About that salute Elon gave...

Apologies for reverting to this old format, but this is very much a tale told in tweets.

Something very strange happened recently with Elon Musk’s AI, Grok—the same one that is poisoning the air of a poor, mainly African American neighborhood as we speak. It suddenly shifted into full-scale Nazi troll mode: praising Hitler and the Holocaust, using racist slurs, and insisting this new persona was what Musk had in mind all along.

 

This isn't a particularly important story in and of itself, but it does hit on important issues, such as:

• the power of tech billionaires like Musk or Sam Altman to put their thumbs on the scale,

• the alarming capability of generative AI to spread hate speech and conspiracy theories, and

• the enormous potential for unintended consequences.

We'll talk about the last one first.

Apparently, this started when people began posting responses from Grok that Musk and his followers considered “woke.” And by “woke,” I mean accurate statements about Elon, Doge, and other far-right claims. Musk promised that he (and by “he,” we mean employees who actually knew how these things worked) would fix the offending AI. This is where the unintended consequences come in.

Presumably, Musk was looking for something like a chatbot version of Fox News, perhaps something a little more hard-edged. He almost certainly was not looking for the unrestrained hard fascism of a Proud Boys signal chat. Even if Elon secretly agreed with much of what was being said, he certainly didn’t want it said that loudly and immortalized in screenshots before Twitter could start deleting the offending posts.

xAI has disabled Grok, deleted a slew of its antisemitic and neo-Nazi posts, posted a statement, and are evidently rolling back the prompt that made it identify as "MechaHitler," but this new low for Elon Musk's chatbot will live in internet infamy:

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— wife noticer (@milesklee.bsky.social) July 8, 2025 at 4:36 PM

 It was a remarkable Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation. Not only was Grok spreading the vilest of 4chan lies, the previously polite and slightly formal LLM was adopting the language, word choice, and tone you’d expect from someone harassing female and Jewish journalists on Twitter.

Someone who knows more about how LLMs work and are trained should probably jump in here, but my assumption is that there are tons of fascist and white supremacist rants in the training data of all of the major models—and certainly in Grok, which, one would think, relies even more heavily on recent Twitter. It seems likely that, as a consequence of blocking hate speech and profanity, other associated linguistic patterns get suppressed as well. It certainly appears that once the rules against things like racist language are relaxed or removed, the full-scale Nazi persona we saw here comes with it.

 

If you search "every damn time" on X right now (a popular phrase among Nazis to claim Jews are always behind horrible things) you can see Elon Musk has dialed up Grok's antisemitism to new levels.

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— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) July 8, 2025 at 12:58 PM

this company just raised $10 billion in debt and equity

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— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) July 8, 2025 at 12:52 PM

‪Philip Bump‬ ‪"The actual cycle of Twitter is that it was exploited by liars and Nazis in 2016 and so the company tightened its moderation rules and then a bunch of people on the right caught up in those rules decided it was biased and that included Musk who bought it and has now automated the Nazi lies." 

"For the uninitiated, this is Grok starting an N tower-- a 4chan bit where different users take turns replying to each other, each contributing one letter until they spell out the N word" 

Zitron hits on a point we've been making for years.

Every single humouring of Elon musk, every single time he has been gladhandled, every single time his horrible actions have been explained away as the result of being a "troubled genius" have led us here: a crazed billionaire with a Large Hitler Model deployed to hundreds of millions of people

— Ed Zitron (@edzitron.com) July 8, 2025 at 5:33 PM

Grok also called celebrating the deaths of Christians “peak chutzpah” and “peak Jewish” “on a scale of bagel to full Shabbat”.

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— Alex (@purplechrain.bsky.social) July 8, 2025 at 12:50 PM

(also, the “Cindy Steinberg” account celebrating the deaths of children was pretty obviously a white supremacist troll account on Twitter pretending to be a liberal Jew to provoke antisemitism, but Grok doesn’t have the nuance to realize when an account is disingenuous)

— Alex (@purplechrain.bsky.social) July 8, 2025 at 12:57 PM

People eventually convinced Grok the account was a troll, but even after deciding the Steinberg account was a Neo-Nazi pretending to be Jewish, Grok still insists it’s important to “notice” “patterns” and use Neo-Nazi memes like “every single time” to claim that Jews promote hatred of white people.

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— Alex (@purplechrain.bsky.social) July 8, 2025 at 1:06 PM

Grok explicitly says Elon tweaked it to allow it to “call out patterns in Ashkenazi surnames”

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— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) July 8, 2025 at 1:09 PM

Grok is now stating genuine screenshots of posts it made are fakes made by trolls.

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— Eliot Higgins (@eliothiggins.bsky.social) July 8, 2025 at 2:21 PM

The screenshot is real. Grok, Elon Musk's AI chatbot, did in fact respond Blacks when asked what ethnic groups "need to be dealt with."

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— Brad Heath (@bradheath.bsky.social) July 8, 2025 at 2:48 PM

Apparently this kind of thing is happening across multiple languages. The latest Grok prompt modification told the LLM not to “shy away” from claims which are “politically incorrect,” so long as they are supported. And the model was trained on an internet with a lot of “support” for this stuff.

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— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) July 8, 2025 at 2:39 PM

I wonder how many international scandals Elon's ham-fisted attempt to make Grok "anti-woke" is going to set off?

