When it came to Elon Musk, the hyperloop was my reindeer moment.

[I wrote most of this ages ago, but it took me so long to get the final draft done that it's now a seasonal post.] 

My parents would tell the story of how, when I was four or five years old, I went up to them and asked somewhat tentatively, “Reindeer can't really fly, can they?” They admitted that no, reindeer couldn’t take flight. I thought about that for a moment and then asked, “There's not really a Santa Claus, is there?” From that point on, it was understood in our household that my mom and dad were providing the presents at Christmas.

I don’t remember that, but I do remember my first-grade teacher having to reassure what I now realize were some rather traumatized six and seven year olds that, no matter what their classmate had been telling them, there really was a Santa Claus.

For a lot of us, the reindeer moment when it came to Elon Musk was the Hyperloop.

 "A cross between a Concorde and a railgun and an air hockey table"

Going into 2013, my general impression of Musk, which was consistent with what I’d been hearing from researchers and engineers, was that he clearly wasn’t a real-life Tony Stark, but he was a smart guy who did his homework and understood the big picture. Then I heard about Musk's big idea for a new mode of transportation and that familiar nagging reindeer doubt began to form.

 For starters, this was more or less explicitly an attack on High-Speed Rail in California which struck a jarring note coming from someone who had built his reputation largely around the issue of sustainability. It turned out to be just the first indication of Elon musk's profound hostility toward public transportation, one of the many wedges that would be driven between him and his supporters on the left.

The main issue, however, was that the proposal was at once stunningly grandiose and incredibly stupid. We've had a decade now of Musk making delusional boasts and describing himself in Messianic terms, but for most of us, this was our first taste of the man's narcissism, made all the more striking by the fact that his "invention" was something that had occurred to thousands of people over the years- - it was even a standard element in science fiction -- but which was obviously unworkable if you gave it any serious thought.

Putting aside the most absurd element of the original proposal, having a high-speed vactrain running on an air cushion (I will never tire of seeing actual engineers reactions when they hear about that part), anyone with common sense and the most basic grasp of engineering and construction could see a huge number of insurmountable flaws.

Civil engineers and transportation researchers immediately tore into Musk' s grand white paper and left virtually nothing standing. Though the rocket scientists at SpaceX had done their best to polish their boss's turd, they couldn't come up with any workable, let alone innovative solutions. There was literally nothing of value there.

The sheer quantity of flaws was so overwhelming that none of the critics even attempted a comprehensive take down. The cost projections were off by orders of magnitude. Most of the issues associated with constructing and maintaining a tube with a near vacuum extending hundreds of miles were ignored. Others were addressed in the silliest way possible (to deal with thermal expansion, the stations at either end would have to be put on rollers so they could move back and forth hundreds of yards). A breach in the tube caused by natural disaster, accident, or terrorist attack would cause catastrophic failure, shutting down the entire line, probably causing serious structural damage miles away from the site, and killing hundreds of people.

The other thing I noticed was how Musk’s fans were quietly, and perhaps even unconsciously, editing and revising what he said to make it more viable. His original pitch was for something that worked like (in his words) an air hockey table, a train that traveled on a cushion of air. This was part of the original proposal. It was in the white paper. It featured prominently in his early interviews. You really couldn't miss it.

 But when actual proposals started coming out promising to make Elon Musk's idea a reality, every single one was for a maglev system. As far as I can tell, out of the hundred plus million dollars that have gone into these projects, literally ot a penny has gone into the technology Musk proposed. As silly and impractical as their designs were, they were still far more workable than what they claimed to be building.

 

Everybody's talking about affordability, but only Marketplace thought to bring in a linguist.

I am generally opposed to making nouns of verbs or vice versa so I should definitely have trouble with this one but Rett, makes a persuasive case that “affordability” really does deserve to be the word of the hour.

Jessica Rett, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, said “affordability” is “a much weirder” noun than “economy.”

“We come to it via this indirect route. It starts off as a verb: afford,” Rett said.

From there, it becomes an adjective adjective: affordable. Stick another ending on it to make it a noun: affordable. This path from a verb to an adjective to a noun means the word “affordable” holds lots of adjectival properties that “economy” doesn’t hold, Rett said.

