New Year's Eve greetings from Winsor McCay

1905

 

 

 

How Christmas goose and Christmas turkey switched places. The economics and agriculture behind changing holiday traditions.

How Christmas goose and Christmas turkey switched places: the economics and agriculture behind changing holiday traditions.

Keeping with the festive theme for the rest of the week, here’s a video that explains the history and science behind the traditional carol, “Christmas Is Coming, the Goose Is Getting Fat.”

This is very much a Talking Heads–style clip (except for the plucking scenes, which might actually be a bit too vivid for some viewers), but Sarah Taber is one of the sharpest commentators on the vitally important but woefully undercovered topic of agriculture, and she always has something insightful and well-informed to say on the subject.

I’m going to start introducing our readers to some of the YouTubers I find entertaining and educational. Between AI slop and content farms, it is getting increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the tsunami of chaff, but the platform still has a tremendous number of smart, hard-working people putting out tons of great videos.

And here’s some bonus content: Taber giving an excellent analysis of why farmers thought it was rational to support Trump even though they fully believed his tariff policies would do serious damage to their businesses.

It's basically the story of the mechanical Turk but with a really dystopian final act

Everyone here probably already knows the basics, but just to review:

Elon Musk is the world’s richest man, and he has been using his tremendous wealth and power to push far-right causes, white supremacist movements, and huge sweetheart government contracts. The majority of his fortune comes from Tesla stock holdings and compensation packages approved by arguably the most corrupt—and certainly the most well-paid—board of directors in corporate America.

Based solely on its small and shrinking car sales (the only significant product that Tesla actually makes) the company is, by any reasonable standard, overvalued by more than one and probably close to two orders of magnitude. This insanely inflated stock price is justified largely, perhaps primarily, by investors’ faith in the Optimus humanoid robot.

In order for this market cap to make sense, you have to believe that bipedal humanoid robots represent the future of labor, that the time frame for them revolutionizing the world’s economy is five—or at the very worst, ten—years away, and that the dominant manufacturer of the entire world’s market will be Tesla.

While it is entirely possible, even likely, that most physical labor will be done by robots sometime in the future, every other proposition in that list is absurd.  It’s true that great progress has been made, but the prototypes we are seeing now are still years away from the performance being promised and that's not even the biggest obstacle. Despite the name, according to the large majority of roboticists not actually on the payroll of these companies, Optimus and other humanoids are a decidedly suboptimal design for all but a handful of situations: expensive, inefficient, unreliable, unstable, too large or too small for most tasks, and obscenely over-engineered for virtually every job. Even if the future belongs to robots, it almost certainly won't be these robots.  
But perhaps silliest of all is the belief that Tesla is the cutting-edge company in this field. 

 Matt Novak writing for Gizmodo:

Tesla held a special pop-up event over the weekend for Art Basel Miami Beach, the international art fair in Florida. The pop-up was dubbed “The Future of Autonomy Visualized” and reportedly featured Elon Musk’s Cybercab prototype and Optimus robots. But a video from the event is going viral for all the wrong reasons. And it’s pretty hilarious.

The video, which appears to have first been posted to r/teslamotors on Reddit, shows an Optimus robot knock over several bottles of water on a table before lifting its arms into the air. The arms move in ways that would be consistent with taking off a VR headset, and then they fall heavily, with one hitting a water on the table that seems to explode and shoot water everywhere. After that, Optimus appears to go lifeless and falls backward.

The video is just five seconds long, but it tells quite a funny story in that short burst of time.

What’s happening here? Many people online speculate that an unseen person was controlling the Optimus robot, and that person took off their headset before disconnecting. And that seems to be the most likely explanation.

This kind of robotic control is called teleoperation, and it has been in existence since at least the 1940s. Sometimes called a waldo, Walt Disney showed off how he made the 1964 New York World’s Fair attraction Carousel of Progress with a similar technology.

