One essential point to keep in mind about "Los Angeles": it's not just bigger than you think; it's way bigger than you think.*

There's a fundamental confusion about LA that pops ups constantly and can be tremendously misleading. If you look up U.S. cities by population, you get the following

1     New York     8,398,748
2     Los Angeles 3,990,456   

But when people say "New York,"  they mean the city of New York, but when people say "Los Angeles" without qualifiers, they almost inevitably mean the county of Los Angeles. Almost no one, including lifelong Angelenos are vague on which areas are neighborhoods and which are cities.

The population of LA County is over 10 million and the area is over 4,000 square miles. It covers mountains, beaches, valleys and, high and low deserts. Multiple microclimates can result in 36 degree temperature differences at the same time of day. The elevation ranges from 0 to over 10,000 feet.

East Coast journalists (and all too often, Bay Area ones, as well) are shockingly ignorant of LA, not to mention San Diego, the Central Valley, and the rest of the state. As a result, issues affecting small slices of the population are over-reported while widespread problems don't get the attention they deserve.

For example, relatively few Angelenos are worried about their houses burning down while the smoke from these fires can create a serious health concern for millions of people.

As bad as this is for us, the ignorance and provincialism of journalists is even worse for most of the rest of the country. If they get this much wrong about LA, imagine how little they know about a place like Phoenix.








* San Francisco, by comparison, is way smaller than you think, but how a city that doesn't break the top 12 in population became the goto example for urban planning narratives is a subject for another post.

Thursday Tweets (because it's been that kind of week)

Reveal does important work, which makes this all the more appalling.

"Planet Aid’s actions in its lawsuit against Reveal are a manifest example of what deep-pocketed interests can do to a news organization even when the facts are on the journalists’ side." https://t.co/Tf1tbguzHu Three years and millions of dollars in legal fees fighting this.

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) November 6, 2019

Most screwed up story of gaming the metrics I've ever seen.

Colleges are sending brochures to people who get low scores on SAT practice tests so they can reject their applications later because US News uses rejection rate as a factor in ranking schools.https://t.co/ULBzPMRbV0

— Dare Obasanjo (@Carnage4Life) November 6, 2019

 
If you want utopian urbanists to ignore you, bring this up.

Add a few miles to the 30 and you could say exactly the same thing about Silicon Valley workers who want to live in a trendy SF zip code. https://t.co/VxW3xXHOLz

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 6, 2019

Andrew has some thoughts on this. I wonder how you can account for the substitution effect in the analysis, but getting the musings to thought-status is too much work.

An obscure but influential argument made for not worrying about inequality is that the poor face a lower inflation rate than the rich. These arguments were everywhere ~2009 and still remain.

Turns out new, actual research on the topic finds the opposite. https://t.co/dTxG9TmLjZ

— Mike Konczal (@rortybomb) November 5, 2019

  


 "Most useless and over-hyped technology ever!"? -- the hyperloop would like to have a word with you.

There is still NOT a single application of blockchain - defined as a public, decentralized/distributed, permission-less, trustless ledger technology - that works or is widely used in spite of billions spent on it for a decade now. Most useless and over-hyped technology ever!

— Nouriel Roubini (@Nouriel) November 6, 2019

 

'It is the right moment for me to leave to pursue an entrepreneurial opportunity.'
G/O Media Editorial Director Who Told Deadspin to 'Stick to Sports' Resigns (after entire staff resigns) https://t.co/WFaAUO3eN3 via @vice

— Margaret Sullivan (@Sulliview) November 5, 2019

 

Here's another beautiful quote from his resignation note: 'I admire the journalism that you produce and the unique voice that is otherwise missing from mainstream media.'

— Margaret Sullivan (@Sulliview) November 5, 2019

  

Accidentally duplicated every item in my @zotero library.

A sane person would've written a script to automate the merging process.

