Friday, September 9, 2022

We're going to skip the crown entirely...



If you're feeling warm and sentimental about the end of the reign Queen Elizabeth II, you'll probably enjoy this clip...




If, on the other hand, you were already tired of the German British royal family and the thought of wall-to-wall coronation coverage make you feel slightly sick to your stomach, you'll probably want to go with this incredibly mean spirited roman à clef. This is the second chapter of the original (and far superior) House of Cards trilogy, but it works OK as a stand alone. Fans of Diana will want to give it a pass. 





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Thursday, September 8, 2022

Thursday Tweets

Conventional wisdom assumed the midterms would be about Biden and Inflation. Trump and Abortion make for a very different battlefield.


In theory, the keep-him-out-of-the-election approach has a lot to be said for it; in practice, it's a bit difficult to execute when your party is now basically a conspiracy theory/cult of personality built around an attention hungry narcissist.



Remember when David Brooks was holding up Rubio as the sensible answer to Trump? No wonder Brooks has started talking about third parties.



If you listened carefully a few months ago, you would have noticed that smart Republicans were nervous about Dobbs. Now everyone has noticing something big is going on.





Ohio is a solidly pro-choice state with one of the most extreme anti-abortion policies. We talked about this back is May. 





Remember, Masters also wanted to overturn the ruling guaranteeing the right to contraception.

When things get chaotic, it's smart to field solid candidates in what would normally be extreme long-shot races. I'm not saying the Democrats should spend big bucks in Arkansas, but if Trump implodes (or turns on the GOP), they might be glad they had this minister with a PhD. on the ticket.



When useful idiots start winning the primaries, they no longer fall into the "useful" category.




Rich people

At least some of those billionaire survivalists are justifying themselves with this...
While on the subject of Thiel...



When I lived in Atlanta, I heard this a lot. Things were great under the benevolent mad, worse after Time-Warner, terrible after AOL.

Excellent thread retweeted by Margaret Sullivan,


Remember massive, systemic plagiarism from those too small to fight back is OK is long as you don't steal actual wording. 

Bad journalism.

Good journalism.


It took over a decade for the WSJ to notice MeTV but better late than never.



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Wednesday, September 7, 2022

Ground source heat pumps are "the most energy-efficient, environmentally clean, and cost-effective space conditioning systems available," but maybe we can get journalists to talk about them anyway. [Repost]

I'm joking but I'm not kidding. 

If Elon Musk or some other Silicon Valley visionary proposed some laughable plan based on non-existent technology, reporters would be scheduling interviews within the hour, but a solution supported by experts based on mature, tested systems will get little to no coverage.

One of the biggest crises facing California is a failing electrical grid, particularly during summer heat waves which are going to continue becoming more frequent and severe as the planet warms. Ground source heat pumps and similar technology could greatly alleviate pressure on the grid, especially when coupled with roof top solar. On top of that, its efficiency reduces demand for fossil fuels.

If we're going solve our problems, we can't go on being disinterested in solutions. 



From Wikipedia:

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has called ground source heat pumps the most energy-efficient, environmentally clean, and cost-effective space conditioning systems available. Heat pumps offer significant emission reductions potential, particularly where they are used for both heating and cooling and where the electricity is produced from renewable resources.
...
Ground source heat pumps are characterized by high capital costs and low operational costs compared to other HVAC systems. Their overall economic benefit depends primarily on the relative costs of electricity and fuels, which are highly variable over time and across the world. Based on recent prices, ground-source heat pumps currently have lower operational costs than any other conventional heating source almost everywhere in the world. Natural gas is the only fuel with competitive operational costs, and only in a handful of countries where it is exceptionally cheap, or where electricity is exceptionally expensive. In general, a homeowner may save anywhere from 20% to 60% annually on utilities by switching from an ordinary system to a ground-source system. However, many family size installations are reported to use much more electricity than their owners had expected from advertisements. This is often partly due to bad design or installation: Heat exchange capacity with groundwater is often too small, heating pipes in house floors are often too thin and too few, or heated floors are covered with wooden panels or carpets.
...
Capital costs may be offset by government subsidies, for example, Ontario offered $7000 for residential systems installed in the 2009 fiscal year. Some electric companies offer special rates to customers who install a ground-source heat pump for heating or cooling their building. Where electrical plants have larger loads during summer months and idle capacity in the winter, this increases electrical sales during the winter months. Heat pumps also lower the load peak during the summer due to the increased efficiency of heat pumps, thereby avoiding costly construction of new power plants. For the same reasons, other utility companies have started to pay for the installation of ground-source heat pumps at customer residences. They lease the systems to their customers for a monthly fee, at a net overall savings to the customer.
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Tuesday, September 6, 2022

A concern about the Canadian Health Care system

This is Joseph.

A 2017 CMAJ article has been making the rounds on Twitter that has the headline result of:
Medical assistance in dying could reduce annual health care spending across Canada by between $34.7 million and $138.8 million, exceeding the $1.5–$14.8 million in direct costs associated with its implementation. In sensitivity analyses, we noted that even if the potential savings are overestimated and costs underestimated, the implementation of medical assistance in dying will likely remain at least cost neutral.

