Tuesday, May 17, 2022

The Alaska Paradox

While there are notable exceptions (Louisiana is often listed as the most anti-abortion state and its proposed abortion restrictions are arguably the most extreme), there doesn't seem to be much correlation between the support for abortion in red states and the nature of the laws being proposed.

Oklahoma is moderately pro-choice and yet it basically photocopied the Texas law, complete with bounties.

Ohio is solidly pro-choice and it produced this:

If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade by upholding Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, then HB 598 would immediately begin.

The bill’s sponsor Rep. Jean Schmidt, a Republican from Loveland, gave her sponsor testimony and answered questions for an hour.

The bill would
Prohibits a person from purposely causing an abortion by using a “substance” or an “instrument” or other means.
Makes criminal abortion a felony in the fourth degree. 
Prohibits any person from making, selling or advertising tools to cause an abortion.
Makes “promoting” abortion a first-degree misdemeanor.
Creates the crime of abortion manslaughter, which is when a person takes the life of a child born from an attempted abortion who is alive when removed from the pregnant person’s uterus.
Makes abortion manslaughter a felony of the first degree.
The penalties
Minimum of four to seven years and a maximum of 25 years of imprisonment and a fine of up to $10,000 for abortion manslaughter.
Minimum of one-half to two years of imprisonment and a fine of up to $2,500 for criminal abortion.
However, the bill does grant immunity from prosecution for abortion manslaughter, criminal abortion or promoting abortion to the person who attempted an abortion or succeeded in an abortion. This individual would also be able to sue for wrongful death for violation of crimes of abortion manslaughter, criminal abortion or promoting abortion.

...
The intense back and forth between [Richard Brown (D-Canal Winchester)] and Schmidt revolved around the lack of exemptions for rape and incest.
“So under this bill, if a 13-year-old girl, let’s say, was raped by a serial rapist, broke into her house, or maybe more likely raped by a family member, which occurs frequently — unfortunately, this bill would require this 13-year-old to carry this felons fetus to term, regardless of any emotional or psychological damage or trauma that may be inflicted upon this 13-year-old girl to deliver this, felons a fetus. Is that right?” he asked.
Schmidt responded and said that rape is a difficult issue.
“It’s a shame that it happens, but there’s an opportunity for that woman, no matter how young or old she is,” she said. 
The opportunity — which would be the only option — is to deliver that baby.

There are a number of other pro-choice red states, but one stands out as the very last place that, according to conventional political wisdom, the Republicans should be willing to poke this bear, Alaska. 

Alaska is more pro-choice than California. "Alaska was one of only four states to make abortion legal between 1967 and 1970, a few years before the US Supreme Court's decision in 1973's Roe v. Wade ruling." On top of that, the GOPs hold on the state is surprisingly limited. Over 57% of registered voters are unaffiliated. For complicated reasons, Republicans share control over the house in the state legislature. You would not expect party loyalty to protect the GOP from unpopular policies. Abortion ought to be the one issue they'd like to avoid. 

Nonetheless.
I'm not going to try to speculate at this point about what's driving this, let alone whether it's politically wise. This could be anything from the GOP conducting a bold and savvy attack to a dysfunctional party playing six-bullet Russian Roulette.

I will say that perhaps the most interesting places in the current political landscape are the pro-choice red states, and smart people should be paying attention.

All of this ties into the Arkansas Paradox, which will be coming to a blog near you soon.

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Monday, May 16, 2022

Leave politics to the politicians?

This is Joseph.

Let us recall the last two end of presidential terms SCOTUS vacancies:

  • Antonin Scalia: February 13, 2016 (position held to after the next election, filled April 10, 2017)
  • Ruth Bader Ginsberg: September 18, 2020 (position filled October 27, 2020)

So one position was filled in six weeks (under a Republican president), the other was open for fourteen months (under a Democrat president) despite a nomination being made well in advance of the election (March 16, 2016). Why does this matter? Consider this interview with Clarence Thomas:

Asked if conservatives were living up to the “mantra” of civility in politics, he said: “They’ve never trashed a Supreme Court nominee. The most they can point to is Garland did not get a hearing, but he was not trashed.”

Thomas was referring to Attorney General Merrick Garland, who as an appeals court judge was President Barack Obama’s nominee to the court after Scalia died in 2016. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), then the Senate majority leader, refused to schedule a confirmation hearing.

“It was a rule that Joe Biden introduced, by the way, which is you get no hearing in the last year of an administration,” Thomas said. He did not mention that Republicans pushed through Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to replace Ginsburg just weeks before Election Day in 2020.

But that last part is the entire story. If respect for the Biden rule explains Neil Gorsuch instead of Merrick Garland then how does one explain Amy Barrett instead of a held position? Is it holding Democrats to a different standard than Republicans? 

The real answer is that Senators were playing politics and willing to break norms in order to gain a nomination advantage on the court. Guess what? There are other norm breaking methods that can be used -- like how Abraham Lincoln expanded the court in the 1860's to 10 members. Why would you ever try and justify the decision to use brute political power to shift the balance of the court at the same time as a major and controversial court decision that directly derives from it? 

All you do is make the court seem even more political. If the court is political, as opposed to a neutral arbiter of the law, then it should not be surprising if political solutions start to be considered. 

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Friday, May 13, 2022

Is the GOP trying to kill Wikipedia or is that just an unexpected bonus?

