Friday, October 28, 2022

The Day-late and Perhaps Penultimate Thursday Tweets



First, some fancy segues, starting with Ukraine



Musk has been weighing in on the war recently with suggestions that earned him the thanks of the Russian government and mockery from almost everyone else, particularly Garry Kasparov. Musk dealt with the criticism with the maturity we've come to expect.

As well as being an attack on Kasparov, this is also a dig at his rival Peter Thiel, who actually was something of a chess prodigy.

The far-right Thiel was also a proponent of injecting the blood of the young to slow aging.which has somehow been retconned into QAnon mythology.

A few more MAGA thoughts.



And plans.
MAGA theories provide us with a nice transition to the topic of British politics.

Which gives us an opening to another one of our favorites.





I considered segueing into the next topic, but this is subject I don't want to be flippant about.

Really effective ad. The humor only fuels the anger.
I believe Oz was trying to make the point that the decision shouldn't be up to senators (I'm not going to listen to the clip unless someone pays me). This is dishonest (if the GOP controls congress, we will have a national ban). It is also the worst possible way of saying it.


Moving onto the polling conversation.

This is a big deal assuming...

... We can trust the polls at all. (In case anyone's curious, I'm in the distrustful camp this cycle.)


A thread and assorted tweets on the rise of the fascists.





Though the longest of long shots, Chris Jones continues to do his best to make this a race.
Tucker was one of the victims of Whitewater (when the modern GOP was invented.)


Misc.

San Jose had a good one this week.

Back on the mad kings beat.

 

Presented without comment.

Context from Rainer Eisfeld:

While the 19th was turning into the 20th century, canals – like automobiles, dirigibles and airplanes – had come to symbolize progress, the triumph of technology over nature. In 1869, the Suez Canal had reduced the sea route to India by 10,000 kilometers, permitting Phileas Fogg and Passepartout to accomplish their imaginary journey around the world in 80 days. Work on the Panama Canal had begun in 1880, and even if the first French effort had foundered, a second American construction attempt was under way. Canals, whether on Earth or (supposedly) on another world, continued to make for headlines: On 27 August 1911, the New York Times captioned a one-page article. ‘Martians Build Two Immense Canals in Two Years’, its headline read. ‘Vast Engineering Works Accomplished in an Incredibly Short Time.’

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Thursday, October 27, 2022

The Nonresponse Problem: What else are we missing?

The shy Trump voter hypothesis does not, by itself, do a good job explaining what we've been seeing in polling data for the past six years. If you are looking for a single theory that will explain large polling biases going in opposite directions in Tennessee and California, you will have to look elsewhere. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that under-response by Trump supporters is a part of the story, and if that is the case, political analysts and data journalists have completely missed perhaps the most disturbing implication.

If we start with the standard assumption of the shy Trump voter hypothesis, that these people tend to distrust and dislike interacting with mainstream media, then it's not just electoral polls that are being affected. All recent polling of Republican attitudes will not just be biased but will be far more biased than the electoral polls (Trump Voters/Registered Voters < Trump Voters/GOP voters).

We would expect the shy (or more specifically mainstream media averse) Trump voter to be, for starters, more likely to be a Trump loyalist rather than just a Republican, and if they are driven by distrust of and hostility toward non-right wing media, we would also expect them to be more likely to be election deniers, more likely to support the January 6th insurrection, more likely to be MAGA, more likely to be Qanon, and more likely to espouse ideas like white nationalism. This would mean that polling has seriously underestimated the support for all of these things within the GOP.  

Of course. We don’t know that the under-responding Republicans are driven by feelings about the MSM. It is perhaps just as likely that the self-selection bias is driven by embarrassment, traditional Republicans who don’t approve of Trump or the QAnon movement but who would not consider supporting a Democrat. 

This second theory might make us feel better but its implications are also troubling. Under the first, we underestimate the danger to the country from these extremists; under the second,  we exaggerate their numbers which helps them entrench their hold over the GOP.

We don’t know if we’re seeing the first, the second, both, or something else, but we can be reasonably confident that we are seeing self-selection biases in recent political polls and there is absolutely no reason to assume those errors stop with the “who are you voting for” section of the polls.