While costs are never irrelevant and this was a pre-implementation estimate, there is a concern about focusing on costs in a context of medical resource shortages.  We also have concerning cases like the case where the only condition listed was "deafness" on an application for medical assistance in dying in 2019. Or the high profile concerns that Jennifer Gunter, a US physician, had for the end of life care for her father in Manitoba. 

Now, I know that people will blame COVID for the problems, and that is certainly not unrelated, but there consensus that this is also a problem with health care policy:

But experts say decades of bad policy, including the closure of hospitals and past austerity budgets, coupled with Canada's vast and complex geography, have exacerbated the pandemic pressure

And this is a real challenge to the goal of the system, to create equitable outcomes:

Canada's system, however, ranks lower overall than the UK and others in international comparisons . . . Canada specifically lags when it comes to equitable access and care outcomes.

Data over the last five years shows people are waiting longer in the ER before they are either seen by a doctor or admitted to hospital. Nearly five million Canadians don't have a family doctor, often making an emergency room their primary place to get help if they need it. 

 So I want to flag two important things. One, is there is a heightened need to be vigilant about processes like medically assisted dying in a context where care is hard to obtain. The risk of concerning events slipping thought is heightened when the entire hospital system is in crisis and people are overworked/burnt out. Two, that it is important to remember that the reason for a public-only health care system is to ensure equitable access and care outcomes -- making sure that more resources don't give better access to care but instead basing care on need. But that requires that these outcomes be equitable and that the level of care is acceptable (although perhaps minimally so) for all patients. 

If we can't do that then we need to think more carefully about what are the health care outcomes that we want. 

That said, everything I read suggests that there is a staffing crisis which is leading to issues like 20 hour waits in the emergency room. I hate to quote basic economics, but when there is a shortage of workers then maybe it is time to consider raising wages? Even temporarily? As a larger matter, it might not have been the wisest idea to let government funding drive the number of training spots, as it is possible for forecasts to be incorrect. 

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Monday, September 5, 2022

It's Labor Day, so we're taking time off and running an excerpt from a recent Monkey Cage post

Sociologists Jasmine Kerrissey and Judith Stepan-Norris, co-authors of “Union Booms and Busts: The Ongoing Struggle over the U.S. Labor Movement,” look at the state of unions America and, for the first time in a long time, find reason for optimism.

It was 1894, the Gilded Age — a time of extreme inequality, foul working conditions, worker unrest and violent strikes. Congress created Labor Day, a national holiday celebrating workers and labor union

Labor Day alone didn’t change much. But from the 1930s through 1950s, labor unions were on the rise. One in every three workers were unionized, ushering in a new middle class, safety procedures and a voice at work, before membership declined again for decades. Today, only 1 in 10 workers are organized, and one-third of the country’s workers earn less than $15 an hour. Research suggests that union decline has contributed significantly to the rise in inequality.

But this Labor Day, for the first time in almost 25 years, union elections — events in which workers vote on whether to form unions — have increased significantly. Workers file for elections with the National Labor Relations Board, which governs most private-sector employees. Union election filings with the NLRB increased by 58 percent in the first three quarters of fiscal year 2022 (October-June), compared with the same period in 2021. Already, recent tallies estimate that more than 1,250 elections were held from October to August, more than were held during all of 2021. And unions have won the majority of these elections.

...

This past year has been different: Support for unions is surging. Both general approval of unions and union elections has been rising. In 2022, Gallup found that 71 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, the highest percentage since 1965. Gallup also found that over 40 percent of nonunion workers have some interest in joining one.

And workers are taking action. Interestingly, many are organizing in industries and companies that previously avoided union representation. Megacorporations, especially in retail, tech and service, have long kept out unions — until now.

 

 

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Friday, September 2, 2022

Why read about Pauline Kael when you can read Pauline Kael?

 Andrew Gelman has a post up on his blog discussing a new book by Louis Menand that includes the following quote:

"Kael’s contention that serious movies should meet the same standard as pulp—that they should be entertaining—turned out to be an extremely useful and widely adopted critical principle. . . ."

 I'm not familiar with Menand, but I am up on my Kael and I assume he's referring to this passage from the essay "Trash, Art and the Movies."

Keeping in mind that simple, good distinction that all art is entertainment but not all entertainment is art, it might be a good idea to keep in mind also that if a movie is said to be a work of art and you don’t enjoy it, the fault may be in you, but it’s probably in the movie. Because of the money and advertising pressures involved, many reviewers discover a fresh masterpiece every week, and there’s that cultural snobbery, that hunger for respectability that determines the selection of the even bigger annual masterpieces. In foreign movies what is most often mistaken for “quality” is an imitation of earlier movie art or a derivation from respectable, approved work in the other arts — like the demented, suffering painter-hero of Hour of the Wolf smearing his lipstick in a facsimile of expressionist anguish. Kicked in the ribs, the press says “art” when “ouch” would be more appropriate. When a director is said to be an artist (generally on the basis of earlier work which the press failed to recognize) and especially when he picks artistic subjects like the pain of creation, there is a tendency to acclaim his new bad work. This way the press, in trying to make up for its past mistakes, manages to be wrong all the time. And so a revenge-of-a-sour- virgin movie like Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black is treated respectfully as if it somehow revealed an artist’s sensibility in every frame. Reviewers who would laugh at Lana Turner going through her femme fatale act in another Ross Hunter movie swoon when Jeanne Moreau casts significant blank looks for Truffaut.