Very probably the latter, but that really doesn't make it better

From TechDirt:

So, I already had a quick post on the bizarre decision by the 5th Circuit to reinstate Texas’ social media content moderation law just two days after a bizarrely stupid hearing on it. However, I don’t think most people actually understand just how truly fucked up and obviously unconstitutional the law is. Indeed, there are so many obvious problems with it, I’m not even sure I can do them adequate justice in a single post. I’ve seen some people say that it’s easy to comply with, but that’s wrong. There is no possible way to comply with this bill. You can read the full law here, but let’s go through the details.

The law declares social media platforms as “common carriers” and this was a big part of the hearing on Monday, even though it’s not at all clear what that actually means and whether or not a state can just magically declare a website a common carrier (as we’ve explained, that’s not how any of this works). But, it’s mainly weird because it doesn’t really seem to mean anything under Texas law. The law could have been written entirely without declaring them “common carriers” and I’m not sure how it would matter.

The law applies to “social media platforms” that have more than 50 million US monthly average users (based on whose counting? Dunno. Law doesn’t say), and limits it to websites where the primary purpose is users posting content to the site, not ones where things like comments and such are a secondary feature. It also excludes email and chat apps (though it’s unclear why). Such companies with over 50 million users in the US probably include the following as of today (via Daphne Keller’s recent Senate testimony): Facebook, YouTube, Tiktok, Snapchat, Wikipedia, and Pinterest are definitely covered. Likely, but not definitely, covered would be Twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress, Reddit, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and possibly Discord. Wouldn’t it be somewhat amusing if, after all of this, Twitter’s MAUs fall below the threshold?! Also possibly covered, though data is lacking: Glassdoor, Vimeo, Nextdoor, and Twitch.

And it gets worse from there.

Wikipedia is one of the best things and most hopeful developments to come out of the internet. I know that sounds like hyperbole but I am absolutely sincere. It might be the one place that actually lives up to the utopian expectations of Web 2.0. A non-profit collaboration of volunteers, it should be a disaster, yet somehow it manages, not just to work, but to achieve an unprecedented scope and a depth while maintaining a remarkable level of accuracy and objectivity. In my experience, you are far more likely to find serious errors and omissions in the New York Times or the New Yorker than in Wikipedia, despite the fact that the editors at the former publications are well compensated while the editors for the latter aren't paid at all. 

The Internet Archive (the only peer of Wikipedia I can think of) set up a backup site in Canada shortly after the election of Trump. Given the role vigilant content moderation plays in Wikipedia's operation, it's difficult to see how it could continue to operate in the U.S.

The standard response to these concerns is that even this court would have to find this law unconstitutional. The problem with that argument is that it has failed so often (months before the Roe decision finally caught everyone's attention), especially when there's been a chance to own the libs or rectify some perceived conservative grievance. Both apply here. 

The Republicans are poking some very big (and deep pocketed) bears -- did I mention your spam filter would go away? The latest far-right conspiracy theory claims that Gmail is biased against conservative emails -- so there will be a fight, and as long as Wikipedia is standing next to Facebook and Google, it will be defended. In 2022, that may be the best we can hope for.


More here from legal expert Ken White.

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Thursday, May 12, 2022

What, me worry?

 I'll try to get Joseph to come in and explain some of this in greater detail (he knows far more about the subject than I do), but in the Bizarro world of cryptocurrencies, stablecoins actually make a certain amount of sense. There are a number of reasons why someone trading in these markets would rather transact coin to coin rather than cash to coin and back again, particularly if the second coin is pegged to a real currency like the dollar.

The trouble is that all that clever financial engineering has a way of convincing people that there's something there that isn't. In the end, it's just a better engineered perpetual motion machine.





Matt Levine explains the details (from his newsletter):

An “algorithmic stablecoin” sounds complicated, and there are a lot of people with incentives to pretend that it is complicated, but it is not. Here is how an algorithmic stablecoin works:

You wake up one morning and invent two crypto tokens.

One of them is the stablecoin, which I will call “Terra,” for reasons that will become apparent.

The other one is not the stablecoin. I will call it “Luna.”

To be clear, they are both just things you made up, just numbers on a ledger. (Probably the ledger is maintained on a decentralized blockchain, though in theory you could do this on your computer in Excel.) 

You try to find people to buy them.

Luna will trade at some price determined by supply and demand. If you make it up on your computer and keep the list in Excel and smirk when you tell people about this, that price will be zero, and none of this will work.

But if you do a good job of marketing Luna, that price will not be zero. If the price is not zero then you’re in business.

You promise that people can always exchange one Terra for $1 worth of Luna. If Luna trades at $0.10, then one Terra will get you 10 Luna. If Luna trades at $20, then one Terra will get you 0.05 Luna. Doesn’t matter. The price of Luna is arbitrary, but one Terra always gets you $1 worth of Luna. (And vice versa: People can always exchange $1 worth of Luna for one Terra.)

You set up an automated smart contract — the “algorithm” in “algorithmic stablecoin” — to let people exchange their Terras for Lunas and Lunas for Terras. 

Terra should trade at $1. If it trades above $1, people — arbitrageurs — can buy $1 worth of Luna for $1 and exchange them for one Terra worth more than a dollar, for an instant profit. If it trades below $1, people can buy one Terra for less than a dollar and exchange it for $1 worth of Luna, for an instant profit. These arbitrage trades push the price of Terra back to $1 if it ever goes higher or lower.

The price of Luna will fluctuate. Over time, as trust in this ecosystem grows, it will probably mostly go up. But that is not essential to the stablecoin concept. As long as Luna robustly has a non-zero value, you can exchange one Terra for some quantity of Luna that is worth $1, which means Terra should be worth $1, which means that its value should be stable.

