Wednesday, September 13, 2023

The central lies of the Musk Persona 2.0

[updated with a final twee from Josh Marshall.]

Isaacson is the definitive Musk biographer, and I don't mean that in a good way. He buys into the myth even more deeply than Vance (who, as much as I hate to say it, looks considerably better in comparison). Of course, a lot has happened in the eight years that separate the two books. In 2015, Musk could be seen in a purely noble light. That was also the year he had a cameo as himself in the Big Bang Theory volunteering anonymously in a soup kitchen, which would probably be a difficult scene to pull off today.

Even as late as two years ago, he could still get press like this (though it should be noted, Time was badly behind the, for lack of a better word, times with this. Most of the press started to wise up around 2019.).

In 2021, Elon Musk became the world’s richest man (no woman came close), and Time named him Person of the Year: “This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P. T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars.” 

...

“He dreams of Mars as he bestrides Earth, square-jawed and indomitable,” the magazine’s Person of the Year announcement read.

 

These days we all know far more about Musk, most of it bad, and all of the other bad stuff, which some of us have been calling out for years, is finally making its way into the discourse. Unless you're writing for a fan boy audience, you can't depict Musk as a purely noble figure; the best you can get away with is the old great but flawed line.

The greatness part of the story rests on two pillars: first, believing Musk has done or is about to do all the things he claims, keeping in mind that he has no background in or aptitude for engineering (when he goes off script, the result is always painful to listen to).

[So Anne Milling and Elon Musk have something in common.]

The second pillar is believing him when he talks about his motives. The NYT's credulous review by Jennifer Szalai has an unintentionally informative example. (If you're looking for something insightful, check out Jill Lepore in the New Yorker or Brian Merchant in the LA Times,) Emphasis added.

Yet even as Musk struggles to relate to the actual humans around him, his plans for humanity are grand. “A fully reusable rocket is the difference between being a single-planet civilization and being a multiplanet one”: Musk would “maniacally” repeat this message to his staff at SpaceX, his spacecraft and satellite company, where every decision is motivated by his determination to get earthlings to Mars. He pushes employees at his companies — he now runs six, including X, the platform formerly known as Twitter — to slash costs and meet brutal deadlines because he needs to pour resources into the moonshot of colonizing space “before civilization crumbles.” Disaster could come from climate change, from declining birthrates,* from artificial intelligence. Isaacson describes Musk stalking the factory floor of Tesla, his electric car company, issuing orders on the fly. “If I don’t make decisions,” Musk explained, “we die.”

This is not just wrong, it's the opposite of right. Musk has used  SpaceX money, personnel, and brand to supports his other companies. The example of Twitter is particularly absurd. He actually borrowed a billion from SpaceX to help fund the $44 billion vanity purchase, money that could great things -- funding R&D, engineering scholarships, STEM programs -- to advance manned spaceflight. 

He could even have funded multiple exploratory rovers to Mars to lay the foundation for the missions he promised were supposed to happen years ago. That's the dirty little secret of his plans for a multiplanetary future. Other than pouring money into developing rockets mainly suitable for low earth orbit missions, neither Musk nor SpaceX have done any of the exploratory work or developed any of the necessary technology for a mission to Mars, despite all the promises.

Musk is a narcissistic fabulist. He has a burning desire to be seen as a savior, but little interest in actually saving anyone. Whenever there's a crisis in the news, he will call a press conference to announce that he's going to deliver water to Flint, minisubs to Thailand, respirators to ICUs. Little or nothing usually follows. You'll notice that his initial account of cutting off Starlink in Crimea was framed as his protecting us from nuclear war.  His promises of saving humanity are just more of the same.



As mentioned earlier, Lepore's piece is really worth a look.




Here's a good discussion of the security issues around Musk and SpaceX from Robert Farley. 

One more for the road.


* Musk's concern over birthrates is for some strange reason limited to certain groups. You can take the boy out of South Africa...

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Tuesday, September 12, 2023

Trump and the 14th Amendement

This is Joseph. 

This clause in the constitution is getting a lot of attention with respect to Donald Trump:

Section 3 Disqualification from Holding Office

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

See this and this, for example. 

However, there is an important section in clause 1 of the same amendment:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

And herein lies the problem. How do you enforce section 3 in view of section 1? Well, obviously there needs to be a legal process and it is not encouraging that these challenges, to date, have not had a great record of success. Look at Marjorie Taylor Greene who has already faced such a challenge and survived it given Jan 6th. 

