Thursday, May 18, 2023

Checking in on Elon

A bit of context to keep in mind... 

 Elon Musk is a narcissist with explicitly Messianic delusions. He often talks about his love of humanity using those very words and constantly frames himself as its savior. Like most narcissists, Musk is easily manipulated and tends to define good and evil in terms of how things affect him.

This wasn't as much of a problem when his followers tended to be mainly space fans and well-meaning but ill informed people who saw him as an environmental hero, though even then there was a substantial gamergate adjacent faction there. Now, though, he has almost completely surrounded himself with alt-right sycophants who are skillfully playing to his worst instincts.


Musk has also started amplifying neo-nazi conspiracy theories.

And white grievance in general.


While the people around him are certainly having an influence, the man did come into this primed for a right-wing message. Tesla has been sued for racial harassment. Musk personally has been sued for sexual harassment, and we won't even get into the creepy borderline eugenics stuff. The signs have been there for a long time.

We'll leave the last word to Inigo Montoya.





























Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, May 17, 2023

What the experts used to say about streaming -- part 2

Picking up where we left off,

Reports of the death of the advertising model may have been premature

Ten years ago the standard narrative had fully embraced the idea of a single revenue stream future with that one stream being subscriptions. Not only was the possibility of alternate TV models dismissed, but we also saw a spillover into other industries. Suddenly everything from cars to Lego were going to be subscription based.

This was in sharp contrast to the existing model where companies made money from subscriptions, advertising, ticket sales, marketing, and syndication. Under the Netflix model, everyone paid a monthly fee and in exchange got a super bundle of every show Netflix was currently licensing, all available for viewing on demand. (Somewhat ironically, advocates of the future of streaming at the time would often point to bundles as a reason that cable was inferior despite the fact that Netflix had taken the concept even further.)

About six or seven years ago, people in or close to the industry started noticing that while actually turning a profit with streaming was proving difficult, some of the best numbers were coming out of partially or wholly ad supported divisions. Companies like Amazon, Fox, and Paramount launched standalone ad supported services. Subscription-based services like HBO Max moved toward adding commercials. Even Netflix started backing away from the model. This trend was obvious years before any national journalist picked up on it.
 

Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, May 16, 2023

Electric vehicles

This is Joseph.

Noah Smith wrote a techno-optimist take on Electric Vehicles (EVs). It ended on a strong note:
Anyway, these are the main arguments I see against the EV transition, and as far as I can tell, they all clearly miss the mark. (There’s also the question of whether we can build enough transmission lines to charge our EVs, but in fact I’m not worried about this; if anything, widespread EV ownership will create more political will to build the transmission lines we need anyway.) The EV revolution is simply a clear-cut case where the human race invented a better technology than what we were using before, and now we’re going to switch to that better technology. Electric vehicles are going to win; just sit back and watch.

Now there are some secondary issues here, like does the heavier weight of an EV make it more dangerous. Which led to this exchange:


 I am not going to overly weigh in here, except to note that assumptions like "brakes will be stronger" are not always as true as we'd like and that EVs typically accelerate faster, which can be a big deal in pedestrian dense areas. 

Far more on point was Lyman Stone's report of renting a Tesla for a work trip. Practical experience backed up all of the limitations of the car for these operations. Charging (even supercharging) is vastly more time consuming than fueling. Range is lowest for highway driving. The need for a dense charging infrastructure becomes clear and while supercharging seems to have only a modest effect on battery life, it also doesn't seem to be zero. When battery replacement can be up to $20,000 (Tesla Model S) this is not a trivial consideration.

Lyman's key point (at least for EVs in general, he also has issues with Tesla controls) is:

It really does seem to be an hour:

Superchargers can recharge a vehicle’s battery up to 80% in just about 40 minutes. After the battery reaches 80%, it will begin to charge slower to protect the battery’s health until it reaches a full charge. 

