"because a 'stock' no longer refers to a unit of ownership in a company so much as it is a chip at a casino where the house constantly changes the rules."

This is taken from an enormous (19,000-word), highly recommended post by Ed Zitron. There is much here that merits comment, but I wanted to single out this section, and in particular the quote in the title, because it reflects a shift I've observed in my lifetime in the way people think about stocks and investments.  

Analysts have, on some level, become the fractional marketing team for the stocks they’re investing in. When Oracle announced its $300 billion deal with OpenAI in September — one that Oracle does not have the capacity to fill and OpenAI does not have the money to pay for – analysts heaved and stammered like horny teenagers seeing their first boob:

John DiFucci from Guggenheim Securities said he was “blown away.” TD Cowen’s Derrick Wood called it a “momentous quarter.” And Brad Zelnick of Deutsche Bank said, “We’re all kind of in shock, in a very good way.”

“There’s no better evidence of a seismic shift happening in computing than these results that you just put up,” Zelnick said on the earnings call.

These are the same people that retail and institutional investors rely upon for advice on what stocks to buy, all acting with the disregard for the truth that comes from years of never facing a consequence. Three months later, and Oracle has lost basically all of the stock bump it saw from the OpenAI deal, meaning that any retail investor that YOLO’d into the trade because, say, analysts from major institutions said it was a good idea and news outlets acted like this deal was real, already got their ass kicked. 

And please, spare me the “oh they shouldn’t trade off of analysts” bullshit. That’s the kind of victim-blaming that allows these revered fuckwits to continue farting out these meaningless calls.

In reality, we’re in an era of naked, blatant, shameless stock manipulation, both privately and publicly, because a “stock” no longer refers to a unit of ownership in a company so much as it is a chip at a casino where the house constantly changes the rules. Perhaps you’re able to occasionally catch the house showing its hand, and perhaps the house meant for you to see it. Either way, you are always behind, because the people responsible for buying and selling stocks at scale under the auspices of “knowing what’s going on” don’t seem to know what they’re talking about, or don’t care to find out.

 
Obviously, there will be exceptions to the following, but in general, when I was a kid, people thought of stocks primarily as owning a small part of a business, mainly so that you could share in the profits in the form of dividends while hopefully seeing the stock price at the very least outpace inflation. Later on, we got growth companies like Walmart, Apple, and Amazon, which didn't pay dividends, but that was okay because they were taking those profits and investing them back into the companies on things like infrastructure and research and development. We might not be getting quarterly checks, but the companies we partially owned were becoming more efficient and offering better products and more market share.

In the 21st century, however, especially with the rise of the meme stock, the fundamental sense of ownership seems to have largely gone away. You buy because “number go up.”

Sure, we have grandiose narratives, outrageous promises, and financial analysts and journalists cranking out a great sea of numbers, but I think those are mainly just feeding the Keynesian beauty contest taken to its absurd limits. I'm sure that some trusting souls actually believed in Zuckerberg's metaverse and Marc Andreessen's Web3, and today believe in Elon Musk's robot utopia, but I suspect most investors only believe that other people will believe them.

And, yes, I know this makes me sound like just another grumpy old man, but I do not believe this will end well. 

Elon doesn't think things through

[As embarrassing as the fluffing is, I suppose we should be happy Grok isn't up to something worse.]

 Elon Musk does deserve what we have to call “credit,” for lack of a better word, for his role in all this. His comments about the Epstein files, made at the height of the Trump–Musk feud, played a non-trivial role in getting this ball moving. Musk also deserves credit for shooting himself in the foot in the most satisfying way possible.

Mike Pearl writing for Gizmodo:

 

“No one pushed harder than me to have the Epstein files released and I’m glad that has finally happened,” Elon Musk

Sorry but “misinterpreted”? Even if you do your absolute damndest to read this guy’s freshly released Epstein emails in a positive light, what you get is the story of a tech tycoon stating unambiguously that he wanted to attend an absolute rager on a sex criminal’s private island.

“What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Elon Musk asked Jeffrey Epstein on on Nov. 25, 2012. 

In 2019, Musk told Vanity Fair that in their past interactions, he had detected that Epstein was “obviously a creep.” Indeed, it wouldn’t have taken much sleuthing to pick up on this attribute of Epstein’s back in 2012. He already had a conviction on his record at the time for soliciting prostitution, and it was also widely reported in the media that the prostitution conviction stemmed from a generous plea bargain, and that the charges Epstein had been facing included sexual relations with minors.

