And if we committed to tithing to Uber, the company would break even within the decade

You always have to be careful reading too much into an anecdote, particularly one that came to your attention via social media, but they can be instructive. As Jason Torchinsky of Jalopnik puts it:

I know there’s sort of a stereotype about a certain sort of painfully obsessed Tesla fan/Elon Musk worshipper that is, likely, an unfair categorization of most Tesla fans. But then you see something like this recent discussion on Reddit’s r/TeslaMotors forum, and you remember that, oh yeah, sometimes stereotypes do come from somewhere.

uhh.... which stage of capitalism is this again? pic.twitter.com/iSHfZ2x6cf

— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) June 12, 2019

Once you're on the list, you're pretty much set.

Parul Sehgal has a devastating review of the latest from Naomi Wolf, but while Sehgal is being justly praised for her sharp and relentless treatment of her subject, she stops short before she gets to the most disturbing and important implication of the story.
There's an excellent case made here that Wolf's career should have collapsed long ago under the weight of her contradictions and factual errors, but the question of responsibility, of how enablers have sustained that career, and how many other journalistic all-stars owe their successes to the turning of blind eyes.

For example, Sehgal's review ran in the New York Times. One of, if not the most prominent voice of that paper is David Brooks. If you'll recall, Brooks got his sinecure (and if NYT opinion writer doesn't qualify, I don't know what does) in part because of a widely read article based largely on fabrications. There were no consequences for Brooks when this came out, or when similar complaints were raised later.

That her advice can contradict itself from book to book doesn’t appear to distress her (she fluctuates between regarding women as all-powerful sorceresses and abjectly dependent). The method has worked too efficiently, and at every stage of her life — as a young woman protesting beauty standards (“The Beauty Myth”) through motherhood (“Misconceptions”) and, later, the aging of her parents (“The Treehouse”), as she has grappled with her ambition (“Fire With Fire”) and her sex life (“Vagina”). Always the books are lit by a strange messianic energy, shored up by dubious data and structured around a moment of crisis and revelation as some veil — some long-held notion — falls away.

Recently, we had the opportunity to witness such a revelation in real time. Wolf was a guest on a BBC radio program, publicizing her new book, “Outrages,” a study of the criminalization of same-sex relationships in the Victorian era. She spoke passionately about discovering “several dozen executions” of men, including teenagers, accused of having sex with other men.

“Several dozen executions? I don’t think you’re right about this,” the host, Matthew Sweet, said, very politely filleting one of Wolf’s central claims. What Wolf regarded as evidence of executions — the notation of “death recorded” on court records — indicated, in fact, the opposite, that the judge had recommended a pardon from the death sentence. Sweet said he could find no evidence that anyone had ever been executed for sodomy in Victorian Britain, and furthermore, that Wolf mistakenly regarded sodomy in the court records as referring exclusively to homosexuality when, in fact, it was also used for child abuse. “I can’t find any evidence that any of the relationships you describe were consensual,” he pointed out.

It was a surprisingly cordial interaction, however. Wolf took the news on the chin, and later expressed her gratitude: “It’s such an important story and I welcome the chance to correct these two out of hundreds of citations and make it perfect.” Her publishers regretted the error but stated they believed the overall thesis still held.

…



Her first, career-making book, “The Beauty Myth,” is well-known for exaggerating the number of women who died of anorexia (Wolf stated that anorexia kills 150,000 women annually; the actual figure at the time, in the mid-1990s, was said to be closer to 50 or 60). One academic paper found that fully 18 of the 23 statistics about anorexia in the book were inaccurate and coined a term — “WOLF” (Wolf’s Overdo and Lie Factor) — to determine the degree to which Wolf was wrong: “On average, a statistic on anorexia by Naomi Wolf should be divided by eight to get close to the real figure.”

…


Throughout it all, she remains impervious to criticism. “I’m lucky,” she said in a recent profile in The Guardian. “I had a good education. I know my books are true.”