I took the analogue approach. pic.twitter.com/kAF9c6tUs3

— Dooley Murphy (@DooleyMurphy) November 5, 2019

 

Four years ago (more or less) -- something to remember when reading the latest analysis from Nate Cohn (and a lot of others)

Track records matter. Like it or not, unless you're actually working with the numbers, you have to rely to some degree on the credibility of the analysts you're reading. Three of the best ways to build credibility are:

1. Be right a lot.

2. When you're wrong, admit it and seriously examine where you went off track, then...

3. Correct those mistakes.

I've been hard on Nate Silver in the past, but after a bad start in 2016, he did a lot to earn our trust. By the time we got to the general election, I'd pretty much give him straight A's. By comparison, there were plenty of analysts who got straight F's, and a lot of them are playing a prominent role in the discussion this time around..

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Revisiting Nate Cohn -- Scott Walker edition

I was going back and forth on whether or not to revisit this critique of the New York Times' Nate Cohn in the wake of the Walker implosion. If you remember, little over a month ago, Cohn made the argument that:

In the end, Mr. Trump almost certainly won’t win the Republican nomination; the rest of the party will consolidate around anyone else. He can influence the outcome only if his support costs another candidate more than others. But for now, he seems to be harming all candidates fairly equally.

This was never a convincing claim (at the time I called it "strained and convoluted"), and it has gotten even less defensible in the light of recent events, but that's not necessarily enough reason to dredge things up. There's a difference between keeping score and piling on (and the last post on Cohn was a bit on the harsh side).

I was leaning toward dropping the thread until I read Cohn's piece on the collapse of the Walker campaign and again saw things that bothered me. It was better than the Trump pieces, but it was improvement without progress.

[Yeah, I know, it sounds garbled but let me unpack the oxymoron. If the most recent outcome is better than the previous one, that's an improvement; if conditions change so that we can expect future outcomes to be better than previous outcomes, that's progress. (My blog, my definitions.)]

Over the past three months, Nate Cohn and many of his colleagues have not only failed to anticipate major developments; they've also made a string of predictions that haven't come to fruition. This wouldn't be worrisome if it were leading to a critical examination of the analogies and assumptions that led to these errors, or at least a little less self-assurance.

What we don't want to see is yet is yet another simple narrative presented as the explanation. Which brings us to..

Mr. Walker faltered so quickly because he simply was not skilled enough to navigate the competing pressures of appealing to the party’s establishment at the same time as arousing its base. It was much like the story of Rick Perry.

Though the entry of Donald Trump into the race made things harder for all the Republican candidates, Mr. Trump can’t be blamed entirely for Walker’s troubles. Mr. Walker was tied with Mr. Bush for second place in national polls heading into the first debate, long after Mr. Trump took a lead in those polls. By the time he dropped out, Mr. Walker had the support of less than one-half of 1 percent of Republican primary voters, according to the most recent CNN survey.

The Walker campaign — or perhaps the candidate personally — felt pressure from the rise of Mr. Trump on his right, especially once Mr. Walker started slipping a bit in the polls. This sort of pressure isn’t unusual and was inevitable — he would have felt it at some point, if not from Mr. Trump, then from Ben Carson or Ted Cruz.

Mr. Walker, to put it gently, did not handle this pressure well. His instinct was to move to the right as fast as possible at any point of vulnerability. He staked out a conservative position on birthright citizenship and a fringe position on considering a wall at the Canadian border. These moves alienated party elites and weren’t credible to conservative voters. He quickly reversed positions; in the end, he reassured no one.

First off there's the argument itself. It seems to be a reasonable, if not all that convincing, little story (not all that different than the one Nate Silver tells, but more an that in a minute) until you consider magnitude of the event being discussed. Walker did have notable missteps (to use Silver's term) but they were relatively minor. If we were talking about a campaign losing momentum or dropping a few points they might make sense as a possible cause, but we're talking about a complete implosion with a well-funded candidate going from near the top of the field to less than one percent support in shockingly little time.