So with that in mind, here’s what Musk and Epstein wrote as they attempted to make plans in 2012 for Musk to visit Epstein’s island with British actress Talulah Riley, Musk’s wife at the time (typos and other text issues are left intact. I don’t want to be accused of misinterpreting):

Epstein: you are welcome to stay or just come for the day, plenty of rroom i will=send heli to get you

Musk: Do you have any parties planned? I’ve been working to the edge of sanity th=s year and so, once my kids head home after Christmas, I really want to hi= the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose. The invitation is=much appreciated, but a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what=l’m looking for.

Epstein: Understood, , I will see you on st Barth, the ratio on my island might m=ke Talilah uncomfortable

Musk: Ratio is not a problem for Talulah

It may be true that Musk declined one or more invitations to visit, but he also tried to make plans to visit multiple times. In addition to the aforementioned change, he emailed Epstein on December 14, 2013 saying he was going to be in the Virgin Islands “over the holidays,” and asked “Is there a good time to visit?” In my opinion it sort of undermines the inherent morality of rejecting offers to be taken to Epstein’s island if you also repeatedly attempt to visit Epstein’s island.

This all raises the obvious question: why in the hell, given what Musk should have known was in the Epstein files, would he bring this up in the first place?

I have no special knowledge here, but I have spent over a decade now following the misadventures of Musk and the other tech saviors of greater Silicon Valley, and based on that, here is my take. Elon Musk is vindictive and childish, lacking impulse control and displaying a level of narcissism that often qualifies as a messianic delusion. Add to that, along with Donald Trump, he has often proven himself to be one of the luckiest sons of bitches in recorded history.

I don't think that most commentators realized how hot and deep feelings ran during the feud. It is essential to consider the context of the New York Times exposé, which, among other things, confirmed that the man was an out-of-control drug addict. That article was obviously based not just on leaks but on actual recordings taken in the White House. Musk's enemies in the administration clearly dropped the dime on him, possibly with the permission of Trump himself.

Musk has a long history of lashing out at even minor slights and holding grudges for decades. I assume most of you remember his absurd overreaction when he was criticized by one of the actual heroes of the Thai cave rescue. Those more familiar with the biography will remember the twenty-year-and-counting vendetta against the actual founders of Tesla and a proclivity for totally irrational rage firings, often based on nothing more than employees crossing their CEO's line of sight when he happened to be angry.

Add to his humiliation from the New York Times piece the possibility of chemically induced mood swings and a history of getting away with countless lies and shady deals, and it's not difficult to imagine the world's richest man not realizing the consequences of his actions. 

Tesla to transition out of the making of real things in order to focus on vaporware

Hadas Gold writing for CNN:

On Tesla’s earnings call on Wednesday, Musk laid out a literal replacement of Tesla cars by robots – announcing Tesla would discontinue the Model S and Model X in favor of making more of its Optimus robots.

“We’re gonna take the Model S and X production space in our Fremont factory and convert that into an Optimus factory … with the long-term goal of having 1 million units a year of Optimus robots in the current SX space in Fremont,” he said.

It’s the quintessential, science-fiction dream of the future: Musk says Tesla’s Optimus robots will do everything from cleaning your house to performing surgery.

He’s called Optimus the key to eliminating world poverty, making human work optional and reaching Mars. And he claims they’ll be on sale by the end of 2027.

“Every human on earth is going to have their own personal R2-D2, C3PO,” Musk said in November, referring to the personal robots from Star Wars. “But actually, Optimus will be better than that.”

But critics say these are fever-dream distractions from Tesla’s core automotive business. And plenty of companies, like Boston Dynamics and Figure, are already deep into the humanoid robot business.

Musk’s own success and pay are directly at stake. Tesla must deliver one million Optimus robots within 10 years for Musk to fully realize an almost $1 trillion Tesla pay plan approved by shareholders late last year.

For those of you just joining our program, the humanoid robot boom is a sub-bubble of the AI boom, only sillier. While there's plenty of absurdity to be had in the dealings of OpenAI and the rhetoric around large language models, these algorithms are genuinely impressive and, at the moment, do, at the very least, represent the cutting edge of natural language processing.

The surge of investment and even more over-the-top promises being made about these C-3PO-style robots runs counter to the opinions of pretty much every roboticist who isn't somehow on the payroll. Engineers tend to look down their noses at naive biomimicry. It is telling that very few years ago only perhaps two or three dozen researchers were working in the field at all, and they seemed to be approaching it more as an engineering challenge and something interesting to do rather than a serious attempt to create something useful.

That all stopped more or less overnight when Elon Musk brought out a dancer in a robot suit and said he was about to revolutionize the industry. Despite the basic concept being as flawed as it had ever been, the announcement opened the floodgates of capital and hype.

Even if you accept the absurdity of bipedal humanoids soon dominating the labor market, Tesla is nowhere near the leading player in the field. It's probably not top five. If you count Chinese companies, it's probably not top ten.