“Nouns like economy often describe a bunch of dimensions all at once, but affordability is really honing in on a particular dimension,” she said.

This means the word “affordable” is easier to understand, since it’s just about one slice of the whole economy. All of this could add to the word’s political power.

“The economy is something that you have to have a PhD in order to be a specialist in,” Rett said. “But everyone’s an expert in affordability, because it’s very subjective. It’s relative to their own personal experience, and it’s something that they have a daily interaction with.”

Our annual Toys-for-Tots post

A good Christmas can do a lot to take the edge off of a bad year both for children and their parents (and a lot of families are having a bad year). It's the season to pick up a few toys, drop them by the fire station and make some people feel good about themselves during what can be one of the toughest times of the year.

If you're new to the Toys-for-Tots concept, here are the rules I normally use when shopping:

The gifts should be nice enough to sit alone under a tree. The child who gets nothing else should still feel that he or she had a special Christmas. A large stuffed animal, a big metal truck, a large can of Legos with enough pieces to keep up with an active imagination. You can get any of these for around twenty or thirty bucks at Wal-Mart or Costco;*

Shop smart. The better the deals the more toys can go in your cart;

No batteries. (I'm a strong believer in kid power);**

Speaking of kid power, it's impossible to be sedentary while playing with a basketball;

No toys that need lots of accessories;

For games, you're generally better off going with a classic;

No movie or TV show tie-ins. (This one's kind of a personal quirk and I will make some exceptions like Sesame Street);

Look for something durable. These will have to last;

For smaller children, you really can't beat Fisher Price and PlaySkool. Both companies have mastered the art of coming up with cleverly designed toys that children love and that will stand up to generations of energetic and creative play.

*I previously used Target here, but their selection has been dropping over the past few years and it's gotten more difficult to find toys that meet my criteria.

** I'd like to soften this position just bit. It's okay for a toy to use batteries, just not to need them. Fisher Price and PlaySkool have both gotten into the habit of adding lights and sounds to classic toys, but when the batteries die, the toys live on, still powered by the energy of children at play.

Explaining the finances of OpenAI remains a job for Patrick Boyle

Does OpenAI expect a Government Bailout

As always, the excerpts don't Boyle justice -- you need to watch the whole thing -- but here's his take on how Sam Altman produced that epic tweet.

From the transcript (proofed and reformatted appropriately enough by ChatGPT):

[CFO Sarah Friar] “We’re building a really healthy business. Free cash flow—every CFO’s favorite way to fund anything—is climbing quickly. The third area we’ve moved into is working with our ecosystem to structure some interesting financing deals. I’m particularly proud of the AMD warrant structure we put in place a few weeks ago, because it creates a very strong alignment of incentives.”

This is a bizarre claim, as OpenAI can’t fund anything with free cash flow when its cash flow is negative.
...

Tech firms have always been creative about financing, but OpenAI’s approach borders on the surreal, where it has become all about trying to find infinite money glitches. MicroStrategy—sorry, “Strategy,” as it now prefers to be called—is attempting a similar trick with its Bitcoin investments, which I don’t expect to end well.

... 

The problem is that they want to lever up their bet on AI, but banks don’t want to lend, and the interest rate on a loan backed by rapidly depreciating chips would be so high that you would need the government to guarantee it.

I can tell that this will make some of my viewers angry, but there’s really no reason to get upset about this, since both Sam Altman and Elon Musk have explained that AGI will soon make money obsolete. So—who cares?

...

The cloud – which was supposed to be weightless - turns out to be very heavy. 

... 

I remember seeing ads on CNBC back in 1999 for a company that manufactured equipment used in the wafer-fabrication steps of making semiconductors. At the time, I couldn’t understand why they were paying for TV ads when all of their potential customers already knew who they were and what they sold. No one watches CNBC and decides to start manufacturing computer chips in their garage.

I later realized they weren’t advertising their products—they were advertising their stock. The stock fell about 80% over the next three years.

