Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
The increasingly self-serving ethics of journalism
(As usual, Brad DeLong gets credit for
spotting this one)
Just to recap, I've been complaining
(whining, moaning, bitching, etc.) about the state of journallism
for a while. Many of those complaints assume (explicitly or
implicitly) that journalism is forming a dangerously insular and
cohesive group identity (I'm writing outside my field so my
terminology might be a bit off -- if a social scientist out there has
any notes, I'm open to suggestions).
Assuming I'm on to something here, one
of the things we would expect is an ethical code that has notably
different standards of behavior inside and outside of the group.
Intra-group crimes (like plagiarism where the primary victim is
another journalist) would be viewed as grave while offenses against
subjects and readers would be seen as less serious. This difference
would be particularly notable where journalists and non-journalists are
mutually responsible for an offense.
Which takes us to the example of the
day. As you probably know, the recent health care decision has
produced as usual amount of leak-driven coverage. This has deeply
offended Charles Lane of the Washington Post. Here's are some of the
phrases that Lane uses when discussing the leaks and leakers:
"slimy"
"oozing slime"
"Cassius and Brutus inside the
court, creeping up behind the chief justice with their verbal
daggers"
"shame on the treacherous
insiders"
And here's how Lane talks about Jan
Crawford, the reporter who published the leaks,
"a fine journalist"
"kudos to Jan Crawford for a nifty
little scoop"
According to Lane, Crawford's story
damages the Supreme Court and misleads the reader, but the
responsibility is apportioned so that all of the blame falls on the
sources for passing the story on to the reporter. He even goes
further and praises the reporter for passing the story on to us.
I suppose it might be possible to come
up with a situation where two parties knowingly work together to
produce something bad for society and yet one party shoulders all of
the blame while the other is praiseworthy but Lane is no where near
making that case here, nor does he seem to realize that he needs to.
Elon Musk talks a lot about humanity, and his love of humanity, and his need to save humanity in a way that isn't at all creepy or indicative of a messiah complex.
Musk's latest mission is to save humanity from the dangers of population collapse (a notion Joseph rebutted in the previously mentioned post). Part of this concern might have been meant to deflect media attention from the news that Musk had impregnated a direct report.
— Suspected Saboteur (@ShortingIsFun) July 9, 2022
When you get into the conversation around population collapse alarmists, you quickly notice that the concern focuses specifically on the collapse of certain populations (the US, Europe, Japan). Africa and Latin America don't get a lot of attention. While we don't want to paint with too broad a brush, much of this is definitely great replacement adjacent.
There is also a strong eugenics lite quality here, further emphasized by some of Musk's comments about the right people having children.
"Contrary to what many think, the richer someone is, the fewer kids
they have. I am a rare exception," Musk said. He returned to that thread
several times over the next month, adding on June 14, "I mean, I'm doing my part haha."
On June 17, Musk tweeted
the opening scene of "Idiocracy," the 2006 Mike Judge comedy depicting a
world in which highly intelligent people are reluctant to reproduce
while those with low IQs continue to have large families, dumbing down
the Earth's population. "When I ask my friends why they're not yet
having kids (very few are), it sounds exactly like the movie," he wrote.
Mike Judge used a somewhat cringey premise (which was the main thing Musk seemed to take away from the movie) to set up a satirical take on 2006 America. That premise was basically an update of "the Marching Morons," a classic science fiction story with a memorable ending.
The elite have tried everything rational to solve the population problem, but the problem cannot be solved rationally. The solution requires a way of thinking that no longer exists – Barlow's "vicious self-interest" and his knowledge of ancient history.
Barlow derives a solution based on his experience in scamming people into buying worthless land and knowledge of lemmings' mass migration into the sea: convince the morons to travel to Venus in spaceships that will kill their passengers out of view of land. The story predates the moon landing, and the safety of space travel is summed up in a description of a rocket that crashed on the moon. Propaganda depicts Venus as a tropical paradise, with "blanket trees", "ham bushes" and "soap roots". In a nationalistic frenzy, every country tries to send as many of their people to Venus as possible to stake their claim.
Barlow's help includes using his knowledge of Nazi propaganda tactics: postcards are sent from the supposedly happy new residents of Venus to relatives left behind, describing a wonderful, easy life, in the same way as fraudulent postcards were sent to relatives of those incinerated in the Nazi death-camps.
But Barlow is duped by his erstwhile assistants. Barlow does not realize that the elite despise him, as they despise all people from the past for not having solved The Problem earlier. In the end, Barlow is placed on a spaceship to Venus to share the fate of his victims and realizes that crime does not pay, just before he dies.