The important part here is the speed of the collapse. Cohn himself was discussing Walker's weaknesses as a campaigner back in July, but he also said Walker had "plenty of time to assuage these concerns."

We now know Walker didn't. A month later, he would already be in free fall.

Scott Walker has sought to reassure jittery donors and other supporters this week that he can turn around a swift decline in the polls in Iowa and elsewhere by going on the attack and emphasizing his conservatism on key issues.

And, if you check the dates, you'll notice that the donors got jittery before Walker started talking about that Canadian wall.

Furthermore, probably Walker's most high-profile move to the right was the anti-labor position. I suppose this could have alienated the party elites (though we are talking about Koch brothers here) but if Scott Walker can't make an attack on unions credible to conservative voters, I honestly can't imagine anyone who could.

But the argument itself isn't what really bothers me. What's troubling here is the way that Cohn deals with the failure of his predictions. Even those with a good track record on the GOP race, such as Josh Marshall, admitted to being surprised at just how rapidly the collapse transpired. As a good rule of thumb, if you did not expect something, you should be careful about offering explanations about how it happened. As far as I can tell, Marshall and company are doing their best to follow this rule.

Cohn, by comparison, has perhaps the worst track record of any of the analysts I've been following when it comes to the GOP primary. After calling a premature end to the Trump surge a number of times and making the just-another-Herman-Cain analogy on no less than five separate occasions, he then made the previously mentioned claim about Trump not having any effect on the race.

Despite this, Cohn appears to be one of the most confident commentators when putting forward his theories about the causes of the implosion. The comparison to Nate Silver here is instructive. Silver actually opens his piece by acknowledging just how wrong he and his team were on Scott Walker. In addition to caution, Silver also offers a great deal more in terms of complexity and counter arguments. Cohn actually uses the word "simply" to describe his version of events.

But what's important here is not just the unwarranted confidence. We all have our moments. What merits attention is what Cohn's confidence in this situation tells us about his process. Anyone who works with data long enough will have occasion to see their models break down and their predictions go so far awry that they are no longer even directionally accurate.

When journalists looking in from the outside describe these disasters, they almost invariably use the phrase "go back and check your numbers," but in complex situations that is relatively seldom the source of the problem. More likely and far more difficult to catch are problems with robustness and modeling assumptions.

I realize I may be making too much of this, but there's a bigger issue here that has been bothering me for a long time. When Nate Cohn says this is what happened to Scott Walker, he is displaying a this-is-how-the-world-works tone and mindset that is very common in places like the Upshot, even when it is not at all appropriate. If you read carefully the work of journalists inspired by Nate Silver (though not so much Silver himself), you pick up the implicit belief that the standard methods and assumptions being employed are as true and as reliable as the laws of mathematics , that they have always worked and will always work.

This is a dangerous way to approach the social sciences, particularly when you start running into range of data issues (and between Trump, Carson, and the rise of the tea party, I think we are definitely in new territory now).

As mentioned before, I strongly suspect that the theory that Walker collapsed because his move to the right offended the elites and yet was not credible to the base is wrong, but I would be much more comfortable with it and would certainly have not written this post if it had been clearly framed as a theory.

Tuesday Tweets

Read the thread.

1) So here's where this is all going:

I submit that Trump may ultimately demand that Republicans *fully* defend his pressure on Ukraine to investigate *Biden in particular,* without any squeamish double-talk about investigating "corruption."

*MINI-THREAD*

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) November 4, 2019

Love the Archive.