That suggests full charge is likely to take an hour. You also have range degradation as the battery degrades. Without supercharging the same resource suggests a charging time between 9.9 hours and 3.4 days (yes, that is DAYS) for an empty battery. If the car is driven a short distance and then is recharged overnight then that is probably ok.  But no long distance trip could put up with that level of time. This also presumes that your company doesn't throttle your range to sell upgrades, but who would do that? 

I think this is a rare case of our blog lagging opinion, but it seems clear that the best use of the EV is for as a solution for short range trips with known equipment on both ends. I am even more bullish about e-bikes for a lot of the warmer parts of the United States, making it possible to combine light exercise with short distance transit. But you know what has none of these problems and dramatically reduces emissions compared to traditional internal combustion engines? A Prius. 

 ________________________________________

 [Ed Niedermeyer is probably the leading journalist on the Tesla/EV beat. He's been pushing a much more constraint-conscious approach than Smith does. For a sense of where he;s coming from, I'd recommend this guest op-ed from the NYT: "We Can’t Just Throw Bigger Batteries at Electric Vehicles" (and you know how it pains me to link to anything from that paper). -- MP]

 

 

Posted by at No comments:

Monday, May 15, 2023

Today in free speech heroes

This is Joseph.

This exchange was amazing:


The answer if you are into free speech is actually obvious enough that everyone is getting it. A specific intervention to appease one political party is precisely the type of media bias that free speech advocates are most worried about. It's not a big deal if the media has a known authorial voice (think Fox News) but it looks bad if that is from a supposedly neutral platform that is supposed to allow engagement. 

I am not saying that this move is the end of Twitter or anything, but it increasingly looks like the owner has a specific viewpoint agenda. Which is sad, because I find the extremely dense information exchange of Twitter to be its biggest asset and, without that, I lose a lot of the value it brings to me. 

Even more interesting, the last time this exact politician tried this they discovered that Twitter was completely uncooperative. Josh Marshall has a good summary here. 
Posted by at 1 comment:

Friday, May 12, 2023

Weekend viewing -- VICE News Presents: Cult of Elon

If you're interested in Elon Musk as a cultural phenomenon (and if you're not and you're a regular reader, we've wasted a lot of your time), you'll want to take a look at this documentary, available for free on the ad-supported service Tubi.*

It mainly consists of intercut clips of fans and critics talking to the camera. Though you can probably guess which side I tend to agree with, the fan interviews provide a useful glimpse into why the bond between Musk and his followers is so strong.

* Tubi will be showing up prominently in future installments of our business of streaming thread.


Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, May 11, 2023

Thusday Tweets -- today's word is "Omphaloskepsis"




Those who follow this sort of thing will remember that Sullivan did a stint as NYT public editor. She was great, but the paper didn't listen to a damned thing she said, which was a great loss for them and for us.



thought

You'll have to take my work on this but when I first saw this Elizabeth vs. Liz Holmes, I also thought about a rehabilitation piece on Manson, though I have to admit pitchbot did it better than I would have.



 

Let's check in on Elon.

Perhaps Tucker thought the best way to bond with Musk was to lie about a business agreement.








The culture wars have reached the point where far right advocates are desperate for something to be offended about.


"None of the counter-protestors the Post spoke to seemed to have attended SM North or had children attend the school, but one man said he pays taxes to the school district."


I've been meaning to do a post on how self-interest no longer explains the actions of these people.



I know we said we were going to lay off Ron for a while, but how often do we get to do a monorail tweet?


As we said before, the biggest political impact of Dobbs lies in the secondary and tertiary effects.


Church of Christ without Christ

Wiki -- Bryan Lee Slaton is a former pastor and American politician. Slaton represented the 2nd District in the Texas House of Representatives from 2021 to 2023.

 

One of the reasons I think we need more Christians in politics (actual Christians).


Russian stooges are back in the news. It's a retro thing, you know, like vinyl.


This one from our friends at the PayPal mafia.


Apparently, Robin Hanson is still a thing. I hadn't heard from him for a while and I'd assumed he was just a frozen head by this point.

Agree.

Back on the Sparta debunking beat.

