Having robots follow criminals around to prevent all crime sounds like a perfectly workable plan that's not at all dystopian

One of these days, we need to have a long, hard discussion about the extent to which the establishment press (The New York Times, The Atlantic, and too many others to count) enabled this mess—first by building up the mythology of the Tech Messiah, and more recently by going all-in on the sane-washing of techno-optimism as “abundance.” 

Tesla says shareholders approve Musk's $1 trillion pay plan with over 75% voting in favor
Lora Kolodny

Tesla said shareholders voted in favor of CEO Elon Musk’s almost $1 trillion pay plan, with 75% support among voting shares.

Board members recommended shareholders approve the pay plan, which they introduced in September. Top proxy advisors Glass Lewis and ISS recommended voting against it.

Results of the vote were announced on Thursday at the company’s annual shareholders meeting in Austin, Texas.

 

A few points we’ve made before, but which bear repeating:

It is impossible to justify Tesla’s current market cap—let alone the proposed compensation package—based on the company’s existing lines of business. The only plausible arguments rest on the assumption that Tesla will achieve monopoly or near-monopoly control over multiple new technologies that will prove profitable beyond precedent.

Two of these—autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots—would each have to exceed even the most optimistic serious estimates of their potential market. The case for large-language-model generative AI is somewhat more controversial, but even that doesn’t matter because…

Tesla is far behind its competitors in all of these fields, with no credible plan for catching up. It is, at best, a distant second to Waymo in the robo-taxi market and continues to fall further behind. It’s probably in fourth or fifth place in generative AI (unless you count pornography, where it does seem to have taken the lead). In robotics, it’s arguably even lower in the rankings. Across all of these sectors, its competitors have a considerable lead in both technology and talent.

Despite all this, Musk’s claims have grown even more grandiose—now constantly tipping into the delusional. He is explicitly promising to end all human want, to satisfy all of our material desires and physical needs, up to and including having robot housekeepers that can also perform delicate surgeries—presumably between cooking dinner and vacuuming the living room.

As commentators have (perhaps too) eagerly pointed out, receiving that full trillion-dollar payout requires meeting a number of highly unlikely conditions. But it’s important not to forget that Elon’s current compensation package is obscene; the company’s valuation—which is the source of most of his wealth—defies all rules of business, logic, and mathematics. And perhaps most importantly, even meeting some of those conditions will unlock mind-boggling amounts of money.

Ed Niedermeyer (who literally wrote the book on Tesla) was there and taking notes.

"But believe it or not, you won't find it so hot If you ain't got the do re mi. "

Giving the devil his due, good story from the New York Times on how Silicon Valley used the narrative that promised unlimited opportunities for those who learned coding to create an oversupply of potential tech workers. As always, with their reporting on these types of stories, there is a huge hot dog suit guy element -- the NYT very much played a role in this -- but that doesn't take anything away from Natasha Singer's work here.

The underlying strategy of creating the false impression of unlimited demand to generate an oversupply of labor isn't exactly new, nor is it the first time it centered on the Golden State.

"Indefensible on any artistic level but..."

 Picking back up on our film criticism thread—specifically, critics versus reviewers. As previously discussed, the defining difference between criticism and reviews is the intended audience. Criticism is (or at least should be) directed at people who are, to some degree, familiar with the subject. Reviews, on the other hand, are primarily intended to provide information for those who are considering watching, reading, or listening to a work of art. I previously mentioned that the best movie reviews came from the team behind the Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide—back when that was still a thing. Here's one of my favorite examples, which also ties into our earlier discussion about art versus good trash.

 

With Eraser, a critic has little to work with. There's nothing to talk about here thematically or aesthetically. There's no attempt to push the medium, no psychological insights, no social commentary. To the extent that important issues are touched upon, it's strictly for the purpose of providing convenient situations and stock villains. Everyone in front of and behind the camera turns in solid, professional work, but, with the possible exception of the stunt choreographers, there are no interesting or unexpected artistic choices.

We could always play film school dropout and analyze what does or does not make a given scene effective -- if we wanted to go down that road, we could probably kill half an hour just on the airplane sequence -- but in terms of criticizing this movie as a work of art, there's simply nothing to say—and that's okay.

So how about the other side? Is there something a reviewer should say about Eraser?

Yes. Exactly what they wrote. Not a word more, not a word less. This is a perfect review. It tells potential viewers exactly what they're in for—and not in for—and gives them a clear sense of whether or not they'll enjoy the film.

 And I love that closing sentence.

If Mamdani wins, please keep your think pieces to yourself

 

When trying to make sense of complicated events, we have to accept that we’ll probably never know exactly what caused what—or to what degree. The data will always be murky. That said, we can make reasonable assumptions about causality based on common sense, particularly if we’re wary of politicians and pundits trying to force their personal hobby horses into the race. Though not foolproof, you’ll generally do well to limit your speculation to the simple and obvious—if those things are enough to explain what you’re seeing.

The primary focus of discussion around the race has been ideological. Based on various headlines and opinion pieces, you might get the impression that free bus rides and some modest rent control represent the final stages of the great Marxist revolution. The second-biggest theme has been ethnic and demographic, despite little evidence showing those factors as major drivers. Commentary has also spent a great deal of time insisting that Mamdani tells us something important about national political trends—despite New York City’s long history of being a beast of its own.