Not accurate or factual, but true. This is a key to understanding why charges of sloppiness or misrepresentation don’t seem to stymie, or even embarrass, writers like Wolf (or Jared Diamond and Annie Jacobsen, who have both been involved in similar scandals in recent weeks, facing them with the same blithe indifference). The issue isn’t simply that publishers don’t spring for fact-checking and leave writers vulnerable to making such errors. These writers see themselves in service of something larger than grubby reporting. “The important thing is that these stories are told,” Wolf recently told The Times of London. They are the emissaries of great stories, suppressed stories, and if they take liberties or eschew careful research — as consistently as Wolf has done — it is because they believe they have a right to them, that the story, the cause, somehow sanctions it.

Tuesday Tweets

Some comments on Hyperloop https://t.co/Q8ndOz9ixf

— David M. Levinson (@trnsprtst) June 10, 2019

As Ryanair moves to publish its emissions data, data show it emitted 1.2m tonnes of carbon dioxide in May, roughly the same amount that New York City produces in a week = roughly the same pa as one of Europe’s larger lignite-fuelled powerplants @lesliehookhttps://t.co/urwcereThW pic.twitter.com/v2WOHtdeqn

— Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) June 7, 2019

“...the company that runs the digital learning platform... takes a 60% cut of online tuition... the contract... contains a so-called poison tail that requires the university to continue handing over its revenue share for two years after canceling” https://t.co/qkVisilYaI

— Ethan Plaut (@ethanplaut) June 8, 2019

Lol probably higher

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 10, 2019

And a thoughtful thread.

In general, these kinds of divergences tend to happen near turning points. As Jason notes, the last time we had a comparable divergence between GDP and GDI was at the start of the Great Recession. NOT calling recession now, but things may be weaker than they appear 3/

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) June 8, 2019

Repost: Phoenix Interruptus -- just ashes

Disney can certainly take the hit, but still:

According to Box Office Mojo, Dark Phoenix tanked with $33 million in its first three days, domestically. That is by far the worst opening in the franchise, finishing well below The Wolverine's $53.1 million back in 2013. It's more than $20 million less than the original X-Men from 2000, even though there have been nearly 20 years of ticket price inflation and premium formats such as 3D. Dark Phoenix finished second for the weekend, trailing The Secret Life of Pets 2 ($47.1 million).

It goes without saying this is a disaster for Fox. While it's true Dark Phoenix was something of a lame duck from the get-go since the Disney/Fox deal made a hard reboot inevitable, everyone involved was still hoping for the film to be successful. Dark Phoenix was even one of the more expensive X-Men movies, with a budget of $200 million. Odds are, it won't turn a profit for the studio; X-Men: Apocalypse, which opened with $65.7 million in 2016, earned $543.9 million globally. That's a figure Dark Phoenix is unlikely to match or surpass, especially with how low interest was at the start. This decidedly was not a must-see cinematic event, and due to the bad reviews, it's not going to have strong legs.

Keep in mind a good rule of thumb is that a film has to more than double its box office to break even, making this a big money loser for Disney/Fox.

The thinking in the film industry for a number of years now has been that the more you spend on these big franchise films, the more you'll make. For those versed in the history of the industry, this line of reasoning strikes a familiar note.

This isn't to say that we're looking at another late-sixties type crash, but the bigger budgets=more profits assumption never ends well.

Film history for fools -- box office disasters

Consider this a footnote to the previous Motley Fool rant.

There's an old and very common saying in Hollywood that the biggest money-losing film ever was the Sound of Music. The joke here is that though the film did rather well...

Upon its initial release, The Sound of Music briefly displaced Gone with the Wind as the highest-grossing film of all-time; taking re-releases into account, it ultimately grossed $286 million internationally. Adjusted to contemporary prices it is the third highest-grossing film of all-time at the North American box office and the fifth highest-grossing film worldwide.

... The films it inspired lost a lot of money. That's a bit of an oversimplification. Music was just the last of a string of hit musicals in the early Sixties ( West Side Story, The Music Man, My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins) but it was the biggest and it suggested an upward trend and, to the extent that it was responsible for what followed, it might well justify that money-losing title. 