Even in its current incarnation, Tesla is wildly overvalued, but compared to what's being proposed, it is the very model of rational valuation.

As if Mike Johnson didn't have enough to worry about...

Unfortunately, though the thought of the porn obsessed hypocrite getting, if you'll pardon the expression, exposed, the victims here (many of them minors) haven't helped suppress the Epstein files or turned a blind eye to war crimes or [too long a list to enumerate]. They just made the mistake of trusting a tech company with some of the most personal data imaginable.

Emanuel Maiberg writing for 404:

An app that purports to help people stop consuming pornography has exposed highly sensitive data, including its users’ masturbation habits. Some of the data exposed includes the users’ age, how often they masturbate, and how viewing pornography makes them feel. According to the data, many of them are minors. 

An example of the personal data of one user said they were “14,” that their “frequency” of porn consumption was “several times a week,” with a maximum of three times a day, and that their “triggers” were “boredom” and “Sexual Urges.” This user was given a “dependence score” and listed their “symptoms” as “Feeling unmotivated, lack of ambition to pursue goals, difficulty concentrating, poor memory or ‘brain fog.’”

We’re not naming the app because the developer has not fixed the issue, which was discovered by an independent security researcher who asked to remain anonymous. The researcher first flagged the issue to the creator of the app in September. The creator of the app said he would fix the issue quickly, but didn’t. The issue is a misconfiguration in the app’s usage of the mobile app development platform Google Firebase, which by default makes it easy for anyone to make themselves an “authenticated” user who can access the app’s backend storage where in many instances user data is stored.

Overall, the researcher said he could access the information of more than 600,000 users of the porn quitting app, 100,000 of which identified as minors. 

The app also invites users to write confessions about their habits. One of these read: “I just can't do this man I honestly don't know what to do know more, such a loser, I need serious help.”

When reached for comment by phone, the creator of the app told me he had talked to the researcher but that the app never exposed any user data because of a misconfigured Google Firebase, and that the researcher could have faked the data I reviewed. 

“There is no sensitive information exposed, that's just not true,” the founder told me. “These users are not in my database, so, like, I just don't give this guy attention. I just think it's a bit of a joke.”

When I asked the founder why he previously thanked the researcher for responsibly disclosing the misconfiguration and said he would rush to fix it, he wished me a good day and hung up.

After the call, I created an account on the app, which the researcher was able to see appear in the misconfigured Google Firebase, showing that user information is still exposed. 

This Google Firebase misconfiguration issue has been known and discussed by security researchers for years, and is still common today. 

 

The Musk Credibility Market

 David Ingram writing for NBC:

 There’s a popular saying among fans of tech billionaire Elon Musk: Never bet against him.

But in the booming world of online prediction markets, some people are not only betting against Musk, but also bringing in big paydays doing so.

On the prediction market websites Kalshi and Polymarket, some bettors are making tens of thousands of dollars by wagering that Musk will fall short on his many ambitious — but so far unrealized — plans, including a robotaxi service in California and a third political party in the United States.

Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has for years issued sweeping public pronouncements on social media, podcasts and earnings calls. His track record is notoriously spotty, with his unfulfilled promises about self-driving cars becoming a meme in their own right. His car service in California still has humans in the driver’s seats, and his political party idea appears dormant. And yet he also oversaw the creation of reusable, self-landing rockets and the meteoric rise of Tesla.

Now, the accuracy of his bluster is getting tested in real time as prediction markets grow in popularity.

David Bensoussan, a Polymarket user whose account is No. 51 on the site’s all-time profits leaderboard (what many call a “whale” for their sizable bets) as of Friday, said he didn’t believe Musk when, during a rift with President Donald Trump last summer, he threatened to form a new political party. So, he bet nearly $10,000 that Musk wouldn’t follow through. He made a 10% return when Musk didn’t.

Bensoussan said he’s not a fan of Musk and takes some pleasure in winning bets against those who may have been seduced by the tech baron.

“He does have a solid fan base, and so if I can help separate them from some of their money, I’m always happy to do that,” he said in a phone interview from Europe, where he’s based.

 The Ingram piece is sharp and well reported, but there are a few points that, at the very least, need to be emphasized.

When we talk about examples of why you shouldn’t bet against Elon Musk and limit ourselves to reality-based incidents, pretty much all of them come from either early in the development of SpaceX or refer to the stock price of Tesla.

It’s possible that no company in history has better demonstrated the principle that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Over the past few years, the company has reached an insane valuation totally unmoored from any business fundamentals.

Other than market cap, the overwhelming majority of the claims Elon Musk has made about not just his two main companies but about XAI, Twitter, the Hyperloop, the Boring Company, DOGE, Optimus, etc., have been so far off the mark as to suggest either deliberate lying or a lack of any real relationship with the truth.