As with so many major political stories, the NYC mayor’s race has mainly been an excuse for people to make arguments they already wanted to make. We’ve seen this from both the left and the right. We’ve also seen—almost entirely from the pro–Andrew Cuomo crowd—a lot of “it’s not really about the hunting, is it?” think pieces. These almost inevitably come from pro-establishment types (with The New York Times, of course, looming large) who are desperate to talk about anything other than the establishment’s responsibility for pushing this walking embarrassment onto the voters of the country’s largest city.
(I am contractually obliged at this point to remind everyone that there are more Angelenos than New Yorkers, but since we’re specifically talking about cities here, NYC does hold the crown.)

If we put aside the hobby horses and the disingenuous arguments and limit ourselves to things that are almost certainly hurting Andrew Cuomo, what do we come up with?

 

He’s a disgraced and scandal-ridden former governor. His death toll during COVID would normally be enough to end a political career. His history of sexual harassment is so long and well-documented it has its own Wikipedia page. His qualifications for both governor and mayor seem largely limited to being the son of a famous father. (Question for current and former New Yorkers in the audience: how well-loved or even remembered is Mario Cuomo? As far as I recall, he was best known for teasing the press about presidential runs, but back in Arkansas we didn’t follow New York State politics all that closely.)

His campaign strategy seems modeled after the scene with Sideshow Bob in the field of rakes.

His displays of entitlement...

 

and incompetence

 

have been stunning even by nepo-baby standards.

Plus, he just comes off as a racist asshole.

By comparison, Mamdani is charming, personable, and has run a strong, sure-footed campaign. There’s nothing mysterious about him being ahead in the polls, nothing that requires convoluted explanations or close readings of the political and analytical tea leaves, no need for 10,000 words on what this says about Americans' attitudes toward socialism or youth or even Trump. Just the opposite.

As mentioned in a previous post: 

There's an exaggerated (but not all that exaggerated) account of the death of Rasputin that goes something like this: the controversial monk was, within the space of a few hours, poisoned, shot, bludgeoned, shot again, and then dumped into an icy Russian River where he drowned. 

There’s a corollary to the famous definition of news as “man bites dog”: unusual events merit coverage. 

The same can be said for unexpected or seemingly unlikely events. We might say it’s not news that Rasputin died; it would’ve been news if he had survived. Same goes for Cuomo.

 

I don't think the administration is going to try to suppress the vote in L.A. (because I don’t think they can).

 

L.A. County is home to more than nine million people, spread over 4,000 square miles. Registered voters received their ballots a month ago. As soon as they arrived, voters could drop them in the mail or deposit them at one of more than 400 secure, 24-hour drop boxes located across the county. Within a couple of days of being received, voters with email accounts were notified that their ballots had been properly counted. According to the city, more than half of residents vote by mail in a typical election,  and there are reasons to expect early voting to be higher this time. 

For those who preferred or needed to show up in person, early voting centers have been open for some time. The state has also maintained a strong presence to ensure no one interferes with the process.

I doubt even this administration could be so stunningly ignorant of the facts on the ground as to believe it could have any real impact — at least not in its favor — on the vote (though that may be a weak spot in my argument). It's possible that this is an attempt to drum evidence of "irregularities" or it might be nothing more than another attempted display of dominance, reacting to a real counterblow with empty bluster.

This ties into a couple of larger points that don’t get the attention they should:

First, as Krugman and Marshall have pointed out, the playbook Trump is using is largely modeled on that of strongmen like Putin and Orbán, who were riding high in popularity and overseeing rapidly recovering economies. There’s no reason to believe these techniques will be as effective under current circumstances — and considerable reason to think they might backfire.

Second — and this is the one no one talks about — the United States is a big country, both geographically and demographically. Despite the impression given by movies like Red Dawn, it would be extraordinarily difficult to impose anything resembling sustained martial law over even just the blue states, especially when the majority in those regions oppose the government.

A group that controls all three branches of the federal government and has abandoned any pretense of following the Constitution or the rule of law can, and likely will, do horrifying things — but it can’t do everything it wants. It’s essential to remember, when fighting back, that though the side in power may have huge advantages, it still faces real constraints.

The worst mistake the opposition can make is imagining them as omnipotent.

Twelve years ago at the blog -- a Halloween themed repost

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Martians and metadata

 

Just in case you don't know the story:

The War of the Worlds is an episode of the American radio drama anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was performed as a Halloween episode of the series on October 30, 1938, and aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. Directed and narrated by actor and future filmmaker Orson Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds (1898).

[Written primarily by Howard Koch who went on to do some other interesting work, but nobody talks about the writer.* ]

The first two thirds of the 60-minute broadcast were presented as a series of simulated news bulletins, which suggested to many listeners that an actual alien invasion by Martians was currently in progress. Compounding the issue was the fact that the Mercury Theatre on the Air was a sustaining show (it ran without commercial breaks), adding to the program's realism. Although there were sensationalist accounts in the press about a supposed panic in response to the broadcast, the precise extent of listener response has been debated.