 

Tesla Optimus
byu/Decent_Cheesecake643 inteslamotors

 

 As Novak points out, this is not the first time Musk has tried to pass off puppetry for automation with Optimus -- at least twice sharp-eyed viewers have spotted controllers off to the side in videos -- nor is this sort of thing limited to the robotics division. We've seen faked demonstrations of self-driving cars and solar roofs along with suspicious accounting practices, data suppression, and projections so unrealistic they can only be called lies. 

Unlike with LLMs where serious people are having real discussions about the state and promise of the technology, the case for humanoids is nothing but hype and the the kind of crude approach to engineering that comes from getting your ideas about technology from old sci-fi shows. the entire sub-bubble is an embarrassment, but you know what's more embarrassing than being a humanoid robot company? Having to fake your demos so no one will notice you're being lapped by pretty much all of your competitors 

Dystopia Watch -- Surveillance State Edition

I’ve been meaning to post more of Benn Jordan’s videos and to talk more about the exceptionally good work being done by 404 Media. This is a two-for-one.

You probably don’t realize how many cameras are watching you on a daily basis. You almost certainly don’t realize how widely available the data they gather is to governments, corporations, and reasonably competent hackers. When you factor in the people currently in charge of both these tech companies and the government, this becomes one of the more disturbing stories of 2025 — and that is a high bar to clear.

Breaking The Creepy AI in Police Cameras



We Hacked Flock Safety Cameras in under 30 Seconds.



This Flock Camera Leak is like Netflix For Stalkers

Little Nemo Meets Lieutenant Kijé

Just over ten years ago, I was playing around with the very cool open-source video editor, Kdenlive and put together this video. The software has gotten considerably more powerful since then yet it's still remarkably intuitive and, you know, free.

 

The images are from Winsor McCay. The music is by Sergei Prokofiev, though you may know it better from the many artists like Greg Lake and Sting who have borrowed it over the years. 

Christmas Eve greetings from XKCD

 Maybe we should state all holidays as Eve powers

 

Christmas Eve Eve with the California Raisins — more on commerce and Christmas.

[We’ll be getting back to serious topics and horrible people next week. For now, I’m thinking more pleasant thoughts.]

A personal favorite here.

There have been many attempts to turn popular TV ads into media franchises (I actually had to Google the Mean Joe Greene ad to make sure I wasn’t just imagining that they actually aired a made-for-TV movie based on it). But A Claymation Christmas Celebration (1987) is probably the best of the bunch.

The reason it stands out is that Will Vinton Studios was an extraordinary operation filled with wonderfully gifted artists and animators. They never had either the cultural impact or, if you’ll pardon the expression, the commercial success they deserved. Nonetheless, they put out an exceptional body of work.

As charming and well animated as the titular raisins might have been, they easily could have worn out their welcome in a longer format. The producers of the Christmas special wisely chose to keep their appearance to a single musical number and instead filled out the rest of the half hour with a range of clever, funny, and—in one case—absolutely beautiful  animation. 

 

  

 

 

Fun little online poll from the people at Tech Won’t Save Us.

Though I do see some room for improvement. 

While I don’t want to idealize Jobs or Gates—they both have plenty to answer for—I have to admit the issues I had with them back in the day seem rather quaint by 2025 standards. We really had no idea how bad things could get.

Likewise, Kara Swisher has probably done more harm than good in the grand scheme of things, but she has cleaned up her act—or at least attempted to whitewash her reputation—recently, distancing herself from the malignant culture of Silicon Valley she used to promote.

The inclusion of Gates and Swisher is particularly objectionable given the fact that some horrible people who are currently making things much worse were left off the original roster. Kevin Roose and Joe Lonsdale come immediately to mind.

The initial assignments were badly done. Most of the talent was concentrated on the left, with Musk and Zuckerberg the only heavy hitters on the other side. (Any ranking that doesn’t have Marc Andreessen in the final four -- probably in Zuckerberg's slot --  is deeply flawed.)

