Thursday, August 31, 2023

Thursday Tweets -- "Anna hurt Anna-self"

Now that you mention it, yes it does...


Rule 1. Don't use campaign funds to pay a porn star to sleep with you.

Rule 2. If you do use campaign funds to pay a porn star to sleep with you, don't pick one who's really good at Twitter.

 


 






What could go wrong?


This is a fun clip.


First. the "Try That in a Small Town" guy turns out to be from a city five or six times the size of the not so small town I grew up in. ("They got a goddamn Target. Shit, might as well be Paris.") Then we find out the "Rich Men North of Richmond" singer/songwriter doesn't especially like rich Republicans. 


Check out the community notes.











I seem to recall hearing about this somewhere before.

"The more insidious thing is the idea that it's not a story until the Times does it. Not everyone thinks this but from my vantage that still emanates from higher-ups at this place."

From Vice. 








One of these days, when I'm liquored up enough to start a fight with someone who knows waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more than I do, I'm going to see if I can start a conversation with Bob Carpenter about why this old high school math teacher remains a large language model skeptic.




And on the fringe...





And misc.

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Wednesday, August 30, 2023

Remember how we said journalists learned nothing from past not-____ candidates? Inevitable NYT Ramaswamy follow-up

Yesterday, we ran a post about why challenges to front-runners started out looking so good but almost inevitably faded away, going back to 2012 for its wealth of examples. Here was the close:

In each case pundits came up with a new set of none-too-believable reasons to explain the rise and fall, such as Cain's gimmicky flat tax/national sales tax proposal (despite the fact that neither idea had ever been a winner with voters in either party). While the explanations we were given weren't credible, they were consistent with the standard narratives, unlike the obvious answer.

Pressure to converge and constant feedback loops led to symmetry-breaking. A slight nudge (like announcing a silly tax plan) would cause an "I hear people are talking about _____" effect which would send a candidate shooting up, at which point voters would take a good look and decide he or she couldn't beat Romney and the support would evaporate. 

The obvious lessons here (and from 2016 and from 2020) are that the candidate who dominates the polls is likely to get the nomination and that the not-the-frontrunner candidates who rocket up in the polls almost always fizzle out, but somehow it seem like none of the journalists covering politics have made those connections.

 About the time I was hitting the schedule button on the post, the following op-ed appeared in the New York Times.

"Vivek Ramaswamy Is Very Annoying. It’s Why He’s Surging in the Polls."
Michelle Goldberg

The question is what Ramaswamy’s supporters see in this irksome figure. Some Republicans, clearly, appreciate the way he sucks up to Donald Trump, whom Ramaswamy has called “the best president of the 21st century.” But that doesn’t explain the roughly 10 percent of Republicans who tell pollsters they’re planning to vote for Ramaswamy instead of Trump. It can’t only be his shtick as Fox News’s “woke and cancel-culture guru,” as one anchor called him, since at this point even the Florida governor Ron DeSantis has learned that railing against wokeness is a losing message. Nor is Ramaswamy’s appeal tailored to the downwardly mobile Trump voters who appreciated the former president’s pledges to protect their entitlements, since Ramaswamy’s promise to “dismantle Lyndon Johnson’s failed ‘Great Society’” makes Paul Ryan look like a social democrat.

 

Before we get into the main topic, a couple of side points: 

First, there is no evidence that "railing against wokeness is a losing message" with GOP primary voters. When DeSatis was mainly known for anti-woke, anti-immigrant, anti-vaxx rhetoric, he rose to over 40% in the polls. He has steadily fallen since then, but only after focus shifted to attacks on or from Trump and on DeSantis's political ineptness;

Second, even wildly unpopular positions can easily cause small bounces if you start low enough, and we are talking about very small numbers. Ramaswamy's "surge" over the past two weeks took him from 7% to 10%. Part, probably most, of that was caused by ridiculous levels of press coverage (the man is good copy and journalists love a horse race story), but putting that aside, it's easy to imagine one out of ten far right Republicans liking a plan to kill SS and Medicare even though a large majority of the party hates the idea.

But the bigger issue with the NYT piece is "what surge?"