It's true that lots of traders have lost money shorting Tesla, but if you were betting against the actual claims behind Musk's enterprises, the odds have been remarkably good. 

The War on Data -- part [I've lost count]

 Natalie Alms writing for Nextgov/FCW:

The federal statistical system is facing “unprecedented strain, uncertainty and transformation” in the face of staffing losses, funding pressures and threats to statistical integrity, according to a report from the American Statistical Association released in early December. 

“Immediate action must be taken to halt the severe decline in the federal statistical agencies’ ability to meet their basic mission,” it reads. 

Most of the 13 statistical agencies have lost from 20% to 30% of their staff since fiscal 2024, according to the report, as the Trump administration has sought to shrink the size of the federal workforce. 

One of the most extreme examples is the National Center for Education Statistics at the Department of Education, which terminated all but three employees in March, the report says. The organization produces data like the congressionally mandated Nation’s Report Card, meant to show what K-12 students know in subjects like math and science. 

Other statistical agencies also saw workforce losses. The workforce at the Office of Research, Evaluation and Statistics at the Social Security Administration, for example, is now about half its former size. 

 

"ICE > MN" -- even for this administration, you seldom encounter the quiet part this loud

Snapshots from a historic moment.

It's hard to know where to start with this degenerate hogwash. But that last line "ICE > MN" captures it. The ICE agents are superior to the whole state. That's their mentalty and model.

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— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) January 24, 2026 at 5:30 PM

 

Comer on Fox right now urging Trump to pull ICE out of Minneapolis to *punish* Minnesotans — will prove to the state how good it was to have ICE there! This is really some 5-D chess

— Catherine Rampell (@crampell.bsky.social) January 25, 2026 at 7:44 AM

Pulling out the guard always has potential unexpected consequences. Publicly keeping distance from ICE is key.

Minnesota National Guard members have arrived at a federal building and were directed to distribute donuts, coffee, and hot chocolate to anti-ICE protesters. Guard members were issued reflective vests so they would not be mistaken for federal agents.

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— Olga Nesterova (@onestpress.onestnetwork.com) January 25, 2026 at 12:55 PM

Speaking as an old Ozarks boy, you shouldn't underestimate the potential for 2nd amendment issues to drive a wedge into the Trump coalition. 

What the Trump Admin is telling you. -Don't record ICE -Don't carry a gun around ICE -Don't ask ICE for a warrant. So that takes out the 1st, 2nd, and 4th Amendments.

— Amanda Carpenter (@amandacarpenter.bsky.social) January 24, 2026 at 6:32 PM

Having Bessent talking about this may represent an all hands on deck moment within the administration or it may just be poor message discipline.

1. Wasn’t at a protest 2. Was disarmed when they shot him while he was face down 3. New gun rights rule: the second amendment is when conservatives can carry guns everywhere, but if anyone else has a gun we can kill him on sight bsky.app/profile/atru...

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— Adam Serwer (@adamserwer.bsky.social) January 25, 2026 at 9:15 AM

 

For the full impact, look up the Reload on Wikipedia.

Chief Strategist for Rand Paul.

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— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) January 24, 2026 at 1:14 PM

So far the attempt to control the narrative seems to be floundering. 

This is a very good and tough interview by @kristenwelker.bsky.social of the execrable Todd Blanche on @meetthepress.com Also very tough (online) home page display by @nytimes.com Change in MSM tone. Seriously worth watching the whole segment. www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-pre...

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— James Fallows (@jfallows.bsky.social) January 25, 2026 at 8:15 AM

CNN's Dana Bash grilling Bovino as well. And WaPo and WSJ analyses! I hope this new stance/moment lasts. youtu.be/-VBJx116hqk?...

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— S (@vidiot.bsky.social) January 25, 2026 at 8:20 AM

No one has been righter on the political impact of Trump’s immigration terror campaign than Elliott. When know-it-all pundits were demanding Dems shut up about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, he pushed back with hard data and has been utterly vindicated every day since. Dems need to listen to Elliott.

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— David Nir (@davidnir.com) January 24, 2026 at 9:28 PM

From June:

Immigration was a winning issue for Trump in 2024, but no issue is so popular that it can't be turned toxic by sufficient evil, overreach, and incompetence. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-b...

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— markpalko.bsky.social (@markpalko.bsky.social) June 16, 2025 at 6:08 PM

Silver can be problematic, but you can't accuse him of having and anti-Republican bias, so it's difficult to dismiss this analysis. 

Trump is losing normies on immigration

 

Of course, not every commentator has a feel for the moment. 

What a day to post this.

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— Joe Stieb (@joestieb.bsky.social) January 24, 2026 at 3:53 PM

Without diminishing the outrage at the shooting, it's important to remember this is one of many horrors going on in the twin cities. 

