California has a serious shortage of housing but apparently it's nothing like the New York Times shortage of straw men

 Joseph may just be trolling me here:

The recent New York Times article on the twilight of the NIMBY was interesting just for the low level of actual good ideas for why new housing is bad. The idea was to build 20 condos on a hill in a neighborhood of detached houses. 

 

While arguments given here certainly do qualify as "low-level", it's just possible that this has less to do with the quality of the potential reasons not to build this particular structure and more to do with the fact that the New York Times has gone all-in for the narrative that blames the housing crisis on hypocritical liberals in expensive neighborhoods, and we know from experience that when this paper invests in a narrative, the staff will do anything to protect that narrative up to and including sacrificing their first born.


In this case, Kirsch may be illogical, hypocritical, and selfish, but she is not wrong. It actually is a horrible idea to put more development in Mill Valley.

To understand why we don't want more people here and why Conor Dougherty's article can't be taken seriously, we need to start with wildland–urban interfaces (WUIs) "a zone of transition between wilderness (unoccupied land) and land developed by human activity – an area where a built environment meets or intermingles with a natural environment. Human settlements in the WUI are at a greater risk of catastrophic wildfire."

 As you can see, Mill Valley construction is problematic from a WUI standpoint.

Nor is history reassuring:
 

On July 2, 1929, a fire lookout on Mount Tamalpais spotted smoke rising from the railroad grade on the eastern slope. A wildfire, cause unknown to this day, had sparked on the mountain, flames blowing downhill toward Mill Valley below. Though the Great Mill Valley Fire covered a relatively small footprint, it was disproportionately destructive, burning for three days and incinerating more than 100 homes.

Sixteen years later, in September 1945, another major fire stormed through the Mount Tamalpais watershed. Dry weather and strong winds converted a pair of small brush fires into an inferno that burned more than 20,000 acres, from Lagunitas to the Bolinas Lagoon. While there hasn’t been a major fire on Mount Tam in the 74 years since, between 1881 and 1945 the area burned five times.

“Everyone thinks about that,” says Shaun Horne, Natural Resources Program Manager for the Marin Municipal Water District. Without a significant fire in decades, he says, and with the encroachment of invasive plant species, “There’s more potential fuel. It’s a high-hazard environment for wildfire.”

 

Encouraging development in WUIs is generally a bad idea for a number of reasons. It puts people in harm's way. The smoke from burning buildings is much nastier than the smoke regular forest fires (especially concerning given Mill Valley's location). Most important though is the way that moving ever more people into these areas makes the necessary political calculus all but impossible.

Arguably the biggest crisis facing California at the moment is megafires. The only way to address this crisis is by aggressively promoting the good fires which we have been suppressing for over a century (unlike the native Americans who were here first). Good fires bring with them risks and those risks are primarily focused on places like Mill Valley.

Loads of other issues with this article, too many for a post. Maybe I'll come back to it, or maybe I'll point you to some of the posts I've done on the subject in the past, all of which point to the conclusion that you should never listen to the New York Times' analysis of the California housing crisis (or any other California story).

 Remember, LAT > NYT.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2021

Yes, YIMBYs can be worse than NIMBYs -- the opening round of the West Coast Stat Views cage match

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2021

Yes, YIMBYs can be worse than NIMBYs Part II -- Peeing in the River

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2021

Krugman then told how the ring of mountains almost kept the Challenger Expedition from finding the lost city of Los Angeles

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2021

Yes, YIMBYs can be worse than NIMBYs Part III -- When an overly appealing narrative hooks up with fatally misaligned market forces, the results are always ugly.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2021

Did the NIMBYs of San Francisco and Santa Monica improve the California housing crisis?

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2021

A primer for New Yorkers who want to explain California housing to Californians

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2021

A couple of curious things about Fresno

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2021

Does building where the prices are highest always reduce average commute times?

MONDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2021

Either this is interesting or I'm doing something wrong

 

Tuesday, December 21, 2021
The NYT weighs in again on California housing and it goes even worse than expected 

NIMBY and California

This is Joseph.

The recent New York Times article on the twilight of the NIMBY was interesting just for the low level of actual good ideas for why new housing is bad. The idea was to build 20 condos on a hill in a neighborhood of detached houses. 

There ensued a decade of meetings, lots of legal back and forth, and a sign that said “Save Kite Hill.” The city also got a lot of letters. They said the project was an “insane” idea that would create “unimaginable density” and lead Mill Valley toward an “LA like destruction.”

Most of the letters raised questions about parking and traffic. Others voiced a more esoteric set of concerns, like “confusion for the post office.” One writer averred that anyone who lived in the new condos would be accepting a higher cancer risk, since their homes would be downwind from the wood-fired oven at a nearby restaurant.

Obviously, the people who currently live near the restaurant are innately immune to cancer? The post office is that understaffed that they can't add addresses? I think the real reason remains this:

“From my backyard I see the hillside,” Ms. Kirsch wrote from her Hotmail account. “Explain how my property value is not deflated if open space is replace(d) with view-blocking, dense, unsightly buildings.” 

Letting house get so expensive has been a terrible idea. It creates inequality (people who own homes gain massive profit from appreciation) and drives up housing costs in general considerably. The other reasons given for why there is a housing shortage are not compelling:

Ms. Kirsch does not deny that California has a housing problem but has a different narrative about why. In her telling the state’s problems have little to do with the lack of housing — a diagnosis that unites basically every liberal and conservative economist along with the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations — but instead blames investors who buy single-family houses, big technology companies, and inequality generally. 

Well, inequality is a factor, in that home owners become wealthier if they resist growth. Not sure how technology companies can be influencing the whole of California prices. As for investors, well an artificial housing shortage is a great way to make investment profitable.  

Now I don't live in California but the general issues here have been getting obvious. Expensive housing has numerous negative externalities and the leakage to transportation issues has not been great, either. One of the hard things with writing a piece like this is that you can really only call out the extreme cases; every housing and transit issue has local considerations and a quick overview makes no sense. It takes something like this, a small development that is unlikely to cripple a neighborhood to illustrate the problem. But that does not mean that development doesn't have costs, just that it looks like they have not been balanced.

Also, worth noting that this is a well reported California example but California is simply not the worst offender and the current list is a bit counter-intuitive. The worst ranked cities in California (Los Angeles and San Jose) are still more affordable than Hamilton, Ontario. Vancouver is far worse than Seattle, and New York City is more affordable than Seattle. More importantly, California is already moving to address housing affordability, maybe not in a perfect way, whereas I do not see this at all in the Canadian context (just look at difference in scale in this Canadian plan). 

 I worry that we'll never break this curse until real estate stop looking like a "can't lose" investment. 