Otherwise, I can’t complain about how things turned out, either, with the final match-up coming down to Musk and Thiel, or with Elon winning in a close match.

 

 

 

 

 

The most famous reindeer -- more on Christmas and commerce

When I was writing the post on demographics and Christmas songs, I did some background reading and found myself going down the rabbit hole of the history of one of the most iconic Christmas songs, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

As with so many Christmas traditions, particularly those involving Santa Claus, this one had a marketing origin, specifically as a free promotion given out to kids whose parents were shopping at Montgomery Ward.

 Compared to corporations today, which tend to cling to intellectual property like a miser clutching his shiniest coin, Montgomery Ward gave May the rights to the story, which was already doing good business in reprints.

The book and its sequels sold steadily for years afterwards. Its name recognition was still high enough in '48 to merit a Max Fleischer produced cartoon, later reedited to reference the song.

Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer (1948)

 In 1949, May’s brother-in-law, songwriter Johnny Marks, composed the version we’re all familiar with. Marks also wrote “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” (God, I hate that song), “A Holly Jolly Christmas” (written two years before it was used in the TV special—the things you learn from Wikipedia), “Silver and Gold,” and “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” He was also the great-uncle of economist Steven Levitt, which doesn’t seem very Christmasy.

From Wikipedia:

Gene Autry recorded the song on June 27, 1949,^[6] and it was released as a children's record by Columbia Records in September 1949.^[7] By November, Columbia had begun pushing the record to the pop music market. It hit No. 1 in the US charts during Christmas 1949.

The song had been suggested as a "B" side for a record Autry was making. He first rejected it, but his wife convinced him to use it. The official date of its No. 1 status was the week ending January 7, 1950, making it the first No. 1 song of the 1950s.^[8] Autry's version of the song also holds the distinction of being the only chart-topping hit to fall completely off the chart after reaching No. 1. The success of the Christmas song gave support to Autry's subsequent popular Easter song, "Here Comes Peter Cottontail".^{[citation needed]}

The song was also performed on the December 6, 1949, Fibber McGee and Molly radio broadcast by Teeny (Marian Jordan's little girl character) and the Kingsmen vocal group. The lyrics varied greatly from the Autry version.^[9] Autry's recording sold 1.75 million copies its first Christmas season and 1.5 million the following year.^[10] In 1969, it was awarded a gold disk by the RIAA for sales of 7 million, which was Columbia's highest-selling record at the time.^[11] It eventually sold a total of 12.5 million. Cover versions included, sales exceed 150 million copies, second only to Bing Crosby's "White Christmas"

  As big as the song was, it was the 1964 TV special that insured that the character would be synonymous with the holiday season.  There have been countless parodies of Rudolph, both the song and the special.. My favorites were done by MADtv: Raging Rudolph and The Reinfather, based on Goodfellas and The Godfather, respectively. While I actually have a slight preference for the former classic, I prefer the second parody. There are simply so many more iconic moments to play off of. 

Raging Rudolph - MADtv


The Reinfather - MadTV

FT: "OpenAI is a money pit with a website on top."

Here's the headline and opening from the Financial Times: 

"OpenAI needs to raise at least $207bn by 2030 so it can continue to lose money, HSBC estimates" 

by Bryce Elder

OpenAI is a money pit with a website on top. That much we know already, but since OpenAI is a private company, there’s a lot of guesswork required when estimating the depth of the pit.

HSBC’s US software and services team has today updated its OpenAI model to include the company’s $250bn rental of cloud compute from Microsoft, announced late in October, and its $38bn rental of cloud compute from Amazon announced less than a week later. The latest two deals add an extra four gigawatts of compute power to OpenAI’s requirements, bringing the contracted amount to 36 gigawatts.

Based on a total cumulative deal value of up to $1.8tn, OpenAI is heading for a data centre rental bill of about $620bn a year — though only a third of the contracted power is expected to be online by the end of this decade. 

