Wednesday, August 7, 2024

Congratulations everyone who chose door number one. You have two months to get your bets in for our next round.

When Elon Musk promised a big robotaxi reveal, we broke our no predictions rule and suggested the following possibilities:

To be blunt, the industry is nowhere near the level of self-driving functionality and Tesla in nowhere near being the leader in this field. Assuming we do not witness the company leapfrog the competition and unveil a major breakthrough in level 4 autonomy, what are we likely to see on August 8th?

1. Nothing. Elon Musk will announce that the big reveal has been pushed back to make the product even more spectacular.

2. An Optimus Style non demonstration where Elon will haul out a barely functional prototype years behind the competition in terms of sophistication and will spend the rest of the time talking about how incredible the next iteration will eventually be.

3. Low level fake. A painstakingly choreographed drive-through of carefully mapped course with selective editing to cover the remaining glitches. (see Optimus.)

4. High level fake. Everything in the low level fake plus a Mechanical Turk actually at the controls. Check out the right side of this video which was released to great fanfare.

 

From Bloomberg:

Tesla will now unveil robotaxis on Oct. 10, and the cars shown will only be prototypes. More affordable models that could juice sales won’t go into production until the first half of next year, at the earliest. A planned factory in Mexico is on pause until after the US presidential election in November, and a humanoid robot that Musk predicts will send Tesla’s valuation soaring won’t start selling until sometime in 2026.

 Here's the rest of our original announcement.

Monday, April 8, 2024

If I had a slightly cynical attitude toward Elon Musk, I might be a bit suspicious of a couple of things here

 First of all, there's the timing of this.


 

The surprise Robo Taxi announcement certainly came at a fortuitous moment for Musk. Before the news broke, Tesla was having a really bad, awful, totally nogood year ...

 

 

 

... followed by a really bad, awful, totally nogood day thanks to the release of a Reuters story about the company ever so quietly canceling its plans for a low-cost EV. This was on top of tons of bad news about the companies inventory and other problems, not to mention the cybertruck managing to edge out the Ford Edsel as the ultimate cautionary tale of why not to overhype a new automobile. 

 At 4:49 in the afternoon, less than an hour after the stock dropped another 3.63%...

 

 And one minute later...


 


Longtime readers will be familiar with Musk's history of announcing incredible breakthroughs, often just as one of his companies is about to go over a cliff.

From May 25, 2022

About seven or eight years ago, Musk's promises started becoming unmoored not just from what his engineers were working on, but from what was even possible. As best I can tell, this started with the hyperloop.

[And before the rumbling starts again, though you have heard about hundreds of millions of dollars going into hyperloop companies, absolutely none of that money is going into Elon Musk s air cushion idea. Every proposal and protype you've seen has been for maglev. Companies like Virgin scrapped his concept but kept the name.]*

Part of the reason for these increasingly delusional boasts may just have been Musk getting high on his own supply.** Take someone with messianic tendencies, give them a full-bore cult of personality, and have even the most respectable journalists refer to him as a real life Tony Stark. You know it's going to go to a guy's head.

But these fantastic claims also served his financial interest. The huge run up in the stock of Tesla came after the narrative had shifted to over-the-top fantasy.

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

To be blunt, the industry is nowhere near the level of self-driving functionality and Tesla in nowhere near being the leader in this field. Assuming we do not witness the company leapfrog the competition and unveil a major breakthrough in level 4 autonomy, what are we likely to see on August 8th?

1. Nothing. Elon Musk will announce that the big reveal has been pushed back to make the product even more spectacular.

2. An Optimus Style non demonstration where Elon will haul out a barely functional prototype years behind the competition in terms of sophistication and will spend the rest of the time talking about how incredible the next iteration will eventually be.

3. Low level fake. A painstakingly choreographed drive-through of carefully mapped course with selective editing to cover the remaining glitches. (see Optimus.)

4. High level fake. Everything in the low level fake plus a Mechanical Turk actually at the controls. Check out the right side of this video which was released to great fanfare.

 

Musk later added a note that the robot was not actually operating autonomously but of course, he wasn't trying to mislead anyone. 

* In the two years since this post, those hundreds of millions have been long been burned through with the biggest and best financed Hyperloop One/Virgin Hyperloop finally shuttering its airlock last year. 

** And we now know getting high on a lot of other things as well.


 

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Tuesday, August 6, 2024

From Biden to Harris – – a view from the ground (mostly)

The past few weeks, particularly since the debate, I have been collecting a largely anecdotal and entirely unscientific sample of opinions and reactions of Democrats. Part of it comes from conversations with a group of acquaintances that is at least geographically diverse, including Georgia, Arkansas, LA, the bay area, and Washington state. Some of it comes from exchanges on social media. Some from professional observers like Josh Marshall and Charles Pierce who have proven themselves clear eyed in the past.

