Accountability is for little people continued -- more thoughts on the Sony hack

I'm not quite sure what to call it, but most business reporting suffers from the journalistic equivalent of regulatory capture. There are exceptions of course – I can think of lots of sharp, independent writers covering this beat – but the vast majority of what you read in the business section reflects the viewpoint and very often the spin of the companies being covered.

This "journalistic capture" becomes particularly apparent when companies have massive screw ups. You get lots of stories about how various disasters were unforeseeable and/or unavoidable. The part about the highly paid C-level executives being grossly incompetent has a way of being buried.

The last post covered an almost comic level of incompetence in Sony's IT department. That is probably the bigger part of the hacking story, but there were other questionable decisions that led up to this fiasco, starting with the decision to greenlight the Interview in the first place.

Mark Evanier, who has been around the industry for decades, has a very good post on the subject. His treatment of the freedom of speech issues is extremely sharp, but it is his discussion of the movie itself that is relevant to this post.

Thursday night at the screening I attended, there was what we call an Industry Crowd, meaning the entertainment industry. I heard much talk about the whole matter and I kept hearing — this is the rumor mill speaking now — that everyone at Sony thought the film was awful and that they were just hoping to get it into theaters and make some bucks before reviews and word of mouth killed it. It's common knowledge the film's release was delayed from last August because Sony demanded changes.

I'm not suggesting that good films deserve to be defended and bad ones don't. But before the hacking and threats, Sony had the right to decide the film was a lox that wasn't worth releasing. Some execs at Sony felt that way; that the film shouldn't be released…or maybe wasn't worth the problems it might cause. (No one in the film business is dense enough to think a movie about assassinating a foreign leader couldn't possibly get anyone upset.) And they had the right to make that decision. I'm suggesting they still have that right.

Evanier is almost certainly correct here, but, from a business standpoint, was making this film a good idea in the first place?

Let's be clear, this decision was never about art or making a statement. We're not talking about Dr. Strangelove; at best we're talking about a Hope and Crosby "Road to" picture with gross-out gags . The only considerations were financial and the only political element was the studio politics involved in telling a couple of big, spoiled stars that they couldn't make a vanity project. From Sony's point of view, the Interview was probably a bad idea for a movie and was likely to create all sorts of problems (keep in mind, this is a Japanese company which makes concern about North Korea a bit more immediate). It appears that the main argument for making the movie was that it kept the stars happy and the studio didn't have to make Green Hornet II.*

As I said before, none of this in any way diminishes the severity of the criminal acts involved, but there's blame enough to cover both malicious and the negligent. In theory, we shouldn't have to worry about the latter because the market for top level executives is supposed to be efficient -- we are told that companies get what they pay for when they pay the big bucks.

With that in mind, take a look at this graph from Fusion.

 (The metric used is “market posture,” which measures each level of employee pay compared to the market median for that level.) According to the chart, SPE pays its level 10 employees 113.1% of the median, but only pays its level 1 employees 92.2% of the median.

Assuming level 10 is the top of the scale, it is difficult to see how that above average pay has translated into above average executive performance.


* The Green Hornet probably did turn a profit (between the massive marketing budget and the peculiarities of Hollywood bookkeeping, it's difficult to say for certain), but the box office was not great and the reaction to the film effectively killed the anticipated franchise.

I'm more comfortable blaming the victim a little when the victim has a market cap of twenty billion

While in no way taking away from the magnitude of the criminal acts involved in the Sony hacks, it is important to remember that upper-level management gets such high salaries in part because they are supposed to anticipate threats and take steps to minimize their potential impact.

At Sony, not so much...

The new trove appears to include a collection of documents the hackers came across on the Sony Pictures network that had “password” in their titles, and includes digital keys for everything from Sony computers and servers to magazine subscriptions and YouTube accounts for Sony movies. (As much as we’d like to log into This is the End’s YouTube page, we haven’t actually tried any of these passwords to see if they work.) It is generally a bad idea to store all your passwords in a document on your computer. It is an even worse idea to title that document something like “My Passwords.”
The hackers leaked a new file that includes a collection of all the documents Sony Pictures employees used to store passwords

Sony Pictures employees and former employees are flipping out about the leak and the unexpected debut of their personal information on screens across the world. But some former employees, who asked to remain anonymous, have told us that they’re disappointed but not surprised by the massive hack given Sony Pictures’ long-running lax attitude toward security. They say that employees highlighted specific vulnerabilities on company websites and systems that were never addressed.

“Sony’s ‘information security’ team is a complete joke,” one former employee tells us. “We’d report security violations to them and our repeated reports were ignored. For example, one of our Central European website managers hired a company to run a contest, put it up on the TV network’s website and was collecting personally identifying information without encrypting it. A hack of our file server about a year ago turned out to be another employee in Europe who left himself logged into the network (and our file server) in a cafe.”

Part of that joke was an org-chart straight out of a Dilbert cartoon.

The information security team is a relatively tiny one. On a company roster in the leaked files that lists nearly 7,000 employees at Sony Pictures Entertainment, there are just 11 people assigned to a top-heavy information security team. Three information security analysts are overseen by three managers, three directors, one executive director and one senior-vice president.

Keep in mind, this is more than three years after Sony suffered "one of the largest data security breaches in history."

Just to be clear, the great majority of the upper-level executives I've encountered (no C-level, but quite a few directors and VPs) have been smart, hard-working and conscientious. I certainly don't want to make a blanket condemnation, but stupid, incompetent people do sometimes make it through, and if they get to a high enough rung, it is amazing how small the consequences are for their screw-ups. Accountability is for little people.

On a completely unrelated topic.

In 2005, Sony Pictures Entertainment was audited to ensure the company was keeping in line with federal regulation regarding information security practices. The auditor found, among other things, that Sony had deliberately engaged in insufficient digital security practices, including allowing employees to use basic proper nouns as passwords instead of requiring them to use a complex system involving random letters, numbers and punctuation marks.

If Sony were a bank, the auditor said, its lackluster security practices would put it out of business.

Sony’s then-executive director of security information Jason Spaltro pushed back: If a bank was a Hollywood film studio, he said, it would already be out of business.

“It’s a valid business decision to accept the risk (of a cyberattack),” Spaltro told CIO Magazine in 2007. “I will not invest $10 million to avoid a possible $1 million loss.”

As mentioned earlier, a few years after that interview hackers would steal  personally identifiable information from 77 million Sony PlayStation accounts. What happened to the executive of security information who gave that embarrassing interview?

By the way, Jason Spaltro — the executive from the beginning of this article who suggested the company not spend $10 million to combat a potential $1 million risk — still works at Sony. He has since been promoted to vice president of information security — one of the top executives tasked with ensuring things like the Sony Pictures hack don’t happen. He makes close to $700,000 a year: $300,000 base salary and a $400,000 initiative-based bonus. We know this because hackers published his employment information last week.

Checking in on the last next big thing

I'm working on a longer piece that involves Uber and I got to thinking about the big discussion we had about Groupon back in 2011. Many of the arguments currently being used to justify Uber's $40 billion valuation (rapid growth, huge potential market, a foundation of new economic and technological paradigms) were also being used to justify faith in Groupon.

I don't want to make too much of the analogy -- they are very different companies with very different business models -- but it is still useful to stop and think about how that bet worked out.

[If you want to get a head start on the Uber thread, check out these exceptionally thorough analyses from Talking Points Memo and NYU Finance Professor Aswath Damodaran.]

A quick note on Kružno, official game of the village of Kružno*

I've got a couple more post I'd like to do on Kružno, the abstract strategy game I developed a few years ago, a post on abstract strategy games and another on trying my hand at small scale manufacturing (and why I ended up using chess pieces in a checkers variant). Unfortunately, I'm a bit pressed for time and I really wanted to get something out today, so this will have to do for now.

You can find the rules here and the game itself here. The game takes about three to five minutes to explain, perhaps a bit longer working from the instructions (some parts are a bit unclear and need to be rewritten).