Given Musk's fondness for classic science fiction, perhaps he has a copy.
It seems to me that this whole sorry saga misses several important points. Let us consider them.
One, the key to raising children is not being the sperm donor, which while a necessary step is far from a sufficient one. The real effort is the bearing of the children and taking the time to properly do tasks like childminding and educating children. One rich person having children with many women (Musk has 10 children by 3 different mothers) is not really doing much to address the fertility crisis.
Two, Earth reached a population of one billion people around 1804 CE. That is 218 years ago. Recorded history goes back to at least 3200 BCE. That means we had 5,000 years of successful human civilization with less than a billion humans. I think we can start getting worried about underpopulation when we hit one billion going the other way. Until then, I think concerns about whether there are enough people seem odd.
Finally, having children with a subordinate at work seems like a suboptimal decision. It is hard to ensure that there was a proper balance of power in the relationship. While the person in question, Shivon Zilis, seems to have a lot of agency in their career, it is always a concern in these cases.
So I would say that this strategy was not the optimal way to handle concerns about a population crisis. It might be fine for Musk and he likely has the resources to support this eccentricity, but I think that is what we need to call if it we are honest.
There are good pro-natalist policies that could be considered. My personal hint is that there is no way to understate the importance of childcare and that a positive childcare experience probably helps people match the number of children they prefer with the number of children they have. But I think these should be considered in the context of human happiness and not because we think we might be going extinct as a species.
Back in 2017, we had a thread discussing a series of predictions Arthur C. Clarke made in 1964 about life in the year 2000, in particular, the suggestion that what we would now call telecommuting or "work from home" would make cities obsolete. The creative class/utopian urbanists' school was even stronger five years ago than it is today, so the standard take on why Clarke got this wrong was that he underestimated the vitality and appeal of cities.
But I think a third factor may well have been bigger than either of those two. The early 60s was an anxious but optimistic time. The sense was that if we didn't destroy ourselves, we were on the verge of great things. The 60s was also the last time that there was anything approaching a balance of power between workers and employers.
This was particularly true with mental work. At least in part because of the space race, companies like Texas Instruments were eager to find smart capable people. As a result, employers were extremely flexible about qualifications (a humanities PhD could actually get you a job) and they were willing to make concessions to attract and keep talented workers.
Telecommuting (as compared to off shoring, a distinction will need to get into in a later post) offers almost all of its advantages to the worker. The only benefit to the employer is the ability to land an otherwise unavailable prospect. From the perspective of 1964, that would have seemed like a good trade, but those days are long past.
For the past 40 or so years, employers have worked under (and now completely internalized) the assumption that they could pick and choose. When most companies post jobs, they are looking for someone who either has the exact academic background required, or preferably, someone who is currently doing almost the same job for a completely satisfied employer and yet is willing to leave for roughly the same pay.
When you hear complaints about "not being able to find qualified workers," it is essential to keep in mind this modern standard for "qualified." 50 or 60 years ago it meant someone who was capable of doing the work with a bit of training. Now it means someone who can walk in the door, sit down at the desk, and immediately start working. (Not to say that new employees will actually be doing productive work from day one. They'll be sitting in their cubicles trying to look busy for the first two or three weeks while IT and HR get things set up, but that's another story.)
Arthur C Clarke was writing in an optimistic age where workers were on an almost equal footing with management. If the year 2000 had looked like the year 1964, he just might have gotten this one right.
Obviously, we have since had a chance to try out some of these ideas. We've had a huge disruption of the office model at a time when demand for skilled workers is comparable to conditions when Clarke was making his predictions.
Businesses are currently trying to decide what the new standard will be. At the moment, the hybrid model seems to be winning but what calls there are for a return to completely office based work seem to be coming from management,
It's possible that workers will come around and we'll see a return to the old model though things seem to be moving the other way as lots of companies are starting to downsize their office space and saving a tremendous amount of money in the process.
Whenever a metric maxes out it creates
problems. Back in my teaching days, I used to try in vain to explain to
colleagues and particularly to administrators that a test where anyone, let
alone numerous students, made 100% was a bad test. A "perfect" score meant you didn't actually know how well that student did. Did they just barely
make that hundred or could they have aced a much more difficult test?
Worse yet, if more than one student make 100%, we have no way of ranking
them. When we start calculating final grades and averaging these
tests, we invariably give the same amount of credit to two students who
had substantially different levels of mastery.
