[I realize we've covered a lot of this territory before and I apologize for the redundancy, but I thought it might be nice to some everything up in one final post.]
Just to have a framework, let's start with some fundamental assumptions of the conventional urbanist wisdom. These are badly oversimplified, but they should be good enough for our purposes here.
The best and easiest way of alleviating the serious externalities associated with commuting (particularly environmental damage) is by having people move near enough to centers of employment that personal transportation (other than bikes) is not necessary.
The best and easiest way of lowering the often exorbitant rents near the center's is by building up.
The best and easiest way of getting high-capacity housing where we most need it is through market forces.
Putting aside arguments for telecommuting (pretty much by definition the fastest and most efficient way to get to work), here are some of my concerns with this model. Ironically, some of them are fairly closely the concerns that urbanists have about suburban sprawl.
Moving is difficult. Buildings are permanent (and they do have an environmental footprint). One of the hidden social costs of home ownership is that it ties the owner to a specific job market. If you are wedded to the idea of making commuting nondependent on automobiles, this high density approach faces many of the same challenges, particularly for households with more than one working member. These housing units need to be so close to a wide enough range of jobs that two people can find housing within easy commute of two different positions and will have a reasonably good chance of staying in the same location in the event of a job change. What's more, that employment center needs to remain relatively stable more or less indefinitely. Booms and busts could play hell with this model.
Actual researchers tend to take a more nuanced and sophisticated view, but in the press, the urban density debate generally treats the choice of where to live as a fairly simple function of two variables, proximity to employment and housing cost. We have reason to believe that the real relationship has more variables and more complexity with interactions between proximity to employment and the weighting of other factors. For example, we know that a nontrivial number of people in Los Angeles and the Bay Area will opt for rental options that are both more expensive and further from work.
Silicon Valley workers living in San Francisco have gotten a lot of coverage but trendy neighborhoods in LA may be a more useful case for study. "Trendy" is the key word here. We're generally talking about well-paid professionals who are willing to put up with an extra half hour or more of traffic for scenic views, dining and other amenities, and, perhaps most of all, the ability to impress other people with where you live and who your neighbors are. The resulting dynamic can be very much like suburban sprawl, but with the suburb tucked in the middle of a high density urban area.
Partially because of the reasons given above, market forces have a very mixed record when it comes to picking the most efficient spot for development. I'll limit my comments to Los Angeles because I know the town, but I believe they could be generalized to a large number of other areas.
A great deal has been written about the NIMBY push against development in Santa Monica. Utopian urbanists like Dave Roberts have gone so far as to suggest that anyone who claims to be an environmentalist and opposes it must be a hypocrite.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that Santa Monica, particularly the extremely expensive section north of the 10 and west of Lincoln, is one of the worst possible places in the county of Los Angeles (and this is a big God damn County) for using high density development to alleviate the impact of commuting and to reduce cost of living.
Geographically, it's bounded on two sides by ocean and mountains thus greatly limiting the number of commuting destinations. The constant flow of tourists means that prices will tend to be high and traffic will never, ever be good. The trendiness of the town makes it likely to become an urban suburb and an appealing spot for second homes among the rich. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the public transportation actuation is extremely bad. Other than the buses, which have to deal with the aforementioned traffic, the only other option is a single, slow train with a not-that-convenient route. (Don't get me wrong, simply having a train to the ocean is a big step forward for LA, but not nearly big enough to alleviate the traffic woes of a much denser Santa Monica/Venice.)
If the goal really were to create a greener, less car dependent Los Angeles, Santa Monica developments wouldn't even be on our radar. Instead, we would be focusing on development around transportation hubs, particularly Union Station. There's plenty of room for growth with in a two-mile radius, but the best places for development are not in the trendy upscale neighborhoods, and developers know that trendy is where the money is.
Monday, March 26, 2018
Friday, March 23, 2018
Self driving cars
This is Joseph.
A few thoughts on the recent automated car crash.
Now it is true that there is one crash so far. But if we assume that crashes are uniformly distributed across the whole driving time, it is worrisome to see the fatal crash happen in the first 5% of the 140 million passenger miles driven. It surely could have happened here by chance. But it isn't a reassuring piece of data.
This is doubly true as we'd like self-driving cars to be as safe as buses, if we are going to eliminate public transit with a network of cars. .
None of this is to say that making cars smarter is a bad thing. But it points out the challenges for some of the more extreme applications, like self-driving taxis. It isn't clear to me that focusing on improved public transit isn't a viable alternative.
A few thoughts on the recent automated car crash.
- The cars need to be able to operate without safety drivers to actually do what pundits want (driverless taxis, shared cars). If they require a safety driver that is a bad thing.
- It sure seems like the failure here was pretty central. This should have been a case where the car sensors give it an advantage over a human driver.
- It is a non sequitur to say that the car was following the rules of the road. Complex urban areas often have many actions that are technically illegal. Ramming rulebreakers at full speed will make traffic much worse and less safe, not better.
- There is a hint of catastrophic failure here and in the Tesla crash. This means that we need the rate to be lower than for human piloted cars, as severity of incidents may be higher.
- Automatic software updates are going to be exciting, as a bad patch is not going to be pretty.
Mike the Mad Biologist did an estimate of the accident rate. Using his figures the fatal crash rates per billion passenger miles (bpm)
Cars 7.28 per bpm
Now it is true that there is one crash so far. But if we assume that crashes are uniformly distributed across the whole driving time, it is worrisome to see the fatal crash happen in the first 5% of the 140 million passenger miles driven. It surely could have happened here by chance. But it isn't a reassuring piece of data.
This is doubly true as we'd like self-driving cars to be as safe as buses, if we are going to eliminate public transit with a network of cars. .
None of this is to say that making cars smarter is a bad thing. But it points out the challenges for some of the more extreme applications, like self-driving taxis. It isn't clear to me that focusing on improved public transit isn't a viable alternative.
"Adam ruins Facebook"
A bit of a quibble. There is reason to be a bit skeptical about some of these claims of the amazing predictive and persuasive power of this kind of targeted marketing (more on that later), but before you start feeling too relieved, there is also a reason to believe that this data could be used to do far worse things than encourage a bacon lover to overindulge.
Thursday, March 22, 2018
Tech revisionism and the myth of the killer app
I'm wondering if anyone else there occasionally has a "blogger moment." It is similar to a "senior moment," but it involves either thinking you posted something that you didn't or failing to remember you posted something that you did. I had one of these this morning when I went looking for what I'd written at the time about this egregious piece of tech revisionism by NPR's Laura Sydell.
These illustrations from the October 12, 1889 issue of Scientific American illustrate the point.
Years later, an Edison assistant wrote: "We were sitting around. We'd been working on the telephone — yelling into diaphragms. And Edison turned to me, and he said, 'If we put a needle or a pin on this diaphragm, it'll vibrate, and if we pull a strip of wax paper underneath it, it should leave marks. And then if we pull that piece of paper back, we should hear the talking.' "Even a cursory check of the historic record would show that the ability to record and reproduce (since that's what we mean when we talk about "recording" technology) spoken words, music, etc. was instantly hailed as a major discovery, that people immediately saw the potential, particularly for music, and that there was from day one an enormous push by a wide range of inventors and engineers to get the technology commercially viable.
Yet, no one knew what to do with this invention. It took 20 years to figure out that music was the killer app.
These illustrations from the October 12, 1889 issue of Scientific American illustrate the point.
Wednesday, March 21, 2018
Repost: Given Facebook's current scandals, this seems like a good time to revisit this argument
I don't know if I've actually come out and said this in so many words but Facebook should be forced to divest itself of Instagram (along similar lines, Google should be forced to divest itself of YouTube, but that's a topic for another day). As we've previously mentioned, mid-20th-century regulators would never have allowed Facebook to become this large or to achieve this level of monopoly power. They certainly would not have allowed it to hang on to Instagram as well.
Having Instagram in competition with Facebook would not solve the problem but it would address it in at least a couple of ways. First, to belabor the obvious, competition is good. Second, Facebook has a widely noted aging demographic problem (in my very limited personal experience, the older the friend the more hours he or she spends on the platform). At this rate, if the company is not allowed to grow through acquisition, the Facebook problem might just take care of itself in time.
[This is another one of those too-topical-to-ignore topics that I don't have nearly enough time to do justice to, but I suppose that's why God invented blogging.]
