Wednesday, August 9, 2023

When it comes to politics, there's almost no real data journalism, just narratives and drunkards' lamp-posts*

* "They use statistics like a drunkard uses a lamp-post, not for illumination but for support."   **

Actual data journalism, where the story comes from the numbers and the journalist tries to explain what they're saying, is the exception in political reporting. What we generally get is narrative journalism where the data serves strictly as a drunkard's lamp-posts. Two recent examples, the first from the NYT.

[This picks up directly from Friday's post, so if you missed that you might want to go back and get caught up before proceeding.]

A year ago, the political press was all abuzz about how badly Trump was doing and how great DeSantis was doing. Their primary evidence was a poll that had the former president leading the governor 49 -- 25. Recently, the same crowd was abuzz over a new poll which had Trump over DeSantis, 54 -- 17.

 In absolute terms, this is not that much of a change. Trump improved by five points; DeSantis dropped by eight, but somehow when journalists, often the same journalists, analyzed these two polls, they managed to come to almost completely opposite conclusions. 49 meant that Trump was imploding, he was effectively out of the game, it was all over but the shouting. 54 meant that Trump was triumphant, he had the nomination wrapped up, it was again all over but the shouting.

 As we pointed out at the time, that 49-25 didn't actually look very good for DeSantis. By the same token, the 54-17 doesn't look as bad for the governor as everyone seems to think. After months of pretty much being the only rival that Trump has been focusing on, despite blistering attacks, DeSantis remains securely in the beauty pageant runner-up slot. If for any reason the pageant winner is unable to fulfill her duties as Miss GOP, the first runner up will step into the job. Since there is a real chance that for reasons of health or incarceration, Trump might drop out or be forced out, this is not a bad place for Ron to be. 

When you add in a rally round the flag effect that may or may not be fleeting, the polls haven't actually shifted that much but they are being used to serve a completely different narrative. Keep in mind, in 2021 and 2022, at least after January 6th, the general consensus was that Trump was effectively dead in the water. Even if you had put aside his legal troubles, he was now branded a loser and conventional wisdom had it that his loyal cult would now start to abandon him. Around the same time, the Rupert Murdoch empire with considerable help from the establishment media of the New York Times, Politico, Slate, etc decided that Ron DeSantis was the perfect choice to replace Trump as a far-right but still conventional candidate. There were a few voices in the wilderness such as Michael Hiltzik of the LA Times pointing out the flaws in this line of reasoning, but they were almost entirely ignored. Now things are different.

Print the narrative. When the narrative changes, print the new narrative.

Perhaps the mother of all modern political narratives is Dems in disarray. We could find countless examples of bad data analysis supporting this one from the pages of the New York Times, but it is hard to beat this recent example from Politico. Emphasis added.

By Jessica Piper [Sam Stein contributed to this report.]

One of the best online fundraising days for Democrats this year was the day of Joe Biden’s campaign launch — but even that day’s haul was meager compared to his campaign kickoff four years ago.

That’s among the findings of an analysis of fundraising for the first half of the year through ActBlue, the party’s primary donation processor. Small-dollar giving at the federal level totaled $312 million in the first half of 2023 — a drop-off of more than $30 million compared to this point in the 2020 cycle. The platform also had 32 percent fewer donors in the second quarter this year compared to four years prior, although its total fundraising increased slightly due to several factors, including more recurring donors and greater giving to non-federal groups.

How do you go from a slight increase to a a full-bore the-sky-is-falling story about a funding catastrophe? You employ those two old standbys of data cooking, arbitrarily limited range and comparing to a spike. In this case, the tip off is "federal." If you look at the big picture, fundraising is going pretty well. If you only look at the federal level, there is a drop, but only because the situation four years ago was completely different.

Think back to 2019. We were in the middle of perhaps the most wide open democratic primary in living memory. There were at that point over 20 reasonably serious competitors, all of whom were aggressively fundraising. 

This pretty much explains the "massive" hit. The money that was going to the primary has now shifted to places like Wisconsin where it can do the most good. If the journalists were following the data, the narrative would be "dems in array."

 Print the narrative.