Recently, I saw a tech CEO being interviewed while wearing a T-shirt with his company’s ticker symbol on it, not the company’s name. And every podcast I listen to seems to have ads for an AI military-tech company. Once again, I find myself wondering whether their potential customers are really listening to a Bloomberg podcast—or whether they just want to pump the stock. I’ll note that the CEO of that company constantly talks about “burning” short sellers while dumping his own shares.

 

"As God as my witness..." is my second favorite Thanksgiving episode line [Repost]

 

 


If you watch this and you could swear you remember Johnny and Mr. Carlson discussing Pink Floyd, you're not imagining things. Hulu uses the DVD edit which cuts out almost all of the copyrighted music. [The original link has gone dead, but I was able to find the relevant clip.]

As for my favorite line, it comes from the Buffy episode "Pangs" and it requires a bit of a set up (which is a pain because it makes it next to impossible to work into a conversation).

Buffy's luckless friend Xander had accidentally violated a native American grave yard and, in addition to freeing a vengeful spirit, was been cursed with all of the diseases Europeans brought to the Americas.

Spike: I just can't take all this mamby-pamby boo-hooing about the bloody Indians.
Willow: Uh, the preferred term is...
Spike: You won. All right? You came in and you killed them and you took their land. That's what conquering nations do. It's what Caesar did, and he's not goin' around saying, "I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it." The history of the world is not people making friends. You had better weapons, and you massacred them. End of story.
Buffy: Well, I think the Spaniards actually did a lot of - Not that I don't like Spaniards.
Spike: Listen to you. How you gonna fight anyone with that attitude?
Willow: We don't wanna fight anyone.
Buffy: I just wanna have Thanksgiving.
Spike: Heh heh. Yeah... Good luck.
Willow: Well, if we could talk to him...
Spike: You exterminated his race. What could you possibly say that would make him feel better? It's kill or be killed here. Take your bloody pick.
Xander: Maybe it's the syphilis talking, but, some of that made sense.

Happy Thanksgiving Eve

Any excuse to post McCay. 

 

Little Nemo in Slumberland 1905-11-26 (from the good people at Wikimedia).

 

 

Apologies in advance but I just have to share this one

A less consequential but far funnier follow-up to yesterday's post.  

 We all knew that Elon Musk was a sad, hollow man whose craving for praise and attention rivals that of Donald Trump, but that doesn't make it any less enjoyable to laugh at each new example.

Jason Koebler writing for 404:

Elon Musk is a better role model than Jesus, better at conquering Europe than Hitler, the greatest blowjob giver of all time, should have been selected before Peyton Manning in the 1998 NFL draft, is a better pitcher than Randy Johnson, has the “potential to drink piss better than any human in history,” and is a better porn star than Riley Reid, according to Grok, X’s sycophantic AI chatbot that has seemingly been reprogrammed to treat Musk like a god. 

Grok has been tweaked sometime in the last several days and will now choose Musk as being superior to the entire rest of humanity at any given task. The change is somewhat reminiscent of Grok’s MechaHitler debacle. It is, for the moment, something that is pretty funny and which people on various social media platforms are dunking on Musk and Grok for, but it’s also an example of how big tech companies, like X, are regularly putting their thumbs on the scales of their AI chatbots to distort reality and to obtain their desired outcome. 

 

 

 

 

Beyond the schadenfreude, this is a reminder both of how easy and how difficult it is to manipulate these models. Easy in the sense that it doesn't appear to take much time or effort to play around with the parameters and move the responses in the direction you want. Difficult in the sense that, based on both this and the Mecha-Hitler incident, attempts to adjust the responses to comically overshoot and greatly degrade the quality of the outputs.

Elon really, really doesn't think things through

Over on X, they just rolled out the public feature that reveals where accounts are located. I've found several major Elon Musk fan accounts that are run out of Africa and two major MAGA accounts are run out of Europe

— steven monacelli (@stevanzetti.bsky.social) November 22, 2025 at 3:34 PM

(Special Investigative Correspondent for the Texas Observer)

Holy shit. So Elon decides it would be nice to know what region of the world people are posting from. So they add that little feature. 2 hours later they figure out that many Trump supporters with millions of followers are posting from other countries. Surprise! That "feature" is now gone.

