Why Dubai -- the inevitable home of the hyperloop

This is a point that has come up in conversation and correspondence frequently but I don't know if I've ever made it in the blog. The odds of ever seeing a full scale hyperloop remain slim, at least until there are major breakthroughs that greatly reduce the cost of constructing, maintaining and protecting a massive maglev vactrain system, but if we do see one, my money has always been on Dubai.

Virgin Hyperloop One has raised $172 million in new funding to bring its futuristic transportation dreams to life, according to new filings with the United States government. At least $90 million has come from existing investor DP World, a major Dubai port operator, The Verge has learned.

The hyperloop startup is also seeking up to $224 million in this equity sale, according to the filing. Eighty investors have contributed to the round, and specific investors weren’t named. The funding amount was disclosed in a new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, which was first reported by Crunchbase News.

 First off, they have the cash. The "hyperloop" (see point 1) was always a bit like a Mars colony in that the question was never "can we do it?" but rather "can we afford to do it?" The misinformation (and in some cases, disinformation) around the proposal has always been primarily about cost. Dubai can afford a hundred or so miles of track.

 More importantly, they have a reason to build it. Not for transportation, of course -- there's no way to make those numbers work -- but for tourism. The country's playground-of-the-rich standing brings in a tremendous amount of money. Whatever its other issues, the "hyperloop" has the makings of a first rate attraction.

 The fit isn't  just economic. This is the land of indoor ski resorts and half-mile tall buildings. A "hyperloop" wouldn't even stand out.

Seems like a good time for a repost -- Netflix + NBC/Universal

Disney takes full control of Hulu as Comcast steps aside https://t.co/4QcTytqlBQ

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) May 15, 2019

Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Netflix Exit Strategies -- Comcast?

I apologize for writing these out of order, but one of the lessons I've learned as a blogger is that, if you want to speculate on something, get the post up quick because events have a way of moving faster than you could imagine and a position can go from bold and provocative to yesterday's news overnight.

For that reason, I want to jump ahead in the Netflix thread to exit strategies. Right now the company is sitting in a classic corporate throne of Damocles, king of the world but with a sword dangling over its head. Having a market cap bigger than Disney's is wonderful, but that stock price is based almost entirely on a highly questionable narrative. How do you gracefully cash out in such a situation?

One possibility I'd like to open up for discussion is some kind of merger or acquisition with Comcast (with the question of who would be acquiring whom rather bizarrely up in the air). There is something of a precedent here with AOL Time Warner, but Netflix and Comcast are a far better fit.

The two companies already have an extremely close working relationship. As previously mentioned, in the all important children's division, Netflix is largely dependent on licensing properties from the NBC/Universal library. NBC also produces (and apparently owns) one of Netflix's highest profile shows, Kimmy Schmidt.

Netflix also desperately needs guaranteed access to a major content library. We currently have a thread going about how the "plan" for Netflix to produce its way out of this problem is unworkable and probably insincere. Though not on par with Disney or Warners, NBC/Universal does have such a library.

The Disney Fox deal means that the House of Mouse now owns a controlling interest in Hulu. This has got to leave Comcast feeling somewhat out in the old. Pairing up with Netflix would put the company roughly on an even footing with its rival.

And finally, with the uncertain future of net neutrality, the business logic of the partnership is even stronger.

I'm writing and posting this in haste so I well may end up repenting it in leisure, but if we are on to something, I'd very much like to be to say you heard it (and discussed it) here first.

“She’s a good ol’ country girl"

When I get clear of some entanglements, I'm planning a big thread on the surprisingly complex relationship between partisanship and ideology in the Bible belt. When I do, I'll probably mention this.

From Politico:

Trump backers applaud Warren in heart of MAGA country
By ALEX THOMPSON

KERMIT, W. Va. — It was a startling spectacle in the heart of Trump country: At least a dozen supporters of the president — some wearing MAGA stickers — nodding their heads, at times even clapping, for liberal firebrand Elizabeth Warren.

The sighting alone of a Democratic presidential candidate in this town of fewer than 400 people — in a county where more than four in five voters cast their ballot for Trump in 2016 — was unusual. Warren’s team was apprehensive about how she’d be received.

About 150 people gathered at the Kermit Fire & Rescue Headquarters Station to hear the Massachusetts senator and former Harvard professor talk about what she wants to do to fight the opioid epidemic. Trump-supporting college students in baggy t-shirts, housewives in pearls, and the fire chief dressed in uniform joined liberal retirees wearing rainbow “Persist” shirts and teachers with six-figure student loan debt.

Kermit is one of the epicenters of the opioid addiction epidemic. The toll is visible. The community center is shuttered. Fire trucks are decades old. When Warren asked people at the beginning of the event to raise their hands if they knew somebody who’s been “caught in the grips of addiction,” most hands went up.

“That’s why I’m here today,” she said.

Warren entered the room from behind a large American flag draped in the station. Roving around a circle of people seated in fold-out chairs, she tried to strike a tone equal parts empathy and fury, while avoiding pity. She went full prairie populist, telling people their pain and suffering was caused by predatory pharmaceutical barons.

The 63-year-old fire chief, Wilburn “Tommy” Preece, warned Warren and her team beforehand that the area was “Trump country” and to not necessarily expect a friendly reception. But he also told her that the town would welcome anyone, of any party, who wanted to address the opioid crisis. Preece was the first responder to a reported overdose two years ago only to discover that the victim was his younger brother Timmy, who died.

Preece said after the event that he voted for Trump and that the president has revitalized the area economically. But he gave Warren props for showing up.

“She done good,” he said.

Others agreed.

LeeAnn Blankenship, a 38-year-old coach and supervisor at a home visitation company who grew up in Kermit and wore a sharp pink suit, said she may now support Warren in 2020 after voting for Trump in 2016.

“She’s a good ol’ country girl like anyone else,” she said of Warren, who grew up in Oklahoma. “She’s earned where she is, it wasn’t given to her. I respect that.”

A memorial repost

Friday, March 2, 2018

Explaining the principal-agent problem

I thought I posted this years ago.

The Butler and the Maid from The Carol Burnett Show

One more note on the Uber fleet -- it makes surge pricing go away*

[* realized what a bad title this was. Uber can still jack up prices at rush hour; it just won't put any more cars on the road.]

I'm nervous about using economic language here -- I'll probably get some of the terms mixed up -- but one of the the most attractive parts of the original Uber business model was surge pricing and the resulting elasticity of supply.

In order for this to work you need to satisfy a couple of essential conditions. First you have to have to have a big surplus of supply most of the time. It's the classic problem of staffing to the spikes. Second, you have to find a way to avoid paying for people and equipment when you're not using them.

Uber and Lyft actually managed to solve those two problems. There are a huge number of underemployed people out there with underutilized vehicles, and when they aren't carrying passengers, they cost the companies nothing.

Conventional wisdom recently has been that both Uber and Lyft need to jump on the self-driving bandwagon and acquire a fleet of autonomous vehicles as soon as we hit level five technology (something that's probably at least a good decade  away, but we'll put that aside for the moment). In addition to the previously mentioned flaws in this plan, both companies lose this tremendous latent supply. If they want to have a million cars available in a metro area for Friday afternoon rush hour, they will have to buy a million cars, and it's fair to assume a large majority of those cars will be sitting idle a large majority of the time.

It still feels weird to say this, but Elon Musk gets this one right.

Well, that pretty much just lays it out in the open

From a characteristically good LA Times article by Sam Dean

“Profitability in the first three-to-five years is not the focus,” said Daniel Ives, an analyst at Wedbush. “The focus is on doubling down on growth and further expanding this Uber economy over coming years.”