This
was especially problematic given the push at one big suburban district (not coincidentally my worst teaching experience) to define an A at 93 and above
rather than grading on some kind of a curve. Since there was little
standardization on the writing of the tests for the most part and
arguably even less in the grading of any even
slightly open-ended questions, the set cut-off made absolutely no sense.
Trying to tweak the difficulty level of the test so that the students
doing A level work fell within that eight-point range was nearly
impossible and pretty much required writing exams where the top of the
class was likely to max out the instrument.
This
Mitchell and Webb radio sketch looks at the same underlying question
from a different angle and while I would probably argue that the one
year interval is a bit short, I can't entirely dispute the logic. While this specific example might make people a bit uneasy, substitute in zero shoplifting and the reasoning would actually be fairly sound.
Ohio girl, 10,
travels to Indiana to get an abortion because Ohio bans abortion at 6
weeks and she’s 6 weeks & 3 days pregnant. https://t.co/qtw8FEzIVA
What I like
about this clip is to watch it on mute - because that moment when the
anger overtakes her at the failure of journalists to raise abortion as a
presidential debate issue…I feel @HillaryClinton on this one.
I've felt for a long time that commenters and possibly political scientists have underestimated the role that resentment and the need for attention ("I owned the libs") plays in the 21st Century right.
According to one of his law clerks, as reported by @nytimes in 1993, Justice Clarence Thomas privately said, "The liberals made my life miserable for 43 years, and I'm going to make their lives miserable for 43 years."
You can't judge a movement by its most extreme manifestations, but the consistency with which iIsee conservatives express their vision of winning in terms of liberal pain reveals something.
To quote a friend of mine, “ We fight the battle in front of us with the cards we have. That battle is an election in five months. Everything else is noise.”
There is a profound difference in the development process between systems in which failure means you don’t get all the posts you expect for a search and systems in which failure means people die and civilizations burn.
In a functional democracy, the Texas GOP would pay a much greater cost for the power grid than the Democrats would for inflation.
Power is out for 4th time this week in Leander neighborhoods. @GregAbbott_TX and his guaranteed electric grid have failed again. 3 hours till our AC is up again.
Marge Greene tonight says that Putin just wanted to be our friend and ally, but we blew the opportunity by supporting Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/ZU9sKBRu48
— Ron Filipkowski πΊπ¦ (@RonFilipkowski) July 2, 2022
Yet again,
Marjorie Taylor Greene's comments are being used by Kremlin
propagandists on Russian state TV. State TV host and State Duma member
Evgeny Popov is interpreting her statements to mean that she wants
Americans to help Putin win in Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/nYLntOYdtb
Meanwhile on Russian state TV: State Duma member Evgeny Popov, who is also the host of the state TV show 60 Minutes, says that Scotland, seeking to hold a referendum on Scottish independence, "should reach out to Russian hackers for help —after all, they helped to elect Trump." pic.twitter.com/3bhV220qlH
Russia is betting that Republicans take over in 2023. They know that Trump @mattgaetz @RepMTG will cut of funds to Ukraine. Leaving it defenseless. pic.twitter.com/tzHENKY25k
An embrace of this independent state legislatures theory would be the equivalent of a coup to steal elections from the rightful winners. Allowing outrageous partisan and racial gerrymandering for state legislatures is part of the plan. https://t.co/6FdhVVnp3Z
"About 21% of
crypto-investors said they’ve used a loan to pay for their
cryptocurrency investments. Personal loans were most popular, but payday
loans, title loans, mortgage refinances, home equity loans and leftover
student loan funds also have been utilized." – DebtHammer
The weird
distortions this stuff is having on the venture market can't be
overstated. How many legit companies will never get built because they
don't sell a token is profoundly embarrassing.
The good people at Marketplace have a sharp Independence Day spin on a big ongoing story.
Jeffrey Williamson: In 1774, the top 1 percent of households got 9.3 percent of income.
Compare that to America today, when the top 1 percent is bringing in about 20 percent of income. Nine percent, versus 20 percent. Wow.
Williamson: Wow.
Even when you include slaves, Williamson says America was actually the
most egalitarian country in the world when it came to the difference
between rich and poor.
So what did the founding fathers have to say about that? I called up a guy who should know.
Clay Jenkinson: Hello my dear citizens, this is Thomas Jefferson.
Actually it's Clay Jenkinson, a historian and Jefferson impersonator.
And he says the writer of the famous phrase -- "All men are created
equal" -- thought a lot about income inequality. In a letter to a friend
describng the 13 colonies, he wrote "The great mass of our population
consists of laborers. The rich, being few and of moderate wealth..."