The commercially and/or critically unsuccessful films included Camelot, Finian's Rainbow, Hello Dolly!, Sweet Charity, Doctor Dolittle, Star!, Darling Lili, Paint Your Wagon, Song of Norway, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Man of La Mancha, Lost Horizon and Mame. Collectively and individually these failures crippled several of the major studios.

I don't want to push the analogy with comic-book movies but there are similarities, particularly regarding the budgets and the stories executives told themselves to justify them. 

And I'm pretty sure if Motley Fool had been around in, say, 1967, these upcoming movies would have generated lots of optimistic exclamation points.

Repost -- engineers were ambitious back in the day

With all this discussion of the hyperloop, it's useful to remember just how long people have been thinking about the basic concepts.

THE PORTELECTRIC SYSTEM

If there's an engineer in the audience, I'd very much like to know what the relationship is between this very cool 1890 system and the history of linear induction trains.

If only it were underground...

Wait, even if they could go 155 mph and be spaced 1 every second (yikes), they eventually have to slow down and let people off right? So you can only do 57,600 passengers/hour/lane if nobody ever gets on, and nobody ever gets off. It’s like Schrödinger's subway system I guess. pic.twitter.com/uhbiCxK5Dr

— Costa Samaras (@CostaSamaras) June 4, 2019

From the good people at Closer than We Think:

Rollerways was published on this day in 1962 #365daysofRadebaugh

Rent or buy the film today! https://t.co/f7MEcTY1Ha pic.twitter.com/TlziJgnhn2

— Closer Than We Think (@CloserThanThink) June 3, 2019

"IEA: Nuke retirements could lead to 4 billion metric tons of extra CO2 emissions"

I know I'm wading into a fiercely heated debate here, but simply as a matter of consistency, it seems like the degree you take climate change seriously should correlate strongly with support for nuclear power, at least for the next 20 or 30 years.

From Ars Technica

A report released today by the International Energy Agency (IEA) warns world leaders that—without support for new nuclear power or lifetime extensions for existing nuclear power plants—the world's climate goals are at risk.

"The lack of further lifetime extensions of existing nuclear plants and new projects could result in an additional four billion tonnes of CO₂ emissions," a press release from the IEA noted.
...

Though politicians have said that nuclear power will be replaced by renewable energy, in practice that may be less likely to come to fruition. When New York state announced the closure of the Indian Point nuclear plant in 2017, Governor Andrew Cuomo said he believed its power could be easily replaced by low-carbon sources of power by its closing date in 2021. But Platts Analytics says that most of Indian Point's 2GW will be "replaced with output from the newly constructed 1,100MW Cricket Valley and 680MW CPV Valley gas-fired power plants."

Tuesday Tweets

A few stories I'm keeping an eye on.

A thoughtful thread on the internet of things..

It's such a smart idea to connect so much of our infrastructure to single points of failure, with much of the risks coupled. Smart homes ftw. pic.twitter.com/qiD7l6RWfJ

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) June 2, 2019

And one on the impact of technology on the economics of entertainment.

The Times has published a posthumous article based on the work of the late, great Alan Krueger on one of his side interests: the economics of the music business. And it is, of course, great. But the premise may not be right! 1/ https://t.co/I8sBabilED

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) June 2, 2019

It's not just that Disney content is leaving Netflix; it's that it's going other places:

2 More Marvel Shows Are Coming to Hulu, Including Ghost Rider Starring SHIELD's Gabriel Luna [Updated] https://t.co/in2J2bqBSf via @io9

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) June 2, 2019

Remember back a few years ago when we kept insisting that the charter school system, as currently configured, was vulnerable to graft and corruption?

Wow. This is an incredible scheme. Fraudsters opened 19 online charter schools in California, bought student data & created 40K "virtual" students. Cash rolled in & real students/parents knew nothing about it https://t.co/XOzSmjIngt

— Jennifer Berkshire (@BisforBerkshire) May 30, 2019

I'm not sure if it's a question  for a linguist or a political scientist, but the way that this childish borderline putdown has moved from rightwing talk radio to the mainstream GOP would be an interesting phenomena to study.