There's a huge problem that people aren't talking about nearly enough. More troublingly, when it does get discussed, it is usually treated as a series of unrelated problems, much like a cocaine addict who complains about his drug problem, bankruptcy, divorce, and encounters with loan sharks, but who never makes a causal connection between the items on the list.
Think about all of the recent news stories that are about or are a result of concentration/deregulation of media power and the inevitable consequences. Obviously, net neutrality falls under this category. So does the role that Facebook, and, to a lesser extent, Twitter played in the misinformation that influenced the 2016 election. The role of the platform monopolies in the ongoing implosion of digital journalism has been widely discussed by commentators like Josh Marshall. The Time Warner/AT&T merger has gotten coverage primarily due to the ethically questionable involvement of Donald Trump, with very little being said about the numerous other concerns. Outside of a few fan boys excited over the possibility of seeing the X-Men fight the Avengers, almost no one's talking about Disney's Fox acquisition.
It didn't used to be like this. For most of the 20th century, the government kept a vigilant watch for even potential accumulation of media power. Ownership was restricted. Movie studios were forced to sell their theaters (see United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc). The largest radio network was effectively forced to split in two (that's why we have ABC broadcasting today). Media companies were tightly regulated, their workforce was heavily unionized, and they were forced to jump through all manner of hoops before expanding into new markets to insure that the public good was being served.
In short, the companies were subjected to conditions which we have been told prevent growth, stifle innovation, and kill jobs. We can never know what would've happened had the government given these companies a freer hand but we can say with certainty that for media, the Post-war era was a period of explosive growth, fantastic advances, and incredible successes both economically and culturally. It's worth noting that the biggest entertainment franchises of the market-worshiping, anything-goes 21st century were mostly created under the yoke of 20th century regulation.
Having Instagram in competition with Facebook would not solve the problem but it would address it in at least a couple of ways. First, to belabor the obvious, competition is good. Second, Facebook has a widely noted aging demographic problem (in my very limited personal experience, the older the friend the more hours he or she spends on the platform). At this rate, if the company is not allowed to grow through acquisition, the Facebook problem might just take care of itself in time.
Tuesday, December 19, 2017
As if you didn't have enough to worry about
[This is another one of those too-topical-to-ignore topics that I don't have nearly enough time to do justice to, but I suppose that's why God invented blogging.]
There's a huge problem that people aren't talking about nearly enough. More troublingly, when it does get discussed, it is usually treated as a series of unrelated problems, much like a cocaine addict who complains about his drug problem, bankruptcy, divorce, and encounters with loan sharks, but who never makes a causal connection between the items on the list.
Think about all of the recent news stories that are about or are a result of concentration/deregulation of media power and the inevitable consequences. Obviously, net neutrality falls under this category. So does the role that Facebook, and, to a lesser extent, Twitter played in the misinformation that influenced the 2016 election. The role of the platform monopolies in the ongoing implosion of digital journalism has been widely discussed by commentators like Josh Marshall. The Time Warner/AT&T merger has gotten coverage primarily due to the ethically questionable involvement of Donald Trump, with very little being said about the numerous other concerns. Outside of a few fan boys excited over the possibility of seeing the X-Men fight the Avengers, almost no one's talking about Disney's Fox acquisition.
It didn't used to be like this. For most of the 20th century, the government kept a vigilant watch for even potential accumulation of media power. Ownership was restricted. Movie studios were forced to sell their theaters (see United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc). The largest radio network was effectively forced to split in two (that's why we have ABC broadcasting today). Media companies were tightly regulated, their workforce was heavily unionized, and they were forced to jump through all manner of hoops before expanding into new markets to insure that the public good was being served.
In short, the companies were subjected to conditions which we have been told prevent growth, stifle innovation, and kill jobs. We can never know what would've happened had the government given these companies a freer hand but we can say with certainty that for media, the Post-war era was a period of explosive growth, fantastic advances, and incredible successes both economically and culturally. It's worth noting that the biggest entertainment franchises of the market-worshiping, anything-goes 21st century were mostly created under the yoke of 20th century regulation.
Tuesday, March 20, 2018
THE PORTELECTRIC SYSTEM
If there's an engineer in the audience, I'd very much like to know what the relationship is between this very cool 1890 system and the history of linear induction trains.
Monday, March 19, 2018
Echo Park Gentrification Watch
While there is always room for the unique and the exceptionally good, Echo Park does not really need another restaurant. It definitely does not need another chain restaurant. And, above all, it does not need a Chipotle.
Before gentrification, Echo Park was primarily known as a Mexican neighborhood and this stretch of Sunset Boulevard has always offered a wealth of spots for burritos and agua fresca and Mexican pastries. These are mostly locally owned businesses and all have deep ties to the community and its culture. When well-funded, heavily marketed franchises move in, the existing businesses get hit from two sides: they lose customers to the new places and they see their rents go up.
I sometimes think the concept of cultural misappropriation is overused, but it's difficult to avoid in this particular case. A Mexican American community seeing its local dining scene being invaded by a trendy the corporate restaurant serving some consumer-research team's idea of Mexican food.
Part of the problem with discussing gentrifying neighborhoods is that, in the early stages, almost everyone is a winner. Crime goes down. Existing businesses start seeing more customers which leads to more hiring. Night life picks up and with it arts and culture. In almost every way, things have gotten better.
Then comes the phase where the original residents and businesses start finding themselves forced out. Well established locally owned places find it difficult to compete against well financed operations with higher prices, larger capacity and much bigger marketing budgets. Apartment dwellers seee steady increases in rent.
A little later, the younger "creative class" types who started the process are forced out as well along with the independent shops and coffee houses that can no longer hold off the high end retail outlets eyeing their spots.
We are often told that you can't have the first part without the last, that simply stopping when things were good for everyone would violate some kind of natural law. This might be true, or it might be that there's a tremendous amount of money to be made in these last stages, and the people making that money are controlling the narrative.
Before gentrification, Echo Park was primarily known as a Mexican neighborhood and this stretch of Sunset Boulevard has always offered a wealth of spots for burritos and agua fresca and Mexican pastries. These are mostly locally owned businesses and all have deep ties to the community and its culture. When well-funded, heavily marketed franchises move in, the existing businesses get hit from two sides: they lose customers to the new places and they see their rents go up.
I sometimes think the concept of cultural misappropriation is overused, but it's difficult to avoid in this particular case. A Mexican American community seeing its local dining scene being invaded by a trendy the corporate restaurant serving some consumer-research team's idea of Mexican food.
Part of the problem with discussing gentrifying neighborhoods is that, in the early stages, almost everyone is a winner. Crime goes down. Existing businesses start seeing more customers which leads to more hiring. Night life picks up and with it arts and culture. In almost every way, things have gotten better.
Then comes the phase where the original residents and businesses start finding themselves forced out. Well established locally owned places find it difficult to compete against well financed operations with higher prices, larger capacity and much bigger marketing budgets. Apartment dwellers seee steady increases in rent.
A little later, the younger "creative class" types who started the process are forced out as well along with the independent shops and coffee houses that can no longer hold off the high end retail outlets eyeing their spots.
We are often told that you can't have the first part without the last, that simply stopping when things were good for everyone would violate some kind of natural law. This might be true, or it might be that there's a tremendous amount of money to be made in these last stages, and the people making that money are controlling the narrative.
Friday, March 16, 2018
The Twonky
This is not a good movie.
Despite an interesting filmmaker and a fun lead, it's difficult getting through this one in a single sitting.
It is, however of interest as probably the first demonic television set movie, a genre that would go on to include Poltergeist, Videodrome, and many less memorable efforts. Though the Twonky was not released until 1953, it was completed in '51, just four or five years after television became a national medium.
Particularly when you take into account the rollout schedule of stations, the speed with which TV became one of, if not the, dominant cultural and political force, and one of the dominant economic forces in the country is astounding. The revolution did not go unnoticed at the time. Writers and cultural critics penned any number of alarmist essays and stories. I suspect that no medium before or since has created quite as intense a feeling of anxiety.
Despite an interesting filmmaker and a fun lead, it's difficult getting through this one in a single sitting.
It is, however of interest as probably the first demonic television set movie, a genre that would go on to include Poltergeist, Videodrome, and many less memorable efforts. Though the Twonky was not released until 1953, it was completed in '51, just four or five years after television became a national medium.
