Thursday, December 15, 2022

Thursday Tweets

For starters, Musk World has been really busy.




 

Another reminder that, yes, he (or perhaps it should be He) really does talk that way, and not just on twitter.You ought to hear him on the TED stage.






Musk embracing QAnon and the alt-right gives the New York Times a chance to run another "Neo-Nazi's rantings are more nuanced than you think" piece, but it's not one of their better ones.




While reading the following thread, pay close attention to Marshall's points and remember that Elon lies a lot.




And on the business side.

 




As we've said before...

   DeSantis = Trump + Anti-Vax - Personality








Only the savviest politicians get to use 'secret weapons.'



Questionable Political analysis from AP




Good thread by Pepper.

...

...

...

Just because the election is over does mean this story should go away.

Speaking of stories we should be paying more attention to...


What do you mean "we"?




A former boss of mine (back when I was still in Arkansas) used to say that Southern Baptists are firm believers in serial monogamy.


And Misc




Insightful thread.




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Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Essential catalogs -- Part 1 (this one kind of got away from me)

Since the following is critical of this post by Josh Marshall, I should start by pointing out that the main thrust of his post, an analysis of the implosion a few years ago of the news industry, is sharp, insightful, and on target. Definitely a must read if you have any interest in the topic.

Where Marshall goes off track is in his comments on the state of the streaming industry.[Problem areas emphasized.]

You may have noticed that storied Disney CEO Bob Iger is back in his old job after successor Bob Chapek was unexpectedly fired last month, the corporate equivalent of a drumhead trial and summary execution. The issues at Disney are partly the bearish stock market, partly Chapek’s poor performance. But the central issue is managing Disney’s transformation or attempted transformation into a streaming behemoth. You may already subscribe to Netflix or Amazon Prime or Hulu or AppleTV. If you do, maybe you’ll sign up for one or two more such services. But not more than that. There’s been a furious competition to be one of those one or two more. Under his long tenure at Disney, Iger made a series of acquisitions — Marvel, the Star Wars franchise, Fox entertainment and more — that made that plausible. Now the future of Disney as a streaming business is in question and that is a central reason why Iger is back.

Normally I wouldn't make such a big deal over this, but Marshall's comments reflect the conventional wisdom and there are few subjects on which conventional wisdom has been so consistently and entirely wrong about as it has been with the future of streaming. If you go back 8 or 10 years and read all of the major publications on the subject, you will see that virtually every major assumption and prediction has been proven comically off base.

One of the standard tenets was that Netflix was on track to become both vertically integrated and the absolute leader with substantial monopolistic power. We'll get to the vertical integration later. How about the market dominance?

From TechCrunch:

Disney reported results for the final quarter of its 2022 fiscal year today, revealing a total of 164.2 million Disney+ global subscribers, an increase of 12 million subs from 152.1 million in Q3. The flagship streaming service was only expected to gain 9.35 million subs.

Across Disney’s streaming services, Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ had a combined total of 235.7 million subscribers, up from 221 million in the third quarter. The company beat expectations of 233.8 million.

“2022 was a strong year for Disney, with some of our best storytelling yet… and outstanding subscriber growth at our direct-to-consumer services, which added nearly 57 million subscriptions this year for a total of more than 235 million,” said Bob Chapek, chief executive officer, The Walt Disney Company, in the letter to shareholders.

The company overtook rival Netflix for a second time, despite Netflix reaching 223.09 million global subscribers during its third quarter.

 

 We could go back and forth on whether comparing Netflix to the Disney bundle is the most valid approach -- there's no right answer to that one -- but you can't really talk about an "attempted transformation into a streaming behemoth." Chapek is a textbook Peter Principle idiot, but Disney is, by at least one reasonable metric, the biggest streaming service and if you believe the standard narrative about first mover advantage and the market only supporting only two or three platforms, running this division at a loss for a while is perfectly defensible.

But we need to throw in an important bit of context here.