I did some research and this checks out.
This is really bad.

Let's stop by and visit with Grady.


TBH, this is really cool (assuming we can count on the quality).
Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, May 10, 2023

What the experts used to say about streaming -- part 1

 Lots of examples to follow, but before we get into the state of the industry,  here are a few notes on what pundits and analysts were saying eight or ten years ago.

 

 This was a subsidized narrative


The standard narrative of the streaming industry was by and large created by the industry and fed journalists who mostly accepted it without question despite numerous dubious and in some cases factually challenged claims. The discussion was heavily influenced by astounding marketing and PR budgets. Netflix alone was spending billions a year just on marketing. Disney was even more. Throw in Apple TV, HBO Max, Peacock, Paramount, Quibi, not to mention smaller players like Britbox. All of this money combined with the bubble mentality and hype economy of the teens produced a deeply distorted, narrative-based picture of the industry.

So what were the main points of the narrative?

"In the end there can be only one"


Conventional wisdom was heavily invested in the King of the Hill assumption. Within a fairly short time a front runner would emerge and from then on dominate the industry much as Google dominate search. This was very similar to what we were hearing about ride-sharing despite having even less justification in terms of barriers to entry.

Netflix was supposed to be well on its way to dominance because of first mover advantage and because it was building a content library so massive that it would not be at all dependent on the major Studios for content in a few years. This claim would have been absurd even if it hadn't actually been a lie. Each of the studios had highly valuable IP going back almost a century thanks to their lobbyist s constantly pushing back copyright protection. Add to this the constant new production and there was no way Netflix could have possibly caught up if it had even been trying, which as it turns out it wasn't, at least not at the time.
 

In one of the biggest and most successful lies of omission from any major company in the past couple of decades, Netflix had managed to convince virtually every journalist working east of the Mississippi and quite a few here in Hollywood that it actually owned shows like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. In reality the company at that point wasn't buying anything. All they were doing was acquiring exclusive distribution rights for 5 or 10 years. Basically they were pulling the old scam of convincing investors they owned what they were merely renting. Eventually, word got out and Netflix started acquiring rights to some, though not all, of their originals.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this part of the story is that the journalist s who had been made fools of for years didn't seem to mind.

In addition to having what was soon to be the most valuable content library in the industry, Netflix also had an insurmountable lead both in the amount of data and in their ability to harness it. Lots of cracks in this claim as well, some going back for years.


No one uses old tech

Conventional wisdom also held that cable and over the air could safely be ignored at this point. They might linger for a while but they would not produce anything of note from here on out. The suggestion that a small independent broadcaster relying heavily on viewers with antennas could pull better numbers than big budget, highly promoted streaming shows or that the biggest thing to hit television would come, not just from cable, but from basic cable, would have gotten you thrown out of an editor's office.

Another popular theory claimed that the studios had screwed up, perhaps fatally, by allowing Netflix to license their properties like Friends, Seinfeld, etc. for billions of dollars. The end result would be that Netflix had better established its brand while the properties would be far less valuable than they would have been had the studios held them out of circulation. (This of course runs counter to everything we know about this kind of intellectual property, but we'll get back to that.)

Next time: the premature obituary of the ad-based model.

Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, May 9, 2023

Everything you used to hear about streaming was wrong. Now it's only most things.

I'll try not to be too much of a dick about this, but there are going to be a lot of I told you sos in the upcoming thread on the state of streaming and I'm not going to pretend that I'm not enjoying myself at least a little bit.

The immediate impetus was this episode of the Daily featuring NYT media reporter John Koblin discussing the writers' strike. It's reasonably informative if you haven't been following the story, but it was far more interesting part (at least for me) as a revision of what we've been hearing from the paper for the past decade.

The thing you have to keep prominently top of mind while trying to follow this story is that, with the exception of streaming being big,  the standard narrative was wrong in every particular from revenue streams to business models to the quality of the IP to the winners and losers. That narrative has crashed so badly in the past half dozen or so years that even its most faithful adherents (a group that very much includes the New York Times) are starting to quietly back away from many of its major tenets.

