Monday, March 13, 2023

Your Silicon Valley Bank Primer

 As is often the case, the best thumbnail comes from Matt Levine.

And so if you were the Bank of Startups, just like if you were the Bank of Crypto, it turned out that you had made a huge concentrated bet on interest rates. Your customers were flush with cash, so they gave you all that cash, but they didn’t need loans so you invested all that cash in longer-dated fixed-income securities, which lost value when rates went up. But also, when rates went up, your customers all got smoked, because it turned out that they were creatures of low interest rates, and in a higher-interest-rate environment they didn’t have money anymore. So they withdrew their deposits, so you had to sell those securities at a loss to pay them back. Now you have lost money and look financially shaky, so customers get spooked and withdraw more money, so you sell more securities, so you book more losses, oops oops oops 

For those who prefer their analysis in tweet-sized bites, Krugman  has an excellent thread. Here are some excerpts.

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"Cultivating relationships" is a bit of an understatement.

Josh Marshall has also been keeping an eye on the story. 

One thing that has come out of my exchanges with readers is unclarity about just what counts as a “bailout”. In one sense it is in the eyes of the beholder: a bailout is when someone else gets it. The more important thing is that term has no real or precise meaning. In general it’s any radical departure from the existing legal/contractual set of rules and obligations in response to a financial crisis. Websters defines it as a “rescue from financial distress.” Clearly the shareholders, i.e., the owners, of Silicon Valley Bank should be wiped out entirely or at least be last in line for any proceeds if the bank goes through a liquidation. They had a business and it failed.

The operative question is the bank’s depositors. What’s being discussed is whether the FDIC should step in and guarantee all the deposits rather than just the 2% or 3% which the FDIC guarantees up to $250,000. What complicates the question is that SVB did very, very little consumer banking. It mainly held deposits of venture capital funds and the start-ups those funds invested in. As noted earlier, the bank likely has enough or close to enough assets to cover all deposits. What it lacks is time and liquidity. So the best solution is for the bank to be purchased by another bank which has time and liquidity. Depositors are protected; risks to the broader economy are prevented; employees at the businesses which banked there have their paychecks covered. That is certainly what regulators are trying to accomplish right now. The question is what happens if they can’t. What basically all the high profile Silicon Valley notables are demanding now is that the FDIC back all the deposits. That’s a bailout by any definition. The point I tried to make above is that such a move could only be justified by grave risk to the broader economy. And that’s a factual question that regulators at the Fed, the FDIC and the Treasury will have to answer.

Still somehow it doesn't feel like a true Silicon Valley disaster until someone from the PayPal mafia makes an appearance.





And for those who are here mainly for the outrage...


 

And schadenfreude.



  And another member of the PayPal mafia pops his head in.


 

 Now, if we could just get three members of the PayPal mafia...






 



via GIPHY



And just as we were going to the presses...


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Friday, March 10, 2023

Deferred Thursday Tweets -- Dems in Disarray and other favorites

We've been talking about consistently this here at the blog since 2015. All Trump has to say is "don't vote" and the GOP is screwed.







The Age of Discovery


200% if you count me.


How many times has the NYT failed to vet these people? Honestly, I've lost count.


  
Wrong ones based on the second condition.
Lots of people dunking on Hamid. Not enough but still lots.





"Hypocrisy is the hangover of an addiction to attention" -- A great line from an epic thread.

We haven't had a eugenics post for a while.

Still not as crazy as Neom.





New York Times Pitchbot has provided us with the perfect template for a major genre of think pieces.

 

Which is appropriate since the NYT has bought into every tech scam of the 21st century.







I don't quote Cory Doctorow often enough.


 The SAT (a topic we spent some time on a few years ago) is back in the news.

Putting me in the odd position of quoting Josh Barro



Remind me to come back to this one.

And now for something completely different...

The poster did some checking and this appears to be real.


No particular significance. Just a cool thread about bugs.


Apologies if I already posted this but I think this would be really funny.
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Thursday, March 9, 2023

We need to talk about tests (in the "I got an A" sense, not the RCT sense)

We are hearing all sorts of hype about large language models passing various exams, but before we can have that conversation, we need to have one about how those tests are supposed to work, the assumptions them, and why a good test of human understanding can be meaningless if approached in a different way.

 Here's a post I wrote a few years ago about a type of test I encounter back when I was getting my BFA. As you read over the description, think about how a LLM would approach this task, and about what (if anything) its performance would tell us.