While most of the money and virtually all of the attention goes to 'originals,' viewers mainly spend their time watching older shows. Pretty much all of the subscription based services other than Netflix, and AppleTV have large, often huge catalogs. Even Amazon, which is pursuing a partnership-based model, jumped in with MGM. Not only has Netflix never shown any interest in acquiring existing catalogs; many of its originals such as House of Cards and She-Ra actually belong to other companies. When Disney spends big money on the Mandalorian, it will cashing in on baby Yoda for years; When Netflix spends big money on the new Airbender show, Paramount will be cashing in for years.

If Netflix had such an overwhelming lead, this might not matter that much. If the company had effective monopsony power over the streaming industry, the studios would have to play ball, but that is not and very probably will never be the case, which leaves Netflix, of all the platforms, by far the most dependent on its competitors. (If you go back eight or ten years, that monopsony assumption was a fundamental part of the standard narrative, It didn't make sense then either.)

None of this means that Netflix is doomed. It's a well-run company with a viable business model as long as things stay basically the same. It is, however, unlikely that Netflix will make it to a final duopoly in anything like its current form. (And, no, the company will never catch up with its competitors' catalogs simply by producing new content, and it doesn't really appear to be trying to.)

But what about the very possibility of a duopoly? 

With a handful of exceptions, the major studios (and now, to a limited degree, Amazon) have long controlled every major title, character and franchise you can think of that's not in the public domain, and these are where the money is. Even shows in their fifties and sixties like Andy Griffith and MASH absolutely crush hits like the Crown in terms of viewership. Reboots, sequels and spinoffs of often decades old IP are among the biggest 'new' shows.

Disney was the 800 lb gorilla in intellectual property even before the Fox merger (which was an enormous anti-trust violation, but that's a topic for another post), but valuable properties are spread out among all the majors. Disney, WB, Paramount, Universal, and possibly Columbia all have big enough catalogs to demand some kind of seat at the streaming table. 

This doesn't rule out consolidation down to two or three platforms but it does complicate the situation. These four or five have and --barring further studio mergers -- will continue to have content that is essential for the paid streaming industry if it wants to continue being a one-stop-shop. With purely ad-supported platforms nipping at their heels, the subscription services can't afford to chase a large part of their audience to cable or niche streamers or some à la carte option.

A Netflix/Amazon duopoly supported by a small cartel of suppliers might actually be better for consumers than what we have now, but they would be nothing like the vertically integrated behemoths that everyone was predicting a few years ago. If anything, it would be closest to the dynamic of broadcast television before deregulation when the networks were prevented from favoring their own studios.

As for the troubles at Disney, I think Marshall underestimates how much of a rake-stepping idiot Chapek proved to be, walking into political minefields that a competent CEO would have seen a mile off (see the video below), spectacularly screwing up major releases ("the worst opening for a Disney Animation Thanksgiving title in modern times"), spending big money on tons of streaming originals that got lost in the shuffle due to oversupply and bad marketing. Other than solid profits for the parks, perhaps the only accomplishment he has to boast about is Disney+/Hulu/ESPN passing Netflix.

Is "the future of Disney as a streaming business" in question? If we are talking about getting out of streaming entirely, then the answer is obviously no. Will there be some rethinking of strategy and goals? One would certainly hope so. There's plenty of room for cost cutting, much of it low hanging fruit. They could stop trying to maintain Hulu and Disney Plus as more or less autonomous platforms and roll them up together, perhaps with the latter as a premium tier for the former. They could start licensing more of their less valuable properties which would bring in a great deal of revenue (Paramount brings in 6 1/2 billion or so a year following this strategy) In addition to the money, broader licensing is a good way of raising the profile of these lesser properties without crowding out the shows you are trying to push.

For the record, Disney never should have been allowed to accumulate most of this IP. Congress should have stood up for the public domain and against the studio's lobbyists when copyrights were due expire and the Justice Department should have blocked the Fox merger, but they didn't and any analysis worth listening to is going to take these facts into account.


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Tuesday, December 13, 2022

One of these things is not like the other

This is Joseph.  

