Thursday, October 20, 2022

Thursday Tweets

The drip, drip, drip of Dobbs stories





Neo-facsism, the anti-vaxx movement and what the hell happened to Canada?




When incentives are based on metrics...

It took long enough, but Democrats and liberal pundits are finally starting to treat threats to Social Security and Medicare as lines of attack worth pursuing.


 

And other political stories.





"This foolishness with covid."

Not exactly apples-to-apples -- lots of recent changes in early voting in GA -- but it's fair to say we appear to be looking at a high turnout election in the state.


Things not to say to Bob Woodward...

If you list Ukraine as a failure for Biden, it's fair to ask which side you're on,


Musk and Ukraine (and China)



That should probably read "partially funding."



I'm with Smith on this one.

A tale of bots


 

I would insert a clip of "the greatest love of all," but I really hate that song.

Misc






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Wednesday, October 19, 2022

The implications of spite

We need to be talking more about this. We have all too an alarming degree allowed ourselves to get used to the idea that one of our two major political parties has a large contingent, perhaps a plurality, of people who are primarily motivated neither by self-interest nor even ideology but by the desire to punish real and imagined political enemies and to "own the libs."

With that in mind, take a look at this news story which Matt Levine points to in a recent newsletter.


Weeks after a Texas school district dropped UBS Group AG as its municipal-bond underwriter because state Republicans labeled it unfriendly to the oil industry, it’s now demanding the bank cover the costs of having to redo the sale.

The Normangee Independent School District was forced to redo an $18 million bond sale that had already been underwritten by UBS Financial Services after the bank’s parent company in August was added to a list of firms that the GOP state comptroller considers to “boycott” the fossil fuels industry.  

The district is demanding UBS refund it for the costs it incurred after it had to resell the debt as a result. Municipal-bond yields surged dramatically and made it more expensive to reissue the debt. But the school district blames UBS -- not the Republican attorney general’s office that is enforcing the law. In fact, the attorney general’s office is representing the district in its effort to recoup the costs incurred from having to resell the debt, according to a document provided through a public records request.

“NISD resold the bonds and hired a different underwriter, at a loss to NISD,” Lauren Downey, assistant attorney general and public information coordinator, said in the Oct. 12 dated document. “In the event the OAG is unable to successfully negotiate a resolution with UBS, our office anticipates filing suit.”

As Levine puts it.

Most people in the anti-ESG movement will tell you that it is just about maximizing financial returns and avoiding politics. But then you get a case like this where the school district simply incinerates some money to pursue Republican political goals! But they had the nerve to ask the bank for the money back.

But I'm not sure you can really call these "Republican political goals." This law feels more like catharsis for Fox News viewers, lashing out at something that makes them angry. It is not the negligible impact of ESGs (which are often nothing more than blatant greenwashing) that bothers them. The source of the anger is the perception that banks are being nice to liberals. 

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Tuesday, October 18, 2022

Five years ago at the blog -- we had questions about the viability of the streaming industry's flood-the-market strategy

We started talking about the content bubble back in 2015, making us early to the party or far on the fringe depending on how you look at it. By 2017, it was still a minority position, but smart people in the industry were starting to get concerned.

Thursday, October 19, 2017

The content bubble -- when reality sinks in

[Couple of small edits. Fixed title and added a link I'd forgotten.]

Quick refresher, the content bubble  refers to the explosion in scripted series being produced for various channels, services and platforms. We've spent a lot of time on the drivers of the bubble and the economics of why it's not sustainable, but probably not enough on the reactions of people on the inside.

Ken Levine (who either wrote, directed or produced about half of the sitcoms you aren't ashamed to mention knowing) recently made the following observation in a post about the experience of working on a show that had just hit big. [emphasis added]

How many shows today are produced and aired in relative obscurity? And it takes the same amount of time and effort to produce a show only relatives watch on a network no one has ever heard of than to produce THIS IS US.