Where's your Ed at? Right here.

Ed Zitron has become the leading voice of doom for the AI bubble. He's sharp, combative, knowledgeable, diligent, and he writes faster than Stephen King back in the height of the author's cocaine period. He has become essential reading for anyone following the tech boom that is now the primary driver of the American markets and a major driver of the K-shaped economy. 

This recent Guardian profile gives a good general overview. His blog alternates between free and pay-walled posts. Both tend to run long (very long if you follow the links). He's also a prolific podcaster. Abrasive, mocking and profanity-laden, but given the subjects he has immersed himself in, that may be the only way to stay sane. 

Part One: NVIDIA Isn't Enron - So What Is It?



Part Two: NVIDIA Isn't Enron - So What Is It?

Excellent discussion of Enron's creative use of mark-to-market accounting 

Part Three: NVIDIA Isn't Enron - So What Is It?




And here's an interview with Empires of AI author Karen Hao

Early seventies socially relevant DC has, as a rule, not aged well

There are some exceptions (particularly from Dennis O'Neil), on the whole though...

 The Brave and the Bold #94
February-March 1971
 

The trope of the youth movement  rising up to suppress, imprison, or straight out massacre everyone over thirty-five was extremely common in the late sixties and early seventies and even made it to the covers of mainstream comics. The subgenre is largely forgotten now, but the anxiety it reflected had a great deal to do with the rise of Reagan a few years later.

The title of this comic was an obvious at the time reference to arguably the definitive youth paranoia movie. 

Monday, March 7, 2022

"You say you want a revolution"

This was going to be part of an upcoming post but I decided it worked better freestanding. 

Back in the late sixties there was a surprising popular genre of apocalyptic dystopias inspired by fears of the youth movement. Countless examples in episodic television (three or four from Star Trek alone). The 1967 novel Logan’s Run (but not the 1976 movie which dropped the political aspects of the story). Arguably films If and Clockwork Orange (though in this case, not the book, which is more a part of the post-war panic over juvenile delinquency). Corman’s Gas-s-s-s. Certainly others I’m forgetting. 

Though not the best in the bunch, the most representative was Wild in the Streets.

Wild in the Streets figures prominently in Pauline Kael's essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies": [emphasis added]

There is so much talk now about the art of the film that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art. The Scalphunters, for example, was one of the few entertaining American movies this past year, but skillful though it was, one could hardly call it a work of art — if such terms are to have any useful meaning. Or, to take a really gross example, a movie that is as crudely made as Wild in the Streets — slammed together with spit and hysteria and opportunism — can nevertheless be enjoyable, though it is almost a classic example of an unartistic movie. What makes these movies — that are not works of art — enjoyable? The Scalphunters was more entertaining than most Westerns largely because Burt Lancaster and Ossie Davis were peculiarly funny together; part of the pleasure of the movie was trying to figure out what made them so funny. Burt Lancaster is an odd kind of comedian: what’s distinctive about him is that his comedy seems to come out of his physicality. In serious roles an undistinguished and too obviously hard-working actor, he has an apparently effortless flair for comedy and nothing is more infectious than an actor who can relax in front of the camera as if he were having a good time. (George Segal sometimes seems to have this gift of a wonderful amiability, and Brigitte Bardot was radiant with it in Viva Maria!) Somehow the alchemy of personality in the pairing of Lancaster and Ossie Davis — another powerfully funny actor of tremendous physical presence — worked, and the director Sydney Pollack kept tight control so that it wasn’t overdone.

And Wild in the Streets? It’s a blatantly crummy-looking picture, but that somehow works for it instead of against it because it’s smart in a lot of ways that better-made pictures aren’t. It looks like other recent products from American International Pictures but it’s as if one were reading a comic strip that looked just like the strip of the day before, and yet on this new one there are surprising expressions on the faces and some of the balloons are really witty. There’s not a trace of sensitivity in the drawing or in the ideas, and there’s something rather specially funny about wit without any grace at all; it can be enjoyed in a particularly crude way — as Pop wit. The basic idea is corny — It Can’t Happen Here with the freaked-out young as a new breed of fascists — but it’s treated in the paranoid style of editorials about youth (it even begins by blaming everything on the parents). And a cheap idea that is this current and widespread has an almost lunatic charm, a nightmare gaiety. There’s a relish that people have for the idea of drug-taking kids as monsters threatening them — the daily papers merging into Village of the Damned. Tapping and exploiting this kind of hysteria for a satirical fantasy, the writer Robert Thom has used what is available and obvious but he’s done it with just enough mockery and style to make it funny. He throws in touches of characterization and occasional lines that are not there just to further the plot, and these throwaways make odd connections so that the movie becomes almost frolicsome in its paranoia (and in its delight in its own cleverness).