All of this is, I think, quite straightforward and correct, except for Point 7, which is insane. If you overcome that — if you can find a way to make Luna worth some nonzero amount of money — then everything works fine. That is the whole ballgame. In theory this seems hard, since you just made up Luna. In practice it seems very easy, as there are dozens and dozens of cryptocurrencies that someone just made up that are now worth billions of dollars. The principal ways to do this are:

Collect some transaction fees from people who exchange Luna for Terra or Terra for Luna, and then pay some of those fees to holders of Luna as, effectively, interest on their Luna holdings. (Or pay interest on Terra, creating demand for Luna that people can exchange into Terra to get the interest.)

Talk about building an ecosystem of smart contracts, programmable money, etc. on top of Terra and Luna, so that people treat Luna as a way to use that ecosystem — as effectively stock in the company that you are building and ascribe a lot of value to it.

These things reinforce each other: The more fees you collect and distribute to Luna holders, the more big and viable your ecosystem looks, so the more highly people value it, so the more Luna they buy, so the more activity you have, so the more fees you collect, etc.

 

But there is no magic here. There is no algorithm to guarantee that Luna is always worth some amount of money. The algorithm just lets people exchange Terra for Luna. Luna is valuable if people think it’s valuable and believe in the long-term value of the system that you are building, and not if they don’t.

Or if they do, then they don't

From the WSJ:

TerraUSD traded as low as 23 cents Wednesday, according to data from CoinDesk. As of about 5 p.m. ET, it had rebounded partially to about 67 cents in volatile trading.

A stablecoin, this breed of cryptocurrencies had gained favor among traders for being the one part of the crypto universe that was known for its stability. While the most popular stablecoins maintain their levels with assets that include dollar-denominated debt and cash, TerraUSD is what is known as an algorithmic stablecoin, which relies on financial engineering to maintain its link to the dollar.

The break in TerraUSD’s peg began over the weekend with a series of large withdrawals of TerraUSD from Anchor Protocol, a sort of decentralized bank for crypto investors.
Here's a characteristically good discussion from Coffeezilla.




While it's easy to mock the celebrities and Silicon Valley visionaries who have been pitching web3, we need to remember that the human toll here is horrifying...

... with the worst yet to come.

As usual, Liz was there first.
But no matter how bad things get, you'll find a rich person with delusions of competence giving bad advice.

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Wednesday, May 11, 2022

Double standards

This is Joseph. 

Some of the recent political stuff has convinced me that there are some odd double standards between the left and the right. Consider England:

A former director of public prosecutions, steeped in the law, who called for the prime minister and chancellor to resign for breaking the rules, unwilling to confirm what he'd do if the same thing happens.

Instead Sir Keir has said if he's fined he'll resign.

This means he can reclaim - at least some - moral high ground and say the moral bar he set for others is the one he'll hold himself to.

The crime? Having lunch between work periods. The contrast, with Partygate, is stark:

Partygate In terms of scale, it’s pretty hard to argue that Partygate and Beergate were alike. The Partygate roster runs from May 2020 to April 2021. In total, 16 events were examined by civil servant Sue Gray for her report, 12 of which were also the subject of police investigation. Boris Johnson is reported to have been present for six of those 12 events. So far, he has been issued with a fixed penalty notice in relation to one incident, though there could be other fines in the future.

Beergate The incident took place on 30 April 2021, at the office of Durham MP Mary Foy. It’s the only occasion on which Starmer has been accused of breaking lockdown rules.

Now lets us go to the United States. This is worthy of a police investigation:

Susan Collins called the cops to investigate “defacement of public property” after an unknown person wrote a message in chalk on the sidewalk near her home asking her to codify Roe.

It will be curious to see if this is taken as seriously as other cases of chalk use.  Just look at this terrifying scene as documented by Josh Marshall:


Everyone seems surprised that actions have consequences, even if this is as about as scary as a toddler on a tricycle. We are already past the "only a monster would leak a supreme court opinion" to "at least three conservative leakers". I wonder if the calls for punishment will increase or not, but it seems like equally bad regardless of the side leaking? But all of this seems more important than legislators dealing with chalk protests.  

It feels like there is an asymmetry in the commentary here. On one side you have the overturning of a long standing court decision based on political preference (or at least I have yet to see a good argument for how stare decisis being overturned makes sense but see lots of comments to the contrary). On the other side you have people protesting a major change in the legal landscape of the country.

This is the lack of proportion that we see in the UK as well. The leader of the opposition might be fined after a deep dive into his movements revealed one potential breach, depending on disputed context. How many people could survive such a level of scrutiny? On the other side, you have a Prime Minister who actually passed the laws who had a serious of parties (16 incidents) and has already been fined. And yet which one has offered to resign?  

It makes me worried about the ability of the press to focus on the key points. You may or may not think Roe versus Wade should be overturned, but the leak is not the biggest story (and the follow-up stories make it look like a conservative ploy to distract). The biggest story is the overturning of a prominent case that not only overturns a long established right but is also an non enumerated right and there are some of those that people also hold dear (Loving, Griswold, Obergerfell). Consider:

The leaked draft opinion seemingly puts several other constitutional rights squarely in the court’s crosshairs. As Mark Joseph Stern argued, Alito’s broadside attack against “unenumerated rights” that aren’t “deeply rooted” in American history could be deployed against the right of same-sex couples to be intimate or to get married. Like the right to decide to have an abortion, the right of same-sex couples to be intimate or to get married isn’t explicitly mentioned in the text of the Constitution. There aren’t state constitutional provisions or state or federal court cases from the 1800s or early 1900s recognizing those rights either. And these other opinions, like Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, are reasoned at a “high level of generality,” invoking concepts like dignity, destiny, and defining one’s own existence

Now maybe it is possible that abortion rights are special and that there is unlikely to be any further appetite for going after other rights. Or even that the new laws will be moderate. Maybe. But it does escalate the value of control of the supreme court in ways that are unhealthy, and I thought that before this change. 