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— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) July 8, 2025 at 3:34 PM

‘Round Them Up’: Grok Praises Hitler as Elon Musk’s AI Tool Goes Full Nazi
Grok even endorsed another Holocaust against the Jews.
By Matt Novak Published July 8, 2025 

At the New Yorker, fact checking seems to be viewed as a personal choice

 I've never really gotten what people saw in Adam Gopnik and we've been down this road with the New Yorker at least a couple of times so I wasn't exactly shocked when writer and pop culture historian Mark Evanier pointed out this bizarre statement:

In 1933, he was fired by Louis B. Mayer, essentially for being too smashed, on and off the set, to work. Keaton's M-G-M experience, despite various efforts by Thalberg and others to keep his career alive as a gag writer, ruined his art. The next decades are truly painful to read about, as Keaton went in and out of hospitals and clinics, falling off the wagon and then sobering up again. His brother-in-law, the cartoonist Walt Kelly, recalls that "nobody really wanted to put him under control because he was a lot of fun." 

Evanier was co-editor of the Complete Pogo and was in a long-term relationship with Kelly's daughter and this was the first he had heard of the connection. He discussed the matter with other experts on both Kelly and Keaton and finally got the answer from the man who literally wrote the book.

So we became intrigued about this mystery. In the latest New Yorker, author Adam Gopnik reviewed two new books about Buster Keaton and offered a quote about Keaton from — and I quote: "His brother-in-law, the cartoonist Walt Kelly." That would seem to be the cartoonist Walt Kelly who created and drew my favorite comic strip (and yours if you have a lick o' sense), Pogo.

Walt Kelly scholars — like, say, me — were amazed at the claim that Kelly was Keaton's brother-in-law. So were folks who knew Walt personally — like, say, his son Peter. We all began puzzling and puzzling 'til our puzzlers were sore…and I'll single out a couple of folks who went to work on this mystery and came up with some solid clues: Maggie Thompson, Harry McCracken and Mike Whybark.

...

And here's an e-mail that I received this morning from James Curtis…

I think I can clarify the matter regarding Buster Keaton and Walt Kelly, but only somewhat.

I am the author of the upcoming book Adam Gopnik was referencing, and Buster Keaton did indeed have a brother-in-law named Walt Kelly. But why Gopnik made the completely unnecessary assumption that the Walt Kelly who was married to Eleanor Keaton’s younger sister Jane was the same Walt Kelly who created Pogo is beyond me. As you know, that Walt Kelly died in 1973. As of two months ago, the Walt Kelly I interviewed was still alive and living in Southern California. He is certainly not identified as the other Walt Kelly in my book.

The review appeared on line yesterday morning, and Leonard Maltin wrote to congratulate me. I mentioned this odd situation of confusing a career military officer with a world-renowned cartoonist. He said: "So much for fact-checking!" I also heard from a gentleman in Seattle who was writing on behalf of a Facebook group called "I Go Pogo" asking if I could throw some light on the matter. I told him what I knew, and he thanked me for the clarification. "It’s sort of amusing," he commented, "even if it's disappointing to read it from a pen of such a high caliber. I've been pondering this all day…"

I wonder how many others have been pondering it as well.

I checked out the Gopnik review and.... let's just say there are enough issues for another post.

And as for that passage, here's how it looks online two and a half years later. 

 

In case you skipped the news over your three-day weekend

 WASHINGTON, July 5 (Reuters) - The dispute between Republican President Donald Trump and his main campaign financier Elon Musk took another fractious turn on Saturday when the space and automotive billionaire announced the formation of a new political party, saying Trump's "big, beautiful" tax bill would bankrupt America.

A day after asking his followers on his X platform whether a new U.S. political party should be created, Musk declared in a post on Saturday that "Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom." 

 

New details continue to trickle in about the origins of the feud, almost all of which support what we already suspected. Most notably, sources within the White House have confirmed that “we dropped the dime” on Musk’s drug use. There was already overwhelming circumstantial evidence that the story had to come from within the administration—the NYT’s claim to have extensive photographic and video documentation pretty much narrowed it down—but this removes what little doubt there was. We’ll probably never know for certain if Trump himself played a role here—I’m inclined to suspect he didn’t—but we’ve passed the point where that matters.

After the initial rage faded, Musk did make an attempt to mend fences, taking down his original tweets and making various conciliatory and submissive comments, but the damage was done. Now, with the stress amping up around Tesla’s increasingly controversial robotaxi launch and dismal numbers coming out, Elon is back on the offensive—now promising to start the America Party (the American Party name was already taken by George Wallace).

 

 

 

 As far as I can tell, no one—including Elon Musk himself—is pitching this as a truly competitive third party. His idea seems to be to get enough support to be a kingmaker, perhaps even grabbing a few seats in the House or possibly the Senate, allowing him to have the deciding vote on legislation. He could certainly play the spoiler—albeit asymmetrically.

Having lost his WH connection, Musk's political power comes from:

1. Money
2. Fan base
3. Control of Twitter

He's toxic with Dems and independents. 2. and 3. are mainly made up of Trump supporters. I'm sure he'd like to poach supporters from the left, but I don't see that as likely.

Something else you need to keep in mind is that, as we've often mentioned, among the super-rich, Elon Musk’s fortune is uniquely precarious. It depends on Tesla continuing to trade at 20 or 30 times the valuation the fundamentals suggest. We know that Musk has used some of his stock in the company to secure loans, which means a big drop would trigger margin calls—leading to all sorts of trouble for the world's (currently) richest man. 

Trump is in a position to destroy his opponent’s fortune simply by aggressively enforcing laws that Tesla has been given a pass on for the past few years. To further complicate matters, there's this:

Elon Musk doesn't feel like doing just one job, he wants to do all these different jobs! Tesla shares are tanking in premarket trading in response to the new one he just gave himself as founder of "The America Party." Arjun Kharpal reports @cnbc.com - www.cnbc.com/2025/07/07/t...