Among the points being conceded are the wisdom of flooding the market with expensive programming, and the business logic behind combining binge friendly shows with no-commitment subscriptions, which always made about as much sense as letting people take doggy bags into an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Some of the points still being ignored include the rise of the ad-based streaming model which had long been declared dead, the fact that the most popular shows and profitable business models of the past few years did not come from the streaming sector, and the grossly exaggerated roll that original programming continues to hold in these discussions.

You would probably get the impression from listening to this that people mainly watch originals. The industry has, by this point, spent tens of billions of dollars in marketing and PR (yes, billions) to get reporters to believe this but the numbers do not back it up.  People still mainly watch licensed shows like NCIS or the Big Bang Theory.

It's worth noting that when Koblin compares the economics of broadcast syndication to that of streaming, he leaves out that we are often talking about the same shows. Along similar lines, at around 24:00, you'll notice the omission of Taylor Sheridan when talking about big show runners. Taylor's Yellowstone is arguably the biggest thing to hit television in years, but in direct contradiction to the standard narrative, it comes from basic cable. 

I realize I'm throwing out a lots of assertions here but we'll have lots of supporting evidence coming. If you're interested in the business of television, this should be an interesting discussion. If not, check back with us late next week.



Posted by at No comments:

Monday, May 8, 2023

When they get to the part about nobody seeing this coming

 If you follow the news on the writers' strike, you're going to be hearing a lot about the business of streaming, including how unsustainable the current level of production of big budget scripted shows is. We'll be diving into this and other issues (I've got at least a half dozen posts in the works and a few more reposts, not to mention the possibility that Joseph might want to chime in), but for now here's a reminder that the problems that the NYT et al. are now discovering weren't exactly unforeseen.

 (Pay close attention to reason 2. We'll definitely be hearing more about that one.)

Monday, August 31, 2015

Arguments for a content bubble

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Posted by at No comments:

Friday, May 5, 2023

Deferred Thursday Tweets -- sometimes it's easier to sell the solution people know they don't understand

Three good threads from Paul Krugman discussing the administration's options for dealing with the debt limit hostage situation (though you might want to do a little background reading first).



An important aspect of the crisis is that the hostage-takers' demands are so politically toxic that the people making them are simultaneously denying them, which is allowing Biden an opportunity to indulge in a little snark.



Speaking of old guys who are still goddamn sharp.



I've always felt the Kennedys (with the possible exception of Ted) were overrated, but they still deserve better than this clown.



While on the subject of Ukraine...

 


NYT pitchbot should start charging a licensing fee.


The very fact that CPAC meets in Hungary makes further comment superfluous, but we won't let that stop us.

The kids are alright (and that bothers certain people).
To be fair, they can still be good citizens as long as their teachers don't encourage that sort of thing.


SCOTUS Tweets





Why don't we play a game of solitaire...


Briefly checking in on the Tucker defenestration.


 

Meanwhile in Muskworld.






On a more general note, important threads from possibly the most important journalist on the EV beat.



 


Great thread on the tech behind the tech.


We need to talk more about framing.

More on regurgitative AI.



All kidding aside.

Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, May 4, 2023

The Snows of May

Some more notes on the weather...

First off, when this post goes up on the blog, it will be snowing in the mountains to the east. 

Snow levels could level to about 4,000 to 4,500 feet; areas with elevations above 6,000 feet could see 4 to 8 inches of snow, with localized areas getting 14 inches. 
(I believe they got a bit more to the north.)

 April ended with a brief heat wave that had people worried about flooding because there are still over a million foot acres waiting to come down...

 

... but as has happened so often this year, we seem to have caught another lucky break.

California's May forecast could limit dangerous snowmelt by Grace Toohey

Even though March 2023 was the second hottest March globally since record keeping began, temperatures in California have remained below historical averages — a trend that officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say will continue at least through next month.

“We’re actually favoring below-normal temperatures for a lot of the state,” said Scott Handel, a meteorologist with NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.

