Thursday, June 15, 2023

Thursday Tweets -- I thought we could go two weeks without Musk, but I hadn't counted on dictator nostalgia.

I'm not really a finance guy, but I don't think this is a good sign.


 

Or this.


Since we've checked in, Musk has had some memorable tweets...


But this one stands out.



And in other tweets you thought were fake but aren't...






Elsewhere in the GOP.





While on the topic of "traditonal fiscal conservatism," remember those IRS cuts the Republicans demanded?




At least she didn't work in anything about the shape of the earth.


Watergate helped Nixon's stock with the far right.


Who would have thought that Ann Coulter would turn out to be the hitchhiker with the axe. *

Or that Hutchinson would be the sanest voice in the GOP.



As much as I hate to agree with this guy.




"The same issue"


If you're following the UFO story, you need to read this (there's  even a DeSantis angle).

AI News






I want to revisit this, but I suspect the post I end up with will just be a longer version of what Tuffy said.





And misc.

 








* Even the hitchhiker with the axe knows you shouldn't pick up the hitchhiker with the chainsaw. 
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Wednesday, June 14, 2023

Do I owe Ron DeSantis an apology?

[For the record, none of this applies to Michael Hiltzik, who pushed back on the standard narrative from day one.]

Andrew Gelman pushed back on my recent post about Ron DeSantis.

It seems to me that you're overstating your case. You say that DeSantis is "devoid of political talent." The fact that someone was nominated by a major party for governor of a competitive state, not to mention winning the election, that's a signal that he has _some_ political talent, no? I can buy the argument that DeSantis had some good luck, but "devoid of political talent"??

And, yes, Gelman does have a point.

For starters, absolute statements about people's character or abilities are almost always hyperbole to some degree. I probably should have been more careful with my language and I almost certainly should have added a couple of qualifiers.

First, when I talk about political talent, what I had in mind was the interpersonal side of the job, the ability to relate comfortably to people, move a crowd with the speech, show some charisma and stage presence. Obviously, there's a lot more to politics than that, and I should have been more clear.

Second, we are talking about the big leagues here. What constitutes practically no talent depends heavily on the standards of comparison. Just as the best performer in your community theater group would look hapless on the Broadway stage, Ron DeSantis shows few discernible gifts for the public facing side of politics compared to what we normally see on this level.

I don't want to spend too much time on examining Ron DeSantis's political career and what was behind it, been there done that, but it is worth taking a couple of minutes to look at 2018 and 2020. The margin a victory in the latter was substantial, but not particularly out of line with what we would expect given the makeup of the state and given that it has become ground central for the MAGA movement.

In the general election of 2018 he won by a fraction of a percent against a flawed Democratic candidate in a reddish purple state. Arguably, the one recent campaign where he overperformed was the 2018 primary and as much as one hates to concede a point to Donald Trump, the primary driver of that victory seems to be the decision to attach himself to the then president like a remora.

And if that categorization seems a bit unfair, watch the clip.




But all of this is straying from the main point. Politics is very much a field where it's better to be lucky than good and mediocre politicians catch favorable winds all the time. There's nothing very interesting about that part of the story, nor, at this point, is there anything particularly controversial about it. Here's how NYT columnist and reliable team player, Frank Bruni recently described watching DeSantis campaign. [Emphasis added.]

From the breathless media coverage of Ron DeSantis’s recent visits to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, you could easily get the impression that:

  • Voting starts in approximately five minutes.

  • You’re really watching a new Netflix series about a body snatcher’s attempts to pantomime just enough humanity to amass power on Planet Earth.

  • The Florida governor’s entire candidacy hinges on his wife, Casey DeSantis.


Bruni is one of the guys you go to for a consensus opinion and he is definitely delivered here. Suddenly everyone seems to have discovered that DeSantis isn't very good at this whole politics thing. Here's another recent opinion piece by Bruni that makes the same point at greater length. And since we're talking about standard narratives, we have to quote Politico.

For some time now she’s been seen mostly and by many as an absolute superstar of a political spouse, a not so “secret weapon,” even something like his saving grace — an antidote for her sometimes awkward husband, social in a way that he is not, charismatic in a way that he is not, generally and seemingly at ease in the spotlight in a way that he so often and so evidently is not.