Particularly when you take into account the rollout schedule of stations, the speed with which TV became one of, if not the, dominant cultural and political force, and one of the dominant economic forces in the country is astounding. The revolution did not go unnoticed at the time. Writers and cultural critics penned any number of alarmist essays and stories. I suspect that no medium before or since has created quite as intense a feeling of anxiety.
Thursday, March 15, 2018
Repost Thursday -- Some threads Iwe'll want to revisit III
Tuesday, August 22, 2017
The Republicans' 3 x 3 existential threat
I've argued previously that Donald Trump presents and existential threat to the Republican Party. I know this can sound overheated and perhaps even a bit crazy. There are few American institutions as long-standing and deeply entrenched as are the Democratic and Republican parties. Proposing that one of them might not be around 10 years from now beggars the imagination and if this story started and stopped with Donald Trump, it would be silly to suggest we were on the verge of a political cataclysm.But, just as Trump's rise did not occur in a vacuum, neither will his fall. We discussed earlier how Donald Trump has the power to drive a wedge between the Republican Party and a significant segment of its base [I wrote this before the departure of Steve Bannon. That may diminish Trump's ability to create this rift but I don't think it reduces the chances of the rift happening. – – M.P.]. This is the sort of thing that can profoundly damage a political party, possibly locking it into a minority status for a long time, but normally the wound would not be fatal. These, however, are not normal times.
The Republican Party of 2017 faces a unique combination of interrelated challenges, each of which is at a historic level and the combination of which would present an unprecedented threat to this or any US political party. The following list is not intended to be exhaustive, but it hits the main points.
The GOP currently has to deal with extraordinary political scandals, a stunningly unpopular agenda and daunting demographic trends. To keep things symmetric and easy to remember, let's break each one of these down to three components (keeping in mind that the list may change).
With the scandals:
1. Money – – Even with the most generous reading imaginable, there is no question that Trump has a decades long record of screwing people over, skirting the law, and dealing with disreputable and sometimes criminal elements. At least some of these dealings have been with the Russian mafia, oligarchs, and figures tied in with the Kremlin which leads us to…
2. The hacking of the election – – This one is also beyond dispute. It happened and it may have put Donald Trump into the White House. At this point, we have plenty of quid and plenty of quo; if Mueller can nail down pro, we will have a complete set.
3. And the cover-up – – As Josh Marshall and many others have pointed out, the phrase "it's not the crime; it's the cover-up" is almost never true. That said, coverups can provide tipping points and handholds for investigators, not to mention expanding the list of culprits.
With the agenda:
1. Health care – – By some standards the most unpopular major policy proposal in living memory that a party in power has invested so deeply in. Furthermore, the pushback against the initiative has essentially driven congressional Republicans into hiding from their own constituents for the past half year. As mentioned before, this has the potential to greatly undermine the relationship between GOP senators and representatives and the voters.
2. Tax cuts for the wealthy – – As said many times, Donald Trump has a gift for making the subtle plain, the plain obvious, and the obvious undeniable. In the past, Republicans were able to get a great deal of upward redistribution of the wealth past the voters through obfuscation and clever branding, but we have reached the point where simply calling something "tax reform" is no longer enough to sell tax proposals so regressive that even the majority of Republicans oppose them.
3. Immigration (subject to change) – – the race for third place in this list is fairly competitive (education seems to be coming up on the outside), but the administration's immigration policies (which are the direct result of decades of xenophobic propaganda from conservative media) have already done tremendous damage, caused great backlash, and are whitening the gap between the GOP and the Hispanic community, which leads us to…
Demographics:
As Lindsey Graham has observed, they simply are not making enough new old white men to keep the GOP's strategy going much longer, but the Trump era rebranding of the Republican Party only exacerbates the problems with women, young people, and pretty much anyone who isn't white.
Maybe I am missing a historical precedent here, but I can't think of another time that either the Democrats or the Republicans were this vulnerable on all three of these fronts. This does not mean that the party is doomed or even that, with the right breaks, it can't maintain a hold on some part of the government. What it does mean is that the institution is especially fragile at the moment. A mortal blow may not come, but we can no longer call it unthinkable.
Repost Thursday -- Some threads Iwe'll want to revisit II
Thursday, March 2, 2017
There will be safe seats. There are no safe seats.
In 2017, we have a perfect example of when not to use static thinking and naïve extrapolation.Not only are things changing rapidly, but, more importantly, there are a large number of entirely plausible scenarios that would radically reshape the political landscape and would undoubtedly interact in unpredictable ways. This is not "what if the ax falls?" speculation; if anything, have gotten to the point where the probability of at least one of these cataclysmic shifts happening is greater than the probability of none. And while we can't productively speculate on exactly how things will play out, we can say that the risks fall disproportionately on the Republicans.
Somewhat paradoxically, chaos and uncertainty can make certain strategic decisions easier. Under more normal (i.e. stable) circumstances it makes sense to expend little or no resources on unwinnable fights (or, conversely, to spend considerable time and effort deciding what's winnable). The very concept of "unwinnable," however, is based on a whole string of assumptions, many of which we cannot make under the present conditions.
The optimal strategy under the circumstances for the Democrats is to field viable candidates for, if possible, every major 2018 race. This is based on the assumption not that every seat is winnable, but that no one can, at this point, say with a high level of confidence what the winnable seats are.
Repost Thursday -- Some threads Iwe'll want to revisit I
Wednesday, February 8, 2017
Though, to be perfectly fair, Tennessee has always been a hotbed of leftist radicals
We have all heard the statistics about how difficult it is for a Congressional representative to lose his or her job. This is partially because of things like gerrymandering and spigots of campaign cash, but it also reflects a process that does a pretty good job allowing a reasonably competent and dedicated legislator to keep the constituents fairly happy in his or her district. A big part of that process is the maintaining of good relationships and lines of communication with voters and communities. Many political career has ended when voters felt someone had "lost touch with the people back home."
In this context, stories like the following from Talking Points Memo's Allegra Kirkland take on a special significance.
Constituents requesting that Rep. Jimmy Duncan Jr. (R-TN) hold a town hall on repealing the Affordable Care Act aren't being met with a polite brushoff from staffers anymore. Instead, Duncan's office has started sending out a form letter telling them point-blank that he has no intention to hold any town hall meetings.Admittedly, it is a long time until midterms, but possibly not long enough to repair this kind of damage.
“I am not going to hold town hall meetings in this atmosphere, because they would very quickly turn into shouting opportunities for extremists, kooks and radicals,” the letter read, according to a copy obtained by the Maryville Daily Times. “Also, I do not intend to give more publicity to those on the far left who have so much hatred, anger and frustration in them.”
In the first weeks of the 115th Congress, elected officials dropping by their home districts were surprised to find town halls packed to the rafters with concerned constituents. Caught off guard and on camera, lawmakers were asked to defend President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and provide a timeline on repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act.
Now, many of them are skipping out on these events entirely. Some have said large meetings are an ineffective format for addressing individual concerns. Many others have, like the President himself, dismissed those questioning their agenda as “paid protesters” or radical activists who could pose a physical threat.
Voters turning out to town halls are pushing back hard on this characterization, arguing that they represent varied ideological backgrounds and have diverse issues to raise. Constituents unable to meet with their elected officials over the weekend told TPM that they’re not attending town hall events to make trouble. Instead, they say they want accountability from the people they pay to represent them.
Kim Mattoch, a mother of three and event planner, told TPM that she tried to go to a Saturday town hall in Roseville, California with GOP Rep. Tom McClintock but couldn’t make it in. The 200-seat theater hosting the event was quickly filled to capacity, leaving hundreds waiting outside.
“I’m a constituent of McClintock and a registered Republican in a very Republican district—though I don’t really align very well these days with the Republican Party,” Mattoch said in a Monday phone call. “So I wanted to go to the town hall because I legitimately had questions for the congressman.”
Mattoch said the protesters waiting outside had a wide range of “legitimate concerns.” She personally hoped to ask her representative about how the GOP was progressing on repealing and replacing the ACA and why House Republicans last week voted to kill a ruling aimed at preventing coal mining debris from ending up in waterways.
Yet McClintock told the Los Angeles Times that he thought an “anarchist element” was present in the crowd outside his event, and said he was escorted to his car by police because he’d been told the atmosphere was “deteriorating.”