These are some recent elections in Arizona that I think give context to a recent announcement on the part of a senator:

2022 Senate

Democratic Mark Kelly   1,322,026         51.40

Republican Blake Masters 1,196,308 46.51

2022 Governor  

Democratic Katie Hobbs 1,287,890 50.33

Republican Kari Lake 1,270,774 49.67

2020 Senate

Democratic Mark Kelly 1,716,467 51.16%

Republican Martha McSally 1,637,661 48.81%

2018  Senate

Democratic Kyrsten Sinema 1,191,100 49.96%

Republican Martha McSally 1,135,200 47.61%

 Presidential election margins

2016  R + 7

2020  D + 0.3

Now the best comparison is not Bernie Sanders or  Angus King, who are rarely making headlines by fighting with the democratic party but instead tend to vote with the party. But the real comparison is Joe Manchin, who often visibly bucks key priorities. 


A few numbers from West Virginia 

2018 Senate

Democratic Joe Manchin (incumbent) 290,510 49.57%

Republican Patrick Morrisey 271,113 46.26%

Libertarian Rusty Hollen 24,411 4.17%

2020 Governor  

Republican Jim Justice 497,944 63.49%

Democratic Ben Salango 237,024 30.22%

Libertarian Erika Kolenich 22,527

2020 Senate

Republican Shelley Moore Capito  547,454 70.28%

Democratic Paula Jean Swearengin 210,309 27.00%

Presidential election margins

2016  R + 13

2020  R + 38


These margins make for a very different electoral landscape. It is not at all clear that anybody could hold West Virginia as a Democrat. If Joe Manchin went independent there would be a really interesting political calculation as to what to do. But, as it is, he is a member of the party in a state that is hard to imagine anyone else winning. 

But there is no real evidence that Arizona is not competitive. Since the first breakthrough, there have been two senatorial elections, a gubernatorial election, and a presidential election that have gone to the Democrats. This is much better than Georgia, for example, where the ticket is clearly splitting. Now you might see this as a spoiler play -- let her stay or she'll sink the race but look at her approval ratings in Arizona. At the moment, she is -72 (8% favorable) among Democrats and +19 (44% favorable) among republicans according to these polls and actually at 5% approval among Democrats in these. Meanwhile Mark Kelly is around 90% approval. 

Now there might be some sort of backroom deal here but it would involve the federal party completely. Look at the op-ed she published as to why she left:

In catering to the fringes, neither party has demonstrated much tolerance for diversity of thought. Bipartisan compromise is seen as a rarely acceptable last resort, rather than the best way to achieve lasting progress. Payback against the opposition party has replaced thoughtful legislating. 

Americans are told that we have only two choices – Democrat or Republican – and that we must subscribe wholesale to policy views the parties hold, views that have been pulled further and further toward the extremes. 

Hidden beneath a "both sides narrative" is a clear attack on her party. How do you motivate people to canvas for or campaign for her? She'd have a better chance keeping the Republicans out of the race but that is the other danger with Arizona -- the last presidential and gubernatorial races showed that this is a beatable margin for an popular Republican candidate. Why would they not go for it? 

Maybe this move is hidden genius but, sometimes, when you can't see the upside there really isn't one  and you are just watching desperation. 


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Monday, December 12, 2022

The New York Times provincialism problem

Over the years here and elsewhere, we've criticized the way the New York Times covers (or often fails to cover) news from the rest of the country. I've tended to put it down to corporate culture but Michael Cieply  (who ought to know) suggested it might be a combination of attitude and economics.

The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper’s daily Page One meeting: “We set the agenda for the country in that room.”

Having lived at one time or another in small-town Pennsylvania, some lower-rung Detroit suburbs, San Francisco, Oakland, Tulsa and, now, Santa Monica, I could only think, well, “Wow.” This is a very large country. I couldn’t even find a copy of the Times on a stop in college town Durham, N.C. To believe the national agenda was being set in a conference room in a headquarters on Manhattan’s Times Square required a very special mind-set indeed.

...

Fine. But what about the rest of the universe, that great wide world we were supposed to cover as journalists? As the years went by, it seemed to become more and more distant. One marker passed in the last decade, when the Wall Street Journal made a strategic move on the Times by strengthening its own New York City presence. The Times, by then firmly established as a national paper, went through a spasm of New York-centric thinking, mostly aimed at keeping the local print advertising base intact. Movie stories from far-away Los Angeles became harder to land; theater reviews and elite arts coverage from New York flooded the culture pages.