Further, do we really want such challenges? See, I remember the 1990's where such rhetoric was deployed against Bill Clinton. This isn't a joke or a crackpot, Orange County Rep. Robert K. Dornan really did accuse Bill Clinton of this as part of his political resistance to the Vietnam war. Similarly, a sitting president leveled these accusations against Barack Obama. Now maybe Donald Trump is an outlier but there really is a good question as to what counts here. 

Josh Marshall is right that there are issues here:

Did Trump commit insurrection or rebellion under the terms of the 14th Amendment? Who says so? He hasn’t been convicted of anything. He was impeached over his actions on January 6th and the Senate did not convict him. Indeed, not only has he not been convicted of anything a federal prosecutor who did indict him for his actions on and leading up to January 6th did not charge him with seditious conspiracy, the crime most proximate to the 14th Amendment’s criteria.

 Like he was actually tried by the US Senate and not convicted. I know that this was a political result, but it does complicate matters. I think that the short answer is that we probably need either an admission or a conviction to make this one work. After all, look at this (performative) congressional resolution about Joe Biden. The real issue is what counts as triggering the amendment and it needs to be a universal standard that we can apply to all future politicians. 

Conviction is a very clean standard. We routinely remove rights from convicted persons (e.g., the right to vote) and, while I may not love it, it is a known feature of the legal system. The problem is that Donald Trump has not been convicted of anything yet. Maybe he will be but it is concerning to let the emotional want for justice to overturn the process of justice, which is flawed enough when done slowly and carefully. 

The worst threat to Donald Trump of being convicted of this right now is the RICO charge, but I worry about that as well, given other ways that statue has been used recently. 

No, I think that this particular question is best approached with care and not passion, no matter how much we might not like where care leads us. 

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Monday, September 11, 2023

"Remember that time the press went crazy for a candidate who turned out to be going nowhere in the polls?" "You'll have to be more specific."

Vivek Ramaswamy's -1.3% surge reminded me of Iowa's swoon-shrugging over Fiorina. Lord, we've been at this for a long time.

 

Friday, June 5, 2015

The internet has made historical revisionism so much easier

[UPDATE: Brad DeLong found an arguably more embarrassing example from the National Journal.]


This may be the best example of New York Times political reporting you will see you all day.


It started as a standard narrative journalism/puff piece. Amy Chozick and Trip Gabriel used a handful of anecdotes and a couple of well-received speeches to build a breathless account of political underdog Carly Fiorina surging toward the lead.

Hack political writers love this narrative. They also gravitate toward positive stories about candidates with whom they are comfortable. When I say "comfortable" I am talking about culture not politics. I will try to back this up in future posts, but I have long argued that left/right biases are far less common than more significant biases involving class, race, religion, region, education, etc. While the New York Times probably disagrees with most of Fiorina's politics, they are more than comfortable with almost everything else about her, from her prominent family to her CEO background to her wealth and extravagant lifestyle.

So far, all of this is just another day at the office for the New York Times election beat. Soon after the piece ran, however, people started to notice that the writers had really buried their lede. Deep in the story, it was revealed that Fiorina's surge was not quite as substantial as the headline suggested.

From paragraph 8 (as pointed out by Duncan Black):
While supporters in Iowa noted that she had doubled her standing in state polls, it was a statistically insignificant change from 1 percent to 2 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University Poll released May 6. (That may seem piddling, but the same poll had Mr. Santorum, who won the Iowa caucuses in 2012, also at 2 percent, while 5 percent supported Mr. Bush.)
It is one thing to have a paragraph in the middle of your story that completely undercuts your premise; it is quite another to have people point out a paragraph in the middle of your story that completely undercuts your premise. A quick rewrite was definitely in order.


The resulting headline doesn't make a lot of sense -- if the polls are a reflection of the state's voters, Iowans appear to be swoon-shrugging over Fiorina -- but it does partially inoculate the story from further mockery.

Of course, the NYT has standards. They don't just rewrite a published story without even acknowledging it. The original headline is right there at the bottom of the page.


In small print and pale gray letters.

 

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Friday, September 8, 2023

With his youthful energy and out-of-the-box thinking, Vivek Ramaswamy has shot up in the polls by -1.3%

Around two weeks ago (Aug 6th)





Today

 


Over those two weeks, we've had to endure countless articles, op-eds, and think pieces about Ramaswamy's surging poll numbers and what they said about America. There seemed to be newly passed law that required every journalist in the English-speaking world to weigh in on how this exciting new candidate was connecting with voters.