"Democrat" is not an adjective, Ms. No Middle Name. Did they make you drop the Romney by threatening to drape a tarp over you so the president* wouldn't see you? https://t.co/ysWYJ4xxTr

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) May 30, 2019

Even by Musk standards, the Boring Company has always been based on bait-and-switch.

Elon  Musk has a long history of debuts that arrive late and, more importantly, fail to include the very features that constituted the promised innovation, but at least products like autopilot were still cool and technologically sophisticated, even if they fell short of the revolutionary advances they had been billed as.With Musk's latest, though, the product isn't just a disappointment in relative terms. It's embarrassing any way you look at it.

Aaron Gordon of Jalopnik pretty much just cuts to the chase.


Elon Musk Says ‘Hyperloop’ Tunnel Is Now Just a Normal Car Tunnel Because ‘This Is Simple and Just Works’

Back in 2017, Elon Musk had grand visions for the test track built by The Boring Company, his tunneling firm, in Los Angeles. The Boring Company’s tunneling work was closely linked to Musk’s Hyperloop idea, which would require hundreds of miles of tunneling to be viable, although the actual test track in California bore none of the traits of an air vacuum-based transportation system. It would have proprietary vehicles with varying capacities for private travel, public transport, or freight. They would travel along electrified skates for frictionless movement. It would be fast and efficient, but more importantly, it would be different, because he’s a genius.

Six months ago, the first demonstration of that track didn’t quite match that vision: it was a Tesla Model X on a sled going down a very bumpy tunnel at roughly 50 mph.

At the time, Musk said the bumpiness was only temporary: “That bumpiness will definitely not be there down the road—it will be smooth as glass.”

Credit where credit’s due: it does appear to be smooth as glass now, according to a video The Boring Company released of a car going 127 mph down the tunnel. How did it achieve such miraculous speed and comfort improvements in a mere six months?

They paved it.

Yes, for those keeping score, in a mere two years we’ve gone from a futuristic vision of electric skates zooming around a variety of vehicles in a network of underground tunnels to—and I cannot stress this enough—a very small, paved tunnel that can fit one (1) car.

The video’s marketing conceit is that the car in the tunnel beats a car trying to go the same distance on roads. You’ll never believe this, but the car that has a dedicated right of way wins. Congratulations to The Boring Company for proving dedicated rights of way are important for speedy transportation, something transportation planners figured out roughly two centuries ago. I’m afraid for how many tunnels they’ll have to dig before they likewise acknowledge the validity of induced demand.

Days of Futures Past -- Apple edition

From Matt Novak's essential Paleo-Future: 

Apple Computer was an innovative and nimble company in 1987, so it makes sense that people at the tech giant would imagine a world dominated by Apple ten years into the future. And that’s precisely what it did when it released this goofy video from the perspective of the year 1997.

The 1987 video, which can be viewed on YouTube, is clearly meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but it shows viewers an amazing world of technological innovation with a handful of things that we actually got.

The video shows Apple payphone stations that communicate with satellites in space (at least they got the satellite part right), and something called the Vista Mac II, eyewear that doubles as a computer (something that we’re still waiting on, sadly). And there’s so much more.

The article has some interesting context on what the 90s were really like for Apple, but there aren't a lot of details about the production. It has the feel of something internal for a company event. These always manage to be a little bit better produced than you expect and yet a little more corny than you're ready for.

That 72% sounds bad until you look into it, then it looks worse

As we've been  over before, the only halfway credible narrative that anyone has come up with to justify the stock price of Netflix is that it will produce so much valuable content of such long-term value that the company will not only be able to survive without the support of the studios, but will completely dominate them. Even if the studios had been able to stop Netflix at one time, the company has too much momentum now. At least that's the story.

If you go by the hype (paid for by unprecedented marketing and PR budgets), it's easy to believe that Netflix originals dominate the platform. That's not the case.