The company is just getting started, the thinking goes, and its core ride-hailing service, Uber Eats food delivery business and Uber Freight shipping logistics division are poised to take over many times their current market across the world.

“As someone who’s covered technology for 20 years, I could count on one hand the stories that are potentially transformational on the consumer enterprise side,” Ives said. “Uber has the blueprint to be what I view as the Amazon in transportation.”

Once Uber reaches that world-eating scale, the believers say, it will have such reach into drivers’ and riders’ lives that it can start tightening the economics, and introduce more profitable subscription models or, eventually, self-driving cars, and fend off any competition from other deep-pocketed tech giants.

Ives sees Lyft, which only operates in North America and hews closer to its core ride-hailing product than the expanding Uber, as a less enticing investment precisely because it has said it plans to work to reduce losses.

“A major strategic mistake that Lyft made was putting their back against the wall talking about the path to profitability in the next few years,” Ives said. “Ultimately with Uber, either you believe or you don’t.”

A few points.

1. We're talking about a world-wide monopoly. Among the other difficulties facing this plan, it requires a certain degree of buy-in from the various governments involved. This is a big stumbling block in Europe and an almost insurmountable obstacle in China.

2. Putting aside the unlikeliness of pulling this off, the phrase "tightening the economics, and introduce more profitable subscription models" is a pretty way of saying "take advantage of the monopoly and start gouging."

3. It's a bit off topic but there are few meaningful parallels between Amazon and Uber business models. The name is evoked here strictly for its magical power.

4. And perhaps my favorite part. Lyft's mistake was even thinking about paths to profitability. That shows a lack of faith, and for all magical thinking, faith is essential. If it works for the Great Pumpkin...

What if self-driving cars will actually hurt Uber and Lyft?

Two reasons for me to be nervous about this argument: first, it is very much in the minority and second, it puts position of defending the business logic of Elon Musk, at least in relative terms.

Of course, the level of autonomy required for viable driverless taxis is still a long ways away. That's not to say that AVs won't start having a big impact on transportation before then (my money's on long-haul trucking), but  go anywhere with no human on board functionality still faces big challenges.

That said, if you could get the technology safe enough and reliable enough, and you put aside Musk's typically exaggerated promises (the cars will not be paying for themselves in a year and a half), the basic idea of setting up a ride share company using privately owned Teslas is not necessarily a bad one.

By comparison, the argument, now absolutely entrenched in conventional wisdom, that Uber and Lyft will greatly benefit from the advent of fully autonomous cars continues to strike me as deeply flawed.

Here's an example. Imagine you own one of two delivery services in a town. Both you and your competitor have roughly the same number of trucks but you have invested a great deal of money upgrading and making sure that your vehicles are as energy-efficient as possible. So far, the cost of the upgrade has been balanced out by your savings on diesel so that you are able to charge roughly the same rate as your competitor. A drop in fuel prices will reduce your operating cost. Normally that would be a good thing, but the cost for your competitor will drop by even more so that he will be able to undercut you on prices.

The Uber business model is based on the fact that there are a huge number of underemployed people who own underutilized cars (virtually all private vehicles are underutilized). Since car and driver are already just more or less sitting there most of the time, Uber is able to offer rides at a rate that would not otherwise be sufficient to cover all the assorted cost.

(Technically Uber doesn't offer the rides, but you get my drift.)

{And, yes, there are people who buy cars just to drive for Uber. There are also people who buy commemorative plates as a hedge against inflation.}

If you take drivers out of the equation, suddenly it becomes unclear what advantage Uber has over taxicab companies, car rental services, car dealerships or any business that maintains a large fleet of cars. Let's consider the Hertz example here in Southern California. Currently you have locations spread around LA and Orange counties, with each lot having to maintain a minimum stock. With truly driverless cars, you can get awfully close to 100% utilization for much of the day. Just have your extra vehicles prowl for fares and make deliveries, then send them to whatever location needs them next. Add to that maintenance facilities, purchasing power, a late model fleet and countless economies of scale.

You can imagine similar scenarios for any number of other businesses and in each of those scenarios, Uber and Lyft get screwed over by large, new, well-positioned competitors.

All of this leads us to the dirty little secret of the ride sharing industry. Though it was made possible by technological innovation (specifically the smart phone), the stability of the business model depends not on sustained disruption and transformation but on things remaining basically the same.

This does not bode well

As many have noted, the competition for economic development has a record of corrupting and/or sharply lowering the intellects of state and local officials. The hyperloop and other Musk proposals have a history of doing the same thing.

Now imagine what is likely to happen when you combine the two.

Only three months ago, another Virgin Hyperloop executive, Assistant General Counsel Nathan Roth, said Texas was "basically ... in the lead" for a hyperloop route because transportation officials in the Dallas area had started a federal environmental impact study — something he said no other area had done.

Such an impact study is different than what Missouri completed and was recently lauded by Walder. Missouri's study released in October was a nine-month feasibility report conducted by Black & Veatch and Olsson Associates. It focused on social impact, potential station locations, route alignments, regulator issues and rights-of-way access.

The process of securing a hyperloop route is indeed complex — so much so that the U.S. Department of Transportation in March launched an organization to help new transportation technologies such as hyperloop come to fruition quicker.

Virgin Hyperloop isn't the only company pushing the technology made popular by tech visionary Elon Musk. Earlier this year, it was reported that Transonic Transportation LLC, a Louisiana-based startup, is working on a hyperloop route in Texas that would transport freight. The company originally investigated a route that would move people.

"There's just no way we can do passenger transport in Texas in the next 20 years, so we ended up refocusing on freight," co-founder Josh Manriquez said in January.

The freight route he now envisions would run from Laredo at the Mexico border to San Antonio.

[Side note. I may not have mentioned it recently, but maglev vactrains are even more problematic for carrying freight than they are for carrying people.]

It must suck to have a hundred million dollar production come in second to happy little trees

One of the fundamental rationales of the content bubble, a multi-billion dollar explosion in television and movie production, is that the value of older content will drop to next to nothing as the newer shows come online.

Content accumulates and, as we've said before, if older shows hold their appeal, let alone find new audiences, then it's not clear how the market (even allowing for healthy international expansion) can absorb a really big surge, and big doesn't begin to describe what we've been seeing.

From Forbes:

Calculations of viewer's habits have uncovered some interesting trends, one of which pointed out that older content seems to appeal to consumers of the on-demand audience.

As an indication of this, Hulu reports that viewers watched more than 1000 million hours of TGIF content in 2018. The ‘TGIF brand’ includes the series Full House, Family Matters, Sabrina:The Teenage Witch, Step By Step, Perfect Strangers, Boy Meets World, and Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper. All of these series premiered in the 1990s. Over 1200 episodes of this content is available for viewing.

Viewers were also draw to take in nearly 1 million hours of Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting.

This series originally aired from 1983 until 1994, amassing 403 episodes. Star/On-Screen Instructor Ross passed away at age 52 in 1995.

Maybe we just need to give Clarke a bit more time

A couple of years ago, we ran a thread on this video from Arthur C. Clarke speculating on the world of 2000. In particular, we discussed suggestion that what we would now call telecommuting would make cities obsolete.

Here was the main reason we suggested for the failure of telecommuting to live up to its promise.

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.

Of course, that was 2017. With two more years of an improving job market, we are getting closer to those post war levels, which makes this perhaps a bit less surprising.