Despite what Delaney says, age is not a significant factor in predicting cardiovascular disease and cancer.* [Blogger took this down for some reason, so we're putting it back up]

*Among undergrad college students

[Following up on Joseph's post]

I'm know this sounds like a joke but it's really not. It's one of those ideas you learn as a sophomore then probably forget even though it's a potentially major issue that crops up frequently.

Whenever you see a claim that age or exercise or diet or whatever isn't a substantial/significant driver of something, there are all sorts of distributional assumptions lurking under the surface. The more homogenous the data set of a study is with respect to a certain variable, the less likely you are to find evidence of that variable causing anything. This is a big concern because an alarming amount of research is based on groups far less diverse than the general population. Remember the old joke about experimental psychology being a discipline built on the study of lab rats and college freshmen. 

On top of that, even if a causal relationship has a trivial impact on the general population today, that impact can grow in the future if the population shifts and distributions change. The reverse can happen as well, though that's usually easier to see coming since you start out with a known relationship. 

Like I said, this is all stat 101 stuff, long internalized by most of you reading this, but it's also one of those obvious/not obvious points that is almost never spelled out explicitly, and that's a mistake on our part.

Why do people make such a big deal over fake engineers when the real thing is so cool?

Bob Sorokanich of Jalopnik introduces is to the very cool body of work of Jam Handy

How does a car’s differential work? You probably have a vague understanding. Some stuff spins, some stuff doesn’t, and somehow, the result allows your car to drive around a curve without shredding its tires or chewing up its own guts. There are gears and other gears, and it’s basically magic. That was the extent of my own understanding, until I found this vintage educational film from 1937. It’s still the best, simplest, most immediately understandable explanation of how a differential works I’ve ever found.

...

Our instructor in this lesson is Henry Jamison “Jam” Handy, a fascinating character [You should check him out -- MP] who spent much of his career making educational films like this. Most of the time, they were cleverly-disguised advertisements — most of Handy’s automotive films were done at the behest of General Motors, while others were sponsored by Standard Oil. Regardless of the topic, a Jam Handy film starts with a simple question of “how does X work,” and answers it with clear, clever, immediately understandable visual aids. Typically, the last minute of the film is where it becomes an advertisement — for example, hyping the latest technological advancement you’ll find at your friendly neighborhood Chevrolet dealer. But everything leading up to that brief sales pitch is general-interest, brand-agnostic knowledge that’s absolutely fascinating for car enthusiasts or anyone with a curious mind.

One cool piece of trivia, before the development of the differential, early cars got around the problem of the wheels spinning at different speed by using a one-wheel drive. 

Around The Corner - How Differential Steering Works 







Spinning Levers





As the Wheels Turn




Living Stereo





Another bit of historical trivia related to this next film, Edison actually made a serious attempt to make a helicopter powered by guncotton. 

Something for Nothing


Since we have Mr. Goldberg here...




And circling back around to cars.

The Realization

Great @TheAutonocast episode.@TaylorOgan on Elon Musk: "Everything that he tries to dive into, if you know anything about that subject, you realize that he's talking out of his ass."

Made me think about Musk explaining why induced demand is "idiotic."https://t.co/IAweP4XWHw pic.twitter.com/4C5qV7kt5X

— David Zipper (@DavidZipper) May 31, 2022

When Elon Musk first became a household name, the reaction, at least among people who were concerned about climate change and in favor of scientific research, broke down into two camps. All agreed he was a nice guy doing worthwhile work. Electric cars, solar power, rockets, what's not to like? 

There was, however, always a sharp divided over the question of Elon musk's technical expertise. The general public and far too many journalists were willing to take him at his word that he was the primary engineer and inventor behind companies like Tesla and SpaceX (not to mention PayPal).

Most engineers and researchers in relevant areas were dismissive of Elon Musk's real-life Tony Stark shtick from the beginning. One Rand researcher I spoke with at the time characterized Musk as a flake while a number of engineers pointed out that the technology SpaceX was using to land its rockets was the direct descendant of what we had used to land on the Moon fifty years ago.

Still, it was all in the service of a good cause.

Pretty much everyone started out somewhere between one of these two views and those who did not follow the story very closely tended to stay roughly where they started. But for responsible journalists working on the front lines, almost without exception, the consensus has moved steadily to a more negative opinion.

Recently, given Musk's meltdowns, various journalists and researchers have started coming forward and talking about their journey from cautiously optimistic to openly critical.

Ed Niedermeyer, who wrote the best book on Musk and Tesla, Ludicrous, started the ball rolling with a Twitter thread and an article in Slate. Both are excellent and, though there is some overlap, both are worth reading in their entirety.

Up to that point I had been skeptical that any startup automaker could succeed. That view wasn't about Tesla, it was about the car biz. But what I found at Harris Ranch was shocking, a cockroach, and I decided to follow a life-changing instinct: THERE IS NEVER JUST ONE COCKROACH.

— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) May 20, 2022

...

Like all human behavior, journalism has crowd dynamics. Every cockroach killed motivates other cockroach hunters to mount up, but celebrity journalism takes this to a new level. EVERY CELEBRITY STORY IS THE SAME: FIRST THEY ARE BUILT UP, AND THEN THEY ARE TORN DOWN

— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) May 20, 2022

...

That is ultimately why my view has evolved from mere skepticism about Tesla as a business to a belief that Elon Musk demands firm justice: his impunity and ability to meme reality to his will is making his behavior worse all the time. HIS TRAJECTORY IS UNSUSTAINABLE.

— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) May 20, 2022

To wrap up: HAPPY HUNTING CELEBRITY JOURNALISTS! This is the moment for you to prove that what you do is as important to society as any business or political journalism. Musk's personal life is a cockroach-rich environment, and your stories will have impact that mine never did.

— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) May 20, 2022

On a beautiful day in May 2015, I drove the 13 hours from my home in Portland, Oregon, to Harris Ranch, California, halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. At the time, Tesla was touting a battery swap station that could send Tesla drivers on their way in a fully powered vehicle in less than the time it takes to fill up a car with gas. Overtaken by curiosity, I had decided to spend a long Memorial Day weekend in California’s Central Valley to see if Elon Musk’s latest bit of dream weaving could stand up to reality.

There, amid the pervasive stench of cow droppings from a nearby feedlot, I discovered that Tesla’s battery swap station was not in fact being made available to owners who regularly drove between California’s two largest cities. Instead, the company was running diesel generators to power additional Superchargers (the kind that take 30 to 60 minutes to recharge a battery) to handle the holiday rush, their exhaust mingling with the unmistakable smell of bullshit.