In theory, the great digital transition should have made it easier for those of us in the bureaus to penetrate the Times’ psyche. But somehow, it didn’t work that way. As quickly as the editorial staff was trimmed in years of successive buyouts and layoffs, it re-grew, largely with a new wave of digital workers, high and low. Many of them were based inside the new Eighth Ave. headquarters; and most seemed to spend much of the time talking about that perennially favorite subject, the New York Times, or buzzing in a digital hive on dozens of Slack channels. It took ever longer to get stories posted or published. More, the paper seemed to lose interest in much that was happening on the ground even in Los Angeles — New York’s palm tree-lined sister city — never mind those half-forgotten spots in Pennsylvania or Oklahoma.

By last summer, a Los Angeles bureau that was built to house 13 had dwindled to four or five inhabitants. Visits by upper editors were rare or nonexistent. Los Angeles stories, especially about the entertainment business, were increasingly written by visiting New York staff members or freelance writers assigned by editors back in Manhattan. The drift was palpable — presumably not just here, but in that heavily populated heartland. And finally, as Spayd said, the paper seemed to lose touch with “the lives and the values of the people who just elected the next president.”


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Friday, December 9, 2022

I also had lunch in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, but I couldn't come up with a song for that one...

Here's a musical itinerary of my recent road trip starting from LA. 




Made it out to Needles...


 








Stood on a corner in Winslow, Arizona (where Jackson Browne's truck breaking down is still a big deal)...

 


Drove down Route 66...
 


 


I would have headed back the same way, but a winter storm blew into Flagstaff so I came back by way of the low desert.

Down Tucson way there's a small cafeWhere they play a little cowboy tune.And the guitar picker was a friend of mineBy the name of Randy Boone.
 
Yea, Randy played her a sweet love songAnd Della got a fire in her eyeThe Dealer had a knife and the dog had a gunand the cat had a shot of Rye.




And passed through Phoenix, probably the only overlap in the catalogs of Glen Campbell and Isaac Hayes.
 


Warning: this is the long one.
 


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Thursday, December 8, 2022

Magical Heuristics and the Musk Proximity Principle 

A few years ago we had a post on how followers of tech messiahs often think in terms we'd normally associate with magic

Magic of association – – properties can be transmitted through proximity (physical or otherwise). This magic is particularly strong in Silicon Valley. Almost any association with someone or something noted for great wealth, success or innovation can pass on these properties. When no direct association is possible, it may be enough to simply invoke the name of a great success which leads us to...

Magic of language – – the proper use of words can alter reality. In addition to the aforementioned example of invoking names like Apple or Google, certain words such as "disruption" are assigned special power. Mission statements actually help determine the fate of companies. Great emphasis is also put on aspirational language which tends to segue into...

Magic of will/belief/doubt – – attitude also shapes reality. Things are more likely to happen the more deeply you believe in them. Correspondingly, skepticism and negative attitudes can undermine this magic. In extreme cases, particularly if surrounded by true believers, there are those who can simply will things into existence which leads us to...

Magic of destiny – – there are chosen ones among us. Their powers are all-applicable, not tied to any specific area or based on specific skills and knowledge; they can simply make things happen. Any association with the chosen ones is unquestionably beneficial. Like messianic American Express cards, they have no preset limits, but they do have at least one weakness: doubters. To question a chosen one is to inspire great hostility.

I guess it was inevitable we'd hit the graven image stage.

 Matt Levine (from his newsletter)

“The way finance works now is that things are valuable not based on their cash flows but on their proximity to Elon Musk,” I wrote last year, and while I am not quite sure that it remains true — so far Musk’s proximity seems to be bad for Twitter Inc.’s cash flows, anyway — it is definitely still a part of postmodern financial analysis. In particular, if you have some crypto project, which almost by definition doesn’t have cash flows, you will value Musk proximity very highly. (Look at Dogecoin, etc.)