The final stages of TEDification include your own personal Netflix special

Ken Levine gives us another example of the researcher -> TED Talker -> celebrity progression.

So I come upon a special by someone named Brene Brown. Who? Well, she must be famous if she has a Netflix Special. So I click on and it starts like every other stand up special – the performer backstage (basically a waste of the first three minutes), and then this attractive middle-aged woman steps out onto the stage. It’s a big theatre with balconies. You can’t do a Netflix special without balconies. And she immediately gets a standing ovation. Have I been marooned on a desert island for five years? Who is this person getting a standing O? She starts off with a few mild jokes that are getting screams. And then I start to realize she’s not actually a comedienne, she’s a self-help guru. But she’s one for Millennials because every sentence was peppered with “So I’m like… and then he’s like… and I’m like… and like they’re like…”

...

Finally, she makes reference to a TED talk she once did. So I decided to turn off the special and seek the TED talk.
...
I guess Oprah or somebody discovered it and the TED talk went viral. And suddenly Brene Brown is a social media star. She now has a bunch of books (I assume with covers that she is allowed to approve), a top draw lecturer, and Netflix Special-er.

Her message sounds sound and every few years another self-help guru comes along (where is Susan Powter when we need her?), but to me the most interesting thing about Brene Brown is her transformation from academic lecturer to zeitgeist celebrity. She’s now got the new hair, new wardrobe, new zippy patter, new Millennial-speak. Someone should really study that phenomenon. Hey, maybe there’s a Hulu Special in your future.

Another reminder that the stakes for Mr. Musk are very, very high

From CNBC:

Tesla said Thursday it plans to raise up to $2 billion, with $1.35 billion coming from convertible notes and $650 million from new equity, including a big purchase from CEO Elon Musk.

In a filing, Musk signaled his intent to buy about $10 million of the electric auto maker’s stock in the new offering. The total equity offering is for 2.7 million shares of Tesla. Musk’s purchase would be 41,896 shares. Before the offering, Musk owned about 20% of Tesla’s outstanding shares, worth about $12.6 billion, according to FactSet.

Forbes lists the next worth of Elon Musk as $20.3 billion as of 5/4/19. $10 million is not by any stretch of the imagination a "big purchase" for him. $12.6 billion, on the other hand, is quite a bit, particularly given the tendency of Forbes billionaires/"billionaires" to exaggerate their wealth (and Musk's tendency to exaggerate everything).

The collapse of Tesla would cost Elon Musk most of his fortune, not to mention his reputation and all those perks of celebrity. Maintaining his persona as messianic visionary and disruptor is absolutely essential for keeping the funding flowing in.

We will probably never know how sincere Musk is when he talks about Mars colonies, or maglev vactrains or telepathy brain chips, but it is important to remember that the buzz those futuristic "ideas" generate buzz that is worth considerably more than $10 billion dollars to the "real life Tony Stark."

[And it appears to be working. ]

Drinking from the wrong pipe -- Bill Barr edition

For those who just got here, we have a long running thread about the implications of Straussianism in the conservative movement. One aspect we've been particularly focused on was instability of a system operating within a relatively free society (as compared with cases where the state controls the media) that depends on channeling censored information and sometimes outright disinformation to the base while keeping the leadership well informed.

Here's how we put it in 2017:

The initial purpose of this "noble lie" approach was to use the propaganda to keep the base sending money and showing up for the polls through of a combination of rage and fear. As with all Straussian systems, it was assumed that those in power would be in on the joke while the people who believed the lies would simply serve as electoral cannon fodder.

At some point though (I suspect inevitably), a couple of things happen. First, the believers become leaders. This is become blindingly obvious with Trump, but the children of Fox News have been in control of the party since at least 2010 and the roots go back further. Remember how Dick Cheney insisted while traveling that all hotel televisions be tuned to Fox News?

The second, and possibly more dangerous problem is that a propaganda-fed base has no capacity to self correct, rather it continues follow unsustainable paths that only gain momentum, often exacerbated by ratcheting mechanisms. Soon you reach a point where, even if the leaders accurately perceive the situation and realized the best solution, they can no longer reconcile that reasonable course of action with what the vast majority of their supporters have been told to believe for decades.

We referred to leaders being caught up in the propaganda as "drinking from the wrong pipe."

Keeping all of that in mind, check out this insightful piece of analysis from Josh Marshall:

It’s a common refrain among non-Republicans that Fox News and the rest of the conservative media superstructure have essentially brainwashed 30 percent or 40 percent of the population over the last couple decades. But implicit in that belief is that it’s those people, voters, for lack of a better word the audience of national politics. Elites or high level appointees or operatives may cynically participate in this flimflam. But somehow they’re not part of the process, they not stewing in the same cauldron. They’re cynical, amoral, pick your description.

This is a major blindspot. Bill Barr is another Republican guy in his late 60s who’s been living, as Miller puts it, in that Fox News/GOP legal circles cocoon for two decades. Why would he be any different from your birther uncle you avoid at holiday dinners?

More to the point, why would we be in the current situation if the bacillus of Foxism or rightwing authoritarianism (whatever you want to call it) wasn’t as pervasive with the Bill Barrs of the GOP as the ordinary Joes you see at the Trump rallies? More articulate, yes. But different? Not really. And why would it be?

Beyond the stonewalling and outrageous comments from Barr yesterday, one thing that struck me is that more than a few times he didn’t seem familiar with basic facts of the case or the Report. I don’t mean points in dispute between pro and anti-Trump commentators. I mean, basic factual details. It wasn’t clear to me he’d actually read the Report itself. At least some of his arguments seemed based on Republican commentaries rather than the actual document. Much the same applies to his comments about 2016 “spying”. This isn’t to excuse any of Barr’s lawless and now, in at least certain cases, criminal behavior. But it’s not clear to me he’s even sweating the details on behalf of his authoritarian aims.

"Her Pilgrim Soul"

With all of the attention going to the new Twilight Zone (haven't gotten around to it -- the queue is long -- but I'm big Jordan Peele fan), I thought it would be a good time to look back at the uneven but often very good 1985 series. It was the show that brought J. Michael Straczynski to the grown-up table and started his surprising long collaboration with the notoriously difficult Harlan Ellison.

The show also revealed a surprisingly sensitive side to Wes Craven, who directed a number of episodes. Here is perhaps the best.




Nice to hear Charles Aidman's voice again.

Stephen Repetski actually read that enormous environmental assessment from Musk's Boring Company

And here are some of the highlights.

Here's the Boring Company's draft DC-Baltimore "Loop" Environmental Assessment: https://t.co/pTkpugoidw

— Stephen Repetski (@srepetsk) April 18, 2019

The "purpose and need" of the Boring Co's "Loop" is that we need "high-speed passenger transportation between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore."

Isn't that called Amtrak? Or MARC? pic.twitter.com/of6BVdfraE

— Stephen Repetski (@srepetsk) April 18, 2019

"the above-ground infrastructure associated with Ventilation Shafts
would typically be behind tree-lines and therefore screened from view from B-W Parkway"

Yes, because I would hate to see some ugly buildings when driving along the Parkway in my car.

— Stephen Repetski (@srepetsk) April 18, 2019

Excuse me but wasn't part of what Boring Co was doing different from everybody else is reusing the dirt removed from the tunnels and turning it into bricks? But now they're going back to disposing it? pic.twitter.com/f7SFeh30iM

— Stephen Repetski (@srepetsk) April 18, 2019

"DUE TO LIMITED SIZE OF THE WASHINGTON, D.C. LOOP STATION LOCATION, INITIAL OPERATION OF THE LOOP SYSTEM WOULD BE LIMITED TO 1,000 PASSENGERS PER DIRECTION PER DAY." pic.twitter.com/n45iug1Bzh

— Stephen Repetski (@srepetsk) April 18, 2019

The daily initial operating capacity of the Boring Co's DC-Baltimore system is equivalent to that of a single WMATA 8-car train.