Even the first year of CHEERS, when we THOUGHT no one was watching, we averaged 20 million people a week. The show was slowly starting to catch on to where we thought we were an underground hit. 20 million viewers was considered “under the radar” back then. Now the landscape has become so fractured that certain shows on certain platforms shown nationally are seen by 100,000 people. I don’t understand the economics. How can they afford to shell out millions for shows that get way fewer views than cats coughing up fur balls on YouTube?


I suspect in most bubbles, there comes a point when the conflict between the desire to believe and the cold, hard, inescapable numbers becomes so pronounced that the consensus of smart sensible people in the field becomes "this just can't go on much longer." In this case, the realization is sinking in that the handful of winners can't possibly begin to balance out the huge number of losers (particularly when you factor in the rapid growth in PR costs).

Just to be clear, Levine's role in is not analogous to that of an investor in a stock market bubble. He's more like one of the tradesmen who sells high-end goods to the suddenly cash rich investors. The talent behind and in front of the camera is currently benefiting from the bubble and will probably pay much of the consequences for the claps, but they are not the ones green lighting a remake of "One Day at a Time."

 

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Monday, October 17, 2022

Proving the proven part

Let's say I claim to have invented an entirely new kind of artillery which can it take out protected targets by firing a projectile up in the air and then letting gravity bring it down. If you challenge my claim and we are talking about the part where the projectile goes up, the burden of proof is on me. If we are talking about the part where the projectile comes down the burden of proof is on you. I don't have to offer any evidence whatsoever to show that projectiles propelled into the air at less than escape velocity will return to earth.

Admittedly, that's a really contrived example but the basic principle does come up, often involving important questions.

Let's take masks and covid. If you accept that aerosol transmission is a significant factor in the spread of a disease, then I don't need to offer any proof that properly used face masks will reduce that transmission. It doesn't matter if there are no clinical or even observational studies to show this. Given aerosol transmission, it is almost impossible to come up with a viable scenario where wearing surgical masks will not help to some degree.

In general, productive arguments always follow the burden of proof. This applies as much to those making claims as to those challenging them.

Let's say you applied for a government contract to build a "hyperloop" (Musk's hyperloop wasn't a maglev train. It was also so unworkable that all "hyperloop" companies quietly scrapped the concept but kept the name.) Your proposal said that you could design and construct this system and build a network of underground tubes for roughly the same cost required to lay a comparable series of railroad tracks. The first part of the claim is your being able to design and build a working maglev vactrain. The second part is that you can build it at an extremely low cost per mile.

No one questions that, given sufficient time and money, you could accomplish the first part. Almost every independent expert is highly skeptical about the second part being possible. And yet, as far as I can tell (and I have been following the story closely), every highly publicized demonstration we've seen of the "hyperloop" has been focused on the first claim with nothing whatsoever focused on the second.

Which takes us to the big unveiling of Optimus.

For a while now, Elon Musk has been promising an imminent breakthrough in robotics that would revolutionize the world economy and human life as we know it.( if anyone out there thinks I am exaggerating the grandiosity of these claims, you really should get to know Musk a little better.)

This is what he delivered.



Musk promised that he was on the verge of mass producing humanoid robots that could readily step in and do a wide range of boring and dangerous jobs. This kind of off the shelf laborer would require enormous advances, solving problems that the best engineering minds in the world have been making only the slowest of incremental progress on. You'll notice that the demonstration doesn't indicate any work on those problems whatsoever.

It just shows a prototype doing things that other robots have been doing for decades. 



Sidenote: Boston Dynamics was sold not too long ago for around one billion. If Musk was serious about getting into the field, this would have been a considerably smarter purchase than Twitter.

For a deeper and far more critical overview, check out this video from long time Musk skeptic, Philip E. Mason,









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Friday, October 14, 2022

Bi-directional disinformation

The 21st century relationship between Russia and the far right ought to give historians and sociologist and political scientist plenty to chew on over the next 50 or so years.

We've all become jaded to the level of influence that Russia has gained over the modern Republican Party despite being something that, as far as I can tell, we have never seen before.

It has been obvious for a while now that the coverage of Russia and Ukraine from conservative media outlets such as Fox News and OAN consist largely of Kremlin talking points. This has reached such a level that Tucker Carlson clips are routinely seen on Russian propaganda television programs.