From Gizmodo [emphasis added]:

At a tech and media conference on Tuesday AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said that the company will yank WarnerMedia content from other streaming services so that the assets will be exclusive to the streaming service his company is launching soon. That would mean that Netflix would lose popular shows like Friends and Hulu is going to lose audience favorites like ER.

... 

“Pulling it away (from Netflix)? It’s certainly something we’re willing to do,” Reilly said, according to Deadline—adding that he doesn’t think sharing assets is a good model and his “belief is that they should be exclusive.”

The move would be a major blow to Netflix. The company paid $100 million for exclusive streaming rights for Friends through 2019. Analytics firm Jumpshot showed late last year that Friends was the second- or third-most watched show on Netflix. And, as Wall Street Journal highlighted, 72 percent of Netflix viewers’ watch time is spent on non-original content, much of which is owned by WarnerMedia. The move would only add to Netflix’s incoming difficulties with the launch of Disney’s new streaming service. A recent survey conducted by Hollywood Reporter and Morning Consult showed that 28 percent of Netflix users said they would cancel their account if Disney pulled all their titles—including Marvel and Star Wars properties—from Netflix.

And that 72% understates the problem. Apologies to the regulars who have heard this before, but from an intellectual property standpoint, Netflix Originals range from complete ownership to licensing agreements where the company get no longterm rights whatsoever.

While we can't know the exact details of the contracts, it's unlikely that IP based companies like Disney or Mattel would let go of properties like Luke Cage or She-Ra. Furthermore, in addition to She-Ra, most of Netflix's other prominent kids' shows appear to be owned by studios like Universal. Historically, children are disproportionately heavy viewers, and they seem to be watching lots of original content that Netflix doesn't own.

If we put these shows with that 72%, little of the viewership seems to be going to shows that Netflix actually controls, which leaves it very much at the mercy of the industry it was supposed to disrupt.

Many Tesla bulls remain studies in faith

We could go back and forth on what an appropriate valuation for Tesla, but it's difficult to argue that a reasonable estimate (even a bullish one) hasn't moved at least a little south over the past year or so. The finance and cash flow picture has gotten truly ugly. Most indicators suggest sharply slackening demand. The competitive landscape is increasingly daunting, both on the EV and AV front.

Most Tesla bulls have adjusted their estimates as the picture has gotten more grim, but many remain steadfast, perhaps even willing to double down. The following is an informative if extreme example. Not surprisingly, the analyst's faith in the company is explicitly tied to her faith in Elon Musk and his ability to "achieve the impossible."

Ark Invest, whose founder predicted on CNBC last year that Tesla could hit $4,000 per share, stands by that call, even as the stock has lost about 40% of its value in 2019.

Tasha Keeney, an Ark analyst, said in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that Wall Street is “misunderstanding the Tesla story” and the potential upside of Elon Musk’s vision. Musk’s accomplishments are widely acknowledged, but he’s gotten himself and Tesla into trouble with the government over his comments, stemming from an August tweet about possibly taking the company private with “funding secured.”

Keeney said Ark believes so strongly in Tesla that its five-year, bear-case scenario is $560 per share, which would be nearly triple the value of where the stock closed Thursday at $195.

This week, Morgan Stanley put a worst-case of $10 per share on Tesla. A day later, Citigroup said the stock could fall to $36 per share.

...
Keeney, however, said Ark is not troubled by additional fundraising. “If we talk about cash, and those worries, in our valuation model we actually expect, we have Tesla raising an additional $10 billion to $20 billion in the next five years. And we’re actually OK with that.”

“We want them to get as many cars on the road as possible” with the next step of running a “fully autonomous taxi network.” Last month, Musk promised 1 million vehicles on the road next year that are able to function as “robo-taxis,” a claim that was generally thought to be optimistic, at best.

On an investor call earlier this month, two of the invitees told CNBC that Musk predicted autonomous driving will transform Tesla into a company with a $500 billion stock market value. As of Thursday’s close, Tesla’s market cap was just over $34 billion.

Keeney admits that Musk sets “extremely aggressive goals” and often falls short. “But in doing that, in sort of pushing to that target, they’ve been able to achieve the impossible so far.”