Given feedback loops and the pressure to come together around someone, we expect to see candidates have small bumps just due to convergence and noise. Add to that the tremendous (and unmerited) levels of media attention Ramaswamy has gotten. A heavily promoted candidate going from 7% to 10% is not a phenomena that needs to be discussed an explained.

Particularly if even that small bump didn't actually happen... (but we'll get to that next time).

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Tuesday, August 29, 2023

2012 was the golden age of not-__________ candidates

Note: none of the following is meant as a prediction, just as a discussion of the current dynamics of the campaign. We aren't in the prognostication business, particularly in black swan season.

First off, a definition. When a candidate who much of the party is dissatisfied with takes an early commanding lead, a middle to bottom of the pack name will suddenly start generating tons of buzz and see a big jump in the polls. These are not-__________ candidates, and they tend to follow a remarkably similar arc. 

The thing to remember is that these dissatisfied voters feel huge pressure to converge on some alternative, someone all of them can get behind. This is not just a Keynesian beauty contest, more like a Keynesian beauty contest where you have to marry the winner. These conditions put the dissatisfied in an extremely receptive mood, where they are inclined to default to optimism and to fill in the blanks with what they'd like to see. 

The best display we've seen of not-_____ candidates was the 2012 GOP primary. From the start, Romney had a commanding but not insurmountable lead, but the evangelicals in the GOP distrusted Mormons and the entire party hated Obamacare, so a substantial portion were looking for a not-Mitt. The result was support converging around a succession of not-Mitts then dissipating to make way for the next. Perry, Cain, Gingrich, and Santorum all topped Romney then (with the exception of Gingrich's mid-run dip) followed the same pattern. If we broaden the definition to leading non-Romney candidates, we could add Bachman.

[Time scale isn't what I would have chosen, but RCP refuses to apply my changes.]

In each case pundits came up with a new set of none-too-believable reasons to explain the rise and fall. such Cain's gimmicky flat tax/national sales tax proposal (despite the fact that neither idea had ever been a winner with voters in either party). While the explanations we were given weren't credible, they were consistent with the standard narratives, unlike the obvious answer.

Pressure to converge and constant feedback loops led to symmetry-breaking. A slight nudge (like announcing a silly tax plan) would cause an "I hear people are talking about _____" effect which would send a candidate shooting up, at which point voters would take a good look and decide he or she couldn't beat Romney and the support would evaporate. 

The obvious lessons here (and from 2016 and from 2020) are that the candidate who dominates the polls is likely to get the nomination and that the not-the-frontrunner candidates who rocket up in the polls almost always fizzle out, but somehow it seem like none of the journalists covering politics have made those connections.

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Monday, August 28, 2023

What is a transaction cost?

This is Joseph.

I thought this was parody. I really, really did. But it seems to be an actual opinion:


This is a fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. 

Let's just take story #1. Why do we not allow private companies to just blow out windows? Well, first of all this sort of approach usually uses a "performance bond" sort of approach. After all, it is expensive to sue SpaceX and SpaceX has lawyers. People might be injured and deserve freedom from injury in their homes. Glass blown out of tall buildings can even be lethal. 

The actual story says:
On the new day, the F.A.A. told SpaceX that, according to its model of the wind’s speed and direction, if the rocket exploded it could create a blast wave that risked damaging the windows of nearby houses. A series of tense meetings followed, with SpaceX presenting its own modelling to establish that the launch was safe, and the F.A.A. refusing to grant permission. Wayne Monteith, then the head of the agency’s space division, was leaving an event at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station when he received a frustrated call from Musk. “Look, you cannot launch,” Monteith told him. “You’re not cleared to launch.” Musk acknowledged the order.

Musk was on site in Boca Chica when SpaceX launched anyway. The rocket achieved liftoff and successfully performed several maneuvers intended to rehearse those of an eventual manned Starship. But, on landing, the SN8 came in too fast, and exploded on impact. (No windows were damaged.)

It is great that no windows were damaged but I don't see anything in the story about SpaceX offering to cover a multiple of any damages caused. Keep in mind that rockets and planes are tightly regulated for a reason. It may be that the FAA is too tight with regulation, but how do you balance that with too risky? 

