Like we said before one more time, levels of automation, schedules of implementation

Apologies to regular readers who've been through this before, but probably the two most important concepts when discussing the potential impact of automated vehicles and certainly the most underused are SAE Autonomy Levels and the rate at which each of these levels will likely be adopted. If you follow the coverage closely you will routinely find, even in the most serious and respectable publications, arguments that mix levels of autonomy in the most careless way and, worse yet, promote as just-around-the-corner applications that require virtually every car on the road to be reliably using compatible level V technology.

Just to be clear, autonomy is coming and it is coming quickly, but when you hear promises of curing congestion by packing cars inches apart at high speeds or redesigned roads with narrower lanes and other human-driver-hostile features, consider the following article from Jalopnik.

For one thing, retail sales of fully-automated vehicles aren’t expected to begin until 2025 at the earliest, wrote Mitch Bainwol, in testimony to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. Bainwol is the president and CEO of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a trade group that represents Ford, General Motors, FCA, BMW and more—automakers that produce 80 percent of cars on U.S. roads today. To put it plainly, he speaks for a significant chunk of the industry.
And in his written testimony ahead of the committee’s hearing on Wednesday, Bainwol offered a sober assessment of the situation.

Level 4 geo-fenced self-driving vehicles that can only be operated by an Automated Driving System will probably begin around 2021. But, retail sales to consumers of so-called Level 5 vehicles that can operate anywhere a person can drive a conventional vehicle today is unlikely to happen until around 2025 or after. Given how much vehicles cost and how long they last – more than 20 percent of cars on the road today were produced before 2002 – vehicles equipped with Level 5 systems will likely not be a majority of the fleet for three more decades. Ubiquity is not projected to occur for at least four decades largely due to the fact that over 260 million light duty vehicles are registered in the U.S.

Anyone who seriously researched this field, discussed the issues with researchers and made a sincere effort to find out what's going on, had a pretty good idea that this was the case. The credulous, sensationalistic, future-is-now reporting you've seen on the subject is not just misinformed it is irresponsible.

The following video clip should challenge cherished assumptions about Tesla, Silicon Valley, and self driving cars (it probably won't, but it should)

Before we go on, if you haven't, take a few moments and read this (we'll be quoting from it later but you really need to read the whole thing).




Obviously, we need to be careful about reading too much into this. There is a limit to how much you should take away from PR releases and tech reporters. There are, however, a few things we can conclude with some safety.

First, the system looks good. By most accounts it is the equal if not the superior of anything else on the road and, in one respect, it represents a significant step forward. Cadillac's system actually watches the driver, a considerably more sophisticated and  safer solution than Tesla and Mercedes Benz's nudge-the-wheel, and far more elegant than Google's just-give-up approach to the driver interface.

We can also conclude that that both the executives and the legal department of General Motors are fairly comfortable with this technology.When Tesla started rolling out its autonomous technology, there was always the possibility that Elon Musk was just betting big and playing reckless. That is certainly not the case here, which leads us to challenge one of the most cherished beliefs of the narrative.

The one thing everyone, from the trendiest tech blog to the New York Times, knew about autonomous vehicles was that the primary challenge was not technology and engineering, but the regulation and legislation.There would have to be massive and inevitably glacial changes in both of these areas before things could move forward. In other words, we couldn't get any cool stuff until those darn bureaucrats got out of our way. It was a narrative with almost archetypal appeal, but we can now say with some confidence it was never true. Multiple car companies are rolling out driverless options despite no great bureaucratic shift because bureaucrats were never a problem. Up until now, we didn't have driverless cars because the technology was not good enough.

Another cherished myth that is seriously threatened is that of the Silicon Valley Savior. It was often assumed that anything as wonderful as a car that drove itself would have to come from that most magical places. You couldn't expect anything wondrous and disruptive to come from a Detroit or a Stuttgart. Thus, the contributions of companies like Google and Tesla were given a wildly disproportionate amount of coverage. Even Apple, each managed to do nothing except prove that it wasn't up to the challenge of making cars, got listed as a major player. This was always a distortion. Silicon Valley never had a lock on the research or even a clear lead.

The deep-seated belief in a magical Silicon Valley populated by powerful chosen ones who could will great advances to being played a large role in the enormous valuation of Tesla. At the risk of oversimplifying, the reasoning went something like this: amazing things are about to happen with automobiles; this sort of thing comes out of Silicon Valley; the only Silicon Valley company/chosen one in position to do these things are Tesla and Elon Musk.