Here's an overview of what I heard.

Take this with however many grains of salt you find appropriate, but I am reasonably confident that these opinions and general mindset give a pretty good picture of where the Democratic Party is at the moment. The consistency of what I'm hearing is remarkable. People I talked to kept telling me the same things, and it is a consensus sharply at odds with what pundits at places like the New York Times are telling us we should be hearing.

Biden's age was always a concern for these people, but not in the way that Nate Silver or the New York Times editorial board would have you believe. There was relatively little concern about his ability to do his job, partially because of how well he had been doing it up to now and partially because we had faith in him and in the people around him to do the right thing should the time come. Everyone I talked to had long accepted the possibility that he might step down sometime during his second administration.

The worry was that, while Biden's age might not affect his performance as president, it could very much affect his performance as a candidate. Being head of state does not require the energy level of a game show host, but increasingly political elections do. This was especially a concern when running against Trump, a politician whose persona was equal parts professional wrestling heel, sideshow barker, and second-tier Vegas insult comic. Trump's energy levels vary dramatically (how many defendants sleep during their criminal trials?), but being a narcissist, he fed off of the energy and adoration of the crowds. As long as he was the center of attention, he would seldom come off as a tired, old man.

This worry was elevated to genuine fear when Democrats realized that most of the establishment press was doing its best to bury stories about Trump's physical and cognitive decline, and there was a lot to bury. Slurred and garbled words. Glitches. Calling people by other people's names, often for extended periods. Weird digressions. Memory lapses. The previously noted inappropriate naps. A campaign schedule that consisted mainly of days off.


 

Unlike with Biden, Democrats noticed that stories of Trump's cognitive decline had remarkably short half-lives outside of liberal outlets like the New Republic. Case in point:

“I spoke to a number of CEOs who I would say walked into the meeting being Trump supporter-ish, or thinking that they might be leaning that direction,” said CNBC’s Ross Sorkin. “[CEOs] said that he was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought, was all over the map.”

Trump promised the CEOs to cut taxes and bring the federal corporate tax rate down from 21 percent to 20 percent, a lackluster attempt to elicit excitement from the suits. One attendee summarized Trump’s message as, “We’re going to give you more of the same for the next four years,” according to CNBC.

“These were people who, I think, might have been actually predisposed to him,” said Sorkin. “And [they] actually walked out of the room less predisposed to him, actually predisposed to thinking ‘This is not necessarily—’ as one person said, ‘this may not be any different or better than a Biden thought, if you’re thinking that way.’”

Here's how it was covered in the New York Times by their A-Team,  Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Charlie Savage.

Former President Donald J. Trump told a group of America’s most powerful chief executives on Thursday that he intended to cut the corporate tax rate to 20 percent from 21 percent, according to three people who attended the meeting and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the ground rules stipulated the meeting was off the record.

Mr. Trump made the remarks from a comfortable gray armchair during a conversation with his former economic adviser Larry Kudlow in front of the audience of dozens of leading chief executives, including Tim Cook of Apple, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, Doug McMillon of Walmart and Charles W. Scharf of Wells Fargo.

They had gathered on Thursday morning in Washington for a meeting of the Business Roundtable, an influential corporate group, and there was said to be palpable relief in the room when Mr. Trump, who has been trying to woo business leaders as potential donors, told the executives much of what they had hoped to hear.

...

Mr. Trump, whose public speeches are often characterized by conspiratorial promises to root “Communists” out of government and hard-line policies such as overseeing the largest deportation operation in American history, was described by one of the people who attended the meeting to have sounded relatively more measured than usual, modulating his messages for the elite audience. He most strikingly softened his language about immigration.

But it was his spiel about taxes that seemed most visibly pleasing to the executives in the room, according to people who attended the meeting.


The realization set in that while both candidates were clearly not the men they had been four or eight years ago, the press was only interested in the Democratic side of that story. Under these conditions, having a candidate who lacked the stamina and energy to successfully campaign was, for lack of a better word, scary.

And yet, no one I talked to had been eager to see Biden step down. Nate Silver and various writers at the New York Times, Politico, etc. complained loudly about the irrationality of Democrats wanting to stick with Joe. There actually was a rational explanation for the seeming contradiction but it was not one that Silver and company would have cared for. Democrats were afraid that people would listen to the New York Times.