How can you obtain Musk proximity? I don’t really know — nothing in this column is ever Musk proximity advice   — but, look, in these circumstances, it would be understandable if you resorted to techniques of ancient magic? Like if you were to sculpt a giant metal idol of Musk, you might go ahead and assume that the idol would have some valuable magical effect on your crypto project? And if you were to offer up that idol as an gift to Musk himself, and if he were to see it and bless it and accept it and perhaps tweet about it, then that would instill your crypto project with Musk’s divine spirit in a way that would probably make the price of your tokens go up? Is this all stupid? I don’t know? Yes? And yet? All I am saying is that humans have been offering precious idols to divine powers for thousands more years than they have been building discounted cash flow models in Excel. Do the idols have a better long-term track record than the DCF models? That is beyond my expertise. Anyway here is, I think you will have to agree, a thing:

 
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Wednesday, December 7, 2022

Ragnarök -- Twilight of the Canadian University System

This is Joseph.

After the end of Laurentian University's insolvency process via the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) has revealed a previously sealed communication and it is explosive. What is crazy about the response to a bailout is the reason WHY. 
MCU’s Proposal prohibits the commencement of a CCAA filing but does not appear to consider the additional cash requirements, increased risk and personal exposure that arises after February 1, 2021 if a CCAA proceeding is not commenced. During our meeting with MCU representatives on January 21, 2021 when the terms of the MCU Proposal were outlined and referred to as final, we asked if MCU was prepared to provide some form of protection or indemnity to Board members for the increased liability that they would be exposed to, if the MCU Proposal was accepted and a CCAA proceeding was therefore not commenced. The response we received was that this would not be provided.

What is this liability?  

The letter suggests that the Faculty Union was about to go to court to force the release of documents “that put our financial position, including the historical practice of not setting aside restricted funds, into the public domain”.  This, it turns out, is the crux of the matter.  The university’s decision, sometime around 2015 probably, to raid the restricted funds for the purposes of funding various renovations and construction (a practice euphemistically referred to as “internal lending” in Laurentian’s Financial Statements – this stuff was hiding in plain sight all along) was simply too embarrassing and a potential cause for litigation against the University and the Board.  Entering CCAA and all the chaos that entailed was a preferable alternative to Haché.  Indeed, if you read the letter’s schedule B – which sets out the pros and cons of an MCU partial bail-out versus CCAA – one of the main arguments against accepting the Ministry’s offer is that eventually the key details would come out and once the banks and the tri-councils found out about the problem, everything would come crashing down. 

The actual cash crunch was caused by early repayment so it looks like the reason for the CCAA was to escape liability for co-mingling restricted funds. This letter was then suppressed by the bankruptcy judge until the end of the process, under the theory that it could disrupt the process. 

The idea that you can suck out $30 million in public funds to protect a board from the liability incurred by a breach of their duty of oversight creates some real questions. Like, do we want to allow board's to shed oversight liability so easily? Why was the cost focused on the faculty, with mass layoffs, and not on the board who allowed this co-mingling to occur? 

The reason I use the term "Ragnarök" (the fate of the gods) is that I think this outcome is the worst possible public policy result. We insulate the oversight body (already only light accountable) from misconduct and allow the costs to be borne by the institution. Since the costs are huge as compared to the liability shed ($24 million in restructuring plus another $24 million in banking costs versus $36.5 million in now unavailable restricted funds) -- it cost the University almost as much as paying back the restricted funds to do the CCAA.

Which makes it look like an exercise in reducing accountability. It has big implications for the ability to trust a board because if the board makes major accounting errors then it is the faculty who bear the costs (some board members lost their seats, seems different then the loss of a tenured job). 

Now it might be that this stays an isolated case. But the breaking of norms and the use of a novel method to avoid liability may well be tempting the next time a board slow walks themselves into a position of considerable liability. 

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Tuesday, December 6, 2022

(Previous) Tuesday Tweets

Last time we had such an embarrassment of embarrassments just in the Musk section, that we didn't have space for anything else. Here's what landed on the cutting room floor.

Notes on the new economy.

A few months ago we talked about the bezzle as economic stimulus (and its collapse as the opposite). Here's a footnote.