If you are, or someone you know is, a teacher (particularly at a school where money is tight) who would like to make more use of games in the classroom, let me know and I'll try to set you up with some game sets or at least some extra boards.


* That's also a subject for another post

Perhaps claims that are almost certainly false should be fact-checked more thoroughly

If you read Talking Points Memo or the Washington Post, you've probably heard about this story from New York Magazine by up and coming journalist Jessica Pressler:

Late last year, a rumor began circulating at Stuyvesant that a junior named Mohammed Islam had made a fortune in the stock market. Not a small fortune, either. Seventy-two million.

An unbelievable amount of money for anyone, not least a high-school student, but as far as rumors go, this one seemed legit. Everyone at Stuy knew that Mohammed, the soft-spoken son of Bengali immigrants from Queens and the president of the school’s Investment Club, was basically a genius.

As the news spread, Mo’s stock went up. The school paper profiled him, Business Insider included him on a list of “20 Under 20,” and Mo became “a celebrity,” as his friend Damir Tulemaganbetov put it on a recent Friday night at Mari Vanna near Union Square. “A VIP!”
...
Like [Jordan] Belfort, Mo started with penny stocks. A cousin showed him how to trade. He loved the feeling of risk—the way his hand shook making the trade—but he swore it off after losing a chunk of the money he’d made tutoring. “I didn’t have the balls for it,” he said. He was 9.

It was a while before he was ready to try again. In the meantime, he became a scholar of modern finance, studying up on hedge-fund managers. He was particularly enamored of Paul Tudor Jones. “I had been paralyzed by my loss,” Mo said. “But he was able to go back to it, even after losing thousands of dollars over and over. Paul Tudor Jones says, ‘You learn more from your losses than from your gains.’ ” Mo got into trading oil and gold, and his bank account grew. Though he is shy about the $72 million number, he confirmed his net worth is in the “high eight figures.” More than enough to rent an apartment in Manhattan—though his parents won’t let him live in it until he turns 18—and acquire a BMW, which he can’t drive because he doesn’t yet have a license. Thus, it falls to his father to drive him past Tudor Jones’s Greenwich house for inspiration. “It’s because he is who he is that made me who I am today,” Mo said.

[I emphasized the part about “high eight figures.” It becomes important later.]

Islam fills in some more details on his website:

My interest in finance started at the tender age of 8, but I really started trading when I was 10 years old. I paper traded for a year or so and finally opened a real trading account using my own capital that I saved from entrepreneurial endeavors. 

So we're looking at six or seven years to go from tutoring money to more than fifty million dollars trading part-time. That's a difficult statement to believe but Pressler and her editor at NY Magazine managed to swallow it, as did the New York Post which ran "High school student scores $72M playing the stock market" and CNBC which had Islam and friends scheduled to appear until...

From the New York Observer:

Monday’s edition of New York magazine includes an irresistible story about a Stuyvesant High senior named Mohammed Islam who had made a fortune investing in the stock market. Reporter Jessica Pressler wrote regarding the precise number, “Though he is shy about the $72 million number, he confirmed his net worth is in the ‘high eight figures.’ ” The New York Post followed up with a story of its own, with the fat figure playing a key role in the headline: “High school student scores $72M playing the stock market.”

And now it turns out, the real number is … zero.

In an exclusive interview with Mr. Islam and his friend Damir Tulemaganbetov, who also featured heavily in the New York story, the baby-faced boys who dress in suits with tie clips came clean. Swept up in a tide of media adulation, they made the whole thing up.

The Washington Post picks it up from there:

Then on Monday afternoon, Mo backed out of a spot on CNBC, confessing the $72 million figure was inaccurate. “The attention is not what we expected — we never wanted this hype,” he said. New York, however, stood by the story: “Our story portrays the $72 million figure as a rumor … we did not know the exact figure he has made in trades. However, Mohammed provided bank statements that showed he is worth eight figures, and he confirmed on the record that he’s worth eight figures.”

Just to be clear, the NY editors initially pinned much of their defense on the distinction between $72 million and “high eight figures,” and on the easily faked bank statement provided to the fact checker. Apparently the fact-checker didn't ask to see additional documentation or to speak to the parents (who are, according to the Observer, really pissed).

New York Magazine finally came out with a retraction but even here they don't seem to have learned their lesson:

After the story's publication, people questioned the $72 million figure in the headline, which was written by editors based on the rumored figure. The headline was amended. But in an interview with the New York Observer last night, Islam now says his entire story was made up. A source close to the Islam family told the Washington Post that the statements were falsified. We were duped. Our fact-checking process was obviously inadequate; we take full responsibility and we should have known better. New York apologizes to our readers.

The process would have been inadequate if the claim had been credible; for a story this incredible, it was grossly negligent.

This is not an isolated case. Standards for journalistic accuracy have been dropping for at least a couple of decades, but perhaps more troubling is the disconnect between fact-checking and credibility. Even at the venerable BBC, the most unbelievable of claims is not subjected to any extra scrutiny. Fact-checking has become a CYA process, not something you do because you want to get the story right.

Infrastructure part 2

This is Joseph

In the same vein as some of my recent comments on infrastructure, the latest example of tricky projects is happening on the west coast.  Consider:

Transit advocates are often accused, absurdly, of engaging in a “war on cars”. If we were indeed committed to such a war, I’m not sure we could have come up better with anything than this. The overruns will likely cannibalize WSDOT’s budget, including all manner of road repair and construction projects (some of which are necessary and useful) for the foreseeable future. If, as appears increasingly likely, the viaduct must be shut down before the tunnel is ready, transit will become even more crucial for accessing downtown, and far fewer cars will be able to do so with any efficiency at peak travel times.  Meanwhile, Sound Transit’s tunneling project for light rail, using well established, off the shelf tunneling technology and conservative cost estimates, chugs along ahead of schedule and under budget, and Seattle just voted itself a tax increase to fund more bus service.

I don't like the terms luddite and ddulite (I prefer technophile and technophobe), but it is a classic example of a series of expensive decisions caused by trying to save money through a clever technological solution.  I return to my thoughts in the previous post, that the real point of concern is our inability to use off the shelf technology effectively in terms of infrastructure.

From an economics point of view, we really have a case of misaligned incentives.  How do we make more projects look like Sound Transit and less like the projects that have been encountered in the viaduct replacement?

Our annual Toys-for-Tots post

[Slightly modified from last year.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

No toys that need lots of accessories;

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

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

Look for something durable. These will have to last;

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

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

Heroic bureaucrats and annoying foodies -- one reason so many reforms fail

As promised, here are some more thoughts on West Virginia's promising initiative to improve school lunch programs.

From a transcript of the interview with writer Jane Black:

People in Huntington across the board were very interested and concerned about what he was doing. But the place that the show focused probably the most was in the schools. There he went in and was shocked and horrified that they were eating breakfast pizza and what he called luminescent strawberry milk. He tried to get them to start cooking from scratch. He said it didn't really matter that the food met the guidelines of the USDA as far as nutrients were concerned, but it wasn't fresh.

Of course what people saw on TV were the school lunch ladies being furious about this and feeling like he was stepping on their toes. They also saw the kids taking those lunches, which are paid for by taxpayer dollars, and dumping them in the trash.

What happened in the aftermath was really interesting. After he left, they were audited by the USDA, who came in and said, "These meals may be fresh, but they don't meet our requirements for nutrients." The head of school food, Rhonda McCoy, basically could have gone back to the way she'd always been doing everything. Even though on the show she came across as this cold, aloof bureaucrat, clearly the message had gotten through.

What she did over the next summer was redevelop the recipes, change the flavors a little bit. For example, she took some of the garlic out of his garlicky greens so that the kids liked them better. Within a year they were basically cooking all their meals from scratch.

I went down there. In this kitchen that any New York restaurant would be happy to have, there were 10 cooks making chicken, rolling it in a spice blend, baking it in the oven, taking potatoes, cutting them up, putting them in olive oil and roasting them in the oven. The meal that I ate there included a salad that had lettuce from a student farmer. It was incredible.