That one decision to go and find the truth underlying Elon Musk’s promises, rather than just take his word for it, changed my life in ways I never could have anticipated. Now, seven long and often lonely years later, the world seems to be understanding what I learned from the experience: Once you stop taking Musk at his word, his heroic popular image evaporates and a far darker reality begins to reveal itself.

 

Russ Mitchell is the head Automotive writer for the Los Angeles Times and he is one of the most respected journalist in his field.

I’ve known @russ1mitchell for more than 25 years and trusted his reporting and judgment through that time.

I take what he says seriously. https://t.co/gIv1fLOmms

— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) May 28, 2022

His thread is less sweeping than Niedermeyer's but it fills in an interesting part of the story, and it raises troubling questions about how many other companies are using similar methods.

It took several months to realize it, but Tesla’s media approach was to find reporters who would in effect serve as a public relations contractor, and then suck up to them with access to Musk and other access. 2/23

— Russ Mitchell (@russ1mitchell) May 27, 2022

... 

Over the years, Musk has been spreading BS about so many things it’s literally impossible to keep full count. Just one example is true “Full Self-Driving” technology, which he’s been saying is right around the corner, year after year. It’s not. 18/23

— Russ Mitchell (@russ1mitchell) May 27, 2022

...

But it’s a business reporter's job to call out corporate BS, especially on life and death matters of public safety. Musk has become a non-stop source of such material. 22/23

— Russ Mitchell (@russ1mitchell) May 27, 2022

 

You buy ‘journalists’ https://t.co/zTV3K56IGl

— Russ Mitchell (@russ1mitchell) May 28, 2022

The Transportation editor of TechCrunch also talks about the company punishing reporters by withholding access. 

I had an on-again/off-again relationship w/ Tesla. Sometimes, I was in the "penalty box" (PR wouldn't answer questions etc). There were other times when I did get access like in Dec 2015, when I interviewed Elon & he said self-driving cars were 2 yrs away. https://t.co/RIh9uridXL

— Kirsten Korosec (@kirstenkorosec) May 27, 2022

Fred Lambert was one of Tesla's most loyal and vocal supporters.

Same vibes.

Musk has a pattern of only fielding things from reporters who are favorable to him and his companies.

The slightest hint of criticism and you get excommunicated and get called a short seller or someone hellbent to cause damage. What a manchild Musk is. pic.twitter.com/TfkLmY8J9R

— Krombopulos Michael (@kr0mb0pul0smike) May 27, 2022

Another common refrain is the Elon Realization, where Musk goes off script on a topic you know something about.

The Realization. IT Edition. Aka @elonmusk can’t stop, won’t stop.

When one programmer (the co-creator of #doge, no less) can expose Elon’s lies with one simple link to Github. $TSLA $TSLAQ pic.twitter.com/0vB1SB67MA

— TalesFromTheFuture (@talesftf) May 31, 2022

 

There's often a "learned phonetically" quality when Musk talks about technical concepts.

When you start to dig, you start to realize Musk explains things the way they were explained to him; he doesn't actually know the ins and outs of many of his ventures. Everyone I know who has worked closely with Musk says this. https://t.co/CXLfAD1uBG

— Taylor Ogan (@TaylorOgan) May 31, 2022

I wrote my Elon enlightenment story back in 2008 when I realized he lied about being Tesla founder https://t.co/Y0T4cQpeAp

— Sam Abuelsamid (@samabuelsamid) May 28, 2022

David Zipper Visiting Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School

In fall 2020 I decided I wanted to write about how a Biden administration might change course with federal AV regulations.

At the time I had a generally positive impression of Tesla (EVs are good!).

Then I started delving into how car companies approached AV tech development.

— David Zipper (@DavidZipper) May 28, 2022

I started writing this @Slate story assuming I'd explore AVs and the car industry writ large.

I learned that only one carmaker habitually cut corners, confused consumers, and put road users' lives at risk. I've never looked at Tesla the same way since. https://t.co/84rdHw7PGI

— David Zipper (@DavidZipper) May 28, 2022

Repost: This five-year old sketch holds up really well

 Better, sadly, than the company that made it.

R.I.P CollegeHumor

Friday, April 7, 2017

We haven't talked about the content bubble for a while...

Don't get me wrong, as a viewer, I'm pleased with all the choices, but from a business standpoint, this got silly quite a while back..




Like so much of our economy, the content bubble is largely driven by hype and CEO dick-measuring. At least in the US, the market is beyond saturated and  the present levels, let alone growth curve are unsustainable.

In other words, enjoy it while it lasts.

P.S. After scheduling this, I heard a public radio segment about Emmy season. It turns out that the people who have to watch all of these shows can't find the time to watch all of these shows.

Repost: Netflix Revisionism Warning

 And it is already getting ugly out there. The very same journalists and industry observers who missed every major development in the streaming story (content saturation, the impact of competition, the return of ad-based models, the continued popularity of older programming, the weakness of Netflix's IP library, the potential instability of hype economy business models) are starting to weigh in on the rough times at the still dominant streaming service. The good news is that the people who got it wrong are standing up and taking their lumps...

I kid, of course. I haven't seen anyone even briefly acknowledge how badly they fucked up. Fortunately, I've been taking notes for the past few years, and I'll be unrevising some of these revisionist takes. In the meantime, here are a few blasts from the past. 

Monday, August 31, 2015

Arguments for a content bubble

First off a quick lesson in the importance of good blogger housekeeping. It is important to keep track of what you have and have not posted . A number of times, I've caught myself starting to write something virtually identical to one of my previous posts, often with almost the same title. At the other into the spectrum, there are posts that I could've sworn I had written but of which there seems to be no trace.

For example, living in LA, I frequently run into people in the entertainment industry. One of the topics that has come up a lot over the past few years is the possibility of a bubble in scripted television. Given all that we've written on related topics here at the blog, I was sure I had addressed the content bubble at some point, but I can't find any mention of the term in the archives.

One of the great pleasures of having a long running blog is the ability, from time to time, to point at a news story and say "you heard it here first." Unfortunately, in order to do that, you actually have to post the stuff you meant to. John Landgraf, the head of FX network and one of the sharpest executives in television has a very good interview on the subject of content bubbles and rather than "I told you so," all I get to say is "I wish I'd written that."

But, better late than never, here are the reasons I suspect we have a content bubble:


1. The audience for scripted entertainment is, at best, stable. It grows with the population and with overseas viewers but it shrinks as other forms of entertainment grab market share. Add to this fierce competition for ad revenue and inescapable constraints on time, and you have an extremely hard bound on potential growth.

2. Content accumulates. While movies and series tend to lose value over time, they never entirely go away. Some shows sustain considerable repeat viewers. Some manage to attract new audiences. This is true across platforms. Netflix built an entire ad campaign around the fact that they have acquired rights to stream Friends. Given this constant accumulation, at some point, old content has got to start at least marginally cannibalizing the market for new content.