In the days following the adaptation, however, there was widespread outrage and panic by certain listeners, who had believed the events described in the program were real. The program's news-bulletin format was described as cruelly deceptive by some newspapers and public figures, leading to an outcry against the perpetrators of the broadcast. Despite these complaints--or perhaps in part because of them--the episode secured Welles' fame as a dramatist.

Of course, no one who heard the whole broadcast panicked. The first line listeners heard clearly spelled out what was about to come: "The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells."

But most of the people who were listening when the show ended hadn't heard the beginning of the show. They had been listening to one of the highest rated acts on radio, a ventriloquist named Edgar Bergen (you might want to take a minute to reflect on the concept of a radio ventriloquist before continuing). About fifteen minutes into the hour, the show cut to a musical interlude and people started channel surfing.

Though we don't normally think of it in those terms, the title of a program is data, as is the author. We feed it into the algorithm we use to interpret what we see, or in this case, hear. People who didn't hear the words  "The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells" tried to impute the genre based on the information they heard when they first tuned in to what seemed to be a reporter covering a disaster.

Check out the first few minutes and think about what you'd conclude.



PBS has a special commemorating the anniversary, but I'm staying loyal to the original medium and recommending this radio documentary produced for KPCC.



* Welles' relationship with Koch in some ways foreshadowed the controversy over Citizen Kane. Here's Pauline Kael's summary.

The Mercury group wasn’t surprised at Welles’s taking a script credit; they’d had experience with this foible of his. Very early in his life as a prodigy, Welles seems to have fallen into the trap that has caught so many lesser men—believing his own publicity, believing that he really was the whole creative works, producer-director-writer-actor. Because he could do all these things, he imagined that he did do them. (A Profile of him that appeared in The New Yorker two years before Citizen Kane was made said that “outside the theatre … Welles is exactly twenty-three years old.”) In the days before the Mercury Theatre’s weekly radio shows got a sponsor, it was considered a good publicity technique to build up public identification with Welles’s name, so he was credited with just about everything, and was named on the air as the writer of the Mercury shows. Probably no one but Welles believed it. He had written some of the shows when the program first started, and had also worked on some with Houseman, but soon he had become much too busy even to collaborate; for a while Houseman wrote them, and then they were farmed out. By the time of the War of the Worlds broadcast, on Halloween, 1938, Welles wasn’t doing any of the writing. He was so busy with his various other activities that he didn’t always direct the rehearsals himself, either—William Alland or Richard Wilson or one of the other Mercury assistants did it. Welles might not come in until the last day, but somehow, all agree, he would pull the show together “with a magic touch.” Yet when the Martian broadcast became accidentally famous, Welles seemed to forget that Howard Koch had written it. (In all the furor over the broadcast, with front-page stories everywhere, the name of the author of the radio play wasn’t mentioned.) Koch had been writing the shows for some time. He lasted for six months, writing about twenty-five shows altogether—working six and a half days a week, and frantically, on each one, he says, with no more than half a day off to see his family. The weekly broadcasts were a “studio presentation” until after the War of the Worlds (Campbell’s Soup picked them up then), and Koch, a young writer, who was to make his name with the film The Letter in 1940 and win an Academy Award for his share in the script of the 1942 Casablanca, was writing them for $75 apiece. Koch’s understanding of the agreement was that Welles would get the writing credit on the air for publicity purposes but that Koch would have any later benefit, and the copyright was in Koch’s name. (He says that it was, however, Welles’s idea that he do the Martian show in the form of radio bulletins.) Some years later, when C.B.S. did a program about the broadcast and the panic it had caused, the network re-created parts of the original broadcast and paid Koch $300 for the use of his material. Welles sued C.B.S. for $375,000, claiming that he was the author and that the material had been used without his permission. He lost, of course, but he may still think he wrote it. (He frequently indicates as much in interviews and on television.)

 

Halloween Deep Cuts

Having gone off on content farms, I should probably explain why,  despite cranking out a ton of videos What Culture is actually one of the good guys, but it's late so, for now, you'll just have to take my word on it.

The following is a prime example, a great list of obscure and unfairly forgotten horror films ranging from recent releases to Universal (Son of Dracula) and Hammer (Captain Kronos). These guys genuinely know their stuff. 

"Back in my day, the internet was really something."

The fundamental challenge of the internet has always been a variation on the old Steven Wright line: “You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?” Or, in this case—how would you find it? Given the vast quantity of content, how do you connect users with what they're looking for? 

Even when things were working as they were supposed to, this was an increasingly daunting problem: ever-growing content, link rot, and even before AI slop, content farms flooding algorithms with SEO-optimized garbage. Add Sora and ChatGPT to the mix, and you have a scenario where the good new content (and yes, it’s still flowing in) is lost in a tidal wave of crap.

This might not be so bad if the gatekeepers were stepping up to the moment, but instead we’re seeing the opposite. Alphabet’s Google—and in particular YouTube—turn a blind eye to content farms that violate their standards and even endanger their audience (such as recommending a fun kids' activity involving using plastic straws to blow bubbles in molten sugar).

[Even if you have no interest in cooking, you should check out all of food scientist Ann Reardon’s debunking videos.]

5-min crafts DESTROYED my microwave! 

They aggressively push AI slop even when no one seems to be clicking. (I have no idea why the algorithm thinks I would be interested in any of these but my feed is full of them.)