 

** The original analogy goes all the way back to A. E. Housman who was talking about manuscripts rather than statistics. That isn't relevant to this post but is too cool to leave out.

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Tuesday, August 8, 2023

"Congress is too credulous on UFOs "

If you're looking for a good brief overview of the UAP (UFO) hearings, this CNN piece by Jason Colavito is an excellent choice. Colavito has been on this beat for years, doing grounded, well-researched, and appropriately skeptical work.

On Wednesday, former military intelligence officer and so-called UFO “whistleblower” David Grusch testified to a House Oversight subcommittee that he had heard from other unnamed officials that the US government has a secret program to recover and reverse engineer non-human spacecraft.

...

In a statement after the hearing, the Pentagon disputed Grusch’s testimony and emphasized that it has found no evidence of crashed saucer programs or space aliens. We can’t entirely rule out the possibility that Grusch discovered something real. Certainly, pilots see things in the sky they don’t understand. It’s also very likely that the Pentagon isn’t completely transparent about all of its advanced aerospace programs. The trouble is that Grusch’s stories are, in all likelihood, not evidence of non-human activity.

...

These stories have circulated in UFO circles since the 1940s. Declassified documents show that during the Cold War, the government repeatedly recovered items first reported as UFOs that in fact were meteors, industrial waste, hoaxed objects and human-made technology. So there were “crash retrievals” — just not of alien ships.

...

For the past several years, Grusch has been working alongside a network of government-adjacent UFO believers (many now working for defense contractors or UFO think tanks) who have been sources in stories about flying saucers and dead aliens across the media and in the halls of Congress. You might have seen some of them on cable UFO shows like “The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch,” in which a former Pentagon UFO analyst who served on the task force that helped write the government’s 2021 UFO report now leads a reality TV crew hunting harmful, disembodied quantum “hitchhiker” entities, one of which he claims attached itself to him. It would be funny, except that the Pentagon regularly employs believers in space ghosts and Congress listens to them.

Eric W. Davis, a physicist and longtime UFO researcher, briefed the Pentagon and Congress on the same supposed crash retrieval programs a couple years back. None of the evidence he or Grusch provided over the past few years, however, has been enough to convince Congress — as credulous as some members have been — that aliens are here. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who has helped lead the charge in Congress for UFO research, recently told The Los Angeles Times that she hadn’t seen definitive evidence of aliens.

One complaint: the quantum hitchhikers are nowhere near the craziest thing the Skinwalker crowd believes in.

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Monday, August 7, 2023

We've got more UFO content coming so I thought I'd set the mood

The Invaders was a 60s sci-fi show from Quinn Martin created by the great exploitation auteur, Larry Cohen. It was sort of a mash-up of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and QM's recently completed the Fugitive.


 

Tom Nichols (yeah, that Tom Nichols) recently wrote an appreciation of MeTV's late night line-up and here's what he had to say about The Invaders.

The Irwin Allen festival is a truckload of cheese (except on the Land of the Giants planet, where it wouldn’t be enough for one hors d’oeuvre). But at 5 a.m., you have the opportunity to catch up on one of the greatest science-fiction programs ever made, a paranoid thriller from the Quinn Martin factory: The Invaders.

The Invaders took the idea of a lone person spotting aliens out in the boondocks, but then asked: What if that one person, instead of being some idiot out fishing in a swamp, was actually a really smart and brave professional and he wasn’t going to take no for an answer when telling his story?

They cast the very intense Roy Thinnes as the hero, architect David Vincent. The show had a real air of menace, not least because the invaders were indistinguishable from humans, but also because they had some scary tech, including a little gizmo that could kill you without a trace by inducing a heart attack. Over the course of the series, David starts gaining the upper hand, even at one point saving a town by negotiating a truce with the invaders. This was pretty intelligent stuff and it’s a shame the show never had a proper finale.


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Friday, August 4, 2023

(Almost) one year ago at the blog -- what the NYT was saying about DeSantis twelve months ago

 But first, what they're saying now...

Trump Crushing DeSantis and GOP Rivals, Times/Siena Poll Finds
    by Shane Goldmacher


The twice-indicted former president leads across nearly every category and region, as primary voters wave off concerns about his escalating legal jeopardy.