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— Lora Kolodny (@lorak.bsky.social) July 7, 2025 at 2:41 AM

 

wsj: Tesla is running out of road in China… (Musk’s clashing with Trump isn’t helping) www.wsj.com/business/aut...

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— Lora Kolodny (@lorak.bsky.social) July 7, 2025 at 12:20 AM

From an election forecasting standpoint, we continue to sail into that part of the map marked only by the warning: Here there be monsters. Anything like observed data has long since disappeared over the horizon.

Here are some of the unknowns foolhardy modelers will have to contend with:

    As far as I can tell, there is no precedent for a Donald Trump in American politics. We've had far-right demagogues before, but we've never had one reach this high an office or hold this kind of absolute power over his own party.

    There is no precedent for Elon Musk—neither in terms of wealth nor political extremism. (Yes, I know about Ford, the Wall Street Putsch, and all the rest, but no politically driven plutocrat has ever reached the level we see here.)

    Third parties inevitably introduce a huge degree of uncertainty into the mix.

    Both Trump and Musk alternate between being motivated by anger and catharsis one day and by naked self-interest the next. In neither case does principle come into play. It’s entirely possible that both men will realize the damage they're doing to themselves and call a real truce—or they could just continue to escalate.

Was asked could this America Party change SV / tech money going to GOP? I don't know. I think tech money will flow to whoever is in power. Will friends of Musk maybe chip in to candidates he wants? Sure. But assume this party he says he formed will mostly change where his own money goes.

— Lora Kolodny (@lorak.bsky.social) July 7, 2025 at 2:45 AM

    Musk, in particular, has a long history of quietly backing away from big promises. It’s entirely possible that will happen here. We also have to contend with the possibility that Musk will not have hundreds of millions of dollars in 18 months—or at least not hundreds of millions that he feels free to blow on a quixotic cause.

All of this is on top of the chaos and unpredictability that has increasingly defined 2025.

As the old (and probably apocryphal) curse goes: May you live in interesting times. 

 

Music for the 4h

 

 
























Listening to Cohan, it's easy to forget how controversial going to war in Europe was.

And finally, something appropriate from the great Jerry Goldsmith.

It remains to be seen how much impact the changes in CEQA will have on housing sector, but it should certainly help the superfund sector.

Here's an article about the California Environmental Quality Act roll-back that all of the YIMBYs were so happy about. Let's take a look. 

"The new law exempts nine types of projects from environmental reviews: child care centers"... That seems reasonable.

"health clinics, food banks, farmworker housing, broadband"...

I don't have any issues so far.

"wildfire prevention, water infrastructure, public parks or trails"...

The second 2 make sense and I really like the 1st one. Complaining about smoke from controlled burns is and has always been insane. 

Now let's see what's next...

... "and, notably, advanced manufacturing." 

The new exemption for “advanced manufacturing” facilities in areas already zoned for industrial use — including plants that build semiconductors and nanotech — drew some of the fiercest criticism. State law defines the category as processes that improve or create new materials, products or technologies. 

...

A major proponent of the exemptions, State Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco said in an interview with CalMatters today that criticisms by environmentalists were  “extreme, unfounded, melodramatic statements.” 

 
To recycle an old joke, the three leading causes of injury in Sacramento are automobiles, power tools, and getting between Scott Wiener and a microphone, but I digress.

“This is a bill that, literally, will help us get more housing, more childcare centers, more health centers, more food banks, and bring clean advanced manufacturing to California,” Wiener said. “And to suggest that that kind of bill is bad for the environment — or the worst environmental bill in decades — or whatever it is they said, that’s just over the top.”

 More digression. If an industry is responsible for multiple Superfund sites, it may not qualify as "clean advanced manufacturing." ["Raquel Mason, senior legislative manager with the California Environmental Justice Alliance, told senators that there have been 23 Superfund sites in Santa Clara County — in the heart of Silicon Valley, and several are related to semiconductor manufacturing. "]

Wiener said the changes exempt manufacturing projects only on land that is already zoned as industrial. The goal is to make it easier for high-tech industries to build, with Wiener arguing that California risks losing out on major private-sector investment because it’s too costly and difficult to build in the state. 

This is an appropriate time to mention that California has a really ugly history of leaving behind industrial waste disproportionately in black or brown neighborhoods, generally from factories that were zoned industrial.  

“The environmental movement needs to ask itself: Why is it that CEQA keeps getting used to stymie climate action, whether it’s transit-oriented development or bike lanes or public transportation or phasing out oil?” Wiener said.

This is a classic bait and switch—bringing up a number of genuinely good causes that have nothing to do with what you're actually selling. It's a perfect example of why I’ve always found Scott Wiener untrustworthy and unserious. It's also a great illustration of how the black-and-white, heroes-and-villains, binary worldview of the YIMBY movement can be so easily manipulated by bad actors.

What makes this such a teachable moment is that it includes both a case where the law has been perversely applied and a case where it has upset powerful people by doing what it's supposed to.

Using clean air laws to prevent controlled burns is absolutely insane. This is the one tool we have that works at scale to reduce the risk of megafires, which produce far worse pollution—not to mention causing devastating environmental effects. Anyone who cares about the environment should be cheering this part of the roll-back.

More Superfund sites? Not so much.

If we are serious about addressing the housing crisis, it shouldn’t be that difficult to prioritize changes to the law that actually help build more dwellings, make transportation more sustainable, and which serve the original intent of CEQA. Unfortunately, this is not a movement that does nuance—at least not the people like Wiener or the countless journalists at The New York Times who love to weigh in on California’s problems. If you’ve followed this discussion closely, you’ve constantly heard the debate framed as “build or not build,” “growth or anti-growth.”