Worse yet, search functions on major platforms are declining in both functionality and quality.

From Matthew Hughes’ highly recommended What We Lost

 Allow me to confess something that will, for many of the readers of this newsletter, make me seem immediately uncool. I like hashtags.

I like hashtags because they act as an informal taxonomy of the Internet, making it easier to aggregate and identify content pertaining to specific moments or themes. In a world where billions of people are posting and uploading, hashtags act as a useful tool for researchers and journalists alike. And that’s without mentioning the other non-media uses of hashtags — like events, activism, or simply as a tool for small businesses to reach out to potential customers.

You see where this is going. A few years ago, Instagram killed the hashtag by preventing users from sorting them by date. In its place, Instagram would show an algorithmically-curated selection of posts that weren’t rooted in any given moment in time. It might put a post from 2017 next to one from the previous day.

What happens if you just scroll through and try to look at every post with the hashtag, hoping to see the most recent posts through sheer brute force? Ha, no.

Instagram will, eventually, stop showing new posts. On any hashtag with tens of thousands of posts, you’ll likely only see a small fraction of them — and that’s by design. Or, said another way, Instagram is directly burying content that users explicitly state that they wish to see. Essentially, your visibility into a particular hashtag is limited to what Instagram will allow.

Additionally, users can’t refine their search by adding an additional term to a hashtag. If you type in “#EvertonFC Goodison Park,” it’ll reply with “no results found.”

Premier League, and Goodison Park is the stadium it used until this year. There should be thousands of posts that include these terms. It’s like searching for “#NYYankees Yankee Stadium” — something that you’d assume, with good reason, to have mountains of photos and videos attached to it.

Additionally, when you search for a hashtag on Instagram, the app will show you content that doesn’t include the hashtag as exactly written, but has terms that resemble that hashtag. As a result, hashtags are effectively useless as a tool for creating taxonomies of content, or for discoverability.

Most of the points I’ve raised haven’t been covered anywhere — save for the initial announcement that Instagram would be discontinuing the ability to organize hashtags by date. And even when that point was mentioned, it was reported as straight news, with no questioning as to whether Instagram might have an incentive to destroy hashtags, or whether the points that Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri would later make (that hashtags were a major vector for “problematic” content) were true.

When Moseri would later say that hashtags didn’t actually help drive discoverability or engagement, that too was repeated unquestionably by a media that, when it comes to the tech industry, is all too content to act as stenographers rather than inquisitors. It’s a point that’s easily challenged by looking at the Instagram subreddit, where there are no shortage of people saying that the changes to hashtags had an adverse impact on their businesses, or their ability to find content from smaller creators.

We should probably talk about the decline of Google search at this point but that needs a post of its own. 

 

It's important to note these Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether moments

One of these days, we’ll have to have a serious, extended discussion about the complex dynamics and interlocking ecosystems of conspiracy theorists and the world of pseudoscience — about how fundamentalists, MAGA types, and techno-optimists find common ground, and how the feelings of paranoia and persecution rampant in these groups create such a fertile breeding ground for all this craziness.

For now, though, we just need to stop and acknowledge how far things have gone.

According to the federal government, AM radio talk-show theories about toxic contrails and secret hurricane-making machines merit serious inquiry while vaccines and global warming are now dangerous fringe science.

Notes on Mr. Arkadin

 [The world's second richest man may be buying yet another storied Hollywood studio so I've been working through the Warners catalog, particularly their Janus/Criterion collection in case I need to cut ties with another streaming service. I thought I'd jot down some impressions along the way. -- MP 10/8/25]

 

Clearly a low-budget effort with a few notable character actors but no name stars other than Welles himself. In what I assume was an effort to save money, Welles apparently hired only cameramen under 4 ft tall, which explains why most of the interior scenes that aren’t full-face close-ups were filmed from waist height.

In general, the direction feels almost like a parody of Orson Welles, with dutched cameras, scenes shot through latticework, expressionistic shadows cast on the walls, etc. A contemporary review of Dumbo said that it had more camera angles than Citizen Kane. Mr. Arkadin has more camera angles than Dumbo.

The main problem with the movie isn’t the budget; it’s the script. Pretty much everyone agrees Welles actually wrote this one, and his limitations definitely show through. That’s not to say there isn’t a great deal of good stuff here — scenes, bits of dialogue, ideas that could have been first-rate had he worked with a collaborator who was sharp enough to see what was worth saving and strong enough not to be pushed around.

The result is absolutely essential for a true Orson Welles fan, a sharp pass for the general public, and somewhere in the middle for the rest of us. 

Boyle's slightly less pessimistic take on the Gen AI bubble.

We've been beating the AI bubble quite a bit lately, partially because the widespread belief that there's a bubble is a story in itself and partially because I find most of the argument from the nothing-to-worry-about crowd unconvincing and motivated (they mainly come from AI true believers).

That said, there is a bit of gray area between the two extremes and we haven't done a very good job capturing that part of the debate. To address that, here's a more nuanced take from Patrick Boyle.  

Remember that quote from Citizen Kane?

"You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars *next* year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... sixty years." *

Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet have lots of money and can keep this rate of spending for a long time. There’s some question as to whether even they can maintain the growth rates being projected by some in the industry, but as long as the big guys remain reasonably committed, the bubble has at least some protection from implosion—if not from deflation.