The article goes into to detail if you're interested but the pictures alone tell a hell of a story.

Keep in mind, there are signs that while growth is still continuing, it is leveling off rather than accelerating, something which raises questions about the estimated revenue.  

 

The bottom line is that if OpenAI doesn’t explode—absolutely explode—in terms of revenue over the next few years, it is on target to burn through hundreds of billions of dollars.

  

Add to this the dizzying maze of circular financing and the fact that a huge chunk of the markets depend on the sustained growth of OpenAI, and these graphs certainly give a fellow something to think about.

Three tweets and a picture presented without comment

(Bloomberg) - Tesla Inc.’s sales in California are poised to be suspended for 30 days as a penalty for allegedly misleading consumers about its driver-assistance technology, according to the head of the state’s motor vehicles department. $TSLA www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

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— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) December 16, 2025 at 4:27 PM

“.. Tesla Robotaxis are crashing once every 40,000 miles, whereas the average human driver in the US crashes about once every 500,000 miles.” 🤡 @rani.bsky.social $TSLA @mims.bsky.social sherwood.news/tech/teslas-...

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— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) December 16, 2025 at 9:28 AM

As my editor and I were just discussing, Elon Musk's net worth is now higher than the market cap of all but 8 companies. TSLA shares hit a record high on robotaxi hype despite EV sales slump... www.cnbc.com/2025/12/16/t...

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— Lora Kolodny (@lorak.bsky.social) December 16, 2025 at 1:15 PM

Asking the right question about the humanoid bubble

I need to do multiple posts on James Vincent's "Kicking Robots," which ran recently in Harper’s (breaking news — articles still appear in Harper’s). This is one of the best overviews to date of what I've been referring to as the humanoid bubble. Not perfect; it should have dove deeper into the problems with the technology, but it did make a reasonable effort to give the critics their say.

For now, I want to single out one paragraph because it's easy to miss, despite the fact that it raises implicitly the most important question around the entire multi-billion-dollar industry.

Musk’s showcase captured perfectly the power of spectacle to mask technological shortcomings and bridge the gap between expectation and reality. But for those who’d been toiling away on humanoid robots for decades, Musk’s announcement was something more than a publicity stunt. “After Tesla Bot, the whole world sort of woke up to humanoids,” Jeff Cardenas, Apptronik’s co-founder and CEO, told me. The number of people working on the technology prior to Tesla’s AI Day pronouncement “could fit in a small room,” but Musk transformed the industry almost overnight, even if all the public had seen of the Tesla Bot was a slide deck and a gyrating man in a robot costume. 

Immediately after this paragraph, Vincent shifts back to his profile of Cardenas and doesn't address the most important point in the entire piece: what changed?

The reason that only a vanishingly small sliver of roboticists were working on humanoids in August of 2021 was because, other than novelty value and the opportunity to push the edge of certain technologies that had a wider range of applications, the viable use cases for these C3POs were all but nonexistent.

The arguments currently being presented in defense of bipedal humanoid robots are silly, a combination of naïve biomimicry, a laughable misinterpretation of convergent evolution, the Cylon design fallacy and a bunch of warmed-over tropes from old sci-fi shows and comic books. What's most significant, though, is not the absurdity of the arguments but their age. Advocates for these designs had been making these same defenses for decades and had convinced virtually no one until Elon's dancer in a robot suit.

What changed? 

Musk's presentation did not mark any notable breakthrough in the tech or shift in the economics. There was nothing even approaching a new idea about how to make these designs viable in an industrial setting. The entire concept remained what it had always been: a cautionary tale of overengineering and putting the cool over the functional.

The only thing he brought to the table — pretty much the only thing he ever brings — was a massive, surging river of hype, hype that drove venture capitalists into a spending frenzy, hype that made respectable journalists credulous and stupid.