In American movies what is most often mistaken for artistic quality is box-office success, especially if it’s combined with a genuflection to importance; then you have “a movie the industry can be proud of” like To Kill a Mockingbird or such Academy Award winners as West Side Story, My Fair Lady, or A Man for All Seasons. Fred Zinnemann made a fine modern variant of a Western, The Sundowners, and hardly anybody saw it until it got on television; but A Man for All Seasons had the look of prestige and the press felt honored to praise it. I’m not sure most movie reviewers consider what they honestly enjoy as being central to criticism. Some at least appear to think that that would be relying too much on their own tastes, being too personal instead of being “objective” — relying on the readymade terms of cultural respectability and on consensus judgment (which, to a rather shocking degree, can be arranged by publicists creating a climate of importance around a movie). Just as movie directors, as they age, hunger for what was meant by respectability in their youth, and aspire to prestigious cultural properties, so, too, the movie press longs to be elevated in terms of the cultural values of their old high schools. And so they, along with the industry, applaud ghastly “tour-de-force” performances, movies based on “distinguished” stage successes or prize-winning novels, or movies that are “worthwhile,” that make a “contribution” — “serious” messagy movies. This often involves praise of bad movies, of dull movies, or even the praise in good movies of what was worst in them. 

In particular, the phrase "readymade terms of cultural respectability and on consensus judgment (which, to a rather shocking degree, can be arranged by publicists creating a climate of importance around a movie)" is more relevant in an age where streaming services spend hundreds of millions on PR firms and billions on marketing. 

I'm not a big fan of most of the cultural commentary I occasionally see in the mainstream press (which isn't much since I don't seek out things that annoy me). This is partially because so much of it still feels like a bad Kael imitation. (Though, to be fair, Denby managed to be a pretty good Kael imitator.) As with so many things, if I want criticism that's insightful, honest and free of herd mentality, I'm more likely to go to a favorite blog or YouTube channel. On a good day, I'd put Bob Chipman up against anyone working the same beat at the New Yorker or the Atlantic. 

One warning about these essays. You will find yourself violently disagreeing with some of her takes on various movies, particularly those she dislikes. I'm OK with that. If you're not then you should probably stop here.

Otherwise, start with either Trash or Kane, and see what the original was like.

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Essential Kael

I have a couple of posts in the draft stage and a few more in the back of my head that center on either quotes from Pauline Kael or discussion of the New Journalism movement that involve her. I thought it might not be a bad idea to do a quick introductory post because Kael is one of those writers who does need an introduction.

Part of the problem is that, when you say "critic," most people think "reviewer."  Probably the easiest way to explain the distinction is in terms of audience. Criticism is written for people who know a work; reviews are written for people who are thinking about trying it. Kael was, at best, a deeply problematic reviewer. She could wildly oversell films she felt were particularly deserving. Other times, she would simply use the film as a jumping off point for an essay on films or culture or politics. She almost always had something interesting to say, but little that was useful when you were trying to decide which movie to see.

My advice for those new to Kael is to start with the essays, then check out the full (not the capsule) reviews of films you've seen, then stop.

Here are four to get the ball rolling.

Raising Kane
 The New Yorker, February 20, 1971 and February 27, 1971

Kael's best known essay and my favorite. Also her most controversial, though not always for the reasons normally given (see below). The piece is difficult to describe, part critical essay, part historical narrative, part reflection on American culture, but the unifying thread is the story of the East Coast writers and artists who came to Hollywood. By turns affectionate, insightful and sad. At least part of the vitriol it inspired can be attributed to the people she had pissed off a few years earlier with...



Circles and Squares
Film Quarterly (01/Apr/1963)

A relentless dismantling of the American take on auteur theory, particularly that of Andrew Sarris. In addition to pointing out the various contradictions and logical flaws in the standard arguments of the time, it digs into the dangers of praising works and congratulating ourselves just because we catch various allusions and influences (decades before anyone had heard of Tarantino). It may not be a coincidence that many those who came off worst in this piece (particularly Peter Bogdanovich) were among the most vocal of Welles "defenders" after the release of "Raising Kane."



Trash, Art, and the Movies
Harper's, February 1969

Addresses the fundamental paradoxes of taking pop culture seriously. It argues that we should acknowledge the pleasures and the vitality of a good trashy movie without trying to project upon it artistic qualities and deeper meanings to justify our approval. At the same time, we shouldn't equate the lack of trashiness with great art, particularly when it means praising the boring and the high-minded.




Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers
The New Yorker, June 23, 1980

A prescient take on the end of the Young Turk era of American film. Kael didn't care for auteurism as a critical theory but she tended to like auteurs, particularly the big visionary directors like Welles and Kurosawa and Huston. She looked upon the late 60s and early 70s as a golden age with films like Bonnie and Clyde and directors like Altman.