The current situation is not sustainable. At some point in the near to nearish future, unless these products and services go from losing money to being enormously profitable, the major players will cut their losses and it's going to be ugly whether it happens fast or slow. 

* This line was taken almost verbatim from George Hearst's response to people telling him about his publisher son's profligate spending.

"Did you hear the one about the huge bubble threatening to take down the economy?"

Normally, you would expect investors to be more easily spooked as talk of a bubble became increasingly ubiquitous, but whatever the investors of 2025 are, it is certainly not skittish. Even the worst economic or political news only chases them away for, at best, a day.

Of course, this is not a normal bubble in any sense. Its magnitude dwarfs even the dot-com bubble. It was preceded by a level of gods-or-ashes hype unlike anything I've ever seen. The people behind it have unprecedented wealth and power. It is hitting a market that has run out of “next big things” and is desperate for the next one. Perhaps most important, the executives running the world's largest companies have decided to pump trillions of dollars into the technology.

Whatever the reason, we have now reached the point where the idea that OpenAI, Nvidia, etc. are a bubble has become so widespread that you can see it everywhere—from stories in The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times to segments on late-night talk shows.

 

For fans of Adam Ruins Everything, Adam Conover also covers much of the same material bu in greater depth. 

In the late 1920s, having your doorman offer stock tips was famously an indicator that it was time to get out of the market. Perhaps in the 2020s it's having comics use the bubble as a punchline. 

A bubble story that's not about AI.

First, the obligatory disclaimers:

Nothing I'm about to say or have ever said about housing should be taken as a blanket condemnation of YIMBY ideas and proposals. I happen to agree with most of them, even the overly simplistic ones featured in The New York Times.

If this were just a question of being right — or at least being directionally right — the majority of the time, I wouldn't have wasted all this time writing a seemingly endless series of posts on the subject. Unfortunately there's more to it..

The housing discourse is embarrassingly dysfunctional even by the abysmal standards of the 2020s. The standard narrative is presented without question as absolute truth, despite being simplistic, often monocausal, heavily reliant on outliers and unrepresentative data, and unforgivably slow to acknowledge conflicting data even when it seriously threatens the major tenets of the arguments.

Case in point, the fixation on zoning along with hypocritical liberals as the primary big bads of the story. In case you think I'm misrepresenting their case. 

 

Here's Krugman with an early and less shrill) version of the zoning argument.  [Emphasis added.]

 Many bubble deniers point to average prices for the country as a whole, which look worrisome but not totally crazy. When it comes to housing, however, the United States is really two countries, Flatland and the Zoned Zone.

In Flatland, which occupies the middle of the country, it’s easy to build houses. When the demand for houses rises, Flatland metropolitan areas, which don’t really have traditional downtowns, just sprawl some more. As a result, housing prices are basically determined by the cost of construction. In Flatland, a housing bubble can’t even get started.

But in the Zoned Zone, which lies along the coasts, a combination of high population density and land-use restrictions – hence “zoned” – makes it hard to build new houses. So when people become willing to spend more on houses, say because of a fall in mortgage rates, some houses get built, but the prices of existing houses also go up. And if people think that prices will continue to rise, they become willing to spend even more, driving prices still higher, and so on. In other words, the Zoned Zone is prone to housing bubbles. 

 

 Don't get me wrong, there are certainly some horrible zoning laws out there and there's no question that they make the housing crisis worse, perhaps much worse, but when you try to make tearing them down your panacea, you run into data like this.  

A new real estate report confirms something that Houstonians pretty much already knew: The city of Houston saw a significant increase in housing prices among U.S. cities within the last decade, with median home prices skyrocketing up to 86 percent.

The report by online real estate database PropertyShark analyzed median home sale prices in 41 of the most populous U.S. cities and locales in 2014 and 2023. According to the study, the median sale price of a home in Houston in 2014 was $142,000. A decade later, median housing prices in the city nearly doubled, landing at $264,000 in 2023.

 

So is Houston one of those few heavily zoned red state cities? Not just "no," but "Hell, No." 

Why doesn’t Houston have zoning? 

Unlike other cities, Houston never successfully voted to put zoning restrictions in place. 

“The lack of zoning started at the Big Bang, the creation of the universe,” joked Matthew Festa, South Houston College of Law professor and land use attorney.  “…We’ve never had zoning, so it didn’t really start. It just never happened.” 

The city charter requires a binding referendum vote from residents or a six-month waiting period for public comment and debate of a zoning ordinance. Houston officials brought it to the ballot in 1948, 1962 and 1993. Voters rejected it each time.

For Christian Menefee, the county attorney, the lack of zoning makes his work more difficult. Just this year, the Harris County Attorney’s Office – led by Menefee – sued the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for approving a permit for a concrete batch plant across from a hospital in Kashmere Gardens. A move that would be far more difficult or impossible with zoning laws. 

“We have numerous concrete batch plants in Fifth Ward and Near North Side,” said Menefee. “(No zoning) makes our lives fighting these situations difficult because then we have to go and try and seek every legal remedy at the state level.” 

Just to reiterate, lots of zoning laws are bad. Just like lots of simplistic narratives about housing.