Despite the fact it never happened. Even if we ignore some curious details about his rise in the polls and take it at face value, Ramaswamy's bump was small -- maxing out at 10% -- and never came close to beating DeSantis, let alone making him a serious challenger to Trump.

None of this is to say that Ramaswamy won't have a real surge at some point. This is black swan season. I'm not ruling anything out.

What I am saying is that this "surge" was a non-event and the press corps should be ashamed of itself for wasting our time.


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Thursday, September 7, 2023

Thursday Tweets on time for once

First, three stories we should be talking about more. The ongoing domestic terrorist attack on our infrastructure...
... and this ...

 

 and this...



 

Now on with the schadenfreude.

 

If you're a news junkie, you've probably already heard about this:

        Musk’s Epic, Antic Labor Day Weekend Against The Jews

But no account could match watching it unfold in real time.




 Of course, Musk's not just prejudiced against Jewish people.

 

Elsewhere in the empire.



And politics. Did anyone have Kavanaugh as leper with the most fingers in the GOP SCOTUS ethics pool?


I'd use stronger language, but, yeah.

All sorts of interesting dynamics in this campaign.

 



Nothing racist to see here.




I suspect DeSantis is smart enough to know the only smart thing he can do with respect to the general is avoid the topic of abortion, but if he wants to stay next in line, he has to keep ratcheting up.





RFK jr



Once again, Naomi Klein would like to remind you she's not that Naomi.

Some say it was caused by a bad poll fourteen months before the election. Some say it was Nate Silver throwing a tantrum because people were calmly discussing Biden's age. I've been watching the political press covering Democrats long enough to know it's just...

Panic Season

 



Crypto


UFOs

Excellent debunking by an expert with more relevant experience than Loeb. (Read the thread here.)

AI

Here's the source.

Misc.






A useful video for twitter replies.

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Wednesday, September 6, 2023

LLMs and IP

Update:

Here's a comment Bob Carpenter left on last week's AI post.

It's not clear, at least as of current court rulings, whether ChatGPT and its ilk have violated any copyright laws. There are a dozen current cases that amount to three basic claims, (1) training infringes copyright, (2) outputs are derivative works, and (3) systems strip out copyright marks. There may be cases about privacy and things like deep fakes coming. There's then the question about who is infringing in cases (2) and (3)---the AI company who built the model or the user who prompts it and then distributes the results? The infringement arguments failed for video recorders because there were non-infringing uses, but succeeded against Napster and music file sharing. The AI companies are most worried about (1). The countervailing consideration they present is that they don't care about the expression of the language (which is what is copyrightable), but only the data or concepts (which are not copyrightable). There's an absolutely fantastic hour long talk on copyright and AI by Pamela Samuelson (where I took the above info), an IP law professor at Berkeley, here: Large language models meet copyright law. She explains the form vs. expression distinction and why it means code is treated differently than other forms of writing (because it's relatively function heavy).

 And here (slightly cleaned up and augmented) is my reply.

Lots to talk about here (keep watching this space) but here are a couple of important point about VCRs (though I believe it was audio cassettes that set the more important precedents). The law allows for personal use, but selling tapes of copyrighted material is still against the law and those rules are well enforced. (Illegal taping did give us one of the all time great Seinfelds, but that's not important right now.) If we were limiting ourselves to personal use, I doubt people would be getting this upset (or investing all those billions).

It's also worth noting that with video (though not so much with audio), the systems being sold to consumers when these precedents were set were next to worthless for large scale IP theft. Copying tapes was a slow process and second-generation VHS was almost unwatchable. Until S-VHS was introduced (years after these cases were decided), you needed a very expensive professional editing suite if you wanted to make money off violating that FBI warning.

Second. Memorex was providing a system where it was the user who did the inputting and the outputting so there was no ambiguity about who was responsible for any piracy. When I use ChatGPT, all of the inputting has been done before I sit down. I had nothing to do with the decision to download the archives of the NYT or the novels of Stephen King. Most users don't even know about it.

More broadly speaking, laws are written with an eye to what's possible, and when that changes, the law should too. There are a lot of ways to steal IP without technically infringing on copyright but that doesn't make it right, and when new tech makes those types of theft easier, those laws should be revisited.

Even pre-LLM, there were lots of gray areas and lots of aggressive lawyers who stretched IP protection to absurd limits, be it clawing a work back after decades in the public domain (It's a Wonderful Life) or suing a singer for sounding like himself (John Fogerty).