Friday, May 25, 2012

"Of course, Shakespeare was much newer at the time"

Back when I was an undergrad I took a class in Shakespeare. I'm mentioning this because a couple of aspects came back to me recently while thinking about education. [The second aspect was covered in this later post -- MP] The first was the format of the tests the teacher used. They consisted of a list of quotes from the four plays we had covered since the last test. Each quote had a pronoun underlined which came with a two part question: who was the speaker and who was the antecedent?

I've never seen that format used in another class (even by the same teacher) and I always thought it was an interesting approach. I wouldn't necessarily recommend using it widely but I'm glad I had it in at least one course. It was a method that encouraged attentive reading (particularly useful with Shakespeare).

Experiencing different styles of teaching and evaluation are part of a well-rounded education. I've seen a wide range approaches. Some were successful. Some were not. Some successful as one-shots but weren't models I'd suggest routinely following, like the number theory class I took that didn't allow mathematical notation (all proofs had to be written out in grammatical sentences without abbreviations or symbols -- more or less the way Fermat would have done it). That pedagogical diversity has been of immense value.

A book on quality control I read a few years ago said that quality in a QC sense was equivalent to a lack of variation; quality meant all parts came out the same. Sometimes I'm afraid that the some in the education reform movement are starting to think of uniformity as an end to itself.

 

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Wednesday, March 8, 2023

Seems like a good time to revisit IBM's war on cancer



Friday, September 15, 2017

A few notes on IBM's Watson, the battle against cancer, and what's wrong with the state of 21st century innovation

If you haven't read the Stat News article by Casey Ross and Ike Swetlitzon on IBM's project to revolutionize cancer treatment using Watson, you should do so as soon as possible. The piece raises all sorts of important points. I'll try to return and explore some of them in greater detail (perhaps even convince Joseph to join the conversation), but for now there are two or three I want to it while the topic is still fresh.

Before we go on, you should take a few minutes to listen to the following track from the Button-down Mind of Bob Newhart. It's a seminal comedy bit that also happens to be directly relevant to the conversation.





The joke here is not that using airplanes for passenger travel is absurd (it was the early 60s for Christ's sake); the joke is that the aircraft at Kitty Hawk was clearly not ready to be monetized in this way. A plan that will be viable sometime the future is not really viable.

Given the complexities of the problem and the mountainous quantities of research that need to be assessed, no one would argue that AI-based tools for diagnosis and recommending treatment wouldn't be tremendously valuable, probably even revolutionary, but IBM's Watson is looking definitely less than ready for prime time in this respect.

The stat news article also hits on a couple of long-standing threads here at the blog, starting with one of the best examples of ddulite reasoning we've seen in a long time.
IBM said in its statement that it has collaborated with the research community and presented data on Watson at industry gatherings and in peer-reviewed journals. Some doctors said they didn’t need to see more research to know that the system is valuable. “Artificial intelligence will be adopted in all medical fields in the future,” said Dr. Uhn Lee, who runs the Watson program at Gachon University Gil Medical Center in South Korea. “If that trend, that change is inevitable, then why don’t we just start early?”

Adopting technology because it supposedly will be the best choice sometime in the future is deeply flawed for at least a couple of reasons. First off, the future is, you know, in the future – – we don't know what we'll find there. While it is reasonably safe to assume that some kind of AI will play a vital role in medicine 20 or 30 years from now, it might have very little to do with the approaches currently being pursued. Furthermore, even early adopters who guess right about the direction of technology are often screwed by getting ahead of the functionality.

Another ongoing thread here at the blog is the ever increasing emphasis on hype and marketing at the expense of research and genuine innovation, particularly when combined with short-term thinking. Following speaks for itself:
“IBM ought to quit trying to cure cancer,” said Peter Greulich, a former IBM brand manager who has written several books about IBM’s history and modern challenges. “They turned the marketing engine loose without controlling how to build and construct a product.”

Greulich said IBM needs to invest more money in Watson and hire more people to make it successful. In the 1960s, he said, IBM spent about 11.5 times its annual earnings to develop its mainframe computer, a line of business that still accounts for much of its profitability today.

If it were to make an equivalent investment in Watson, it would need to spend $137 billion. “The only thing it’s spent that much money on is stock buybacks,” Greulich said.


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Tuesday, March 7, 2023

An interesting piece of housing history


A few years after the ad shown here, Buster Keaton used the house-a-box concept as the jumping off point for his classic short One Week.

