. Music to our luddite lugholes, tbh.

Over on the other side of the chamber, though, there’s a new crypto playa in town. And the new pusher of virtual currencies is none other than king of virtual tears himself, Mr Matthew Hancock, a former cabinet minster and now mere disgraced Tory MP (you might notice a theme).


None of this is all that surprising to those who have been following the story. If you push past the next-big-thingism and the Ponzi scheme aspects, the underlying appeal of Web3 has always been the libertarian wet dream of money and property freed from the tyranny of the state. 

Of course, the fact that the current conservative movement is swarming with grifters has certainly sped things along.

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Wednesday, February 23, 2022

'We really did hit peak stupid' -- Linette Lopez on the return to reality-based markets

Lopez was unfashionably early to this party, having pointed out for years the absurdity and precariousness of the hype and bullshit economy. Her reporting and analysis have been consistently frank and independent, as have her regular appearances on public radio's Marketplace.

 On a not unrelated note, Elon Musk hates her. 

This latest column won't make her any more popular.

Every once in a while on Wall Street there is what is called a "washout": a cataclysmic shift in the market that swaths of the investment community do not survive. Wall Street is standing on the edge of such an event. So if you want your "billionaire tears," you shall have them.

Why now? Well, after more than a decade of keeping interest rates near zero, the Federal Reserve is all but assured to raise them multiple times in the coming year to fight inflation. In the world of finance, these hikes are akin to messing with the Earth's gravity. Assets that were once attractive — companies that used cheap capital to grow rapidly without making a profit — will be shunned. Some of the investors who ate up those growth stories will go out of business. This is not a drill. It's the beginning of a bear market . And based on conversations with some of the most elite investors on Wall Street, it's clear that this drop isn't a months-long process. It'll take a year or more.

"I think there's going to be a few people who've really gone over their skis and will get hurt badly," one billionaire value investor told me.

Silly season's over, folks

Before the pandemic, the most pressing problem for central banks around the world was the meandering recovery from the financial crisis. Growth was sluggish, and inflation was well short of their target, prompting the Fed and others to keep interest rates historically low to encourage banks to give out loans and juice the economy. A side effect of making money easy to borrow was that all kinds of garbage ideas could get funding and all kinds of garbage companies could stay in business. Combine that with lax corporate law enforcement and you have Wall Street without consequences. Investors were champing at the bit to pile into companies that used fantastical metrics, like WeWork, and lapped up every utterance from billionaire CEOs who promised flashy technology but consistently underdelivered, like, say, Elon Musk.

And that was before millions of bored, homebound Americans jumped into the market via Robinhood and other trading apps. Armed with their pandemic-era stimulus checks, they bought crypto, piled into blank-check companies called SPACs, and joined message boards claiming that stocks like AMC and GameStop were going "to the moon." Awash with capital, companies — especially in tech — saw their valuations leave Earth's atmosphere and make a home somewhere on Saturn. Short sellers were culled. Value investors went into hiding.

"We really did hit peak stupid, but peak stupid extended beyond truly, truly stupid and then we went to bottom-of-the-ocean-rare-earth-metal-companies stupid," the value investor told me.

This is the kind of bubble a financial professional should see forming — one where investors lose sight of fundamentals like profitability and cash flow and embrace a kind of Beanie Baby zeitgeist. In fairness, on Wall Street you can make a lot of money dancing to the music at a bubble party. Or you can stand by the snacks and watch. What you cannot do is pretend that the music will never stop.

We've all heard the sound financial insight that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. I'd like to offer a corollary: The market can go back to rational faster than you can get out of it.  

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Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Who could have seen this coming?

Comments in brackets.

Virgin Hyperloop axes half its staff in focus on freight

by Simeon Kerr and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson


Virgin Hyperloop has made almost half of its staff redundant as the company developing the high-speed transport system pivots from passenger travel to freight.

[In the overwhelming majority of cases, speed is worth far more money for people than for freight. When time is that valuable, you can always go by air, which also offers flexibility of destination.]

The US company said that 111 people were laid off on Friday, as the group focuses on delivering a cargo version of the experimental transport, which propels pods through low-pressure tubes at speeds of up to 670mph.

[Because completely changing your business model and infrastructure requirements requires way fewer staff.]

...

The company is “changing direction”, it added. “It really has more to do with global supply chain issues and all the changes due to Covid.”

[Just so we're clear. This is a land-based system that is, under the most wildly optimistic assumptions, years away from having a single operational line, let alone the extensive network needed to make this model viable. And they're making these changes in response to current "global supply chain issues."]

Backers of the company, which is developing technology first proposed by Elon Musk, include Dubai government logistics provider and ports operator DP World and Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group.

[Neither Virgin nor any other "hyperloop" company has spent a single dollar developing Elon Musk's completely unworkable air-caster based proposal. They are working on maglev vactrains. All they kept was the name.]

...