That said, there was a case to be made for Tesla reaping huge profits from autonomous vehicle technology. Here Goldfarb lays out the details:

So is Tesla the next Honda, or the next Webvan? If one believes that Tesla is worth more than Ford or GM, one better have a decent theory of how Tesla is making current capabilities obsolete, why incumbents cannot replicate these capabilities, and whether Tesla will earn good margins in a post-Detroit world. In short, when betting on disruption, one has to identify how this disruption will occur — not just intone the magic word. I identify four bets that Tesla is plausibly making: the EV bet, the autonomous vehicle bet, a software-platform-in-a-car bet, or the clean-energy-and-battery-company bet. None of these bets appear particularly promising.

…

The autonomous-vehicle bet

One aspect of the software strategy is so important that it deserves its own separate category. Perhaps Tesla will win the autonomous vehicle race. Alphabet (a.k.a. Google) is famously in this space, and Intel just bought the Israeli startup MobileEye for $15 billion. Uber raided Carnegie Mellon to begin to develop this capability, and every major manufacturer is investing in automation technologies. This is a very competitive space. But it’s undeniable that Tesla is at the forefront of self-driving technology that’s already on the roads. Tesla is able to learn as the technology is used — and this may be Tesla’s secret sauce: the difficult-to-get information that is necessary to perfect autonomous vehicles.

Driving is one of the most dangerous activities most people do on a regular basis. The technological problem of building software and sensors that replicate what a good driver does is difficult — and based on understanding rare events. (One Tesla driver, Joshua Brown, thought the technology was more advanced than it was and died when his auto-piloted Model S failed to recognize a semi-trailer and his car slid under it.)

Of all of the theories involving Tesla and disruption, this is the most intriguing — and convincing: Tesla is the first to roll out an autonomous driving technology. Its use allows Tesla to learn and improve, leading to a technological leadership position. Since the technology relies on machine learning, and machine learning only gets better with more data, Tesla is then able to develop a leadership position that becomes difficult to assail — analogous to Google’s in search. Tesla is then able to monetize this dominant market position.

The trouble, once again, is that at least 33 other companies are also developing autonomous vehicle technology, and also gathering a great deal of data. Any successful strategy would require a quick rollout that would prevent competitors from catching up. Mercedes’ new models already have advanced driver assistance capabilities similar to Tesla’s. Cadillac is expected to deploy within months. But perhaps the software platform is integral to this. Perhaps the software bet blends with the autonomous-vehicle bet! Tesla recently showed off this capability when it curtailed some of the autopilot features of Teslas with a software update.

The presupposition is that Tesla has and maintains an insurmountable lead. With the Cadillac generation of self driving technology, it is not clear that Tesla has any lead at all. Just to be clear, this does not mean that Tesla is out of the race or that it won't go on to a long and profitable future, but it makes it increasingly unlikely that these profits will reach the sky high level needed to justify what people have been paying for the stock.

Good science reporting can be popular if it comes with enough obscenity and cute photo-shopped memes

A while back (the queue is long), Joseph and I were discussing the post I was about to run on the treatment of autism in that godawful New York Magazine piece. I argued that the risk of throwing out irresponsible and unlikely theories about the disease was that it was likely to encourage false diagnoses. Joseph counted that the real cost was in the wasted resources that would be expended on theories that had already been effectively ruled out.


Later that evening I got around to watching this Last Week Tonight segment on Vaccines and heard John Oliver making the same case as Joseph.

If you indefinitely allow economic and political power to grow more concentrated and unchecked, it will be abused (even by those who promise not to be evil)

My surprise at the following story is somewhat blunted by my low opinion of the New America Foundation.  It always struck me as the sort of place that grinds out tired variants of failed conventional wisdom, then congratulates itself for boldness and originality, the sort of place that public intellectuals like to lend their names to and that large corporations are happy to sponsor.

That corporate-friendly approach leads to inevitable tensions, particularly in an age where big money increasingly expects a great deal of obedience from the not-so-powerful and when you have a researcher at the foundation actually focusing on the dangers of monopolies, those tensions can reach the breaking point.