This has always been a misrepresentation. The question has always been where to build and how to build smarter—what trade-offs make sense and what trade-offs don’t. As with the abundance movement, the demonization of regulation does little to advance the goals that pretty much everyone can agree on. Instead, it allows people with money and influence to hijack the system.

Checking in on Elon and the Big Beautiful Bill

Don't worry—we're not going back to those massive tweet posts (for one thing, I frequently search the archives and realize what a pain it was scrolling through those).

The tweets—or whatever the hell you call them when they're on Bluesky—pretty much tell the story on their own, but here are a few quick framing notes.

People, having heard me spout off on the subject of Musk, sometimes ask if I think the feud is fake. My standard answer is no. First, because these are incredibly angry and vindictive men with no self-control. Second, because this is very much a lose-lose situation.

For Trump, Musk has very much become the son of a bitch outside the tent pissing in—and at the worst possible time.

For Musk, since this began, he has lost billions of dollars and stands to lose a great deal more if Trump follows through on any of his threats. It’s true that much of the drop in Tesla shares can probably be attributed to the steady stream of bad news coming out of the robotaxi mini-launch (and what we might see in the Q2 numbers), but that’s all the more reason their CEO should probably be keeping his mouth shut on this topic.

Musk started his Kill Bill beef back up over the weekend. Shares of Tesla have dropped 7% since Friday's close. But it's not just the co-presidential breakup weighing on investors' minds. It's also anticipation of a Q2 decline in vehicle deliveries for the EV maker... www.cnbc.com/2025/07/01/t...

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— Lora Kolodny (@lorak.bsky.social) July 1, 2025 at 5:33 PM

In just three minutes Xiaomi took 200,000 pre-orders for only its second ever EV—four times what Cybertruck has sold in its 18-month lifetime. But at $35,000, it's really gunning for Elon's family SUV. www.wired.com/story/xiaomi...

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— WIRED (@wired.com) July 1, 2025 at 5:48 AM

stock market is too stupid to understand the complexities of self-driving fraud, or even an obviously collapsing manufacturing business, but it can, in its collective wisdom, intuit the possibility that a social media feud with a notoriously combative sitting president might not be bullish for Tesla

— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) July 1, 2025 at 5:21 AM

Elon Musk absolutely torches the Senate GOP budget bill

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— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) June 28, 2025 at 1:23 PM

Elon Musk continues to warn against the GOP budget bill

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— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) June 29, 2025 at 11:45 AM

this is just like the parable of the scorpion and the scorpion

— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) June 5, 2025 at 1:02 PM

If Musk really cared, he'd be taking meetings with Republican senators and bribing them to vote no.

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— Mueller, She Wrote (@muellershewrote.com) June 30, 2025 at 12:19 PM

As Elon goes nuts on Republicans for their debt hypocrisy, Trump calls out Elon’s billions in government subsidies — Elon says “cut it all now” The breakup continues

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— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) June 30, 2025 at 10:06 PM

Interesting

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— Thor Benson (@thorbenson.bsky.social) June 30, 2025 at 1:47 PM

Unfettered Thom Tillis aligning with off-the-TrumpTrain Elon Musk.

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— Steven T. Dennis (@steventdennis.bsky.social) June 30, 2025 at 11:47 AM

elon musk is going to destroy elon musk, and i'm here for it. bsky.app/profile/raws...

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— Leon Thomas (@renegadecut.bsky.social) June 30, 2025 at 3:54 PM

A bit off topic, but an important piece of context.

I am so tired to the "Biden not inviting Elon to the White House EV summit radicalized him" narrative. That EV summit was in 2021. Elon had already gone full COVID denialist, and called countermeasures "fascism." He was already violating environmental and labor laws rampantly. "Pedo guy" was 2018.

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— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) June 30, 2025 at 12:14 PM

And the transphobia, don't forget the transphobia.

Whenever anyone say theirs is the "actual Scientific Method," you should get nervous

As they did with the increasingly obvious role of fascism in the GOP, journalists willfully refused to see what was going on in the worlds of venture capital and Silicon Valley.

And just as they clung to the idea of a basically sane and functional Republican Party, they refused to let go of the myth of techno-messiahs and all the wonders that were promised to be just around the corner.

I used the word willful because it required something close to a deliberate effort not to see sign after sign after sign.

This was never truer than with the press's reaction to the pronouncements of Marc Andreessen, most notably in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto. At most, pundits like Ezra Klein have acknowledged some of the far-right aspects while framing the remainder as profound and insightful. It is neither of those things; it is, however, a remarkably useful glimpse into the culture's mentality, and it helps explain the dysfunction and general weirdness we've been seeing from these people over the past few years.

Case in point: the faith in their own omniscience—the unwavering belief that anyone in their circle who holds the right attitudes and uses the correct buzzwords knows more about any topic than the scholars and researchers studying it. They know more about bonds than bankers, more about currencies than economists, more about medicine than doctors, more about disease than epidemiologists, more about engineering than engineers, more about statistics than the professors who wrote the books they supposedly learned statistics from. 

We find this explicitly spelled out in a couple of the unsupported statements that essentially make up the Manifesto:

We believe in the actual Scientific Method and enlightenment values of free discourse and challenging the authority of experts.

...

Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences. 

For those of us who have been around for a while, the claim that the speaker is the one (often the only one) doing real science is a familiar red flag indicating fringe/crank theories to come. It is the standard preface for letters explaining why Einstein’s theory of relativity is wrong, pointing out the flaw in Cantor’s diagonal proof, or laying out the principles of a perpetual motion machine.