Former President Donald J. Trump is dominating his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, leading his nearest challenger, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, by a landslide 37 percentage points nationally among the likely Republican primary electorate, according to the first New York Times/Siena College poll of the 2024 campaign.

Mr. Trump held decisive advantages across almost every demographic group and region and in every ideological wing of the party, the survey found, as Republican voters waved away concerns about his escalating legal jeopardy. He led by wide margins among men and women, younger and older voters, moderates and conservatives, those who went to college and those who didn’t, and in cities, suburbs and rural areas.

The poll shows that some of Mr. DeSantis’s central campaign arguments — that he is more electable than Mr. Trump, and that he would govern more effectively — have so far failed to break through. Even Republicans motivated by the type of issues that have fueled Mr. DeSantis’s rise, such as fighting “radical woke ideology,” favored the former president.

Overall, Mr. Trump led Mr. DeSantis 54 percent to 17 percent. No other candidate topped 3 percent support in the poll.

Below those lopsided top-line figures were other ominous signs for Mr. DeSantis. He performed his weakest among some of the Republican Party’s biggest and most influential constituencies. He earned only 9 percent support among voters at least 65 years old and 13 percent of those without a college degree. Republicans who described themselves as “very conservative” favored Mr. Trump by a 50-point margin, 65 percent to 15 percent.

Other NYT headlines from just the past few days include phrases like "With DeSantis Reeling," "As His Campaign Craters," "A Reeling DeSantis." (Apparently, they like that word.)

The paper's political analysts feel that 17% is a poor showing for a candidate, and I would be the first to agree. I do, however, feel compelled to point out that this is the same team who thought 25% was really impressive.

 

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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Thursday, August 3, 2023

Thursday Tweets -- a week so packed, I couldn't even work in the one about David Hasselhoff being Pee-Wee Herman's college roommate

Other than having a famous father, I've never been able to figure out why Josh Barro has a career.

 

We've been talking about this since early 2016. Trump has been holding the party ransom for almost eight years and the rates keep going up.


I know it's competitive, but I think McCarthy's dignity levels may now be lower than Lindsey Graham's.






If any pundit or political analyst tries to make a historical polls based prediction about the upcoming primary, just scream "range of observed data!" until they go away.



As we've said before, Democrats need to make every discussion about democracy, reproductive rights, and Social Security/Medicare.

For example...

Not sure this has wide resonance.

Bonier has a good track record.




If Musk has a messiah complex, does that mean Sacks has a herald complex or just a sycophant complex?


Here's the decision you have to make about Tesla:
are you not going to buy one because of this?;
or are you not going to buy one because the range numbers are fake?;
or are you not going to buy one because they sometimes spontaneously burst into flames?

At least when your Tesla does burst into flames it's over quick.

 




Maybe he could partner with Elizabeth Holmes.

 





Like the former fighter pilot said.



Or just read the Cliff Notes.







They also have grounds for a false advertising case against parent company Yum! for calling itself Yum!




All videos with non-Newtonian fluids are cool.

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Wednesday, August 2, 2023

Saving the world by buying luxury cars was always a painful example of first world thinking.


 

Following up on Monday's post ("The biggest automotive scandal since VW's Dieselgate and guess who's behind it... "), Edward Niedermeyer, the guy who literally wrote the book on Tesla, provides some important context for the company's latest scandal.

For much of the past decade, Tesla’s popularization of electric vehicles has centered on one innovation above all others: solving “range anxiety,” or the worry that your EV will run out of juice midtrip. By packing more batteries into its cars and establishing a fast-charging network, Elon Musk’s automaker sold the seductive idea that EVs could be a drop-in, one-to-one replacement for gas-powered vehicles. Today, that idea is the most fundamental orthodoxy underpinning the “EV transition,” shaping government policy and consumer tastes alike.

...