The article later goes on to discuss "the perception of a novice, faltering DeSantis that’s also visible in a slide in early primary polls," and suggest the Casey is actually the brains behind the campaign.

I'm not sure I'd assign any value to the Politico piece as journalism -- there is usually little to be learned from juicy off-the-record quotes presumably from sources with axes to grind -- but as a gauge of conventional wisdom it's hard to beat.

I read the Bruni piece on first wives and skimmed the Politico profile of Casey DeSantis and I'm reasonably sure I managed to cull everything of value. There's nothing there that justifies the time it would take to read them. The only interesting aspect here is the complete and completely unacknowledged reversal in the narrative. [note to Andrew Gelman: yes, someone out there probably did acknowledge it but I don't personally know of an exception and I really liked that sentence.] 

For more than a year, the NYT, Politico and all the usual suspect, palpably delighted to have a leading Republican contender with Ivy League manners who didn't put ketchup on his steak, wrote article after article (some as late as this February) about how DeSantis was an unstoppable force. Now history has changed. We have always been at war with Eastasia and Ron DeSantis has always been bad at politics.


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Tuesday, June 13, 2023

Who would have thought that deciding to base a pick-up on those cars from Blade Runner would lead to engineering issues...

Before we get into this, it should be noted that the market reacted (or more accurately, failed to react) to this by pumping the stock up 15%. The main driver of the surge appears to be a deal with GM and Ford to partner up on an expanded charging network. The bull case seems optimistic, particularly when you remember that many of these same people justified their sky-high valuations partly because Tesla had exclusive rights to its charging network.

From "A Leaked Tesla Report Shows the Cybertruck Had Basic Design Flaws" by Jeremy White Aarian Marshall

In May, the German newspaper Handelsblatt began reporting on the “Tesla Files”: thousands of internal documents provided to it by a whistleblower. Among those documents was an engineering report that might give some insight into why the vehicle has taken so long to come to market. The report, dated January 25, 2022, which WIRED has examined, shows that the preproduction “alpha” version of the Cybertruck was still struggling with some basic problems with its suspension, body sealing, noise levels, handling. and braking.

This is on top of the issues we already knew about, including...

Stainless steel is not easy to shape or mold, “Hence the look as if it's the output of a student in an in-class ‘Pop Quiz Number 1’ for the course ‘Intro to Car Design,’” says Raj Rajkumar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.  The material requires specialized welding techniques, and it doesn’t flex easily, which could be dangerous in a crash, when force usually absorbed by a “crumple zone” could be transferred to cabin occupants instead, Rajkumar says.

Experts have noted that the odd shape of the vehicle, and particularly its sharp edges, will make it hard for the Cybertruck to meet pedestrian protection rules in Europe, and possibly in other markets.  “These long, unbroken sheets of metal, with the sharp lines and a humongous windshield, make me think there’s going to be some real issues with potentially passing safety regulations, especially outside the US,” Gartner’s Ramsey says.

Addressing all of these manufacturing and engineering issues is likely to have substantially pushed up the price of the Cybertruck. Musk initially said the pickup’s price would start below $40,000. However, by 2021 those attractive price estimates had already been removed from Tesla’s website. Musk told shareholders last year that the vehicle’s specifications and pricing had changed since its introduction in 2019.

 It was, however, this paragraph that particularly caught my eye.

“You need something new to reinvigorate the story. Whether that’s the humanoid robot, the Tesla Semi, the Cybertruck, Full Self-Driving, all of those are fair game in the eyes of the Tesla PR machine to keep the narrative going about continued growth,” says Jeffrey Osborne, a managing director and senior research analyst who covers Tesla at the financial services firm Cowen. “The logical [first] one of all of those is the Cybertruck.”