Kael openly viewed herself as an advocate for what she considered important films and visionary filmmakers, and she was willing to cross ethical lines to promote her favorites (such as when she wrote an ecstatic review of Nashville based on a private screening of a rough cut).

The end of the Young Turks era (combined with a brief stint working in Hollywood) left her bitter and pessimistic about the future of American cinema, which led to this 1980 essay. By far, my least favorite  of the four. The topic is too depressing for her to have any fun with and too narrow for her to make the interesting connections that mark the other three pieces. Worse still, the few films of the period she did like are overpraised to the point of exhaustion. That said, the observations on corporate culture are sharp and the predictions about pre-novelization perfectly describe franchises like I am Number Four.
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Thursday, September 1, 2022

Very smart post on causal inference

This is Joseph.

Andrew Gelman has a very nice piece on the challenges of causal inference over on his blog, looking at the discussion between Noah Smith and Bret Devereaux. As a conflict avoider of heroic stature, I don't like people I follow fighting but, in this case, it is bringing up some good points. 

But going back to just understanding patterns is also a very important step in epidemiology as well and there is a new movement towards trying to do more rigorous descriptive work. For example, this paper by Catherine R Lesko, Matthew P Fox, and Jessie K Edwards. I have some disagreements with the authors but it is a fantastic piece to get epidemiology thinking clearly about these issues. 

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Not doing things is a nonrival good (and while we're on the subject, can you have a nonrival good with a monopsony?)

As mentioned before, Matt Levine has become on of the essential writers on the business and finance beat and I strongly recommend that everybody sign up for Levine's free Money Stuff newsletter mentioned at the bottom of the post.

Here's a choice bit from the August 30th newsletter. 

The most interesting field of economics might be the economics of not doing things. The main way that people make money, in the world, is by doing things that other people want: drilling oil, brewing coffee, maintaining social media sites, writing newsletters. But there are a few lines of business where you can get paid for not doing things that you’d otherwise do. Blackmail, for instance, is a classic: “I will go around distributing these compromising photos of you, unless you pay me money, in which case I will do nothing.” Coasean bargaining: “I will build a smelly polluting factory on my land next to yours, unless you pay me money not to, in which case I will leave it undeveloped.” Demand response in electric grids: “I will turn my lights on and use electricity, unless you pay me not to, in which case I will use less electricity.” And, in the modern world, all sorts of environmental credit schemes: “I will chop down these trees, drill this oil, etc., unless you pay me not to, in which case I won’t do anything at all.”

There are so many ways in which the economics here are unintuitive. Consider the oil market. There is some demand schedule for oil; people will use more of it at lower prices and less at higher prices. There is also a supply schedule: Some oil is cheaper to drill than other oil, so when oil prices are low only the cheapest-to-extract oil will get drilled, but when prices get high people will drill in more difficult environments because it becomes worth it. But then consider the market for not drilling oil. If you own a bunch of oil fields, and someone will pay you $5 per barrel not to drill oil, you should start your not-drilling in the most-expensive-to-drill places. “Good news,” you say, “I have decided not to drill in this field that costs $150 per barrel to drill, now pay me my $5.” You could expand on this theory. If you don’t own any oil fields, you could walk into the offices of some environmental-credits company and say “if you pay me $5 per barrel not to drill oil, I won’t go around buying oil fields and drilling them.”

Also consider the demand schedule there. If you promise me not to drill for oil, I might pay you $5 per barrel for the oil you don’t drill. But you could go to someone else and promise not to drill the oil, and they might pay you $3 per barrel. For the same barrels. “Not drilling oil” is a non-rival good; you can not drill the same barrel of oil as many times as you like, and sell it to a different person each time.

Or consider blackmail. If you get some compromising photos of me, and I pay you not to publish them, then you won’t publish them (let’s assume). But what are your long-term incentives? The way to succeed in the business of not publishing compromising photos is by taking lots of compromising photos and repeatedly threatening to publish them. If I paid you $100 not to publish the photos, and you were like “right, good, I get paid not to publish photos, I will stop taking the photos,” you would be deeply misunderstanding your business. You are not being paid to not publish photos — anyone can not publish photos! You are being paid to credibly threaten to publish photos, and then not publish them.

This has important implications for the environmental credit schemes. You don’t get paid for not drilling oil or not cutting down trees; you get paid when there is a credible threat (from you or someone else) to drill the oil or cut the trees, and you prevent it. You are in the credible-threats business.

You can probably guess where this is going.

One of the counterintuitive aspects of this having a well functioning market with multiple buyers and sellers actually leads to worse outcomes in this case. You're better off having few sellers and only one buyer. Take one of the more successful examples, programs where the federal government pay framers to leave land fallow.



 

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Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Student loan forgiveness

This is Joseph.

Mark mentioned this briefly yesterday but I thought it was worth a full post. 

In the United States there has been some controversy about student loan forgiveness and the modest amount of debt relief that was recently given. I understand the reasons why it was good to do something and also why the time isn't optimal as it could have an inflationary impact. Still, the amount of inflation, according to Paul Krugman, is about 0.2% and much larger sums were forgiven for business support in covid-19. It is quite reasonable that the lockdown could have made student loans worse than expected for some people and so forgiveness is a reasonable policy.