3. Everybody's got to have a show of their very own. (And I do mean everybody.) I suspect that this has more to do executive dick-measuring than with cost/benefit analysis but the official rationale is that viewers who want to see your show will have to watch your channel, subscribe to your service or buy your gaming system. While than can work under certain conditions, proponents usually fail to consider the lottery-ticket like odds of having a show popular enough to make it work. And yet...

4.  Everybody's buying more lottery tickets. The sheer volume of scripted television being pumped out across every platform is stunning.

5. Money is no object. We are seeing unprecedented amounts of money paid for original and even second run content.

For me, spending unprecedented amounts of money to make unprecedented volume of product for a market that is largely flat is almost by definition unsustainable. Ken Levine takes a different view and I tend to give a great deal of weight to his opinions, but, as I said before, Langraf is one of the best executives out there and I think he's on to something.

Tuesday Tweets -- catching up with web3

I genuinely feel embarrassed for how much time I spend harping on this issue and then I remember “Oh yeah, greatest fraud in history happening in plain sight, perhaps I should be harping much louder.”

— Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) May 27, 2022

HFSP is an acronym used typically in the crypto community against non-believers. Translates into "have fun staying poor." It makes it easy to gloat until you remember that for every asshole pushing crypto on Twitter, there were countless innocent victims.

This poll, showing that black and Hispanic Americans are considerably more likely to own crypto, meme stocks, or NFTs, is a bit worrying. Communities of color have always been a dumping ground for predatory financial products. https://t.co/oHCJfuiLCZ pic.twitter.com/njh9Zk8VEG

— Will Stancil (@whstancil) December 31, 2021

If you bought $1000 of a bitcoin ETF when Matt Damon's "Fortune Favors the Brave!" crypto ad premiered on October 28 last year, you would now have $554. pic.twitter.com/qgeVmGYZw7

— Jon Schwarz (@schwarz) May 9, 2022

If you invested $100 in Luna one month ago, the fourth most popular cryptocurrency at the time, you now have $0.04.

— Matt Novak (@paleofuture) May 12, 2022

Don't worry, the volatility of bitcoin will subside once it hits zero. Then it will finally be a store of value.

— Stephen Diehl (@smdiehl) May 9, 2022

This is potentially one more thing that can wipe out the cryptocurrency space: https://t.co/nfaIUOgVnG
Trades are all taxable events, and you can't offset this year's loss against last year's gain. And wait till the IRS targets DeFi...

— Nicholas Weaver (@ncweaver) May 28, 2022

Tether declines to reveal details on $40bn Treasury cache after dollar peg snaps | “Why would we want to calm market suspicions about the backing of our stablecoin…?” https://t.co/aS3hsA5Woi

— Diogenes (@WallStCynic) May 12, 2022

Vocabulary quiz.

The general public should understand the concept of 'Ponzi finance', a term coined by the late economist Hyman Minsky, which is increasingly happening in operations we see around us today such as the Evergrande liquidity crisis. https://t.co/7Pm4VEU8pl

— Stephen Diehl (@smdiehl) May 30, 2022

This will be on the test:

 While the scheme itself is now widely known, the general public generally doesn’t know the related term Ponzi finance, coined by the late economist Hyman Minsky. Ponzi finance is a broad term for a category of non-sustainable patterns of finance in which an enterprise can only meet its debt commitments if they continuously obtain new sources of debt financing to pay the interest rates on its existing loans. Enterprises involved in Ponzi finance constantly need to borrow at ever-increasing interest rates to pay the interest on their existing loans, thus the common cliche to describe this runaway phenomenon as “interest on the interest.”

 


If you're the kind of person who puts a lot of weight on the opinions of well-credentialed experts:

me: What is Web3?

cryptobro: It's the future of the Web, built on blockchain!

Vint G. Serf, co-inventor of TCP/IP: https://t.co/SVxbY8NFhj

— Luciano Ramalho ☔ 🐍 ⚗ ▶️😷💉💉💉 (@ramalhoorg) May 23, 2022

Quite pleased the Nobel prize winners are finally speaking out publicly on this issue now. What him and Lagarde are saying now is starting to manifest as the public consensus.https://t.co/Ka6bPLhFqO

— Stephen Diehl (@smdiehl) May 27, 2022

Good article. "stablecoins start with a convoluted and inefficient base technology in order to avoid intermediaries, and then add intermediaries (often with apparent conflicts of interest) back in." But doesn't the argument apply to crypto in general? https://t.co/KtKVTmuU6y

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) May 25, 2022

Anyone with even the vaguest interest in cryptocurrency/blockchain should take a few minutes and read the responses to the tweet from @JorgeStolfi—including in particular the quote tweets. An anthology of informed voices seeking to explode dangerous myths that imperil society. https://t.co/3QGky2Hexz

— neil turkewitz (@neilturkewitz) May 9, 2022

Along with the actors and athletes, some journalistic reputations will crash and burn before this is over.

Kara, you’re losing your ethical moorings. Retirement funds? Whether crypto is a scam or not, its volatility makes it a terrible choice for anyone approaching retirement. The inexperienced investors who trusted you and Scott and lost half their money, that’s on you. Wow. https://t.co/vrAFQogp8k

— Russ Mitchell (@russ1mitchell) May 23, 2022

Andreessen Horowitz, for when your business is too flaky for SoftBank.  

Gm. It's time to build a bigger casino. https://t.co/aCFENQYGfz

— Jacob Silverman (@SilvermanJacob) May 25, 2022

And finally, the genius behind Wework is back, and he does not disappoint. (And in case you're wondering if we need a blockchain for this, ask Vint Cerf.)

Adam Neumann is the cofounder of a company called Flowcarbon that just raised $70M.

This is the opening slide in their deck that describes what they do.

You guys, they are selling something called the Goddess Nature Token.

$70M.

This is not a shitpost. pic.twitter.com/NPM2E2nkMx

— Chris Bakke (@ChrisJBakke) May 26, 2022

Memorial Day Repost

 There is, of course, no such thing as the military perspective -- no single person can speak for all the men and women who have served in the military -- but if you are looking for a military perspective, my first choice would be Lt. Col. Robert Bateman who writes eloquently and intelligently on the subject for Esquire. Here are Bateman's recent thoughts on Memorial Day.

When the guns fell silent in the Spring of 1865, they all went home. They scattered across the country, back across the devastated south and the invigorated north. Then they made love to their wives, played with their children, found new jobs or stepped back into their old ones, and in general they tried to get on with their lives. These men were no longer soldiers; they were now veterans of the Civil War, never to wear the uniform again. But before long they started noticing that things were not as they had been before.