— TheRoadie. (@roadie63.bsky.social) November 23, 2025 at 7:29 AM

This is a funny story (how could they not see this coming?), but it’s also an important one. It almost certainly won’t get the coverage it deserves, but news organizations are starting to pick up on it (though, as expected, The New York Times is dragging its feet).

On some level, this is telling us something we already knew, but that doesn’t mean we should find it any less appalling or feel any less responsibility to face the consequences now that our suspicions have been confirmed. If anything, these new revelations should prompt a round of soul-searching from the journalists who decided that the uncovering of the Tennant operation—where we learned that some of the most prominent far-right influencers were literally on the Russian payroll—was a three-day story. Of course, we won’t see any soul-searching from these people, but we should.

We’ve made this point before, but journalists and political scientists have got to stop treating MAGA and the rise of Trump as an organic, spontaneous phenomenon rather than a massive experiment in social engineering. I’m not saying we shouldn’t continue to look at the social and economic forces that helped and continue to shape the current Republican Party, but anyone studying this needs to start from the assumption that large parts of it have been deliberately cultivated over the years.

One complicating factor is that while many—perhaps most—of the far-right influencer accounts on TwitterX are foreign actors operating under false identities, many are lying on a freelance basis. They are being paid not by Russia or China but by the site in exchange for generating so many clicks. It turns out that spreading falsehoods and undermining American democracy can be its own reward, financially speaking.

If I’m understanding this correctly, X is owned by a white nationalist who pays poor people of color in developing countries to pretend to be working class white Americans to scare other white Americans into being afraid poor people of color from developing countries are going to ruin America?

— Max Berger (@maxberger.bsky.social) November 23, 2025 at 11:30 AM

Anyone who has read up on the Cold War knows that this sort of thing is nothing new. Propaganda both overt and covert was flowing from both sides for decades. The difference is, though, are substantial. The technology is more advanced, the techniques are more sophisticated, and this campaign has been terrifyingly successful.

The funniest part of the latest XKCD cartoon isn't on XKCD

Don't get me wrong, it's a funny gag... 

... but not as funny as this detail about the strip revealed in the Explain XKCD blog.
  

A search for "total number of simultaneous EPIRB signals" on Google the day after this comic returned an AI Overview bullet point of "System-wide: The overall system is designed to handle thousands of beacons globally. One source suggests a scenario of up to 1,600 simultaneous signals at the same geographic location, which authorities can manage and verify." which implies that Google's AI algorithm was reading this comic explanation page and including it in search results as a source for how EPIRBs operate. 

For more unexpected XKCD connections, check this out.

Cacti, Goats, Charcoal -- we do it all

There are lots of questions about scalability and the best way to take advantage of this, but at the very least, if you live in the Southwest, replacing your lawn with native plants is a win-win-win. 

 From the Arizona Republic:

Professor Laurence A.J. Garvie of Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration noticed something interesting while walking in the desert.

Garvie saw gritty, light-colored tailings within fallen, decaying saguaros. It turned out to be calcium carbonate – the same material that makes up chalk and caliche.

When a saguaro dies, it essentially makes a chalk line around its own body.

So what?

The significance is atmospheric.

All plants sequester – or trap – atmospheric carbon (CO2) as they grow. After they die, most of that carbon goes back into the atmosphere as the plant decays.

But when a saguaro dies, much of that carbon is transformed into an inorganic mineral that is sequestered for geologic time in the ground.

...

And it isn’t just saguaros – although they are the most iconic example.

Garvie says all common species of cacti remove carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in the earth as calcium carbonate.

You may have come across some of it when gardening. It’s called caliche and the desert plants have been producing it for millions of years.

“Our desert cacti are just like a coral reef,” says William Peachey, a saguaro researcher who discussed Garvie’s research during the annual meeting of the Tucson Cactus and Succulent Society earlier this year.

Coral reefs are known to transform atmospheric carbon into limestone, “our desert has a terrestrial equivalent,” says Peachey.

 

 

After you've cleaned your room, you can go outside and play with Foamy.