The story involves a newlywed couple who receive a build-it-yourself house as a wedding gift. The house can be built, supposedly, in "one week". A rejected suitor secretly re-numbers packing crates. The groom struggles to assemble the house according to this new "arrangement". The result is a lopsided structure with revolving walls, kitchen fixtures on the exterior, and upper-floor doors that open onto thin air.

The Sears homes-in-a-box were compact, well-designed and reasonably priced ( $26,982.83 in 2023 dollars). Sears was the best known provider of kit houses, but there were a number of others including, perhaps inevitably, Montgomery-Ward. The business model started dying out during the Depression, but they never entirely went away.

There is even a modern NIMBY element (and, no, in this case I'm not going to try to defend them). From the LA Times:

When a New York designer came up with a plan for a tiny cottage that could offer permanent shelter for Gulf Coast residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina, Mississippi officials pressed hard for federal funding.

Why build a flimsy government trailer, they asked, when it was possible to build a sturdy, long-lasting cottage -- especially one as charming as the “Katrina cottage,” designed in a Southern vernacular style, with a steep metal roof and a deep front porch?

But now that the “Mississippi cottage,” a small shotgun-style house inspired by the original, is rolling onto the coast, things have become a little more complicated: The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency provides only the cottage -- not the land -- and cities have imposed rule after rule to keep qualified residents from settling into them.

Local officials, it seems, fear that the brightly colored cottages will become permanent fixtures in their hurricane-ravaged neighborhoods. They say the cottages, which range from 400 to 840 square feet and cost as little as $34,000 to build, will hurt property values.




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Monday, March 6, 2023

A human knight/knave puzzle

In real life, very few people are wrong reliably enough to be useful. You get people who are basically coin flips and others who are wrong most of the time, but in ways that are so predictable that knowing their opinions doesn't supply any useful information (like the booster who always bets on the home team).

The kind of wrong that can be turned into something helpful simply by flipping it 180 is almost entirely the stuff of logic puzzles. Real life examples are vanishingly rare, but at least some investors think they've found one.

Katherine Greifeld writing for Bloomberg:

    Whether you’re a lover or loather of Jim Cramer — and on both Wall Street and Main Street, there are plenty of each — you’re now able to express that view via the magic of ETFs.

    A pair of new products is launching Thursday that will help US investors bet either on or against the stock picks of the host of CNBC’s Mad Money show, arguably the world’s most-famous financial pundit. …

    Matthew Tuttle, CEO of Tuttle Capital Management, has turned his attention to Cramer, fulfilling a long-running finance joke that the CNBC anchor should get his own inverse fund.

    “If he specifically says either buy, buy, buy a stock, then we’re gonna go short that stock at the next practical moment,” Tuttle told Bloomberg’s Trillions podcast, referring to the inverse strategy. “If he tells you he hates a stock or sell, sell, sell or something like that, then we’re gonna go long that name again at the next kind of practical entry point.” ...

    The methodology behind the ETFs is decidedly low-tech. To design the portfolios, which are equal weight, Tuttle and two colleagues watch Cramer’s television appearances throughout the day and monitor his Twitter account. The result is two actively managed portfolios that hold between 20 to 50 names with a high turnover rate, Tuttle said. Both products carry an expense ratio of 1.2%.



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Friday, March 3, 2023

Law and order

This is Joseph.



Even the Libertarians get why this is a problem:

But, at the same time, people seem to be completely able to understand why cracking down on turnstile jumping is bad. Matt has a longer piece on why fake license plates are bad and the list of reasons is actually pretty cogent. In addition to lost revenue, there is a real issue with criminals using lax enforcement to make moving stolen cars substantially easier. 

Reading the comments, people love to introduce the red herring that front plates are not required by every state. Y'know, there are places with free transit. It does not make jumping turnstiles in New York legal by osmosis. Or there is the question of whether it is snitching or acting like a "Karen".

But my least favorite argument is this one:


First, the real poor do not drive German luxury cars. They ride public transit. Second, if the reason that people are using fake tags is because they can't afford real tags, that is an income problem that I would be happy to address. Waive fees for low income car owners by increasing them for high income car owners? I mean these costs are trivial compared to car insurance, and are on the order of a tank of gas. There will be somebody who is immiserated by these costs but they are in deep trouble already as soon as they need a car repair ($72!!!). In Virginia it is $30 and literally the cost of a tank of gas. 