This is a new world, and for better or worse why is that not the dominant conversation? 

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Tuesday, May 10, 2022

We can't return to Ithuvania if we never left -- seven years ago at the blog

Things have been eventful since our first visit. Thiel has become even more cartoonishly evil. Musk has become even more delusionally messianic (and evil). Silicon Valley billionaires made bold claims about fixing the pandemic then mainly just pushed hydroxychloroquine. Through political contributions and crypto, tech messiahs and far right extremists are growing closer. 


VC unicorn disruptors are turning out to be mythical beasts.


None of which has dented their self-confidence in the least. 

Friday, May 29, 2015

Adventures in Ithuvania

There's a wonderful Far Side cartoon that shows two scientists addressing a man sitting behind a desk in a sumptuous office. The lead scientist says:

"Sorry, your highness, but you're really not the dictator of Ithuvania, a small European republic. In fact, there is no Ithuvania. The hordes of admirers, the military parades, this office -- we faked it all as in experiment in human psychology. In fact, you highness, your real name is Edward Belcher, you're from Long Island, New York, and it's time to go home, Eddie."

Sometimes, when I come across yet another bit of jaw-dropping flakiness from some tech-bubble billionaire, my thoughts turn to Ithuvania. What if this were an experiment? What if some well-funded research organization decided to see what would happen if it randomly selected individuals of average intelligence, handed them huge checks and told them they were super-geniuses?

I'm not saying that's what happened; I'm just saying the results would have been awfully damned similar.

From Wired:

THE SEASTEADING INSTITUTE was the toast of tech entrepreneurs when it received financial backing from venture capitalist Peter Thiel in 2008. Its mission was to build a manmade island nation where inventors could work free of heavy-handed government interference. One early rendering shows an island raised on concrete stilts in eerily calm waters. The buildings atop the platform resemble nothing so much as the swanky tech campus of an entrepreneur’s ultimate dream: No sign of land or civilization in sight. The island, despite appearing strapped for square footage, has room for a full-size swimming pool with deck lounges.

In a 2009 essay, Thiel described these island paradises as a potential “escape from politics in all its forms.” It wasn’t just desirable, he said. It seemed possible. “We may have reached the stage at which it is economically feasible, or where it will soon be feasible,” he wrote.

More than a half-decade later, the dream has yet to be realized. And optimism is starting to waver. Earlier this year, during a talk at George Mason University, Thiel said, “I’m not exactly sure that I’m going to succeed in building a libertarian utopia any time soon.” Part of the problem: A truly self-sufficient society might exceed the range even of Thiel’s fortune. “You need to have a version where you could get started with a budget of less than $50 billion,” he said.

For its part, The Seasteading Institute has also come to appreciate that the middle of the ocean is less inviting than early renderings suggest. It now hopes to find shelter in calmer, government-regulated waters. According to its most recent vision statement, “The high cost of open ocean engineering serves as a large barrier to entry and hinders entrepreneurship in international waters. This has led us to look for cost-reducing solutions within the territorial waters of a host nation.”

Thiel’s reassessment marks a clear departure from tech culture’s unflinching confidence in its ability to self-govern. In recent years a number of prominent entrepreneurs have urged Silicon Valley to create a less inhibited place for its work. Larry Page called on technologists to “set aside a small part of the world” to test new ideas. Elon Musk has aimed at colonizing Mars. And venture capitalist Tim Draper made a proposal to divide Silicon Valley into its own state. But aside from the continued growth of full-service tech campuses such as Google’s and Facebook’s, very little has been accomplished in the way of true societal independence.

Building a government, it turns out, is a more complex challenge than much of Silicon Valley would have you believe. Now, Thiel and other high-profile Silicon Valley investors are carefully taking stock of the anti-government view they helped popularize. For all Thiel’s open criticism of elected officials, he sounded remarkably like a politician recanting false promises on the stage at George Mason. Toward the end of the talk, he reflected for a moment on his early essay on seasteading. “Writing is always such a dangerous thing,” he said. “It was late at night. I quickly typed it off.”
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Monday, May 9, 2022

X -- "A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is."

 From Business Insider:

Elon Musk's aspirations for Twitter include a mysterious new product named "X," according to his investor presentation obtained by The New York Times. 

Product "X" would launch in 2023 and bring in 9 million users within the first year, the pitch deck estimates. Musk projects 104 million users would subscribe to the product by 2028, per the Times report.

It's one of several ideas outlined in the billionaire's grand plan to quintuple Twitter's revenue and quadruple the size of its user base, despite his previous claims that he doesn't care about the economics of buying Twitter "at all."


There are a lot of vague details in Musk's promised turnaround of Twitter, but the aptly named "X" is the most mysterious. The amazing promises and lack of specifics reminded me of this passage from Charles Mackay's  Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. 