Here we see that Russian propaganda about America intended for the Russian people is largely based on Fox News talking points.

 [New link]

The first bit I sort of understand -- Twenty-first Century Russia has a horrible problem with homophobia so it's not surprising that propagandists would try to play on that bigotry -- but veganism and and particularly reparations are a strange choice here. This doesn't seem to be the sort of message that you'd push when trying to scare your citizens away from America, unless those citizens had learned about our country from Fox.

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Thursday, October 13, 2022

Thursday Tweets -- probably the only time I'll use the phrase "rapists' rights Rubicon"

I watched this because I'm from Arkansas. You should watch it because it's a devastating interview.


Great thread. I need to do a post on this.

And this as well.

Once you've crossed the rapists' rights Rubicon, you might as well keep marching.

See our previous threads on secular evangelicalism.


Those familiar with the history of the Nazis may want to weigh in here.




Just like how really cool people constantly tell you they're cool.





This is the second or third time something like this has happened.

 








In case you missed our earlier posts on this.




Foreign policy experts are having that moment where Musk weighs in on a topic you know a lot about.



 



Presented without comment.







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Wednesday, October 12, 2022

Ten years ago at the blog -- the terrestrial superstation thread has aged well

You heard it here first.

If you go back 10 years or so and look at what media and business reporters were saying about the future of television, you'll notice that pretty much everything turned out to be wrong. The future of streaming was supposed to be the single tier, ad-free model of Netflix based on original programming. Basic cable was dying and over the air television was already dead. Outside of the Chicago and to a lesser extent, LA papers, there was virtually no coverage of the industry other than the occasional opinion piece arguing for selling off its share of the spectrum. 

Now even Netflix is moving away from the Netflix model, the basic cable show Yellowstone is arguably the biggest thing on television, and over the air television is coming off more than twelve years of steady profitability and growth with channels like MeTV and Bounce beating deep-pocketed competitors and almost all of the majors playing some kind of catch up. Hell, The Wall Street Journal just did a profile of the newly retrocool Svengoolie. 



Friday, October 7, 2011

Free TV blogging -- Why Weigel Broadcasting may be the best business story that no one's covering -- part I

[I should start with the disclaimer that all of the information I have about Weigel comes from two sources: Wikipedia and way too many hours of watching television. It's entirely possible that a competent journalist could discover that the truth here is something entirely different, but if competent journalists were paying attention I wouldn't be writing these posts.]

Though the improvement in picture and sound got most of the attention, another aspect of the transition to terrestrial digital was arguably more important, particularly for broadcasters: under the new technology, each station could broadcast multiple subchannels. The situation was analogous to the TV landscape thirty years earlier when cable and satellite stations were exploding on the scene. It's not surprising that someone would try to create the broadcast equivalent of superstations like TBS. What is surprising is who was able to get a channel up and running before any of the competitors were out of the gate.

The name of the channel was ThisTV. It was produced by a regional broadcasting called Weigel, best known for operating the last independent station in Chicago and being the home of the cult favorite Svengoolie -- last of old time horror hosts. Weigel had a content deal with MGM which was not nearly as impressive as it sounds -- Turner had bought out the classic MGM library years earlier -- but MGM still had a lot of films including the catalog of American International, the studio responsible for virtually every drive in movie you can think of from the late Fifties through the early Seventies.

Access to all those AIP films probably had a lot to do with the unique ThisTV brand. Here's how I summed it up earlier:
Weigel are the people behind ThisTV and the exceptionally good retro station MeTV (more on that later). ThisTV is basically a poor man's TCM. It can't compete with Turner's movie channel in terms of library and budget -- no one can (if my cable company hadn't bumped TCM to a more expensive tier I never would have dropped the service), but it manages to do a lot with limited resources using imagination and personality. As a movie channel, it consistently beats the hell out of AMC.