Unlike the AI bubble, which at its core does represent an exciting and potentially valuable technological advance, the humanoid bubble is pure tech-visionary absurdity. It's possibly the most Musk thing Musk has ever done.

I'm really starting to hate Last Christmas.

I was never a huge George Michael fan, but I always had a great deal of respect for his talent and have enjoyed some of his songs. That said, I think we can agree that Last Christmas was a decidedly minor entry into the artist’s catalog, which wasn't an issue until the Christmas muzak algorithm decided to play it very fifteen minutes. 

From Wikipedia: 

In December 2023, "Last Christmas" became Christmas number one. It also became the third-best selling UK single, with 5.34 million sales, including streams. As of December 2023, "Last Christmas" had sold over 1.93 million physical copies and downloads, making it the eighth-bestselling single ever in the UK. It was certified six-times platinum in December 2023. In 2024, it became the first song to be Christmas number one for two consecutive years. That year, PRS for Music estimated that "Last Christmas" generates £300,000 of royalties per year. 

(Trivia buffs might remember that the perpetual royalties from a Christmas hit were a key plot point in both the book and the movie About a Boy.)

The definitive post on the persistence of Christmas songs that should have long since worn out their welcome wasn’t a post at all; it was this cartoon from XKCD.

 

 While Randall's point is valid, it does leave out a couple of arguably more important factors.

For decades, you could see popular media trying to appeal to some idealized viewer born circa 1952 because, like the man said about the banks, that was where the money was. The market was huge and everybody wanted a piece. Studios, record companies and publishers pumped out tons upon tons of content while going back to the previous decade to find more material to fill the pipeline (particularly for television). It helped that the forties was golden age for Christmas standards, written largely by Jewish songwriters like Irving Berlin. 

By the end of the mid-sixties, media companies had an enormous catalog of Christmas songs, some of them very good, with a huge amount of name recognition, which led to the second factor: content accumulates, and between the craving for familiarity around the holidays and the eleven month breaks, the shelf life of of this genre was very long indeed.  

We certainly can't blame boomer nostalgia for Last Christmas, but given that the age of that song today matches the age of Frosty and Holly Jolly in 2000, we can possibly blame old people in general.  

It's Hollywood, you knew there'd be a cliffhanger.

What you'd expect to see if you prompted ChatGPT with the word nepo baby

 

Trump: "I think the people that have run CNN are a disgrace. I think it's imperative that CNN be sold because you certainly wouldn't want to just leave those people with some money so they can spend even more spending poison. It's lies. I wouldn't want to see the same company end up with CNN."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) December 10, 2025 at 12:57 PM

The saga continues. I live less than a mile from the gates of the Warner Brothers Studio. It makes this already strange story even more bizarre when you read about it sitting in a cafe patio then look up and see the actual WB water tower.

One of these days, I should probably do a post too about how disastrous mismanagement and ill-conceived financial deals put Warner Bros. in this position. It's a good story and one that has been largely untold by the big news organizations. If the studio had been competently run like, say, Columbia — which is in much better shape despite having fewer hits and a fraction of the IP — we would not be having this discussion.

Even a couple of years ago, the suggestion that Netflix buying WB would be the preferred outcome would have seemed absurd, but in 2023, we had no idea how bad an Ellison led Paramount would be, let alone the partners this  new deal would involve..

From Josh Marshall: 

Simply extraordinary stuff coming out this morning about the battle over what used to be Time Warner and now goes by the name Warner Bros Discovery (which includes CNN in addition to the more lucrative media stuff). The company had agreed to be acquired by Netflix. So Paramount — now the vehicle of the Ellison family successor and a Trump state media entity-in-the-making — has launched a hostile takeover effort to swoop in and gobble up WBD for itself. In its public pitch, it has openly advertised to shareholders that it is the better acquirer because the Ellisons are tight with Trump, and the White House will never let a Netflix deal go through. Trump, in comments yesterday, as much as agreed. Trump has refashioned antitrust oversight to be little more than a personal veto for the Trump family. Friends can do mergers; foes can’t. Indeed, the indifferent and uncommitted can’t either. You need to get right with the Trump family.