Cheering for fire trucks and crossing with the light- - notes on a Portlandia/Spirit Halloween protest.

As promised, here's how I spent my Saturday afternoon. 

LA is huge, and I didn’t feel like dealing with the traffic or parking that would come with one of the really big demonstrations, so I opted for one here in Burbank, next to my local library. I’m not going to try to guesstimate crowd sizes — there’s more than enough of that available elsewhere — but it was a good turnout, with the small park fairly full.

Rather than focusing on numbers, here are some more subjective and anecdotal observations.

I’ve seen the mood of the demonstrations described elsewhere as a big block party, and that about perfectly captures it. It felt festive and cheerful. Though anger was what brought people out, I don’t recall seeing anyone actually angry. You saw cheerful seniors in wheelchairs, elementary school kids timidly asking if they could have their pictures taken with a dinosaur (the answer was always yes), funny signs, and elaborate costumes being compared. Just a bunch of folks from the neighborhood having a good time defending democracy.

The Portlandia / Spirit Halloween aesthetic has proven to be an ideal response to the administration’s push toward fascism. With the possible exception of misinformed economic concerns, Trump’s return to power was mainly the result of his success at playing on fears of social upheaval — fears rooted largely in racism. Inflatable frogs and dancing grandmas completely undercut that. It’s not surprising that Republican frustration with these images has been palpable.

The administration’s messaging is further undercut by the fact that, like the Burbank protest, so much of the No Kings movement has been, if anything, slightly disproportionately white. The Republicans’ attempts to portray the protests as collections of militant Islamists and other “scary” types engaging in violent insurrection have pretty much collapsed. It’s impossible to frighten white suburbanites with middle-aged wine moms and Barney the Dinosaur. It’s no coincidence that Fox News has gone from warning its viewers about Marxist revolutionaries to mocking No Kings for having “too many old people.” (Side note: given the network’s own demographics, perhaps not the best strategy.)

From what I’ve seen both online and in person, protesters seem to grasp the importance of not giving the administration or conservative media anything that could be depicted as threatening. One thing that struck me was that, while large groups would march from one side of Buena Vista and Verdugo to the other, they always did it with the light and were careful not to actually impede traffic.

On a probably related note, for the entire two hours — or at least the hour and forty-five minutes that I was there — there was a constant cacophony of honking horns from passing motorists, most smiling and giving the protesters a thumbs-up, which was met with cheers and waves in return. It would be interesting to get a count of those showing approval, but I can say it had to be a large number.

The biggest cheer of the day came when a hook-and-ladder truck from the Burbank Fire Department drove past the demonstration, honking and waving with an American flag flying from the back.

One comment I made to a friend at the rally — and have since seen echoed online — was that there were an awful lot of American flags for what was supposed to be a “hate America” rally. That was combined with a great deal of patriotic imagery: a protester dressed as Abraham Lincoln, countless references to the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence. Many signs referenced 1776. Much of what I saw would not have been out of place at a Fourth of July parade. 

Tweet-posting History

In a day or two, I’ll have a first-hand account from one of the Los Angeles No Kings protests, but for today I thought I’d do a big-picture post on the demonstrations.

First off, the numbers were huge.

Somewhere around 2% of the population of the the United States showed up for a peaceful Saturday afternoon.  

 

Among the many remarkable things about the turnout, perhaps the most notable is the fact that the number is growing when, by most standards, it should have shrunk. The first No Kings Day was, in large part, a counter-protest prompted by anger and embarrassment over Trump attempting to throw himself a North Korean–style military parade for his birthday.

This was just a generic Saturday afternoon in October of 2025. 

 

As before, the where was often even more surprising 

Dothan, AL, voted for Trump by almost two to one.

 

Perhaps by this point, we should not be surprised that the NYT didn't live up to the journalistic standards of the Dothan Eagle.

To their credit, the NYT wasn't the worst. 

The Republican reaction ranged from whiny...

Corollary: when comics started printing "Collector's Edition" on the cover, they ceased being financially worth collecting.

 

 

If you look up a copy of the Overstreet Price Guide from 1990 on the Internet Archive, you will find a large number of 25- to 35-year-old titles that were selling at the time for more than $1,000. If you did the same thing today, you would find only two. Add to that 35 years of inflation and the fact that comics in the Silver Age ranged from 10 to 15 cents, while in the 90s, the titles were more likely to cost two or three dollars.

So, what changed? There were cultural shifts in the '70s and '80s, particularly around comic books as a medium. Boomers hit their prime earning years and decided that they didn’t have to put aside childish things. Most of all, though, people realized that old comic books in mint condition could be worth serious money.

In the '40s, '50s, and '60s, comics were a fragile and disposable medium. They grew brittle with time. They faded in the light. Even relatively careful reading would leave them creased and torn. A few fans did keep their comics in pristine condition, but it was strictly a labor of love. No one was treating that first appearance of Spider-Man as an investment.

In the '70s, known to comic book fans as the Bronze Age, the collector's market started to emerge, and people began paying more and more for that limited supply. Particularly with the so-called Golden Age titles, the numbers were tiny. It has been suggested that there are fewer than 100 collectible-quality copies of Action Comics #1 featuring the first appearance of Superman.