What's even more amazing is that since then, Cabell County, the county that Huntington is in, has trained I think 52 of 55 West Virginia counties to do the same. I would say West Virginia, which is not known as a very progressive state, probably has one of the best school lunch programs in the country.

If you follow reform movements, you see this all the time (particularly in education). Outsiders come in with lots of valid criticisms and some good ideas, but they also come in with unacknowledged personal preferences and cultural biases amplified by a subjective viewpoint and a dangerous lack of humility.

Jamie Oliver had some useful things to say about a tremendously important topic, but his initiative was a failure. His creations were, in many ways, less nutritious than the "unhealthy" meals they were supposed to replace. They didn't meet federal guidelines, making the whole enterprise a non-starter. Oliver brought the sensibility of a celebrity chef from a Michelin-starred London restaurant (specializing in Italian cuisine which might explain the level of garlic). He didn't think through the problems of dealing with kids or the other constraints school officials work under.

The difference between success and failure was Rhonda McCoy. We normally think of bureaucrats like McCoy as being, if not out-and-out villains, then at least being part of the problem, but it was McCoy who understood both the kids' tastes and the constraints of the program and who took this dead-in-the-water proposal and made it work. McCoy managed to take the best parts of Oliver's ideas and make meals that were both appealing to the students and manageable from a standpoint of budget, logistics and federal standards.

The press loves stories of the heroic outsider who shows up and fixes everything in a few easy steps. It's a plus if the outsider is a celebrity but an economist is almost as good (for some reason, this is one discipline that is always granted instant expert status). One of the main problems with these stories is that they tend to assume that the people in the field before the outsider showed up were either criminally lazy or dumb as a box of ball-peen hammers.

Finding an entire field full of idiots is rare (finding one with a dysfunctional culture is a bit more common but that's a subject for another post). That means that it is extremely difficult to come up simple ideas that are good and easy to implement but which haven't already occurred to almost everyone already working on the problem. That doesn't mean that people who are new to a field can't make a contribution, but it does mean that these contributions usually need to be collaborative. Fresh perspectives make for good first drafts, but it generally takes experience to fashion them into something usable.

How do you move diagonally in hexagonal chess?

As mentioned before, I've been selling an abstract strategy game called Kruzno. I've got a couple of posts coming up on the game, but in the meantime, I'm doing a thread on a few of the many other games that can be played on a six by six by six hexboard.

One of the most popular hexboard games is Glinski's Chess. I've got the moves posted at the teaching site. Most are fairly straightforward analogs to the game you're all familiar with. The bishops are probably the most counterintuitive, but if you think about it for a minute, you'll see that is a reasonable way of making diagonal moves on hexagonal tiles.

Differential levels of technological progress

This is Joseph

Mark and I often talk about how technology often improve at different rates even in similar areas.  Our go to example is cars (much better now than in 1980) versus airplanes (which have had a more mixed improvement record).  However, the Oatmeal offers up a really good example in terms of computers versus printers.  In a lot of ways, I suspect that this is an even better example than the cars versus planes one, as the modern desktop is massively cheaper and more powerful than what was state of the art twenty years ago

Worth a quick read for a Friday lunch break smile.

The death of the comic book industry (circa 1970)

I've been working my way through the archives Mark Evanier's site. I was familiar with his work as a writer and comics historian, but I only recently caught on to his blog. Many of the posts from a decade ago suffer greatly from a loss of topicality, but most stand up fairly well and a few actually benefit from the added perspective.

This post from 2004 has certainly remained current. We frequently see stories (many of which grow into accepted narratives) about media and industries that are shrinking and facing serious new challenges. The standard response is to assume that trends will hold and business models will remain unchanged until the institution in question rides off into the sunset to join the ice wagon and the rag-picker.

This does, of course, happen, but not that often. In order to completely wipe out a product or service, you have to replace it with something that's better in almost every respect (think chemical film, 8-tracks and, while we're on the subject, ice boxes). If there is still value in something, the market is very good at finding a way to exploit that value.

Creative destruction has become one of the most beloved buzzwords of the Twenty-first Century. It is seen as a moral good, an inevitable force of nature and an irrefutable argument (you can't stand in the way of creative destruction"). The result falls somewhere in between conventional wisdom and a better-a-gram-than-a-damn Pavlovian response. In these cases of groupthink, it is always useful to remind yourself of counter-examples, in this case a major branch of the publishing industry that looked like it was about to disappear.

Around 1970, when I got into the comic book business, the consensus was that there wouldn't be a comic book business for long…and not because of me.  The traditional method of distribution — comics sold on a returnable basis to newsstands around the country — was failing, or at least it was failing comic books.  The biggest distributor, Independent News, was making large sums off more expensive, adult publications like Playboy and Penthouse, and some there suggested that newsracks were no longer a place for kids or low-priced periodicals. Since comic books were low-priced and largely for kids, this was a pretty ominous suggestion, especially when you considered that Independent News not only distributed DC Comics but was a part of the same company.  In other words, DC's wares were being sold by an outfit that no longer believed there was a future in selling comic books.  With that attitude, there couldn't be much of one.

The "returnable" part was what was really hurting comics.  Marvel would print 500,000 copies of an issue of Spider-Man and would get paid only for those that actually sold.  So if the racks were crowded (or the distributor trucks filled with an extra-thick issue of Playboy that week), 50,000 might not make it to the racks at all.  Many more copies would get damaged and returned with all the unsold copies for credit.  300,000 might actually be sold and the rest would get pulped…obviously, not the most efficient way to do business. In the past, the ratio had not been that bad, and a publisher could make a tidy profit…but by the seventies, the numbers were closing in on the comic book industry.

To the rescue came not Superman or Batman but a Brooklyn school teacher named Phil Seuling.  Phil ran the big comic conventions in New York for years so he knew the fan market and its buying power.  Around 1973, he began proposing to DC and Marvel that he sell their comics in a different manner, by-passing traditional newsstands and getting them directly to comic book dealers and shops.  He would pay slightly less per copy to the publisher but he'd be buying the comics on a non-returnable basis, so a sale would be a sale; no printing five copies to sell three.

At first, publishers rebuffed his proposal.  The "direct market," as it would come to be called, did not seem lucrative enough to warrant the attention, to say nothing of how it might further destroy the old method.  But before long, it became apparent that the old method was being destroyed, with or without selling books the Seuling way, so DC, Marvel and other companies tried it.  Within a year, around 25% of all comic books were being sold via "direct" distribution, through Seuling's company and about a dozen others, with 75% still on conventional newsstands.  Within ten years, those percentages were reversed.  Today, the "direct market" is the primary market…though Phil, sadly, did not live to reap the full benefits of his idea.  He died in 1984 at the age of 50.

There's also an interesting demographic side to this story, but that will have to wait for another post.

I should really come back to this one

"The Splendid Table" is one of those names that make it easy to get annoyed at public radio, but it's a pretty good show and this is a very good story, both for the points it makes and the issues it raises. Lots of threads intersect here, from nutrition and public health to behavioral economics to class tensions. Definitely worth a listen.

Infrastructure

This is Joseph

Larry Summers (via the Mad Biologist):

Walk from the US Airways shuttle at New York’s LaGuardia Airport to ground transportation. For months, there has been a sign saying “New escalator coming in Spring 2015.” The Charles River at a key point separating Boston and Cambridge is little more than 100 yards wide. Yet traffic has been diverted for over two years because of the repair of a major bridge and work is expected to continue into 2016.

The world is said to progress, but things that would once have seemed easy now seem hard. The Rhine is much wider than the Charles, yet Gen. George S. Patton needed just a day to create bridges that permitted squadrons of tanks to get across it. It will take almost half as long to fix that escalator in LaGuardia as it took to build the Empire State Building 85 years ago.

I think that this really does hit on something important.  Yes, in some cases things like safe labor practices matter and have a real cost.  But on the other side, it seems impossible to think that we have simply lost the ability to generate infrastructure.  At the very least, regulatory and financial incentives are failing to properly align. 