Jenkinson (Quoting Jefferson): Can any condition of society be more desireable?
I realize that we shouldn't treat the writings of the Founding Fathers as sacred text but you know, they had their moments...
No connection to any to any of our ongoing threads, but if you're interested in sketch comedy, you really need to see this series from That Mitchell and Webb Look. I'm at a loss for something else like it.
You can find find darker sketches (though "mummy won't wake up" does set the bar rather high), but few where the characters in the increasingly horrifying situations are so sympathetic. In that way, they remind me a bit of the Carol Burnett Show's Eunice sketches, which grew remarkably cruel toward the end, but those were long form pieces that could alternate between comedy and drama (and eventually go purely with the latter). The Quiz Broadcast is an exercise in world-building in 3-minute bites, and one that's become a bit more relevant recently.
3. San Francisco is not adjacent to or even particularly near Silicon Valley. Instead it's around fifty miles away. There are people who live in SF and commute to SV but it's a wasteful and completely unnecessary practice. San Jose is nearer and cheaper.
$5.3 billion: San Jose to San Francisco high-speed rail costs balloon by over 200%
Eliyahu Kamisher
Plagued
by years of funding shortages and spiraling costs, California’s
beleaguered high-speed rail project suffered another unexpected blow
this month in a new report that more than tripled the cost estimate for
the San Francisco-to-San Jose segment to a staggering $5.3 billion.
The new price tag is part of a report that completes a years-long environmental clearance
process for the 48-mile corridor that would carry bullet trains down
the Peninsula on electrified Caltrain tracks at 110 miles per hour and
eventually on to Southern California. It outlines three stops, a
controversial rail yard in Brisbane and money allocated to everything
from protecting Monarch butterflies to restoring Bent-flowered
fiddleneck habitat.
But the environmental document released last week also includes the new price tag
for the recommended route through the Peninsula, which is more than
three times the figure penciled into the High-Speed Rail Authority’s 2022 business plan.
As for the project itself, I have mixed feelings. California could certainly use more passenger rail, but there are places that need it more and are not as well served by public transit, some of which would probably be cheaper.
But whatever the merits of this line may be as infrastructure, it is an absolutely first rate reminder that most of the California housing debate consists of people (mainly from New York) demanding that we build housing 50 miles from where the Bay Area housing crisis is most severe.
This remarkably nonchalant New York Times piece on executive compensation deserves a deep dive (and not in a good way), but for now, I want to zoom in on one number in particular.
Jeff Green, chief executive of The Trade Desk, a digital advertising company, reported compensation of $835 million last year, making him the top-paid executive in the Equilar survey, which encompasses 200 companies, all of which have revenue over $1 billion. Mr. Green’s pay in 2021 was the third-highest amount that Equilar found in its past five annual surveys, which are based on companies’ pay disclosures; Mr. Musk’s deal in 2018, which Tesla valued at $2.3 billion, is still the biggest in those years.
...
For Mr. Green of The Trade Desk to qualify for the options in his package, valued in the proxy statement at $828 million, the company’s stock price must climb well above current levels, but there are no business goals for The Trade Desk to achieve.
Melinda Zurich, a spokeswoman for The Trade Desk, said the stock price targets in the company’s award were ambitious and noted that its stock was up several thousand percent since its initial public offering in 2016.
“Jeff has played an integral role in driving that growth, and is key to the company’s future growth agenda,” she added.
These deals are complicated and it's possible that Mr. Green will walk away with less than $835 million, but given the numbers, it's almost impossible to come up with a scenario where the man won't wildly overcompensated if the stock lucks (or is manipulated) into a good run. If so, all of the profits for the next six plus years will go to installment payments for the CEO's 2021 compensation package.
It is true that TTD had revenue greater than $1 billion which big money, but $835 million takes up an obscenely large chunk of that $1.2 billion. The number is even more striking when you look at income. Whether you use operating or net, Green's compensation package for 2021 is, at least in theory, more than six times the company's income for that year.
TTD appears to be a healthy company with a history of solid growth (though its 2021 income was sharply off from the previous year), but there is no reason to expect this thirteen year old operation will suddenly experience explosive growth in the near future, and if it doesn't, (assuming the stock still has a good run) this pay package would fall under the category of, for lack of a better word, looting.
Green came into this a billionaire going into this. He can
afford to take an all or nothing bet, particularly when the expected
value is this high.