One thing that has really jumped out at me watching recent events is how much the Democrats of 2024 yearn for unity and how angry they get at anything that threatens that unity. The concerns over the Biden campaign, though substantial, were still less than the concerns over the chaos that might ensue if he stepped down. The process being aggressively lobbied for by people like Ezra Klein or Ross Douthat seemed likely to result in a bitterly divided Democratic Party that would be crushed by Trump and the MAGA Republicans up and down the ticket. If you could have convinced these Democrats that the new nominee would be Kamala Harris, someone they had voted for explicitly in 2020 and implicitly in 2024 and whom they considered the legitimate successor, you would've run into far less resistance, and if you could also convince them that the party would come out of the transition far more unified, you would've seen almost unanimous support.

One last point. This is, at least for the moment, a happy and hopeful group.

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Monday, August 5, 2024

Who reads the headlines, anyway? -- a tale told mostly in tweets

 
 
 

Saturday morning Twitter, or at least the corner of twitter that obsesses over politics and political journalism, started furiously exchanging takes triggered by this headline from the online version of the New York Times.

Political scientist Amy Fried appears to be the one who got the ball rolling at an embarrassingly early hour for a weekend.

The tweets tell the story here, but we'll set the stage first.

A few days ago, we ran a post about a piece by the New York Times editorial board which talked about how both sides could and should do more to facilitate debates, somehow failing to mention the facts that Harris had already been aggressively pushing for a debate while Donald Trump had just backed out of one. That piece so misrepresented what was actually going on that it crossed the line into distortion. This headline managed to do the same in a dozen words.

Just to get the obvious out of the way, there is no such thing as a unilateral agreement. Trump backed out of an agreed-upon debate giving a succession of sometimes contradictory reasons. He then made a counterproposal. An unserious counterproposal.

When the social media reaction started hitting critical mass, the NYT changed the headline without comment, but the damage was done.




The actual article didn't help.


The proposal itself was a poison pill, not to mention being completely at odds with the serious exercise in democracy the NYT had been pontificating about.


A bit off topic but still relevant.






It didn't take long for the usual suspects from Politico, the NYT, and the rest to start whining about the criticism. It did not go over well with the crowd.

 

You can read Marshall's excellent thread here.


"Anyway, my position remains that if you have a six-figure job in political media and strongly believe that nothing you do matters (and therefore you cannot be held to any standards for professional conduct), you should quit and let somebody who actually gives a shit have the job."  

Scott Lemieux


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Friday, August 2, 2024

I'm trying to wrap up the New York Times bashing thread but they keep giving me so much material

Written on 7/29/2024.

Lots to criticize here (the embarrassing "code switching" article alone would be good for a couple posts), but I am going to try stay on topic, and use the Harris 2020 headline to illustrate how the NYT is manipulated and how you can spot it. Keep in mind is that arrogant people are the easiest on and, with the possible exception of a Harvard physics professor, no one is more arrogant than a New York Times editor. They are the ideal marks. 

Are there notable disconnects between how prominent a story should be based on newsworthiness or interest and how prominent it actually is? Has a big story been buried or omitted entirely? Is a relatively trivial and boring story featured on the first page of the website and above the fold in the print edition while bigger stories are pushed aside? 

If you do see one of these disconnects, the next question you should ask yourself is who would be happy to see the minor stories played up big? Who would be relieved when the buried or omitted stories are forgotten? 

If you see a pattern of odd editorial choices favoring one side, you have intimidation and/or bias regardless of what the stories themselves actually say. No matter how good the articles happened to be, simply by putting those that favor one side on A1 and those that favor the other on A13 the damage is done. Of course, if the headline is inaccurate (and remember those are normally written by an editor), that makes the bad even worse. 

Look at what the New York Times considered the top election story of 7/29/2024, and ask yourself: 


1. Is this really the most important political development of the day? Is it what people most want to talk about? If you were editor, would you have put this above the Republican candidate promising to establish a national bitcoin stockpile, the increasingly intense demands from Democrats that Trump debate Harris, or this? 


 

1b. Were progressive ideas the primary focus of the Harris 2020 campaign or was it more about ability to challenge Donald Trump?


 2. Who would be happy to see the conversation shift to Harris's more liberal positions four years ago? Who would've been unhappy to see the conversation concentrate on Trump's crypto announcement, JD Vance's historically bad VP debut, or the fact that the Republican pulled out a schedule presidential debate?

3. Is there a pattern? I've been following the NYT with a critical eye for years now and I'm confident that I could easily write virtually this same post two or three times a week with examples as or more egregious than this. The New York Times has created a deeply flawed and self-serving code of ethics and they somehow manage to violate even that on a regular basis. They been bad for years and they continue to get worse which is not behavior we can afford from the paper of record.

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Thursday, August 1, 2024

The Return of Thursday Tweets -- “Cross of Doge” wins it this week

Let's start with representative Kimble.



Maybe it would be simpler if we gave people with children some kind of exemption for each child.



Rampell has always been in the impartial and nonpartisan school, but she's clearly getting fed up.




This part's also worth a listen.