Whatever it is that is causing this malaise, I think it is crucial that we understand it -- no matter how much it may annoy entrenched interests.  By that I do not only include workers/unions, but also things as diverse as courts, regulatory structures, and the rest that make it hard for public infrastructure to be efficient, or which impede a properly competitive private sector. 

Agon alert -- a post for board game geeks

I believe I mentioned earlier that I recently set up an Amazon store to sell Kruzno, an abstract strategy game I developed a few years while I was teaching high school math. I'll be posting more on the game (partially for the obvious promotional purposes but also because this corner of the blogosphere is actually nerdy enough to read posts on developing abstract strategy games).

On a related note, I used a six by six by six hex board so it could serve as a "utility player" in the game library. Lots of very cool games are played on this board including Gliński's hexagonal chess and the forgotten gem, Agon. I have a write-up over on the teaching blog. Definitely worth a look if you're into two player strategy games.

From commie to Randian and back in under four minute

Nat Hiken was a writers' writer. William Faulkner, who disliked television as a rule and who did not own a set, was a fan of Car 54 and would regularly go over to a neighbor's house to catch the show. Ken Levine called him the "greatest sitcom writer of his era." Larry David lists Bilko as a primary source for Seinfeld.

The Seinfeld connection is easy to spot. Hiken was perhaps the all-time master of the unexpected-consequence plot, where a small and seemingly harmless event would spiral into a series of bigger and bigger complications. An attempt to get a citation or help a couple avoid their weekly fight would spiral out of control, often upending the precinct, the police department or the entire city.

"Toody & Muldoon Meet the Russians" is not good introduction to the series. Rather than building up, the Russian characters pretty much start at eleven and much of the political satire has age poorly (One, Two, Three is one of my least favorite Billy Wilder films for similar reasons). It is, however, an interesting time capsule of JFK's America. Check out the specific business strategies the commissar proposes before spotting his KGB tail.




p.s. It doesn't come up in this clip but both Bilko and Car 54 were notable at the time for their integrated casts featuring African-Americans as as professionals and co-workers.

The challenge of discussing racism is finding definitions under which you and your friends don't qualify as racists.

We are probably all guilty of the above from time to time but among the commentariat it's more or less a job requirement. One popular technique is to couch racist statements in terms of class. Arguing that poor people are genetically inferior -- less intelligent, less disciplined and less moral -- has somehow become an acceptable position in publications like the New York Times. 

Other times, journalists avoid acknowledging the racism of colleagues by simply pretending to ignore what's in front of their faces. This leads us (via Brad DeLong) to a couple of pieces on the New Republic.

Here's Ezra Klein writing in 2009 about TNR and its editor-in-chief Marty Peretz [emphasis added]:

[Jeffrey ] Goldberg's article was a particularly weird piece of work, but it fit neatly into the "anti-anti" Israel genre. The thing about criticizing Israel is that you get called an anti-Semite rather a lot. This doesn't happen when you criticize sugar subsidies or come out against the stimulus bill. And make no mistake: Anti-Semitism is a serious charge. A genuine anti-Semite would be, should be, drummed out of political journalism, just as a legitimate racist should find no home at a serious opinion outlet. For that reason, being called an anti-Semite by hobbyist Zionists who happen to own and control prestigious domestic political magazines seems like it would be a bad thing. But the charge has been rendered tinny through overuse.

That 'should' gives Klein a bit of wiggle room but a reader could certainly come away with the impression that this sort of thing is not tolerated.

Via Max Fisher (who provides a notable exception to my first paragraph), here's a sample of what Peretz was routinely printing in one of the country's most prestigious journals.

The truth is that no one has ever really cared about the lives of Africans in Africa unless those lives are taken out by whites. No one has cared, not even African Americans like [Jesse] Jackson and [Susan] Rice. Frankly -- I have not a scintilla of evidence for this but I do have my instincts and my grasp of his corruptibility -- I suspect that Jackson was let in on the diamond trade or some other smarmy commerce.
...
Well, I am extremely pessimistic about Mexican-American relations, not because the U.S. had done anything specifically wrong to our southern neighbor but because a (now not quite so) wealthy country has as its abutter a Latin society with all of its characteristic deficiencies: congenital corruption, authoritarian government, anarchic politics, near-tropical work habits, stifling social mores, Catholic dogma with the usual unacknowledged compromises, an anarchic counter-culture and increasingly violent modes of conflict.
...
But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imaam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.
...
I actually believe that Arabs are feigning outrage when they protest what they call American (or Israeli) "atrocities." They are not shocked at all by what in truth must seem to them not atrocious at all. It is routine in their cultures. That comparison shouldn't comfort us as Americans. We have higher standards of civilization than they do. But the mutilation of bodies and beheadings of people picked up at random in Iraq does not scandalize the people of Iraq unless victims are believers in their own sect or members of their own clan. And the truth is that we are less and less shocked by the mass death-happenings in the world of Islam. Yes, that's the bitter truth. Frankly, even I--cynic that I am--was shocked in the beginning by the sectarian bloodshed in Iraq. But I am no longer surprised. And neither are you.

Fisher goes on to spell out the reaction of fellow journalists to this "overt racism."

And no one resigned — including me, while I was an intern at the magazine for four months. Though I was unpaid, I eagerly accepted the resume-boosting prestige that came from working there. And, like the rest of the staff, I did it knowing it meant turning a blind eye to Peretz's frequent screeds on the magazine's website, fully aware that they were not just the crazy rants of an old racist but were in fact palpably damaging to the minority families who had to live in a society that was that much more intolerant because Peretz enjoyed a platform that legitimized his views.

I am thinking about this today as I watch senior editors and contributing editors resign en-masse from the magazine, in response to the firings of Foer and Wieseltier. Many of them are friends, and many never worked under Peretz at all.

But a number of the journalists who are resigning their positions as "contributing editor," typically an honorific title granted to former staffers who are no longer actually contributing or paid, did work under Peretz, or did accept this same honorific title from him.

Some of these resigning editors chose to tolerate and lend tacit support to Peretz; I am in no position to critique them for this. But the fact that many of them found Peretz's promulgation of racism to be tolerable, whereas Chris Hughes' firing of two beloved colleagues was not, speaks to a larger problem of how we think about racism in American society and particularly in the elite media institutions that have badly lagged in employing people of color.

Mars One -- libertarian ideology, ddulite fantasies and the decline in journalistic standards

[Update: Before posting, I try to follow up on all relevant links. This time I missed at least one. My apologies to Ms. Keep.]

There is a lot to complain about in the coverage of science and technology and, God knows, I do my share of bitching about the way the NYT et al. report on topics like driverless cars. Just to be clear, though, my complaints are generally meant to be focused on specific problems that tech journalists tend to overlook, usually involving issues like implementation, compatibility, scalability and infrastructure. For example, Google's autonomous car is a tremendous piece of engineering, but it currently requires road-data that cannot be gathered cheaply on a large scale. Google appears to have gotten stuck on this and a handful of other problems that effectively keep the technology from being commercially viable.

Most tech stories play out like that. They start with interesting, even promising ideas from smart, serious people, then the journalists covering them either choose to ignore or don't understand the subtleties and caveats. The researchers aren't always completely innocent here -- there's often a temptation to feed the hype -- but in their primary role they are doing respectable work.

Not all of these stories are cases of good research badly reported. Sometimes the rot goes all of the way down with lazy writers uncritically reporting bad technology and questionable science. Elmo Keep is neither lazy nor credulous. Writing for Medium, she has produced a devastating take-down of one of the most notable of these bullshit stories:

I will have to tell him that from everything I can find, Mars One doesn’t appear to be in any way qualified to carry off the biggest, most complex, most audacious, and most dangerous exploration mission in all of human history. That they don’t have the money to do it. That 200,000 people didn’t actually apply. That, with all the good faith one can muster, I wouldn’t classify it exactly as a scam—but that it seems to be, at best, an amazingly hubristic fantasy: an absolute faith in the free market, in technology, in the media, in money, to be able to somehow, magically, do what thousands of highly qualified people in government agencies have so far not yet been able to do over decades of diligently trying, making slow headway through individually hard-won breakthroughs, working in relative anonymity pursuing their life’s work.