From the very beginning, even before Elon Musk was involved with the company, Tesla’s vision was simple: put enough lithium-ion batteries into a car to give it blistering performance and long range. This resulted in a high-end product that was tailor-made to be marketed to the emerging tech elite, with the promise that the resulting high price would be magically reduced through scale and technological innovation. In a landscape of modest, short-range but still not cheap commuter EVs, Tesla’s gas-rivaling range (and later, fast-charging network) felt like a vision of a viable future and not just another hair shirt for environmentalists.

...

Thanks to Tesla’s leadership, consumers are buying the biggest battery EVs they can, thinking that they’re saving the planet when they’re actually hoarding unused batteries to ward off their personal range anxiety. Because Americans only drive 40 miles a day on average, and because 95 percent of car trips are 30 miles or less, the range figures Tesla has normalized are wildly overkill and exacerbate battery supply chain issues that are only just starting to bite. Only wild inefficiency can make it feel like EVs can replace gas cars perfectly, and even then, with the best charging network available, long-distance journeys will still never be as fast and efficient as they are with gas cars, because it will always take longer to juice up an EV.

The big lie at the heart of Tesla’s big-battery approach is that EVs can directly replace gas cars without any real behavioral change on the part of consumers. But no matter how desperate the public and lawmakers are to believe this—it would be nice!—it simply isn’t so: Internal combustion and battery electric vehicles are fundamentally different technologies, with different strengths and weaknesses. No battery electric will ever be as good at unplanned, long-range trips in remote areas as a gas car, just as no gas car will ever refill its tank overnight.

Instead of following Tesla’s lead and getting into a battery-size arms race that will make the future of cars even more expensive, oversized, dangerous, and wasteful than they already are, we simply need to accept that the market must change. Instead of giving the biggest incentives to the biggest batteries, government policy should focus on electrifying the vast majority of daily trips, which start and end at home and could easily be handled by vehicles with 100 miles of range or less. That means incentivizing home charging, not the roadtrips that make up a tiny percentage of trips, and nudging consumers toward using the smallest battery possible for those regular trips. That means incentivizing e-bikes, plug-in hybrids, and other small battery electric vehicles, not holding fleet electrification hostage to the 5 percent use cases.

Musk's promise of salvation without sacrifice has found an eager audience with the technocratic wing of the pundit class, as has the rest of hiss mythology. The idea of Musk and Musk-like tech messiahs  support Noah Smith's gospel of abundance.

It required entrepreneurs like Elon Musk to invest their lives and their fortunes in battery companies that pushed down the cost of batteries through mass production and scale effects, rather than starting companies that made death drones or ad tech.
Musk buys his batteries from Panasonic then lies about their performance. (We'll get into the whole bursting-into-flames thing some other time.)

Vox's David Roberts bought the full service "Musk is not in it for the money." PR package complete with SolarCity scam. Roberts' credulity became a bit easier to understand when I got to this: " (For insight on Musk, see Ashlee Vance’s biography or this invaluable series on Wait But Why.)" 

Vance's book is deeply problematic, a largely trusting account of a serial liar, but at least it looks good in comparison to the WBW posts, which start with an entry entitled "Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man." Things go down hill from there.

Lots of people are now catching on that Musk was and is a con man whose reputation rests on claiming credit for things that were either done by other people or simply made up, but for many of those people there's a lag. They haven't come to terms with the possibility that Elon wasn't a tech messiah because there are no tech messiahs.

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Tuesday, August 1, 2023

Remember how everyone got so worked up about aliens using Apple OS in Independence Day? Turns out they're also on the metric system.


Remember the story of the Trinity Incident where a couple of old guys came up with an unbelievable and completely unsubstantiated story that fooled the world's leading ufologist, the New York Times, and the US government?  Douglas Dean Johnson wrote the definitive debunking of the hoax. Loads of amusing details, but this might be my favorite.

From: Crash Story File: The “Alien” Artifact with Metric Dimensions

Beginning with early versions of the Reme Baca-Jose Padilla story, Padilla, while inside the crashed alien craft, uses “a pipe," or in later renditions a “cheat bar” (crowbar), to pry a metal device off the inner wall of the craft. As he described it to radio host Richard Syrett in December 2010:

There was a piece of material there, you could turn it around in circles...I got a cheater bar, and I went back in there and pried it off, I ripped it right off...to me it looked like a boomerang.