Now, they had memories of things that they could not erase. There were the friends who were no longer there, or who were hobbling through town on one or two pegs, or who had a sleeve pinned up on their chest. There were the nights that they could not shake the feeling that something really bad was about to happen. And, aside from those who had seen what they had seen and lived that life, they came to realize that they did not have a lot of people to talk to about these things. Those who had been at home, men and women, just did not "get it." A basic tale about life in camp would need a lot of explanation, so it was frustrating even to talk. Terminology like "what is a picket line" and "what do you mean oblique order?" and a million other elements, got in the way. These were the details of a life they had lived for years but which was now suddenly so complex that they never could get the story across to those who had not been there. Many felt they just could not explain about what had happened, to them, to their friends, to the nation.

So they started to congregate. First in little groups, then in statewide assemblies, and finally in national organizations that themselves took on a life of their own.

The Mid-1860s are a key period in American history not just because of the War of Rebellion, but also because this period saw the rise of "social organizations." Fraternities, for example, exploded in the post-war period. My own, Pi Kappa Alpha, was formed partially by veterans of the Confederacy, Lee's men (yes, I know, irony alert). Many other non-academic "fraternal" organizations got their start around the same time. By the late 1860s in the north and south there was a desire to commemorate. Not to celebrate, gloat or pine, but to remember.

Individually, at different times and in different ways, these nascent veterans groups started to create days to stop and reflect. These days were not set aside to mull on a cause -- though that did happen -- but their primary purpose was to think on the sacrifices and remember those lost. Over time, as different states incorporated these ideas into statewide holidays, a sort of critical legislative mass was achieved. "Decoration Day" was born, and for a long time that was enough. The date selected was, quite deliberately, a day upon which absolutely nothing of major significance had occurred during the entire war. Nobody in the north or south could try to change it to make it a victory day. It was a day for remembering the dead through decorating their graves, and the memorials started sprouting up in every small town in the nation. You still see them today, north and south, in small towns and villages like my own home of Chagrin Falls -- granite placed there so that the nation, and their homes, should not forget the sacrifices of the men who went away on behalf of the country and never came back.

To understand why Elon Musk is having such a bad month, you have to understand the role of FSD

In 2017, we talked about how Elon Musk's wholly undeserved reputation as a brilliant inventor and engineer was essential to his success.

Finally, it is essential to remember that maintaining this “real-life Tony Stark” persona is tremendously valuable to Musk. In addition to the ego gratification (and we have every reason to believe that Musk has a huge ego), this persona is worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Musk. More than any other factor, Musk’s mystique and his ability to generate hype have pumped the valuation of Tesla to its current stratospheric levels.

Back then we thought a market cap of $50 billion was "stratospheric." Turned out we hadn't seen anything yet.

A couple days ago, we talked about flying exoskeletons, those wild proposals (often based on old sci-fi shows) that Elon Musk uses to pump Tesla stock and, to a lesser extent, the valuation of SpaceX. For the car company, Musk has focused on three of these, only one of which, Full Self Driving (FSD), remains viable as a next big thing.

For a couple of years, cybertrucks (inspired, of course, by an old sci fi movie) were the product that was supposed to revolutionize the industry and push Tesla into the stratosphere. They were the subject of tremendous hype, but since the 2019 unveiling, multiple competitors (particularly the Ford F-150 Lightning) have beaten them to market, it is difficult to maintain the next big thing framing.

More recently, Musk has been trying to drum up excitement for a proposed Tesla robot named, of course, Optimus. The effort has not been going well. Elon is promising functionality far beyond anything we've seen, but, at the moment, the only things he has to show are some flashy CGI (much of it fan-generated) and, I kid you not, footage of a dancer in a robot suit. No one outside of the fanboys seems to be taking the robot seriously and of those who do, a disproportionate share seem to be primarily focused on its potential as a sexual partner. (this is not something you want to do a Google image search on.)

"Our cars are... semi-sentient robots on wheels"

Full Self Driving was the first one in and the last man standing. Every year for the past eight, Elon Musk has been promising that Tesla was a year or two away from level 5 autonomy. Even now, no one is close to level 5 and at no point in the past decade has Tesla been the leader in the field (currently it's not even in the top four), but that didn't stop the company from putting FSD on the road.

Here's the route we drove. Nothing crazy. We didn't even film all of the interventions. I have drives like this every time I use it, regardless of what x.x version it's on. THIS is what Elon is saying will be Level 4 this year. THIS was supposed to be robotaxi in 2020. pic.twitter.com/mJyRmdUqpb

— Taylor Ogan (@TaylorOgan) February 1, 2022

$TSLA FSD software is nowhere near Beta level. Beta means that development is complete and all functionality is implemented. Beta is a production release candidate and only requires intensive testing by expert users. Clearly this is not the case. https://t.co/mo6D6Df9iN

— CoverDrive (@CoverDrive12) May 25, 2022

Is this legal? That's a topic of some debate. The regulators have been slow to move but the wheels are starting to turn. 

Russ Mitchell writing for the LA Times.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration currently is investigating 42 crashes involving robot-controlled automated driving systems. Of those, 35 are Tesla vehicles and seven are from other carmakers.

...

Tesla has been selling Full Self-Driving with a growing list of features since 2016. In recent years it’s been increasing the number of people it allows to use its “beta” version. In Silicon Valley parlance, beta means a program that functions but may contain bugs and isn’t ready for broad public release.

On YouTube, Tesla customers testing the technology on public roads continue to post videos that show it quickly veering into oncoming traffic over double-yellow lines, failing to stop for semi-trucks making turns in front of the vehicles, heading toward metal poles and pedestrians, and much more.

In compliance with DMV regulations, companies such as Waymo, Cruise, Argo, Motional and Zoox have used professionally trained test drivers as a safety backup while testing their own autonomous-driving systems. The companies report all crashes to the DMV and also report what are known as “disengagements,” moments when the robot system fails or otherwise faces a situation that requires human driver intervention.

Tesla’s exemption from those regulations is a matter of definitional parsing by the DMV. The agency, through public documents and prior statements by its media relations department, has said Full Self-Driving is a driver assist system, not an autonomous system.

The feature falls “outside the scope of DMV autonomous vehicle regulations” because it requires a human operator, Gordon told Gonzalez in a five-page letter in January. He noted that DMV regulations apply only to fully autonomous cars but said the agency would “revisit” that stance.

Regulators cracking down on FSD could devastate Tesla's stock, as could a sufficient amount of bad publicity.

Retweeting for 🍿 prep. Musk doc tackles Tesla safety, Twitter fans. What to know - Los Angeles Times https://t.co/npu5NEzokl

— Russ Mitchell (@russ1mitchell) May 21, 2022

"Crash Course" is a collaboration between FX and the New York Times, and while I'm no fan of the paper (stick with the LAT or the WP), their head automotive writer, Neal Boudette, is very good and has been one of the best reporters on this story.