Some of these schemes were plausible enough, and, had they been undertaken at a time when the public mind was unexcited, might have been pursued with advantage to all concerned. But they were established merely with the view of raising the shares in the market. The projectors took the first opportunity of a rise to sell out, and next morning the scheme was at an end. Maitland, in his History of London, gravely informs us, that one of the projects which received great encouragement, was for the establishment of a company "to make deal-boards out of saw-dust." This is, no doubt, intended as a joke; but there is abundance of evidence to show that dozens of schemes hardly a whir more reasonable, lived their little day, ruining hundreds ere they fell. One of them was for a wheel for perpetual motion—capital, one million; another was "for encouraging the breed of horses in England, and improving of glebe and church lands, and repairing and rebuilding parsonage and vicarage houses." Why the clergy, who were so mainly interested in the latter clause, should have taken so much interest in the first, is only to be explained on the supposition that the scheme was projected by a knot of the foxhunting parsons, once so common in England. The shares of this company were rapidly subscribed for. But the most absurd and preposterous of all, and which showed, more completely than any other, the utter madness of the people, was one, started by an unknown adventurer, entitled "company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is." Were not the fact stated by scores of credible witnesses, it would be impossible to believe that any person could have been duped by such a project. The man of genius who essayed this bold and successful inroad upon public credulity, merely stated in his prospectus that the required capital was half a million, in five thousand shares of 100 pounds each, deposit 2 pounds per share. Each subscriber, paying his deposit, would be entitled to 100 pounds per annum per share. How this immense profit was to be obtained, he did not condescend to inform them at that time, but promised, that in a month full particulars should be duly announced, and a call made for the remaining 98 pounds of the subscription. Next morning, at nine o'clock, this great man opened an office in Cornhill. Crowds of people beset his door, and when he shut up at three o'clock, he found that no less than one thousand shares had been subscribed for, and the deposits paid. He was thus, in five hours, the winner of 2,000 pounds. He was philosopher enough to be contented with his venture, and set off the same evening for the Continent. He was never heard of again
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Friday, May 6, 2022

Matt Damon's soul didn't come cheap and other Friday miscellanea

!!!MOOB

[Implosion sound effect]



From YouTuber and scam expert Coffeezilla.



More details here.


Also from Coffeezilla. You may have read about this interview, but that's not the same as actually hearing it.

"You're just like 'well, I'm in the Ponzi business.'"



Sam Bankman-Fried is worth $24 billion.



110 doesn't seem like a lot.


We'll probably do another post of this article by Emily Shugerman focusing on the politics of this 2022 bitcoin conference (Jordan Peterson, Peter Thiel, you see where this is going). Most of the well-written piece focuses on less famous and far more likeable characters. Much of it is funny. Most of it is sad. This will not work out well for these people.

MIAMI BEACH—The thing about bitcoin, the man at the back of the convention center wanted me to know, was that once you understood it, it changed everything. It seeped into every aspect of your life: personal, political, financial. Bitcoin was freedom, he said; it had the power to literally end all war. And that’s why he was here, at Bitcoin 2022—the largest bitcoin event in the world—trying to spread the gospel through women’s panties.

“Once you get into bitcoin, there is no way back,” the man, whose name was Pablo, said over piles of women’s underwear emblazoned with the cryptocurrency’s logo. A sign behind him read: “Panties for Bitcoin.”

“Once you understand it, it gets into your life from every point of view—not only the economic point of view,” he continued. ”Once you have control of your money... you have control of everything.”

I heard a similar refrain from other attendees over the course of the conference, including a man who quit his job as an industrial engineer to make bitcoin-themed merchandise on his 3D printer and a 23-year-old Lebanese jewelry heir who had recently convinced his family to invest part of their fortune in bitcoin.

The former engineer asked me why I was among the 25,000 people at the conference, and I told him my reporting beat included cults.

“We’re a cult, absolutely,” he said. “One hundred percent. I love the bitcoin cult.”



A free speech absolutist, but only in the relative sense.


I can't really call this miscellanea without including Cory Doctorow's chickenized reverse centaurs. 

Big Chicken tells farmers which chicks to buy, what kind of coops to raise them in, when the lights go on and off, which vets they’re allowed to use and which medicines the vets are allowed to administer. They even tell them who they’re allowed to hire to fix their coops (specifically, they bar farmers from hiring ex-farmers who speak out against the industry).

The processors tell the farmers everything…except how much they’ll be paid for their birds. This is decided only after the farmers bring them to market, and the sum is titrated to pay them enough to service their debts and raise another batch of chickens, but not one penny more.

This worker misclassification and control — governed like an employee, paid like a contractor — has spilled out beyond the poultry industry. Uber drivers are heavily chickenized, with their pay calculated to let them service their car loans, insurance payments and fuel bills — but not enough to save up and quit the industry.
And
In AI circles, a “centaur” is a human/AI collaboration, like when chess masters and chess programs form a team that can trounce the best people and the best programs. In these centaur ops, the human is the “head” and the AI is the “body” — a “decision-support system,” that augments the human.

A reverse centaur is when it’s the other way around. Think of an Amazon delivery driver, whose work is observed and analyzed by a constellation of cameras and algorithms. These workers are the body, not the head — the AI gives the orders and the human is the dumb meat, augmenting the machine.

Now we’re ready to put it all together. A chickenized reverse-centaur is a worker who is misclassified as a contractor, micromanaged like an employee, and given no guarantees of pay or hours.

This is end-stage app work capitalism, as with Doordash and Uber, where workers don’t get to see the full amount on offer until they take the job. This lets these unprofitable companies continue to grow by offering subsidized services to customers. The app work monopolists have always relied on subsidies to grow, and this tactic switches the costs of subsidies from their shareholders to their workers.