“I had to put all my one hundred pounds that I weighed to get it off,” Padilla said in 2010 (Veritas interview at 30:10). Striving to explain the workings of his ostensibly eight-year-old mind, Padilla added, “I had to get something out of evidence, that will some day, you know, we’ll come up with something, you know.” (Veritas at 30:30)

 This is a part from a pump. You can buy something almost exactly like it online or from a well stocked hardware store. If someone showed you something like this and said it came from a crashed alien spaceship, I;ll bet I can guess your reaction, and furthermore, I'll bet it would be this: the guy grabbed the part from a pile of old parts and made the story up.

 I'll also bet your reaction wouldn't be this:


 

 

Struggling a bit with the details, here. They had the generator and the cord but they didn't have a spool (or needed another one) so they got their hands on a Mexican pump part and bolted it to the inside of the spaceship.

 Vallée (the basis for the François Truffaut character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind) had more to say on the subject.

 I had become convinced it was likely a common industrial object, but Paola disagreed, and indeed some mystery remained. Actually, it had only become more puzzling: How did that piece of rough aluminum alloy end up pinned to the interior wall of the extraordinary vehicle the military had been so eager to remove and hide away in an undisclosed laboratory, where it presumably rests today?” (Trinity, page 125)

I have a theory.

That convoluted instrument may appear standard but it is not “unremarkable." We have yet to ask what an ordinary, human fragment of some low-tech aluminum gadget was doing aboard a fantastic craft dropping from the sky in the middle of a storm, shattering the Marconi Tower of the White Sands Missile Range as its crew of diminutive insectoids skidded weirdly through the cabin. (Trinity, page 140)

Still have a theory.

What kind of interplanetary spacecraft would contain a device made of a common, human industrial alloy, without brand identification, manufactured to precise metric dimensions (30 cm long by 9 centimeters high) and metric diameters for all the holes? (Trinity, page 306)

 Pretty sure I have an answer for this one.

 

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Monday, July 31, 2023

The biggest automotive scandal since VW's Dieselgate and guess who's behind it...

 On some level, everyone who has been following the auto industry knew there was something like this going on. Pretty much every time an independent outfit like Edmunds tested EVs, Tesla not only under-performed but did so by a far worse margin than anyone else. The details, however, tell a story far more wide spread and egregious than all but the most jaded Elon watcher was expecting.

From  Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints

                      by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu

Tesla years ago began exaggerating its vehicles’ potential driving distance – by rigging their range-estimating software. The company decided about a decade ago, for marketing purposes, to write algorithms for its range meter that would show drivers “rosy” projections for the distance it could travel on a full battery, according to a person familiar with an early design of the software for its in-dash readouts.

Then, when the battery fell below 50% of its maximum charge, the algorithm would show drivers more realistic projections for their remaining driving range, this person said. To prevent drivers from getting stranded as their predicted range started declining more quickly, Teslas were designed with a “safety buffer,” allowing about 15 miles (24 km) of additional range even after the dash readout showed an empty battery, the source said.

...

Tesla was fined earlier this year by South Korean regulators who found the cars delivered as little as half their advertised range in cold weather. Another recent study found that three Tesla models averaged 26% below their advertised ranges.

...

Such advisors handled a variety of issues, including range complaints. But last summer, Tesla created the Las Vegas “Diversion Team” to handle only range cases, according to the people familiar with the matter.

The office atmosphere at times resembled that of a telemarketing boiler room. A supervisor had purchased the metallophone – a xylophone with metal keys – that employees struck to celebrate appointment cancellations, according to the people familiar with the office’s operations.

Advisers would normally run remote diagnostics on customers’ cars and try to call them, the people said. They were trained to tell customers that the EPA-approved range estimates were just a prediction, not an actual measurement, and that batteries degrade over time, which can reduce range. Advisors would offer tips on extending range by changing driving habits.

If the remote diagnostics found anything else wrong with the vehicle that was not related to driving range, advisors were instructed not to tell the customer, one of the sources said. Managers told them to close the cases.