Would Tesla be a healthy company today if it had never crossed the Ponzi threshold?

I'm perfectly serioius about this thought experiment.

LA Times: Elon Musk’s growth story is looking more like a fable as Tesla Inc. enters survival mode. https://t.co/PCmJA17tsn

— Russ Mitchell (@russ1mitchell) May 21, 2019

This is an enormously complicated question, far beyond my ability to address seriously, but it's not a bad thought experiment. Imagine back ten years ago, shortly after the company received its half billion dollar loan from the DoE, Tesla had decided to limit their growth and keep the focus on high-end (and high-margin) sedans and SUVs with an eye on the truck market when the technology was ready.

The stock would probably never have hit $383 back in 2017, but I wonder if it would be above $200 today.

Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Ponzi Thresholds

Another post based on Reeves Wiedeman's Uber article in New York magazine. This one sets up a concept I've been meaning to discuss with the tentative name of a Ponzi threshold. The basic idea is that sometimes overhyped companies that start out with viable business plans see their valuation become so inflated that, in order to meet and sustain investor expectations, they have to come up with new and increasingly fantastic longshot schemes, anything that sounds like it might possibly pay off with lottery ticket odds.

Like I said, this is been bouncing around for quite a while. I may have even slipped in a previous reference that I've forgotten about. There are plenty of potential examples, but the following is the first time I've seen the phenomenon spelled out in such naked terms [emphasis added]:

Meanwhile, in an effort to show potential investors in an IPO that it has multiple revenue streams, Uber has expanded into a variety of industries tangentially related to its core business. In 2015, the company launched Uber Everything, an initiative to figure out how it could move things in addition to people, and when I visited Uber headquarters, the guest Wi-Fi password was a reference to Uber Freight, the company’s attempt to get into trucking. (A former employee said the password often seemed to be a subliminal message encouraging employees to focus on the company’s newest initiatives.) But moving things had its own complications. One former Uber Everything manager said the company had looked at transporting flowers or prescription drugs or laundry but found that the demographic of people who, for example, couldn’t afford a washer and dryer but would pay to have their laundry delivered was a small one. Uber Rush, a delivery service in New York, had become “a nice little business,” the manager said, “but at Uber, you’re looking for a billion-dollar business, not a nice little business.”

It turned out that food delivery was the only area that made much sense, though even that was difficult. In the past year, food-delivery companies SpoonRocket, TinyOwl, Take Eat Easy, and Maple have all ceased operations. Postmates said in 2015 that it could be profitable in 2016, at which point it pushed the date to 2017. Its target is now 2018. “It absolutely does not work as a one-to-one business — picking up a burrito from Chipotle and delivering it,” a former Uber Eats manager said. “It has to be ‘I’m picking up ten orders from Chipotle, and I’m picking up this person next to Chipotle, and I’m gonna drop the burritos off along the way.’ ” Uber Eats has grown significantly, but getting the business up and running had required considerable subsidies, and the manager said it was rumored that a significant portion of the company’s domestic losses were coming from Uber Everything.

Uber’s expansion into an ever-widening gyre of business interests makes sense for a company looking to justify a huge valuation, but it has drawn criticism from some who wonder why the company is moving into so many different markets without becoming profitable in its first one. “It’s a Ponzi scheme of ambition,” Anand Sanwal, a venture-capital analyst, told me. “ ‘We’re gonna raise money on the promise of dominating an industry to come in order to pay for this thing that doesn’t make us money right now.’ ” He had recently conducted an unscientific poll of subscribers to his newsletter asking how many would invest in Uber today, even at a discounted valuation, and 77 percent said they wouldn’t. But the new initiatives have the benefit of keeping everyone excited about the future: In April, Uber held a conference in Dallas to explain why it planned to one day get into flying cars.

That phrase "looking to justify a huge valuation" is one that you need to contemplate for a few moments, let the logical implications wash over you. As I suggested before, like most New York magazine tech writers, Wiedeman does a good job capturing the telling detail, but is reluctant to draw that final Dr.-Tarr-and-Prof.-Feather conclusion, particularly when it threatens a cherished narrative.