But the real issue here is that the homeowners should be free from capricious damage and regulation is how we manage risks. If windows were damaged is there any evidence that these bills would be paid or would it be the start of either costly litigation or just an unrecoverable cost? 

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Friday, August 25, 2023

Tweets -- "Shut up and go mow your mom"

Possibly the most important news of the week (so you probably haven't heard much about it).
 







I'd like to believe this study. On some level, I'm sure that if you could get people off of an immersive diet of disinformation and toxic propaganda and replace it with actual news, they would start to have a more accurate (and healthier) worldview, but this feels like a classic minor intervention/major effect experiment.



Ukraine






Possibly my favorite indictment tweet.


This goes great with Ramaswamy's plan to raise the voting age.










 Weren't we just talking about projection?



This is painful to watch. Recently the right seems to have a "wandered off the streets" problem. People who normally couldn't get past the gatekeepers are getting on camera, on staff, even elected to office.


The Nazi stuff doesn't help.









AI



This has all sorts of interesting implications.




 UFO



Misc


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Thursday, August 24, 2023

Thursday Tweets part 1 (lots to cover this week) -- war criminal on war criminal violence

Here are some reactions to the death of Pregozhin in my Twitter feed. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.


 






 

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Wednesday, August 23, 2023

Tropical Storm Hillary pretty much went like we said it would (though I'll admit the earthquake caught me off guard)

Basically what we said about the storm Sunday morning, butt now in the past tense... except for the earthquake. 

I was sitting on the couch watching the local news that afternoon. I'd taken a walk a little while earlier to see how things were looking. The rain had been mild but steady (the heavy stuff wasn't forecast until after midnight) and the air was mostly still. That's why I was so surprised when the building started to sway. My first thought was that wind feels almost like an earthquake. Then the alert went off on my phone and I noticed the news anchors had stopped talking and were looking around the studio.

Though it was felt over a considerable distance, the earthquake didn't do any major damage and so far there haven't been any major aftershocks. Much like the storm, it was more notable for its timing than its magnitude.

While Hillary was a severe storm, in terms of damage and loss of life, it was far from the worst storm we've seen recently, partially because the eye passed over the most populous part of the state.

 By Washington Post Staff | Aug 21, 2023

Los Angeles officials said Monday morning that there had been no known reports of deaths or major damage from Tropical Storm Hilary, as officials throughout Southern California begin to assess the storm’s toll. The storm, which no longer has tropical characteristics, swept through the deserts of California, Arizona and Nevada on Sunday, bringing brief but heavy downpours and record rainfall. Some of the effects were already evident Monday: deserts deluged with rainwater, motorists pushing broken-down cars across highways, disrupted air travel and mass power outages. 

And while you might have heard...

Dodger Stadium did not flood.

Contrary to popular belief, this weekend’s tropical storm did not transform Dodger Stadium into a forlorn island surrounded by floodwaters.

...

“Reflection of light,” said Times photographer Robert Gauthier, who captured new images on Monday. “That’s what it seems like.”

Still pictures and video of the inundated stadium drew tens of thousands of views on social media. Amid a wet, wild and historically abnormal weekend — which also included an earthquake — it isn’t surprising that people would be ready to believe anything.

 

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Tuesday, August 22, 2023

Only the New York Times would use the line "only 54 percent of likely primary voters" unironically.

 I know you're tired of reading these because I'm certainly tired of writing them, but here we go again

 

 What if, Knowing What They Know Now, Republicans Don’t Vote for Donald Trump?

The Editorial Board

But almost certainly before then, he will have to answer to Republican voters. His grip on the party has proved enduring but not universal; while he is far ahead of the other candidates, a recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed that he is the choice of only 54 percent of likely primary voters. And about half of Republican voters told pollsters for Reuters/Ipsos that they would not vote for him if he was convicted of a felony.

For more than eight years now, the New York Times has been consistently and embarrassingly wrong about Donald Trump and the Republican Party. I strongly suspect this is mainly due to the difficulty the publisher, editors, and star reporters have letting go of false balance, and the paper's above-mere-politics self image. 