From Josh Marshall:

Because this is a big interest of mine, yesterday I interviewed Barry Lynn for my podcast. Lynn is probably the most prominent and influential voice about the importance of monopolies today. He has or at least had his work cut out for him because a number of factors over recent decades had made the idea monopolies and the importance of anti-trust action seem to many like a quaint artifact of a bygone era when reformers lacked a full understanding of how monopolies work in practice. Lynn’s work and that of his working group at The New America Foundation, have led in recent years to renewed attention to the issue from professional economists, the people who have the technical knowledge and (for better or worse) policy world credibility to bring these concerns from concept to proof. ‘Proof’ is probably too strong a word but I mean the kinds of studies that make the theories real or credible in policy and political terms.

In any case, you may have noticed that there’s a big story out today in The New York Times about how Google – one of the three preeminent platform monopolies – apparently used its juice as a major funder of The New America Foundation to get Lynn’s Open Markets initiative booted. As it happens, from my understanding, while this could have been the end of Lynn’s Open Markets Initiative, it’s actually been able to get separate funding and will be even bigger on the outside. But it does show, in a particularly brazen and comical manner, the power of the platform monopolies both in economic terms and political terms.

“Bubbles and mere cheats"

Another hump-day except from Charles Mackay's  Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

Contrary to all expectation, South Sea stock fell when the bill received the Royal assent. On the 7th of April the shares were quoted at three hundred and ten, and on the following day, at two hundred and ninety. Already the directors had tasted the profits of their scheme, and it was not likely that they should quietly allow the stock to find its natural level, without an effort to raise it. Immediately their busy emissaries were set to work. Every person interested in the success of the project endeavoured to draw a knot of listeners around him, to whom he expatiated on the treasures of the South American seas. Exchange Alley was crowded with attentive groups. One rumour alone, asserted with the utmost confidence, had an immediate effect upon the stock. It was said, that Earl Stanhope had received overtures in France from the Spanish Government to exchange Gibraltar and Port Mahon for some places on the coast of Peru, for the security and enlargement of the trade in the South Seas. Instead of one annual ship trading to those ports, and allowing the King of Spain twenty-five per cent. out of the profits, the Company might build and charter as many ships as they pleased, and pay no per centage whatever to any foreign potentate.

 Visions of ingots danced before their eyes, and stock rose rapidly. On the 12th of April, five days after the bill had become law, the directors opened their books for a subscription of a million, at the rate of 300 pounds for every 100 pounds capital. Such was the concourse of persons, of all ranks, that this first subscription was found to amount to above two millions of original stock. It was to be paid at five payments, of 60 pounds each for every 100 pounds. In a few days the stock advanced to three hundred and forty, and the subscriptions were sold for double the price of the first payment. To raise the stock still higher, it was declared, in a general court of directors, on the 21st of April, that the midsummer dividend should be ten per cent., and that all subscriptions should be entitled to the same. These resolutions answering the end designed, the directors, to improve the infatuation of the monied men, opened their books for a second subscription of a million, at four hundred per cent. Such was the frantic eagerness of people of every class to speculate in these funds, that in the course of a few hours no less than a million and a half was subscribed at that rate

In the mean time, innumerable joint-stock companies started up everywhere. They soon received the name of Bubbles, the most appropriate that imagination could devise. The populace are often most happy in the nicknames they employ. None could be more apt than that of Bubbles. Some of them lasted for a week, or a fortnight, and were no more heard of, while others could not even live out that short span of existence. Every evening produced new schemes, and every morning new projects. The highest of the aristocracy were as eager in this hot pursuit of gain as the most plodding jobber in Cornhill. The Prince of Wales became governor of one company, and is said to have cleared 40,000 pounds by his speculations. [Coxe's Walpole, Correspondence between Mr. Secretary Craggs and Earl Stanhope.] The Duke of Bridgewater started a scheme for the improvement of London and Westminster, and the Duke of Chandos another. There were nearly a hundred different projects, each more extravagant and deceptive than the other. To use the words of the "Political State," they were "set on foot and promoted by crafty knaves, then pursued by multitudes of covetous fools, and at last appeared to be, in effect, what their vulgar appellation denoted them to be—bubbles and mere cheats." It was computed that near one million and a half sterling was won and lost by these unwarrantable practices, to the impoverishment of many a fool, and the enriching of many a rogue.

Conspiracy theorists don't just imagine improbable connections; they create them.