 We've been making similar points for a while now. From 2017:

Finally, it is essential to remember that maintaining this “real-life Tony Stark” persona is tremendously valuable to Musk. In addition to the ego gratification (and we have every reason to believe that Musk has a huge ego), this persona is worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Musk. More than any other factor, Musk’s mystique and his ability to generate hype have pumped the valuation of Tesla to its current stratospheric levels. Bloomberg put his total compensation from Tesla at just under $100 million a year. When Musk gets tons of coverage for claiming he's about to develop telepathy chips for your brain or build a giant subterranean slot car race track under Los Angeles, he keeps that mystique going. Eventually groundless proposals and questionable-to-false boasts will wear away at his reputation, but unless the vast majority of journalists become less credulous and more professional in the very near future, that damage won’t come soon enough to prevent Musk from earning another billion dollars or so from the hype.

And from 2022:

 

Maintaining his current fortune requires Musk to keep these fantasies vivid in the minds of fans and investors. People have to believe that the Tesla model after next will be a flying exoskeleton that can blow shit up.

Here are the primary exoskeletons of the Musk empire as of 2022.

Full Self Driving (Beta but see below)

Cyber trucks (one handmade prototype after all these years. Accepting checks now. Production always "next year")

Optimus the friendly robot (literally a dancer in a robot suit)

Fitbits for your brain (mainly an excuse to torture small primates to death)

Super fast tunnelling machines (actually slower than the industry standard)

And the one of these things which is not like the other...

Starlink (doable technology, absurd business plan, horrifying externalities)

From a business standpoint, FSD is the most important and a big chunk in the stock plunge may be a reflection of how it's going.


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Monday, June 12, 2023

"Melted, that would be enough to hypothetically drape almost 5 inches of water across the entire state of California."

It's been strange watching California's weather become such a big national story, partially because of the disconnect in tone The attitude out here has been appreciative than you might have guessed from the coverage. We got stunning levels of desperately needed precipitation with far less flooding than feared (though we still aren't entirely out of the woods) and little loss of life (mainly from swimmers and kayakers as far as I can tel.).

We've also gotten lucky with a cool Spring and early Summer that has spread the out the snowmelt, giving us a relatively steady flow of water that should continue well into the Summer, which is what we were hoping for.

From the LA Times June 8, 2023

 

That was UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain’s warning to Californians in late March, days before officials announced that this year’s Sierra snowpack contained historic volumes of water.

After years of drought and restrictions on water use, a series of atmospheric rivers between January and March brought epic amounts of rain and snow to the parched state. Heavy precipitation and below-average temperatures meant that snow accumulated for months high in the Sierra Nevada mountains along California's eastern border.

At its peak, the snowpack contained roughly the same amount of water as a full Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the country.

The snowpack itself acts as a natural water storage system for California. When the region’s climate shifts from cold and wet to warm and dry, the snow gradually melts down from mountain rivers and creeks, filling reservoirs and, possibly, causing further flooding in the Central Valley’s once-dry Tulare Lake.

State water managers say the snowmelt has likely peaked for the season, so long as temperatures remain relatively cool. Another rise in the melt is expected next week.

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Friday, June 9, 2023

Ten years ago at the blog

Thomas Friedman demonstrates the Roommate Effect

I have mixed feelings about criticizing Thomas Friedman. For one thing, it's been done. For another, he did some really impressive reporting on the Middle East and I suspect that, if he stuck to that topic, he would still be adding a great deal to the conversation.

In the role of public intellectual, though, he's pretty much been a disaster (insert Peter Principle digression here), and he keeps coming up with passages that are simply too representative not to use as examples of bad punditry.

Which brings us to the roommate effect. The roommate effect is one of the reasons that people who go to elite schools to tend do well professionally.

Imagine a small town populated predominately by people in their early 20s with similar backgrounds who are new to the area. Young people are good at making friends and this scenario is almost perfect for forming new relationships. You have roommates and friends and friends of roommates and roommates of friends. You meet people in the cafeteria and in the coffee houses and in the bars. You find people with common interests in music or movies or art or sports. These people tend to form much of the base of a social network that you will rely on for the rest of your life.

This part of the experience is common to anyone who has gone to a traditional college. But in an elite school, there is a fairly good chance that a new friends will be someone who is or is connected to someone who is rich/famous/powerful. Playing in a college pool league with the son of a Fortune 500 CEO is likely to be a good career move.