Only invest in the heavily hyped approach may have a subtle flaw.


On a related note, remember all the great innovations (self-driving cars, hyperloops) where boosters argued the technological challenges were solved. The only things standing in the way were regulators.




Death and ...

I saw this a few days ago in LA and it reminded me of the conversation we've been having for at least five years now about the possible downsides of motivating the base by questioning elections.




[I had to add one new tweet.]

Bonier is having a good year.


Don Jr.'s positions are now closer to those of DeSantis than to those of his father

I keep finding reasons to retweet this one.


It still comes down to being insulted by a black man.



The rise of apocalyptic language and imagery in the Republican Party should have been getting more attention for a long time.




And other stuff.

 




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Monday, December 5, 2022

Can we all see the concern here?

This is Joseph. 

The main Canadian medical grading agency, CIHR, decides to bypass peer review rankings:

In some cases, that meant proposals with lower scores from peer reviewers jumped ahead of those with better scores.

For example, Dylan MacKay, a nutritional biochemist at the University of Manitoba, submitted a proposal to compare two approaches to treating kidney disease. Peer reviewers ranked it fourth out of 130 proposals. But the proposal was not one of the 22 selected for funding by the second round of reviewers. MacKay was shocked. “No one has seen anything like this at CIHR,” he says. “We never thought they wouldn’t follow the peer-review order.”

A spokesperson for CIHR says applications were rated on how well they addressed one of several strategic objectives, including better preparing Canada to respond to pandemics. But those objectives were not listed in the original call for proposals.

 Even if done in complete good faith, this is a terrible idea. A hidden set of review criteria that are not made part of the competition is the sort of thing that can, all too easily, become a pathway to politically determined outcomes. After all, a slip of the tongue by an official could give a competitor an extremely important advantage in drafting a grant if this was decided in advance (it's even worse if this was added after seeing the initial peer review rankings). 

In a non-science context, this sort of post-hoc ranking of grants has gone quite wrong. It shakes trust by applicants and reduces the engagement of peer reviewers (why work to get the best possible ranking when external criteria will be the primary method used to determine awards). 

What are the hidden criteria? Here:

  1. Strong and coordinated governance: Enabling rapid decision-making, informed by experts; and, to ensure our investments achieve maximum impact.
  2. Laying a solid foundation by strengthening research systems and the talent pipeline: From post-secondary institutions, research hospitals and Canadian scientists, we are supporting the foundational inputs necessary to have a healthy life sciences ecosystem. Afterall, there is no point having a state-of-the-art factory if we don't have the people and talent to run it.
  3. Growing businesses by doubling down on existing and emerging areas of strength: We will continue to support Made-in-Canada solutions through the Strategic Innovation Fund to rebuild the sector. We have a strong pipeline of projects across the country that will create thousands of good jobs for Canadians while closing key gaps in our biomanufacturing supply chain.
  4. Building public capacity: Taking advantage of the new capacity coming online at Canada's National Research Council, including its new Biologics Manufacturing Centre. With this new facility built ahead of schedule, we will be able to produce vaccines for whatever the future may hold.
  5. Enabling innovation by ensuring world class regulation: Lastly, this will make Canada a more attractive destination for leading life sciences firms to establish and grow. Overall, this will help us grow a strong and competitive domestic life sciences sector, and ensure Canada's readiness for future pandemics or other health emergencies.

Some of this is quite good policy but, when applied to a clinical trials grant competition, it is hard not to notice how it would really advantage anybody with an industry connect (e.g., #3 is clearly aligned with businesses). Had this been announced as a part of the grant announcement, applicants could have decided to either directly address these pillars in the proposal or to decline to put in the effort of preparing an application. 

For one competition, this is admittedly a minor concern. But the reason for concern is that this could end up being very toxic to science in Canada without much imagination. 

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Friday, December 2, 2022

Gladwell gives us a reason to revisit the Grandiosity/Contribution Ratio

Andrew Gelman has an excellent take-down of a recent Malcolm Gladwell essay. I may dive in with my own criticisms of Gladwell's arguments, but for now here's some context on one passage that particularly bothered Gelman.