Many years ago I purchased a paperback copy of  Proofs of a Conspiracy by physicist John Robison (who also invented the siren [I'm sure there's a metaphor there somewhere]) at a library sale. For those not familiar:

Towards the end of his life, he became an enthusiastic conspiracy theorist, publishing Proofs of a Conspiracy ... in 1797, alleging clandestine intrigue by the Illuminati and Freemasons (the work's full title was Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati and Reading Societies). The secret agent monk, Alexander Horn provided much of the material for Robison's allegations. French priest Abbé Barruel independently developed similar views that the Illuminati had infiltrated Continental Freemasonry, leading to the excesses of the French Revolution. In 1798, the Reverend G. W. Snyder sent Robison's book to George Washington for his thoughts on the subject in which he replied to him in a letter:

        It was not my intention to doubt that, the Doctrines of the Illuminati, and principles of Jacobinism had not spread in the United States. On the contrary, no one is more truly satisfied of this fact than I am. The idea that I meant to convey, was, that I did not believe that the Lodges of Free Masons in this Country had, as Societies, endeavoured to propagate the diabolical tenets of the first, or pernicious principles of the latter (if they are susceptible of separation). That Individuals of them may have done it, or that the founder, or instrument employed to found, the Democratic Societies in the United States, may have had these objects; and actually had a separation of the People from their Government in view, is too evident to be questioned.

Modern conspiracy theorists, such as Nesta Webster and William Guy Carr, believe the methods of the Illuminati as described in Proofs of a Conspiracy were copied by radical groups throughout the 19th and 20th centuries in their subversion of benign organizations. Spiritual Counterfeits Project editor Tal Brooke has compared the views of Proofs of a Conspiracy with those found in Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope (Macmillan, 1966). Brooke suggests that the New World Order, which Robison believed Adam Weishaupt (founder of the Illuminati) had in part accomplished through the infiltration of Freemasonry, will now be completed by those holding sway over the international banking system (e.g., by means of the Rothschilds' banks, the U.S. Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank).

I never did more than skim the contents of the actual book. What caught my interest was the introduction which somehow managed to connect the late 18th century text on Freemasons and the French Revolution to mid 20th century conspiracy theories involving communists, intellectuals and Jewish bankers. That last point has become relevant once again, given some of the people close to the current administration.

I've always had a morbid fascination with fringe dwellers and I've noticed that they have an extraordinary gift for seeking out and drawing up on other similarly crazy peers. Remarkably, this sense of companionship and urge to collaborate frequently crosses over seemingly unbridgeable ideological differences. Right wingers too extreme for the John Birch society would find common ground with Maoists talking about evil industrialists. Proof of conspiracy was proof of conspiracy regardless of who was supposedly conspiring against whom.

Positive Thinking and Party Loyalty

It is difficult to find situations where, once you have started a task, there is a negative correlation between positive attitude and likelihood of success. (I know some people out there are starting to form a quibble , But bear with me for a little while.) You can make a similar argument with political success and party loyalty – – the group that sticks together does better in most cases.

This raises an interesting question: if these behaviors are so overwhelmingly advantageous, why do we not see a correspondingly high preference for them? Why are attitudes so negative so often? Why are groups so hard to hold together even when they serve the interests of all of the participants?

At least part of the answer, I think, lies in the hidden fallacy of the first paragraph. The statements are technically true, but they are framed in such a way as to leave out a major problem. Both scenarios started in media res with narrowly defined success. We began with situations and agendas set, but optimism will affect the situation you find yourself in and party loyalty will affect the agendas you commit to. By treating success and failure as a binary, we ignored the variability in the costs and kinds of failure. If two climbers decide to ascend a mountain, the positive thinker is more likely to reach the top, but the negative thinker is more likely to stop before risking a fatal fall.

GOP's Dream Scenario

I tend to have an overwhelming dislike and distrust for any piece of news analysis built around a tweet, particularly an anonymously sourced tweet, but I might just make a limited exception to this one, at least partly because it's an excuse for some Friday videos but also because it dovetails nicely with an ongoing thread.

Here's the tweet:

prediction just in from top R strategist: Trump resigns "once Mueller closes in on him and the family," Pence makes Rubio VP, "GOP recovers"

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) August 19, 2017

One thing to get out of the way before we get to deeply in. This looks very much like a trial balloon directly or indirectly coming from an interested party, or as Dave Weigel of the Washington Post put it:

Was the source named "Darco Lubio" and was he wearing a fake mustache? https://t.co/hDfwzVlLVE

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) August 20, 2017

Of course, the presence of sources with ulterior motives does not rule out good reporting. You'd probably be hard pressed to find a major investigative story that didn't rely on such sources. In this case, the ulterior motives are perhaps the most interesting part of the story, but more on that in a moment.