Ramon Fliek, who attended the McClintock event with his wife, told TPM on Monday that police “were kind enough to block the whole road” to make space for the overflow crowd, and that he overheard protesters thanking law enforcement for “doing their jobs.”
“If you look at the videos from the event, you can’t get any notion that it was aggressive,” he said. “There was an older woman with a poodle that ran after him and it’s like, okay, the older lady with the poodle is not going to threaten you. I understand that he might want to give that impression, but it was very pleasant.”
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
Part of a wholesome breakfast
As with so many things, the late 19th and early 20th centuries seem to represent the turning point for a modern perspective on nutrition. As far as I can tell, this is the point at which people started thinking of nutrition as a chemistry problem: you take food into a laboratory, analyze the constituent parts, and optimize the things you need while minimizing the things you don't.
The thing that jumps out at the modern reader as particularly off key is the treatment of fiber. I'm assuming “crude” in this context means insoluble, but it is still odd to see fiber treated as an undesirable component.
The thing that jumps out at the modern reader as particularly off key is the treatment of fiber. I'm assuming “crude” in this context means insoluble, but it is still odd to see fiber treated as an undesirable component.
Tuesday, March 13, 2018
When the NIMBYs were primarily motivated by racism and class bigotry, there was no NIMBY backlash. *
We've commented before that much of the discussion of urban density, particularly on the advocates' side, tends to be overly simplistic and inappropriately moralistic. This last point is greatly complicated by the fact that historically the motivations for NIMBYism were more often than not pretty repugnant. Opposition to public transportation, low-cost housing, and integration of neighborhoods was based almost entirely on the desire to keep people of color and the poor as far away as possible.
These issues haven't gone away, of course – – try to add another subway stop in Beverly Hills and check out the response you get – – but the NIMBY/YIMBY conflict that makes the news and dominates the public discourse here in Los Angeles (and, I suspect, in the Bay Area as well) has very little racial and class component.
At best, the battle over Santa Monica is a struggle between the top decile and the top quartile. Sometimes, there's not even that much of a class distinction. To be hammer blunt, you have a bunch of well-off people who enjoy the fantastic weather and bland conspicuous consumption of the town and who don't want other well-off people coming in and clogging the place up.
Advocates generally argue that development will drive down prices both in the city of Santa Monica and in the county of Los Angeles. I'm skeptical. While I'm not saying this is a bad approach in general, the arguments I've seen so far seem simplistic and overly linear, and the proposed impacts wildly overoptimistic. I could easily be wrong on these questions but either way, this is not a moral argument and framing it in moralistic terms simply serves to cloud the issues.
These issues haven't gone away, of course – – try to add another subway stop in Beverly Hills and check out the response you get – – but the NIMBY/YIMBY conflict that makes the news and dominates the public discourse here in Los Angeles (and, I suspect, in the Bay Area as well) has very little racial and class component.
At best, the battle over Santa Monica is a struggle between the top decile and the top quartile. Sometimes, there's not even that much of a class distinction. To be hammer blunt, you have a bunch of well-off people who enjoy the fantastic weather and bland conspicuous consumption of the town and who don't want other well-off people coming in and clogging the place up.
Advocates generally argue that development will drive down prices both in the city of Santa Monica and in the county of Los Angeles. I'm skeptical. While I'm not saying this is a bad approach in general, the arguments I've seen so far seem simplistic and overly linear, and the proposed impacts wildly overoptimistic. I could easily be wrong on these questions but either way, this is not a moral argument and framing it in moralistic terms simply serves to cloud the issues.
* Should read YIMBY backlash
Monday, March 12, 2018
We won't even get into the return of vinyl...
I'm assuming that everyone has heard the buggy whip analogy, one of the most shopworn pieces of conventional business wisdom. One of the underlying assumptions, sometimes made explicit depending on who's doing the telling, is that you are always better off abandoning even the best company in a declining industry in order to make the move to a field that's new and growing.
It's important to note that even in declining industries you can find companies that continue to turn a profit for a long time while even in industries that do proved to be the wave of the future, lots of individual companies don't last that long.
Or, put another way, you can still buy a buggy whip from the Westfield Whip Manufacturing Company, but they stopped making Lamberts a long time ago.
Friday, March 9, 2018
The checkers speech was made in 1952.
I know you know that – – everyone knows that – – but think about the implications for a moment. This nationally televised speech is often credited with saving the career of Richard Nixon and making him one of the dominant forces in American politics for the next 20 years. It was unquestionably a turning point in the way that public figures used media, particularly in the face of scandal.
And it happened in 1952.
What's the big deal? Remember that television was still in its experimental phase until the postwar era. It wasn't until around 1947 that it became a national medium and even then, large swaths of the country had no TV stations. The fate of a presidential ticket was determined by something that was, at best, five years old.
When you hear the claim that technology today is changing our lives faster than ever before, remember Checkers.
And it happened in 1952.
What's the big deal? Remember that television was still in its experimental phase until the postwar era. It wasn't until around 1947 that it became a national medium and even then, large swaths of the country had no TV stations. The fate of a presidential ticket was determined by something that was, at best, five years old.
When you hear the claim that technology today is changing our lives faster than ever before, remember Checkers.
Thursday, March 8, 2018
All of this would look remarkably modern if not for the horse drawn carriages
What struck me about this 1903 cover from Scientific American was the way planners set aside dedicated spaces for different modes of travel, one level for pedestrians, one for cyclists, one for automobiles and carriages, and two for trains, an allotment that would no doubt please many urbanists today.
This begs the question, did this approach to urban transportation fall out of fashion? Or was it one of those things that had a way of showing up in proposals but which seldom made it to the groundbreaking?
This begs the question, did this approach to urban transportation fall out of fashion? Or was it one of those things that had a way of showing up in proposals but which seldom made it to the groundbreaking?
Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Seems like a good time to reopen this thread.
This post by Jonathan Chait about the renewed demographic threat faced by the GOP got me thinking about a thread I've been meaning to revisit.
If I were writing this today, there are obviously things I would handle differently, but I'm reasonably comfortable standing by the main points.
But, just as Trump's rise did not occur in a vacuum, neither will his fall. We discussed earlier how Donald Trump has the power to drive a wedge between the Republican Party and a significant segment of its base [I wrote this before the departure of Steve Bannon. That may diminish Trump's ability to create this rift but I don't think it reduces the chances of the rift happening. – – M.P.]. This is the sort of thing that can profoundly damage a political party, possibly locking it into a minority status for a long time, but normally the wound would not be fatal. These, however, are not normal times.
The Republican Party of 2017 faces a unique combination of interrelated challenges, each of which is at a historic level and the combination of which would present an unprecedented threat to this or any US political party. The following list is not intended to be exhaustive, but it hits the main points.
The GOP currently has to deal with extraordinary political scandals, a stunningly unpopular agenda and daunting demographic trends. To keep things symmetric and easy to remember, let's break each one of these down to three components (keeping in mind that the list may change).
With the scandals:
1. Money – – Even with the most generous reading imaginable, there is no question that Trump has a decades long record of screwing people over, skirting the law, and dealing with disreputable and sometimes criminal elements. At least some of these dealings have been with the Russian mafia, oligarchs, and figures tied in with the Kremlin which leads us to…
2. The hacking of the election – – This one is also beyond dispute. It happened and it may have put Donald Trump into the White House. At this point, we have plenty of quid and plenty of quo; if Mueller can nail down pro, we will have a complete set.
3. And the cover-up – – As Josh Marshall and many others have pointed out, the phrase "it's not the crime; it's the cover-up" is almost never true. That said, coverups can provide tipping points and handholds for investigators, not to mention expanding the list of culprits.
With the agenda:
1. Health care – – By some standards the most unpopular major policy proposal in living memory that a party in power has invested so deeply in. Furthermore, the pushback against the initiative has essentially driven congressional Republicans into hiding from their own constituents for the past half year. As mentioned before, this has the potential to greatly undermine the relationship between GOP senators and representatives and the voters.
2. Tax cuts for the wealthy – – As said many times, Donald Trump has a gift for making the subtle plain, the plain obvious, and the obvious undeniable. In the past, Republicans were able to get a great deal of upward redistribution of the wealth past the voters through obfuscation and clever branding, but we have reached the point where simply calling something "tax reform" is no longer enough to sell tax proposals so regressive that even the majority of Republicans oppose them.