I see the same argument rolled out for things like the gas tax. The very poor pay no gas tax and the people most impacted by it are those who elect to drive large single occupancy vehicles. 

Now, not wanting to pay for traffic offenses is different. But there it gets tricky. Automated cameras do not check the race of the driver before snapping a photo. In general, I would presume that they are fairer than direct enforcement and so the actual impact of fake tags undermining the automated system could well be more disparate impact in traffic enforcement. 

If we want to really focus on helping out those with few resources then I am all for it. But then support policies intended to help these groups more broadly and not just when it intersects with a policy that mostly helps the well off. 
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Thursday, March 2, 2023

Thursday Tweets -- You can take the boy out of South Africa...

 





For those keeping track. Jones switched from Trump to DeSantis because Trump was pro-vaccine.








And if you're tired of Republicans spreading Russian propaganda...

In other political news...



 





Chait is one of the few journalists who has come to terms with what DeSantis really is.

As alluded to earlier, anti-vaxx is the one issue where DeSantis has successfully flanked Trump to the right.


We may get Joseph to weigh in on this one.



And in tech news...



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Wednesday, March 1, 2023

It always feels reassuring when Josh Marshall agrees with you

From Talking Points Memo:

 Ignore the Noise. It’s Still Trump’s Nomination to Lose

Every day we see more evidence that Donald Trump has jumped the shark — poor fundraising, deteriorating elite GOP support, mounting criminal legal peril and more. Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis, coming off a resounding reelection win, has all the malevolence and lib-owning of Trump and none of the baggage. The only remaining bright spot for Trump are the polls which continue to show him … well, to be the leader of the GOP and the odds-on favorite to be the 2024 GOP nominee. Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Don’t believe the hype: Trump is still the guy. And if you look at recent polls he seems to be becoming more the guy rather than less as we get further from the November election.

Back in August, when the mainstream press had almost convinced itself that DeSantis was all but assured to replace Trump as the party's leader, we ran this post questioning the analysis behind the then standard narrative.

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Wednesday, August 24, 2022

I shouldn't have to say this but a 49-25 poll is not good news for the 25 (and it gets worse)

First off, the decision of the New York Times to even conduct a presidential poll more than two years before the election is irresponsible and bad for for Democracy. It distracts from important conversations and, since the data are largely worthless,  its main function is to introduce noise into the conventional wisdom. 

 But while the data are not worth wasting any time analyzing, the analysis in the NYT piece by Michael C. Bender is worth talking about, and I don't mean that in a good way. This represents a disturbing throwback to the wishful analytics of the second half of 2015, showing that many data journalists and the publications that employ them have learned nothing in the past seven years.

Back in the early (and not so early) days of the last Republican primary, 538, the Upshot, and pretty much everyone else in the business were competing to see who could come up with the best argument for why being consistently ahead in the polls was actually bad news for Trump. These arguments, as we pointed out at the time, were laughably bad.

Just as being ahead in the polls was not bad for Trump in 2015, the results of this poll (to the extent that they have any meaning) are not bad for Trump in 2022. When elections approach, parties tend to converge on whoever has the clear plurality, and 49% is a big plurality, particularly when a large part of it consists of people who are personally loyal to Trump rather than to the GOP. On top of that, 53% of self-identified Republicans had a "very favorable" opinion of the former president and 27% were "somewhat favorable."

80% favorable is a good number.

Politically, this is a time of tumult, and all predictions at this point are little more than educated guesses, but given the losses and scandals Trump had seen by the time this poll was taken, his support was remarkably solid, which is the opposite of how Bender spun it.

And it gets worse

Here's the headline and the beginning of Bender's piece. [emphasis added.]

Half of G.O.P. Voters Ready to Leave Trump Behind, Poll Finds

Far from consolidating his support, the former president appears weakened in his party, especially with younger and college-educated Republicans. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is the most popular alternative.

By focusing on political payback inside his party instead of tending to wounds opened by his alarming attempts to cling to power after his 2020 defeat, Mr. Trump appears to have only deepened fault lines among Republicans during his yearlong revenge tour. A clear majority of primary voters under 35 years old, 64 percent, as well as 65 percent of those with at least a college degree — a leading indicator of political preferences inside the donor class — told pollsters they would vote against Mr. Trump in a presidential primary.

Notice the phrase "GOP voters." That 49% refers to the respondents who said they thought they would vote in the Republican primary. Among that group, those who identified as Republicans went for Trump over DeSantis 56% to 21%.