Whatever the reason, it has repeatedly led them to deny the obvious. Given the current state of the race, unless Trump collapses on stage or flees the country or we get some other black swan event, there is little chance he does not get the nomination. Not only is 54% a big number (as is 49%), but the current make up of the party makes the picture facing a not-Trump even more bleak.

At the beginning of this year, at least 80% of Republican support went to two candidates who were either Trump or someone to the right of Trump. DeSantis got on the map by being more extreme on LGBTQ persecution, racist policies, abortion and the one issue where Trump was most vulnerable on the right, vaccinations. Vivek Ramaswamy has also run to the far right, and while there is some question as to whether his recent surge in the polls is real, if we do trust the numbers, then as of August 20, no one with over 5% support is less extreme than Trump Even if you combine the support for the three "moderates" (Christie, Hutchinson, and Hurd), it still adds up to less than 5%.

Putting aside the disturbing thought that Trump is in the ideological center of today's Republican Party, this means that, even if Trump loses a substantial part of his support, a challenger would still have to attract GOP voters from both the left and mainly the right of the former president to get a plurality, the latter group including anti-vaxxers and actual nazis.

 The most common mistake pundits make when thinking about not-________ candidates is assuming that voters oppose the front runner for compatible reasons, so that a single electoral messiah can just step in and sweep them all into the fold. This is almost never true. 

If I had to rank the reasons of not-Trump Republicans, I'd say:

1. Electability

2. Not sufficiently far right on certain issues

3. A criminal

This hypothetical candidate who will come in and save the party will have be perceived as electable,  will have to appeal to the hard liners which means taking unpopular stands on issues like abortion, and will have to steal a large chunk of the former president's supporters, most of whom are not going to support anyone who isn't at least election denial adjacent. This savior, who is almost certainly not one of the declared candidates, will have to do this while fending off vicious attacks from Trump, and do so without alienating his supporters or seeming to side with the Democrats. 

Add in the cautionary tale of what happened to Ron DeSantis, and it's difficult to imagine a GOP A-lister wanting to try.

 

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Monday, August 21, 2023

Eight years ago to the day...

... And it feels like nothing has changed.


Friday, August 21, 2015

Wishful Analytics

As mentioned previously, Donald Trump's campaign has definitely strained the standard assumptions of political reporting, Though this is an industry wide problem (even Five Thirty Eight hasn't been immune), it is nowhere more severe than at the New York Times.

The trouble is that the New York Times is very much committed to a style of political analysis that takes the standard narrative almost to the formal level of a well-made play. The objective is to get to the preassigned destination with as much craft and wit as possible. Nate Silver's problems at the NYT generally came from his habit of following the data to conclusions that made his editors and colleagues uncomfortable (by raising disturbing questions about the value of their work).

Cohn's articles on Trump have been an extended study in wishful analytics, starting with a desired conclusion then trying to dredge up some numbers to support it. He really, really, really, really, really wants to see Trump as another Herman Cain. Other than both being successful businessmen, the analogy is strained -- Cain was a little-known figure who surged well into the campaign because the base was looking for an alternative to an unacceptable presumptive nominee – but Cohn brings up the pizza magnate at every opportunity.

In addition to reassuring analogies, Cohn is also inclined to see comforting inflection points. Here's his response to the McCain dust-up.
The Trump Campaign’s Turning Point

Donald Trump’s surge in the polls has followed the classic pattern of a media-driven surge. Now it will most likely follow the classic pattern of a party-backed decline.


Mr. Trump’s candidacy probably reached an inflection point on Saturday after he essentially criticized John McCain for being captured during the Vietnam War. Republican campaigns and elites quickly moved to condemn his comments — a shift that will probably mark the moment when Trump’s candidacy went from boom to bust.

Paul Krugman (like Silver, another NYT writer frequently at odds with the paper's culture) dismantled this argument by immediately spotting the key flaw.
What I would argue is key to this situation — and, in particular, key to understanding how the conventional wisdom on Trump/McCain went so wrong — is the reality that a lot of people are, in effect, members of a delusional cult that is impervious to logic and evidence, and has lost touch with reality.

I am, of course, talking about pundits who prize themselves for their centrism.

...

On one side, they can’t admit the moderation of the Democrats, which is why you had the spectacle of demands that Obama change course and support his own policies.