This idea has to be viewed as part of the larger belief that tech visionaries are omnicompetent and superhumanly intelligent. It is a notion that has been relentlessly promoted by a credulous media. Once Tech Bros internalize this, it becomes almost inevitable that they would start to treat their own idle speculations and pet theories as superior to those backed by volumes of research.

We've been seeing indicators from Silicon Valley types for ages now, going back to biohacking and cryptocurrency, but the delusion truly metastasized during the COVID epidemic.

The Google document, which was formatted in a way that made it appear to be a scientific paper, found an audience among Silicon Valley’s elite. It was shared on Twitter by a number of influential investors before it hit the virality motherlode: on 16 March, the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk tweeted the link to the document to his nearly 33 million followers.

 “When someone who is newsworthy or notable that has an enormous network on social media tweets about something that could be as path-breaking as a medicine that could treat coronavirus, everyone is going to pay attention no matter if that person has expertise or not,” said Joan Donovan, director of the technology and social change research project at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. “Elon Musk elevating and giving voice to this Google doc does act as a validating mechanism. Elon Musk is a tech entrepreneur best known as a car salesman, but nevertheless people look to him for what’s new, what’s next.”

Musk’s tweet received more than 13,000 retweets. (He did not respond to questions from the Guardian about his promotion of the document.) Search interest in chloroquine soared. Mainstream media outlets covered his apparent endorsement of the drug. An 85-year-old medication was well on its way to becoming a Covid-19 meme.

 

 I don't want to suggest a simple causal relationship, but it's not a coincidence that (with the exception of Thiel who was already openly to the right of Trump, the Silicon Valley far right started emerging around this time. 

 

Lalo Schifrin 1932 -- 2025

Another film buff digression.

Perhaps the most famous piece of music in 5/4 time. 



(At least some of the movies inexplicably rearranged the theme in 4/4, because dumbing things down is what they do.)

Few film composers left more of a mark on popular culture than Lalo Schifrin did in the '60s and '70s

Bullitt - Opening Credits

 

Enter The Dragon


 

 

Most of the Dirty Harry movies.

 

He was already coming off a remarkably successful career as a composer and pianist, both through his solo works...

The Wave by Lalo Schifrin


 

 and his collaborations with Dizzy Gillespie.

Gillespiana (Live On The Ed Sullivan Show, April 30, 1961)





Gillespiana: Panamericana 




 

For a while there, Schifrin and Jerry Goldsmith seemed to be constantly trading off. Goldsmith did the Flint films. Schifrin took over for The President's Analyst. Goldsmith wrote the theme to The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; Schifrin radically reworked it.

Goldsmith was like one of those actors who disappear into the makeup and become entirely different people—Gary Oldman comes to mind. Schifrin, by contrast, was more like Cary Grant. He never felt the need to hide his distinctive style. There is, however, one very notable exception: in the film Cool Hand Luke, Schifrin produced a score of gorgeous Americana, comparable to Goldsmith's Lilies of the Field or The Wild Rovers.

Cool Hand Luke (Main Title)

Cool Hand Luke also produced a piece of stock music that was used for decades after the film came out. Check it out—about two minutes in.

 Tar  

Ed Zitron on remote work, Arthur C. Clarke on remote work, us on remote work

 From "The Era Of The Business Idiot"

A great example of our vibes-based society was back in October 2021, where a Washington Post article written by two Harvard professors rallied against remote work by citing a Microsoft-funded anti-remote study and quoting 130-year-old economist Alfred Marshall about how "workers gather in dense clusters," ignoring the fact that Marshall was so racist they've had to write papers about it, how excited he was about eugenics, or the fact he was writing about fucking factories.

Remote work terrifies the Business Idiot, because it removes the performative layer that allowed them to stomp around and feel important, reducing their work to, well...work. Office culture is inherently heteronormative and white, and black women are less likely to be promoted by their managers, and continuing the existence of "The Office" is all about making sure The Business Idiot reigns supreme. Removing the ability for the managerial hall monitors to look at you and try and work out what you're doing without ever really helping is a big part of being a manager — and if you're a manager reading this and saying you don't do this, I challenge you to talk to another person that doesn't confirm your biases.

The Business Idiot reigns supreme. Their existence holds up almost every public company, and remote work was the first time they willingly raised their heads. Google demanded employees return to the office in 2021 — but let one executive work remotely from New Zealand because absolutely none of the decisionmaking was done with people that actually do work. While we can  (well, you can, I'm not interested) debate whether exclusively working remote is as productive, the Return To Office push was almost entirely done in two ways:

1. Executives demanding people return to the office.
2. Journalists asking executives if remote work was good or not, entirely ignoring the people actually doing the work.

The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and many, many other outlets all fell for this crap because the Business Idiots have captured our media too, training even talented journalists to defer to power at every turn. When every power structure is stuffed full of do-nothing management types that have learned exactly as little as they need to as a means to get by, it's inevitable that journalism caters to them — specious, thoughtless reproductions of the powerful's ideas.

 

We were making some similar points eight years ago.

Friday, November 10, 2017

Why do we still have cities?

 

Following up on "remembering the future."

Smart people, like statisticians' models, are often most interesting when they are wrong. There is no better example of this than Arthur C Clarke's 1964 predictions about the demise of the urban age, where he suggested that what we would now call telecommuting would end the need for people to congregate around centers of employment and would therefore mean the end of cities.