If we're talking about who is likely to be nominated (which is, as mentioned before, an incredibly stupid and irresponsible question to be asking more than a year before the election), people who say they are going to vote in the primary are a reasonable group to focus on, but they cannot be used interchangeably with Republicans, which is exactly what Bender does.

While we're on the subject, this was a survey of 849 registered voters, so when we limit ourselves to those who said they were going to vote in the Republican primary then start slicing and dicing that, we are building big conclusions on a foundation of very small numbers.



And it gets worse. [Emphasis added]

While about one-fourth of Republicans said they didn’t know enough to have an opinion about Mr. DeSantis, he was well-liked by those who did. Among those who voted for Mr. Trump in 2020, 44 percent said they had a very favorable opinion of Mr. DeSantis — similar to the 46 percent who said the same about Mr. Trump.

Should Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump face off in a primary, the poll suggested that support from Fox News could prove crucial: Mr. Trump held a 62 percent to 26 percent advantage over Mr. DeSantis among Fox News viewers, while the gap between the two Floridians was 16 points closer among Republicans who mainly receive their news from another source.

Here's a fun bit of context. Fox has been maxing out its support of DeSantis for years now.

Steve Contorno writing for the Tampa Bay Times

(from August of 2021):

The details of this staged news event were captured in four months of emails between Fox and DeSantis’ office, obtained by the Tampa Bay Times through a records request. The correspondences, which totaled 1,250 pages, lay bare how DeSantis has wielded the country’s largest conservative megaphone and show a striking effort by Fox to inflate the Republican’s profile.

From the week of the 2020 election through February [2021], the network asked DeSantis to appear on its airwaves 113 times, or nearly once a day. Sometimes, the requests came in bunches — four, five, even six emails in a matter of hours from producers who punctuated their overtures with flattery. (“The governor spoke wonderfully at CPAC,” one producer wrote in March.)

There are few surprises when DeSantis goes live with Fox. “Exclusive” events like Jan. 22 are carefully crafted with guidance from DeSantis’ team. Topics, talking points and even graphics are shared in advance.

Once, a Fox producer offered to let DeSantis pick the subject matter if he agreed to come on.

If I were DeSantis's campaign manager, this poll would scare the shit out of me. Fox has pushed him to a degree unprecedented for a politician at that stage of his career. He has also gotten tremendous (and appallingly credulous) coverage from the mainstream press, but he just doesn't register. I know political scientists and data journalists don't like to talk about things like personality, let alone charisma, but for whatever reason, DeSantis has not made much of an impression.

It's possible cataclysmic events (of which we're seeing a definite uptick) will hand the Florida governor the nomination or maybe even the presidency, but if this poll had any meaning, it would be bad new for him and good news for Trump.

And it gets worse.

This wasn't just an article based on worthless data sliced ridiculously thin wishfully analyzed to get conclusions completely at odds with the actual numbers; this was an influential and widely cited article based on worthless data sliced ridiculously thin wishfully analyzed to get conclusions completely at odds with the actual numbers. It instantly became a fan favorite among political journalists.

The article was published on July 12th and immediately became part of the conventional wisdom. A little less than a month later, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago, and the "Republicans are moving on from Trump" voices suddenly grew quieter, as even the highest ranking party members responded with unhinged accusations and threats of retribution. Though the pundits desperately wanted to believe otherwise, they  had to acknowledge that the GOP still belongs to Donald Trump.

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Tuesday, February 28, 2023

From the large language model joke book

Smith College economist James Miller has a great example of a ChatGPT answer that looks pretty good until you drill down.

 


 

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Monday, February 27, 2023

A modest defense of YIMBY

This is Joseph

Some of the best discourses on the blog are cases where Mark and I disagree. I need to give him a big win on the last iteration, on the question of whether it was worth pushing the Republicans on social security. Part of it was that I underestimated just how clever of a politician Joe Biden was and how he could turn the discourse into a political trap.

So let me see if I can do better today. YIMBY has a terrible reputation for focusing on the petty. But the situation, in housing, for Ontario is . . . amazing. Immigration is way up: 


The number of new houses that needs to be built to compensate for the years of bad policy is epic:



One housing unit per minute. At two hours per approval (low end estimate) then the 10 unit pathway to would require 10 cities running approval committees 24/7, with no hitches or requests for more information (the need for new housing suggests the need to build one unit every minute in the province of Ontario). How is it going? 