3. Immigration (subject to change) – – the race for third place in this list is fairly competitive (education seems to be coming up on the outside), but the administration's immigration policies (which are the direct result of decades of xenophobic propaganda from conservative media) have already done tremendous damage, caused great backlash, and are whitening the gap between the GOP and the Hispanic community, which leads us to…
Demographics:
As Lindsey Graham has observed, they simply are not making enough new old white men to keep the GOP's strategy going much longer, but the Trump era rebranding of the Republican Party only exacerbates the problems with women, young people, and pretty much anyone who isn't white.
Maybe I am missing a historical precedent here, but I can't think of another time that either the Democrats or the Republicans were this vulnerable on all three of these fronts. This does not mean that the party is doomed or even that, with the right breaks, it can't maintain a hold on some part of the government. What it does mean is that the institution is especially fragile at the moment. A mortal blow may not come, but we can no longer call it unthinkable.
For obvious reasons, the broadly liberal demographic trends in American politics have received much less attention since the 2016 election. Yet the fact remains that America is politically sorted by generations in a way it never has before. The oldest voters are the most conservative, white, and Republican, and the youngest voters the most liberal, racially diverse, and Democratic. There is absolutely no sign the dynamic is abating during the Trump years. If anything, it is accelerating.In the first few months of the Trump administration, we did a series of posts on how the underlying dynamics of the Republican Party were changing and what some of the consequences might be. One of the fundamental ideas of the thread was that the country had entered a period where our normal ways of talking about subjective probability made no sense in terms of politics. You could still make directional and even ordinal statements, but we were so far outside of the range of data and precedent that you could no longer confidently assign upper and lower bounds to the probability of a number of events including the destruction of the Republican Party. Note, I never said that this was "likely" to happen, but rather you can't say that it can't happen now.
The most recent Pew Research Survey has more detail about the generational divide. It shows that the old saw that young people would naturally grow more conservative as they age, or that their Democratic loyalties were an idiosyncratic response to Barack Obama’s unique personal appeal, has not held. Younger voters have distinctly more liberal views than older voters:
One could probably quibble with the overall definitions of which voters have liberal views and which have conservative views. What’s telling here is the comparison between generations. By Pew’s given definition, younger voters are wildly more liberal than older ones. The youngest voters have nearly five times as many voters with liberal views than with conservative views. The oldest voters have one and a half times more conservative than liberal voters.
Correspondingly, the Democratic lean of millennial voters is as strong as ever:
In the upcoming midterm elections, millennials are providing a huge share of the Democrats’ edge, with older generations splitting their vote relatively close:
If I were writing this today, there are obviously things I would handle differently, but I'm reasonably comfortable standing by the main points.
Tuesday, August 22, 2017
The Republicans' 3 x 3 existential threat
I've argued previously that Donald Trump presents and existential threat to the Republican Party. I know this can sound overheated and perhaps even a bit crazy. There are few American institutions as long-standing and deeply entrenched as are the Democratic and Republican parties. Proposing that one of them might not be around 10 years from now beggars the imagination and if this story started and stopped with Donald Trump, it would be silly to suggest we were on the verge of a political cataclysm.But, just as Trump's rise did not occur in a vacuum, neither will his fall. We discussed earlier how Donald Trump has the power to drive a wedge between the Republican Party and a significant segment of its base [I wrote this before the departure of Steve Bannon. That may diminish Trump's ability to create this rift but I don't think it reduces the chances of the rift happening. – – M.P.]. This is the sort of thing that can profoundly damage a political party, possibly locking it into a minority status for a long time, but normally the wound would not be fatal. These, however, are not normal times.
The Republican Party of 2017 faces a unique combination of interrelated challenges, each of which is at a historic level and the combination of which would present an unprecedented threat to this or any US political party. The following list is not intended to be exhaustive, but it hits the main points.
The GOP currently has to deal with extraordinary political scandals, a stunningly unpopular agenda and daunting demographic trends. To keep things symmetric and easy to remember, let's break each one of these down to three components (keeping in mind that the list may change).
With the scandals:
1. Money – – Even with the most generous reading imaginable, there is no question that Trump has a decades long record of screwing people over, skirting the law, and dealing with disreputable and sometimes criminal elements. At least some of these dealings have been with the Russian mafia, oligarchs, and figures tied in with the Kremlin which leads us to…
2. The hacking of the election – – This one is also beyond dispute. It happened and it may have put Donald Trump into the White House. At this point, we have plenty of quid and plenty of quo; if Mueller can nail down pro, we will have a complete set.
3. And the cover-up – – As Josh Marshall and many others have pointed out, the phrase "it's not the crime; it's the cover-up" is almost never true. That said, coverups can provide tipping points and handholds for investigators, not to mention expanding the list of culprits.
With the agenda:
1. Health care – – By some standards the most unpopular major policy proposal in living memory that a party in power has invested so deeply in. Furthermore, the pushback against the initiative has essentially driven congressional Republicans into hiding from their own constituents for the past half year. As mentioned before, this has the potential to greatly undermine the relationship between GOP senators and representatives and the voters.
2. Tax cuts for the wealthy – – As said many times, Donald Trump has a gift for making the subtle plain, the plain obvious, and the obvious undeniable. In the past, Republicans were able to get a great deal of upward redistribution of the wealth past the voters through obfuscation and clever branding, but we have reached the point where simply calling something "tax reform" is no longer enough to sell tax proposals so regressive that even the majority of Republicans oppose them.
3. Immigration (subject to change) – – the race for third place in this list is fairly competitive (education seems to be coming up on the outside), but the administration's immigration policies (which are the direct result of decades of xenophobic propaganda from conservative media) have already done tremendous damage, caused great backlash, and are whitening the gap between the GOP and the Hispanic community, which leads us to…
Demographics:
As Lindsey Graham has observed, they simply are not making enough new old white men to keep the GOP's strategy going much longer, but the Trump era rebranding of the Republican Party only exacerbates the problems with women, young people, and pretty much anyone who isn't white.
Maybe I am missing a historical precedent here, but I can't think of another time that either the Democrats or the Republicans were this vulnerable on all three of these fronts. This does not mean that the party is doomed or even that, with the right breaks, it can't maintain a hold on some part of the government. What it does mean is that the institution is especially fragile at the moment. A mortal blow may not come, but we can no longer call it unthinkable.
Tuesday, March 6, 2018
I guess I'll force myself to have a chocolate malt
I'd like to see a list of all of the foods that were originally sold on the basis of health but which now survive as unhealthy indulgences. In addition to malted milk, many early soft drinks fall into this category and I have the feeling I'm missing some other obvious examples.
From Scientific American 1908-12-05
From Scientific American 1908-12-05
Monday, March 5, 2018
Hyperloop watch -- We are now reaching that part of the movie where the wife goes to the bank and realizes that her husband has given their life savings to the con man.
I know I've been harping on this for years now and I'd imagine regular readers are growing a bit tired of the ranting, but the standard tech narrative, the one that is still more or less the default for even sober news organizations like the BBC and NPR, is deeply flawed and genuinely dangerous.
The hype and bullshit and magical heuristics that dominate our discussion of technology and innovation aren't just annoying; they have a real cost. They distort markets, spread misinformation, lead to bad public policy, and starve worthwhile initiatives of both funding and attention.
No figure brings out the worst of these tendencies in journalists more than does Elon Musk. Musk, it should be noted, does have some major accomplishments under his belt as an administrator, promoter, and finance guy. With SpaceX and, to a lesser degree, Tesla, he deserves considerable credit for significant innovations, but even with his most serious projects, there is always a bit of the Flimflam Man present.
The Hyperloop has always been Elon Musk at his most substance-free. A 70s era B- senior engineering project dressed up with 3-D graphics and a cool name. Despite being thoroughly demolished by virtually every independent expert in the field, the "proposal" has generated endless and endlessly credulous press coverage. Hundreds of millions of dollars in financing have been lined up by Hyperloop companies with dubious business plans. And now you can add millions in tax dollars to that.
From an excellent Slate article by Henry Grabar.
For American lawmakers, funding public transit often feels like small ball. Politicians prefer to dream bigger. Earlier this month, transportation agencies in the Cleveland region and in Illinois announced they would co-sponsor a $1.2 million study of a “hyperloop” connecting Cleveland to Chicago, cutting a 350-mile journey to just half an hour. It’s the fourth public study of the nonexistent transportation mode to be undertaken in the past three months.