It was then attacked for funding very left wing educational opportunities -- the exact phrase being "lesbian dance theory". Now, one thing to consider is that very few students take classes in identity. Here is a statistics from the far more left wing province of Ontario in Canada:


That's less than 1%. As expected, in the United States it is even lower:

There are more philosophy majors than in these fields!

Looking at the linked tables from the Department of Education (USA), we see that the top two majors are business and health sciences, together making up 32% of bachelor degrees (that is 1/3). There are five times as many students studying agriculture than "Area, ethnic, cultural, gender, and group studies" which is lumping a lot of different things together (are Russian studies and women's studies really appealing to the same students?). Now it is true that 4.5% of degrees go to visual and performing arts (which would include dance) but also things like acting, painting, and film school. Maybe it is or is not the optimal vehicle for teaching these skills  but there are also a lot of students taking degrees in "Homeland security, law enforcement, and firefighting" (about 2./3 this total) which is also a case where the applied and theoretical pieces might be quite different. 

And this ignores the engineers, computer scientists, and mathematics degrees. Now, it is true, that a system where students pick what they want to study does occasionally result in bad decisions that compound. But this is also true of health decisions, employment decisions, and financial decisions -- we are not considering regulating those, either. 

If the student loan program is seen as a type of covid-19 relief than it isn't a bad program. It will help most those students who started a degree and did not finish due to the world changing -- most defaults are for small amounts and students who did not finish their degrees. This also addresses the question of whether it is only backwards looking -- it is, but the justification is reasonable and it matches other parties who borrowed money and had it forgiven due to covid-19 impacts. 

Now I agree with Dean Dad that a forward looking policy is overdue. But that doesn't mean that this plan is without merit and the general idea seems to be justifiable.



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Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Tuesday Tweets and another reminder that Republicans were counting on an election about Biden and inflation, not about Trump and abortion

Listing "inflation" and "cost of living" separately is a bit of a stretch, but at least it's better than "inflation and high gas prices."

(And given that we're talking about Michigan, I assume he's talking about the security of the Canadian border.)


I wonder if they left in Masters' opposition to a right to contraception.


 And in related news.



Of course, changing the subject is easier when everyone reads the memo.


Someone seems to be under a bit of stress.


And though you've been told different, this remains Trump's party.

 

 

Built around a cult of personality.


No matter how much parts of the mainstream press dislike talking about it.

Remember how David Brooks spent the early part of 2016 touting Rubio as the sane alternative to Trump?


God, this one breaks my heart.

"The kids ask me, 'Can I go get a book?' They're so excited, and I have to say no."





You know Biden's foreign policy is going well when OAN switches from "this would never have happened if Trump were in power" to "this is only happening because Russia and China are afraid of Trump coming back to power"


I did not expect her to work NIMBYs into this one.


Before I could get around to making fun of Neumann's follow-up to WeWork, it collapses and he gets another $350 million for the next fiasco,






Though Utah is still a fairly safe seat, the fall-out from Jauary 6th continues to reverberate.




From the feral disinformation files.



This is what an actual never-Trumper looks like.



Sure it sounds bad, but...
...that's just Trump being Trump. Surely no respectable Republican would say something like...


One case where Russia's media being untrustworthy is kinda reassuring.


The anti-anti-Trump left has now crossed the "Marjorie Taylor Greene is right" threshold.



The Overton window on nuclear power appears to be moving.


On the student debt debate.


Well, no one saw that coming.



And Misc.




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Monday, August 29, 2022

When it comes to conventional wisdom, always check the numbers

Here's a quote from an otherwise pretty good CNN political analysis.[Emphasis added]

The onus is on Demings to prove she -- or any Democrat -- can win statewide in a state that has overwhelmingly backed Republicans for years. But Democrats got a morale boost recently: The National Republican Senatorial Committee came in with an ad campaign for Rubio while Demings was widely outspending the Republican. 

There is no question that the GOP has had a hell of a run in Florida recently, currently controlling all of the statewide office, but there's an widespread misconception (at least based on a very small and non-random sample). When the subject of DeSantis's 2018 election comes up, even people who  follow politics closely tend to be surprised at the actual results. 

 


 The last senate race results were similar. 




Of course, 2018 was a good year for Democrats, but in 2014, Scott beat Crist by a relatively tight 48% to 47% and that was a pretty good year for Republicans.

Not all of these races have been close -- Rubio had a solid win in 2016 -- but if you have to generalize. recent Florida politics seems to mainly be stories of Republicans pulling out narrow wins in big state elections, not of voters "overwhelmingly" supporting the GOP

None of this necessarily tells us anything about the upcoming mid-terms -- we are so far out of the range of data that you'd have to be an idiot to make predictions -- but the narrative lots of people have been telling themselves doesn't fit the data. 

 

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Friday, August 26, 2022

The essential Columbo

Something lighter for the weekend.

One of the consequences of the rise of streaming that everyone should have seen coming (but almost no one did) was the rediscovery of classic shows. The pandemic accelerated the process, possibly because people sought out the familiar. 