We've got regulators and aggressive reporters. How about a senate candidate? Even I didn't have that one on my bingo card.

.@elonmusk, is your @Tesla Full Self-Driving software just a trillion dollar Ponzi scheme? Did you become the wealthiest man in history by swindling customers and investors?

Here's the story, in your own words:#ODowdForSenate pic.twitter.com/HpG0NF9FVK

— Dan O'Dowd (@RealDanODowd) May 24, 2022

Why is FSD falling behind the rest of the pack? The long answer is very long, but the short answer is computing power and LIDAR

I know Value Dissenter, an expert in this field and highly trustworthy. @SenGonzalez_33 https://t.co/f8k5RePMHA

— Russ Mitchell (@russ1mitchell) May 22, 2022

And to be clear, small increments are not good enough.

We've all seen the videos of the $TSLA car veering into oncoming traffic (or, in Gail's case, going the wrong way on a 1-way street).

The car just ran out of compute.

From the testing I saw, lanes were first to go

(11/n)

— Value Dissenter (@ValueDissenter) May 22, 2022

Their stack is optimized to protect PR disasters:
- Don't hit pedestrians
- Don't miss stop-signs or traffic lights
- Don't hit other cars
- Don't drive off the road
- Don't drive outside your lane

If all your compute is going to scenarios 1-4... good luck

(15/n)

— Value Dissenter (@ValueDissenter) May 22, 2022

Nearly zero compute goes to things like traffic lights, or even traffic signs/markings, because the AV companies have already mapped out where all of them are

And those are scenarios that take a lot of compute. 99.999% precision isn't good enough for a stop sign, period

(18/n)

— Value Dissenter (@ValueDissenter) May 22, 2022

There is, as the saying goes, always a tweet.

LIDAR is a seductive local maximum. SpaceX designed & built them to dock with ISS.

However, the road system was designed to work with biological neural nets & eyes, so a general solution to self-driving necessarily will require silicon neural nets & cameras.

Real-world AI.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 25, 2022

We have been talking about the rise (and hopefully fall) of the Silicon Valley tech messiahs for about ten years which has required a lamentable amount of time to be spent on Elon Musk. Based on that I am reasonably certain he doesn't really understand the terms "local maximum," "neural nets," or "AI," but the valuation of Tesla depends on people thinking that he does.

Will they get Bill Cosby to do the ads?

From Bloomberg:

A proposal by the founder of the troubled Terra ecosystem to salvage the project was approved, averting a total collapse of one of the most-watched experiments in decentralized finance. 

Under Do Kwon’s newly approved structure, the original blockchain will be known as Terra Classic, while its native token Luna, which plunged close to zero this month, will be renamed Luna Classic with the ticker LUNC. The new Terra blockchain will start running a coin under the existing Luna name and ticker, and won’t include the TerraUSD stablecoin

Terra’s unraveling, which started earlier this month with the implosion of the algorithmic stablecoin Kwon had touted relentlessly, marked one of the biggest busts in the crypto industry’s history. While the outcome of Wednesday’s vote represents a victory of sorts for Kwon and his supporters, doubts persist about whether Terra can ultimately be revived. 

The process means Terraform Labs is effectively abandoning the stablecoin TerraUSD, or UST, which from now on will only trade on the Terra Classic blockchain. Designed to maintain a 1-to-1 peg to the dollar, it traded at around 10 cents on Wednesday.

As a marketing guy, I'm not sure I follow the branding logic here. Classic Coke was one of the, if you'll pardon the phrase, classic examples of how to recover from a PR disaster. 

Labeling something "classic" is supposed to play on (or create then play upon) the perception that the old stuff was better. That's why TCM promos have clips of Singing in the Rain and Casablanca, classic rock stations throw in clips from the Beatles and the Stones, MeTV identifies itself with Dick Van Dyke and the Twilight Zone. We can go back and forth over how good these shows and songs actually were but all are fondly remembered with a reputation for quality. 

How does that work with Terra and Luna? What positive associations are they hoping to play on here? "Remember that time I lost our life savings and had sell the house earlier this year?"

I understand the urge to use the most positive language possible when trying to pick up the pieces after a fiasco, but like the man said, "Some things are classic. Some things are just old." 

We need to start with imaginary flying exoskeletons

Elon Musk has become a genuinely important topic of conversation with implications for business, media, politics and technology. In order to truly follow what's going on, we need to talk about this...

 

Musk was until recently the richest man in the world because of the astronomical value of the marginally profitable Tesla. That value is based on a string of amazing promises from Elon Musk, none of which he has ever delivered on.

I can already hear the rumbling of the crowd getting ready to list all the impressive cars and rockets those companies have produced. All of which is true. But as we've discussed before, they were the result of solid, incremental, and by no means revolutionary engineering by his staff. Furthermore, they mainly appeared well before the companies shot up beyond anything that could be justified by the fundamentals.

About seven or eight years ago, Musk's promises started becoming unmoored not just from what his engineers were working on, but for what was even possible. As best I can tell, this started with the hyperloop.

[And before the rumbling starts again, though you have heard about hundreds of millions of dollars going into hyperloop companies, absolutely none of that money is going into Elon Musk s air cushion idea. Every proposal and protype you've seen has been for maglev. Companies like Virgin scrapped his concept but kept the name.]

Part of the reason for these increasingly delusional boasts may just have been Musk getting high on his own supply. Take someone with messianic tendencies, give them a full-bore cult of personality, and have even the most respectable journalists refer to him as a real life Tony Stark. You know it's going to go to a guy's head.

But these fantastic claims also served his financial interest. The huge run up in the stock of Tesla came after the narrative had shifted to over-the-top fantasy.

Maintaining his current fortune requires Musk to keep these fantasies vivid in the minds of fans and investors. People have to believe that the Tesla model after next will be a flying exoskeleton that can blow shit up.

Here are the primary exoskeletons of the Musk empire as of 2022.

Full Self Driving (Beta but see below)

Cyber trucks (one handmade prototype after all these years. Accepting checks now. Production always "next year")

Optimus the friendly robot (literally a dancer in a robot suit)

Fitbits for your brain (mainly an excuse to torture small primates to death)

Super fast tunnelling machines (actually slower than the industry standard)

And the one of these things which is not like the other...

Starlink (doable technology, absurd business plan, horrifying externalities)

From a business standpoint, FSD is the most important and a big chunk in the stock plunge may be a reflection of how it's going.

.@elonmusk, is your @Tesla Full Self-Driving software just a trillion dollar Ponzi scheme? Did you become the wealthiest man in history by swindling customers and investors?