And internal turmoil has followed the departure of Virgin Hyperloop co-founder Josh Giegel last year, triggering a “massive talent flight” as other executives also quit the company, according to one former senior employee. “Morale is low and there is no confidence in the new direction.”

Shunning passenger transport was triggering a “complete unravelling” at the group and would put its sole contract with the Saudi government in jeopardy, the person said.

...

“It’s abundantly clear that potential customers are interested in cargo, while passenger is somewhat farther away,” DP World said. “Focusing on pallets is easier to do — there is less risk for passengers and less of a regulatory process.”

[Though no apparent reduction in the infrastructure component, which means no significant cost reduction period.]

The company is also considering a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, or Spac, two people briefed on its strategy said. Virgin Hyperloop, Virgin Group and DP World declined to comment on any plans.

[There had to be a Spac.]

This is all, to use the technical term, polishing the turd. The company, which has raised more than $400mn in funding, is very probably running on fumes at this point. They can't come out and say this because they need more money and there's nothing that spooks the greater fool herd like the whiff of desperation. I suspect even Dubai is looking for an exit and it's remarkably difficult for a big, flashy business idea to be so stupid that it scares Dubai. 

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Monday, February 21, 2022

A seven year old response to Dean Baquet's farewell revisionism tour

We're seeing another wave of defensiveness from the New York Times regarding 2016, countless variations on "No one could have known."/"We were no worse than anyone else."/"If only we could have sent more reporters to middle American diners."

Dean Baquet speaking to the New Yorker. 

I don’t think that anybody had their arms wrapped around the mood of the country that allowed for the election of Donald Trump, including us. I don’t think people—including the New York Times—quite had a handle on the anger, the amount of racial animosity. I don’t think any of us thought that Donald Trump was going to be elected President. Anybody who says they did, I don’t buy it.

If I had to do that over again, oh, my God, I would do that very, very, very differently. I mean, we treated Trump seriously. We treated him as an investigative story. But I would have covered the country a lot differently in the months leading up to the election of Donald Trump.

This "mood of the country" line is tremendously self-serving. It allows Banquet to ignore the bad judgement and terrible analyses that dominated the NYT's coverage of the election as far back as the summer of 2015.

Fortunately, I was taking notes. We ran more than a dozen posts on the paper's coverage of the election. There were lots of things we got wrong, just not as wrong as the New York Times.


Friday, August 21, 2015

Wishful Analytics

As mentioned previously, Donald Trump's campaign has definitely strained the standard assumptions of political reporting, Though this is an industry wide problem (even Five Thirty Eight hasn't been immune), it is nowhere more severe than at the New York Times.

The trouble is that the New York Times is very much committed to a style of political analysis that takes the standard narrative almost to the formal level of a well-made play. The objective is to get to the preassigned destination with as much craft and wit as possible. Nate Silver's problems at the NYT generally came from his habit of following the data to conclusions that made his editors and colleagues uncomfortable (by raising disturbing questions about the value of their work).

Cohn's articles on Trump have been an extended study in wishful analytics, starting with a desired conclusion then trying to dredge up some numbers to support it. He really, really, really, really, really wants to see Trump as another Herman Cain. Other than both being successful businessmen, the analogy is strained -- Cain was a little-known figure who surged well into the campaign because the base was looking for an alternative to an unacceptable presumptive nominee – but Cohn brings up the pizza magnate at every opportunity.

In addition to reassuring analogies, Cohn is also inclined to see comforting inflection points. Here's his response to the McCain dust-up.
The Trump Campaign’s Turning Point

Donald Trump’s surge in the polls has followed the classic pattern of a media-driven surge. Now it will most likely follow the classic pattern of a party-backed decline.


Mr. Trump’s candidacy probably reached an inflection point on Saturday after he essentially criticized John McCain for being captured during the Vietnam War. Republican campaigns and elites quickly moved to condemn his comments — a shift that will probably mark the moment when Trump’s candidacy went from boom to bust.

Paul Krugman (like Silver, another NYT writer frequently at odds with the paper's culture) dismantled this argument by immediately spotting the key flaw.
What I would argue is key to this situation — and, in particular, key to understanding how the conventional wisdom on Trump/McCain went so wrong — is the reality that a lot of people are, in effect, members of a delusional cult that is impervious to logic and evidence, and has lost touch with reality.

I am, of course, talking about pundits who prize themselves for their centrism.

...

On one side, they can’t admit the moderation of the Democrats, which is why you had the spectacle of demands that Obama change course and support his own policies.

On the other side, they have had to invent an imaginary GOP that bears little resemblance to the real thing. This means being continually surprised by the radicalism of the base. It also means a determination to see various Republicans as Serious, Honest Conservatives — SHCs? — whom the centrists know, just know, have to exist.

...

But the ur-SHC is John McCain, the Straight-Talking Maverick. Never mind that he is clearly eager to wage as many wars as possible, that he has long since abandoned his once-realistic positions on climate change and immigration, that he tried to put Sarah Palin a heartbeat from the presidency. McCain the myth is who they see, and keep putting on TV. And they imagined that everyone else must see him the same way, that Trump’s sneering at his war record would cause everyone to turn away in disgust.