ThisTV has caught on to the fact that the most interesting films are often on the far ends of the spectrum and has responded with a wonderful mixture of art house and grind house. Among the former, you can see films like Persona, the Music Lovers and Paths of Glory. Among the latter you'll find American International quickies and action pictures with titles like Pray for Death. You can even find films that fit into both categories like Corman's Poe films or Milius' Dillinger.

If I ran a TV station, I would definitely combine Bergman and ninjas. I would not, however, run Mario Bava's feature length pulp magazine cover, Planet of the Vampires from twelve till two. Some of us have to get up in the morning.

This mix was in place from the very beginning. The station officially debuted on November 1, 2008 with Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It but many stations started carrying it a day earlier to take advantage of a day of cheesy Halloween horror films. It was a formula that made a virtue out of cheapness (rarely seen auteur films and drive-in movies both have the advantage of not costing much) and it produced a format that's been running smoothly with remarkably few adjustments for almost three years.

For a small player to identify a new market, develop a concept, negotiate the necessary deals with a content provider (MGM), line up affiliates, make the countless other arrangements that accompany a major launch and to be up and running with a quality product when the support technology first comes online is an impressive accomplishment. But it gets better.

So far we have a solid business story -- small yet nimble company with some good ideas beats big, well-established competitors into a new market. Not exactly the most original piece of journalism but certainly good enough for the front page of the business section. However the story doesn't stop there. Weigel didn't just beat its big and well-financed competitors; it lapped them. Before the next entrant, Tribune/WGN, was able to get its station, AntennaTV on the air, Weigel managed to launch a second channel, the ambitious classic television station, METV. If this weren't enough, AntennaTV is the only one of the three to look slapped together despite having taken far longer to make it to the air (of course, we have no way of knowing how long it took Tribune to see the opportunity and how long it took them to act on it but either way Weigel looks good by comparison).

To put this in context, at least half of this story takes place after the collapse of '08, a downturn that hit advertiser-based businesses particularly hard. Furthermore, the story occurs in an industry that a large number of lobbyists and at least a few pundits were literally trying to kill. There had even been a New York Times op-ed calling for the government to eliminate over the air television and sell off the spectrum.

One of the great memes of the Great Recession has been that uncertainty paralyzes businesses. Even the possibility of a tax increase or some additional regulation -- both extremely mild by historical standards -- are enough to bring the economy to a standstill, but here's a market filled with unknowns under a credible threat of annihilation and we can still find a company like Weigel moving aggressively to establish dominance of it.

That's the other side of uncertainty. It allows companies to substitute boldness and decisiveness for money and market position and take advantage of opportunities that would otherwise be out of their reach.

 

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Tuesday, October 11, 2022

We re-invent the train

This is Joseph.

I was reading eschaton who posted this tweet:




Ok, this is pretty bad. Eschaton went down the European pathway (better mixed use) and how this would completely not be compatible with that. It is also worth noting that it would make infrastructure a lot more expensive, as putting up all of these features to protect the road. 

But what else has a dangerous track but can self drive inside of a crowded city? 

Automatic train operation has been in use in Montreal since 1977 (that is not a typo). Closed track self-driving trucks are in exactly the same category, with a slightly harder learning environment but still a completely controlled one. Light rail can definitely be added to city infrastructure and be a success even post-covid (see Seattle) and there is not a reason that trains cars could not be single occupancy (well, there are efficiency reasons). But this highlights two things:
  1. Closed courses are expensive, especially inside cities
  2. Closed courses require new land to become available (tunnels?) or the restriction/removal of the current roads
The real advantage of self-driving cars would be the ability to be integrated into the complex urban transit environment in a safe way. Instead we have a limited use car that also has storage problems or a closed course taxi, which is probably less cost effective than a light rail and requires a second taxi or bus to solve the last mile problem. Because it seems deeply unlikely that modern housing would be ok with removing all access to the roads in front of people's houses and you would still need access for things like waste collection. 

Mark saw this post being drafted and contributed this tweet:


Which means the transport experts were on this issue the same day it came out (us bloggers run on older time scales). 