Here's the story, in your own words:#ODowdForSenate pic.twitter.com/HpG0NF9FVK

— Dan O'Dowd (@RealDanODowd) May 24, 2022

Here's a typical drive on Tesla FSD Beta, and why it's the opposite of useful. It's most certainly not even close to being "safer than a human", by any factor.

22-minute drive, 4.5 miles, and WAY too many interventions. pic.twitter.com/oKmkRZ3Tgh

— Taylor Ogan (@TaylorOgan) February 1, 2022

2/ @russ1mitchell has written a superb review of the documentary. I'll try not to plow too much of the same ground. (And I'll say it again, my online subscription to @latimes is a bargain, even if I often gag at the editorials.)https://t.co/hrzmtIqt1M

— Montana Skeptic (@montana_skeptic) May 21, 2022

What if the standard narrative about evangelicals and the GOP gets things backwards? [Late night phone dictation -- beware bad voice recognition]

Or at least, what if the causal arrow points both ways? Could evangelicals becoming more conservative/Republican have, in part, caused them to become more extreme on abortion? 

Let's start with the historical basis, or lack thereof, for evangelical opposition to abortion. From an excellent NPR interview with historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez: 

KRISTIN KOBES DU MEZ: In the late 1960s, we have this remarkable issue of Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of American evangelicalism, discussing this question of abortion. And the conclusion is that it's a very complicated moral issue. So there are theologians discussing precisely when ensoulment happens - when does the fetus become an actual life? - and weighing the complicated issues not just in terms of rape and incest, but also the health and well-being of the mother and the family. And, yes, the Southern Baptist Convention comes out in favor of opening up access to abortion in many cases in 1971, and then they reaffirmed that in 1974 and in 1976, so after Roe v. Wade.

But what happens in the 1970s is, first of all, with the passing of Roe v. Wade, you see a spike in the number of abortions. And that causes many Americans, not just evangelicals, to kind of rethink is this what we wanted? But I think more importantly, you have the rise of second-wave feminism and, in conservative, white, evangelical spaces, a real backlash against feminism. And over the course of that decade, abortion becomes linked to feminism. And so you see the sentiment start to shift so that in 1979, when political activist Paul Weyrich identifies abortion as a potential to really mobilize conservative evangelicals politically, to help build the Moral Majority, then it is a very effective mechanism for doing so. And from 1979 on, that's when you see a real kind of shrinking of space within conservative evangelicalism to have any view on abortion that isn't strictly and staunchly pro-life, life begins at conception.

It appears the alliance with the conservative movement happened approximately the same time as abortion becoming a defining issue for evangelicals, and that raises some interesting questions with the standard narrative. 

And if we're doing standard narratives, where better than the Washington Post?

White Protestant evangelicals had voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976 — the first “born again” president — helping him narrowly capture the White House. But disillusioned over his handling of abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment and the tax exemptions for White religious schools, they had switched their allegiance to Ronald Reagan in 1980.

But this doesn't quite sound right. For starters, Ronald Reagan was the exact opposite of Jimmy Carter with respect to religion. Rather notoriously at the time, the Reagans were more inclined to consult astrologers than the clergy.

The Equal Rights Amendment was a strongly bipartisan issue in the 70s supported by Nixon, Ford, and Carter. It is true of that Carter's decision to extend the deadline for ratification was controversial (and anti-feminist backlash was real), but given that the amendment had largely stalled out a couple of years before, it doesn't seem like it should be a defining issue. As for white religious schools, it is important to remember that the alliance between Conservative Catholics and evangelicals is a recent development. Tax exemptions for religious schools was more of a Catholic than an Evangelical issue (though you certainly did have white flight protestant or nondenominational "Christian" academies). Back in 1980, evangelicals were deeply distrustful of Catholics with the more extreme members even comparing the pope to the Antichrist.  Finally, though it is true that abortions spiked during Carter's presidency, they had been trending up for years and as we saw above this was not an issue that historically had defined evangelicals.

There had to be something more that drove white evangelicals from the old-time religion Jimmy Carter to the new age mumbo-jumbo of Ron and Nancy.

What's the missing factor or factors? I don't know. But there are a few things I think did play a role.

The conservative movement made a massive effort to find and reignite reactionary embers around the country, ugly things that were on their way to dying before the movement stepped in. Carter had defeated Lester Maddox. Winthrop Rockefeller and Dale Bumpers had defeated Orval Faubus. The segregationist movement in the South was appearing to fade before the election of Ronald Reagan and the triumphant conservative movement came in to administer life support. 

I'm not as familiar with the history of the anti-abortion movement, but it seems entirely reasonable that the same sort of thing could have happened there is well. Making C. Everett Koop surgeon general fits perfectly with this view. Koop, though highly qualified, was mainly known as a militant spokesman for the anti-abortion movement and was the ideal figure for staking out the position and promoting it to religious voters. He also turned out to be a man of actual principle, which came back and bit the Republicans in the ass in a big way, but that's another story.

The late 70s and early 80s also marked the rise of be enormously corrupting influence of televangelists and mega churches. There have always been religious hucksters and tent show preachers and yes, you had people like Aimee Semple McPherson and Billy Graham earlier who achieved remarkable influence and financial success, not to mention infamous figures like Father Coughlin, but the level of money and power that could be gained in the televangelism era of the 70s and 80s dwarfed what came before. Combined with the unmitigated evil of Prosperity Gospel, the potential for corruption was almost unprecedented. The Falwells, the Robertsons, the Swaggarts all had a tremendous incentive to align themselves with the conservative movement. They were obscenely wealthy, terrified of scrutiny and regulation. Perhaps more importantly, their strategy playing on fear and anger matched perfectly with that of the conservative movement and up-and-coming rabble-rousers such as Rush Limbaugh.

I don't claim these things explain everything, or even that much, but I will say that there's more here than the standard narrative suggests. 

Our view of Musk five years ago -- pretty comfortable with how this one aged

This was very much the minority opinion back then. Now? Not so much. 

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

A few points to keep in mind when reading any upcoming story about Elon Musk

First, a quick update from the good people at Gizmodo, specifically Ryan Felton:

Elon Musk awoke on Thursday with the intention of sending Twitter into a frenzy by declaring that he received “verbal govt approval” to build a Hyperloop in the densest part of the United States, between New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington D.C. This is dumb, it’s not how things work, and requires, uh, actual government approval.

Felton goes on to contact the government agencies that would absolutely have to sign on to such a project. Where he was able to get comments, they generally boiled down to "this is the first we're hearing of it." The closest he came to an exception was the federal Department of Transportation, which replied

We have had promising conversations to date, are committed to transformative infrastructure projects, and believe our greatest solutions have often come from the ingenuity and drive of the private sector.