And a little politics. 


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Thursday, May 5, 2022

Thursday Thoughts: A tale of two tweets

This is Joseph.

So the leaked Roe versus Wade opinion has elicited a variety of reactions. On one side, we see the group that sees abortion as unique and unlikely to lead to further dramatic changes:





On the other hand we have people who are deeply concerned:

I think the real point of concern is what happens next. James Joyner, who I have always seen as fairly right wing, has this point to make that I think is largely correct: 
Regardless, Tribe’s larger point is surely right. There’s nothing stopping a Court that is willing to simply disregard precedent from making wholesale changes to the way the country is governed. Even aside from various “rights” that previous Courts found hiding in the shadows of the Bill of Rights, there are strong signs that this collection of Justices may overturn the very foundations of the Administrative State. Grounded in the Constitution of 1787, they have a plausible case for doing so. But it would be dangerous, indeed, making governing a modern continental superpower next to impossible
Really, this is the key point of concern. The law is a living and breathing thing, that evolves over time as technology and circumstances also evolve. It goes forward and backwards, makes mistakes but ultimately creates the underpinning of how to make a complex society work. Codified law has been a feature of complex (i.e. agrarian) societies for at least 4,000 years. There are different types of law but the sort of constitutional law that the United States uses is deeply based in precedent. It is also a system with a lot of veto points and a written constitution. It might be that a parliamentary system could react more quickly to a radical court -- but that isn't the US system. 

Now it is possible that things will improve. This could be a bad draft that is a lot better in final form. I hope nobody ever leaks the first draft of one of my papers! There could be bargaining to improve the legal reasoning and bring it more into line with precedent (laws can evolve, or, perhaps, devolve). It could be a one off decision like Bush versus Gore, that ages badly but does not foretell of future radical decisions (the Megan McArdle view, above). 

That said, I go back to Abraham Lincoln. In the face of a major internal crisis, he expanded the court to its largest historical number as a part of stabilizing the country. If there is too much tampering, I think we should consider that the primary legislative body is congress and that the democratic accountability of congress makes it a far better branch to enact radical change, should it be desired. 

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Wednesday, May 4, 2022

Late Night Thoughts on Roe v Wade, Black Swans, Elections, and Uncertainty

I normally let these things sit for a while and run them past a stat professor or two to check my logic and language, but this is a fast-moving story and I wanted to make some points before the experts weighed in.

Dictated to my phone, so beware the occasional homonym. 

1. All predictive models are based to some degree on the assumption that the underlying relationships that held before will continue to hold in the future.

1b. All causal relationships we observe or, more often, fail to observe depend on the ranges of the variables in question. You will find no relationship between age and blood pressure if your study is based on a group of college students.

When we have reason to believe that underlying relationships in changed, particularly when factors have moved out of previously observed ranges, you should be prepared to discard deeply held assumptions about what is likely and what is unlikely.

2. Also remember that most of those nice, straightforward relationships we throw around when explaining and predicting are at best oversimplifications and frequently useful fictions. We constantly gloss over complexity and complication in order to get a clear, concise explanation. Think using a simple linear model when an enormous Bayesian network would be more appropriate. Under normal circumstances, we can usually get away with this -- It may even be the best approach -- but when profound changes are happening these oversimplifications can lead to disastrously wrong conclusions and recommendations.

3. We also have a tendency to put far too much faith in what we have come to think of as fixed points. At least in the social sciences, there are very few values, thresholds, or relationships that we can treat as immutable laws of nature.

The main lesson here is that when we get into uncharted territory, no one can be certain of anything including the pundits and even researchers. 

My gut feeling is that the upcoming SCOTUS ruling is horribly dangerous for the Republican Party. The GOP has staked out a position as the anti-Roe, pro-Putin, anti-vax, pro-insurrection party. On top of that, the governors of their two most populous states have in effect declared war on their own states' economies. My instincts tell me that under these circumstances, bringing any of these issues front and center in the discourse is likely to hurt the Republicans.

But that's just a guess. 

I don't know what I'm talking about, not because this is way out of my field (which it is) and not because I am unfamiliar with the data (though I am, in fact, almost completely ignorant of it*). I don't know what I'm talking about when I make predictions about the upcoming election because nobody knows what they're talking about when they make predictions about the upcoming election. 

We are so far beyond the range of data that no statement can be made with any confidence, not just with respect to Roe v Wade but along a number of other dimensions, the extremism of the rhetoric, the level and precision of gerrymandering, the role of conspiracy theories, the infiltration (sorry, there's no better word) of one party by a hostile power, revelations of coups past and future, and this is not a comprehensive list. 

There are limited sorta-kinda parallels from history books and interesting, perhaps even informative findings from polls and previous elections, but none of it is science, at least not yet. A year from now, you will see some first-rate research coming from smart political scientists that will give us real insight into what is and is about to happen, but for now, no one is making any kind of statistically solid predictive analysis about November. 

*Yes, I know, but the plural just sounds stupid.
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Tuesday, May 3, 2022

Tuesday Tweets -- Web3 edition

One of the best cryptocurrency quotes, period.




A bit off topic for this post, but an important point (and I'm a sucker for really British names).



While we're leafing through the Financial Times, no one does needful snark like Jemima Kelly.


Tough stance from an organization that needs (and deserves) donations.
This bodes well.

Anyone else getting a really strong sophomore stoner who likes to impress freshmen vibe off of these Silicon Valley visionaries? 

What could go wrong?
                                        What could go wrong?
                                                                                     What could go wrong?