On the other side, they have had to invent an imaginary GOP that bears little resemblance to the real thing. This means being continually surprised by the radicalism of the base. It also means a determination to see various Republicans as Serious, Honest Conservatives — SHCs? — whom the centrists know, just know, have to exist.

...

But the ur-SHC is John McCain, the Straight-Talking Maverick. Never mind that he is clearly eager to wage as many wars as possible, that he has long since abandoned his once-realistic positions on climate change and immigration, that he tried to put Sarah Palin a heartbeat from the presidency. McCain the myth is who they see, and keep putting on TV. And they imagined that everyone else must see him the same way, that Trump’s sneering at his war record would cause everyone to turn away in disgust.

But the Republican base isn’t eager to hear from SHCs; it has never put McCain on a pedestal; and people who like Donald Trump are not exactly likely to be scared off by his lack of decorum.


Cohn's initial reaction to his failed prediction was to argue that the polls weren't current enough to show that he was right. When that position became untenable, he shifted his focus to the next inflection point:
Mr. Rubio, the senator from Florida, has a good case to be considered the debate’s top performer. A weaker Mr. Bush probably benefits Mr. Rubio as much as anyone, and if Mr. Bush raised questions about whether he would be a great general election candidate, then Mr. Rubio added yet more reason to believe he could be a good one. Mr. Rubio still has the challenge of figuring out how to break through a strong field in a factional party.



...
Mr. Walker won by not losing. In a lot of ways, the moderators’ tough, specific questions played to Mr. Walker’s weakness. He didn’t have much time to emphasize his fight against unions in Wisconsin. But he handled several tough questions — on abortion; on relations with Arab nations; what he would do after terminating the Iran deal; race; and his employment record — without appearing flustered or making a mistake. His answers were concise and sharp.
...

Mr. Kasich also advanced his cause. He entered as a largely unknown candidate outside of Ohio, where he is governor. But he was backed by a supportive audience, he deftly handled tough questions, and he had a solid answer on a question about attending same-sex weddings. His answer might not resonate among many Republicans, but it will resonate in New Hampshire — the state where he needs to deny Mr. Bush a path to victory and vault to the top of the pack.



It was Donald Trump, though, who might have had the weakest performance. No, it may not be the end of his surge. But he consistently faced pointed questions, didn’t always have satisfactory answers, endured a fairly hostile crowd and probably won’t receive as much media attention coming out of the debate as he did in the weeks before it. If you take the view that he’s heavily dependent on media coverage, that’s an issue. Whatever coverage he does get may be fairly negative — probably focusing on his unwillingness to guarantee support for the Republican nominee.
You might want to reread that last paragraph a couple of times to get your head around just how wrong it turned out to be. Pay particular attention to the statements qualified with 'probably' both here and in the McCain piece. The confidence displayed had nothing to do with likelihood – all were comically off-base – and had everything to do with how badly those committed to the standard narrative wanted the statements to be true.


This attempt to prop up that narrative have become increasing strained and convoluted, as you can see from the most recent entry
Yet oddly, the breadth of [Trump's] appeal and his strength reduce his importance in shaping the outcome of the race.


If Mr. Trump were weaker, or if his support were more narrowly concentrated in either New Hampshire or Iowa, he would play a bigger role in shaping the outcome. In that scenario, a non-Trump candidate might win either Iowa or New Hampshire — and he or she would be in much better position than the second-place finisher in the state where Mr. Trump was victorious.



If Mr. Trump were to win both Iowa and New Hampshire, the second-place finishers would advance as if they were winners. Assuming that one or both of the second-place finishers were broadly acceptable, the party would try to coalesce behind one of the two ahead of the winner-take-all contests on March 15.



In the end, Mr. Trump almost certainly won’t win the Republican nomination; the rest of the party will consolidate around anyone else. He can influence the outcome only if his support costs another candidate more than others. But for now, he seems to be harming all candidates fairly equally.