That said, in a lot of places the better option for a parallel set of completely closed off roads would be bike paths, which might become extremely popular in the world with e-bikes and protected lanes to make them a lot safer. Not so great in severe winter (although see Finland) but there is a big percentage of the US where bike paths would be a far better infrastructure choice. Since bikes can go on regular roads, it gets rid of the last mile problem.

Overall, I just don't see how this could end up being a viable path forward. 


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Monday, October 10, 2022

Matt Levine on the culture of lawyers

 As we've said before, anyone with even a passing interest in business should sign up for Levine's email newsletter. Among his other strengths, his background as a lawyer and an investment banker allows him to supply interesting context like this.

Third, a sort of a sociological point, one that stereotypes far too broadly but has some truth to it. There are two sorts of lawyers in the world, [2]  litigators and deal lawyers. Deal lawyers do things like negotiate merger agreements and debt financing, and make sure that all the funds flows and paperwork are right for the closings of those mergers and financings. One part of their job is to think about how the other side might try to betray them, and write protections against that into the contract. But another big part of the job is to work with the other side in a cooperative way to make everyone happy, so that the deal moves smoothly and feels like, and is, a win for both sides. And then most of the time the deal closes on schedule and everyone really is happy.

Every so often a deal goes wrong, and then the litigators come in to do the lawsuit. The litigators are trying to win: When the deal has become a lawsuit, the possible outcomes are much more zero-sum than they were when it was a deal. Litigators fight. The litigators for one side send the other side discovery requests saying “send us all the documents you’ve written about this deal,” and the litigators for the other side send back objections saying “this request is ridiculous and we could never do that,” and then they go to court and fight bitterly about what documents they should send each other. That has been the main action in the Twitter case so far, arguing over documents ahead of the trial, and it is the main action of much of modern US litigation, fighting over what documents you have to send to the other side. (Deal lawyers love sending documents to the other side. The other side has to sign them!)

When a deal turns into a bitter lawsuit the litigators take over, and the deal lawyers go off and do something else. No deal lawyer is going to send a closing memo to her counterpart on the other side in a lawsuit this bitter; the litigators would never allow it. What if the closing memo gives the other side some information? What if it tacitly admits something? No, the deal lawyers are too cooperative and conciliatory to be allowed near litigation.

Most lawsuits settle, and when you negotiate a settlement you will want to have a good litigator on your side to say things like “if you don’t accept this settlement you will have to deal with me in court and you won’t like that.” But in this case, the settlement will take the form of closing a merger. And to do that, you need the deal lawyers to come back. You need them because they know the paperwork and funds flows and incantations that are required to close a merger, but you also need them because of how they work. The deal lawyers on one side send a funds flow memo to the deal lawyers on the other side, and the deal lawyers on the other side send back a note that is like “this looks good, thanks, but FYI we will have wires coming from two separate accounts, here they are,” and the deal lawyers on the first side send back a note that is like “thanks, we’ve updated to reflect that.” Litigators do not reply to discovery requests with notes that say “this looks good, thanks, but FYI you probably will want to read a few other documents, we’ve added those.”

The deep point of the stay in this case is to make the litigators go away. They have been punching each other in the face for months, because that is their job and because they enjoy it, but now they have to stop, so the deal lawyers can come back and actually close the deal. If you leave the litigators in charge of the closing, they will litigate everything. “We really punched them in the face over this closing memo,” they will say as they high-five each other. And then it will never get done.

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Friday, October 7, 2022

In 1962, having "Jet" in a name still felt futuristic

Andrew Gelman recently did a post on Saturday Morning cartoons of yesteryear, so you know there had to be something that would set off my inner-nerd. In this case:

It’s been often noted that The Jetsons have had an outsized influence on popular memory given that it was only on the air for one season (later forgettable reboots notwithstanding).

The Jetsons didn't just run for one season. It ran for decades. It was just that all those years consisted of the same 24 episodes over and over again, part of the Saturday morning lineup of all three networks. This was very much par for the course for Hanna-Barbera. You see the same thing with shows like Johnny Quest or Space Ghost. The studio was notorious for cost cutting and for squeezing every last drop out of a piece of intellectual property. Since the audience for Saturday morning cartoons was constantly cycling through, it made sense to just keep rerunning the same episodes of popular shows until the ratings started to fall.