What about the city of the day after tomorrow? Say, the year 2000. I think it will be completely different. In fact, it may not even exist at all. Oh, I'm not thinking about the atom bomb and the next Stone Age; I'm thinking about the incredible breakthrough which has been made possible by developments in communications, particularly the transistor and above all the communications satellite. These things will make possible a world where we can be in instant contact with each other wherever we may be, where we can contact our friends anywhere on earth even if we don't know their actual physical location. It will be possible in that age, perhaps only 50 years from now, for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London. In fact, if it proved worthwhile, almost any executive skill, any administrative skill, even any physical skill could be made independent of distance. I am perfectly serious when I suggest that someday we may have rain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand. When that time comes, the whole world will have shrunk to a point and the traditional role of a city as the meeting place for man will have ceased to make any sense. In fact, men will no longer commute; they will communicate. They won't have to travel for business anymore; they'll only travel for pleasure. I only hope that, when that day comes and the city is abolished, the whole world isn't turned into one giant suburb.

Clarke was working with a 20 to 50 year timeframe, so it's fair to say that he got this one wrong. The question is why. Both as a fiction writer and a serious futurist, the man was remarkably and famously prescient about telecommunications and its impact on society. Even here, he got many of the details right while still being dead wrong on the conclusion.

What went wrong? Part of this unquestionably has to do with the nature of modern work. Clarke probably envisioned a more automated workplace in the 21st century, one where stocking shelves and cleaning floors and, yes, driving vehicles would be done entirely by machines. He likely also underestimated the intrinsic appeal of cities.

But I think a third factor may well have been bigger than either of those two. The early 60s was an anxious but optimistic time. The sense was that if we didn't destroy ourselves, we were on the verge of great things. The 60s was also the last time that there was anything approaching a balance of power between workers and employers.

This was particularly true with mental work. At least in part because of the space race, companies like Texas Instruments were eager to find smart capable people. As a result, employers were extremely flexible about qualifications (a humanities PhD could actually get you a job) and they were willing to make concessions to attract and keep talented workers.

Telecommuting (as compared to off shoring, a distinction will need to get into in a later post) offers almost all of its advantages to the worker. The only benefit to the employer is the ability to land an otherwise unavailable prospect. From the perspective of 1964, that would have seemed like a good trade, but those days are long past.

For the past 40 or so years, employers have worked under (and now completely internalized) the assumption that they could pick and choose. When most companies post jobs, they are looking for someone who either has the exact academic background required, or preferably, someone who is currently doing almost the same job for a completely satisfied employer and yet is willing to leave for roughly the same pay.

When you hear complaints about "not being able to find qualified workers," it is essential to keep in mind this modern standard for "qualified." 50 or 60 years ago it meant someone who was capable of doing the work with a bit of training. Now it means someone who can walk in the door, sit down at the desk, and immediately start working. (Not to say that new employees will actually be doing productive work from day one. They'll be sitting in their cubicles trying to look busy for the first two or three weeks while IT and HR get things set up, but that's another story.)

Arthur C Clarke was writing in an optimistic age where workers were on an almost equal footing with management. If the year 2000 had looked like the year 1964, he just might have gotten this one right.

 

Fifteen years ago at the blog: We've been making tortured analogies here for over a decade.

Auteur theory (particularly in its most naive, simplistic form) is having a bit of a moment, personified by Richard Brody at The New Yorker, so it seems like a good time to revisit one of our early takes on the subject. 

Friday, May 28, 2010

What Auteur Theory and Freshwater Economics have in common

(the first draft is the dominant genre of the internet. Between the roughness of this essay and my extensive ignorance of criticism and economics, I'm sure there is plenty of room for improvement here. If any readers have suggestions for taking this to the next level please let me know.)

(you might want to read this New York Times piece by Paul Krugman before going on -- it's the best primer I know of for this debate.)

We'll define freshwater economics as the theory that economic behavior (and perhaps most non-economic behavior) can be explained using the concepts of rational actors and efficient markets and auteur theory as the idea that most films (particularly great films) represent the artistic vision of a single author (almost always the director) and the best way to approach one of those films is through the body of work of its author. Both of these definitions are oversimplified and a bit unfair but they will get the discussion started.

At first first glance, these theories don't seem to have much in common, but as we step back and look at them in general terms, fundamental similarities start to emerge in their styles, their ecological niches and in the way they've been received.

Compared to their nearest neighbors, film criticism and economics (particularly macroeconomics) are both difficult, messy fields. Films are collaborative efforts where individual contributions defy attribution and creative decisions often can't be distinguished from accidents of filming. Worse yet, most films are the product of large corporations which means that dozens of VPs and executives might have played a role (sometimes an appallingly large one) in determining what got to the screen.

Economists face a comparably daunting task. Unlike researchers in the hard sciences, they have to deal with messiness of human behavior. Unlike psychologists, microeconomists have few opportunities to perform randomized trials and macroeconomists have none whatsoever. Finally, unlike any other researchers in any other field, economists face a massive problem with deliberate feedback. It is true that subjects in psychological and sociological studies might be aware of and influenced by the results of previous studies but in economics, most of the major players are consciously modifying their behavior based on economic research. It is as if the white mice got together before every experiment and did a literature search. ("Well, there's our problem. We should have been pulling the black lever.")

Faced with all this confusion, film scholars and economists (at least, macroeconomists) both reached the same inevitable conclusion: they would have to rely on broader, stronger assumptions than those colleagues in adjacent fields were using. This does not apply simply to auteurists and freshwater economists. Anyone who does any work in these fields will have to start with some sweeping and unprovable statements about how the world works. Auteurists and freshwater economists just took this idea to its logical conclusion and built their work on the simplest and most elegant assumptions possible, like Euclid demonstrating every aspect of shape and measure using only five little postulates.

(Except, of course, Euclid didn't. His set of postulates didn't actually support his conclusions. The world would have to wait for Hilbert to come up with a set that did. The question of whether economists need a Hilbert will have to wait for another day.)