"It has become fashionable to deride today’s tech C.E.O.s for their grandiose ambitions: colonizing Mars, curing all human disease, digging a world-class tunnel. But shouldn’t we prefer these outsized delusions to the moral impoverishment of Welch’s era?"

The Martian stuff is too big a topic for the moment, but the Boring Company is and has always been a Theranos-style exercise in promising incredible (in both senses of the word) proposed advances with no idea how to actually achieve them. As with Holmes, Musk used this snake oil to raise hundreds of millions in funding, but the real pay-off was in maintaining Musk's reputation as a real life Tony Stark, which props up the valuation of Tesla making Musk the richest man in the world (as long as the stock price holds).

This recent WSJ expose provides a detailed overview of the scam.

As for the origin of the "curing all human disease" line...


Tuesday, January 23, 2018

The Grandiosity/Contribution Ratio

From Gizmodo [emphasis added]
Zuck and Priscilla laid out the schematics for this effort on Facebook Live. The plan will be part of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and will be called simply “Chan Zuckerberg Science.” The goal, Zuck said, is to “cure, prevent, or manage all diseases in our children’s lifetime.” The project will bring together a bunch of scientists, engineers, doctors, and other experts in an attempt to rid the world of disease.

“We want to dramatically improve every life in [our daughter] Max’s generation and make sure we don’t miss a single soul,” Chan said.

Zuck explained that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will work in three ways: bring scientists and engineers together; build tools to “empower” people around the world; and promote a “movement” to fund science globally. The shiny new venture will receive $3 billion in funds over the next decade.
...

“Can we cure prevent or manage all diseases in our children’s lifetime?” Zuck asked at one point. “This is a big goal,” he said soon after, perhaps answering his own question.

Obviously, any time we can get some billionaire to commit hundreds of millions of dollars a year to important basic research, that's a good thing. This money will undoubtedly do a tremendous amount of good and it's difficult to see a major downside.

In terms of the rhetoric, however, it's useful to step back and put this into perspective. In absolute terms $3 billion, even spaced out over a decade, is a great deal of money, but in relative terms is it enough to move us significantly closer to Zuckerberg's "the big goal"? Consider that the annual budget of the NIH alone is around $35 billion. This means that Zuckerberg's initiative is promising to match a little bit less than 1% of NIH funding over the next 10 years.

From a research perspective, this is still a wonderful thing, but from a sociological perspective, it's yet another example of the hype-driven culture of Silicon Valley and what I've been calling the magical heuristics associated with it. Two of the heuristics we've mentioned before were the magic of language and the magic of will. When a billionaire, particularly a tech billionaire, says something obviously, even absurdly exaggerated, the statement is often given more rather than less weight. The unbelievable claims are treated less as descriptions of the world as it is and more incantations to help the billionaires will a new world into existence.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Zuckerberg's language here is that it reminds us just how much the Titans of the Valley have bought into their own bullshit.

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Thursday, December 1, 2022

Innumeracy and Brexit

This is Joseph.

Simeon Stylites has a very good catch. In a column arguing against a "Swiss Model" of membership for the United Kingdom, David Frost suggests that you are looking at a 0.5% GDP difference. This appears to be per annum. 

The United States has grown by an average of 1.8% per annum between 1948 and 2022 (not an era known for low growth). Losing 0.5% per annum would end up creating, over 20 years, a difference of 43% net growth and 30% net growth, given US growth rates. That is a huge difference. Over a century it would be an enormous loss relative to their European Union neighbors -- enough to meaningfully change the relative balance of soft power in Europe.  

What I find strange is that I also cannot puzzle out the benefits that Brexit is supposed to bring. It isn't about cultural preservation: the number of immigrants is now at an all time high post-Brexit. I can see interest in trade but what do they want to trade and to whom? The recent interest in joining CPTPP suggests it is not about taking back control as they will be joining another trade bloc that will also make rules for the UK. How can all of this be worth a large GDP loss at time when the UK could well use a period of brisk economic growth to get out of a financial hole?