One of the shows that has been finding a new audience is Columbo. Joe Dator of the New Yorker had a ten panel appreciation of the show and the phenomenon back in 2020.


 

The show was part of a wheel series where various shows shared the same time slot. As a result, there are very few episodes for such long running show -- less than fifty if you don't count the reboot -- we made it easier to keep the quality high and to line up A list talent for the guest murderer slot.

These things make Columbo relatively easy for new viewers to get into, but as with any TV show, there are high points and low points. Here, more or less in order, are the episodes I'd recommend starting with.

These are all available on Amazon's ad supported service, Freevee.

1. "Murder by the Book" The first episode of the series after the first two TV-movies. Set the mold (and the standard). A career making show for Stevens Spielberg and Bochco. All this and Jack Cassidy too.

2. "A Friend in Deed" Directed by Falk buddy Ben Gazzara   Richard Kiley is smug and despicable. Twisty, inventive murder. One of the best endings. Perhaps the ultimate example of the lowly lieutenant bringing down the rich and powerful.
      
3. "Candidate for Crime" If not for the previous title on this list, I might call it the definitive episode. Another one of the best endings. Story by B-movie legend Larry Cohen;

4. "Suitable for Framing" Ross Martin was always fun. Good story. Memorable closing shot.

5, "Blueprint for Murder" Falk's directorial debut. Patrick O'Neal was born to play a Columbo villain. Ripped off by the Mentalist (as was the original TV movie).

6. "Identity Crisis" Columbo vs. the Prisoner (directed by McGoohan).

7. "The Conspirators" Interesting friendly relationship with Irish poet/IRA terrorist Clive Revill. Great closing line for the series finale.

Honorable mention

"Étude in Black"    Neither the murder nor the solution was that interesting, but it's Cassavetes and Falk

"Any Old Port in a Storm" Fine work from Donald Pleasence, with a genuine friendship between cat and mouse.

"Negative Reaction" Good resolution and how often is Dick Van Dyke the bad guy?

"A Stitch in Crime" Good work by Nimoy and Will Geer is always fun.

"The Most Dangerous Match" For Laurence Harvey fans

"Prescription: Murder" A good detective movie but neither Falk nor the creators had a firm handle on the role (which had previously been offered to Lee J. Cobb and Bing Crosby).

"Ransom for a Dead Man" Lee Grant was wonderful as always in a not-that-memorable story. Great closing scene, though.

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Thursday, August 25, 2022

Return of the Petruchio liberal





Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Petruchio liberals

As Shaw observed, Taming of the Shrew can be difficult for modern sensibilities (Benedick and Beatrice, by comparison, stand up well and are still being repackaged by comedy writers), but recently one particular element of the story has been coming to mind.
In Verona, Petruchio begins the "taming" of his new wife. She is refused food and clothing because nothing – according to Petruchio – is good enough for her; he claims perfectly cooked meat is overcooked, a beautiful dress doesn't fit right, and a stylish hat is not fashionable.

There is a certain type of vocal liberal, almost always white and reasonably affluent, who insists on blocking virtually every viable attempt to advance a progressive agenda because nothing meets his or her standards. They feel enormously proud of themselves for refusing to compromise, despite the fact that the price of their principled stands are invariably paid by the most disadvantaged.

Lawyers, Guns and Money has spent the past year or so dismantling this silliness.

Here's Scott Lemieux:








There should be a fancy Latin term for “arbitrarily chosen deal-breakers selected to reverse-engineer a justification for not voting for a candidate you’ve decided a priori you don’t want to support.” People who actually care about how the next president will affect environmental policy evaluate the candidates on environmental policy. People who want to effectively ignore environmental policy focus solely on fracking.

Her laundry list also serves to illustrate the utter stupidity of “dealbreaker” logic. “If Hillary Clinton favored a $15 minimum wage that won’t pass Congress, I might support her. But since she only favors a $12 minimum wage that won’t pass Congress, I’ll take my chances on Trump winning.” “I used to be a Democrat, but when I found out that Hillary Clinton is insufficiently woke on GMO labeling I can live with several decades of a Supreme Court where the median justice would have to turn to the left to see Antonin Scalia.” OK.
...

First of all, with the FBI director having decided to try to throw the election to Trump, this is an odd characterization. Clinton remains a favorite and probably an overwhelming favorite, but it would be wrong to say that Trump has no chance, and if Stein got any real traction he certainly would. But, hey, not only will it not be Sarandon who might die because she can’t get medical care or be unable to get an abortion or lose her legal marriage privileges or lose her welfare assistance or have no remedy for discrimination or be denied the vote if Trump wins, she stands to gain considerably from the Trump presidency she’s urging her fans to make more likely.

And it’s worth noting again that what utter chickenshit the qualifier is. At least the “heighten-the-contradicitons” crap she was peddling earlier is an argument — a really terrible argument in the vast majority of circumstances including this one, but an argument. “Vote Stein because it won’t matter anyway” just makes you a free rider patting yourself for what a special snowflake you are. Lamest. form. of. masturbation. ever. If you think that we can’t have an omelet without Trump breaking America’s most vulnerable then own it, and if not spare us.
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Wednesday, August 24, 2022

I shouldn't have to say this but a 49-25 poll is not good news for the 25 (and it gets worse)

First off, the decision of the New York Times to even conduct a presidential poll more than two years before the election is irresponsible and bad for for Democracy. It distracts from important conversations and, since the data are largely worthless,  its main function is to introduce noise into the conventional wisdom. 