It's easy to be dismissive of these fears fifty plus years later, but the revolutionary rhetoric of the movement was often extreme and was punctuated by the occasional bombing, bank robbery, etc.

But probably the biggest mistake people made when predicting the impact of the sixties youth movement was taking them at their word, believing that their commitment to radicalism (or even liberalism) would outlast the end of the Vietnam War. The post-war generation would change the country, but I doubt anyone in 1969 would have guessed how. 

 

Acknowledging what these people are while being realistic about what they can and can't do

The tendency of pundits and commentators has been to dramatically underestimate just how bad the intentions of the administration may be. Despite what is now a massive accumulation of evidence, supposedly savvy people remain far too reluctant to acknowledge how far Trump, Miller, Noem, Vance, et al. would be willing—indeed, eager—to go.

At the same time, there is an equally persistent tendency to grossly underestimate the gap between intention and capability.

A commenter on Bluesky offered the perfect analogy:

“if the president says he wants to blow up the moon, you should be very scared about what he might accidentally blow up in pursuit of the moon and everything downstream of his diminished mental state, but the ball is in your court to tell me how he’s actually going to blow up the moon.”

The definitive example here is the recurring claim that Trump will cancel the 2026 election and/or run for a third term. Jamelle Bouie (probably the New York Times’ best surviving pundit) has been on top of this for months.

the question to ask about this is, okay, he wants to cancel the midterms. how does he get the VA state board of elections to cancel the midterms? how does he get the georgia board of elections to do it? how does he convince republican house members to quit their jobs and give up their paychecks?

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— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) January 15, 2026 at 8:29 AM

Bouie realizes that Trump can do terrible things with respect to the election, just not mist of the terrible things he would like to. 

Along similar lines, we hear a lot about the administration looking for an excuse to occupy Los Angeles,* but far less discussion of how they would actually manage to put a metropolitan area with roughly twenty times the population of Minneapolis under military control—particularly given that ICE has reliably turned tail whenever it lacked a clear numerical advantage.

Just to be clear, what we've seen from around the country has been horrifying, but it seems mainly to be masked gangs trying to harass and often terrorize residents. I don't want to understate what's going on, but I doubt that an unpopular administration which has alienated the military could manage an extended occupation of LA, NYC, or Chicago, let alone all three at once. 

That said, this gap does not always work in our favor. If you are counting on TACO, it’s worth remembering that in high-stakes, fast-moving, complex situations, the person bluffing or making empty threats can still lose control of events. The most disturbing scenario here is Greenland.

* Remember: the appropriate unit here is the county.

I didn't expect to be recommending a nearly hour long video essay on Hopalong Cassidy...

Hell, I had no intention of watching the whole thing, but from the "how much did you like the best job you ever had" hook to the end, I never came close to turning it off.

As a piece that combines film criticism, biography, history, and cultural commentary to tell an extended story that pulls you in and leaves you both thoughtful and moved, the obvious precedent is Pauline Kael’s Raising Kane, and Bob Chipman’s essay stands up remarkably well to the comparison. 

Have a safe and contemplative Martin Luther King Jr. Day

 

 “Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.”

 

Now more relevant than ever.

An AI conversation older than me (we just won't say by how much)

I’ve been meaning to post this video, "The Thinking Machine," an episode of CBS’s Tomorrow series made in cooperation with MIT, hosted by David Wayne.

It’s a fascinating look at how people were discussing artificial intelligence in the early sixties. There’s a lot to consider here, but for me the most interesting part may be how little attitudes and expectations have changed.

I’ll probably get some pushback on this, but I suspect that if you went back to 1961 with a version of ChatGPT and showed it to the people in this video, they would be greatly impressed, but if you asked them to guess how long this development took, most would guess substantially less than sixty years.





For camp value, you should definitely check out the script “written” by a computer and featuring veteran character actor Jack Gilford.

I’m going to try to be a little nicer to David Roberts in the future…

…that’s not to say that I won’t criticize him in the future, or that I don’t continue to have some issues with his reporting and analyses, but if it comes down to a judgment call, I’m very much inclined to give the man some slack, because he did something that we desperately need more journalists—and people in positions of authority—to do:

He said he was wrong.

About a month ago, I quote-posted the following.

It's great that Roberts is on the side of the angels here, but did he ever admit that by buying into the benevolent Elon PR package he was part of the problem? See below for details

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— markpalko.bsky.social (@markpalko.bsky.social) December 18, 2025 at 9:08 PM

Here were the West Coast Stat View posts I linked to. As you can see, I did not go easy on Roberts. 
_______________________________________

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

"Musk is not in it for the money."