Finally, OpenAI, like Uber, Airbnb, and Tesla, has gained a competitive advantage by bending or breaking the spirit and often the letter of the law even when it doesn't have to just because it can. There is a huge amount of text that is in the public domain and could be used without infringing on anyone's rights or privacy. Of course, it would cost a little more, but a company valued at $27-29 billion could afford it, and you wouldn't be able to get a column written in the style of Maureen Dowd, but I consider that a social good.

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Tuesday, September 5, 2023

This would be an example of my concerns with naive YIMBYism.

Silicon Valley billionaires (including the co-founder of at leading YIMBY advocacy group) paving over unethically acquired farmland to build a car-dependent upscale exurb between SF and Sacramento in the middle of a flood plain next to a nature preserve.

Remember, reducing sprawl and therefore carbon emissions is one of the main promises of the movement, but Solano County, measured from the county seat, Fairfield, is more than forty miles from either San Francisco or Sacramento. San Jose (the Bay Area's largest city, the center of tech industry, and the spot that really needs the housing) is almost eighty miles away. The proposed site would be a few miles farther still.

Probably the most dangerous part of the YIMBY movement (at least in the form it's best known by) is the straw-man lie that this is about whether to build when it's actually about where to build and about the wisdom of letting market forces and the profit motive make that decision. There are plenty of places we can develop where housing is more badly needed, where development will reduce commute times and carbon footprints, where there is minimal danger of fire or flood, and where productive farmland won't be bulldozed and you won't have to lie to land owners to get them to sign over their property.

 Silicon Valley elites revealed as investors behind $800M land grab
by Megan Fan Munce, Shira Stein, J.K. Dineen -- Aug. 25, 2023

The investors behind a mysterious company buying thousands of acres in Solano County have been revealed to be a group of Silicon Valley power players. 

Flannery Associates caught the attention of both local politicians and several federal government agencies after it spent more than $800 million buying  140 properties in Solano County over the past five years, purportedly to build an entire new city.

But until Friday, where exactly the money was coming from was unclear. 

The New York Times first reported that the company’s investors included Laurene Powell Jobs, owner of the Atlantic and widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and Andreessen Horowitz, a Menlo Park venture capital firm that’s backed companies including Skype and Lyft, among a host of other prominent Silicon Valley figures.

A source with knowledge of the project confirmed the list of investors to the Chronicle. The Chronicle agreed not to name the person, who was not authorized to speak to the media. 

The original man behind the idea, the Times reported, is Jan Sramek, whose LinkedIn account says is a former Goldman Sachs trader. 

...

Along with Moritz and Powell Jobs, the project has also received funding from LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison, and independent investors Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, the Times reported. Friedman is also the co-founder of California YIMBY, a pro-housing advocacy group.

Andreessen Horowitz general partners Chris Dixon and Marc Andreessen [of course -- MP] are also individually backing the company alongside their firm.

...

The security concerns for Travis Air Force Base endure, even with this new information, [Rep.] Garamendi said. “Travis Air Force Base handles more personnel and material than any other air force base in the United States,” he said. “At this moment, C-17s and C-5s are being loaded with munitions for Ukraine.

“There are numerous ways in which those movements can be disrupted by any organization or person that is adjacent to the air base,” he said. The county has zoning requirements that severely restrict wind and solar farms within miles of the base, so as not to disrupt radar.

Both lawmakers said they are also concerned about protecting family farmers. “They just can’t displace our family farmers; these are people who make a living feeding American households, and that’s totally inappropriate to think that they can come in and just drive them out of business,” Thompson said.

“Flannery Associates used strong-arm mobster tactics to purchase the land, including suing farmers — generational farm families — promising that they can continue to operate, and then throwing them off the land,” Garamendi said.


 
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Monday, September 4, 2023

Vivek

This is Joseph.

One unfortunate implication of the recent political landscape in US and British politics is the movement into a post-truth era for one of the parties. Here is the Telegraph defending Vivek Ramaswamy with ""By focusing on old shibboleths like fact and consistency, his critics make themselves sound arcane." But before we laugh too much, this is the 3rd ranked candidate for Republicans (now, to be fair, it might be inflated but, as the Telegraph notes, should facts get in the way?).

But this person is saying crazy things. Just looking at WIKIPEDIA we get gems like "Ramaswamy favors raising the standard voting age to 25" which is repealing a constitutional amendment. How does one get an amendment:
An amendment may be proposed by a two-thirds vote of both Houses of Congress, or, if two-thirds of the States request one, by a convention called for that purpose. The amendment must then be ratified by three-fourths of the State legislatures, or three-fourths of conventions called in each State for ratification. 