Tesla also updated its phone app so that any customer who complained about range could no longer book service appointments, one of the sources said. Instead, they could request that someone from Tesla contact them. It often took several days before owners were contacted because of the large backlog of range complaints, the source said.

...

The team was expected to close about 750 cases a week. To accomplish that, office supervisors told advisers to call a customer once and, if there was no answer, to close the case as unresponsive, the source said. When customers did respond, advisers were told to try to complete the call in no more than five minutes.

In late 2022, managers aiming to quickly close cases told advisors to stop running remote diagnostic tests on the vehicles of owners who had reported range problems, according to one of the people familiar with the diversion team’s operations.

“Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” by advisors who had never run diagnostics, the person said.

Normally, this kind of news would devastate a  high flying stock like Tesla (P/E ratio 75.64, more than ten times that of VW, GM, or BMW), particularly in a week that also saw evidence that yet another company had passed Tesla in the robotaxi race, but there was nothing more than a quick drop which was gone by the afternoon.

Yet another reminder, the market can stay irrational...


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Sunday, July 30, 2023

Joe Biden redux

This is Joseph.

On a lazy Sunday, I want to point you to a column by Josh Marshall. It has a lot of good points about how the best person to be making the decision about whether Joe Biden should run in 2024 is . . . Joe Biden. I disagree that the only time to have done this was at the beginning, but the window for a contrary decision is closing fast. Furthermore, Donald Trump, an exceptionally challenging figure as president, is almost certainly going to be the Republican nominee.

Now there are some possibilities left to prevent this outcome. But there really isn't a strong challenger arising that can beat the core of Trump's support. Indictments never help a candidate, but they also are unlikely to lead to convictions before the election (if ever). There is an old joke that an incompetent lawyer will add a year to the length of a trial. A competent one will add much more. It is possible that Aileen Cannon will force a speedy trial but so far she looks like she is treating his Florida prosecution as bog standard normal, which inclines towards a long trial. Reality Winner was a much less complex case, and it took from June 3, 2017 to June 28, 2018 for a conviction (which included her changing her plea to guilty). 

So you will have a current incumbent president who has beat his challenger before. The challenger is battered by indictments but beat a previous Democrat candidate. Even worse, the alternatives include some really odd choices: RFK Jr. is surging among Republicans.  It would be an odd choice to pick a candidate with support primary among the opposition, especially since one possible source of his popularity could be a perception he will be easy for Donald Trump to beat. 

So the Joe Biden question comes down to two things. Is he willing. Uh, yes, obviously yes. Is the Republican candidate likely to be able to play a major weakness against him. Well, it at this point, it looks pretty obvious to me that the most probable match-up advantages Biden.

And Marshall has a great piece on why, given these facts, it's time to stop speculating about primaries and start planning for the next election. 
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Friday, July 28, 2023

How did the 2023 New York Times become the 1973 National Enquirer?


 

 Don't get me wrong, the gray lady is still as stuffy and arrogant as ever, but in terms of gullibility, it is edging ever closer to "I had a space alien's baby." (That's more of a Weekly World News headline, but you get my drift.)

 When I say 'debunked' I mean now less credible than Uri Geller. For one thing, Geller put some real effort into fooling people. Remigio (Reme) Baca and Joseph Lopez (Jose) Padilla, two childhood friends from New Mexico, just started telling stories about how fifty years earlier they had encountered a crashed alien spaceship with both living and dead crew. Their only evidence was a part from a pump obviously of terrestrial manufacture. Their story kept changing and yet none of the versions checked out. They were both caught in numerous transparent lies. The claims that can't be checked are to incredible to treat seriously. After the story started making the rounds, the son of an army air corps pilot claimed that his father had transported the aliens' bodies from the crash site. The story was completely unsupported, changed from telling to telling, and followed attempts to insert his father into two other well known tales of UFO sightings. 

That is the tl;dr version of the Trinity incident. If you have the time, you should read all of Johnson's posts on the subject -- it's a hell of a story -- but the paragraph above is what you need to know. Keep that in mind as you the NYT article mentioned in the tweet.

From Did Aliens Land on Earth in 1945? A Defense Bill Seeks Answers.