When you ask why so much of corporate America is beholden to Trump now, this is why. A big diversified corporation simply cannot compete and thus, in practice, can’t exist with a determinedly hostile administration.

Now we learn this: who else is part of the hostile takeover bid? None other than Jared Kushner. Yes, Jared — international M&A man when he’s not cutting “peace” deals in Israel-Palestine or Ukraine. And wait, there’s more! Just moments ago I saw that it’s not just Jared: the Saudis, Qataris and Emiratis are also in on the deal. Backstopping the deal is a fund, RedBird Capital, seen by many as a stalking horse for China.

At this point, perhaps our best hope is that events will lead to some events will lead to some belt-tightening around the Ellison household and the decision that they'll have to get by with only one studio. 

 

 

 

Still waiting for the episode where Don Draper pitches the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory

Fun video for the admittedly narrow target audience of fans of classic toys, Mad Men era advertising, and the distinctive forced exuberance of a corporation trying to put a happy face on a desperate situation.  

If you operated a toy store in 1965, you might have seen this promotional film with the new A.C. Gilbert toys for 1965. You will see television commercials that were to be aired nation wide showing the new line of Erector Sets: Erector Set 1,2,3,and 4, Erector Constructor 5 in 1, Ride-Em Erector, Gilbert Auto-Rama Power Steering Pit Stop slot cars, ChemLab Chemistry Set 1 to5, Gilbert Microscope Lab, Gilbert Telescope, and American Flyer Trains: The All Aboard, ready to go train sets. The commercials are great. A Carnival Barker, and Spokesperson for Gilbert add to the fun. "65: The Year To Go Gilbert" will also show what TV shows in the United States Gilbert will sponsor. A rare glimpse of the new toys you might have had under your Christmas tree in 1965. Sadly, after several failed attempts to market their existing toys and to create new lines of toys, the A.C. Gilbert Company ceased production in 1966 and declared bankruptcy in 1967. They couldn't keep up with the changing trends and competition in the toy industry. Transferred from 16mm color film, faded, color corrected. 

Gilbert was a cool company that deserved better, particularly its line of Erector sets (though Lego has since filled most of the niche), but Alfred Carlton Gilbert (a remarkable character described by Wikipedia as "an American inventor, athlete, magician, toy maker and businessman") was the business and his death in 1961 pretty much sealed its fate.

And, no, I wasn't kidding about the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory.

The set originally sold for $49.50^[3] (equivalent to $650 in 2024^[7]) and contained the following:^[3][8][9]

• Battery-powered Geiger–Müller counter
• Electroscope
• Spinthariscope
• Wilson cloud chamber with short-lived alpha source (Po-210) in the form of a wire
• Four glass jars containing natural uranium-bearing (U-238) ore samples (autunite, torbernite, uraninite, and carnotite from the "Colorado plateau region")^[3]
• Low-level radiation sources:
  • beta-alpha (Pb-210)^[10]
  • pure beta (possibly Ru-106)^[10]
  • gamma (Zn-65)^[10]
• "Nuclear spheres" for making a model of an alpha particle
• Gilbert Atomic Energy Manual — a 60-page instruction book written by Dr. Ralph E. Lapp
• Learn How Dagwood Split the Atom — comic book introduction to radioactivity, written with the help of General Leslie Groves (director of the Manhattan Project) and John R. Dunning (a physicist who verified fission of the uranium atom)^[11][12]
• Prospecting for Uranium — a 1949 book published jointly by the Atomic Energy Commission and the United States Geological Survey
• Three C batteries
• 1951 Gilbert Toys catalog

 

If the lab had come out a few years later, Stan Lee could have gotten a few more origin stories out of it.