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Wednesday, October 26, 2022

Rings of Power: a few thoughts

This is Joseph.

SPOILERS!


Amazon made a Rings of Power show set in the second age of middle earth. There are some tough decisions to make when doing this sort of show and I think it is useful to think about the options with a prequel. The downside (of both prequels and historical epics) is that we already know what happens and so certain types of suspense are lost. If you watch the Hobbit after watching the Lord of the Rings, there really is no tension in whether or not Bilbo survives. 

I think there are three solutions to this problem:

  1. Focus the story on somebody that we don't know anything about. Arondir is a good example of this in the Rings of Power. Were he and Bronwyn to be the main characters then we'd not know anything about how their story ends. They could end up being secretly quite important to the events of the second age or involved in things that happened far away from the main characters of the third age.
  2. Engage us in the characters and make us feel empathy for the decisions that are made. This is a common focus of historical epics -- we all know that the Great Heathen Army will lose to Alfred the Great in Vikings, but watching it happen is still interesting as we get drawn into the stories. This is especially effective if there are parts that are not part of the popular understanding of the period that really deepen the story. Henry VIII in the Tudors was a good example (lots of that story was ahistorical but it was great to see them start with the young and optimistic king and not the well known later part of his reign).
  3. Put the events into a completely different context. We all think of Galadriel as a hero but what if she was conspiring with Sauron? A good example of this inversion is Dances with Wolves, where we are forced to think of the American occupation of the frontier in a different context.
I think that the biggest problem with the Rings of Power is that it failed to commit to an approach and that weakened everything about it. By doing #1 and #3, it lost the ability to engage people with the tales that they loved (which is ok, but a choice). A very faithful adaption (even with some cinematic alterations) could have worked. A story about the doomed love of an Elf and Human is very Tolkienesque (see Beren and Luthien) and could be set in regions that simply don't get much treatment. A lot could happen in, for example, Rhun, that people like Elrond might be largely ignorant of in the future. Or the Blue wizards could be the main Istari -- we never did find out what happened to them leaving a ton of possibilities. 

The last option would have been the boldest and it is where I thought that they were going. But it doesn't work if you don't increase the stakes. After all, in Lord of the Rings the wise note that Saruman could be of great help to the white council if redeemed. Why are they so sure? One possibility that would be quite interesting is if Galadriel had followed that path in the past (and, long redeemed, nobody feels the need to constantly bring it up). That would create totally new context for her temptation with the ring and her challenge to Sauron in the Hobbit trilogy. It would make us look at her completely differently and make her character richer. 

I was briefly deceived by Sauron but puzzled it out and rejected him before any real harm could be done is a much less compelling redemption story. What if this was real? 


That would make the whole thing about the challenges of visions of the future in Galadriel's mirror make a lot weightier at the end of the third age. 

Now I could be wrong. There are seasons to go and maybe some twists await us. But I think that is the reason that the first season fell a bit flat despite strong acting, decent writing, gorgeous visuals, and a deep well of source material. 


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Tuesday, October 25, 2022

Criminalizing solutions -- Western Wildfires edition

We've been banging the drum about Western wildfires for at least a couple of years now. The inactivity has been frustrating to watch, but this story out of Oregon takes things to the level of infuriating.

 Forest Service employee's arrest after fire crosses onto private land sparks larger debate
TONY CHIOTTI Blue Mountain Eagle

When Rick Snodgrass approached Grant County Sheriff Todd McKinley, he thought the sheriff was there to help him.

According to Snodgrass, he’d called for law enforcement to help control aggressive traffic and to deal with harassment his crews had been receiving while implementing a prescribed burn on the Malheur National Forest in Bear Valley, about 7 miles north of Seneca.

That burn — called the Starr 6 — had since jumped the fireline, and now there was active fire on both sides of County Road 63, where Snodgrass and McKinley met: the prescribed burn operation on Malheur National Forest land to the north of the road — now flaring up in gusts of wind — and an uncontained slopover on private land to the south. The crews under Snodgrass’ direction were now attempting to quell one fire while holding the reins on another, with tempers, smoke, wind and now traffic adding to the dangers to his crew.

But instead of assistance, what Snodgrass got was arrested.