 Remy Tumin --  2023/01/13

An amendment tucked into this year’s $858 billion National Defense Authorization Act, which funds the Defense Department’s annual operating budget, requires the department to review historical documents related to unidentified aerial phenomena — government lingo for U.F.O.s — dating to 1945. That is the year that, according to one account, a large, avocado-shaped object struck a communication tower in a patch of New Mexico desert now known as the Trinity Site, where the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated that July.

Experts said the bill, which President Biden signed into law in December, could be a game changer for studying unidentified phenomena.

“The American public can reasonably expect to get some answers to questions that have been burning in the minds of millions of Americans for many years,” said Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence. “If nothing else, this should either clear up something that’s been a cloud hanging over the Air Force and Department of Defense for decades or it might lead in another direction, which could be truly incredible. There’s a lot at stake.”

...

“This is what all scientists and my colleagues have always dreamed of,” said Dr. Vallée, who has helped study reports of U.F.O.s for the Centre National d’Études Spatiales, the French space agency. He said that the U.S. government’s agreement to dig into the past meant “the stigma has been removed.”

Dr. Vallée began studying the Trinity incident several years ago alongside a journalist, Paola Harris, and interviewed people who claimed to have witnessed the crash. Dr. Vallée and Ms. Harris chronicled their research in a book, “Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret,” including the details of the avocado-shaped object. They also spoke to witnesses who said they came across the object as children and found what they described as “little creatures.”

In the United States, Dr. Vallée said, “there has always been, on the part of the government, especially the Pentagon,” a sense that civilian sightings are unreliable. “The reason,” he said, “is that civilians don’t have the technology to really document what happens, and of course the Pentagon does.”

At the risk of repeating myself, but other than a metal part that even Vallée and Harris admit was made on earth, the only evidence of the "Trinity incident" are fifty-plus year old, contradiction filled accounts (one second hand) from three serial liars. It is of interest only as a study of how people let themselves be fooled.

 And the federal government is about to spend valuable time and money pretending this is real.

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Thursday, July 27, 2023

Thursday Tweets -- X marks the spot where $44 billion used to be.

From the WP:

SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter began removing its name from its corporate headquarters Monday, blocking two lanes of traffic as a large crane plucked letters off the sign. The crane departed by midafternoon leaving the task half-finished — only the blue bird logo and the “er” remained, next to a ghostly outline reading “@twitt.”

Some will see that as an apt metaphor for state of business at the social media platform. In changing Twitter’s famous blue logo to a black-and-white “X,” part of a sweeping rebrand that has alienated longtime users and left marketing experts perplexed, owner Elon Musk is trading a bird in the hand for the promise of a wide-ranging “everything app,” one analysts say may never materialize.

He is leaving behind a symbol of silliness, outrage and celebrity that meant something to hundreds of millions, even earworming its way into the dictionary.

“It has become a verb. That’s the holy grail,” said Forrester research director Mike Proulx. “This is a brand that has secured a place in our cultural lexicon. Musk has wiped out over 15 years of brand equity in the Twitter name.”




 





For more background, check out this thread. (Best line: "He's doing the tech equivalent of drunk-DMing his highschool girlfriend to tell her she's still hot.")


If you haven't paid the rent, is it actually your headquarters?




 


That looks like a good place for a political segue.



I am as surprised as anyone to say that I'm looking forward to the Barbie Movie. Great reviews, first rate talent in front and behind the camera, amazing art design, and these guys freaking out in the background.




I know they say campaigns can be a strain on marriages, but this is definitely an extreme case.

As we've said before, the own-the-libs mentality lead to some strange choices.




Even if I hadn't liked the tweet (which I did), I would have had to post it just because of the name, Joe Btfsplk.


"this war in Ukraine against Russia."




Tells us more about prediction markets, conventional wisdom, and the overweighting of the unlikely (Obama ?!?), but still interesting in those terms.


Those last five seconds...

 




A few years ago, I got into the habit of looking up the Wiki pages of people with mediocre abilities who had somehow achieved great success at an early age. Prestigious prep schools showed up a lot.






Closing with some cool stuff.


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