“Ohio is defined by its history of innovation and adventure,” said Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who once canceled a $400 million Obama-era grant for high-speed rail in the state. “A hyperloop in Ohio would build upon that heritage.” In January, a bipartisan group of Rust Belt representatives wrote to President Trump to ask for $20 million in federal funding for a Hyperloop Transportation Initiative, a Department of Transportation division that would regulate and fund a travel mode with no proof of concept.
It’s hard to keep up: Last week, the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission announced feasibility and environmental-impact studies for a different hyperloop route, connecting Pittsburgh and Chicago through Columbus, Ohio, to be run by a different company, Virgin Hyperloop One. The company—which fired a pod through a tube at 240 mph in December—is also studying routes in Missouri and Colorado.* Meanwhile, Elon Musk—who has obtained (contested) tunneling permission from Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan—pulled a permit from the District of Columbia for a future hyperloop station.
But let’s first look at the hyperloop [from our old friends, the incredibly flaky, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies -- MP] that Grace Gallucci, the head of the Cleveland regional planning association the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA), told local radio could be running to Chicago in three to five years, and to the study of which the NOACA contributed $600,000.
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
The Butler and the Maid from The Carol Burnett Show
Thursday, March 1, 2018
Urban suburbs
My first corporate job also led to my first big move. I'd bounced around before that, between teaching and going off to grad school, but the moves had, at most, entailed crossing only one state line. The corporate position took me from just west of the Mississippi to the East Coast, with no social contacts or experience of the area to draw on.
I did what seemed like the sensible thing and got an apartment a few minutes from work. The company's campus was on the outskirts of town deep in the suburbs. Before that, I had lived in the country, small towns, and a couple of urban areas. Each of those three options had some strong pluses and, under the right conditions, could be quite appealing. By comparison, suburban living, at least without kids, had nothing to recommend it as far as I was concerned. I realized quickly but still too late that I should have picked an interesting neighborhood closer to the center of town, even though that would've meant an extra 20 or 30 minutes of commuting per day.
I did not repeat that mistake for my next job. Before moving, I scouted the area and ask around before deciding on a very cool neighborhood featuring lots of restaurants, bars, and the city's best art-house movie theater within easy walking distance. My daily commute was 45 minutes to an hour, but the traffic wasn't bad and much of it skirted around (and at one point across) the Chesapeake Bay making for a relaxing and scenic beginning and in to each workday.
That neighborhood was, for me, functioning as a de facto suburb. I was trading a longer commute for more desirable living conditions. The fact that these more desirable conditions were found in an area of higher density, rather than lower, does not affect the underlying dynamic.
One of the primary tenets of faith among utopian urbanists is that making it dense areas more dense will have a range of tremendously beneficial effects starting with great reductions in commuting and suburban sprawl. The existence of urban suburbs raises serious questions about that argument.
How big a deal is this? A good urban researcher could probably provide us with fairly reliable numbers, but we can say with some confidence that it's having a sizable effect in at least isolated cases. San Francisco has clearly become an urban suburb for Silicon Valley and, to a degree, Santa Monica and the rapidly gentrifying Venice Beach often fill the same role for much of Los Angeles.
It is worth noting that San Francisco followed by Santa Monica are probably the two cities that density proponents are most passionate about. This raises a disturbing question (and one which, I suspect, researchers will find more difficult to answer): if you greatly increase the density of cities that are already largely functioning as urban suburbs, will you in effect simply be producing more suburban sprawl?
Wednesday, February 28, 2018
"A space engine that could make flying into orbit commonplace"
Obviously, you can't compare a piece of technology in development to one that's up and working. The Falcon Heavy isn't a proposal or a prototype; it's a viable vehicle currently in use. The engineers at SpaceX deserve a great deal of credit for solving daunting technical challenges, but it's important to note that it took them much longer than they anticipated and, more to the point, there's nothing revolutionary about the technology. For that, you'd have to look someplace like this.
Sabre: the ‘Holy Grail’ in space technology
Researchers have spent decades trying to crack the problem of how to fly from earth to space and back again, writes Peggy Hollinger.
But it took a combination of rocket and nuclear science to make the breakthrough that is now drawing interest from around the world in Reaction Engines’ Sabre technology.
“It was pretty clear that the rocket needed a bit of a leg up and the only place to get that was from the Earth’s atmosphere,” says Alan Bond, one of Reaction Engines’ three founders.
“But the [speed] you get out of conventional jet engines isn’t enough. Somewhere in 1982 . . . I realised that a bit of theory I had used on nuclear engines 10 years before could actually help. So the hybrid air-breathing rocket engine came into existence.”
The engine combines jet and rocket technologies thanks to its unique pre-cooler, which extracts heat from air flowing in at high speeds of up to Mach 5 — several times the speed of sound.
This enables it to be used by the engine, which then uses the heat energy to power a turbocompressor. When at the edge of the atmosphere, the engine switches into rocket mode, using liquid oxygen to break through into orbit.
Unlike partially re-usable launchers being developed by the likes of SpaceX of the US, Sabre does not need to carry large quantities of liquid oxygen, and will not have to discard stages of the craft during flight.
It could be what the industry describes as the “Holy Grail” — a single stage to orbit system.
Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Another one from the turn-of-the-century Scientific American – – I can't decide between the Far Side or the Planet of the Apes joke here
This is an interesting piece from a 1907 issue of Scientific American, but what really caught my eye and the reason I'm sharing it with you is that I was under the impression that speculation about animals' problem-solving and tool-building ability was something that scientists first started seriously discussing in the mid-20th century. This account from the generally sober journal shows that the notion was at least considered suitable for serious discussion.
Monday, February 26, 2018
Small improvements
This is Joseph
I hope that this argument is a straw man:
1) Technology is incremental. No one tweak is likely to have a 100% success rate. The modern cell phone is the product of a thousand small tweaks over decades improving efficiency. We did not go from huge analog radios to cell phones in one step.
2) Medical and public health advances are never 100% effective. Vaccines reduce infectious disease but they rarely eliminate it (smallpox being a nice exception). Tactics like hand washing do not drop the rate of disease transmission to zero. Seat belts do not eliminate auto fatalities, even if they reduce them. Josh Marshall is good on this point.
3) Laws reduce risks they do not eliminate them. We have a lot of laws that reduce risks but don;t drop them to zero. We have screeners for airplanes; nobody thinks that they are 100% effective but they are thought to reduce risk. We require people to be licensed to drive not because it drops the rate of accidents to zero but because it reduces the rate.
I mean one could argue that particular guns are important for some reason or another, or that a specific law is bad. But it is the balance between cost and effectiveness -- the effectiveness of a specific intervention may be low but so might the cost. It isn't "virtue signaling" to note that a small improvement in a battery is better, even if it took hundreds of them to make a big difference.
And if we want to make these types of arguments (total benefit is small) then I have an idea for making airports more efficient.
I hope that this argument is a straw man:
Someone will say that mass shooting are rare. Moreover, if a future schoolyard shooter can’t get an AI rifle, he will use an only marginally less lethal weapon. Thus, preventing civilians from legally owning AI rifles would save only a few lives and only trivially reduce the total of gun deaths. So, really, aren’t you just virtue-signalling?Because, if it is serious, it misunderstands technological advances, public health, and legal systems all at once.
1) Technology is incremental. No one tweak is likely to have a 100% success rate. The modern cell phone is the product of a thousand small tweaks over decades improving efficiency. We did not go from huge analog radios to cell phones in one step.
2) Medical and public health advances are never 100% effective. Vaccines reduce infectious disease but they rarely eliminate it (smallpox being a nice exception). Tactics like hand washing do not drop the rate of disease transmission to zero. Seat belts do not eliminate auto fatalities, even if they reduce them. Josh Marshall is good on this point.
3) Laws reduce risks they do not eliminate them. We have a lot of laws that reduce risks but don;t drop them to zero. We have screeners for airplanes; nobody thinks that they are 100% effective but they are thought to reduce risk. We require people to be licensed to drive not because it drops the rate of accidents to zero but because it reduces the rate.
I mean one could argue that particular guns are important for some reason or another, or that a specific law is bad. But it is the balance between cost and effectiveness -- the effectiveness of a specific intervention may be low but so might the cost. It isn't "virtue signaling" to note that a small improvement in a battery is better, even if it took hundreds of them to make a big difference.
And if we want to make these types of arguments (total benefit is small) then I have an idea for making airports more efficient.