When people talk about the Jetsons having one season, they are talking about its original prime time run. ABC in the 50s and 60s was more or less in the same position as Fox in the '90s, a perennial last place and a bit of a joke. This was partially due to the network's origin. It was carved off from NBC as the result of an antitrust action from the government against NBC. Like Fox, ABC tried a lot of out of the box programming including prime time animation. They had a moderate hit with The Flintstones which ran for a number of years. The Jetsons was an attempt to cash in on what they hoped would be a trend.(Jonny Quest also had its initial run in prime time on ABC.) By the late Sixties, no one in the target audience had any idea that any of these shows had ever been anything but Saturday morning cartoons.

In addition to being inspired by The Flintstones which was itself a rip-off of The Honeymooners, The Jetsons lifted most of their premise and many of their gags from the still well remembered at the time movie series Blondie, even going so far as to cast the same lead actress.

Lifting characters and premises from other people's intellectual property was a bit of a Hanna-Barbera specialty. Well it was common practice for cartoon Studios to toss in celebrity caricatures and other references / homages,( see Andrew Gelman's class Foghorn Leghorn) HB took things to an extreme, seldom producing anything that wasn't at least partially lifted from familiar pop culture. For example, Scooby-Doo was a mashup of the Bob Denver character from Dobie Gillis and the fake haunted house genre. (Shaggy is also class Foghorn Leghorn).

And speaking of Hanna-Barbera, did you ever notice how many of their early characters had collars and ties but no shirts (or pants for that matter)? Turns out it comes down to economics.





Unlike the Jetsons, the Banana Splits (another show mentioned by Andrew) pretty much vanished after its initial run, despite being, for HB, a relatively high budget show. (Even for eight-year-olds, some things don't age well.) The legendary Al Kooper contributed a song and check out the writing (but unfortunately not singing) credit on "Doin' the Banana Split."




To give you some idea how little value this Banana Splits IP has. This was the last attempt at a reboot.



On the other hand, a mash-up of Freaky Friday and Friday the 13th sounded like a terrible idea and that actually turned out pretty damned good.


Andrew harshly disparaged Liz Phair's cover of the Banana Splits theme. I thought it was the best track on the album (though I'm not going to defend the lyrics). You be the judge.


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Thursday, October 6, 2022

Twelve years ago at the blog: back when jetpacks were just around the corner

Monday, October 4, 2010

The cusp of coolness

One of the most popular genres of science writing since at least the age of Edison has been the "cusp of coolness" story, where the writer breathlessly tells us how some futuristic development is about to revolutionize our lives.

Here's the latest entry:
Although it may sound more sci-fi than sci-fact, a commercially developed jetpack is actually being eyed for mass production, with plans to eventually release it to the public. Let that sink in for a second. Jetpacks are real, and you might be able to buy one someday soon. Or at least see them among the skies.
I don't think we'll need the full second since jet packs have been around for between fifty and seventy years and you've been able to buy them for much of that time. The Germans had a prototype in WWII (Not surprisingly, Wikipedia has an excellent write-up on the subject). By the mid-Sixties they were flying over the World's Fair and showing up in Bond movies (yes, that was an actual Bell Rocket Belt).

But despite consuming countless man-hours and numerous fortunes (and prompting at least one kidnapping*) over what is now more than half a century, progress has been glacial. Jet packs are and will probably remain one of the worst under-performing technologies of the post-war era.

"Cusp of coolness" stories are annoying but they can also be dangerous. They give a distorted impression of how technological development works. Columnists and op-ed writers like John Tierney (whose grasp of science is not strong) come away with the idea that R&D is like a big vending machine -- deposit your money and promptly get what you asked for.

It's OK when this naive attitude convinces them to clear out space in their garages for jet packs. It's dangerous when it leads them to write editorials claiming that the easiest way to handle global warming is by building giant artificial volcanoes.