So the province is falling completely short of the goal, that is also completely inadequate to make up for the bad policy of the past. At a time when the population is rapidly increasing (e.g., see the student visa situation). 

Now, let us look at an example in Guelph. 


The fight is over 23 stories or the 18 which is currently zoned. The comments are mad -- questions of whether the housing is affordable. Remember, the province needs to double the current record of housing (in the 1970's) just to stay standing still. What is the letter writer concerned about?
Regarding the highrise at the Wellington lot. Nothing being built should be more than five storeys tall.

Creating wind tunnels and blocking out the sun and sky is a Toronto answer to keep developers happy.

Low rise is the best answer going forward. Community is important.

Tornadoes and power outages are more of a problem when the buildings are too high. Think, what then.
So we should just remove the idea of a high rise building?  

YIMBY seems to pick petty fights, but look at this from the big picture. In the case where things need to move quickly, every single project gets held up on the pettiest of things. London, Ontario:
Ted Donaldson, a nearby resident and opponent of the townhome plan, said planning staff in the report appeared “hellbent on shoehorning” the project in against the wishes of 71 neighbours.

“Infill is essential. Nobody here sees another single family home being built on this lot,” Donaldson told the committee. “Infill must complement what is already there. It’s like a sculptor adding finishing touches to an already great neighbourhood. Infill is not a sledgehammer.”

Critics of the project expressed concerns about damage to trees, potential drainage issues on the lot, limited parking and garbage collection at the site.

What are they hoping for?

 “Five of these units, set back from the road, I could definitely support,” she said, adding she can’t vote against the proposal at the committee because she is not a member.

Now, it is true that this particular project is not going to materially effect the housing crisis, should it end up reduced to 5 units instead of ten. But the real goal is at the end:

Opponents of the project say they are not opposed to development on the property, but believe a 10-unit townhouse cluster is out-of-synch with the character of the neighbourhood.

Critics also see the potential rezoning as a warning to other London homeowners, who could see similar high-density infill projects crop up in subdivisions filled with single detached homes.

Basically, there is no way to grow the population of the province and not change the character of the cities. between 2011 and 2021, Ontario grew from 12.8M to 14.2M, which is 1.4M new citizens in 10 years. If this high rate of growth continues, which is the federal policy, then the idea that density can be opposed will require entirely new cities to be created. 

The other nasty secret, is that single family detached housing adds value to a neighborhood. It is a popular type of housing, Those neighborhoods that resist density reap a significant financial benefit and if every small project needs to go through a political fight then we'll never manage to end the housing crisis except in an explosion. It is true that not every new house can help with affordability, but a dramatic shortfall, in the face of an accelerated population boom, is sure not going to result in affordable housing, either. At some point, massively restricted supply has to have a market effect. 

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Friday, February 24, 2023

When watching YouTube can make smarter

I'm not making a general claim. Most of the videos you'll find on the platform won't do anything for your intellect and more than a few will actually make you dumber (and frequently poorer). Nonetheless, there are some bright spots, channels that consistently leave you not only entertained, but better informed and perhaps more thoughtful.

Here are a few to start your weekend.

Common Sense Skeptic -- CSS is best known for their take-downs of Elon Musk's more outrageous claims (colonizing Mars, solving the labor crisis with humanoid robots. etc.), but they also make make time to debunk a wide range of scams by actually running the numbers and citing mountains of relevant research,






LegalEagle -- Devin James Stone was a lawyer before he was a YouTuber and he is one of the best at making legal issues understandable without oversimplifying them. He also knows when to ask for help, often brings in guest lawyers who specialize in that day's topic.




Brick Experiment Channel -- I love real engineering and this is one of my favorite channels in the field.






David Mitchell's Soapbox -- Funny and thoughtful essays about everyday subjects like social conventions, language, and, in this case, advertising.




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Thursday, February 23, 2023

Senator Rick Scott and Simple Solutions

This is Joseph.

One of the most pernicious mistakes that I see if the common fallacy that complex problems can be solved by a simple solution. This is often accompanied by the conjecture that the people in power just do not have the willpower to implement the obvious solution. I see it a lot with the national deficit -- just spend less without grappling with the huge choices and constituencies that are involved.

Enter Rick Scott.