Friday, February 23, 2018
I just realized that we haven't made fun of Gwyneth Paltrow for a long time.
Fortunately, Stephen Colbert's staff has been keeping up with goop for us.
Thursday, February 22, 2018
Non-sarcastic praise for Elon Musk (no, really)
This is a big deal. Not as big as some of the hype would lead you to believe and not big in the way most people think, but it is a big deal.
The thing to focus on here is cost. I have seen various estimates and, while evaluating them is well beyond my expertise, if you're looking for a nice round number, 50% seems quite reasonable. We will have to see how reliable the system proves (when your payloads are valued in the billions of dollars, reliability is a major consideration) and will have to see how reusable the reusable boosters are, but at this point it certainly looks like Elon Musk has greatly reduced the cost of getting things into orbit.
This is an extraordinary advance, but it is more an accomplishment of determination then innovation. It is important to note just how mainstream the Falcon Heavy approach is. Most of the basic technology goes back to the Apollo program. This is not, in any way, meant to diminish the exceptional work done by the engineers of SpaceX. Getting this system to work on this scale is incredibly challenging, but it's the kind of challenge that probably could've been done by any number of other major players had they expanded the resources and maintained the focus. Musk does not seem to have shown any interest in radical approaches with even greater potential cost savings such as spaceplanes or railguns and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Both here and with Tesla, Musk has a history of making daring business bets but playing it relatively conservative with the technology. It's an approach with a lot to recommend it (though Tesla investors may not feel that way a year from now – – more on that later).
With so many people out to deify Elon Musk (in the case of the notorious Rolling Stone profile, almost literally), there is an enormous temptation to default to the iconoclastic, but it's important to remember that while Musk may not be the person (and certainly not the engineer) he and his accolades would like you to think he is, the man still has extraordinary gifts for promotion, organization, and motivation, and those gifts sometimes produce some worthwhile, even important benefits.
And, yes, watching those boosters land under their own power is really cool.
Wednesday, February 21, 2018
The stocks “couldn't be valued according to traditional methods because they represented a whole new era of the economy that was nothing like the past.” – Déjà vu all over again
I just finished a recent post on how companies try to get some investor love by associating themselves with sexy, overhyped sectors of the economy. This Forbes piece by Marius Meland nicely illustrates the point.
It's also of interest for a few other reasons. It fits in with our ongoing thread about the technological innovations spikes around the late 19th/early 20th centuries and in the postwar era. The subject of the interview, Burton Malkiel, is possibly the best person you could talk to about market efficiency versus investor irrationality and the timing (a 1999 comparison of the internet boom to previous stock bubbles) makes the observations look particularly prescient in retrospect.
It's also of interest for a few other reasons. It fits in with our ongoing thread about the technological innovations spikes around the late 19th/early 20th centuries and in the postwar era. The subject of the interview, Burton Malkiel, is possibly the best person you could talk to about market efficiency versus investor irrationality and the timing (a 1999 comparison of the internet boom to previous stock bubbles) makes the observations look particularly prescient in retrospect.
"Tronics boom" of 1959-1962
With the dawn of the space age, every electronics stock suddenly took off like a rocket on Wall Street, reaching valuation levels not unlike Internet stocks today. And just like a "dot com" can help an obscure offering surge into the stratosphere today, the key to a stocks success could often be found in its name in the 1960s as well.
"I call it the tronics boom because these soaring stocks usually had some form of tron or tronics in their name," says Malkiel, citing such "trons" as Astron, Dutron, Vulcatron and Transitron and "onics" like Circuitronics, Supronics and Videotronics, as well as one company that, for good measure, put together the winning combination Powertron Ultrasonics.
Then, like now, the demand was huge but the IPOs were relatively thin, so that stock prices would soar at the launch.
Investors argued that "tronics" stocks couldn't be valued according to traditional methods because they represented a whole new era of the economy that was nothing like the past. Promoters entered the stage to talk the stocks up further. As a result, stocks soared to multiples of 50, 100 or even 200 times earnings.
But in late 1962, "tronics" stocks and other growth issues came crashing down in a massive sell-off.
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
More memorable ads from the turn of the century Scientific American
More on the medicinal powers of Coke. 1907
Electricity meant push button control which, if you think about it, was a pretty big deal. 1903
The more things change... 1908
I keep thinking of jokes I shouldn't make. 1903
And from JUNE 10, 1905
From that same issue.
Not all that different from the pitch phone companies make to businesses today. 1908
Electricity meant push button control which, if you think about it, was a pretty big deal. 1903
The more things change... 1908
I keep thinking of jokes I shouldn't make. 1903
And from JUNE 10, 1905
From that same issue.
Not all that different from the pitch phone companies make to businesses today. 1908
Monday, February 19, 2018
Profit laundering
[I need to come back to this in more detail later, but just so it doesn't sit in the queue forever, here's a quick rundown of the concept.]
It's not always rational, but investors care a great deal about where the money comes from. Two companies with exactly the same cost and revenue numbers will often be valued very differently. Sometimes, the preferences are based on perceived possibilities for growth or fears about the future of a particular business or market. Other times, it comes down to the sexiness of the industry and/or the buzz and halo effect surrounding the company.
Obviously, management will do everything it can to put their businesses in the hot category. When a company has multiple sources of revenue of varying attractiveness, it will do its best to maximize the perceived portion of the money coming from the cool streams and minimize the perceived amount coming from the uncool.
We saw some really blatant examples of this in the 90s Internet boom – – companies using brick-and-mortar profits to create the impression of online success – – but it certainly preceded that and it's never gone away since.
The lesson that many investors and most business/financial journalists need to take away from this is that, whenever you have a company with multiple revenue streams, one or more of which is particularly sexy, you should always assume you are being to some degree misled about which stream is actually bringing in the profits.
It's not always rational, but investors care a great deal about where the money comes from. Two companies with exactly the same cost and revenue numbers will often be valued very differently. Sometimes, the preferences are based on perceived possibilities for growth or fears about the future of a particular business or market. Other times, it comes down to the sexiness of the industry and/or the buzz and halo effect surrounding the company.
Obviously, management will do everything it can to put their businesses in the hot category. When a company has multiple sources of revenue of varying attractiveness, it will do its best to maximize the perceived portion of the money coming from the cool streams and minimize the perceived amount coming from the uncool.
We saw some really blatant examples of this in the 90s Internet boom – – companies using brick-and-mortar profits to create the impression of online success – – but it certainly preceded that and it's never gone away since.
The lesson that many investors and most business/financial journalists need to take away from this is that, whenever you have a company with multiple revenue streams, one or more of which is particularly sexy, you should always assume you are being to some degree misled about which stream is actually bringing in the profits.
Friday, February 16, 2018
Alec Guinness was George Smiley
If you can think of a piece of video, be it an old TV show, a musical performance, a stand-up routine, it's probably on YouTube. I've started making a note whenever I think of something I'd like to see (or see again), like this definitive adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy...
And of Smiley's People.
And of Smiley's People.
Thursday, February 15, 2018
Of course, modern researchers tried talking to plants so who are we to judge?
I'd never heard of electro-culture before coming across this article from a turn-of-the-century issue of Scientific American, but, based on some quick googling, it seems to have been one of those scientific theories (like N-rays and, to a lesser extent, Martian canals) that had a brief run of acceptance and respectability before being dismissed by the scientific community and drifting into the area of fringe beliefs.
The big question reading this today is whether or not the original researchers were frauds or simply incompetence who did a bad job setting up their experiments.
The cover of the issue, depicting Russian battleships, has nothing to do with this article but it's too cool to leave out.
The big question reading this today is whether or not the original researchers were frauds or simply incompetence who did a bad job setting up their experiments.
The cover of the issue, depicting Russian battleships, has nothing to do with this article but it's too cool to leave out.
Tech Boosterism
[More notes for the upcoming book]
Journalists have a natural tendency to be supportive of efforts to serve some public good. There is undoubtedly an element of self-interest here – – philanthropists and local heroes make for good copy – – but I suspect of main driver is a sincere desire to advance worthwhile causes. This is completely understandable and even, to some degree, praiseworthy, but it can also be dangerous.
Accounts of volunteers cleaning seabirds after an oil spill can create a false sense of having addressed a massive problem. Feel-good stories about imaginative school fundraising projects (disproportionately found in relatively wealthy districts) seldom mention the ways that funding by community can exacerbate educational inequality. Press releases on hedge fund managers always omit the tax benefits, the strings that often accompanied the gifts, and the reputation laundering bought with what is frequently very dirty money (see the Sacklers and the opioid crisis for example).