Bob Dylan, the Monkees and the flooded landscape analogy
Seth Godin's comments on Bob Dylan and the Monkees (which comes to us via Gelman via DeWitt via Tinkers via Evers via Chance) got me thinking about fitness landscapes. Here's the quote:
Let
me first describe a distinction between the Monkees and Bob Dylan. Bob
Dylan gets laughed or booed off the stage every ten years, whether he
wants to or not. He got booed off the stage when he went electric and
again when he went gospel, and most recently with his horrendous
Christmas album. The Monkees never get booed off stage, because the
Monkees play "Last Train to Clarksville" exactly the same way they did
it 30 or 40 years ago. Here's the thing: Bob Dylan keeps selling out
stadiums and no one goes to see the Monkees, because the Monkees aren't
doing anything worth noticing. There are people who have succeeded who
just keep playing the same song over and over again, whatever that is
that they do.
Think of a musician's career as a landscape
where creative decisions like repertory, genre, style, arrangements give
the location and concert sales are the fitness function. (see here and here for previous posts on landscapes)
In
Godin's example, the Monkees have stuck very close to a local maxima
that has sank over the years (the sticking close part doesn't actually
match reality all that well -- Mike Nesmith had a run of innovative and
interesting projects in the early days of music video -- but for the
sake of the post let's overlook that part). Any small to moderate change
in repertory or arrangement or style would move them to a lower point
on the landscape.
I think I may be stealing this from Stuart
Kuafmann, but let's flesh out the metaphor a bit and add water. Our
landscape dwellers can travel freely on dry land but they can only swim
very short distances. Exactly how does this relate to our real life
example? Remember that altitude in our landscape corresponds to ticket
sales. In order to stay viable, ticket sales for a touring act have to
stay above a certain level. If the sales fall below that level, the act
loses bookings and can no longer cover its expenses. Of course, like any
other business, the act can run at a loss for a while (swim) but that's
obviously not a long term solution.
Godin suggest that a
willingness to, in our analogy, move to another optima is the key to
success. Dylan made the move and thrived. The Monkees stayed put and
whithered. But how comparable were the two situations?
Dylan had a
steady source of income from other artists covering his songs. In
landscape terms, he was a good swimmer (of course, so was Nesmith who
got a tiny check every time you used that little Liquid Paper brush).
More importantly, Dylan didn't have that far to swim. He might not even
have needed to get wet. At least a portion of Dylan's fan base were
going to stay with him no matter where he went on the musical landscape
and given his reputation (and phenomenal talent, though I'm trying to
leave that out of the discussion), there was a maxima waiting for him at
pretty much every genre and subgenre of popular music. Those moves
might not have been as artistically or commercially successful as the
ones he made but Dylan was going to remain viable no matter where he
went.
What about about the Monkees? Musically they weren't a bad
line-up. Dolenz was a veteran child actor, Jones was a Tony nominee for
Oliver! and Tork and Nesmith were both accomplished musicians. Highly
successful careers have certainly been built on less, but what did their
career landscape look like? Compared to Dylan's collection of
tightly-packed peaks, the Monkees had a lonely island surrounded by what
looked like a large and empty ocean. The vast majority of their fan
base was location specific. When they moved away from that location they
hit deep water very quickly.
It is, of course, possible that the
group could have focused on coming up with new songs and a new sound
with the hope of finding a new audience. This is a dynamic landscape,
and where the artist chooses to go is one of the factors that affects
it. There might not be a concert market for the Monkees playing new
grass or thrash metal now but that doesn't mean there won't be one in
the future. Sometimes, by playing music no one wants to hear, you can
create a demand for that music. To return to the landscape analogy,
treading water in one spot can cause an island to rise up beneath you.
It has been known to happen but it's probably not something you want to
count on.
In the case of the Monkees, the water-treading strategy
would be particularly risky since their reputation is likely to work
against them if they try something radically new. This is probably why
Nesmith chose to use his own much less well known name for the
Grammy-winning Elephant Parts rather than trying to sell it as a Monkees
project.
Which brings us back to Mr. Godin and the advice books
he and other business gurus dump on the market every year. These books
gush out at such a rate that there are actually companies that put out
fifteen page versions so that executives can at least give the
impression that they have read the latest releases. The Dylan/Monkees
example is sadly representative. It takes one of business gurus'
favorite truisms (take risks, i.e. move out of your comfort zone, i.e.
they laughed at Henry Ford), bills it as a fundamental key to fabulous
success (fabulous as in fabled as in obviously untrue) then backs it up
with an irrelevant but impressive sounding example.