*from Wikipedia:
In 1992, one-time insurance salesman and entrepreneur Brad Barker formed a company to build a rockeltbelt with two partners: Joe Wright, a businessman based in Houston, and Larry Stanley, an engineer who owned an oil well in Texas. By 1994, they had a working prototype they called the Rocketbelt-2000, or RB-2000. They even asked [Bill] Suitor to fly it for them. But the partnership soon broke down. First Stanley accused Barker of defrauding the company. Then Barker attacked Stanley and went into hiding, taking the RB-2000 with him. Police investigators questioned Barker but released him after three days. The following year Stanley took Barker to court to recover lost earnings. The judge awarded Stanley sole ownership of the RB-2000 and over $10m in costs and damages. When Barker refused to pay up, Stanley kidnapped him, tied him up and held him captive in a box disguised as a SCUBA-tank container. After eight days Barker managed to escape. Police arrested Stanley and in 2002 he was sentenced to life in prison, since reduced to eight years. The rocketbelt has never been found.
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Wednesday, October 5, 2022

Thursday Tweets -- a day early in case something happens to Twitter









Politics

"Berry had stated that she would be in favor of bringing the MSC back for early voting next year." Just in time for the 2023 midterms.


Gingrich. Trump. Walker.... Christ.


Remember when the mainstream press got the vapors when Joe said semi-fascist?

Last time it was "Crimes by Jews."

Hello to all the Tucker Carlson fans in the crowd.

 

I have a feeling there might be a lesson here.


Pastor Jones continues to stay in there slugging.





Dobbs




I, Robot


 

Not sure what to make of Mankiw and Krugman being on the same page.


Weak grasp of the metaphor.




Kudlow has one of the few perfect prognostication records.

 


RBG undid all of her considerable good works when she became convinced she was indispensable. The coverage from journalists like Totenberg was a big part of the problem.




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Tuesday, October 4, 2022

More musings on higher ground

From last week's hurricane post.

A common, perhaps even the standard framing of rising sea levels is that it's a existential threat for all coastal cities, and while I understand the desire not to downplay the crisis, this isn't true. For cities with relatively high elevations like Los Angeles (a few low-lying neighborhoods, but most of it hundreds and some of it thousands of feet above sea-level) or cities with at least moderate elevations and little danger from tropical cyclones (like almost all major cites on the West Coast), we are talking about a problem but not a catastrophe (The remnants of hurricanes we do see in California are generally more good news than bad. Kay broke our recent heat wave and gave some relief to firefighters). Some beaches will be lost and a few people will have to relocate, but compared to drought and triple-digit temperatures, that's a fairly manageable situation.  

Of course, the real tragedy of this framing is not that it overstates the threat to the West Coast, but that it dangerously understates the immediate and genuinely existential threat to many cities on the East and Gulf Coasts. 

While New York City is not in danger of total oblivion the way Miami or Jacksonville are, it is far from safe from the threats associated with rising sea levels. The area has frequently been hit by hurricanes including two category 3s in the past hundred years. Given climate change trends, the city probably won't have to wait nearly so long for the next one.

This is one of the things that makes the following New York Times article from a while back so strange.

What do you do when the sea comes for your home, your school, your church?

You could try to hold back the water. Or you could raise your house. Or you could just leave.

An estimated 600 million people live directly on the world’s coastlines, among the most hazardous places to be in the era of climate change. According to scientific projections, the oceans stand to rise by one to four feet by the end of the century, with projections of more ferocious storms and higher tides that could upend the lives of entire communities.

Many people face the risks right now. Two sprawling metropolitan areas offer a glimpse of the future. One rich, one poor, they sit on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean: the San Francisco Bay Area (population 7 million) and metropolitan Manila (almost 14 million).

Their history, their wealth, and the political and personal choices they make today will shape how they fare as the water inevitably comes to their doorsteps.



I have been meaning to write something about this article since it came out, but recent events in Florida have made it too timely to put off any longer. The New York Times felt the need to go all the way to San Francisco to do the story despite the fact that New York City has more people, lower elevation, and faces a far, far greater risk from tropical cyclones. This is not quite as bad as the San Francisco Chronicle doing features on earthquakes and wildfire smoke and using NYC as one of the two examples, but it’s close.