Just to remind everyone, the obsession with having the right people breed is where the traditional far right meets the Silicon Valley variety, particularly the PayPal mafia.


On the subject of the MAGA/Techbro alliance:










It's been a while since we checked in on Elon.






Musk really needs people to start talking about those robots. See here and here for details.


He may have lost a step but he can still run circles around the pundit class.






One of the main worries about a Thunderdome convention was that various factions, particularly on the left, would set themselves up as kingmakers, locking Harris into unpopular positions and preventing her from taking advantage of openings like this.





On a related note.



In case you were wondering where the NYT finds all of those Biden voters who are switching to Trump.


We'll see how well Trump's attempt to deny ever having heard of his own platform will go over.






Sorry, ladies, but he's spoken for.


Only the body horror genre.







Because we need this...







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Wednesday, July 31, 2024

The New York Times Editorial Board loves narratives, but they especially love narratives where they're the hero

This is quite the piece of work. Sanctimonious and self-serving. It is such a platonic ideal of New York Times editorial board posturing that, if it were to come in tweet sized bites, you would assume it was actually written by the Pitchbot.

Vice President Kamala Harris, now the likely Democratic nominee, has the chance to encourage and embrace the kind of close examination that the public so far has had little opportunity to witness during the 2024 race.

Americans deserve a campaign that tests the strengths and weaknesses of the candidates; that highlights their differences and allows scrutiny of their plans; that motivates people to vote by giving them a clear account of how their choice in this election will affect their lives.

Americans deserve the opportunity to ask questions of those who are seeking to lead their government.

You know that whenever the NYT offers to speak for those of us among the great unwashed, it's going to be embarrassing and, at least in that respect, this does not disappoint. Unless I've gotten hold of a truncated version, the entire thing comes in at around 350 words, so we could take it line by line, but fortunately there's one paragraph that epitomizes the self-righteousness, fatally flawed ethics, and general dishonesty of the whole piece.

But she needs to do more, and she needs to do it quickly. Ms. Harris ought to challenge Mr. Trump to a series of debates or town halls on subjects of national importance, such as the economy, foreign policy, health care and immigration. Mr. Trump claims that he is ready and willing to participate in debates once Democrats have officially selected a nominee. Americans would benefit from comparing the two candidates directly.

[The linked article is also a remarkable exercise in calling a spade anything but a spade.] 

Two of the three sentences are so bad that we either have to conclude that the editorial board is almost completely ignorant of what actually happened or that these are deliberate lies of omission. In the first the board leaves out the fact that Harris has already been challenging Trump to debates or at least demanding that he show up to the one he already agreed to. Check out this clip from the day before the NYT ran its editorial.

If anything, the second sentence is even worse. It is absolutely absurd to talk about Trump's willingness to debate while making no mention of the fact that he just backed out. I'm tempted to stop here since anything else risks going into "other than that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" territory, but it's worth noting that the rationale has shifted by the day from ABC being unfair to him, to the fact that Obama had not at the time endorsed her, to her not yet being the official nominee to this...  

 

Despite the recent posturing on the subject, the value of presidential debates is not all that clear. Based on the history of the last 64 years, they haven't been particularly good at conveying information and substantive arguments, and to the extent they have mattered at all, they have tended to hinge on trivialities, gaffes, and appearances. Nixon's decision to forgo makeup, Gerald Ford's obvious misstatement about Russian influence, Reagan's movie star fame.

But once you accept the premise that debates are essential for democracy (let alone the sacred institution the NYT has been building them up as for months now), then recent events lead to a story that the New York Times editorial board desperately wants not to tell: we need to have debates but Trump backed out. Harris responded by demanding debates and trying to pressure and shame Trump into going along but he keeps coming up with new reasons to avoid them.

The board hates this version for at least a couple of reasons. First, there's no way to tell it without making the Democrat look good and the Republican bad, at least not without dumping the pro-debate premise. "Something is good. The Democrat wants to do it. A Republican is trying to stop it." is the kind of thing that ends up on page A14 in the paper of record.

More importantly though, it is a story that makes the New York Times a trivial character. In the version they published, they are wise and impartial judges and advisors, standing above the fray, alone seeing the big picture. We, the New York Times, defenders of democracy, are out there fighting for you the voters if only both sides would listen to our counsel. 

No institution in journalism has a culture more centered around the belief in its own superiority than does the New York Times. Few institutions do, period. The one other example that springs to mind are the Ivy leagues schools and even there I think the comparison might be a bit unfair. 

The NYT has made a string of disastrous decisions over the past thirty years, starting with Whitewater, Bush V Gore, and the Iraq war. In each case and in all the cases since, it has reacted by denying his own culpability and clinging even more tightly to its own self-deceptions. 


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