Godin is
telling businesses to be like Bob Dylan and to make radical moves that
may piss off your customers and invite scorn and mockery. The trouble is
very few businesses are Dylan-at-Newport. The majority are the
Monkees-at-the-state-fair. They have something they do reasonably well.
If they stick close to their local maxima they can turn a decent profit
and have a pretty good run. If they follow Mr. Godin's advice they will
sink like a cinder block and never be heard from again.
Along with the asset bubble, I blame CGI. Back in the day, it took time, money and talent to come up with a good, let alone photo-realistic artist's rendering. Now you can find a high school student who can whip up everything up need (stills and video) in a weekend.
Stream It, Inc., maker of the CyberLandr – a pop-up camper accessory for the upcoming Tesla Cybertruck – made several interesting announcements today via its Facebook
page, as well as an official press release. The company has reportedly
racked up $100 million worth of pre-orders for the CyberLandr, it's now
making some shares available for purchase, and it has a new and improved website.
This is the only physical object the company has created. Everything else is CGI.
The company didn't promise a telescoping box (lots of campers can do that); they promised a camper that could expand in two dimensions producing an almost TARDIS level of roominess.
Complete with queen sized bed.
The company doesn't even know what the specs of the production model of the Cybertruck are going to be. Tesla now says they'll start making making them in 2023, but that was before the company announced mass layoffs and keep in mind, they originally promised to start selling them in 2021. The deposits are a fraction of the pre-orders, but a pretty substantial fraction.
Of course, that's not where the real money is. Also from December, 2021:
CyberLandr, a very ambitious high-tech camper designed for the Tesla Cybertruck, is raising money at an astronomical $400 million valuation.
Space Campers is already accepting reservations for its camper, which may start at $24,000, but you can, of course, add options. There’s an available fully-equipped kitchen, a combined shower and toilet, solar panels on the roof that can be integrated into a custom roof rack and an additional tent thermal insulation kit, custom sheets, electric blanket, thermal padded flooring and even a built-in movie projector.
I suppose we should be glad they don't come with NFTs.
With one notable
exception, storytellers and songwriters have pretty much ignored San
Jose. Even in “Do you know the way,” the point of the song is
that there’s not much to the town, small, friendly and unglamorous,
presented as the opposite of LA.
LA is a great big freeway Put a hundred down and buy a car In a week, maybe two, they'll make you a star Weeks turn into years, how quick they pass And all the stars that never were Are parking cars and pumping gas
You can really breathe in San Jose They've got a lot of space There'll be a place where I can stay I was born and raised in San Jose I'm going back to find some peace of mind in San Jose
San Francisco, one
the other hand, has never suffered from lack of attention, It was
getting more than its fair share of PR as far back as the turn of the century.
Fancy a novel about
Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville, Tennessee! There are
just three big cities in the United States that are “story
cities”—New York, of course, New Orleans, and, best of the lot,
San Francisco. —Frank Norris.
East is East, and
West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a
race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State. They are
the Southerners of the West. Now, Chicagoans are no less loyal to
their city; but when you ask them why, they stammer and speak of lake
fish and the new Odd Fellows Building. But Californians go into
detail.
Of course they have,
in the climate, an argument that is good for half an hour while you
are thinking of your coal bills and heavy underwear. But as soon as
they come to mistake your silence for conviction, madness comes upon
them, and they picture the city of the Golden Gate as the Bagdad of
the New World. So far, as a matter of opinion, no refutation is
necessary. But, dear cousins all (from Adam and Eve descended), it is
a rash one who will lay his finger on the map and say: “In this
town there can be no romance—what could happen here?” Yes, it is
a bold and a rash deed to challenge in one sentence history, romance,
and Rand and McNally. -- "A Municipal Report" by O. Henry (William
Sydney Porter)
If you get your news about the West Coast from New York
journalists, you might get the impression that nothing much has changed,
but the days when SF could claim to dominate even the Bay Area for
anything but restaurants and clubs has long passed. The area’s
biggest population and employment center is lowly San Jose, and it
has been for decades.
But reputations don't die that easily, particularly ones this entrenched. Despite the worship piled on the tech messiahs of the region, cool people still don't want to live in Silicon Valley. They want to live someplace they can brag about, someplace with iconic street scenes or spectacular mountain views, which usually means someplace that requires more than an hour's drive to get to work.
In other words, a functional exurb and when we discuss housing in the Bay Area, we always need to ask how long does it take to get to San Jose without a car.
One thing to be said for SF is that, for the West, it is fairly well served by public transportation. Some otherfavorites of YIMBY advocates... not so much.