And that brings us to this recent Friedman column (mercilessly but not inaccurately satirized by Timothy Burke). The column is basically an unpaid advertorial for the job placement firm HireArt. The weaknesses of the column are a subject for another post; Friedman's lack of understanding of education and the job market is genuinely profound. However he does manage, quite unintentionally, to make an important point about the way things actually work (emphasis added for those who like to skim):
One of the best ways to understand the changing labor market is to talk to the co-founders of HireArt (www.hireart.com): Eleonora Sharef, 27, a veteran of McKinsey; and Nick Sedlet, 28, a math whiz who left Goldman Sachs. Their start-up was designed to bridge the divide between job-seekers and job-creators.
...

The way HireArt works, explained Sharef (who was my daughter’s college roommate), is that clients — from big companies, like Cisco, Safeway and Airbnb, to small family firms — come with a job description and then HireArt designs online written and video tests relevant for that job. Then HireArt culls through the results and offers up the most promising applicants to the company, which chooses among them.
In case you're wondering, Eleonora Sharef got her bachelor's from Yale.
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Thursday, June 8, 2023

Thursday Tweets -- now less musky

We are overstocked with bad science this week (AI, UFOs, Flat Earthers and RFK jr.), I thought I'd skip any tweets about a certain individual, though I suspect some of his known associates may make an appearance.


I love this analogy.







While not quite the same tech Apple just unveiled, it is always worth remembering that VR has been the next big thing for longer than many of the people saying VR is the next big thing have been alive.





I give you the perfect AI hype story.


Seguing from techbros to politics...




If he can hold on to the spotlight, Christie could make this interesting and by the standards of today's GOP, he may be the leper with the most fingers.


If you had told me that Ann Coulter would make a persuasive argument for contributing to the Chris Christie campaign...



Remember when Republicans didn't like Russian stooges?




I did Nazi that coming...

But with water (h/t to Seva Gunitsky)


Just so everyone remembers, the Miss Teen USA competition includes girls as young as 14.



Credibility...



I've been trying to sucker Andrew Gelman into doing a post on this. Read the thread to see why someone needs to write this up.



More from Devereaux.

I recall a story from a sci-fi collection about a menial office worker who was convinced he should have been born in the days of knights. A stranger appears and tells him he was right. There's a flash and he finds himself in a stable holding a shovel.

A visit to Aesthetica's page reveals exactly what you'd expect, implicit racism, explicit misogyny, and lots of bad fantasy art.


Speaking of flakes.



When friends tell me we wouldn't have these problems if we had a parliamentary system.

Just because we're taking a break from you know who doesn't mean we can't check in with another member of the PayPal mafia.





Also any famous person goes to the hospital. (see what they're saying about Jamie Foxx)



I promised you UFOs.


 
This is a long thread (it started in 2020) but you should read the whole thing).



 

 Come for the flat-earth content. Stay for the masterclass in how not to defend yourself from mockery.


In a case of bringing satiric coal to Newcastle, an Atlanta comic weighs in.


In case you thought RFK jr was was a one trick pony.


I do give this guy credit for leaving the tweet up.



Thunderbird going upscale is a development I did not (and did not wish to) see coming.


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Wednesday, June 7, 2023

The sad part is he's still better at his job than Chapek was

Living within walking distance of the Warner Brothers lot, I see an uncountable number of For Your Consideration billboards and I hear a lot about the strike.

Overall, average pay for Hollywood’s top execs climbed to $28 million in 2021, up 53% from 2018 (and roughly 108 times the average writer’s pay) according to the analysis, which uses compensation data from the research firm Equilar and includes stock options, base salaries, bonuses and other perks.

Meanwhile, average pay for Hollywood writers has remained virtually flat at about $260,000 as 2021, the Times reports. Median screenwriter pay has dropped 14% when adjusted for inflation over the last five years, according to statistics from the Writers Guild of America, the TV and film writers’ union with 11,500 members.