Except WMATA's trains run more than once per day.https://t.co/x8mK78UG3M

— Stephen Repetski (@srepetsk) April 18, 2019

Due diligence in Boring Co's EA means they list their competitor transit modes between DC and Baltimore, which they say include regularly-scheduled bus and rail service that are "inexpensive, reliable" and "frequent" for a cost starting at $8. pic.twitter.com/dnslTrkiJY

— Stephen Repetski (@srepetsk) April 18, 2019

TBC DC-Baltimore Loop would pass through several aquifiers. The tunnels themselves would be fairly shallow, 30 to 44 feet down. pic.twitter.com/vwZGXthtne

— Stephen Repetski (@srepetsk) April 18, 2019

I've seen nothing in this document how TBC plans to deal with water infiltration and outflow pumping infrastructure.

— Stephen Repetski (@srepetsk) April 18, 2019

Repost: Netflix's social media problem

Twitter was pretty much wall-to-wall Games of Thrones this weekend. Though the show does still have a marketing budget, it's safe to say the buzz is now mostly self-sustaining, unlike most of its competitors. Walking Dead did that. As did the Voice. Possibly the Americans.



GoT's impressive social media presence got me to thinking about this post from a few years ago.

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Curiously, agressively anti-social

As previously mentioned Certain business models limit you to certain marketing approaches. For example, the standard model for scripted cable series is to run weekly for about three months usually following long story arcs with start dates varying from show to show. This model lends itself to promotion through blogs and social media and it may not be a coincidence that original, scripted shows have increased greatly in popularity and influence over the past dozen years along with social media. When it works well, these shows can create a powerful weekly cycle of buzz and feedback starting with Twitter traffic during the actual broadcast and building from there.

The sheer volume of tweets, posts and podcasts we're talking about is astounding and it's made even more valuable because it bypasses our normal anti-advertising filters. These are people we know recommending a show. What's more, there's a tremendous social norming aspect. Watching the show become part of what's expected.

Keeping that in mind, think about the Netflix direct-to-binge model. Social media thrives on having a critical mass of people sharing a common experience.  With a shows like House of Cards, the kind sustained build-up you see with a Game of Thrones is impossible and even an ordinary discussion requires you to find a group who are at same point in the viewing.

Ted Sarandos, Chief Content Officer of Netflix, responds to this concern with a truly extraordinary statement:

“No one has ever watched anything on Netflix that they couldn’t watch all at once,” Sarandos said. There was no interest in changing that model for a new group of originals. But that not only meant changing consumer behavior, it also meant dealing with the realities of today’s social network environment.

Sarandos called it a “different style of watercooler etiquette.” Rather than having to deal with the weekly conversation that is produced, viewers need to ask each other which episodes they’re watching and dealing [sic] with that. Still, the strategy seems to be paying off, as viewers are continuing to tune in.

(quick aside: "paying off" implies improvement over what would have happened otherwise. By this standard you could argue that having disgusting bathrooms "pays off" for a filling station as long as someone still buys gas there.)

Sarandos is saying that part of the company's strategy is to get viewers to engage in less word of mouth promotion. That's an amazing position, hoping that people will refrain from conversation until everyone has had a chance to catch up on all thirteen hours of a show. Of course, by the time that happens (assuming it ever does), the show will be an old topic for the people who watched it when it first came out.

In an age where social media is generally considered the inevitable wave of the future, Netflix is launching a programming model based on people talking less about their shows. It's possible that there's some method to the madness here.

Of course, it's also possible these people haven't thought this through.

"The notion of singularity ... is a religion"

This essay from Joi Ito makes a lot of points that will feel familiar to regular readers (mistaking S-curves for exponential when discussing technological progress, the rise of cult-like thinking -- what we've been calling magical heuristics). Lots of other good stuff as well, which is pretty much what you'd expect from the director of MIT’s Media Lab.

The notion of singularity – which includes the idea that AI will supercede humans with its exponential growth, making everything we humans have done and will do insignificant – is a religion created mostly by people who have designed and successfully deployed computation to solve problems previously considered impossibly complex for machines.

They have found a perfect partner in digital computation, a seemingly knowable, controllable, machine-based system of thinking and creating that is rapidly increasing in its ability to harness and process complexity and, in the process, bestowing wealth and power on those who have mastered it.

In Silicon Valley, the combination of groupthink and the financial success of this cult of technology has created a feedback loop, lacking in self-regulation (although #techwontbuild, #metoo and #timesup are forcing some reflection).

On an S-curve or a bell curve, the beginning of the slope looks a lot like an exponential curve. According to systems-dynamics people, however, an exponential curve shows a positive feedback curve without limits, self-reinforcing and dangerous.

In exponential curves, Singularitarians see super-intelligence and abundance. Most people outside the Singularity bubble believe that natural systems behave like S-curves, where systems respond and self-regulate. When a pandemic has run its course, for example, its spread slows and the world settles into a new equilibrium. The world may not be in the same state as before the pandemic or other runaway change, but the notion of singularity – especially as some sort of saviour or judgment day that will allow us to transcend the messy, mortal suffering of our human existence – is fundamentally a flawed one.

Revisiting the New York Magazine pseudo-science thread -- now with consequences

And pretty damned horrifying ones at that.

As of this week, there have been 695 cases of measles in the U.S. across more than 20 states this year—the highest annual toll seen since the disease was declared extinguished in the U.S. in 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Given that it’s only April and we’ve already broken a yearly record, it’s worth wondering: Just how much worse could things get?

Measles is a highly contagious virus, capable of infecting someone through airborne droplets left behind by someone else, even hours after they’re no longer present. But measles’ one major weakness is humanity itself. Humans are the only natural host the virus uses to reproduce and spread. That means if you can fully stop the chain of transmission between people—by vaccinating practically everyone who could be exposed to it, for instance—you can eradicate measles completely.

In the U.S., the eradication of measles was formally declared in 2000, thanks to a tremendous public health effort and a mandatory vaccination program. But since there are still parts of the world where measles happens regularly, even with vaccination, travelers have continued to catch measles somewhere else and bring it to the U.S. Because most Americans continue to be vaccinated against it at an early age, though, outbreaks and cases of measles since 2000 have largely been isolated.

The anti-vaccination movement, however, has provided the kindling for this resurgence in measles, according to Peter Pitts, former associate commissioner for external relations at the Food and Drug Administration and president and co-founder of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest.

“This measles epidemic is a perfect storm of vaccine denialism, stupidity, and groupthink,” he told Gizmodo.

As has been widely reported, one of the major epicenters of the anti-vaxx movement was the pricier sections of the west side of LA, which brings us to...

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

David Wallace-Wells, autism and bad science

David Wallace-Wells has been catching a lot of flack (most of it richly deserved) for his recent New York Magazine article on climate change. It is a hugely troubling sign when the very scientists you were claiming to represent push back against your article.

This controversy illustrates a larger problem with science reporting at the magazine. We already have a post in the queue discussing the neutral-to-credulous coverage of topics ranging from homeopathy to magic crystals to Gwyneth Paltrow's goop empire. The Wallace-Wells piece takes things to another level and goes in a very different but arguably worse direction. Rather than giving bad science a pass, he takes good science and presents it so ineptly has to do it a disservice.