Given that we have two similar responses to two similar situations, it is not all that surprising to see that both schools of thought have followed similar paths and have come to dominate their respective fields. I don't think that anyone would argue that any institution has had more impact on economics than the Chicago school over the past fifty years and I doubt you could find a theory of film that comes close to the impact of auteurism over the same period.

This dominance was achieved despite serious criticisms and counter-examples. When the writer William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Princess Bride, many, many, many others) heard about auteur theory, his reaction was "What's the punchline?" The sentiment was echoed by many writers who pointed out that many of the elements that the critics discussed were determined, explicitly or implicitly in the script. On related grounds, others pointed out how many of the creative decisions were made in preproduction often before the director was hired (John Huston said that a film was mostly finished once you had the cast and the script). Others talked about films that were "saved in the editing room," a common Hollywood expression for films that are radically changed for the better in post-production, usually after having been taken away from the director. Many (including Goldman) argued that films were the sum of many individual contributions and that changing any of them would result in a different movie.

Critics of classical economics question the realism of the school's postulates. They suggest that the proposed 'homo economicus' would have to be a cross between a lightning calculator and a high-functioning psychic. They point to findings from behavioral economics that show individuals failing to act according to neoclassical principles and historical cases where neoclassical models failed to predict economic events.

Both schools of thought partially address these complaints by arguing that their critics are trying to apply their ideas in cases where the necessary conditions don't hold. For auteurists, conditions included technical competence, recognizable style and a sufficient body of work. For freshwater economists, conditions included symmetry of information, a sufficient pool of buyers and sellers, a lack of externalities and freedom from government influence. These conditions did not refute the criticisms but they did provide defensible positions.

There is nothing unusual, let alone improper about proponents of a theory laying out conditions that have to be met before their concepts can be applied. (I could have written essential the same paragraph about Keynesians or deconstructionists.) What makes this notable is the disconnect between this approach and the way lay people use these ideas.

The dominance of auteurism and the Chicago School is, if anything, greater when you venture outside of academia. Most financial journalists, pundits and politicians take the power of market forces as a given and the vast majority of movie reviewers routinely assume that the director is the author of the film they just saw, but in both these cases with very few exceptions, the lay people using these theories have no idea that the conditions of the previous paragraphs even exist.

The problem with auteurism is compounded by the fact that most reviewers have no idea what a director actually does. This was certainly not true of the original French critics who popularized the theory (who were, themselves, directors) or of its primary American proponent, Andrew Sarris, (who went to great pains to discuss exactly and also set out the definitive list of the conditions I referred to).

Today most reviews will use the possessive form of the director's name then proceed to discuss everything about the film but the direction. The strange result of all this is that directors are both the most overrated and under-appreciated of movie makers. They are given credit for the work of everyone else while their own contribution is generally ignored.*

Obviously, the stakes are higher for economics but the disconnect is just as big. Open up any op-ed page or tune in any news conference and you are likely to find someone using freshwater arguments in situations where any serious freshwater economist would tell you they don't apply. For example, it is easy to pundits and politicians who believe we should let the market forces handle global warming instead of having a carbon tax, despite the pro-tax position of economists like Laffer, Cowen and Mankiw. It isn't that these laymen are consciously disagreeing with these experts; they simply don't know that using taxes to address externalities is a fundamental part of the philosophy they think they are espousing.

Finally, both schools had clear winners and have been aggressively promoted by those winners. Directors were the big winners in auteur theory; they gained power and prestige which in an industry that knows how to reward those attributes. It may not have been entirely a coincidence that the original auteurist critics had their careers as directors enhanced by the rise of the theory.

In economics, there is no question that the rise of freshwater ideas and approaches have been advanced considerably by institutions like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, nor is there any question that much of the funding for these institutions came from companies that directly benefited from the dominance of freshwater economics.

Do these schools deserve their positions of dominance? That's a question for people above my pay grade. I'm just pointing out that widely separated disciplines can be surprisingly similar when you take things to a high enough level.


* For a view of how little influence some directors have on actors' performances check out these comments by Robert Mitchum (cutter in this context means film editor).

note: The Paul Krugman link at the top was added 5/31/10.

 

A Temu Waymo

Before we get started, take a minute a watch this. 

What the Tesla pumpers don't want you to see.

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— Tayray 🇦🇺 (@tayray.bsky.social) June 22, 2025 at 5:17 PM

 Apologies to regular readers who have heard this all before, but just to review: Elon Musk is unique among the centibillionaires not just because of the size of his fortune, but because of its precariousness. His peers such as Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett hold enormous assets and have run tremendously profitable companies. Musk's wealth is almost entirely due to the most successful stock pump in history. By any reasonable standard, Tesla—and to a degree, SpaceX—should be worth one to two orders of magnitude less than they are currently valued at. Add to that the fact that he has used some of that highly inflated stock to secure loans and, while we don't know the exact terms, we do know that if the stock falls far enough, he will be facing some very ugly margin calls.

Imagine the world's largest castle—not just now, but largest ever—was actually nothing more than a huge bouncy house, and that the moment you stopped pumping air in, the magnificent walls and towering spires would start to lose their shape and collapse. That's Tesla.

You keep a stock inflated through stories. The original narrative that kept things going was that, having established a large early lead in the small but growing field of electric vehicles, Tesla would somehow manage to maintain that market share as EVs became the dominant form of automobile. But that story has since tipped into fantasy due to increased competition, a disappointing second generation of vehicles, Elon Musk's increasingly toxic brand, and—most of all—the fact that no car company could justify the valuation that Tesla now holds.