First off, notice the odd way that Cohn discusses influence. If I asked if you would like to “play a bigger role in shaping the outcome” of something, you would naturally assume I meant would you like to have more of a say, but that's not at all how the concept of influence is used in the passage above. Cohn is simply saying that a world where Trump was behind in one of the first two primaries might have a different nominee but since Trump wouldn't get to pick who would beat him, it's not clear why he would care and since there's no telling who would win in Cohn's alternate reality, it's not clear why anyone else would care either.


But even if we accept Cohn's framing, we then run into another fatal flaw. Put in more precise terms, “harming all candidates fairly equally” means that each candidate's probability of becoming president would have been the same had Trump not entered the race. This is almost impossible on at least three levels:

Trump has already produced a serious shift in the discussion, bringing issues like immigration and Social Security/Medicare to the foreground while sucking away the oxygen from others. This is certain to help some candidates more than others;

For this and other reasons, the impact on the polls so far has been anything but symmetric;

And even if Trump's support were coming proportionally from each of the other contenders, that still wouldn't constitute equal harm. Primaries are complex beasts. We have to take into account convergence, feedback loops, liquidity, serial correlation, et cetera. The suggestion that you could remove the first two primaries from contention without major ramifications is laughably naive.


Finally there's that “only.” Even if Trump isn't the nominee (and I would certainly call him a long shot), he can still influence the process as either kingmaker or spoiler.


While Cohn's work on this topic has been terrible, what's important here is not the failings of one writer but the current culture of journalism. This is what happens when even the best publications in the country embrace conventional narratives and groupthink, adopt self-serving but silly conventions and let their standards slip.

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Sunday, August 20, 2023

SoCal and Hillary: Not the apocalypse but a handful of places are going to get hammered

Eastern journalists have a tendency to get overwrought when it comes to Western weather, so let's all calm down and keep things in perspective.

Hillary is a fast moving tropical storm -- here in LA we're looking at a little over twenty-four hours of rainfall -- and the ground isn't saturated from earlier precipitation which bodes well for us evading catastrophic flooding. We have plenty of experience dealing with storms this bad or worse. With a few exceptions like Palm Springs, what's remarkable here is not the magnitude and the potential for damage, but the type and timing. We do get major storms out here, inevitably with flash floods, just almost never in August.

 That said, a few areas are going to see extraordinary, perhaps unprecedented amounts of water.

Needless to say, infrastructure is virtually never designed to handle years worth of rain in a single day.

We're not talking about the kind of widespread devastation you see after a hurricane in the Southeast, but we may have some bad spots.

When people who aren't familiar with  the region try to write about LA and Southern California, they almost always fail to grasp the scale, the range, and the complexity of the place. Just in terms of Los Angeles terrain, we have valleys, mountains, beaches, high deserts and low deserts all of which can be different in terms of temperature, cloudiness, fogginess, and precipitation. It's not unusual to call someone else in LA and ask "how's the weather over there?"

Right now, the answer's not bad. We'll let you know if anything changes.

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Friday, August 18, 2023

Climate change?

This is Joseph.

It's not funny but it really strikes me how extreme weather events keep piling up. There is a topical storm about to hit Los Angeles. Maui is burning, and even without the missing people it is the deadliest wildfire in a century. Canada is evacuating the capital of the Northwest territories as fires close in.  

I know that this is weather and not climate, but surprisingly small changes in the mean temperature can produce a lot more outlier events and I wonder if that is what we are seeing as we head into a "weather exciting" weekend in August? 
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Thursday Tweets -- There is no K in 'Kenya' [deferred because a certain company sucks]

Guess what. If you start a post in HTML view while embedding you tweets, then switch to compose view to edit, rearrange, and add comments, then switch back to HTML to add one more tweet, be careful not to hit control-z, because it will undo everything you did in compose and you can't control-y it back.

Let's start with the best show on Twitter... its owner trying to get out of fight club with some portion of his dignity.


 

I suspect that Elon was hoping that Zuckerberg would play along and let him off the hook, but Zuck had apparently had enough.

So Musk is in "somebody hold me back" mode.  


 In a quote tweet of this Walter Isaacson post, New York Times Pitchbot commented "One of America’s most respected journalists."

 Blogger does strange things so just in case it decides to crop the tweets image, here's the original.


Elsewhere in the world of the site formerly known as Twitter.