 

The top 10 highest-paid Hollywood executives in the last 5 years includes:

  1. David Zaslav, Warner Bros. Discovery Inc.: $498,915,318
  2. Ari Emanuel, Endeavor Group Holdings Inc.: $346,935,367
  3. Reed Hastings, Netflix: $209,780,532
  4. Bob Iger, Walt Disney Co.: $195,092,460
  5. Ted Sarandos, Netflix: $192,171,581
  6. Rupert Murdoch, Fox Corp.: $174,929,867
  7. Lachlan Murdoch, Fox Corp.: $171,359,374
  8. Brian Roberts, Comcast Corp.: $170,158,088
  9. Joseph Ianniello, Paramount Global: $152,793,125
  10. Patrick Whitesell, Endeavor Group Holdings Inc.: $143,584,597

 Let's take a look at Zaslaz. To be fair, most of that half billion came from before the merger, when he was CEO of Discovery and had a very good run pumping out cheap and profitable reality shows. It's difficult to argue anyone deserves that kind of compensation, but at least he was competent... was competent.

Since the merger, the studio is arguably floundering worse than it was before (and that's saying something). He rebranded the streaming service with the painfully generic name Max. He put James Gunn in charge of the superhero line apparently without seeing either Suicide Squad or Peacemaker. (Gunn is a brilliant filmmaker and Guardians shows he can make an effort to play by the studio rules but there's a lot of Troma in his DNA. Seriously, watch his deeply transgressive  DC work or, better yet, Tromeo and Juliet, and ask yourself, is this really the guy you want to give the car keys to?)

Perhaps the worst part of Zaslav's tenure has been the recent turmoil at CNN. Particularly since the Trump town hall, ratings are down, credibility is shot, and the talent is edging toward open revolt.

 And then there's this.

 
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Tuesday, June 6, 2023

The term of the day is "Reverse Centaur"

 From Cory Doctorow:

In AI circles, a “centaur” describes a certain kind of machine/human collaboration, in which “decision-support” systems (which the field loves to call “AI”s) are paired with human beings for results that draw upon the strengths of each, such as when a human chess master and a chess-playing computer program collaborate to smash their competition.

...

By contrast, an Amazon driver is a reverse-centaur. The AI is in charge, and the human is the junior partner. The AI is the head, telling the body what to do. The driver is the body — the slow-witted, ambulatory meat that is puppeteered by the AI master.


Doctorow provides further details in this post (complete with the wonderful phrase "digital phrenology").

Amazon DSP vans have Netradyne cameras inside and out, including one that is always trained on drivers' faces, performing digital phrenology on them, scoring them based on junk-science microexpression detection and other imaginary metrics.

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Monday, June 5, 2023

Over the next year and (almost) and half, you're going to hear a lot of historical "rules" from 538, the Upshot, etc. Here's a counter example to keep in mind when they start to sound persuasive.

 The pattern was clearer than almost any of the rules that were dredged up by data journalists in the past couple of elections to support this or that prediction. This is a forty year run with plenty of examples of candidates with and without the trait and 100% accuracy.

Then it just stopped. The lesson here is that even with the most convincing historical precedent based argument, you shouldn't assume the future should look like the past.

Monday, November 18, 2019

Fun with Political Trivia

This picks up on a recent thread (telling which one might be too much of a clue). The ones and zeros represent a trait of Democratic candidates from 1964 to 2004. Take a look and think about it for a moment. Here's a hint, the trait is something associated with each man well before he ran for president.

Johnson           1
Humphrey       0
McGovern       0      
Carter              1           
Mondale          0           
Dukakis           0           
Clinton            1                 
Gore                1                      
Kerry               0


As you might have guessed, the relationship between this trait and the popular vote didn't hold in the previous or following elections. The trait is not at all obscure. It was well known at the time and figured prominently into their political personas, This is not a trick question.

Read more »
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Friday, June 2, 2023

Ten years ago at the blog -- I may owe Burger King an Apology

Not because BK has notably upped their game, but they don't seem to have had any big screw-ups lately and they certainly haven't done anything as mind-numbingly stupid as firing the firm largely responsible for turning around probably the most damaged brands in the industry.