Christina Cauterucci writing for Slate:

But opposition to pet vaccines seems to have risen since the COVID-19 pandemic. Experts say that since contemporary pet owners view their animal companions as family members, attitudes toward veterinary treatments mirror attitudes toward human medical interventions. The Vaccine journal study found that people with negative views of human vaccines were likelier to have negative opinions of animal vaccines—and COVID-19 had a lasting impact on the way people feel about preventative shots. In a series of Gallup polls, the percentage of Americans who said it was extremely or very important for parents to vaccinate their children dropped 15 points between 2020 and 2024, a decline the poll attributed almost entirely to right-leaning Americans. A survey conducted in Brazil found that pet owners were six times more likely to refrain from vaccinating their animals if they themselves were not fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

Anti-vaccine advocates save their strongest rebukes for mRNA pet vaccines, the first of which were approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for canine influenza and feline leukemia last year. The menu of veterinary mRNA vaccines may soon expand; in Canada, pets can already get one for rabies. Because the two most famous and effective COVID-19 vaccines—Pfizer’s and Moderna’s—were the first-ever mRNA products to receive Food and Drug Administration approval, mRNA technology has become a primary villain of the anti-vaccine movement in both human and animal medicine.

Just as the alleged connection between human vaccines and autism has been thoroughly, repeatedly debunked, there is no evidence that pet vaccines are responsible for the ills with which anti-vaccine advocates credit them, from early-onset cancers to a suite of cognitive and behavioral problems that some half-jokingly call “pawtism.” Like autism in humans, “pawtism” is allegedly characterized by repetitive behaviors, sensitivity to sensory stimuli, and difficulty in social situations.

The lack of scientific backing for these vaccine concerns hasn’t stopped a multitude of influencers, care providers, and activists from raising alarm about veterinary shots. There are peddlers of tonics that claim to heal pets from the effects of “toxic preventatives and pharmaceuticals.” There are podcasters trumpeting “the risks of over-vaccination.” There are social media personalities posting scary videos about pet vaccines “shedding” onto humans.

...

Like more than a dozen other states, Colorado offered a loophole for medical exemptions. If she could argue that a pet was not healthy in any way, Jasek would write up a note excusing the animal from the rabies vaccine. Most of the time it worked fine, but she says she was twice contacted by the state board because people had filed complaints against her. (The complaints never led to any disciplinary proceedings.) Once, it was another veterinarian who didn’t believe an exemption was justified. Another time, a client’s unvaccinated dog bit someone.

“She kind of threw me under the bus, basically, and said, ‘Well, Dr. Judy said I don’t need the vaccines,’ ” Jasek told me. “That isn’t true. I mean, I tell people that the vaccines can cause health concerns. However, when it comes to the laws and the rules, people still have to be accountable.”

Rabies outbreaks in wildlife populations are on the rise across the U.S., due in part to human incursion on natural habitats. Though the people who have died from rabies exposure in the last year have gotten the disease from wild animals, veterinarians worry that distrust of pet vaccinations could lead to a resurgence among domestic animals of a virus that is nearly 100 percent fatal in both animals and people.

 

Edison on the power grid of the future

Edison (who never learned to drive) loved riding in fast cars but hated the fuel that powered them. 

From a 1910 interview.

… said Edison as we sat at lunch… “Some day some fellow will invent a way of concentrating and storing up sunshine to use instead of this old, absurd Prometheus scheme of fire. I’ll do the trick myself if some one else doesn’t get at it. Why, that is all there is about my work in electricity–you know, I never claimed to have invented electricity–that is a campaign lie–nail it!”

“Sunshine is spread out thin and so is electricity. Perhaps they are the same, but we will take that up later. Now the trick was, you see, to concentrate the juice and liberate it as you needed it. The old-fashioned way inaugurated by Jove, of letting it off in a clap of thunder, is dangerous, disconcerting and wasteful. It doesn’t fetch up anywhere. My task was to subdivide the current and use it in a great number of little lights, and to do this I had to store it. And we haven’t really found out how to store it yet and let it off real easy-like and cheap. Why, we have just begun to commence to get ready to find out about electricity. This scheme of combustion to get power makes me sick to think of–it is so wasteful. It is just the old, foolish Prometheus idea, and the father of Prometheus was a baboon.”