I'd seen the term "gas war" in this context before but I was never entirely clear about what it meant until I read this post by Amy Castor.

Yuga Labs launched a land sale for its upcoming metaverse project Otherside Saturday night, which quickly morphed into a gas war — and broke Ethereum. 

As part of their psychedelic-fueled business plans, Yuga Labs offered 55,000 NFTs called “Otherdeeds” for 305 APE each ($5,800, at the time). Apecoin was the only crypto accepted for the minting.  

The sale, which started on April 30, at 9 p.m ET, immediately became a land grab for the rich. People paid between 1.3 ETH to 1.9 ETH ($3,500 to $5,500), on average, just to get their transactions to go through. Some even paid 5 ETH ($13,500) and higher — double the cost of the land itself.

The high fees lasted several hours, making Ethereum virtually unusable for any other projects. [Reddit]

By the time the sale was over, Yuga Labs netted 16.7 million APE ($310 million), helping to recentralize a coin they can then claim is decentralized. All of the APE acquired in the sale are locked up for one year. 

Gas fees

Ethereum — a “world computer” — ambles along at 15 transactions per second. You have to pay a fee, called “gas,” to Ethereum miners to process transactions. 

When transaction volumes are high, miners get to selectively process only transactions paying the highest gas fees. The higher the gas fee you are willing to pay, the better your chance of having a miner include your transaction in the next block on the blockchain.  

If you happen to pay too low a gas fee, your transaction will fail, and you lose your gas money. The Otherdeed mint saw lots of failed transactions. [Dune]
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Monday, May 2, 2022

I just checked and we've been making fun of Zucker since 2010.

Sometimes you come up with an example so good you just have to keep revisiting it. When it comes to executive compensation, that example is Jeff Zucker.

The standard defense of exorbitant CEO salaries and bonuses is that they are worth it, that they more than pay for themselves in terms of corporate performance. 

The problem with that argument is that there doesn't seem to be that strong a correlation between how well these people do and how well they are paid or how they are able to get and hold on to incredibly sweet jobs.

As you can see from our earlier post below, Zucker is a strong competitor for worst network executive executive ever, taking NBC from first to fourth with remarkable speed. You might have thought this would have been a bit of a black mark on the resume. Fred Silverman had spectacular runs at CBS and ABC, then stumbled at NBC and though he later re-established himself as a successful producer and many of his NBC decisions look pretty good in retrospect (such as greenlighting and developing David Letterman's first show), he remained an industry punchline for years.

At NBC/Universal, Zucker just kept failing up. Even after being forced out there, he landed the top job at CNN because he had "experience" running a network. All of which makes it all the more fitting that he left on this note.  

Before we give ourselves over to schadenfreude, it's important to remember that when executives screw up, it's the people way down the food chain who pay the price.

Here's a very pensive and uncharacteristically unpolished Bob Chipman on the subject.





From Business Insider:
CNN+'s demise came fast, and so have the blame and recriminations. 

Warner Bros. Discovery pulled the plug on the costly project less than a month after launch, with new CNN CEO Chris Licht saying in a statement that "CNN will be strongest as part of WBD's streaming strategy which envisions news as an important part of a compelling broader offering along with sports, entertainment, and nonfiction content."

...

Blame for the destruction doesn't seem to be falling on new owner WBD or its emissary Licht. Instead, company insiders and industry observers are largely laying responsibility on the shoulders of former CNN president Jeff Zucker and departed WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar.

"This was all ego. All a power play for a bigger job or independence. Hubris. Nothing more," said one former WarnerMedia exec of Zucker. "The only people who ever thought this was a good idea either worked at CNN or were trying to get CNN + to hire them. Nobody else."

...

"It was a vanity project for [Kilar] and Zucker," an insider familiar with CNN's plans said in early April. "They wanted to launch it." 

After Zucker resigned from his role in February — over his failure to disclose a relationship with a colleague — industry observers wondered if the company might hit pause on CNN+. But Kilar stayed the course. 

"Frankly, I think Jason Kilar knew it was going to fail," the former WarnerMedia executive said, "and was happy to let Zucker push it out there so his last final thing at CNN was a failure."



Saturday, September 25, 2010

Forget teachers-- hell, forget employees, what does it take to fire a CEO?

One of the fundamental tenets of the modern educational reform movement is faith in the private sector. In the last post, I discussed the contradictions in using that faith to justify attrition policies that are pretty much unheard of in the corporate world.

There's a second potential danger in looking to the private sector for answers. Companies are not very transparent. Most go to great lengths to hide incompetence and depict every effort as a success. There's nothing illegal or even unethical about this. If anything, the people who run a company have an obligation to present it in the best possible light.

Though you can't blame businesses for spinning their results, you can get into a great deal of trouble by imitating them. For example, a school system might adopt an innovative system of project management and never know that it was responsible for hundreds of millions in cost overruns.

Occasionally, however, you will run into a corporate screw-up so massive that no degree of opacity, no amount of spin can obscure it. When you encounter one of these, you should take a moment to remind yourself that the snafus that break the surface represent a minute share of the general population.

Which brings us to Jeff Zucker.

Zucker was brought in as president of NBC Entertainment in 2000 after a stint at the Today Show where his most notable accomplishments were moving the studio and introducing the Today Show's outdoor rock concert series.*

His tenure on the Today Show represented one of Zucker's two specialities: making tiny tweaks to a hit then claiming credit for its success and screwing up on an almost biblical scale. Under Zucker, NBC was the first network to ever go from first to fourth place and he came very close to destroying their lucrative late-night slate. According to an executive for another network (quoted by Maureen Dowd), "Zucker is a case study in the most destructive media executive ever to exist... You’d have to tell me who else has taken a once-great network and literally destroyed it."