I am not going to delve into that science myself. The topic has been well covered by numerous expert and knowledgeable writers [see here and here]. The best I could offer would be a recap. There are some journalistic points I may hit later and I do want to highlight a minor detail in the article that has slipped past most critics, but which is perfectly representative of the dangerous way Wallace-Wells combines sensationalism with a weak grasp of science.

Other stuff in the hotter air is even scarier, with small increases in pollution capable of shortening life spans by ten years. The warmer the planet gets, the more ozone forms, and by mid-century, Americans will likely suffer a 70 percent increase in unhealthy ozone smog, the National Center for Atmospheric Research has projected. By 2090, as many as 2 billion people globally will be breathing air above the WHO “safe” level; one paper last month showed that, among other effects, a pregnant mother’s exposure to ozone raises the child’s risk of autism (as much as tenfold, combined with other environmental factors). Which does make you think again about the autism epidemic in West Hollywood.

No, David, no it doesn't.

I want to be painstakingly careful at this point. These are complex and extraordinarily important issues and it is essential that we do not lose sight of certain basic facts: by any reasonable standard, man-made climate change is one of the two or three most important issues facing our country; the effect of various pollutants on children's mental and physical development should be a major concern for all of us; high ozone levels are a really bad thing.

But the suggestion that ozone levels are causing an autism epidemic in West Hollywood is both dangerous and scientifically illiterate. You'll notice that I did not say that suggesting ozone levels cause autism is irresponsible. Though the study in question is outside of my field, the hypothesis seems reasonable and I do not see any red flags associated with the research. If Wallace-Wells had stopped before adding that last sentence, he would've been on solid ground, but he didn't.

Autism is frightening, mysterious, tragic. This has caused people, particularly parents facing one of the worst moments imaginable, to clean desperately to any explanation that might make sense of their situation. As a result, autism has become a focal point for bad science, culminating with the rise of the anti-vaccination movement. There is no field where groundless speculation and fear-mongering are less welcome.

So, if ozone and other pollutants may contribute to autism, what's so bad about the West Hollywood claim? For that, you need to do some rudimentary causal reasoning, starting with a quick look at ozone pollution in Southern California.

Here are some pertinent facts from a 2015 LA Times article:

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy selected a limit of 70 parts per billion, which is more stringent than the 75 parts-per-billion standard adopted in 2008 but short of the 60-ppb endorsed by environmentalists and health advocacy groups including the American Lung Assn. The agency’s science advisors had recommended a limit lower than 70 -- and as low as 60.

...


About one-third of California residents live in communities with pollution that exceeds federal standards, according to estimates by the state Air Resources Board.


Air quality is worst in inland valleys, where pollution from vehicles and factories cook in sunlight to form ozone, which is blown and trapped against the mountains.


The South Coast air basin, which includes Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, violated the current 75-ppb ozone standard on 92 days in 2014. The highest ozone levels in the nation are in San Bernardino County, which reported a 2012-2014 average of 102 parts per billion.

Now let's look at some ozone levels around the region. West Hollywood, it should be noted, is not great.

But just over the Hollywood Hills, the situation is even worse.

Go further inland to San Dimas and the level is even higher…

Higher still in Riverside ...

Though still far short of what we find in San Bernardino.

If you look at autism rates by school district and compare them to ozone levels, it is difficult to see much of a relationship. Does this mean that ozone does not contribute to autism? Absolutely not. What it shows is that, as with many developmental and learning disabilities, the wealthy are overdiagnosed while poor are underdiagnosed. It is no coincidence that a place like Santa Monica/Maibu (a notorious anti-vaxxer hotspot) has more than double the diagnosis rate of San Bernardino.

The there's this from the very LA Times article by Alan Zarembo that Wallace-Wells cites [emphasis added]:

 Irva Hertz-Picciotto, an epidemiologist at UC Davis, suspects that environmental triggers such as exposure to chemicals during pregnancy play a role. In a 2009 study, she started with a tantalizing lead — several autism clusters, mostly in Southern California, that her team had identified from disability and birth records.

But the hot spots could not be linked to chemical plants, waste dumps or any other obvious environmental hazards. Instead, the cases were concentrated in places where parents were highly educated and had easy access to treatment.

Peter Bearman, a sociologist at Columbia University, has demonstrated how such social forces are driving autism rates.

Analyzing state data, he identified a 386-square-mile area centered in West Hollywood that consistently produced three times as many autism cases as would be expected from birth rates.

Affluence helped set the area apart. But delving deeper, Bearman detected a more surprising pattern that existed across the state: Rich or poor, children living near somebody with autism were more likely to have the diagnosis themselves.
Living within 250 meters boosted the chances by 42%, compared to living between 500 and 1,000 meters away.

The reason, his analysis suggested, was simple: People talk.
They talk about how to recognize autism, which doctors to see, how to navigate the bureaucracies to secure services. They talk more if they live next door or visit the same parks, or if their children go to the same preschool.

The influence of neighbors alone accounts for 16% of the growth of autism cases in the state developmental system between 2000 and 2005, Bearman estimated.

In other words, autism is not contagious, but the diagnosis is.

The fact that I had to Google the topic because I'd forgotten the name of the company should tell you something

[On a somewhat ironic note, I put the wrong name in the original version of this post.]

A big part of the dotcom boom was the idea that the surefire secret to success in the new economy was to have an online business, quickly line up tons of funding, bring in serious traffic and establish a strong brand through memorable, preferably edgy ads. (Thankfully, we've learned or lesson.)
Few companies took this idea further than Outpost.com.


From Wikipedia:

The company expanded rapidly, taking advantage of the booming Internet. Revenue increased from $1.9 million in the year ended February 29, 1996 to $22.7 million in the year ended February 28, 1998.

In 1997, Money Magazine rated the site as "Best Site for Computer Equipment". Outpost.com raised $2.7 million in venture capital in 1997, at which point the site had 25,000 visitors per day and 1.3 million customers. The company secured another $22 million in financing in 1998, and raised another $70 million from its initial public offering. Outpost.com opened a warehouse in Ohio that could guarantee next-morning domestic delivery and worldwide delivery within 48 hours. Outpost provided next-day shipping on all orders, regardless of size, up until 2001.

After the dot-com bubble burst, the company fell on hard times. In 2001, the company entered into a merger agreement with PC Connection but then terminated that merger agreement and the company was sold to Fry's Electronics for $21 million including the repayment of $13 million in debt from PC Connection. At that time, the company had 1.4 million customers and 4 million visitors per month to its website.

Hail Marys and the limits of the hype economy

Events are moving quickly and in a very bad direction for Tesla.

The company reported Wednesday that automotive revenue in the first quarter fell 41% to $3.7 billion from $6.3 billion in the previous quarter, a far steeper drop than expected for sales of all its electric-cars — the Model S, the Model X and the Model 3.

Total sales, including Tesla energy and battery storage products, fell 38% to $4.5 billion from $7.2 billion.

The sales slump in turn slammed the company’s bottom line. The company turned unprofitable again after two rare quarters of positive earnings. The net loss was $702 million, after a $139-million profit in the previous quarter. (The first-quarter loss was close to what the company recorded in the year-earlier period — $709 million — when it was grappling with fundamental manufacturing problems.)
Scarce cash got even scarcer. Cash on hand dropped from $3.69 billion at the end of last quarter to $2.2 billion. That included paying off $920 million in convertible bonds.