If you have to get a story from an anonymous "top R strategist," someone like Harwood is a good place to turn. He's been working this beat since he became White House correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in the 1991. He's not above floating a trial balloon, but he is not likely to accept one from someone not in the know.

Does this mean that highly placed people in the GOP know that something big is about to go down with the Mueller investigation? That's possible, but I suspect it's more likely that this is a combination of planting some seeds and wishful thinking.



For well over a year now we have been discussing the central dilemma that the Republican Party faces with Trump. The man is dangerous, erratic, vindictive, and has no personal ties to the party. The leaders (both official and unofficial) mostly have wanted to have him disappear from the moment he went from useful rabble-rouser to actual candidate. The trouble is that there are very few ways to get rid of Trump without alienating a large enough segment of the base to devastate the party.

Impeachment or falling back on the 25th amendment would trigger an intraparty war if Trump decided to go down fighting (and that's how the smart money should bet). A resignation that left the GOP with reasonably clean hands is perhaps the only plausible resolution that leaves the party essentially intact.

That last phrase in the tweet is enormously telling. "GOP recovers" suggests that the party not recovering is not necessarily a given. Furthermore, there is at least an implication that resignation is a necessary condition for recovery.

How likely is the scenario laid out in the tweet? I wouldn't begin to speculate. Between the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns, committing to an estimate would be a fool's game, but what we can say with a little more confidence is that, based on this and other evidence, some of the top people in the Republican Party are pushing this scenario at least in part because they really want to believe it.

I suppose I should've known it would involve Tesla

I've been meaning to revisit the ddulite thread for a while. I coined the term (derived from Luddite) to refer to those people whose love of technology (or, more precisely, what they perceive as technology) makes them prefer newer and more "sophisticated" tech even when it has inferior functionality.

Recently the always solid Jason Torchinsky of Julopnik supplied us with perhaps the perfect example.

Possibly the most controversial design decision of the Tesla Model 3, even beyond its Renault Caravelle-like grille-less face, is its instrument panel, which consists solely of a center-mounted landscape-oriented LCD screen. This tweeted video showing how the climate-control air-direction system works is one of the first real looks we’ve had at the Model 3's UI, and I really can’t say I’m impressed.

That puts me in pretty direct opposition to noted rich guy Bill Lee, the Tesla investor who posted the video of the HVAC control interface, who called it “genius.”

…

These controls are invoked by pressing the small fan icon at the bottom of the display, which then opens a window in the lower right corner of the screen. That window is divided into two panes, the left one having the basic climate controls—fan speed, temperature, face/feet airflow, etc—and the right pane containing the interface to adjust where the air flows.

That’s the focus of this little video, so let’s focus on that as well. The interface consists of a horizontal bar, which I guess is supposed to represent the dash’s vent bar, and an oblong ‘thumb’ that can be positioned anywhere on the panel, and can also be split in two via a little button at the lower right.

…

First, that thumb is needlessly low-contrast; why do a light gray control on a slightly less light gray background like that? Is there a reason not to make it more visible, maybe use the blue color that’s also in this UI design?

The whole idea of the oblong is weird. I don’t normally think of airflow as hitting a given point in space; airflow is more of a directional vector—it flows out from a source, in some direction. Picking a ‘point’ like that for where the air goes is not very natural feeling.

Then, there’s the question of how is this to operate while you drive? The nature of a touch screen, drag-to-position interface is that it is entirely visual. There’s no tactile feedback, and you need your eyes to focus on the control to drag it about with your finger.

With conventional physical vent controls, you never needed to take your eyes off the road; that interface was entirely tactile. You could actually feel the flow of air, and you used your hand to direct vanes to redirect the air. Feedback was instantaneous and immediately understandable.

…

The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that the Model 3's HVAC solution isn’t “genius” at all; it’s stupid. Perhaps there’s some manufacturing cost savings with the one long mono-vent; making the controls in software could be cheaper, but it also necessitates some sort of electric actuator to direct the airflow. Which is another thing, buried deeply and expensively inside that dashboard, that can break.

I want to be clear that there are things I like about Tesla’s approach here, and I’m not some traditionalist stuck in the past. I very much appreciate that they’re not falling into the usual trap of faking analog gauges, and I think an LCD screen can be designed to be a very effective instrument panel.

Physical vent controls and vanes aren’t ‘clumsy’ as Bill Lee suggests. They’re really quite elegant. They take no extra power, they give direct and immediate feedback, they don’t require taking eyes or attention off driving, they allow for greater flexibility of airflow directions, and they’re non-modal, and don’t lock out any other controls of the car.