All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again. [Bold added by me]

 It has been replaced by:

All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years, with specific exceptions of Social Security, Medicare, national security, veterans benefits, and other essential services. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again. Note to President Biden, Sen. Schumer, and Sen. McConnell — As you know, this was never intended to apply to Social Security, Medicare, or the US Navy [Bold in original]

I think this change illustrates two things. 

One, upon close inspection all sorts of bad examples appear that look alarming. The example of the Navy jumps out immediately, but the US Navy is a construct of legislation and the idea that it would sunset every 5 years seems bleak. All you get is a ton of work constantly renewing legislation. including this one (unless it becomes constitutional). Other fun questions arise about all sorts of foundational laws. For example, the supreme court is mentioned in the constitution but all of the rests of the courts are established by legislation. 

Article III of the Constitution, which establishes the Judicial Branch, leaves Congress significant discretion to determine the shape and structure of the federal judiciary. Even the number of Supreme Court Justices is left to Congress — at times there have been as few as six, while the current number (nine, with one Chief Justice and eight Associate Justices) has only been in place since 1869. The Constitution also grants Congress the power to establish courts inferior to the Supreme Court, and to that end Congress has established the United States district courts, which try most federal cases, and 13 United States courts of appeals, which review appealed district court cases.

For example, the size of the supreme court comes from the Judiciary act of 1869, which I do not see in the intended list of essential services. Reading the constitution, I see very few details and no support for the lower courts independent of legislation. So could the federal court system simply vanish because congress got distracted or gridlocked on another matter? One presumes that serious answers to these questions need to be thought about in advance. 

One also wonders about the 1790 residence act. Or the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act. Or the 1878 Posse Comitatus act. This is really shooting fish in a barrel. There are hugely important laws that form the basis of civil society, which is why I bolded legislation in the first quote above. 

Finally, this is no longer simple. Now, every law has to be categorized as "sunset" or "doesn't sunset", a herculean task which could be equally accomplished by just having a plan to sunset unnecessary rules. No congress can bind a predecessor. But these sort of mass sunset plans tend to go poorly even when the laws in question are a small portion of the total.  Because current laws may have replaced other important laws and there are some quite unexpected interactions that occur. 

Now, old laws get struck down all of the time, although maybe this wasn't the example that Senator Scott was aiming for. But I think the real answer is that this document was rhetorical in nature, and not intended as a serious proposal. But I do think it illustrates the problems of "one simple solution" and the benefits of a careful engagement with the underlying issues. 

That said, I got this far without mentioning social security, so my editor will be annoyed. So let me say that I agree with Josh Marshall that the goal is to cut social security. I think that the coming demographic shift is unpleasant to deal with -- there is no way to keep benefits at current levels indefinitely and not raise additional revenue. I do think that the sums involved are a lot more modest than the doomsayers say, but that they are enough to cause some pain. This is a hard problem, which is why it has not been simply solved already. But fixing it requires a real discussion about trade-offs and not a simple idea.  

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Wednesday, February 22, 2023

More SoCal Weather

 We're having quite a year.

Blizzard warning issued for SoCal mountains, with snow also expected at unusually low elevations

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- A storm expected to be the coldest of the season is blowing into Southern California, bringing chilly rain and snow at low elevations.

The snow is expected to fall as low as 1,000 to 1,500 feet, meaning areas like Santa Clarita and lower-lying areas of the Inland Empire will see a rare coat of powder.

And at higher elevations, the National Weather Service has issued a blizzard warning starting Friday morning for the mountains of Ventura and Los Angeles counties. The service predicts from 2 to 5 feet of snow could accumulate in the mountains above 4,000 feet, falling even as heavy winds gust up to 75 mph.

Below that, at elevations of 2,000 to 4,000 feet, about 6-12 inches of snow are expected.

Visibility at that time is expected to be very low and travel is not advised through those areas. The blizzard warning is in effect from 4 a.m. Friday to 4 p.m. Saturday.

Passes like the Grapevine [I-5 from LA to the Central Valley and the Bay Area. -- MP] and the Cajon Pass are likely to also see dangerous driving conditions. Drivers are advised to bring chains and a full tank of gas and be prepared for difficult weather and road closures.

"They're expecting snow to drop as low as 1,000 feet," said Mark Bishoff with Caltrans. "The top of the Grapevine is a little over 4,000 feet, so they're expecting it to be impacted by snow." 

Just for a bit of context, the highest point in the city limits of LA is slightly over 5,000 feet. In the county, it's slightly over 10,000 feet.

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