“You have that high snowpack in a lot of the West, including California, and also higher-than-normal soil moisture, and at the same time there’s below-normal temperatures in the ocean right off the coast of California — all of those factors should conspire to limit the chances of above-normal temperatures for [California],” Handel said.

Parts of California’s Central Valley continue to battle flooding after an extremely wet winter. While state water officials have warned residents of treacherous conditions this spring and summer due to increased river flows, NOAA’s outlook raised hopes that the so-called Big Melt might be milder than initially forecast.

“We’re not seeing any very warm periods that would cause concern just yet, and the hope is that when we do see those, or if we do see those, that they will be later in the season when the snowpack isn’t quite as large,” said Andrew Schwartz, lead scientist at UC Berkeley’s Central Sierra Snow Laboratory. “I would say things are looking pretty optimistic in terms of keeping any type of flooding — and the severity of that flooding — light.”

I don't want to dismiss the danger of upcoming floods or the damage we've seen so far, but we've managed to avoid the kind of deluge that the Central Valley is historically prone to. As natural disasters go, the events of the past few months have been minor and we desperately needed the water.

Many Californians with dry wells face long wait for fixes by Ian James

In a neighborhood surrounded by almond orchards and citrus groves southeast of Fresno, large plastic cisterns occupy the yards of many homes, and residents have learned to ration water until the next tanker truck arrives.

Even after major storms have boosted California rivers and reservoirs, many in the unincorporated community of Tombstone Territory continue to rely on state-funded water deliveries. Some of their wells went dry last year, while others have been coping with dry wells for as long as three years.

...

Groundwater depletion has progressively worsened through both wet and dry periods in the Central Valley, and accelerated over the last three years as heavy pumping sent aquifer levels plunging to new lows.

One of the encouraging signs I've noticed this year was that people (the government, journalists, the public at large) are finally getting serious about getting as much water as possible back into the ground. Historically, California infrastructure was built to get as much rain water into the ocean as quickly as possible, an approach that was short-sighted even before climate change kicked in.

Though it may seem counterintuitive, I get the feeling that the recent abundance of water has actually made folks out West think more seriously about conservation and management. The long drought seemed to produce a sense of learned helplessness -- why bother? -- but this winter has reminded us that the only thing worse than doing without is knowing that you're doing without because of wasted opportunity.
Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, May 3, 2023

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" -- Neom was just the beginning for MBS

“Let’s talk about something other than women driving. The NEOM project, the futuristic city that he (the crown prince) plans to invest half a trillion dollars in. What if it goes wrong? It could bankrupt the country.”
 Jamal Khashoggi, June 2017
 

As mentioned before, we live in a time of mad kings, megalomaniacal sociopaths granted dangerous power through wealth and/or political position, prone to wild schemes of empire and grandeur. Even in this crowded field, the ruler of Saudi Arabia manages to stand out, particularly with his willingness to burn through even the impressive coffers of his country building futuristic boondoggles. 

He's like a self-funding Elon Musk.

Space pods and flying dragons: How Saudi Arabia wants to transform its capital
Nadeen Ebrahim and Dalya Al Masri

At the heart of the project is the "Mukaab," a 400-meter (1,312-foot) high, 400-meter wide and 400-meter-long cube that is big enough to fit 20 Empire State buildings. It offers "an immersive experience" with landscapes changing from outer space to green vistas, according to Public Investment Fund (PIF), the MBS-led $620-billion sovereign wealth fund. The project is due to be completed in 2030.

...

"Back in the day, you would have negative discussions about Saudi Arabia affiliated to human rights abuses," said Andreas Krieg, research fellow at the King's College London Institute of Middle Eastern Studies. "But now they're trying to push new narratives of being a country of development and one that can build futuristic cities."

...

But some have questioned whether the project will even come to fruition. Saudi Arabia has announced similar mega projects in the past, work on which has been slow.