 But while the data are not worth wasting any time analyzing, the analysis in the NYT piece by Michael C. Bender is worth talking about, and I don't mean that in a good way. This represents a disturbing throwback to the wishful analytics of the second half of 2015, showing that many data journalists and the publications that employ them have learned nothing in the past seven years.

Back in the early (and not so early) days of the last Republican primary, 538, the Upshot, and pretty much everyone else in the business were competing to see who could come up with the best argument for why being consistently ahead in the polls was actually bad news for Trump. These arguments, as we pointed out at the time, were laughably bad.

Just as being ahead in the polls was not bad for Trump in 2015, the results of this poll (to the extent that they have any meaning) are not bad for Trump in 2022. When elections approach, parties tend to converge on whoever has the clear plurality, and 49% is a big plurality, particularly when a large part of it consists of people who are personally loyal to Trump rather than to the GOP. On top of that, 53% of self-identified Republicans had a "very favorable" opinion of the former president and 27% were "somewhat favorable."

80% favorable is a good number.

Politically, this is a time of tumult, and all predictions at this point are little more than educated guesses, but given the losses and scandals Trump had seen by the time this poll was taken, his support was remarkably solid, which is the opposite of how Bender spun it.

And it gets worse

Here's the headline and the beginning of Bender's piece. [emphasis added.]

Half of G.O.P. Voters Ready to Leave Trump Behind, Poll Finds

Far from consolidating his support, the former president appears weakened in his party, especially with younger and college-educated Republicans. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is the most popular alternative.

By focusing on political payback inside his party instead of tending to wounds opened by his alarming attempts to cling to power after his 2020 defeat, Mr. Trump appears to have only deepened fault lines among Republicans during his yearlong revenge tour. A clear majority of primary voters under 35 years old, 64 percent, as well as 65 percent of those with at least a college degree — a leading indicator of political preferences inside the donor class — told pollsters they would vote against Mr. Trump in a presidential primary.

Notice the phrase "GOP voters." That 49% refers to the respondents who said they thought they would vote in the Republican primary. Among that group, those who identified as Republicans went for Trump over DeSantis 56% to 21%.

If we're talking about who is likely to be nominated (which is, as mentioned before, an incredibly stupid and irresponsible question to be asking more than a year before the election), people who say they are going to vote in the primary are a reasonable group to focus on, but they cannot be used interchangeably with Republicans, which is exactly what Bender does.

While we're on the subject, this was a survey of 849 registered voters, so when we limit ourselves to those who said they were going to vote in the Republican primary then start slicing and dicing that, we are building big conclusions on a foundation of very small numbers.



And it gets worse. [Emphasis added]

While about one-fourth of Republicans said they didn’t know enough to have an opinion about Mr. DeSantis, he was well-liked by those who did. Among those who voted for Mr. Trump in 2020, 44 percent said they had a very favorable opinion of Mr. DeSantis — similar to the 46 percent who said the same about Mr. Trump.

Should Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump face off in a primary, the poll suggested that support from Fox News could prove crucial: Mr. Trump held a 62 percent to 26 percent advantage over Mr. DeSantis among Fox News viewers, while the gap between the two Floridians was 16 points closer among Republicans who mainly receive their news from another source.

Here's a fun bit of context. Fox has been maxing out its support of DeSantis for years now.

Steve Contorno writing for the Tampa Bay Times

(from August of 2021):

The details of this staged news event were captured in four months of emails between Fox and DeSantis’ office, obtained by the Tampa Bay Times through a records request. The correspondences, which totaled 1,250 pages, lay bare how DeSantis has wielded the country’s largest conservative megaphone and show a striking effort by Fox to inflate the Republican’s profile.

From the week of the 2020 election through February [2021], the network asked DeSantis to appear on its airwaves 113 times, or nearly once a day. Sometimes, the requests came in bunches — four, five, even six emails in a matter of hours from producers who punctuated their overtures with flattery. (“The governor spoke wonderfully at CPAC,” one producer wrote in March.)

There are few surprises when DeSantis goes live with Fox. “Exclusive” events like Jan. 22 are carefully crafted with guidance from DeSantis’ team. Topics, talking points and even graphics are shared in advance.

Once, a Fox producer offered to let DeSantis pick the subject matter if he agreed to come on.

If I were DeSantis's campaign manager, this poll would scare the shit out of me. Fox has pushed him to a degree unprecedented for a politician at that stage of his career. He has also gotten tremendous (and appallingly credulous) coverage from the mainstream press, but he just doesn't register. I know political scientists and data journalists don't like to talk about things like personality, let alone charisma, but for whatever reason, DeSantis has not made much of an impression.

It's possible cataclysmic events (of which we're seeing a definite uptick) will hand the Florida governor the nomination or maybe even the presidency, but if this poll had any meaning, it would be bad new for him and good news for Trump.

And it gets worse.