I started to excerpt a few paragraphs of Keep's article but you really need to read the whole thing to grasp just how unlikely it is for this enterprise to go beyond the asking for money stage. Every single aspect collapses under scrutiny, from the unrealistic funding model to the wildly optimistic cost estimates to the nonexistent specs and contracts to the unresolved technical issues.

There is no excuse for a respectable news organization to treat this as a serious and yet we still get articles like this from Vibeke Venema and the BBC:

Could you leave everyone you love for the chance to settle on Mars? Sonia Van Meter describes herself as an "aspiring Martian" - she hopes to be one of the first humans on the planet in 10 years' time. But it would mean never seeing her husband again.

"I don't think you can apply for something like this and not be the tiniest bit insane," says Sonia Van Meter. "But this is the next great adventure, and I'm going to do absolutely anything I can to be a part of this."

The 35-year-old political consultant from Austin, Texas, is one of 705 people in the running to form a 20- to 40-strong human colony on Mars - a group whittled down from 200,000 who sent applications to Dutch not-for-profit organisation Mars One last year.

"I thought: 'Shoot, this sounds like fun!'" she says. "I didn't think there was the slightest chance that I would be selected, I just wanted to be a part of it."

For her husband Jason Stanford, her application - and the fact that she now appears to have a 35-to-one chance of leaving forever - evoked mixed emotions.

"Like any good red-blooded American male, at first I thought this was all about me. I thought: you're leaving me," he says.

Over time he changed his mind. "The more she talked about it, the more I realised she was doing this for the right reasons - she was doing this to show humanity what we can all do if we work together," he says.

There is one quick cover-your-ass 'if' buried deep in the piece ("The mission, if it goes ahead, will be dangerous, some say suicidal."), but even in that single brief sentence, the possibility of it not happening is just an aside. There is no real effort to put this in a realistic context. Instead, we're given figures like that 35-to-one chance; it's almost certainly false but it makes for a good story.

The press likes to maintain the convenient fiction that it is "open to all voices." This is an obviously absurd proposition – – even though the Internet has greatly expanded what news organizations like the BBC can offer, they can still only cover a tiny fraction of the information and opinions out there – – but it serves the purpose of absolving journalists and, more to the point, editors and publishers from taking responsibility for what they present to the public.

When something appears in a major news outlet, particularly when it is presented noncritically, that outlet is implicitly endorsing the story; it is, in effect, saying that this story is something important enough to spend time learning about. I have seen numerous stories on this proposed Mars One mission but Keep's article is the first of those to make any real effort to address the sheer silliness of the proposal.

A very specific definition of 'exclusive'

I spend a lot of time on Netflix, but I'm afraid that I often don't do a very good job focusing on the main point. What's important here is not the strengths and weaknesses of the company -- let the day traders do their own research -- but rather the way that the story illustrates so many of the problems in the way the press covers business, particularly the tech sector.

For example, the coverage of "Netflix Originals" shows how persistent a factual error can be if it fits a popular narrative. In this case, the narrative is that Netflix is the next HBO which has lead many journalists covering the story to assume that Netflix is building a content library similar to HBO's. They aren't. Netflix doesn't own shows like House of Cards. They just license it. Anyone who researches the story should know this, but more often than not, you see something like this from Seeking Alpha:

Reed Hastings can now promote Netflix as the only place to see "House of Cards" and other Netflix original series that are gaining momentum, like "Orange is the New Black." These productions will generate millions of new members. One other major benefit is that Netflix owns ALL rights to the shows, and can easily now start offering some kind of service in new markets like Asia.

I've been banging this drum for quite a while, but I have to admit I was surprised to learn how narrow even the streaming rights are.

Apparently, Netflix's rights to exclusive access only cover unlimited streaming options like Amazon Prime. You can still buy episodes online from other sources if you're willing to cough up a couple of bucks.

Is purchasing very limited rights a smart business strategy on the part of Netflix? That's a question for another post.  For now, though, let's just say that this is yet another story where the narrative sometimes obscures the facts.

False flags

Frances Woolley has a nice post about retirement and women's rights:

Yes, there are older female academics who will enjoy greater financial security as a result being able to work past 65. But let's think not about anecdotes - the stories of particular men and particular women. Overall, how many of the beneficiaries from the end of mandatory retirement are men, and how many are women? Who bears the costs of the transition?

Two thirds of university teachers between 65 and 69 are men (p. 22 here), as are three quarters of those over the age of 70. This is not simply a reflection of an academy that, 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, when these folks were hired, favoured men over women. Let's rewind five years, to when the people who are now 65 to 69 were 60 to 64. This is more or less the same group of people, just at two different points in time.

In 2005-6, just before the standard retirement age ended, 65 percent of academics aged 60 to 64 were male (p. 22 here).

In 2010-11, when that same cohort of people were 65-69, 68 percent of those working as university teachers were male. There is hardly any hiring of individuals into university teaching in that age group. The only plausible explanation of the three percentage point increase in the proportion of men in the academia is that the more women than men retired in that cohort.

In other words, while there might be other reasons to end mandatory retirement, it is pretty clear that it did very little to increase the participation of women in the academy.  Furthermore, since it is very costly (professors at the end of their careers make a lot in Canada), it may well outcompete alternatives like a massive pay equity program. 

You see this sort of principal a lot when people don't want to admit the actual reasons that they are doing something.  Or, even worse, when they are pretending to be on the side of the people who will lose the most from the policy.

My current favorite example is the opposition to gas and congestion taxes under the rubric that they hurt the poor the most.  That can only be true in a very narrow sense.  First of all, the poorest of people don't actually own cars (which are expensive).  Second, subsidizing car commuting makes it more difficult to put in alternative systems like public transit -- as this approach both makes driving easier and starves government of revenue.  Who benefits the most from public transit?  I'll give you a hint -- it's not the people with brand new SUVs. 

Furthermore, the real test of a false flag is when people resist alternative ways to help the populations who are under discussion.  For example, do the people who are against mandatory retirement also want to ensure strict gender equality in pay?  What about paying for long maternity leaves to make it easier for women to retire at 65 with full pensions? 

Similarly, why can't we increase the gas tax and then give money to poor people (who could spend it on gas or something else)?  Heck, to be logically consistent, the tax that would hurt the poor the least would be a wealth tax.  Why not do that instead of a gas tax? 

Now this is not to say that these policies may not be okay on the merits without the false flags.  The policy alternatives that I pointed out may have other good reasons to be rejected.  But the failure to even engage these adjacent arguments is a pretty good evidence that the main priority is not the concern for the group in question but rather worry that the policy argument is weak on the merits.

And we should be less forgiving of that. 

Remembering a couple of conservative college columnists

A quick digression to set up the story. After getting a B.F.A. in creative writing, I did what seemed at the time to be the sensible thing and went off to a master's program in a very big out-of-state school. It didn't go well -- the main thing I learned was that I didn't want to be an English professor -- so I returned to my alma mater to get a teaching certificate. The education requirements didn't fill up my schedule so I decided to take some math courses and get a double certificate (which eventually led to a much more pleasant grad school experience but that's another story).

While I was making that initial run at grad school, a conservative columnist at the university paper (which was big enough to be a multi-section daily) was kicked off the staff for repeatedly lifting large chunks from George Will columns. It wasn't a big story even around the school but there was something slightly funny about the columnist's name that made him lodge in my memory.

A year later, back at the then-small college in Arkansas (it has grown considerably since I left), I noticed something in that school's paper (a far less impressive weekly tabloid of about twelve pages).