The Tesla Model 3's solution is less effective in every possible way. That’s a weird idea of “genius,” if you ask me.

Narrative bias at NPR

One of the points we keep coming back to on this blog is that, while liberal ideological bias has long been held up as a bogeyman by critics of the mainstream media, it is both trivial and rare, at least in the way it is generally presented. You certainly have ideological and particularly partisan bias around the fringes, especially in conservative outlets such as Fox News, and you can find individual issues where the MSM displays strong biases. Entitlement reform, education reform, and gun control are all prominent examples, though it should be noted that only the last is particularly liberal.

That's not to say that biases don't exist and are not a problem – – given recent events, I list them as threats to the republic – – but the forms those biases take have little to do with left/right and everything to do with laziness, cultivating sources, driving traffic, intellectual conformity, and one that gets so little attention that there's not even a widely accepted name for it, narrative bias, selecting subjects and tweaking details to create a "good story" according to certain unstated but fairly standard criteria.

This piece by Carrie Johnson is a depressingly good example.

Robert Mueller May Not Be The Savior The Anti-Trump Internet Is Hoping For

In Procrustean fashion, it forces the facts to justify two decrepit clichés. The first is the Internet angle. For reasons too complex to delve into here, reporters and editors continue after about a quarter century to believe that framing something as an online phenomenon somehow gives it modern sheen.

In this context, you could pretty much substitute "Internet" with "carbon-based life forms." Since most journalists are active on twitter, quoting a few tweets is not evidence of an "online community." What's worse, of the four tweets she cites, one is from a cable news personality, one is from the formerly print-based publication the onion, and the third is from a writer for the still in print magazine the New Yorker.

The second and arguably even more threadbare cliché is the "not so fast" reversal which starts out by depicting a piece of supposed conventional wisdom then claiming to undercut it. In order to fit the narrative to this genre, Johnson has to cut lots of corners. For starters, while Trump opponents are certainly encouraged by the investigation and annoyed by the unavoidably slow pace of the process, it is not clear how many are "counting on" him to be their "savior." Trump resigning as part of a plea bargain would certainly be seen as a happy outcome by most administration critics (and a substantial number of Republicans who see this as the exit strategy least likely to devastate the GOP) but it is not the only happy outcome and perhaps not even the most hoped-for. Trump's critics (particularly his non-Republican critics) are arguably more focused on the Democrats retaking the house and starting impeachment hearings, preferably with the Senate also changing hands. There is also a lot of talk about the 25th amendment. Johnson has to underplay these aspects in order to set up the premise of the narrative.

Then there is the conclusion. This requires downplaying the potential amount of damage this investigation can do. In this case, that means relying on perhaps the most unreliable source imaginable.

Three months into the job, however, it's not clear what, if anything, investigators may uncover about the president, who has repeatedly denied any improper contacts with people in Russia and has called the special counsel probe "a witch hunt."

"They're investigating something that never happened," Trump told reporters last week. "There was no collusion between us and Russia. In fact, the opposite. Russia spent a lot of money on fighting me."

Putting aside the fact that three months does not seem like very long at all given the scope and complexity of this investigation, framing it in terms of Donald Trump's denials is simply unjustifiable. For starters, people under investigation virtually always start by claiming "there's no there there." Even if we were dealing with a normal politician, these declarations of innocence wouldn't count for much, but Trump is no normal politician. Among high-ranking elected officials, he has a unique-in-living-memory record of dishonesty and fabrication both directly and through his surrogates. On top of that, the statement actually ends with a demonstrable lie about Russia trying to undermine his election. If anything, a denial this ridiculous should arouse disbelief in readers and, more to the point, in reporters.

Keeping with the narrative, Johnson further understates the danger to the administration.

Another complicating factor: Mueller is using grand juries in Alexandria, Va., and Washington, D.C., and grand jury information is rarely made public.

"It is going to be hard and frustrating to get this information out," said Peter Zeidenberg, a lawyer at the Arent Fox firm who worked on the special counsel team investigating the leak of a CIA operative's identity in the George W. Bush administration.
…

In his leak investigation, a lot of information eventually became public through the prosecution of former vice presidential aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Absent a decision to charge someone with a crime, investigations in Congress may be the best way for people to understand what happened and why in last year's election interference.