There are at least two layers of crazy here. First, hype and next-big-thingism push Uber's value far beyond any defensible level, then, as reality sets in and investors realize that the original business model, though sound, can never possibly justify the money that's been put into the company, Uber's management responds with a series of more and more improbable proposals in order to keep the buzz going.

The phenomenon is not unique to this company but I can't think of another case this big or this blatant. (And they actually used the term "Ponzi scheme.")

Memorial Day Repost

A good day for a recommendation

There is, of course, no such thing as the military perspective -- no single person can speak for all the men and women who have served in the military -- but if you are looking for a military perspective, my first choice would be Lt. Col. Robert Bateman who writes eloquently and intelligently on the subject for Esquire. Here are Bateman's recent thoughts on Memorial Day.

When the guns fell silent in the Spring of 1865, they all went home. They scattered across the country, back across the devastated south and the invigorated north. Then they made love to their wives, played with their children, found new jobs or stepped back into their old ones, and in general they tried to get on with their lives. These men were no longer soldiers; they were now veterans of the Civil War, never to wear the uniform again. But before long they started noticing that things were not as they had been before.

Now, they had memories of things that they could not erase. There were the friends who were no longer there, or who were hobbling through town on one or two pegs, or who had a sleeve pinned up on their chest. There were the nights that they could not shake the feeling that something really bad was about to happen. And, aside from those who had seen what they had seen and lived that life, they came to realize that they did not have a lot of people to talk to about these things. Those who had been at home, men and women, just did not "get it." A basic tale about life in camp would need a lot of explanation, so it was frustrating even to talk. Terminology like "what is a picket line" and "what do you mean oblique order?" and a million other elements, got in the way. These were the details of a life they had lived for years but which was now suddenly so complex that they never could get the story across to those who had not been there. Many felt they just could not explain about what had happened, to them, to their friends, to the nation.

So they started to congregate. First in little groups, then in statewide assemblies, and finally in national organizations that themselves took on a life of their own.

The Mid-1860s are a key period in American history not just because of the War of Rebellion, but also because this period saw the rise of "social organizations." Fraternities, for example, exploded in the post-war period. My own, Pi Kappa Alpha, was formed partially by veterans of the Confederacy, Lee's men (yes, I know, irony alert). Many other non-academic "fraternal" organizations got their start around the same time. By the late 1860s in the north and south there was a desire to commemorate. Not to celebrate, gloat or pine, but to remember.

Individually, at different times and in different ways, these nascent veterans groups started to create days to stop and reflect. These days were not set aside to mull on a cause -- though that did happen -- but their primary purpose was to think on the sacrifices and remember those lost. Over time, as different states incorporated these ideas into statewide holidays, a sort of critical legislative mass was achieved. "Decoration Day" was born, and for a long time that was enough. The date selected was, quite deliberately, a day upon which absolutely nothing of major significance had occurred during the entire war. Nobody in the north or south could try to change it to make it a victory day. It was a day for remembering the dead through decorating their graves, and the memorials started sprouting up in every small town in the nation. You still see them today, north and south, in small towns and villages like my own home of Chagrin Falls -- granite placed there so that the nation, and their homes, should not forget the sacrifices of the men who went away on behalf of the country and never came back.

The lure of literalism

Mainly in social sciences, there's a popular genre of papers built around supposedly showing that commonly recognized nonliteral associations are in fact literal. Pulling the the corners of your mouth back actually makes you happy. Striking a self-assured pose actually changes your body chemistry to make you more confident. Linguistic forms that encourage people to use first person pronouns make societies less likely to promote education and other institutions that make individuals more independent. 

The studies are overwhelmingly based on questionable observational data or experimental approaches so contrived or round-about that they would make Rube Goldberg dizzy. This would be a good time to start an in-depth discussion of why these obviously flawed studies are so consistently appealingly, but that would take too much effort so I'm just going to play off the Goldberg reference and post a couple of very cool OK GO videos.