This is crazy unlikely. The path to 67 Republican senators, alone, would be extraordinary (they have 48 right now) and you are asking states to make themselves toxic to a big chunk of voters in the hope that the amendment ratifies.  I actually think repealing the second amendment has better chances and it remains fantastically unlikely. 

Or the delightful idea of abolishing agencies by executive fiat and firing 75% of federal employees and making them all "at will". Again, huge legislative and constitutional barriers exist to this plan and there is no clear way that such a massive reform could be enacted without a close relationship with congress (look at how Joe Biden gets all of his successes).  Instead he appears to want to rule by fiat, as a king instead of a president.

But who cares, it is all lies anyway because facts don't matter. 

He asked for truth about 9/11 and then denied that he did so. He got rich running with some extraordinarily well timed stock sales. Now he is using his campaign to delay testifying about his corporate dealings. 

So we have a person with a shady past, no attachment to facts, and no experience in government promising implausible things. How is this the best way to select a political leader? In any case, after how Brexit turned out, I hesitate to trust the UK right wing on, well, anything. 

P.S. Our editor also pointed out this particular tweet. The incoherence of the foreign policy positions of this candidate are remarkable. In particular, is the current Russian regime really the people you want to make deals with that depend, entirely, on their sense of integrity (they could take the concessions and just never really change their strategic relationship with China other than a couple of speeches that are later ignored). 

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It's Labor Day, so we're taking time off and running a repost

 


Look for the Union Label

The ILGWU sponsored a contest among its members in the 1970s for an advertising jingle to advocate buying ILGWU-made garments. The winner was Look for the union label.[9][10] The Union's "Look for the Union Label" song went as follows:

    Look for the union label
    When you are buying a coat, dress, or blouse,
    Remember somewhere our union's sewing,
    Our wages going to feed the kids and run the house,
    We work hard, but who's complaining?
    Thanks to the ILG, we're paying our way,
    So always look for the union label,
    It says we're able to make it in the USA!

The commercial featuring the famous song was parodied on a late-1970s episode of Saturday Night Live in a fake commercial for The Dope Growers Union and on the March 19, 1977, episode (#10.22) of The Carol Burnett Show. It was also parodied in the South Park episode "Freak Strike" (2002).















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Friday, September 1, 2023

Is AI the new crypto?

This is Joseph

This David Gerard is a very insightful article on AI and the scam associated with it. I think the key is right here:
Anil Dash observes (over on Bluesky, where we can’t link it yet) that venture capital’s playbook for AI is the same one it tried with crypto and Web3 and first used for Uber and Airbnb: break the laws as hard as possible, then build new laws around their exploitation.

The VCs’ actual use case for AI is treating workers badly.

The Writer’s Guild of America, a labor union representing writers for TV and film in the US, is on strike for better pay and conditions. One of the reasons is that studio executives are using the threat of AI against them. Writers think the plan is to get a chatbot to generate a low-quality script, which the writers are then paid less in worse conditions to fix

It really is one of the real issue of regulation that we need to face as a society -- it is always going to be more profitable to be allowed to change the existing rules in a way that allows for extra profit. The deference we give high flying venture capitalists and tech firms really does create a profit opportunity. 

  • If you don't have to follow hotel rules then you can make hospitality cheaper (AirBnB) at the cost of your neighbors
  • If you can see securities without following security laws (BitCOIN) then you can make money with a superior regulatory framework (and I will believe that crypto is currency when it stops inflating in price and becomes a stable store of value)
  • Uber manages to treat drivers as independent contractors despite incredible control over them via the application
The real issue with today's most interesting type of AI (large language models) is that they require huge amounts of input from stuff that is copyrighted but for which the model does not pay out any royalties. I suppose that they could be trained on entirely open source material but that doesn't seem to be the case:

Where does ChatGPT get its data?
ChatGPT’s data comes from a massive dataset that includes a diverse range of sources such as websites, books, news articles, and journals. 

Just like the controversy with AI art in D&D, this mostly seems to be a mix of autocomplete and the ability to indirectly use copyrighted material without attribution or license. 

In any case, this is an interesting perspective and one that I suggest our readers will find quite interesting. It's also going to be a very contentious area of law -- with the most interesting piece being the journalist just assuming that AI will eventually be able to copyright art. Keep in mind that this is a very interesting direction to go -- if I feed in a picture to be tweaked by AI have I just removed copyright? What if the tweaks are imperceptible? 

So I think this intersection between Tech and Intellectual Property Law is an interesting area for our readers to follow. 

P.S. Our editor, Mark, wanted to highlight this article as well. 

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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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