The paper's conservative columnist was an odd, bitter fellow, antisocial and prone to bizarre feuds with faculty members and student groups whom he felt were promoting a leftist agenda. His column that week was focused on the ways conservative voices were persecuted in academia and exhibit 1 was the previously mentioned plagiarist. Not that plagiarism figured prominently in this account. The column was written under the assumption that the dismissal had been politically motivated and any charges of journalistic impropriety had been trumped up to silence a someone willing to challenge the liberal establishment.

The slant was not unexpected given the author. What did surprise me was the reference to this obscure story from a school hundreds of miles away. This was in the late Eighties, years before the internet so it's not like they got it from a friend on Facebook. I was fairly certain that I was the only student at the small school who had attended that big university the year before and the only reason I remembered the incident was because of that odd connection I had made with the name. How did the story make that long trip and how did it get transformed from embarrassing lapse to heroic stance?

After I started paying more attention to this columnist in particular and to other conservative writers at other colleges, it started to make more sense. Both the left and the right had channels for distributing useful information and in some cases misinformation, but the channels on the right tended to be more centralized and obviously better funded. When a conservative journalist ran into trouble, there was a national network in place to disseminate his side of the story.

Things may have always been this way with more money and support available on the right, but I suspect that much of what I observed was the result of the rise of the conservative movement and that today's right-wing media owes at least some of its DNA to those information exchanges of the Eighties.

What's wrong with the press part 10^100 -- people who use 'summer' as a verb

One of these days, I want to do some long posts on race and class prejudices. The two topics are so closely intertwined and so complexly related that you can't have an in-depth conversation about one without addressing the other. That's a huge problem because, thought the press might be willing to address its racism, it is in complete denial about its class bigotry and lack of diversity.

This anecdote from the Philadelphia Inquirer says a lot.

Jill Nelson says she had misgivings from the start.

On the day she was interviewed for a writing job at the Washington Post's new magazine in 1986, she recalls, the conversations seemed less about her work and more about her.

Editor Ben Bradlee, who has since retired, warmed up, according to Nelson, only after she told him she'd summered each year at Martha's Vineyard. The privileged background that Nelson had alternately enjoyed and eschewed had given her an "in."

But getting there was one thing, she writes; surviving was another.

Her book, Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience, is a juicy expose of life at one of the nation's most venerable institutions. In this memoir, published by Noble Press, Nelson describes four puzzling, disillusioning and demeaning years at the job and severe family strains that she had to deal with at the time.

Faced with the challenge of keeping her integrity and meeting the expectations of editors portrayed as callous and ignorant about African American sensibilities, Nelson says she knew four months after her arrival that it wasn't going to work. But she hung in, she said in an interview last week, for the money and out of a sense of responsibility. Success, she said, was an expectation of her upper-middle-class upbringing. The subtitle, she said, underscores lifelong feelings that her background had allowed her to elude the experiences of most blacks.

A recent exchange I had with my iPhone

You know those ads where people have those amazing Turing-certified conversations with Siri.








Here is what one of my recent conversations with Siri sounded like.

Me: "Call _____ home."

Siri: "There's no home number for _____. Would you like me to use mobile instead?"

Me: "Call _____ home."

Siri: "Which phone number for _____?"

Me: "Call _____ home."

Siri: "Calling _____ home."

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

If you watch this and you could swear you remember Johnny and Mr. Carlson discussing Pink Floyd, you're not imagining things. Hulu uses the DVD edit which cuts out almost all of the copyrighted music. .

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

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

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

It's not a question of being too positive or negative but of being wrong in both directions

Given some recent discussions, I perhaps ought to go back and clarify my position on Google's driverless cars. The Google part is important. Lots of companies, particularly big auto makers like GM and Nissan, are seriously pursuing this research. However, when you read a news account about autonomous vehicles, most of the time it's a story about Google which is troublesome for at least two reasons: first because there are some big concerns that are particularly applicable to Google's approach; and second because Google has a way of playing to the worst tendencies in tech reporters. The result is a standard narrative that manages to get both the pros and the cons wrong.

The official account goes something like this: from a technological standpoint, the Google driverless car is virtually good-to-go. There is every reason to expect you will be able to buy one in a couple of years; the only clouds on this horizon are concerns with safety and, more importantly, regulation. This version is extremely popular. It is regularly reported in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. It also gets both the pros and cons wrong.

Though it's too early to say for certain, safety appears to be the one non-issue for this technology. All transportation carries an element of risk, but based on a pretty good sample of road tests, that risk appears to be considerably smaller for Google's self-driving cars than it is for other ways of getting around.

Regulation is only a slightly greater concern We have had well over a century to work out the problems associated with insuring and regulating a wide variety of high-speed and potentially very dangerous vehicles. The idea that a viable, highly anticipated, and, relatively speaking, very safe technology will be kept off the market due to legal issues not just in the United States but in Europe and Asia is simply not believable.

So, if the concerns are not safety and regulation, what are they?

As previously discussed many times, much of the more gee-whiz reporting has been based on the idea that autonomous cars will quickly reach 100% adoption. As unrealistic as that assumption is, it pales in comparison to another jump tech reporters seem to have made.

Based on this Slate article, it appears that Google's approach to fully autonomous cars requires a specialized and highly expensive data infrastructure, specifically a collection of incredibly detailed maps. In order to compile this level of data, dedicated vehicles with human drivers have to travel the roads in question multiple times. What's more, the process needs to be constantly repeated to keep the data up-to-date. Road construction, new houses, all sorts of things need to be taken into account by the system.

The primary advantage of automobiles over other forms of transportation is their flexibility. A car can go pretty much anywhere you want. You can even decide on a new destination while traveling. In order to be viable, new automotive technology needs to keep that flexibility. Apparently Google's current approach means it would take a prohibitive amount of time and money to map out more than a tiny fraction of the nation's roads. Put bluntly, if this is true, given these infrastructure costs and be wide array of transportation alternatives, the Google's autonomous cars will never be viable in its present form.

Caveats are important here. It is entirely possible that Google is on the verge of a breakthrough that will allow its cars to operate off of existing Google maps. That would come close to making the technology viable. For all I know, the company could be preparing a press release as I write this. If this is the case, I'll pen a sheepish retraction then call friends and family members who don't drive and share the good news.

For now, though, this appears to be a very difficult technical nut to crack and, rather than showing signs of progress, Google seems to be trying to divert attention from the problem. You'll notice that their latest highly touted 'advance' was actually a step down in this respect, going from actual road tests to far less demanding closed tracks.

New side project up at Amazon.

A few years ago, I developed this checkers variant based on non-transitive relationships to help my students get some experience working with the concept. I'll talk more about the game and its development later, but in the meantime, here's a link to the webstore at Amazon.

For another example of non-transitive play, check this out. If nothing else, it will give you something to talk about if you ever meet Warren Buffet.

This isn't about Ferguson, but it may be the most relevant thing you'll read on the subject.

This is an excellent time to go back and reread "Against Law, For Order" by Mike Konczal. Since this essay appeared in April of 2012, we've seen the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the grand jury ruling on Darren Wilson and any number of additional incidents that support Konczal's troubling but convincing argument.

More bad behavior from your friendly neighborhood cable company

There's another flight going on between Viacom and a cable provider. Suddenlink, a major provider for much of the middle of the country, has recently dropped all of by a calms basic cable channels. This includes big names such as MTV, Nickelodeon, TVland, and Comedy Central. In Their place Suddenlink has scheduled some decidedly second-tier alternatives. Fans of Jon Stewart now have to make do with Jon Lovitz.

The story hasn't gotten a lot of attention (as often happens when you're on Central Time), but it's worth digging into if you're trying to keep up with the media landscape. It also ties into our ongoing rabbit ears thread.

Having lost most of the cable channels he regularly watched, a friend of mine recently called up Suddenlink and tried to downgrade his service. If you've been following the news you probably know what's coming next. He was immediately referred to a "specialist" who spent the next half hour badgering him ("why don't you want to get the best deal?").