“When we learn how to store electricity, we will cease being apes ourselves; until then we are tailless orangutans. You see, we should utilize natural forces and thus get all of our power. Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy.”

“Do we use them? Oh, no! We burn up wood and coal, as renters burn up the front fence for fuel. We live like squatters, not as if we owned the property.

“There must surely come a time when heat and power will be stored in unlimited quantities in every community, all gathered by natural forces. Electricity ought to be as cheap as oxygen, for it can not be destroyed.

“Now, I am not sure but that my new storage-battery is the thing. I’d tell you about that, but I don’t want to bore you…” 

Lots of researchers at the time were interested in wind and solar, but Edison characteristically identified the main challenge not as generation but as storage.

Actually a P/E ratio of 200 would be an enormous improvement

 

 As we've said before, anyone with even a passing interest in business, finance, or the economy should sign up for Allison Morrow's newsletter. She has become one of my must-reads.

Here, she does a great job laying out the absurdity of Tesla's valuation and capturing the frustration felt by rational observers watching an irrational market.

Consider Tesla, a stock so detached from the company’s actual business some analysts call it the “OG meme stock.”

 

Its core product, electric cars, is quickly growing stale and losing market share to rivals. But don’t worry, it’s not a car company anymore, Elon Musk has said (despite cars being the only commercially viable, revenue-generating product Tesla offers). No, Tesla is an AI and robotics company now, its future staked to robotaxis (still in development, buggy, years behind Alphabet’s Waymo) and $20,000 humanoid robots (also still in development, and still require a human operator to do the household chores it’s billed to one day do autonomously.)

 

This week, Bank of America analysts said Tesla’s core automotive business represents just 12% of the company’s total value. Robotaxi is 45% and “full self Driving” — Tesla’s autonomous driving software that doesn’t reliably work and customers don’t reliably want to pay for — is 17%.

 

In short: Well over half of the stock’s value lies in products that either don’t yet exist or don’t exist at scale.

 

...

 

Sensible investors might say “hey, there’s clearly value here but a stock that trades at 200 times earnings is overhyped and I’m going to sit this one out.” And they’d be right, in the Warren Buffett sense of right.

 

But they’re not Warren Buffett.

 

...

 

Being a naysayer in this market doesn’t pay the bills. Buying the dip does. All those crypto trolls who taunted skeptics to “have fun staying poor” were not, sadly, incorrect (though we can all agree they were jerks). Crypto has not only stayed alive, it’s practically gone mainstream. Even Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan Chase boss Jamie Dimon, a longtime critic, has sort of come around, saying earlier this month that blockchain – crypto’s underlying technology — “is real.”

 

There is almost no “bad” news that can rattle Wall Street anymore, as investors have learned that buying the dip almost always pays off.

 

That is, of course, until it doesn’t. And no one knows when, or even whether, we’ll hear the record scratch.

 

Finally, a piece of data visualization that truly captures the moment.

 

 Given that this is from the Financial Times, it’s very probable the intent here is satiric. Unfortunately, these are very strange times, and I can’t be entirely sure—especially since the Financial Times has an extremely formidable paywall.

Either way, I felt this was one I should share with everyone.

We really should set aside more time for cool math

One of the disadvantages of having so much to talk about (literally thousands of items in the draft folder waiting for completion) is that so much fun stuff gets pushed aside. Case in point: this post from John D. Cook.

 

John Conway discovered a right triangle that can be partitioned into five similar triangles. The sides are in proportion 1 : 2 : √5.

 

 

 

You can make a larger similar triangle by making the entire triangle the central (green) triangle of a new triangle.

 

 

 

Cook later points out that repeating this gives us an aperiodic tiling of the plane and has a cool animation. 

 If I were still teaching high school geometry (and wasn't being Common-Cored into submission), I'd make the following assignment.

Prove these five smaller triangles are similar to the large one.

Prove these five smaller triangles are congruent to each other.

Find the ratio of the corresponding sides of the small triangles to the corresponding sides of the large triangle. 

Prove that this partitioning of a right triangle would only work for sides in proportion 1 : 2 : √5..