The damage caused by uncritical and unthinking supportive journalism really kicks into high gear when you combine it with other biases and corrupting factors. This problem is particularly acute with technology. Most journalists quite reasonably see technological progress as being good for society on the whole. Therefore, the default setting of a report of some demonstration or new development is "isn't that great?".
Unfortunately, this default approach is generally combined with a weak grasp of how technology works and progresses, particularly when it comes to things like proposals, prototypes, and producing viable products. Add to that the tremendous role of hype, the enthusiasm for conventional narratives (in this case frequently involving Silicon Valley messiahs, often with what can only be described as magical powers -- see magical heuristics), and the occasional flat out scam. The result is a press corps that ranges from a mainstream that is strongly inclined to believe what they're told to converts with a cultlike faith in Elon Musk and company.
Journalists have a natural tendency to be supportive of efforts to serve some public good. There is undoubtedly an element of self-interest here – – philanthropists and local heroes make for good copy – – but I suspect of main driver is a sincere desire to advance worthwhile causes. This is completely understandable and even, to some degree, praiseworthy, but it can also be dangerous.
Accounts of volunteers cleaning seabirds after an oil spill can create a false sense of having addressed a massive problem. Feel-good stories about imaginative school fundraising projects (disproportionately found in relatively wealthy districts) seldom mention the ways that funding by community can exacerbate educational inequality. Press releases on hedge fund managers always omit the tax benefits, the strings that often accompanied the gifts, and the reputation laundering bought with what is frequently very dirty money (see the Sacklers and the opioid crisis for example).
The damage caused by uncritical and unthinking supportive journalism really kicks into high gear when you combine it with other biases and corrupting factors. This problem is particularly acute with technology. Most journalists quite reasonably see technological progress as being good for society on the whole. Therefore, the default setting of a report of some demonstration or new development is "isn't that great?".
Unfortunately, this default approach is generally combined with a weak grasp of how technology works and progresses, particularly when it comes to things like proposals, prototypes, and producing viable products. Add to that the tremendous role of hype, the enthusiasm for conventional narratives (in this case frequently involving Silicon Valley messiahs, often with what can only be described as magical powers -- see magical heuristics), and the occasional flat out scam. The result is a press corps that ranges from a mainstream that is strongly inclined to believe what they're told to converts with a cultlike faith in Elon Musk and company.
Wednesday, February 14, 2018
Keep in mind that back then $600 million was quite a bit of money
Tuesday, February 13, 2018
“I’m almost afraid not to take the chance,” – This is when it becomes a bubble.
It's that moment when risk aversion flips and the thought of not making money starts to feel like losing it. I'm not talking about opportunity costs in any kind of rational sense. Instead, I'm referring to having the visceral emotional reaction associated with a deep, costly loss because you didn't buy into the skyrocketing market the day before. People become afraid not to invest in what should obviously be highly risky ventures.
Truly crazy bubbles are driven by this paradoxical combination of greed and fear. They both desire instant wealth and dread the sense of regret that would go with missing it. Individually, either of these emotions can drive otherwise sensible people into irrational behavior. Together, they can spur investment in some laughably bad ideas.
This Washington Post piece by Chico Harlan on a group of Bitcoin investors perfectly illustrates the point.
“Us little guys working our butts off, we can’t get ahead,” Cedric Knight, 35, told Melin. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change my life.”
Knight and others visiting Melin were pinning their hopes on a new form of currency whose potential value the world was only beginning to recognize. Millions of people around the world are chasing after fortune by investing in bitcoin — which has soared by more than 2,500 percent in value in the past two years — and other digital instruments known as cryptocurrencies.
...
“What crypto allows is for the masses to be venture capitalists,” Melin said.
“And guys like me, I’m not in the loop,” Knight said. “This is my chance.”
…
Knight, meantime, went home, cooked dinner and then decided to reopen one of the eight cryptocurrency apps he had downloaded. His account had fallen nearly $500 on the day — his initial $1,500 was below $900 — and he said he was “freaking out.” But then, he thought about what it meant to be a cryptocurrency investor. There would be days such as this. But there might be better days, too — much better days. If there were, he did not want to miss out.
“I’m almost afraid not to take the chance,” he said, and soon, he added $260 to his cryptocurrency account.
Some historical perspective from the archives.
"A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is."
Another except from Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I believe "a company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is" was an initial business plan for Groupon.Some of these schemes were plausible enough, and, had they been undertaken at a time when the public mind was unexcited, might have been pursued with advantage to all concerned. But they were established merely with the view of raising the shares in the market. The projectors took the first opportunity of a rise to sell out, and next morning the scheme was at an end. Maitland, in his History of London, gravely informs us, that one of the projects which received great encouragement, was for the establishment of a company "to make deal-boards out of saw-dust." This is, no doubt, intended as a joke; but there is abundance of evidence to show that dozens of schemes hardly a whir more reasonable, lived their little day, ruining hundreds ere they fell. One of them was for a wheel for perpetual motion—capital, one million; another was "for encouraging the breed of horses in England, and improving of glebe and church lands, and repairing and rebuilding parsonage and vicarage houses." Why the clergy, who were so mainly interested in the latter clause, should have taken so much interest in the first, is only to be explained on the supposition that the scheme was projected by a knot of the foxhunting parsons, once so common in England. The shares of this company were rapidly subscribed for. But the most absurd and preposterous of all, and which showed, more completely than any other, the utter madness of the people, was one, started by an unknown adventurer, entitled "company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is." Were not the fact stated by scores of credible witnesses, it would be impossible to believe that any person could have been duped by such a project. The man of genius who essayed this bold and successful inroad upon public credulity, merely stated in his prospectus that the required capital was half a million, in five thousand shares of 100 pounds each, deposit 2 pounds per share. Each subscriber, paying his deposit, would be entitled to 100 pounds per annum per share. How this immense profit was to be obtained, he did not condescend to inform them at that time, but promised, that in a month full particulars should be duly announced, and a call made for the remaining 98 pounds of the subscription. Next morning, at nine o'clock, this great man opened an office in Cornhill. Crowds of people beset his door, and when he shut up at three o'clock, he found that no less than one thousand shares had been subscribed for, and the deposits paid. He was thus, in five hours, the winner of 2,000 pounds. He was philosopher enough to be contented with his venture, and set off the same evening for the Continent. He was never heard of again
Monday, February 12, 2018
Laws and markets
This is Joseph
This point, by James Joyner, is quite good:
But all markets are based on rules and laws. We would have no markets at all if force and fraud where not prohibited, for example. The piece that is dodgy here is the evasion of the existing rules in order to build a company. It is fine to lobby to change the rules. But when you have to design your business to evade local regulations then that is a problem. Not because the laws are good -- they are likely not. But because it is not the case that private actors who violate laws that they see as stifling innovation are left alone.
And if government is wrong about a law and needs to backtrack then it makes sense to compensate the losers of the law change. We don't let private property block roads but we do have to buy it back when we put a road in. I think applying the same logic to shutting down taxi licensing agreements is sensible.
This point, by James Joyner, is quite good:
The taxi industry is a special case, though, in that cab and limousine owners and drivers made economic decisions based on rules set by the government. While the medallion system is outrageous and I’m happy to see it disrupted, the fact of the matter is that it was the norm for generations. People saved up or took big risks in borrowing to bid on them based on guarantees from their municipal government. They have every right to expect that same government to either enforce the law against illegal competition or compensate them in some way for the broken contract.The piece that is very important here is the decision to change the legal framework. Disruption is normal and many people end up as economic losers when conditions change. We are already bad at coping with that.
But all markets are based on rules and laws. We would have no markets at all if force and fraud where not prohibited, for example. The piece that is dodgy here is the evasion of the existing rules in order to build a company. It is fine to lobby to change the rules. But when you have to design your business to evade local regulations then that is a problem. Not because the laws are good -- they are likely not. But because it is not the case that private actors who violate laws that they see as stifling innovation are left alone.
And if government is wrong about a law and needs to backtrack then it makes sense to compensate the losers of the law change. We don't let private property block roads but we do have to buy it back when we put a road in. I think applying the same logic to shutting down taxi licensing agreements is sensible.
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