Seguing to another member of the PayPal mafia,


And bigger news.




Jeff Gerth is the same credulous, ignorant, ill-informed hack who brought us Whitewater. The NYT created him. It is poetic justice for them to now know how he treats his subjects.




"Shock and outrage over the fall of Roe v. Wade has faded as confusion has spread, deflating Democrats’ hopes that the issue could carry them to victory"




"Oops, I made a mistake" doesn't entirely set things right for helping bring the country to the verge of fascism.

 

Because when you're defending your decision to spend big money addressing climate change, the last thing you want people talking about is climate change.



I'm a little more bullish on RD than Frum, but it is amazing how the consensus has shifted.


Normally, it's not the defendant who has the option of 'moving on'



Basically, Dean Phillips just wants attention.


We've said before that Loeb has been feeding his considerable reputation into the woodchipper. Now he's found the best network for it.

The Internet Archive does good, important work, particularly as preservationists. I give them money. You should too.


Adventures in AI





Notes from academia.



And in closing...
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Thursday, August 17, 2023

Reposted because Disney is actually spending serious money on an Emmy campaign for a show that 47 people saw

 [And because Blogger just ate the post I had just finished.]



Thursday, February 16, 2023

If a TV show runs in the city and nobody sees it...

When I came across this article from New York Magazine (technically the Cut, but you know what I mean) on on Fleishman Is in Trouble, I had originally intended to do a post making fun of the many passages like this.

Since leaving New York, Beth has found herself in tears at least once a week. She makes $300,000 a year — more than she’s ever earned in her life — but she’s running out of minutes in the day to squeeze out more dollars. “How do I make the $700,000 that I’m going to need to send her to private school or do the renovation in the attic so I can turn it into the master suite so I can have a tub and so I can have one thing I enjoy in my life?” she says. Her takeaway from the show: “Both avenues are shit. You can stay in New York and climb, climb, climb and never get where you need to go and give yourself a nervous breakdown, or you can move to the suburbs and be like, Who the fuck are these pod people? Neither seems great. Is the secret to it all that we have to just choose a lane and embrace it?” 

The national press, particularly publications with "New York" somewhere in their name), never tire of telling us about the financial and emotional hardships faced by the bottom half of the top one percent. By the standards of the genre, the NYM piece lacks the hilarious budgeting assumptions explaining how a middle class couple can find it hard to scrape by on $300,000 or the stunning cluelessness of a Bret Stephens who thinks a couple in SF making $400,000 are lucky to manage a Camry, still it's hard to beat lines like "so I can have one thing I enjoy in my life." 

But as I started to read up on Fleishman, I started thinking this story might fit better with another long running thread.

The series has gotten a ton of coverage...


... which means (and I apologize for disillusioning some of our less worldly readers) Disney is spending a ton on PR. The streaming industry runs on hype and easy to promote awards bait play a big role.



Whenever you're reading about these shows, the first question you should ask is "how many people are actually watching. (The second question is "who owns the IP?"). It's often difficult to find out -- streaming services are secretive about these numbers -- but FlixPatrol is probably as good as we'll get. Here's their list of Hulu shows ranked by viewership for 2022.

For a sense of what is popular, here are the top 20. (check out number 5)

1.         Family Guy    
2.         P-Valley    
3.         The Kardashians
4.         Power Book IV: Force    
5.         General Hospital    
6.         Law & Order: Special Victims Unit     
7.         Bob's Burgers     
8.         Power Book III: Raising Kanan     
9.         House of the Dragon
10.       The Chi     
11.       Euphoria
12.       Power Book II: Ghost    
13.       9-1-1    
14.       Love Island     
15.       Only Murders in the Building
16.       Grey's Anatomy     
17.       Abbott Elementary     
18.       The Patient
19.       The Good Doctor    
20.       This Is Us     

 If you go down the list (or use control-F), you find FIiT at 97 out of 119.



Though we can't say exactly how many viewers it takes to get to position 97, we can be pretty sure it's a very small number by TV standards. You almost have to wonder... If you took all the people who wrote articles about Fleishman Is in Trouble, and all the people quoted in those pieces, is it possible you'd have a majority of people who actually watched the show?


 

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