 AdWeek from 2015:

Instead, the fast food chain stopped working with Secret Weapon last month. The client is now “working to…determine our formal relationship” with L.A.’s David&Goliath, which joined its creative roster early this year and created  its “Legendary” ad for the Super Bowl. The decision to switch agencies also follows Jack in the Box’s promotion of Keith Guilbault to the chief marketing officer role in late 2013.

 (I looked up "Legendary" on YouTube. I believe I'd seen it before, but I'd almost completely forgotten it.)

 

Friday, May 31, 2013

Burger King vs. Jack in the Box -- More thoughts on corporate competence

 

While on the subject of corporate competence, this recent story  seems like a good excuse to do a post on on one of the most consistently incompetent companies on the business landscape.

One of the most intriguing and for those inclined toward schadenfreude entertaining things about Burger King is the way that for about the past thirty years, with a variety of managers and owners, the company has been so bad at so many things.

Their PR is often clumsy (you generally want to avoid headlines about you copying your competitor's products).

Their relationship with their franchisees is terrible.

Relations became so antagonistic that last year the [franchisees'] association took the extraordinary step of filing two class-action lawsuits challenging management decisions. One suit, filed in U.S. district court in San Diego, came after the company sought to divert to national advertising millions of rebate dollars that franchisees get from Coca-Cola Co. and Dr. Pepper Snapple Group Inc. for selling their beverages. That suit was dropped after the company agreed to augment its ad budget by other means.

The other association suit opposed a company mandate that franchisees sell a double cheeseburger for $1. That suit, still pending in federal district court in Miami, contends that management can only suggest prices franchisees charge. Franchisees had voted down the proposed sandwich, arguing they would lose money at $1, but Burger King introduced it anyway. In court papers, the company argued that an appeals-court ruling in another suit involving pricing gave it the right to make the move. Since the filing, Burger King has taken the double cheeseburger off its $1 Value Menu, and raised its suggested price, but announced plans to add more items to that menu.

Burger King also faces a suit brought by three franchisees—two are in the company's Hall of Fame for exceptional franchisees—challenging a mandate that they keep their restaurants open late at night. It "costs franchisees $100 an hour, but they gross only $25 to $30 an hour," says Robert Zarco, a Miami attorney representing the plaintiffs. The two sides are awaiting a hearing on the company's motion to dismiss that litigation, which was filed in Dade County Circuit Court in Florida in December 2008.
The dealings with the franchisees demonstrates another reason why BK schadenfreude is so satisfying. The incompetence often comes mixed with a curious nastiness.

Here's Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, writing for the New York Times:
In 2005, Florida tomato pickers gained their first significant pay raise since the late 1970s when Taco Bell ended a consumer boycott by agreeing to pay an extra penny per pound for its tomatoes, with the extra cent going directly to the farm workers. Last April, McDonald’s agreed to a similar arrangement, increasing the wages of its tomato pickers to about 77 cents per bucket. But Burger King, whose headquarters are in Florida, has adamantly refused to pay the extra penny — and its refusal has encouraged tomato growers to cancel the deals already struck with Taco Bell and McDonald’s.
...
Telling Burger King to pay an extra penny for tomatoes and provide a decent wage to migrant workers would hardly bankrupt the company. Indeed, it would cost Burger King only $250,000 a year. At Goldman Sachs, that sort of money shouldn’t be too hard to find. In 2006, the bonuses of the top 12 Goldman Sachs executives exceeded $200 million — more than twice as much money as all of the roughly 10,000 tomato pickers in southern Florida earned that year. Now Mr. Blankfein should find a way to share some of his company’s good fortune with the workers at the bottom of the food chain.
And then there are the ad campaigns. You would be hard pressed to find a comparable company with a worse run of advertising. You have to go back to the Seventies and early Eighties to find effective BK commercials. Since then a variety of agencies have produced a steady stream of mediocre ads ranging from forgettable to off-putting (try Googling "creepy Burger King").

Actually, there is at least one BK campaign that people in the advertising industry are still talking about, but not in a good way. In response to the proto-viral success of Joe Sedelmaier's "Where the Beef" ads, BK engaged J Walter Thompson (who were and are kind of a big deal) to set up a massive nation wide campaign of ads and cash prizes for people who spotted "Herb."