In 2021, MBS announced his $500 billion futuristic Neom city in the northwest of the country, with promises of robot maids, flying taxis, and a giant artificial moon. And last year, he unveiled a giant linear city, the Line, which aimed to stretch over 106 miles and house 9 million people.

...

"The more absurd and futuristic these projects get, the more I can't help but imagine how much more dystopian everything surrounding them will be," wrote Dana Ahmed, a Gulf researcher at Amnesty International, on Twitter.

Saudi officials have insisted that work on the projects is going ahead as planned.


Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, May 2, 2023

Always take a minute to think about the source of your data




Posted by at No comments:

Monday, May 1, 2023

Marketplace -- brought to you by American Public Media and the good people at the Koch Foundation [Updated]

Before we get started, I just want to go on the record with this: Marketplace is the best daily news show on public radio by a clear margin. Smart, clear, willing to push back against bullshit, attentive to the entire country, but some bad habits are so wide-spread and so entrenched that even the best journalists lapse.

From Why is it so hard for Congress to deal with the national debt? by Kimberly Adams.

And for all the complexities of the U.S. economy, if Congress really wants to address this, the broad solutions are fairly simple.

“On one hand, you can reduce certain types of spending that hopefully will not have these other negative consequences, like increasing poverty, increasing inequality, etc., etc.,” said Mariely Lopez-Santana, who teaches government and politics at George Mason University. “But on the other hand, you just need more money, right? And how do you get more money? By taxing certain types of people. So in that way, the solution might seem very basic.”

But of course, the political pain comes when you have to decide who loses benefits and who pays more in taxes.

“You have politicians who are all incentivized to go home to their constituents and say, ‘Look at all of the goodies I brought you out of the federal coffers,'” said EJ Antoni, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Promoting more economic growth can ease deficits, but to make a meaningful dent in the debt, Antoni said both parties need to make hard choices about popular programs like defense spending.

“But on top of that, we also need to have some very serious conversations about entitlements,” he added. This means Social Security, Medicare — the things politicians and their constituents don’t like messing with.

The reporter spoke with sources from two institutions, both coming from virtually identical perspectives, both (particularly Heritage) with somewhat checkered histories, and both funded in the past by the Koch brothers. Predictably, (to paraphrase Dorothy Parker) the range of policy suggestions ran the gamut from A to B, hitting the same old talking points that have been in heavy rotation even before anyone had heard of Simpson-Bowles, hard choices and "very serious conversations about entitlements."

Adams (usually a very good reporter) could have provided some context, pointing out that tax increases poll well with pretty much every group except Republican politicians, or that one party has a much better track on the deficit and it's not the one that gets a lot of support from George Mason University or the Heritage Foundation,

Update: This is Heritage in 2023.
Posted by at No comments:

Friday, April 28, 2023

The prize for best analogy of the week goes to Matt Levine

Actually last week but I'm playing catch-up.

From the April 19th newsletter [emphasis added]

But yesterday’s hearing undermines my view. There are members of Congress who seem to think that crypto is valuable and innovative, that the SEC is stifling innovation, etc., all the stuff that was standard in 2021 and that retreated after the high-profile crypto frauds and failures in 2022. Ahead of the hearing, all the Republicans on the committee sent Gensler a letter “slamming the Commission’s approach to digital asset regulation and attempts to force digital asset trading platforms to ‘come in and register’ under the ill-fitting national securities exchange (NSE) framework.” “To date,” they write, “the SEC has forced digital asset market participants into regulatory frameworks that are neither compatible with the underlying technology nor applicable because the firms’ activities do not involve an offering of securities.”

...

Third, there was pushback against Gensler for not owning or using crypto. “It is hard to understand something without using it,” writes Anthony Pompliano. “The idea that we have regulators who are actively making rules for something that they have never used seems confusing.”

This seems like a simple mistake. Nobody asks the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration if she has ever used meth. “How can you regulate meth if you have never used meth” is a non sequitur. “How can you understand meth if you have never used meth,” similarly, has easy answers: You can look at the science and sociology of how it affects people, decide that it’s bad, and regulate it accordingly. 


Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)