At one point my friend (who has suffered through many of my tirades on the subject) said he was thinking about going over to an antenna. That was largely a bluff -- between terrain and distance to a broadcast tower, he probably wouldn't get very good reception unless he put up quite an antenna -- but the response was interesting. The specialist told him that going to over-the-air television would mean giving up HD.

Like I said, my friend had heard more on this topic than a reasonable person would care to so he knew this simply was not true -- not only can you get HD over the air; the quality is often better than what you get from cable -- so he challenged the company rep on this point and got him to back down to a "I'm pretty sure you can't get HD." My friend still didn't get them to accept the downgrade but he did get a rate reduction, which counts as victory when dealing with a cable company.

This ties into perhaps the most important point in these terrestrial TV stories. Competition is good but it's not not good enough by itself. When American television joined the rest of the world and went digital,the market should have become more competitive but years after the conversion, cable and satellite companies are still able to act like near-monopolies in large part because of asymmetry of information.

I've argued that digital over-the-air television is a great technology that more people ought to be using, but it may turn out to have the most impact on those stick with cable. Dealing with Comcast et al. will be much easier when the companies start facing more market pressure.

Megan and Mark are in synch

This is Joseph.

As a follow-up to Mark's post, Megan McArdle has this great point:

If the left-wing MSM is indeed biased against you, then your strategy needs to take that into account. Do you have a plan for compelling the left-wing MSM to treat you fairly? If not, then you should not settle upon a course of action that would work, if only this fact were not true. You don't launch your cavalry regiment against a Panzer battalion on the grounds that you could beat the Germans if only they didn't have all those darned tanks.

In other words, at some point an optimal strategy involves accepting the world as it is and not complaining that it isn't the best of all possible worlds.   The ability to develop realistic strategies in the face of the "facts on the ground" is a key skill in many contexts: political, military, and even business. 

Thoughts on the coming storm

From a text exchange I had on election night

The press has gone from
"The Republicans are the responsible party"
To
"Both parties are irresponsible"
To
"The Republicans will start being responsible after they win"
To
Whatever they are going to say after the impeachment.

[voice recognition errors corrected.]

This must be an interesting time to be a political scientist or anyone studying the way institutions form, function and fail.

The  Republican party seems locked into a course that defies conventional political explanation. I don't see any way that this fight over this issue is a winning move for the GOP. I am inclined to agree with Josh Marshall's analysis:

It all adds up to an intense and likely toxic campaign fracas in which a lot of people will have a unique and intense motivation to vote. That will apply to people on both sides of course. But the anti-immigration voters vote consistently almost every cycle. And as intense as your animus is toward undocumented immigrants, it's hard for it to compare to the motivation of voters who directly know someone who will be affected. And that latter group has far more 'drop-off' or occasional voters.

This isn't getting mentioned a lot right now. But behind the headlines I suspect it's one of the key reasons Republican elites are upset that this might happen: because it's an electoral grenade dropped right into the heart of the 2016 campaign.

Of course, the standard line at this point is to say something about the leaders of the party losing control of the base, but I don't buy that -- at least not in the way it is generally framed. For one thing, the underlying political philosophy of the base and the leaders doesn't seem that different, and where there are differences, they seem to mostly come from the base actually believing the message crafted by the party elites.

Keeping in mind that they decisively won the last election, the Republicans still have big problems with information and coordination. That makes it more difficult for the party to make decisive rational moves that promote its self-interest and instead leaves it inclined to seek catharsis. Shut down and impeachment are about emotional release. The challenge for the party leadership is convincing their followers that there's something more important than that.

Other than stem cells...

What are the most notable examples of regulation holding back new technology? There has been a lots of talk recently about encouraging innovation through deregulation zones. The idea being that, for example, having a city with no regulation on drones will spur a great deal of research into the technology. On one level, this does make a certain amount of sense. The easier it is to do research, the more research we expect to see.

That said, other than studies with human subjects (where the rules really can have a dampening effect), I can't think of an area where regulations are clearly having a big negative impact on research. When a technology is promising and well-funded (as with drones), companies don't seem to have that much trouble working with the rules.

I assume I'm missing some obvious example. Any ideas?

"Duct tape and string"

Or as we used say back in the hills, spit and bailing wire.

From James Kwak's recent piece on United Airlines:

There are two lessons to be drawn from these entirely unexceptional examples of air travel gone wrong. One is that United’s computer systems don’t work — for the same reasons that many large companies’ core systems don’t work. The overnight unbooking and rebooking was probably a computer error, and in any case United had no way of rolling back all the automated changes to its reservation system. The automated cancellation of my return flight was either an incompetent customer service representative who didn’t preserve my return reservation when I asked her to, or a computer system that didn’t give her any way of preventing the cancellation. I was downgraded from first class because some marketing genius at United decided to add a new upsell feature to the website — but no one bothered to extend the legacy system they use behind the scenes to capture the new data from the ticket sales process. (This is a common problem with enterprise software these days: companies build new features in their websites but can’t integrate those features properly with their core processing systems.) All of this just reinforces a point I’ve made several times before: the computer systems holding together the world’s largest companies are held together by duct tape and string.

I've got at least a couple of posts I'd like to write on the how bad this side of the business often is. Having seen some of these systems up close, I'm surprised things don't crash and burn more often.

A subtle issue with standardized tests

This is Joseph.

Dean Dad has a nice piece on assessment.  A part of it that jumped out was:

Johnson’s argument is subtle enough that most commenters seemed to miss it.  In a nutshell, he argues that subjecting existing instruction to the assessment cycle will, by design, change the instruction itself.  Much of the faculty resistance to assessment comes from a sense of threatened autonomy.  Johnson addresses political science specifically, noting that it’s particularly difficult to come up with content-neutral measures in a field without much internal consensus, and with factions that barely speak to each other. 

He’s right, though it may be easier to grasp the point when applied to, say, history.  There’s no single “Intro to History” that most would agree on; each class is the history of something.  The ‘something’ could be a country, a region, a technology, an idea, an art form, or any number of other things, but it has to be something specific.  Judging a historian of China on her knowledge of colonial America would be easy enough, but wouldn’t tell you much of value.  If a history department finds itself judged on “scores” based on a test of the history of colonial America, then it can either resign itself to lousy scores or teach to the test.

This means that the design of standardized test is crucially important if students and/or teachers are going to be evaluated on them.  For some subjects, e.g. basic math, this may be less controversial but it still involves making choices about what the emphasis will be.  A perfect test is like a perfect teachers -- neither beast really exists in nature. 

But this is critically important for high stakes tests, because what is taught cannot help but be influenced by the test.  If history questions on the high stakes tests are all focused on colonial America, guess what the history section of classes will look like.  In some sense that is okay, insofar as we have a broad consensus as to what should be taught.  But it does make the content of the tests a matter of public policy and concern as much as any other aspect of school instruction.

James Boyle's devastating take down of Robert Bork

What makes this piece so effective is Boyle's refusal to dismiss Bork as a crank or a charlatan. Boyle instead insists on treating Bork as an important figure in conservative thought. It would have been easy to lapse into mockery, but by starting from the explicit assumption that Bork's ideas are worth taking seriously, Boyle is left with an obligation to examine them in painful detail.

From A Process of Denial: Bork and Post-Modern Conservatism

by James Boyle

With this range of defects it is hardly surprising that Mr. Bork chose to shift his ground somewhat. In The Tempting of America he argues that the understanding of the public at the time the Constitution was ratified, rather than the intent of its original authors, should determine its meaning. There is obviously a price to pay for making this change. The best thing about the intent of the framers was that it appealed to the unreflective idea that a document must always mean exactly what its authors meant it to -- no more and no less. The practitioners of original intent can claim with superficial plausibility that their method is the one "natural" way to read the text. They can even claim that we often (though not always) read other legal documents this way -- trying to determine what Congress, or the judge, or the administrator meant by this word or that phrase. Original understanding has less unreflective appeal. Precisely because it is a more sophisticated notion of interpretation, it sacrifices the idea that this is the only credible way to read a text (what about what the words mean out of context, or what the author meant?) the appeal to everyday practice and perhaps even the claim that this is the way we read other legal documents.