Zucker was grossly incompetent. The cost to shareholders is difficult to estimate but it's probably in the hundreds of millions (possibly billions**). His poor performance was widely discussed in the industry.

And yet it took a change of ownership to force him out and he still gets terms like these:
Zucker's contract had been renewed last year to run through January 2013 with an annual salary of $6.3 million and a guaranteed annual bonus*** of $1.5 million. If he leaves by January, he can expect at least a $15.6 million check.
The moral of this story is: next time people tell you that schools should be run like a business, make sure to ask them which business they have in mind.


* Apparently the Today Show has an outdoor rock concert series.

** Here are some numbers from Wikipedia to put things in context:

On December 1, 2009, CNBC reported that a tentative agreement had been reached between Comcast and GE.[26] The deal was formally announced on December 3, 2009.[7] Under the agreement, NBC Universal would be 51% owned by Comcast and 49% by GE. Comcast is to pay $6.5 billion cash to GE. Comcast will also contribute $7.5 billion in programming including regional sports networks and cable channels such as Golf Channel and E! Entertainment Television. GE plans to use some of the funds, $5.8 billion, to buy out Vivendi's 20% minority stake in NBC Universal.[7] After the transaction completes, Comcast will reserve the right to buy out GE's share at certain times. GE will also reserve the right to force the sale of their stake within the first seven years. The deal is subject to regulatory approval.[7]

Vivendi will sell 7.66% of NBC Universal to GE for US$2 billion if the GE/Comcast deal is not completed by September 2010 and then sell the remaining 12.34% stake of NBC Universal to GE for US$3.8 billion when the deal is completed or to the public via an IPO if the deal is not completed.[27][28]


*** I just love the idea of a "guaranteed annual bonus."











Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Peter Principle or Dilbert Principle*

In case you haven't heard, Jeff Zucker has just been named president of CNN. Since we've been discussing incompetent executives lately, this seems like a good time to ask how, despite huge stakes, fierce competition and multiple layers of screening, incompetents still sometimes manage to make it to the top of large corporations.

At first glance, Zucker would appear ot be a perfect example of the Peter Principle, an effective producer promoted past his talents, but when you look closer at Zucker's one big accomplishment, the resurgence of the Today Show, you see less proof of competence and and more evidence that corporate reputations are often built on unrepresentative baselines, delayed effects, external factors and the tendency to embrace appealing and established narratives.

First some background via Wikipedia (as are all block quotes unless otherwise noted).
In 1989, [Zucker] was a field producer for Today, and at 26 he became its executive producer in 1992. He introduced the program's trademark outdoor rock concert series and was in charge as Today moved to the "window on the world" Studio 1A in Rockefeller Plaza in 1994. Under his leadership, Today was the nation’s most-watched morning news program, with viewership during the 2000-01 season reaching the highest point in the show’s history. ... In 2000, he was named NBC Entertainment's president.
Sounds pretty good, but remember two things that happened at the Today Show in 1990 an 1991. The first was a disastrous transition from Jane Pauley to Deborah Norville. You could make the case that Norville was actually better qualified for the job, but that did nothing to soften the viewer reaction. The younger Norville was seen as taking advantage of looks and youth to steal Pauley's position. Saturday Night Live even did a sketch entitled "All About Deborah Norville."

The ratings took a hit from the debacle, but Norville was soon gone, setting the stage for an upturn. That recovery was all but guaranteed by the hiring in 1991 of Katie Couric, a journalist who could have been genetically engineered to host a morning show.

Whoever got the producer's gig in 1992 was almost certain to oversee a substantial rise om ratings as the memory of the debacle faded and Couric started bringing in viewers. Now add in what was going on at Today's significant competitor.
Good Morning America entered the 1990s with its overwhelming ratings success. Gibson and Lunden were a hard team to beat. But Good Morning America stumbled from its top spot in late 1995. Lunden began to discuss working less, and mentioned to network executives that the morning schedule is the hardest in the business. ABC executives promised Lunden a prime time program; Behind Closed Doors would be on the network schedule. On September 5, 1997, Lunden decided to step down after seventeen years on Good Morning America and was replaced by Lisa McRee. Gibson and McRee did well in the ratings. However, ratings sharply declined when Gibson also left the show to make way for Kevin Newman in 1998. With McRee and Newman as anchors of Good Morning America, long-time viewers switched to Today, whose ratings skyrocketed and have remained at the top spot since the week of December 11, 1995.
In other words, Zucker started with an artificially low baseline, was handed a major TV personality on the verge, and saw his competition fall apart at exactly the right time. All of the important drivers of the show's success were things he had nothing to do with.

Just to be clear, many, probably most CEOs get their jobs because they are smart and capable and add value to the company, but there are other ways to  succeed in business. You can:


Fit in with the culture;

Make the right friends;

Couple your career with rising leaders and initiatives;

Fashion a persona that complements the favored narratives;

As for that last one, the legend of the studio boy wonder runs deep in the entertainment industry, from Thalberg to Silverman. When Zucker was put in charge of Today in his twenties and NBC in his thirties, he tapped into something both familiar and resonant.

But Thalberg and Silverman really were boy wonders who had laid down impressive resumes before they were put in charge. Zucker only had the perception of success. Sometimes, though, that's enough.



* Technically not the Dilbert Principle, but close.






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