I need to come back to this article because there's a lot of wrong packed in here but this one brief section needs to be singled out because it spells out one of the fundamental lies upon which the myth of Elon rests. It is a lie that is completely transparent and yet persists to this day.

David Roberts writing for Vox:

Musk is not in it for the money. If all he wanted was money, he wouldn’t keep risking enormous sums of it on schemes that nine out of 10 people predict will fail.

Instead, as he’s been very forthright in saying, he’s trying to address what he sees as humanity’s most pressing problems. 

Even by 2016, it was obvious that Musk had gotten extremely rich from government subsidies and by playing the game mainly with other people's money. Well over a year before the Roberts piece came out, the LA Times laid out in great detail the dependency on taxpayer money while the then upcoming SolarCity merger looked like (and turned out to be) an attempt to have Tesla stockholders save Musk's dying company. And this wasn't the first time he had used investors' money from another company to bail out his ill-conceived solar business.

Musk has now become the world's richest man largely by manipulating stocks, using questionable accounting practices and flat out lying about his products and paradoxically he's gotten away with it in no small part because the standard narrative holds that his motives are pure and he's "not in it for the money."

I suppose we're lucky. Imagine the level of criminal behavior we'd have seen  if he were just motivated by greed.

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Wednesday, August 2, 2023

Saving the world by buying luxury cars was always a painful example of first world thinking.

Following up on Monday's post ("The biggest automotive scandal since VW's Dieselgate and guess who's behind it... "), Edward Niedermeyer, the guy who literally wrote the book on Tesla, provides some important context for the company's latest scandal.

For much of the past decade, Tesla’s popularization of electric vehicles has centered on one innovation above all others: solving “range anxiety,” or the worry that your EV will run out of juice midtrip. By packing more batteries into its cars and establishing a fast-charging network, Elon Musk’s automaker sold the seductive idea that EVs could be a drop-in, one-to-one replacement for gas-powered vehicles. Today, that idea is the most fundamental orthodoxy underpinning the “EV transition,” shaping government policy and consumer tastes alike.

...

From the very beginning, even before Elon Musk was involved with the company, Tesla’s vision was simple: put enough lithium-ion batteries into a car to give it blistering performance and long range. This resulted in a high-end product that was tailor-made to be marketed to the emerging tech elite, with the promise that the resulting high price would be magically reduced through scale and technological innovation. In a landscape of modest, short-range but still not cheap commuter EVs, Tesla’s gas-rivaling range (and later, fast-charging network) felt like a vision of a viable future and not just another hair shirt for environmentalists.

...

Thanks to Tesla’s leadership, consumers are buying the biggest battery EVs they can, thinking that they’re saving the planet when they’re actually hoarding unused batteries to ward off their personal range anxiety. Because Americans only drive 40 miles a day on average, and because 95 percent of car trips are 30 miles or less, the range figures Tesla has normalized are wildly overkill and exacerbate battery supply chain issues that are only just starting to bite. Only wild inefficiency can make it feel like EVs can replace gas cars perfectly, and even then, with the best charging network available, long-distance journeys will still never be as fast and efficient as they are with gas cars, because it will always take longer to juice up an EV.

The big lie at the heart of Tesla’s big-battery approach is that EVs can directly replace gas cars without any real behavioral change on the part of consumers. But no matter how desperate the public and lawmakers are to believe this—it would be nice!—it simply isn’t so: Internal combustion and battery electric vehicles are fundamentally different technologies, with different strengths and weaknesses. No battery electric will ever be as good at unplanned, long-range trips in remote areas as a gas car, just as no gas car will ever refill its tank overnight.

Instead of following Tesla’s lead and getting into a battery-size arms race that will make the future of cars even more expensive, oversized, dangerous, and wasteful than they already are, we simply need to accept that the market must change. Instead of giving the biggest incentives to the biggest batteries, government policy should focus on electrifying the vast majority of daily trips, which start and end at home and could easily be handled by vehicles with 100 miles of range or less. That means incentivizing home charging, not the roadtrips that make up a tiny percentage of trips, and nudging consumers toward using the smallest battery possible for those regular trips. That means incentivizing e-bikes, plug-in hybrids, and other small battery electric vehicles, not holding fleet electrification hostage to the 5 percent use cases.

Musk's promise of salvation without sacrifice has found an eager audience with the technocratic wing of the pundit class, as has the rest of hiss mythology. The idea of Musk and Musk-like tech messiahs  support Noah Smith's gospel of abundance.

It required entrepreneurs like Elon Musk to invest their lives and their fortunes in battery companies that pushed down the cost of batteries through mass production and scale effects, rather than starting companies that made death drones or ad tech.

Musk buys his batteries from Panasonic then lies about their performance. (We'll get into the whole bursting-into-flames thing some other time.)