Operating cash flow turned negative — a net $640 million going out the door over the three months versus a positive $1.23 billion in the previous period.

Tesla shares, down about 22% for the year through Wednesday’s close, were up slightly in after-hours trading Wednesday, to about $259 a share.
...

Where the money for such projects will come from is unclear. Musk was asked why he doesn’t raise money through a debt or equity sale. Musk said he’d rather focus on efficiency first. “I don’t think raising capital should be a substitute for making the company operate more effectively,” he said. “I think it’s healthy to be on a Spartan diet for a while.”

Without an infusion of equity or debt, major expansion would require healthy cash flow. But cash flow has gone negative. Capital spending, which funds assembly lines and other manufacturing operations, has been declining. It fell from $325 million in 2018’s fourth quarter to $280 million in 2019’s first quarter. The number topped $1 billion in the third quarter of 2017 and has fallen with each quarter.

Not surprisingly for those who have been following his career, rather than tamping down expectations, Elon Musk has responded with even more incredible promises (from a couple of days ago:

Tesla’s aim is to create a fleet of self-driving cars that can be used as robot taxis in what Musk is calling the “Tesla fleet.” The company will manage the apps and software. Tesla owners could let their cars out for robo-taxi use, with the company keeping a percentage of the revenue. Tesla would also operate its own robo-taxi fleet.

“We expect to deploy the first robo-taxis with no one in them next year,” Musk said Monday. “I’m confident we’ll get regulatory approval somewhere.”

Make no mistake. Musk is talking about level 5, fully autonomous vehicles, something that, as far as we can tell, no one is even close to. Most researchers put this functionality at least a decade away, which is why the focus has shifted to finding ways to get the most out of level 4 AVs.

Even by his standards, this is an audacious claim, but the stakes are stunningly high. The valuation of Tesla has always been based on a combination of hype and the "real life Tony Stark" persona and there are still investors who want to believe (as well as those who don't).

The range in target prices for Tesla stock is almost bizarre, reflecting wildly different opinions about Tesla’s growth prospects. The stock closed trading Monday at $262.75 a share, down 3.9%.

The Ark Invest money management group sees Tesla trading at $4,000 as self-drive technology becomes more popular. Ives puts an “outperform” rating on Tesla, with a 12-month price target of $365.

At the other end of the spectrum, Garrett Nelson of CFRA recommends Tesla stockholders sell, with a target price of $225 a share. And short sellers have set a target price as low as zero.

I suspect that a lot of the visionary pronouncements and proposals about giant underground slot car racing sets  and brain-computer interfaces we've been hearing about recently have less to do with the projects themselves and more with maintaining a futuristic aura around Musk, and thus propping up the stock a little bit longer.

It worked for a long time but even in the hype economy, there are limits.

Elon Musk's self-confidence shouldn't inspire much confidence

More good work from Timothy B. Lee on the Tesla beat [emphasis added]:

Tesla is less than two years away from full self-driving, CEO Elon Musk said in an interview with MIT researcher Lex Fridman published on Friday. And he said Tesla was far ahead of other companies working on self-driving technology.

"To me right now, this seems 'game, set, and match,'" Musk said. "I could be wrong, but it appears to be the case that Tesla is vastly ahead of everyone."

Musk told Fridman that Tesla customers would need to keep their hands on the wheel "for at least six months or something like that." But he predicted that soon—"maybe even toward the end of this year, I'd be shocked if it's not next year at the latest"—Tesla's self-driving technology will become so good that "having a human intervene will decrease safety."

Musk has maintained an optimistic mood about Tesla's self-driving progress at the same time that other industry CEOs have been tamping down expectations. (Musk is congenitally optimistic on this topic—in 2015, he predicted that fully self-driving cars would be ready within two years, declaring it a "much easier problem than people think it is.")

...

"Tesla Autopilot is not yet even close to where Waymo was 6 years ago," wrote Brad Templeton, a longtime self-driving car evangelist who advised Google during the early years of its self-driving car program.

By 2012, Google had developed highway driver assistance software that had capabilities similar to recent versions of Autopilot. Google considered selling this technology as a standalone product but decided there was too much danger of drivers becoming overly reliant on the technology—and failing to properly monitor it.

So Google pivoted to developing fully self-driving cars that would never need customers to take control. By 2015, Waymo was confident enough in its technology to allow a blind man to ride through residential streets in Austin, Texas. But more than three years later, Google's project—now rechristened Waymo—still hasn't launched a fully driverless taxi service.

At this point, regular viewers should be able to fill in the the missing dialogue without much trouble. Musk is a huckster, and like most of the best of the breed, he has the gift of believing his own line. His natural lack of talent as an engineer (he really is shockingly bad at this) may actually give him an advantage here -- that Dunning–Kruger boost of confidence can make a pitch even more convincing.

You can almost imagine the conversation with the genuinely gifted engineers at Tesla as they tried to explain the many problems with that were almost solved compared to the handful that were still years away from resolution, patiently walking him through the subtle distinctions and spelling out the difficult trade-offs required to get an autonomous vehicle ready for the road.

The real tip-off is "much easier problem than people think it is."  If you've ever had a job that required presenting complex technical or analytic concepts, you've probably had that moment where you realize that your audience missed all of those fine but important point and drew exactly the wrong conclusions.

Of course, your audience probably didn't use those conclusions to justify the viability of a multi-billion dollar company.

It's entirely possible for Netflix to be a fantastic success and a disastrous failure

Not just Netflix, of course. For any of the numerous companies with both huge valuation and sky-high price to earnings ratios, healthy growth and a couple of decades of solid profitability aren't enough to justify the level of investment. These companies have to be unprecedented, spectacular successes that completely dominate their industries.This is one of those facts that everyone knows but few spend much time thinking about, at least few of those in the business press.

Personally, I hope that Netflix has a long and lucrative run -- the more players, the better -- but it's important to remember that the bullish argument for the stock price requires blowing Disney out of the water, and right now, the house of mouse is looking rather substantial.

Check out this graphic courtesy of Barry Ritholtz:

Elon Musk's latest sounds "worse than pointless"

At this point, I don't think that Musk actually expects to get any real money out of the DC to Baltimore tunnel proposal directly, but he has got to shore up his visionary credentials and he has to do it fast.

Demand for Tesla cars appears to have stalled. Stores are being closed. Inventory is piling up. Prices are being cut.

Panasonic, the company’s closest business partner, abandoned plans to expand operations at Tesla’s giant battery factory in Nevada unless car sales pick up.

Although Tesla posted consecutive quarterly profits late last year, Musk has prepared Wall Street for a loss when first-quarter 2019 earnings are announced April 24.

The controversial chief executive also faces contempt charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission. He had agreed to settle SEC stock fraud charges after tweeting falsely last August that he had the funding to take Tesla private. In the settlement, he agreed not to tweet material information about the company without prior vetting. A federal judge said the settlement could be clearer, ordering both sides to put on their “reasonable pants” and revise the agreement.

Amid the bad news, Tesla’s volatile stock has fallen from a year-to-date high of $347.31 a share to 273.26 on Thursday, a 21% decline.

 The valuation of the company was always driven primarily by Musk's carefully cultivated "real life Tony Stark" persona, and that persona is starting to fade just as the company's debts are coming due. He absolutely has to keep the show going.

Aaron Gordon of Jalopnik has an insightful review of the latest act.