This problem is a particularly acute one for Mr. Bork. Throughout The Tempting Of America he explicitly connects his struggles to those going on within other disciplines. As well he might. Most disciplines seem to have rejected the idea that the text can only be read to mean what the author intended. Literary critics and historians have added other methods of reading. How would the text have been understood by its audience at the moment that it was written? How would an audience today understand it? Can the text be illuminated by evidence of the author's subconscious desires or conflicts? How does the text read if we take it as an a-contextual attempt at philosophical argument?

These other methods are referred to collectively (and a little pretentiously) as "the reader's revolution against the author." They represent everything that Mr. Bork finds most reprehensible in today's scholarship. He quotes approvingly a letter from intellectual historian, Gertrude Himmelfarb attacking this impermissible openness to other methods of interpretation. "Any methodology becomes permissible (except of course, the traditional one), and any reading of the texts becomes legitimate (except, of course, that of the author)." (p. 137) If Mr. Bork was still claiming that constitution meant what its authors intended, this would be all well and good. But the trouble with Mr. Bork's revamped and sophisticated version of originalism is that it can no longer appeal to the romantic idea that the imperial will of the author must govern the text. "The search is not for a subjective intention." (p. 144) Instead, he has handed over interpretive competence to the historically located readers of the constitution. For reasons we can only speculate about, he has shifted ultimate interpretive authority from the Framers of the Constitution to the "public of that time." Mr. Bork has joined the reader's revolution.

As I pointed out before, this switch is a costly one for Mr. Bork. To the initial cost of having been seen to adopt the very same methodology so often criticised by conservatives in other academic disciplines, one also has to add the cost of having been seen to change from one dogmatically asserted position to another. Mr. Bork obviously feels this one particularly strongly because he denies having done it. Though he described himself during the hearings as "a judge with an original intent philosophy"(61) and argued in print that "original intent is the only legitimate basis for constitutional decision-making",(62) he says in The Tempting of America that "[n]o even moderately sophisticated originalist" believes the Constitution should be governed by "the subjective intent of the Framers." (p.218) He suggests that no-one could ever have held such a belief, because it would necessarily mean that the secretly held beliefs of the Framers could change the meaning of the document. Thus all (moderately sophisticated) originalists must have believed in original understanding all along. This seems like a red herring. There are many varieties of intentionalism and many varieties of "reader-controlled" interpretation. But allowing the intention of the author to control interpretation is fairly obviously not the same thing as allowing the understanding of the reader to control. Expanding the definition of intentionalism does not turn it into the philosophy of original understanding. The `intention of the Framers and ratifiers' is not the same as `the understanding of the American people at the time.' Mr. Bork seems to find it hard to admit the change.

The most interesting example of Mr. Bork's scholarly method is the point in The Tempting of America he takes sections from his 1986 article The Constitution, Original Intent, and Economic Rights(63) which, as one might suspect from the title, defends original intent, and uses those sections to defend original understanding. At first glance, it appears that he does this by finding the words "original intent" wherever they appear in the article, and simply replacing them by "original understanding." Chunks of text which had reproved Paul Brest with failing to understand that the original intent determines the meaning of the 14th Amendment, are edited, expanded upon, a new philosophy of interpretation inserted. With a quick change of key words they can become reproofs to Paul Brest for failing to understand that original understanding determines the meaning of the 14th Amendment.(64) Even the same counterarguments can be pressed into service. In 1986 for example, "[t]here is one objection to intentionalism that is particularly tiresome. Whenever I speak on the subject someone invariably asks: "But why should we be ruled by men long dead?"(65) In 1990, Mr. Bork finds that "[q]uite often, when I speak at a law school on the necessity of adhering to the original understanding, a student will ask, "But why should we be ruled by men who are long dead." (170) In the era of the word processor, this kind of "search and replace" jurisprudence has its attractions. Still, both the interpretive criteria and the identity of the `dead men' has changed, and Mr. Bork seems uneasy with that fact.(66)

One of these days I'm going to do a post on genres as fitness landscapes

In the meantime, here's a completely unexpected but surprisingly effective reworking.

What do stock buyback actually do?

Barry Ritholtz passes along an interesting thought from Aswath Damodaran, a professor at New York University.

Before a company calls for a stock buyback, it has risky assets (its operating business) and riskless assets (cash). After the buyback, the company has less of its riskless asset (cash) but also has fewer outstanding shares.

Hence, we end up with a somewhat riskier stock. Damodaran argues, rationally, that a buyback by an all-equity funded company should be a value-neutral transaction. In other cases, the shift should be reflected in by assigning the company a somewhat lower price-earnings ratio.

I don't know enough to comment intelligently on this claim, but it does seem to indicate that, as with so many other stories, the impact of buybacks is considerably more complicated than the experts on CNBC would have you believe,

Fixing Common Core (or at least a small part thereof) over at the teaching blog

With a nod to David Coleman, last week I did a post called "Deconstructing Common Core" focusing on the homework problems going out under the Common Core banner.

[The generally unproductive question of what is and isn't Common Core comes up frequently. Hopefully, having an actual copyright notice will keep us from wasting any more time on the subject.]

I've become increasing concerned about the direction of mathematics education. Here's a big part of the reason:

I volunteer a couple of times a week to help a group that tutors kids from urban schools. My role is designated math guy. I go from table to table helping kids with the more challenging homework problems.

Recently, I have noticed a pattern in helping with Common Core problems. First I explained them to the students, then I explained them to the tutors.

That may be the most noticeable difference between the mathematics of Common Core and the new math of the 60s. In the summer of love, an advanced degree in mathematics or engineering was sufficient to understand an elementary school student's homework. These days, the tutors with math backgrounds often find themselves more confused than their less analytic counterparts since what they know about solving the problem seems to have nothing to do with what the assignment asks for.

To follow a Common Core worksheet, you really need to have a little knowledge of the underlying pedagogical theories. Unfortunately, if you have more than a little knowledge, you'll find these worksheets extraordinarily annoying because, to put it bluntly, much of what you see was produced by people who had a very weak grasp of the underlying concepts.

I thought it might be of interest to walk through the process of 'fixing' these problems, showing how, with a few changes, these confusing and ineffective problems could be greatly improved.

I used an example of a Common Core problem that went viral a while back.

Here is my proposed fix (which was anticipated by at least one of our regulars).

James Kwak does a valuable service...

...and states the obvious.

The value of a company is supposed to be the discounted present value of its expected future cash flows. Actually, the value of a company is the discounted present value of its expected future cash flows. So it follows that a breakup should only create value for shareholders if it increases future cash flows or lowers the discount rate. Most breakups don’t obviously do either.

This may seem to border on tautology -- "of course, that's the value of a company" -- but if you follow the business page regularly you'll routinely run into strategies and initiatives that make no sense given this definition. Sometimes these decisions are justified in terms of stock price. Other times, flavor-of-the-day notions like disruption are invoked. Occasionally, there is no excuse at all;

Unless you've logged some time with a few major corporations, you can't imagine how much time and money is wasted on unadulterated bullshit largely because C-level executives lose sight of the obvious.

Annals of heroic inference

This is Joseph.

Via Andrew Gelman, we get this gem:

One consequence of this is that the number of respondents who report that they are not citizens yet vote or are registered to vote is quite small in absolute terms: in 2010, for example, only 13 respondents — not 13 percent, but 13 out of 55,400 respondents — reported that they were not citizens, yet had voted. Given the ever-present possibility of respondent or coder error, it takes a bit of hubris to draw strong conclusions about the behavior of non-citizens from such small numbers.

Yes, it is very hard to determine characteristics of very rare groups.  For one thing, it's unlikely that you know much about the underlying source population.  So I think the authors are right that it is going to hard to say much about this group, given this instrument.

"The unbookable lesson"

I've got a new post up at the teaching blog about the differences in live presentation and other educational media. Check it out if that sort of thing sounds interesting, but if you do, you might want to watch Flight of the Phoenix first.