But the Republican base isn’t eager to hear from SHCs; it has never put McCain on a pedestal; and people who like Donald Trump are not exactly likely to be scared off by his lack of decorum.


Cohn's initial reaction to his failed prediction was to argue that the polls weren't current enough to show that he was right. When that position became untenable, he shifted his focus to the next inflection point:
Mr. Rubio, the senator from Florida, has a good case to be considered the debate’s top performer. A weaker Mr. Bush probably benefits Mr. Rubio as much as anyone, and if Mr. Bush raised questions about whether he would be a great general election candidate, then Mr. Rubio added yet more reason to believe he could be a good one. Mr. Rubio still has the challenge of figuring out how to break through a strong field in a factional party.



...
Mr. Walker won by not losing. In a lot of ways, the moderators’ tough, specific questions played to Mr. Walker’s weakness. He didn’t have much time to emphasize his fight against unions in Wisconsin. But he handled several tough questions — on abortion; on relations with Arab nations; what he would do after terminating the Iran deal; race; and his employment record — without appearing flustered or making a mistake. His answers were concise and sharp.
...

Mr. Kasich also advanced his cause. He entered as a largely unknown candidate outside of Ohio, where he is governor. But he was backed by a supportive audience, he deftly handled tough questions, and he had a solid answer on a question about attending same-sex weddings. His answer might not resonate among many Republicans, but it will resonate in New Hampshire — the state where he needs to deny Mr. Bush a path to victory and vault to the top of the pack.



It was Donald Trump, though, who might have had the weakest performance. No, it may not be the end of his surge. But he consistently faced pointed questions, didn’t always have satisfactory answers, endured a fairly hostile crowd and probably won’t receive as much media attention coming out of the debate as he did in the weeks before it. If you take the view that he’s heavily dependent on media coverage, that’s an issue. Whatever coverage he does get may be fairly negative — probably focusing on his unwillingness to guarantee support for the Republican nominee.
You might want to reread that last paragraph a couple of times to get your head around just how wrong it turned out to be. Pay particular attention to the statements qualified with 'probably' both here and in the McCain piece. The confidence displayed had nothing to do with likelihood – all were comically off-base – and had everything to do with how badly those committed to the standard narrative wanted the statements to be true.


This attempt to prop up that narrative have become increasing strained and convoluted, as you can see from the most recent entry
Yet oddly, the breadth of [Trump's] appeal and his strength reduce his importance in shaping the outcome of the race.


If Mr. Trump were weaker, or if his support were more narrowly concentrated in either New Hampshire or Iowa, he would play a bigger role in shaping the outcome. In that scenario, a non-Trump candidate might win either Iowa or New Hampshire — and he or she would be in much better position than the second-place finisher in the state where Mr. Trump was victorious.



If Mr. Trump were to win both Iowa and New Hampshire, the second-place finishers would advance as if they were winners. Assuming that one or both of the second-place finishers were broadly acceptable, the party would try to coalesce behind one of the two ahead of the winner-take-all contests on March 15.



In the end, Mr. Trump almost certainly won’t win the Republican nomination; the rest of the party will consolidate around anyone else. He can influence the outcome only if his support costs another candidate more than others. But for now, he seems to be harming all candidates fairly equally.

First off, notice the odd way that Cohn discusses influence. If I asked if you would like to “play a bigger role in shaping the outcome” of something, you would naturally assume I meant would you like to have more of a say, but that's not at all how the concept of influence is used in the passage above. Cohn is simply saying that a world where Trump was behind in one of the first two primaries might have a different nominee but since Trump wouldn't get to pick who would beat him, it's not clear why he would care and since there's no telling who would win in Cohn's alternate reality, it's not clear why anyone else would care either.


But even if we accept Cohn's framing, we then run into another fatal flaw. Put in more precise terms, “harming all candidates fairly equally” means that each candidate's probability of becoming president would have been the same had Trump not entered the race. This is almost impossible on at least three levels:

Trump has already produced a serious shift in the discussion, bringing issues like immigration and Social Security/Medicare to the foreground while sucking away the oxygen from others. This is certain to help some candidates more than others;

For this and other reasons, the impact on the polls so far has been anything but symmetric;

And even if Trump's support were coming proportionally from each of the other contenders, that still wouldn't constitute equal harm. Primaries are complex beasts. We have to take into account convergence, feedback loops, liquidity, serial correlation, et cetera. The suggestion that you could remove the first two primaries from contention without major ramifications is laughably naive.


Finally there's that “only.” Even if Trump isn't the nominee (and I would certainly call him a long shot), he can still influence the process as either kingmaker or spoiler.


While Cohn's work on this topic has been terrible, what's important here is not the failings of one writer but the current culture of journalism. This is what happens when even the best publications in the country embrace conventional narratives and groupthink, adopt self-serving but silly conventions and let their standards slip. 
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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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