All of this commentary is to say that I still don't see what the policy goal of Brexit was and how it improved any of the long term goals of the Conservative government. Or is it really the case that it was people who believed Libertarians coming to power and watching how well these ideas work in practice? 




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Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Few things are nicer than being cool when it's hot and warm when its cold.

A few weeks back, while we were discussing Ukraine, Joseph pointed out that, given its role in climate change and the energy economy, heating and cooling played a huge roll but got a fraction of the attention compared to personal transportation. (At this point, long time readers of the blog are expecting a lecture on ground source heat pumps, but we'll save that for another day.)

Hopefully, we can get Joseph to make a serious deep dive into the subject. In the meantime, I thought I'd have some fun with it. I've always believed that, when wrestling with a big topic, there's a lot to be said for wandering off the path occasionally to check out the dead ends, the cool but non-scalable, and the quirky.

Like a heating system based on candles.




There are lots of basic lessons to be learned from the previous video about the science of heating: start with as small a space as possible; insulate well while maintaining good ventilation; minimize waste heat.

The next video isn't nearly so practical but it is much cooler. It's from a highly recommended channel (if you're into this sort of thing) called the Outdoor Boys and it approaches the challenge of making it through a cold Alaska night not as a matter of woodcraft but as more of a physics problem.



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Tuesday, November 29, 2022

Tuesday Tweets -- Musk Edition



See also Marshall's  "Elon Musk and the Narcissism/Radicalization Maelstrom"  (JPM's been on a roll lately).

Since the meltdown, quite a few journalists who had gotten a lot of mileage out of their access to Musk are doing some serious backtracking.




This WSJ story has been getting a lot of attention. It doesn't (pardon the pun) break a lot new ground, but it does a good job pulling the story together for a wider audience.


And in what was probably the worst news for Twitter last week...

 

Josh Marshall points out that the loss of ad revenue is actually the smaller part of the damage.


From the guy who wrote the book on Tesla.


If you subscribed to Levine's newsletter, you'd already know about this.












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Monday, November 28, 2022

Canada's medical system under siege.

This is Joseph.

The thread here by Emer O'Toole is a good example of the craziness that parents in Canada undergo when seeking emergency medical care:
 

Several days later it turns out the the child has pneumonia. That leads to the discovery that antibiotics are almost unavailable. Forget the long missing fever and pain medications, this is so much of a crisis that there is an official Health Canada page explaining the crisis. Yes, the antibiotics are a crisis too:


Keep in mind this is a partnered adult with resources (university professor) who is unable to find basic care for an asthmatic infant. 

This is also happening in Toronto, the largest city in Ontario, and trends are not reassuring. Even the averaged wait times in Winnipeg are not reassuring: how is it a good idea to put sick people in close proximity for this long just waiting for care. People will avoid the ER if there are other options. Why are these not being considered?





Now, it is quite true that US healthcare is also under strain. It is a very rough world for respiratory diseases right now. But what is the cause of a shortage of antibiotics? Before one starts saying "private markets", do you know of any country in the world willing to gamble on private markets getting it right for food supply? Nor is this situation unnoticed by the media:
Meanwhile, Canadians are suffering because they don’t have access to doctors, or the emergency room wait time is 20 hours, or the wait to see a specialist is months instead of weeks

The other part that is hard is that we see attempts to shift plan for systemic failure:

But when we start talking about government-imposed mandates, we will inevitably see polarization on the issue, a division between pro and anti-maskers. And how much of this internecine squabbling gets our government off the hook for failing to foresee the foreseeable? In this case, for failing to prepare with adequate surge capacity? Why is there no flexibility in this system?

Once again, we're shifting the blame, and putting the responsibility for managing a collective crisis onto individual choices in order to cover for systemic failures. To put it another way, we need a health-care system that can handle the fact that I'm going to breathe on my children. 

This is Jen Gerson, who is admittedly criticizing from the right as well. But there isn't a lot of defense of this situation, so much as a general worry about resources. But this is the thing about central planning (which the Canadian health system effectively does) -- you need to design resilience into the system or else this is inevitable. Only now are we seeing some movement towards system level improvements -- three years are the shock began. 

This really isn't an ideal way to showcase our ability to support these systems.
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