It was around this point that people started thinking of comic books as something of tremendous potential value, which ironically guaranteed that no comic book would ever shoot up to tremendous values again.

By the 1980s, many, if not most, comic book buyers were to some degree treating their purchases as potential investments. As a result, a large share of virtually every title published by DC or Marvel remained in mint or near-mint condition. It became almost impossible to get the supply low enough to bring in astronomical returns.

 

A partial exception, which actually proves the rule, would be the most valuable comic book published in the '90s ($2,000). Bone is one of the most beloved comics of the past 40 years, but it started out as a tiny self-published venture. Over the years, it would grow through word of mouth and glowing reviews, eventually becoming one of the best-selling titles of the past few decades. However, very few people bought that first issue, and even with that extremely limited supply, the growth and value were nothing compared to what we saw with the titles of the Silver Age. Once everyone started putting their comics in bags, the gold rush was over.

There's an ongoing war against the very concepts of public domain and fair use and it's something we should be talking about.

I realize you've got a lot on your plate and I'm constantly coming up with more things to worry about, but major media companies such as Universal Music Group, with the help of companies like Alphabet, are using questionable and often out-and-out fraudulent copyright claims to harass creators while ignoring legitimate copyrights when it suits their purposes. 

Thought you ought to know. 

 

Engineering prof uses a computer to play Bach's Prelude no 1. YouTube goes after him for copyright infringement. 

 

 

 If Beato's clips don't qualify as fair use, the term has no meaning. 

And you thought consultants were overpaid before...

 

 

"Deloitte Australia will issue a partial refund to the federal government after admitting that artificial intelligence had been used in the creation of a $440,000 report littered with errors including three nonexistent academic references and a made-up quote from a Federal Court judgement."

 

One of— and probably the— central problems with LLM-based tools is that you need to find that sweet spot where the flexibility adds real value but the results are easily checked.

I’ve found I can get pretty good value out of something like ChatGPT as long as I work in manageable chunks and keep the process as transparent as possible. With coding, that usually comes down to reasonably sized macros, functions, and queries that I can quickly test for errors. With proofreading, it means only looking at a few paragraphs at a time and instructing the chatbot to make minimal corrections and list all changes.

Using the tool to come up with actual information is very seldom worthwhile. It almost always comes down to one of two extreme cases: either the answers are something I could find in a more usable form with a couple of minutes of searching or by just hitting Wikipedia; or confirming the information would take longer (and always be less informative) than doing the research myself. Google’s AI is somewhat more useful, but only because it provides relevant links — which I inevitably need to follow to make sure the information is good.

For bigger jobs, you almost always run into the same underlying problem that makes autonomous driving so dangerous in most situations. Though it seems paradoxical, humans generally find it easier to focus on doing a task than to focus on making sure a task is being done properly. There’s been a ton of research on this in areas like aeronautics. It turns out that not only is it difficult to maintain your attention on an autonomous system; it’s more difficult the better the system works. The more miles your “self-driving” car goes without an incident, the less likely you are to be ready to grab the wheel when it does.

LLMs also play to two great temptations: the desire to get that first draft out of the way and the promise we make ourselves to fix something later. First steps can be daunting — often nearly to the point of paralysis — but they can very seldom be outsourced. It’s easy to see the appeal of letting an AI-based tool grind out that initial work, but the trouble is twofold. First, the dreary and time-consuming process of research does more than simply compile information; it builds understanding on the part of the researcher. Second, while it is beyond easy to tell ourselves that we will diligently check what we’re given, that often turns out to be more dreary and time-consuming than it would have been to simply do the work ourselves in the first place. After a while, attention wavers and our fact-checking grows more cursory. Add to that the looming deadlines that govern the life of a consultant, and you virtually guarantee AI-generated nonsense will make its way into important and expensive reports.

Given the incentives, I guarantee you that Australian report is not an isolated incident. It is remarkable only because it was detected.

 

_____________________________

 

 

 

Fourteen years ago at the blog: the "a pervasive fetish" line actually holds up better today than it did then

From "The Rot-Com Bubble" by Ed Zitron. 

The noxious growth-at-all-costs mindset of the Rot Economy sits at the core of every issue that I've ever written about. It’s the force that drives businesses to grow bigger rather than better, making more products to conquer more markets rather than making products or services that people need or improving products they already like.

...

This belief — that exponential growth is not just a reasonable expectation, but a requirement — is central to the core rot in the tech industry, and as these rapacious demands run into reality, the Rot-Com bubble has begun to deflate. As we speak, the tech industry is grappling with a mid-life crisis where it desperately searches for the next hyper-growth market, eagerly pushing customers and businesses to adopt technology that nobody asked for in the hopes that they can keep the Rot Economy alive.

The Rot Economy and tech's growth-lust isn't new. Venture capital has been incentivizing and monetizing the rot for over a decade, with Marc Andreessen advocating in 2011 that we should look to "expand the number of innovative new software companies created" rather than "constantly questioning their valuations." Yet, just one year earlier in March 2010, his partner Ben Horowitz advocated for "fat startups," saying that you "can't save your way to winning the market," and that "startup purgatory" is when you "don't go bankrupt, but you fail to build the number one product in the space" and have "zero chance of becoming a high-growth company," which Horowitz describes as "worse than startup hell" because you're "stuck with the small company," even if it's cash-flow positive.