A couple of important points here, one of which is badly understated, the other omitted entirely. First, big investigations like this do tend to produce criminal charges, often of people not immediately involved with the primary case (just ask Jim Guy Tucker). When you start digging into any sufficiently complex scenario involving great money or power, you will generally find that someone broke some law. Second, and this very much affects the previous point, the legitimate scope of this investigation is huge. Of the quid pro quo being investigated, only the middle piece is reasonably well contained.

After Trump lost access to conventional funding due to his habit of screwing over business partners, he had to rely on disreputable sources. Much, perhaps most of the time, those sources had direct or indirect ties to Russia. This means that a thorough investigation will need to closely examine the financing of every project Trump was involved in for perhaps the past 10 years. It is highly likely that the grand juries will find something to charge someone with. And we haven't even gotten into the hacking of the election itself.

None of this means that Trump or a member of his inner circle will be indicted. It doesn't even necessarily mean that anyone will be indicted (though that second one seems a bit improbable). What it does mean is that, like the "anti-Trump Internet" premise, the facts have been stretched or truncated to fit the genre.

The Republicans' 3 x 3 existential threat

I've argued previously that Donald Trump presents and existential threat to the Republican Party. I know this can sound overheated and perhaps even a bit crazy. There are few American institutions as long-standing and deeply entrenched as are the Democratic and Republican parties. Proposing that one of them might not be around 10 years from now beggars the imagination and if this story started and stopped with Donald Trump, it would be silly to suggest we were on the verge of  a political cataclysm.

But, just as Trump's rise did not occur in a vacuum, neither will his fall. We discussed earlier how Donald Trump has the power to drive a wedge between the Republican Party and a significant segment of its base [I wrote this before the departure of Steve Bannon. That may diminish Trump's ability to create this rift but I don't think it reduces the chances of the rift happening. – – M.P.]. This is the sort of thing that can profoundly damage a political party, possibly locking it into a minority status for a long time, but normally the wound would not be fatal. These, however, are not normal times.

The Republican Party of 2017 faces a unique combination of interrelated challenges, each of which is at a historic level and the combination of which would present an unprecedented threat to this or any US political party. The following list is not intended to be exhaustive, but it hits the main points.

The GOP currently has to deal with extraordinary political scandals, a stunningly unpopular agenda and daunting demographic trends. To keep things symmetric and easy to remember, let's break each one of these down to three components (keeping in mind that the list may change).


With the scandals:

1. Money – – Even with the most generous reading imaginable, there is no question that Trump has a decades long record of screwing people over, skirting the law, and dealing with disreputable and sometimes criminal elements. At least some of these dealings have been with the Russian mafia, oligarchs, and figures tied in with the Kremlin which leads us to…

2. The hacking of the election – – This one is also beyond dispute. It happened and it may have put Donald Trump into the White House. At this point, we have plenty of quid and plenty of quo; if Mueller can nail down pro, we will have a complete set.

3. And the cover-up – – As Josh Marshall and many others have pointed out, the phrase "it's not the crime; it's the cover-up" is almost never true. That said, coverups can provide tipping points and handholds for investigators, not to mention expanding the list of culprits.


With the agenda:

1. Health care – – By some standards the most unpopular major policy proposal in living memory that a party in power has invested so deeply in. Furthermore, the pushback against the initiative has essentially driven congressional Republicans into hiding from their own constituents for the past half year. As mentioned before, this has the potential to greatly undermine the relationship between GOP senators and representatives and the voters.

2. Tax cuts for the wealthy – – As said many times, Donald Trump has a gift for making the subtle plain, the plain obvious, and the obvious undeniable. In the past, Republicans were able to get a great deal of upward redistribution of the wealth past the voters through obfuscation and clever branding, but we have reached the point where simply calling something "tax reform" is no longer enough to sell tax proposals so regressive that even the majority of Republicans oppose them.

3. Immigration (subject to change) – – the race for third place in this list is fairly competitive (education seems to be coming up on the outside), but the administration's immigration policies (which are the direct result of decades of xenophobic propaganda from conservative media) have already done tremendous damage, caused great backlash, and are whitening the gap between the GOP and the Hispanic community, which leads us to…



Demographics:

As Lindsey Graham has observed, they simply are not making enough new old white men to keep the GOP's strategy going much longer, but the Trump era rebranding of the Republican Party only exacerbates the problems with women, young people, and pretty much anyone who isn't white.

Maybe I am missing a historical precedent here, but I can't think of another time that either the Democrats or the Republicans were this vulnerable on all three of these fronts. This does not mean that the party is doomed or even that, with the right breaks, it can't maintain a hold on some part of the government. What it does mean is that the institution is especially fragile at the moment. A mortal blow may not come, but we can no longer call it unthinkable.