Elon Musk's D.C. to Baltimore Tunnel Sounds Worse than Pointless

What if I proposed digging two 35-mile tunnels that would begin and end right next to two train stations that currently have service between one another? And this tunnel would be right underneath an existing highway? But this tunnel would be used to skim cars along tracks at speeds no one has achieved yet? And it would move fewer than two trains’ worth of people per direction per day?

...

This is no small caveat. 35 miles is a really long tunnel, and they’re not just digging one, but two of them. The report claims a digging time of less than two years, which would be an unprecedented achievement orders of magnitude [Not quite, but still a lot -- MP] faster than any other tunneling project to date, as Kevin DeGood, Director for Infrastructure Policy at the Center for American Progress pointed out:

Reuters: “Boring says it would take between 12 and 20 months to dig the [35.3 mile] tunnels.”

Hahahahahahahahahahahahah

— Kevin DeGood (@kevin_degood) April 18, 2019

For comparison, a 35-mile twin-bore tunnel through the Swiss Alps took 17 years to build. Yes, digging through the Alps is much harder than the soil beneath Maryland, but not that much harder.

And, for the record, it takes high-speed trains 17 minutes to travel through the tunnel, or only two minutes longer than the proposed travel time in Musk’s DC-Baltimore route.

...

Instead of talking about those things, The US and Maryland DOTs are investing actual resources to study this pointless tunnel and openly advocate for its construction. In a statement accompanying the report’s release, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Elaine L. Chao talked up the potential benefits (heavy emphasis on “potential”):

    The publication of a draft environmental assessment for this unique project demonstrates the Department’s commitment to preparing for the future of transportation across all modes.

All modes?! It’s a car in a tunnel! That mode exists!

It's been an eventful week.

I think we should all take this advice for now and come back refreshed and ready to go Monday morning.

An important message for everyone eager to tweet your thoughts on the Mueller report at 9:30am

pic.twitter.com/jHiMfT0G6x

— Comfortably Smug (@ComfortablySmug) April 18, 2019

“Uber for astrological readings” is still a more rational investment than the actual Uber

I'm afraid there's less to this story than meets the eye. All snark aside, astrology has been a popular and profitable segment of the economy for a long time and an app that delivers horoscopes makes perfect business sense. Unlike, for example, a model based on buying movie tickets than reselling them at a loss.

From the New York Times:

As an Aquarius, David Birnbaum is naturally skeptical of astrology. But as an investor, he has zero doubts about the business potential of the $2.1 billion “mystical services market.” It’s an area that he has been trying, unsuccessfully, to invest in for nearly two decades.

Mr. Birnbaum researched lots of astrology start-ups in the Web 1.0 era but concluded then that they were not good investments. “They were pretty much just marketplaces sending traffic off to random astrologers,” he said. “They were definitely shady.”

This year he finally backed one: Sanctuary, an app that can be described as “Uber for astrological readings.” For $19.99 a month, you can receive a monthly one-on-one chat consultation with an astrologer. (The app also provides free daily horoscopes.)

Mr. Birnbaum’s decision to back a horoscope company through Five Four Ventures, the incubator he runs, “gets a lot of grins” from people in the finance world, he said. But they get it. Astrology is having a cultural moment, and for investors, that translates to dollar signs.

In recent years astrology traded its psychedelic new-wave stigma for modern Instagrammy witch vibes, and those vibes are very popular with millennial women. This means there’s money to be made. Start-ups — professional, non-shady ones with interesting business models — are bubbling up, eagerly raising funding from people like Mr. Birnbaum.

I really should frame this in terms of the hype economy and magical heuristics, but you all have heard it before

Scott Lemieux points us to this from the New York Times

The offering, which could value Uber at around $100 billion, is expected to reverberate through global financial markets and to solidify the company’s position as one of the most consequential technology firms of the past decade. The share sale would be the biggest since the Alibaba Group of China began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014, and would peg Uber’s value at more than four times that of United Airlines’ parent and double that of FedEx.

But the prospectus renewed questions about how sustainable Uber’s business actually is. The company said in the filing that it lost $1.8 billion in 2018, excluding certain transactions, on revenue of $11.3 billion. And the prospectus also showed that its rocket-ship trajectory for revenue growth was beginning to slow.

While I appreciate the dry understatement of describing an annual loss of almost two billion in terms of questions about sustainability, I'll have to go with Lemieux's summary:

I mean, I’m as happy to pocket the subsidies offered by venture capitalists as the next urban dweller. But the fundamental problems of Uber’s business model remain as ineluctable as ever. They haven’t solved the problem of offering prices low enough to get a lot of customers while paying drivers enough that they’ll be quickly available for prospective riders while making money. And the barriers to entry will remain low enough — and the ability of riders to use other modes of transportation if prices get too high present enough — that “drive your competitors out of business and jack up the prices” can’t actually work for the industry either.

South of 92nd St.

For about a dozen years now, I've been saying that one of these days Watts is going to gentrify. Back then, the response I got from residents of the neighborhood was polite disbelief. A few years later, it was "well, maybe someday." 

Now, it's a nod followed by "look at Inglewood."

From The Root:

Similarly, in neighboring Inglewood, the same type of thing is happening. A new NFL stadium and plans for a new basketball arena for the Los Angeles Clippers have made Inglewood the new target for developers who are swooping in, buying up properties, and pushing out older residents who have lived there for years.

In some instance, as Angel Jennings reports for the Los Angeles Times, tenants have been given notice that their rents will more than doubled—although no new improvements have been made to the units they are living in. In cases where the rent is not being raised, tenants are simply being given 60-day notices to vacate the premises as new owners take over.

In a city with no rent-control or rent-stabilization laws, there is little that anyone can do to stop this from happening to residents—about 25 percent of whom are black and over the age of 55, according to the Times.

In one instance, Tomisha Pinson—who lives next door to site where the new stadium is being built for the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers—told the Times that she received notice that her $1,145 monthly rent would be increasing to $2,725 for the two-bedroom apartment she currently lives in.

...

Currently, blacks and Latinos make up 42 percent and 51 percent of Inglewood’s population, respectively. Gentrification could change all of that. Two-thirds of the city’s residents are renters, and with no rent-control laws in place to prevent what is currently happening, the city is an attractive investment to those looking to cash in on all the new entertainment construction.

Back on the TV beat

I'll probably be coming back to connect some more dots -- it's a complicated story -- but there's been an interesting development in the streaming television industry which doesn't quite jibe with the some of the assumptions that are essential to the standard narrative.

Specifically, the future of television is the Netflix, single-tier, all-you-can-eat model. No ala carte, no ad-based approaches. The services that survive will bell the ones that create the most compelling (i.e. buzzworthy) original content. There is a reasonable chance that this will end with Netflix holding very close to a monopoly over the world market for movies andd television.

Both investors and journalists have embraced these assumptions, and their support have propped up the whole enterprise, but other than that, there has never been much evidence in support and more than a little that seems to go against them.

We've already discussed the rise of the terrestrial superstations starting with Weigel's MeTV. This model, based on ad revenue, older established programming, and minimal spending on original programming, has proven extraordinarily profitable.

With that in mind, the advent of Pluto TV (joining services like Amazon's Freedive and the evil but generally competent Sinclair's Stirr) is worth noting.

From the Hollywood Reporter:

As its competitors rush to launch Netflix-style subscription streaming services, Viacom is making a bet on free programming.

The company is paying $340 million in cash to acquire free streaming service Pluto TV, which it plans to use as a distribution outlet for digital programming from brands like Awesomeness and as a marketing tool for its portfolio of media brands. The deal is expected to close during the first quarter of the year.