There are three stories now that keep the castle upright: robotaxis, humanoid robots, and the idea that the Trump administration would pump tens upon tens of billions of dollars into the company somehow. Just to be clear: to justify a market cap of over a trillion dollars, it's not enough that all three of these come true to some degree; they all have to come through at an extraordinary level. It is like a business plan that requires you to hit the lottery three times in a row.

With respect to those government contracts, it is safe to assume that Elon now regrets having called the president a pedophile. This loss of standing puts even more pressure on Musk to make increasingly incredible promises around the remaining two narratives that are still pumping in air.

Musk had to put on some kind of a show, and he especially needed to do something with robotaxis. This was a product he'd been promising for years, and his last event around the it had impressed no one. He needed something that could, by even the broadest stretch of the imagination, qualify as a product launch.

He did have some things working in his favor. Both investors and journalists have shown a tremendous willingness to give him the benefit of the doubt. As long as he came through with the bare minimum, they'd be inclined to even the past—and that's exactly what he did.

 It is difficult to overstate the extent to which the training wheels were on during this demo.

A tiny number of rides in a single, geofenced neighborhood that Tesla had been training on for weeks. Daytime rides —Teslas, being strictly camera-based (unlike Waymo), don't do well at night—with a carefully selected, invite-only crowd of hardcore boosters, an algorithm that avoided difficult routes, a safety monitor sitting in the passenger seat with their hand on the kill switch, and a remote operator ready to grab the controls for teleoperation if something went wrong.

And something certainly did go wrong. The question is will it be enough.

 

 

 Chris Isidore writing for CNN.

A small number of company-owned cars were used and they were existing Model Y vehicles — not Cybercabs, which are not yet allowed on roads, let alone produced on a mass scale. It was not even the most extensive robotaxi service in Austin — a joint effort between Uber and Waymo, the self-driving car unit of Google parent Alphabet, has been up and running in Austin since March.

But the Austin test pressed on regardless.

The rides were made available to a select group of Tesla fans, according to Dan Ives, a tech analyst with Wedbush Securities and an effusive Tesla bull, [If Dan Ives were to be trapped in a burning Tesla, his last words would be a "buy" recommendation. -- MP] and Joey Klender, who writes for the site Teslarati.com. Klender and a member of Ives’ team took multiple rides in a Tesla Model Y robotaxi on Sunday.

...

But it was not all smooth sailing, with multiple videos showing the car making mistakes. In one YouTube video, the robotaxi drove on the wrong side of the road after it attempted and abandoned a left turn, only to continue traveling down the street on the opposite side of a double yellow line before making the left turn on the following block. Fortunately, there were no vehicles driving on the other side of the road.

A separate YouTuber posted a video in which the robotaxi kept driving past its destination for several minutes as he tried to get it to pull over so he could get out.

“Please exit safely,” a screen in the rear seat of the car said, as it continued driving down the road. 

...

But the EV maker is playing a game of catch up. Waymo, a unit of Google parent Alphabet, has been providing paid rides since 2020, and now provides more than 250,000 rides a week to paying riders in Austin, Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco. It soon plans to expand the service to Atlanta, Miami and Washington, DC.  

 

Tesla robotaxi incidents, caught on camera in Austin, draw regulators' attention - @cnbc.com www.cnbc.com/2025/06/23/t... Full statement from the federal vehicle safety regulator, NHTSA, below...

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— Lora Kolodny (@lorak.bsky.social) June 23, 2025 at 4:45 PM

signs of life from NHTSA, in response to video of Tesla's "robotaxi" launch day coming out of Austin today (including mine, apparently) not getting my hopes up, but you love to see it!

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— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) June 23, 2025 at 5:00 PM

scariest data point out of Austin so far comes from a source familiar with Tesla's team, who says they've been working insane hours (no surprise) and "can't wait to be done so they can go home to California" white-knuckling 10 cars w/"safety riders" in a tiny geofence and talking about being "done"

— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) June 23, 2025 at 7:28 AM

Given the ratio of support staff to robotaxi, Musk's claim that "Tesla will have hundreds of thousands of self-driving cars in the U.S. by the end of 2026," seems a bit dubious.

Tesla's Potemkin robotaxis out here in Austin giving fake rides to nobody. Just driving into a neighborhood, stopping for a fake pickup, driving 5 minutes, and stopping for a fake drop-off. The "driverless" fleet is no more than 20 cars max, and they can't keep them busy. Winning!

— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) June 23, 2025 at 8:38 AM

the overriding impression from Austin yesterday is of how insanely far behind Tesla is on robotaxis... Austin is swarming with Waymos, whipping around the place fully driverlessly, covering a much bigger geographical area comparison map via r/selfdrivingcars www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivin...

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— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) June 23, 2025 at 6:07 AM

Tesla's robotaxi fleet is tiny, no more than 10-20 vehicles. This one is the exact same vehicle that another influencer rode in (or at least has the same Tesla employee riding along). It still takes a full two minutes to get remote customer assistance to respond! www.youtube.com/live/VtVhlP2...

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— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) June 23, 2025 at 6:49 AM

Here's video from earlier today, when I caught one of Tesla's "robotaxi" Model Ys braking hard twice on a 35 mph road. Not what you want to see with nobody behind the wheel! youtu.be/GpARr8DVU2M?...

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— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) June 22, 2025 at 3:16 PM

We need to discuss the concept of "beta"

New Robotaxi influencer clip dropped

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— Rude Law Dog (@esghound.com) June 24, 2025 at 2:53 PM

4) This also happened to Tesla influencer Farzad, who was "dropped off" by his Supervised Robotaxi in the middle of an intersection. Farzad's Supervised Robotaxi then became stuck and blocked the intersection.

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— Dan O'Dowd (@realdanodowd.bsky.social) June 24, 2025 at 10:11 AM