Here's Wikipedia's description of the aftermath:
The promotion met with some positive reviews. Time called it "clever", and a columnist for the Chicago Tribune stated that Herb was "one of the most famous men in America". Ultimately, however, the Herb promotion has been described as a flop. The advertising campaign lasted three months before it was discontinued. One Burger King franchise owner stated that the problem was that "there was absolutely no relevant message". Although some initial results were positive, the mystique was lost after Herb's appearance was revealed during the Super Bowl. Burger King's profits fell 40% in 1986. As a result of the poorly-received campaign, Burger King dropped J. Walter Thompson from their future advertising. The US$200 million account was given to N. W. Ayer.
Recently, an MSNBC article listed this as the second worst Superbowl ad of all time.

Burger King has little competition for worst managed large fast food company and absolutely for worst marketed. McDonald's, Wendy's, Subway, Hardee's/Carl's Jr, and the Yum brands have all had better campaigns, but my vote for best (at least for the past 18 years) is the smart and innovative regional chain Jack-in-the-Box.

The commercials come from the aptly named ad agency, Secret Weapon which has an interesting policy.
We will never take on more than three clients at a time. This means our clients get hands-on attention from the principals of the agency. You may have been promised this before by other agencies, but it’s tough to give 25% of your time to 18 different accounts.

Our three client rule means you get to work with the people you meet in the pitch. And since we rarely pitch we’re able to keep our attention on existing clients, not potential ones. As it should be.
The ads are sharp and funny (sometimes too sharp -- certain competitors were decidedly unamused by an ad for a sirloin burger that pointed at a diagram of beef cuts and asked "where's the angus?"). More importantly, they're good ads; they focus on the product.





Check out Jack's expressions on this one.




The following comment appeared on the site where I found the following mini sirloin burgers ad.  Could say something about the cultural impact of advertising but I'll just leave you with the image.

"Shit you not, guard controlled TV for the cell block, most of 128 inmates singing along to this. Almost magical except for the whole incarceration thing."



And in the did-they-just-say-that-? category.




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Thursday, June 1, 2023

Thursday Tweets

I only watched the first season so it is possible Succession got much better later on. It is not, however, possible that it got good enough to justify the coverage the finale has been getting. Thank God for Pitchbot.


A few choice moments with today's GOP





The best part is when she misses the bags completely.



And you thought being fired by email was bad.


I prefer to think of it as the politics of catharsis, but it's basically the same concept.


Republicans are providing the opposition with plenty of ammo. Now if the Democrats will only use it.

 

For example.




The line between satire and...

A Mount Everest of false equivalence. Remarkable even for the New York Times.



The trouble isn't that this is what Heritage has become; the trouble is that too many journalists still think they're dealing with the old Heritage. 



Back in the USSR


[I feel like there ought to be a smooth segue from Russia to failed policies and food shortages...]



Checking in with Elon.





You know those stories where bigotry is overcome by a parents love of an LGBT child? This is not one of those stories.


Conversations in AI


Thread





The essay on The National Library of Thailand thought experiment is highly recommended.

 

And one more from Pitchbot.

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Wednesday, May 31, 2023

When looking at the debate over Samuelson's USSR forecasts, at least we can all agree that somebody comes off looking bad.

I've been meaning to write this up for a few months now, but recent events have pushed it back to the forefront.

A number of times over the past few years, Andrew Gelman has revisited this Marginal Revolution post from Alex Tabarrok. (emphasis added.)

In the 1961 edition of his famous textbook of economic principles, Paul Samuelson wrote that GNP in the Soviet Union was about half that in the United States but the Soviet Union was growing faster.  As a result, one could comfortably forecast that Soviet GNP would exceed that of the United States by as early as 1984 or perhaps by as late as 1997 and in any event Soviet GNP would greatly catch-up to U.S. GNP.  A poor forecast–but it gets worse because in subsequent editions Samuelson presented the same analysis again and again except the overtaking time was always pushed further into the future so by 1980 the dates were 2002 to 2012.  In subsequent editions, Samuelson provided no acknowledgment of his past failure to predict and little commentary beyond remarks about “bad weather” in the Soviet Union (see Levy and Peart for more details).