That's not to say that sleeping around can't be a plus

Over the past few years I have gotten in the habit of making a quick (or, to be honest, often not-so-quick) visit to Wikipedia when I read something that seems curious and I've spotted some common threads. For example, when a US representative makes a particularly clueless reactionary remark, I will give you excellent odds that he or she comes from a white flight district. I have found this to be the best predictor of far right extremism for politicians at the municipal or district level. Growing up in such a neighborhood is also strongly correlated with journalists and pundits holding these views.

Another curious phenomenon that I think I may have largely explained via Wikipedia is the mysterious rise of young, highly successful incompetents. You know what I'm talking about. You see someone with no apparent ability or qualifications who has raced up the career ladder, or has just been handed a huge check to start a company with a dubious business plan or has landed a high profile gig at a big-name publication. These are incredibly competitive fields and yet some manage to race past countless peers who are smarter, more talented, and better qualified.

The standard joke response is "who did that person sleep with?" but a little digging online provides a better explanation, or at least a highly suspicious pattern. If you look up the bio of a bizarrely successful incompetent, you will notice that the overwhelming majority come from an elite university and, in a truly remarkable number of cases, a ridiculously selective and expensive prep school. Wealth and family connections often figure prominently as well, but they are not as essential. Spending a decade or so in the company of the rich and powerful seems to be sufficient.

Just to be clear, I'm not making a blanket statement about the intellect or abilities of people who come from these schools. There are a lot of smart, capable preppies with degrees from Harvard out there. What I am saying is that the connections and prestige that comes with this kind of education provides enormous advantages, advantages so large that they often swamp the qualifications we like to think determine success.

With that in mind, the following raises disturbing implications:

"Access to colleges varies greatly by parent income," writes Raj Chetty of Stanford University and four co-authors. "Children whose parents are in the top 1% of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than those whose parents are in the bottom income quintile." 

Employer sponsored Health Insurance

This is Joseph

Via Mike the Mad Biologist was this gem:

Even people who do not switch jobs are vulnerable to losing their health insurance under the employer-sponsored system. For the health insurance market to actually work like a market, participants need to be prepared to change their insurer every single year. Employers need to constantly rethink what insurers they should contract with to provide benefits. And when open enrollment comes around, employees and those on the Obamacare exchanges are supposed to reassess their options and switch to the best insurer on offer. Put simply: a well-functioning private health insurance system requires people to frequently change their insurance situation, which is precisely the evil that Krugman says we need to avoid.

I think that this is an under-appreciated point.  Insofar as "continuity of care" is an important part of medical care, shopping around is discouraged.  Just think of how long intake medical appointments take, and thus impose a cost on patients switching providers.  Some degree of switching of providers is inevitable in any health care system (people move or retire).   But this stickiness undermines one of the major assumptions behind how markets are supposed to work.

Now this doesn't necessarily limit the options all that greatly, but it is a good reason to be cautious about too strong of a status quo bias when considering the current health care system.  There are some great aspects to the current system but also some real costs that need to be considered as part of any policy-reform.

Feeling stressed? Overwhelmed? Give me three minutes of your time.

Just hit play [Assuming you can read this in under twelve seconds.]

War on science (outsourced)

This is scary:

Any resident in Florida can now challenge what kids learn in public schools, thanks to a new law that science education advocates worry will make it harder to teach evolution and climate change.

The legislation, which was signed by Gov. Rick Scott (R) this week and goes into effect Saturday, requires school boards to hire an “unbiased hearing officer” who will handle complaints about instructional materials, such as movies, textbooks and novels, that are used in local schools. Any parent or county resident can file a complaint, regardless of whether they have a student in the school system. If the hearing officer deems the challenge justified, he or she can require schools to remove the material in question.
...

But Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Council for Science Education, said that affidavits filed by supporters of the bill suggest that science instruction will be a focus of challenges. One affidavit from a Collier County resident complained that evolution and global warming were taught as “reality.” Another criticized her child's sixth-grade science curriculum, writing that “the two main theories on the origin of man are the theory of evolution and creationism,” and that her daughter had only been taught about evolution.

“It's just the candor with which the backers of the bill have been saying, 'Yeah, we’re going to go after evolution, we’re going to go after climate change,'" that has him worried, Branch said.

But I do have to admit the music is catchy.