When the sheriff cuffed Snodgrass, it is thought to be the first time a U.S. Forest Service firefighter has been arrested in the course of performing their job.

Snodgrass, the “burn boss” on the day’s operation, was taken away from the scene and charged with reckless burning, a Class A misdemeanor that carries a maximum penalty of a year in jail and a $6,250 fine. Before it was contained, an hour after it kicked off, the spot fire burned an estimated 20 to 40 acres of private land owned by members of the Holliday family.

 ...

“I think in a lot of parts of Oregon, it’s just a very real experience for federal employees to have a lot of hostility towards what they’re doing right now,” said Christopher Adlam, a regional fire specialist for Oregon State University’s Extension Service. “I’m not saying that people don’t also appreciate firefighters and thank firefighters. But it’s a pretty common thing in some parts of Oregon for federal employees to face hostility.”

...

If you use the phrase “controlled burn” in the vicinity of firefighters operating a prescribed burn, you will be corrected.

This is fire. You don’t control it. The best you can plan for is to manage it and be prepared if the fire has other ideas.

Adlam points out that spillover fires like the one that happened in Bear Valley are rare occurrences but can still have a huge impact on people. “I think that, the last 20 years, we’ve had one other occurrence of a burn crossing over from federal land onto private land in Oregon,” he said.



The Malheur National Forest supervisor notes that the spillover was quickly brought under control.

 

Not only was this a horrible precedent, it also made the situation far more dangerous.

It has also stirred the ire of wildland firefighter communities, who fear this development will set a precedent and only complicate an already difficult and dangerous job. And in these groups’ online conversations, it is clear many believe that the arrest created a situation on the ground that may have added to the real risk faced by fire crews in Bear Valley.

“One of the huge watch-out situations in any fire operation is a transition in leadership,” said Trulock. “And that’s when it’s a plan to transition in leadership. This was obviously unplanned. What I would say is there were definite heightened risks because of that action. Until leadership can be reestablished under a new person, then everybody is distracted because they know something happened. And so it created a huge distraction in the middle of what I would consider is a relatively high-risk operation.”

Adlam, the Extension Service fire specialist, agreed.

“The burn boss’s role is never more important than at the moment where something happens that is not part of the plan,” he said. “If you cut off the head of an operation before it’s finished, how is that supposed to be leading to a positive outcome?”


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Monday, October 24, 2022

Bombs under everybody's chairs -- starting a thread

What we mean by a bomb? In this case, we are talking about an event or development which has an almost completely unknown distribution of outcomes, but where we are reasonably sure there's a non-trivial possibility of something blowing up, though the direction of the blast may be difficult to predict.

Most of these events lack any real precedent. Many of them suggest sharp bifurcation. Furthermore, since, for a variety of reasons, we can put less and less faith in the polls, we have no reliable picture of where they are heading, and those indicators we do have often point in opposite directions.

Dobbs is a bomb. Inflation is a bomb. January 6th and other Trump scandals are bombs. Ukraine. The rise of fascism both nationally and internationally. The threat of violence and intimidation of the polls is a bomb. That's only a partial list. Add to that the shaped charges, bombs with the potential for a big but geographically constrained impact. Immigration. Power grid failures and school shootings in Texas. ( I know a lot of people would put this in the National category but this is an area where we do have some president and it argues against this going big across all 50 states.) Various stunts by DeSantis in Florida (though I have no idea whether they will work for him or against him).

The pundit class will pull out various supposed precedents to suggest that they aren’t completely in the dark. Almost all of these think pieces can be ignored. Whether you’re talking about Dobbs, or inflation (not to be conflated with stagflation), or American fascism, you have to look too far back and/or too far away to find something similar. While it is certainly worth studying relevant history here, anyone who tries to make look-what-happened-last-time predictions is an idiot.

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Friday, October 21, 2022

Well, that didn't take long

We don't normally do this but here's a follow-up to this tweet from yesterday's post.
It may not reflect well on us but it's difficult to resist the Wile. E. Coyote clip reel that the Conservatives (and their US supporters) have managed to compile.
[As various people have observed, This is half right, which represents a personal best for Kudlow.]

Sadly, all embarrassing things must come to an end.

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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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