"As the video marketplace continues to segment, we see an opportunity to support the ecosystem in creating products at a broad range of price points, including free," CEO Bob Bakish said Tuesday in a statement announcing the purchase. "To that end, we see significant white space in the ad-supported streaming market and are excited to work with the talented Pluto TV team, and a broad range of Viacom partners, to accelerate its growth in the U.S. and all over the world." 

Misc

I've always been fascinated with cross-pollination






The music started in the hearts and drums, from another land
Played for everyone, by sons, of the motherland
Sendin out a message of peace, to everybody and
Came across the oceans in chains and shame
Easing the pain, and it was without name
Until some men in New Orleans on Rampart Street
Put out the sounds, and then they gave it a beat
I`m talkin' 'bout Jelly Roll, King, and Satch
I`m talkin' 'bout the music that had no match
Yes the music, and it was born down there
We`re gonna use it, so make the horn sound clear
It`s jazz music...jazz music
Yo, the music that Pops, and other cats made
It stayed, cause people love when they played
To the North, it took a riverboat shuffle
To the big cities, with lots of hustle and bustle
To Chicago, and to the Apple too
This was a scene, that our forefathers knew
Go get your crew, I know they`ll get into
The jazz music... jazz music
The music called jazz had the razzamatazz
It had the flavor, and a lot of pizazz
The big band beat was very neat and unique
The swing was king, it made you tap your feet
There was Benny and Duke and of course the Count Basie
The melody was smooth and yes, very taste
There was Hap, The Prez, and Lady Day and
Dizzy Bird and Miles, they were all playin'
They brought it to the people of the foreign lands
Back across the oceans and the desert sands
Where it echoes in the distant sounds of drums
And it rises with the sun on days begun
This is the music, that we give tribute to
They gave it to us, that`s why we give it to you
The jazz music, the jazz music
The jazz music, uh, uh, uh



This is cool.

Cool EV for commuting from @shareyourbicar #ev #evs #tryev #ElectricVehicles #eMobility #AirPollution pic.twitter.com/e44IJfPtNx

— Try EV (@tryevs) April 10, 2019

And this is scary.

“All the technology we need to do this already exists,” and other red flags

Perhaps the 21st Century is making me cynical, but this does feel familiar.

There's a genre that we've seen a lot recently. Someone (frequently with a Silicon Valley connection) will announce that we're finally on the verge of the development and/or the the widespread implementation of some innovation we've been promised for decades. Maglev vactrains, Martian colonies, and yes, even flying cars.  These long awaited advances are always just around the corner, surprisingly cheap and almost ready because they depend on "existing technology."

I might be missing some obvious cases but it's difficult to think of an example where people spent years waiting for a breakthrough like this only to realize that, like Dorothy, they had the power all along.  This one could well be different, but from what I'm seeing here, this seems to have less to do with advances in enabling technology and more to do with telling a story that people want to believe.

Even if you missed out on the Concorde, you may soon get a chance to fly in a supersonic airliner
By Eric Adams April 3, 2019

...

The J85 is GE’s workhorse military turbojet. Three of them will power Boom’s XB-1, a one-third-scale demonstration model of the $200 million, 55-seat carbon-fiber airliner the company hopes to see streaking across the sky at twice the speed of sound by 2025. It would be difficult to overstate the challenges Boom faces as it chases this goal and all the ways its plan could go wrong. Seventy-one years after Chuck Yeager punched through the sound barrier in the Bell X-1, the Concorde and the Soviet Union’s Tupolev Tu-144 remain the only airliners to achieve Mach speed. Neither worked out. The Tupolev mostly carried cargo, making just 102 flights with passengers. British Airways and Air France lost money on most Concorde trips despite exorbitant ticket prices and hefty government subsidies. They grounded the airplanes in 2003 after 27 years of glamorous—if fiscally strained—service.

The business case doesn’t appear much better today. Even as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic make steady progress toward the day tourists will glimpse space through the porthole of a rocket ship, no one’s figured out how to make supersonic transport economically feasible. The problem lies in maximizing fuel efficiency while reducing engine noise and mitigating the sonic boom that inevitably accompanies anything moving faster than the speed of sound. When you throw in the requirement that this tech turn a profit, the puzzle is so fiendishly difficult to solve that Boeing and Airbus all but quit trying, launching precisely zero efforts since the Concorde’s last flight. Why bother, when airlines show little interest in jets that carry fewer people, burn more fuel, and can fly only over oceans because of the awful racket they make?

Given all this, the idea that a guy who’s best known for Amazon’s ad-buying tech could make supersonic work seems unlikely. [Blake] Scholl’s plan sounds absurd when you realize his aviation experience is limited to flying small planes. Yet he exudes the ebullient confidence typical of startup founders. “All the technology we need to do this already exists,” he says. “It’s safe, reliable, and efficient. So let’s take that same proven technology and make passenger’s lives more efficient too.”

For Scholl, the path to that vision is clear. Boom’s success hinges on developing a jet engine capable of achieving supersonic speeds without that fuel-guzzling afterburner. And he believes the boom problem won’t be a problem for his company. His business plan relies on convincing airlines that with new, more-efficient technology, they’ll make plenty of money shuttling business-class passengers across the Atlantic in three hours or the Pacific in six. The Virgin Group and Japan Airlines are among five carriers so intrigued by the idea that they’ve lined up to buy Boom’s airplanes, should they make it to production.

...

Boom is definitely going for glamorous. With its ­needle-​like fuselage, pinpoint-sharp nose, and triangular delta wing, the Overture is one cool-looking craft. The planned interior is no less impressive. A ­virtual-​­reality demo offers a glimpse of what crossing the sky at 1,400 mph could be like. No one gets stuck in the middle because there’s just one passenger on either side of the aisle. There’s lots of leather, gleaming surfaces, and polished wood. Every one if its 55 seats [about half the capacity of the Concorde -- MP] faces a giant screen, and customers watch the scenery through large round windows. Scholl says the cabin will be so insulated that you won’t hear the engines. “Our goal is to exude tranquility,” he says.

It's so nice to not be debunking a tech story for a change

 We've been making the point for a while now that the vanity aerospace industry's role in the hype economy has a way of obscuring and perhaps even diverting resources from real innovation. Eventually though, the real thing has a way of rising to the top.

If the still daunting technological challenges can be resolved, air-breathing rockets dwarf the potential of anything currently being proposed by any bored Silicon Valley billionaire.

The test took place at Reaction Engines’ facility at the United States’ Colorado Air and Space Port. They were the first phase of an extensive trial program, which will eventually see the precooler exposed to temperatures hotter than 1,000 degrees Celsius – the conditions expected during Mach 5 hypersonic flight.

In space rocket mode, the engines are being designed to speed a craft up to Mach 25.

Over the last four years, Reaction Engines has secured more than £100 million ($130 million) in investment from backers including BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, and Boeing’s venture capital arm. The firm has also received a £60 million ($78 million) funding commitment from the U.K. Government.

Mark Thomas, Reaction Engines CEO, said in a press release Monday that the results were unparalleled and a “hugely significant milestone.”

“This provides an important validation of our heat exchanger and thermal management technology portfolio, which has application across emerging areas such as very high-speed flight, hybrid electric aviation and integrated vehicle thermal management,” he said.

 (Now if the Russians come through with nuclear rockets and NASA finally decides to have some fun with railguns, things will really start interesting.)

Tweet of the Week

made me lol. "Is Your Startup Idea Already Taken?" via @buzzfeed pic.twitter.com/4lzM8JYR94

— Andrew Chen (@andrewchen) April 4, 2019