Not to say that the Bay Area doesn't have some low lying country and we do experience storm surges and king tides or that fixing these problems won't require considerable money and political will (and possibly a small degree of managed retreat), but for the most part they can be fixed, and compared to California's real environmental crises (droughts, heat waves, non-coastal floods, mega-fires and their smoke), rising seas and storm surges are low on our list of worries.

Even out of that context, the article is still bizarre and with its depiction of first world problems, cringe-inducing. The devastation of a city of almost two million people hit by five to seven typhoons a year and vulnerable to tsunamis is unironically listed next to rich people losing beach houses.

[What about the threat of California mega-floods you’ve been hearing about? This is very much a real problem with frightening and relatively recent precedents -- as recently as the 1860s, Governor Stanford had to take a rowboat to his inauguration – but other than both being caused or exacerbated by climate change, these risks have almost nothing to do with the problems described in the NYT piece. The flooding described here is non-coastal.]

The different elevations of Manila and San Francisco and how they affect the impact of rising sea levels is largely undiscussed. There is exactly one mention of tropical storms, none whatsoever of tropical cyclones, and the fact that certain areas are more vulnerable than others is almost completely ignored. All coastal cities are treated as effectively interchangeable.

As we've said before, the all coastal cities are equal narrative embraced by the New York Times is extraordinarily dangerous. It inevitably underplays the to cities from New York all the way to Houston along the coast, particularly in Florida. The States largest city, Jacksonville, is only a few feet higher than Fort Myers. Miami is actually lower (Miami Beach is effectively zero). Even before climate change kicked in, Florida had been playing a decades-long game of Russian Roulette. With more frequent and powerful storms, we will almost certainly see death tolls and property damage that dwarf the impact of hurricane Ian, and we will see them in the not too distant future.



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Monday, October 3, 2022

It's been a while since we made fun of homeopaths

From That Mitchell and Webb Look:







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Friday, September 30, 2022

What happens when the government believes its own propaganda?

This is Joseph.

Tax cuts cause dynamic growth is a common talking point that fails most of the tests of being a clear and universal principle. There are high tax nations (Germany, 48%) that have strong and robust economies (US$ 45.7K per capita). There are low tax nations that struggle (Greece, 35%) with US $17.6K GDP per capita. 

This is especially true with the idea that it is tax cuts on the wealthy that drive growth. The United States had it's highest income taxes on high earners in the 1950's -- hardly a period of sustained slow growth. Now this is not to say that taxes have no effect, but that it is a complex relationship with feedback that is not really subject to simplistic analysis. But there are simple examples which should make you question the unthinking conclusions of "taxes always lower growth" but it is also the case that the contrary isn't true. It is my suspicion that it is all about how the taxes are spent and the efficiency of government that is driving these factors. 

As we mentioned a few days ago, the UK did a serious of massive tax cuts. The consequence appeared to be the markets thinking that the government had lost its mind and a sudden massive increase in borrowing costs, requiring the central bank to intervene. Pension schemes faced serious risks of insolvency as they suddenly watched the value of their bond holdings plummet. Home sales are collapsing as banks pull back mortgages that are suddenly unprofitable. One internet pundit annotated the following chart to show just how destructive this is:


Even after a GBP 65 billion intervention, borrowing costs increases alone are as large as the budget for housing. The net deficit is >10% of the 2022 budget and exceeds education, and is about 2/3 of health care costs. It's just crazy. 

Now just listen to the Prime Minister's radio tour to try and defend these policies. It is true that there are some external shocks, mostly due to the war in Ukraine, but the tax cuts are an unforced error that has increased interest rates and dropped the value of the Great British Pound. Nor does it help when the Prime Minister won't answer a question on whether people's pensions are safe and tries to shift responsibility to the Bank of England. That isn't going to increase economic uncertainty at all, is it?  

I suspect that this type of action is the result of "noble lies" told to benefit the well off being repeated so often that the people in charge no longer realize that they were lies and have begun to believe the propaganda and I fear that rarely ends well. 

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