Vox's David Roberts bought the full service "Musk is not in it for the money." PR package complete with SolarCity scam. Roberts' credulity became a bit easier to understand when I got to this: " (For insight on Musk, see Ashlee Vance’s biography or this invaluable series on Wait But Why.)" 

Vance's book is deeply problematic, a largely trusting account of a serial liar, but at least it looks good in comparison to the WBW posts, which start with an entry entitled "Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man." Things go down hill from there.

Lots of people are now catching on that Musk was and is a con man whose reputation rests on claiming credit for things that were either done by other people or simply made up, but for many of those people there's a lag. They haven't come to terms with the possibility that Elon wasn't a tech messiah because there are no tech messiahs.

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A few hours later, I saw my post on Bluesky had a reply.

Yeah. Mea culpa! I was new to WBW then & somewhat taken with it, before its tragic flaws were clear to me. Same with Musk I guess.

— David Roberts (@volts.wtf) December 18, 2025 at 9:44 PM

You’ll notice he didn’t say “we” were wrong or that “everyone” was wrong. That’s the standard weasel line—something that passes itself off as soul-searching and self-criticism while evading any personal responsibility.

When a publication like The New York Times (arguably the worst offender) says “we all got this wrong” or “no one saw this coming,” it is almost always a lie. If you go back and check the record, you will pretty much invariably see that lots of people—including some prominent and highly respected voices with excellent track records—were pointing out the flaws in the standard narrative in real time, while the mainstream press was either ignoring them or even mocking them for being out of step.

Roberts does not try to evade responsibility by saying we were all wrong about Elon Musk, or even that the majority of his colleagues were also taken in (something that was very much the case). Nor does he resort to the all-too-common claim that his earlier stance on Elon was correct at the time, but that the Tech Messiah has undergone a mysterious Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation in the past five years.

Hearing an unqualified mea culpa is satisfying, but there’s more at stake here than showing character or not being annoying. When journalists and other authorities try to acknowledge now-obvious lapses in reporting, judgment, and analysis without taking responsibility, they are forced to introduce all sorts of small lies, omissions, and distortions to make their case. They can’t be honest with us because they can’t be honest with themselves.

The result is that nothing is learned, making us destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over—sometimes as little as eight years apart.

Just one more, I promise.

Other topics coming soon — as you would imagine, the backlog is considerable — but I did want to wrap up the Fed discussion with a few more clips.

Explaining the (relatively muted) market impact of Trump threatening to jail Fed Chair Powell: Trump talk, talk, talks, and only rarely acts. His talk is alarming, but he TACO's so often that markets have learned not to respond. And so he's broken that feedback loop from politics to markets.

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— Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers.bsky.social) January 13, 2026 at 4:52 AM

Wolfers is the expert here, and he’s very sharp, but I have an issue with his framing. There is a big difference between rarely acting versus acting and then frequently backing down, and a key component of the TACO process up to this point has been pushback, particularly from the markets.

As for the idea that the market’s lack of reaction was because Powell “won,” color me skeptical.

Lotta Q's about why markets didn't respond to Trump's attack on Powell. Lemme 'splain: 1. Markets had (largely) priced in that Trump hates Fed independence. That's not news. 2. But something happened yesterday: The next found of Trump v. Powell. And Powell won! That's news. Markets respond to news

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— Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers.bsky.social) January 13, 2026 at 6:14 AM

What happened over the weekend was a major escalation, and even if we saw the highly dramatic and still more highly unlikely possibility that Trump picks someone unquestionably independent — like, say, Janet Yellen — the Fed will come out of this with seriously damaged credibility. And credibility is really important for this kind of institution.

To be clear, Wolfers is by no means unaware of the danger here.

We've seen this movie before -- In Venezuela, Turkey, and Zimbabwe, a popular strongman came to power with an absurd view of the world, and not enough checks and balances. They destroyed their monetary institutions. Does the US have enough checks and balances to prevent Trump from filming a sequel?

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— Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers.bsky.social) January 13, 2026 at 5:51 AM

We should also take into account the fact that there’s no real sign of the rhetoric cooling, either from Trump or his supporters.

Nice little independent central bank you got right there. Would be a shame if something happened to it.

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— Catherine Rampell (@crampell.bsky.social) January 13, 2026 at 1:31 PM

The Trump Put: "When the market goes up, they should lower [interest] rates."

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— Catherine Rampell (@crampell.bsky.social) January 13, 2026 at 11:19 AM

As Donald Trump grows more desperate and erratic, we are seeing a definite ratcheting action with Powell, with his other economic policies, with mass deportations and with the half dozen or so countries he is now talking about invading. It’s possible that the worst is over, but it’s not a bet I would take.