This is a good time to reiterate a few basic points to keep in mind when covering Elon Musk:

1.    Other than the ability to make a large sum of money through some good investments, Elon Musk has demonstrated exceptional talent in three (and only three) areas: raising capital for enterprises; creating effective, fast-moving, true-believer corporate cultures; generating hype.

2.    Though SpaceX appears to be doing all right, Musk does not overall have a good track record running profitable businesses. Furthermore, his companies (and this will come as a big slap in the face of conventional wisdom) have never been associated with big radical technological advances. SpaceX is doing impressive work, but it is fundamentally conventional impressive work. Before the company was founded, had you spoken with people in the aerospace community and asked them "what is closest to being Mars ready, who has it, and who are the top people in the field?", the answers would have been the type of engine SpaceX currently uses, TRW (which sued SpaceX for stealing their intellectual property), and the chief rocket scientist SpaceX lured away from TRW. By the same token, Tesla is pretty much doing what all of the other major players in the auto industry are doing in terms of technology.

3.    From the beginning, Musk has always had a tendency to exaggerate and overpromise. Smart, skeptical journalist like Michael Hiltzik and the reporters at the Gawker remnants have taken any claim from Elon Musk with a grain or two (or 20) of salt.

4.    That said, in recent years things have gotten much, much worse. Musk has gone from overselling feasible technology and possibly viable business plans to pitching proposals that are incredibly unlikely then supporting them with absurdly unrealistic estimates and sometimes mere handwaving.

5.    The downward spiral here seems to have started with the Hyperloop. This also seems to be the point where Musk started trying to do his own engineering rather than simply taking credit for the work of those under him. On a related note, it is becoming increasingly obvious that Elon Musk has no talent for engineering.

6.    Musk’s increasingly incredible claims have started to strain the credulity of most of the mainstream press, but the consequences have been too inconsistent and too slow-coming to have had much of a restraining influence on him. Even with this latest story, you can find news accounts breathlessly announcing that supersonic travel between New York and DC is just around the corner.

7.    Finally, it is essential to remember that maintaining this “real-life Tony Stark” persona is tremendously valuable to Musk. In addition to the ego gratification (and we have every reason to believe that Musk has a huge ego), this persona is worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Musk. More than any other factor, Musk’s mystique and his ability to generate hype have pumped the valuation of Tesla to its current stratospheric levels. Bloomberg put his total compensation from Tesla at just under $100 million a year. When Musk gets tons of coverage for claiming he's about to develop telepathy chips for your brain or build a giant subterranean slot car race track under Los Angeles, he keeps that mystique going. Eventually groundless proposals and questionable-to-false boasts will wear away at his reputation, but unless the vast majority of journalists become less credulous and more professional in the very near future, that damage won’t come soon enough to prevent Musk from earning another billion dollars or so from the hype.

Ten years ago at the blog -- our first Musk post

Lot of Elon blogging coming up, which makes this an aptly timed repost. 

Frank's essay has not aged well. Despite Musk's increasingly grandiose and, to be blunt, delusional promises of Martian cities. when you take away government contracts, SpaceX's business is almost all low earth orbit, and that has been heavily subsidized. The primary focus has been on launching mega-constellations that offer better gaming and video conferencing in exchange for light pollution and an accelerated Kessler syndrome.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Adam Frank is better at science than business

This is Falcon 7, not Falcon 9

Astrophysicist Adam Frank is what you might call a fan of SpaceX:

So what's the big deal? Well, the Falcon 9 is a private spaceship, fully developed and owned by the private company SpaceX. And SpaceX is the brainchild of Elon Musk, the Internet billionaire who made his fortune from PayPal. With contracts from NASA to develop new launch platforms, SpaceX and other companies are poised to make space the domain of profitable businesses. And Musk has been explicit about his intentions to go beyond Earth orbit, to build commercially viable ventures that might take people to Mars in a decade or two.

His timing couldn't be any better or any more urgent. Even without the space shuttle, America needs to remain a leader in space. Now, when I was a kid, the U.S. space program fueled my imagination and led me into a life of science. But as I got older, it became clear that the real business of getting a human presence across the solar system was going to have to fall to business. Governments might get the exploration of space started, but the vagaries of election and budget cycles meant they could never go further.

Now, we've reached the point where it's the exploitation of space that matters. And while exploitation might seem a dirty word to some folks, they should stop to consider how dependent we are already on the commercialization of that region of space we call low earth orbit. Think of the billions of dollars in commercial activity tied to weather prediction, global broadcasting and global positioning. All this business depends on satellites orbiting overhead right now.

But if, as a species, we want to go beyond the thin veil of space directly overhead, then the basic principles of private venture and risk will have to apply. These are the ones that have always applied. While Queen Isabella may have given Columbus his ships to cross the Atlantic, it was private companies that built the seagoing trade routes and brought folks across to settle - for better or worse. Likewise, it's only through commercially viable endeavors that large numbers of humans are getting off this world and into the high frontier of space.

It's no small irony that the billionaires bankrolling the new space entrepreneurship built their fortunes not in jetfighter aerospace manufacturing but in the dream space of the Internet.

Frank's enthusiasm is understandable but his thinking about the business and economics of space ranges from the wishful to the hopelessly muddled, particularly when it comes to "the basic principles of private venture and risk."

Private space travel has not, if you'll pardon the phrase, taken off in a serious way because there is no credible business model to support it. No one has figured out a way to make money going beyond earth's orbit and until we see a major technological breakthrough, it's likely that no one will.

There's an important distinction that needs to be made, the economic forces Frank is alluding to only come into play when markets efficiently allocate resources where they will have the greatest return (and the markets have decided that doesn't include trips to Mars). What we're talking about here is having the government contract with an independent company. We can discuss the wisdom and practicality of that decision later, but claiming that this "the basic principles of private venture and risk" are behind SpaceX is like claiming that the hiring of Blackwater meant that the markets decided we should invade Iraq.

To salvage the Columbus analogy, before he returned with information about the existence and location of the new world, people didn't attempt voyages because the expected return on investment was negative. After people had that information the expected return was positive.

Giving some contracts to companies like SpaceX might be a good idea (that's a discussion for another time) but it will do virtually nothing to shift the economic fundamentals.

There are things that the government could do to improve those fundamentals -- research initiatives, mapping out resources, setting up infrastructure (ground and/or space based)* -- but they require lots of upfront money. Our only other option is to wait for technology to bring the costs of launching materials way down, but that is likely to take a long time.

When it comes to the exploration and exploitation of space, those are our realistic choices.



* This is a topic for another post but aerospace researchers are exploring some technologies that could shift those expected returns from negative to positive, such launching components and supplies by railgun.