Even making the 15 mile trip from Mill Valley to SF takes well over an hour if you don't have the option of driving.
Fortunately, there is a lot of construction in San Jose where it is desperately needed. Now if we could just get all these New York Times experts to ask that musical question.
NEW: Jan. 6 committee member Adam Schiff says they have texts showing that Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows wanted to send Georgia election investigators, in the words of one aide, a “shitload of POTUS stuff” including “coins, actual autographed MAGA hats”
Fortunately Trump is mature enough not to take this personally and start lashing out.
New from me @Axios: Dr. Oz has quietly dropped his Trump branding post-primary:
- 70+ tweets about Trump btwn endorsement and primary, none since then - No new ads feat. Trump vs. tons during primary - Scrubbed Trump from social media profiles/website https://t.co/GcYCwdIXnu
BREAKING: Arizona’s top drag queen reveals the shocking and hate-filled hypocrisy of Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake with receipt after receipt of Kari attending drag events for over a decade. #ByeKarihttps://t.co/5MpxFNLB2t
This CleanTechnica op-ed was not something I saw coming.
Wow—I've warned clients for yrs re Elon's reckless & destructive behavior hurts his companies & stakeholders, but now even LT fans like @SteveHanleyRI at @cleantechnica so concerned he's quoting MacBeth. Elon hasn't changed; just doesn't care anymore who sees.$TSLA$TWTR#SpaceXhttps://t.co/1sQj9xu9Vl
— Vicki Bryan’s Bond Angle (@VickiBryanBondA) June 19, 2022
This may be the most important line in this staggering piece: "The number of “hits” we get on the stories we write determines how much money comes in the door, and putting “Musk” or “Tesla” in the title guarantees a story will get a fair number of them." #AHitIsAHit$tslaQ$TSLAhttps://t.co/qfTLngaaDj
Is it just me or does this suggest a certain sense of urgency.
Republicans are planning to subvert future elections. They tried to overturn the election results in court in 2020 and overthrow them at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Republicans will try again in 2022. If they fail, they will try again in 2024.https://t.co/TW2VDSoKBg
Funniest and maybe most revealing nugget in this Chesebro profile is his one time mentor Larry Tribe saying the last time he heard from his erstwhile protege was in 2019 when Chesebro tried to get Tribe involved in a Bitcoin investment. https://t.co/ioiQdqIZ6j
THE HEAD OF LENDING AT CELSIUS IS AN EX-ADULT STAR WITH ONLY PRIOR EXPERIENCE OF BEING A SHOE DESIGNER.
SHE STARTED AS A MARKETING INTERN AND BECAME HEAD OF LENDING OVERNIGHT. HOW DOES AN ADULT ACTOR WITH NO FINANCE EXPERIENCE START MANAGING BILLIONS OVERNIGHT ? pic.twitter.com/G84pUym6ns
Never forget Michael Saylor encouraging unsophisticated investors to liquidate every asset they own to buy Bitcoin on leverage.pic.twitter.com/Wvv3c2JpOZ
— Ludwig Wittgenstein (@0xWittgenstein) June 18, 2022
Of course, a lot of VCs are assholes.
I saw a VC say
they won’t invest in companies that don’t require people to work in the
office. As someone who’s worked on distributed teams across continents
and the U.S., this seems more like a culture war position than one based
on data about effectiveness of hybrid/remote work
As asset bubbles pop, tech leaders will start going through a series of realizations 1.) Our hiring strategy doesn’t work 2.) Our business model doesn’t work
and soon
3.) Our product doesn’t actually work because it was subsidized by cheap money.
Putting aside all the people we now know told him it was illegal.
Terrible reporting here. It is not true a defendant can get acquitted by saying "I thought everything I did was okay and I found a lawyer who told me it was all fine. " https://t.co/BPlFVSf37D
In other words - what federal prosecutors need to prove in every single fraud case across this country every single day. (And what’s the federal conviction rate for fraud cases again?) https://t.co/n34eO3pjuD
It’s so weird that these Proud Boys were allegedly chanting an insult that was coined by none other than Tucker Carlson. So weird. Complete coincidence, surely… https://t.co/a6wjRyCvT7
NEW: The Texas Republican Party just voted to approve new language to their platform that: —Declares Biden is “not legitimately elected” —Declares homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle choice” —Calls to require kids be taught that life begins at fertilization, per @texastribune.
— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) June 19, 2022
And this should be even bigger.
Every senior in America should know that Social Security and Medicare are on the ballot in November.
— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) June 16, 2022
Ask yourself: How well are you going to sleep at night knowing that every five years Ted Cruz and other Congressional Republicans pushing ultra-MAGA policies are going to vote on whether you’ll have Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid?
A bit more background on one of reasons the New York Times housing article we've been discussing made me so angry (though in fairness, it is actually a significant improvement over what we've been seeing from the NYT on the subject).
Western mega-fires fall into that distressingly familiar category of dire crises with obvious solutions that people have alarmingly little interest in fixing. There is no real disagreement over what needs to be done (there hasn't been for decades), but the magnitude is stunning. [emphasis added]
Yes,
there’s been talk across the U.S. Forest Service and California state
agencies about doing more prescribed burns [a.k.a. controlled burns --
MP] and managed burns. The point of that “good fire” would be to create a
black-and-green checkerboard across the state. The black burned parcels
would then provide a series of dampers and dead ends to keep the fire
intensity lower when flames spark in hot, dry conditions, as they did
this past week. But we’ve had far too little “good fire,” as the
Cassandras call it. Too little purposeful, healthy fire. Too few acres
intentionally burned or corralled by certified “burn bosses” (yes,
that’s the official term in the California Resources Code) to keep
communities safe in weeks like this.
Academics believe that
between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in
prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land
managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and
2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state
passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional
burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant
change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature
Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would
need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to
restabilize in terms of fire.
...
[Deputy fire chief of
Yosemite National Park Mike] Beasley earned what he called his “red
card,” or wildland firefighter qualification, in 1984. To him,
California, today, resembles a rookie pyro Armageddon, its scorched
battlefields studded with soldiers wielding fancy tools, executing
foolhardy strategy. “Put the wet stuff on the red stuff,” Beasley summed
up his assessment of the plan of attack by Cal Fire, the state’s
behemoth “emergency response and resource protection” agency. Instead,
Beasley believes, fire professionals should be considering ecology and
picking their fights: letting fires that pose little risk burn through
the stockpiles of fuels. Yet that’s not the mission. “They put fires
out, full stop, end of story,” Beasley said of Cal Fire. “They like to
keep it clean that way.”
Why is it so difficult to do the smart thing? People get in the way. From Marketplace.
Molly
Wood: You spoke with all these experts who have been advocating for
good fire for prescribed burns for decades. And nobody disagrees, right?
You found that there is no scientific disagreement that this is the way
to prevent megafires. So how come it never happens?
Elizabeth
Weil: You know, that’s a really good question. I talked to a lot of
scientists who have been talking about this, as you said, literally, for
decades, and it’s been really painful to watch the West burn. It hasn’t
been happening because people don’t like smoke. It hasn’t been
happening, because of very well-intended environmental regulations like
the Clean Air Act that make it harder to put particulate matter in the
air from man-made causes. It hasn’t happened because of where we live.
You don’t want to burn down people’s houses, obviously.
For better than a hundred years, we’ve been setting too few fires and putting out too many. It wasn’t always like this. The indigenous tribes mastered fire as a forest management tool and used it extensively until the European settlers criminalized the practice, thus setting us up for the disaster facing us today.
The result has been a tinder bundle the size of Maine. Clearing it out is California’s second most serious environmental challenge (after global warming) and is the most urgent problem we face, period. Solving it requires a level of focus and political will that our current governor simply does not have (particularly compared to his predecessor). It’s up to the rest of us to keep this top of mind.
There are huge externalities to these projects, almost none of which can be easily addressed though a conventional regulatory framework. I would need to reach out to experts to be sure, but I doubt environmental impact laws even apply here since we aren’t worried about the direct damage the developments cause to the forests; we’re worried about the damage we’ll cause to the forests trying to protect those developments.
Every dwelling an a forest-adjacent wildland urban interface has got to be treated as, to some degree, expendable, or at the very least, the people who live there need to accept that they are on their own. When frequent controlled burns fill their neighborhoods with smoke, they shouldn't be able to file complaints. When those fires become uncontrolled (as they sometimes inevitably do), they should not have the option of suing.
A planned burn to reduce the threat of wildfire turned into the largest blaze in New Mexico history due to miscalculations, inaccurate models and a lack of understanding of how dry things are in the Southwest, the U.S. Forest Service said Tuesday. https://t.co/VLgpPuKwg5
It would be different if these upscale forested developments had any real possibility of having a substantial impact on the housing crisis, but we're talking about badly situated and trivially small pieces of land in the third largest state in the country. They arguably cause more problems than they solve and the disproportionate focus on them distracts us from a situation where we cannot afford distraction.
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