At the time, it made sense — even if there’s something inherently abnormal about describing a stable, profitable company as being in a state that’s “worse than hell.” 

 

Speaking of 2011... 

Thursday, September 15, 2011

The Growth Fetish

[This is a big topic so I'm just going to lay out the bare bones for now and flesh things out later, hopefully with a little help.]

It's obvious that our economy is suffering from a lack of growth but for a while now I've come to suspect that in a more limited but still dangerous sense we also overvalue growth and that this bias has distorted the market and sometimes encouraged executives to pursue suboptimal strategies (such as Border's attempt to expand into the British market).

Think of it this way, if we ignore all those questions about stakeholders and the larger impact of a company, you can boil the value of a business down to a single scalar: just take the profits over the lifetime of a company and apply an appropriate discount function (not trivial but certainly doable). The goal of a company's management is to maximize this number and the goal of the market is to assign a price to the company that accurately reflects that number.

The first part of the hypothesis is that there are different possible growth curves associated with a business and, ignoring the unlikely possibility of a tie, there is a particular curve that optimizes profits for a particular business. In other words, some companies are better off growing rapidly; some are better off with slow or deferred growth; some are better off simply staying at the same level; and some are better off being allowed to slowly contract.

It's not difficult to come up with examples of ill-conceived expansions. Growth almost always entails numerous risks for an established company. Costs increase and generally debt does as well. Scalability is usually a concern. And perhaps most importantly, growth usually entails moving into an area where you probably don't know what the hell you're doing. I recall Peter Lynch (certainly a fan of growth stocks) warning investors to put off buying into chains until the businesses had demonstrated the ability to set up successful operations in other cities.

But the idea of getting in on a fast-growing company is still tremendously attractive, appealing enough to unduly influence people's judgement (and no, I don't see any reason to mangle a sentence just to keep an infinitive in one piece). For reasons that merit a post of their own (GE will be mentioned), that natural bias toward growth companies has metastasized into a pervasive fetish.

This bias does more than inflate the prices of certain stocks; it pressures people running companies to make all sorts of bad decisions from moving into markets where you don't belong (Borders) to pumping up market share with unprofitable customers (Groupon) to overpaying for acquisitions (too many examples to mention).

As mentioned before we need to speed up the growth of our economy, but those pro-growth policies have to start with a realistic vision of how business works and a reasonable expectation of what we can expect growth to do (not, for example, to alleviate the need for more saving and a good social safety net). Fantasies of easy and unlimited wealth are part of what got us into this mess. They certainly aren't going to help us get out of it.

Eleven years ago at the blog: This one had legs

This recent post by Andrew Gelman about billionaire Bill Ackman got me thinking about an exchange we had a little over 11 years ago, which has since become even more relevant.

For those of you who don’t follow these things, Ackman has recently surged from the back of the pack to become a real contender for “most clueless rich guy.” His most recent stunt—trying to pass himself off as a professional tennis player—is indicative of the exceptional effort he’s been putting in to distinguish himself from the competition. But I’m bringing him up now because he’s also a second-generation nepo baby.

That reminded me of this post from 2014 and of Gelman's response in the late, lamented Monkey Cage. Looking back, I had no idea how much worse things could get. 

Monday, January 20, 2014

Are we becoming more tolerant of nepotism (and other perks of privilege)?

The New Republic has a very good profile by Julia Iofee of  Michael Needham of the Heritage Foundation. The whole thing is worth reading, but there's one paragraph I'd like to single out both because of its content and its placement deep in the article.

After [Michael] Needham graduated from Williams in 2004, Bill Simon Jr., a former California Republican gubernatorial candidate and fellow Williams alum, helped Needham secure the introductions that got him a job at the foundation. Ambitious and hard-working, he was promoted, in six months, to be Feulner’s chief of staff. According to a former veteran Heritage staffer, Needham is intelligent but “very aggressive”: “He is the bull in the china closet, and he feels very comfortable doing that.” (“I consider him a friend,” says the college classmate, “but he’s a huge asshole.”) In 2007, Needham, whose father has given generous donations to both Rudy Giuliani and the Heritage Foundation, went to work for Giuliani’s presidential campaign. When the campaign folded, Needham followed his father’s footsteps to Stanford Business School and then came back, at Feulner’s bequest, to run Heritage Action.

You'll notice Iofee goes out of her way to suggest that Needham got his first rapid promotion by being "ambitious and hard-working," and there is, no doubt, some truth in that, but pretty much everybody who goes to work for a big-time D.C. think tank is ambitious and hard-working. These are not traits that would have set Needham apart while being the socially well-connected son of a major donor very well might have.

My question is: would this angle have been handled differently a few years ago? Obviously nepotism and advancement through connection have always been with us, but until recently I get the impression that this career path was seen as somewhat suspect; people who obviously got their positions thanks to string-pulling were put on a kind of public probation until they had proven themselves.

Now, the public (or at least the press) seems to me much less likely to discount the accomplishments of the well-connected children of the rich and powerful. Along similar lines, though you can certainly still find jokes about the boss's son/nephew/brother-in-law, but they don't seem nearly as pervasive as they were through most of the 20th Century. Anyone else see a trend here?