I've always had the nagging feeling that this was not the whole story, a reaction I often have with Marginal Revolution posts, but it wasn't until recently that I came across this very good Paul Krugman piece discussing how the collapse of the Soviet economy helped put Vladimir Putin in power that I found out what Tabarrok had left out.

First, some background: Nowadays everyone views the old Soviet Union, with its centrally planned economy, as an abject failure. But it didn’t always look that way. Indeed, in the 1950s, and even into the 1960s, many people around the world saw Soviet economic development as a success story; a backward nation had transformed itself into a major world power. (Killing millions in the process, but who’s counting?) As late as 1970, the Soviet Union’s success in converging toward Western levels of wealth seemed second only to Japan’s.

Nor was this a statistical mirage. If nothing else, Soviet performance during World War II demonstrated that its industrial growth under Joseph Stalin had been very real.

After 1970, however, the Soviet growth story fell apart, and by some measures technological progress came to a standstill.

 If you follow the link to the Robert C. Allen paper, you'll find the following graph:

Assuming that the US was one of the boxes on the far right, when "Paul Samuelson wrote that GNP in the Soviet Union was about half that in the United States but the Soviet Union was growing faster," he was simply stating the facts.

To be clear, I didn't know any of these things about the economy of mid 20th century USSR. The only reason I started to look into it was because I happened to read the Krugman op-ed. Before that my knowledge was be limited to the memory of some disastrous famines and a few anecdotes about Soviet factories turning out concrete couches, and I would have had no idea that Samuelson's models were consistent with the actual GDP/GNP data.

Quick caveat. Neither GDP nor GNP is a measure of quality of life. The Soviet Union was a terrible place. As Krugman points out, Stalin's policies killed millions of his own people. We should also note that economies are complex things that can never truly be boiled down to a single scalar. The same country that could build the world's second most powerful military could also be comically inept at making consumer goods and tragically bad at producing food.

But this is a conversation about growth, and given those terms, there are three great unresolved questions about the Soviet economy. Why was growth so good for forty plus years? Why was it so stunningly bad after that? And what changed?

This opens up multiple really big warehouse-store cans of peas, but if we keep focused on the question of Samuelson's treatment of the Soviet economy, it certainly looks reasonable up to say the late 60s or early seventies. After that, the performance of the Soviet economy started to rapidly collapse. What exactly do we expect a modeler to do under those circumstances? The first option is to treat the new numbers as an outlier. The second is to treat them as a trend. The third is to attempt to incorporate the new data while still not ignoring the bulk of the numbers. It appears that Samuelson went with door number three which would seem to be the most reasonable choice.

There were certainly issues with Samuelson's approach. Ironically, by editing out the genuinely impressive and largely uncontroversial period of Soviet economic growth, Tabarrok missed the chance to point out a real and fairly obvious flaw in Samuelson's forecast. Small economies modernizing often rack up impressive growth rates but they by nature follow S curves. You can create a big bump in GDP by moving a peasant or surf from the fields to the factory, but you can only do it once.Linear extrapolation was clearly a mistake.

In general, though, if you start with the fact that the observed data included a 40 plus year run of extremely high GDP growth, then look at where the data was at the point in time when Samuelson made a particular statement or assertion (taking into account a one or two year time lag between the analyses being run and the copyright date on the textbook), most of it looks okay. Were there changes that should have come one edition before? Sure, but the impression of clownishness which the George Mason crowd is pushing here only works if the audience doesn't know the history of Soviet economic growth, but does know how the USSR ended up. Taking all of that into account, Samuelson comes off looking not all that bad. Alex Tabarrok, on the other hand...

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Tuesday, May 30, 2023

The Fallen of World War II

Neil Halloran is a film-maker who specializes in data visualization. Everything I've seen from him is good, but he's best known for this remarkable video on the human toll of the second world war.





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Monday, May 29, 2023

"Humor in Uniform"

As previously mentioned, the names of two of the best known cartoon characters to come out of WWII (Snafu and Sad Sack) were euphemisms for a couple of decidedly colorful phrases.











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