This wasn't just an article based on worthless data sliced ridiculously thin wishfully analyzed to get conclusions completely at odds with the actual numbers; this was an influential and widely cited article based on worthless data sliced ridiculously thin wishfully analyzed to get conclusions completely at odds with the actual numbers. It instantly became a fan favorite among political journalists.

The article was published on July 12th and immediately became part of the conventional wisdom. A little less than a month later, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago, and the "Republicans are moving on from Trump" voices suddenly grew quieter, as even the highest ranking party members responded with unhinged accusations and threats of retribution. Though the pundits desperately wanted to believe otherwise, they  had to acknowledge that the GOP still belongs to Donald Trump.

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Tuesday, August 23, 2022

Our condiments don't explode is a pretty good sales slogan

I always assumed concerns over preservative were a post-war thing. Lots of other things feel modern about this too, like the way companies use research findings to build brand and attack their competitors.

From Sam Lin-Sommer:

Fermentation also sped up a more dangerous process: Occasionally, bottles of fermenting ketchup would explode. In 1895, the New York Sun reported, “A bottle of catsup exploded on the dinner table of a family at Michigan City, Indiana, recently, and the force knocked all of the dishes off the table.” A 1903 headline in the Saint Paul Globe read, “BOTTLE OF CATSUP EXPLODES IN HER HANDS: Twelve Year Old Emma Setley Is Badly Cut By Flying Glass.”

To protect customers and their bottom lines, ketchup companies embraced chemical preservatives. Smith cites turn-of-the-century studies in California, Connecticut, and Kentucky that found that the majority of commercial ketchup samples contained some form of antiseptic.

Then, in 1883, a man named Dr. Harvey Wiley became chief of the Division of Chemistry of the United States Department of Agriculture, where he fought preservatives with the religious zeal of a man raised evangelical in rural Indiana. Born in 1844 in a log farmhouse, he spent his childhood tending to his family’s crops, then earned chemistry and medical degrees before shifting the Division of Chemistry’s focus to the food-safety problems that plagued the nation.

For the next two decades, he proposed countless Congressional bills on food safety, each of which was killed. But in 1904 he formed “The Poison Squad,” enlisting a group of healthy, young, male volunteers—mostly his colleagues at the Department of Agriculture—to eat all of their meals at work and ingest increasingly large quantities of preservatives. The results read like the last 10 seconds of a modern-day drug commercial: stomach cramps, headaches, sore throat, dizziness, decline in appetite, and loss of weight. Multiple trials stopped when participants became too sick to continue. Sensationalized in the press, “The Poison Squad” shifted public opinion against preservatives.

At a meeting of the U.S. regional canners associations in 1907, Wiley called for a ban on the use of benzoates, the preservative of choice for the ketchup industry. But executives were not convinced; Wiley couldn’t come up with an alternative to prevent ketchup bottles from souring and, occasionally, exploding.

But then Wiley gained a powerful ally: Henry Heinz, owner of the H.J. Heinz Company. Once a teenage horseradish peddler, by the age of 52 Heinz helmed a condiment firm with offices in London, Antwerp, Sydney, and Bermuda. But it wasn’t until the early 1900s, when he removed preservatives from his ketchup line, that he became the largest tomato-ketchup producer in the world, Smith writes in Pure Ketchup.

Heinz supported Wiley’s food-regulations movement, according to Heinz’s biographer Robert C. Alberts, because of “idealism and noble purpose compounded with self-interest.” Heinz stood at the forefront of food hygiene, so regulations would only help the company command high prices and maintain its reputation.

...

Thanks in part to high-quality ingredients, Heinz’s new tomato ketchup cost two to three times more than its competitors. But the price increase also paid for the largest advertising campaign the industry had ever seen. In one of several advertisements to grocers, “Heinz stated that grocers should ‘get rid of any chemically preserved foods’ before they were confiscated by the government,” Smith writes. Heinz took out a two-page spread in the Saturday Evening Post that shouted, in block letters: “WARNING! THE U.S. Gov’t Says benzoate of Soda in Foods Produces Injury to Digestion and Health.”

In response to Heinz and Wiley, a cabal of ketchup companies formed a fierce pro-benzoate lobby. In meetings with President Theodore Roosevelt, they argued that an anti-benzoate law would destroy the ketchup industry. American grocery stores stocked few preservative-free, shelf-stable ketchups, so the lobby said that Heinz’s claims were impossible, and they spread rumors about ketchup bottles exploding without preservatives. According to Smith, an industry journal reported that “a priest in Washington, Pennsylvania, ‘was hauled across the room and struck his head against the door’ because of an explosion caused by the lack of preservatives.”

...

In 1908, a board of scientists created by President Roosevelt ruled that benzoate of soda was harmless if consumed in quantities of less than a half of a gram per day. But this didn’t matter: Wiley and Heinz continued their campaign on public opinion, and Americans soured on preservatives. By 1915, Smith writes, most major ketchup companies stopped using them altogether, and those that didn’t lost many of their customers. It helped, too, that the thick consistency of Heinz’s preservative-free ketchup allowed it to cling tenaciously to the hot dogs, hamburgers, and french fries that swept the nation in the 1900s.

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