"Truth Might Fracture" said @Wikimedia 's Exec Dir @krmaher to me 3 years ago. It chilled me to my spine. So we redirected much of the @internetarchive for 3 years, and this is where I announce what we have done: https://t.co/WvCSXC6n31 Books<->Wikipedia https://t.co/lz5Bc52edr

— Brewster Kahle (@brewster_kahle) November 4, 2019

You better watch out... https://t.co/hJPW8VwKHF

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) November 4, 2019

 

The primary work around has been to have journalists from different backgrounds abandon their own identities and adopt the viewpoint of an Ivy league-educated, white, upper class, New Yorker.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) July 28, 2019

Cement, iron & steel alone account for half of industrial CO2 emissions (1/6th of total). And their production is seriously hard to decarbonize.https://t.co/IoOayIGCpL pic.twitter.com/AxDO9OXolo

— Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) November 4, 2019

Making that sweet, sweet $25,000 a year (exceptional writers only) https://t.co/fLhvelxRDG

— Jesse Hawken (@jessehawken) November 2, 2019

 

How did I miss this guy for so long? He's the perfect lord of Ithuvania. Came across him taking G/O Media's side over Deadspin and I had to double check to make sure it wasn't a parody account.https://t.co/PQHHespjvz https://t.co/YZC5Pwncnu

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 3, 2019

 

We all need to relax.

The baby’s face when the head scratcher came out 😍 pic.twitter.com/umIVONgWwE

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) November 3, 2019

To all my friends back East, we're all doing just fine here in LA

Though air quality is always a concern, other than a few hazy days, very few of us have been directly affected by the fires.

Homelessness remains a huge problem on a humanitarian level, but the streets do not run with sewage, used needles do not litter the sidewalks and the housed do not cower in fear.

Housing prices and traffic have definitely taken a turn for the worse over the past five or so years, but for those who are not at the bottom of the income ladder (and we should be doing more for those who are), the city is still manageable if you are flexible about where you live, particularly if you don’t insist on trendy neighborhoods and aren’t afraid of ethnic and economic diversity.

 Climate change has us worried about fires and droughts, but not so much about rising oceans. The California coast has lots of high ground. The elevation of downtown LA is almost 300 feet above sea level, with much of the town considerably higher. Perhaps more importantly, being on the western side of the continent, we are not in the path of any tropical cyclones. Rising oceans and more powerful hurricanes make for a bad combination.

Just to be clear, I don’t want to make light of any of these challenges facing the state, but it is possible to take the problems seriously and still recognize the silliness of the dystopian disaster porn coming out of otherwise respectable publications like the New York Times and the Atlantic.

Steve Lopez has the essential summary of the latest wave of California-is-doomed stories.

The political right, of course, has long specialized in the sport of California mockery. But we’re now getting it from the left, as well. People are running for their lives and losing their homes, and the haters can’t wait to do a grave dance.

“It’s the End of California As We Know It,” warned a New York Times headline on an op-ed piece declaring that “at the heart of our state’s rot” is “a failure to live sustainably.”

Yeah, we‘ve got problems and a long way to go, but is there a state in the union that has done more in the interest of sustainability?

“California Is Becoming Unlivable,” screamed the Atlantic.

Speaking of which, do we sit around in California wondering if the Southeast — where many states are governed by Republicans, not wifty liberals — is unlivable because decades of construction on fragile coastal land has put millions of people in the direct path of killer hurricanes?

“Climate change,” the Atlantic said of our state, “is turning it into a tinderbox; the soaring cost of living is forcing even wealthy families into financial precarity. And, in some ways, the two crises are one: The housing crunch in urban centers has pushed construction to cheaper, more peripheral areas, where wildfire risk is greater.”

Some fair points can be found in this article. But even when you have to clear your throat to draw attention to yourself, there is no good reason to use the word “precarity.” Second of all, are some wealthy families, God forbid, selling their Range Rovers and laying off half the domestic staff? Are those among the horrors of financial precarity?

Even before fire season, California was under attack.

“California’s Hobo Paradise” was the title of a September editorial in the Wall Street Journal. The piece parroted President Trump’s bashing of California, particularly San Francisco and Los Angeles, for its tent cities and public health problems.

By the way, please advise Trump he doesn’t need to fuel up Air Force One and fly to California if homelessness is a genuine concern, because there’s a sizable population within walking distance of the White House.
...
“California is a failed state,” said Breitbart News, which, as I recall, was founded by a man who lived rather comfortably here in one of the many affluent areas of our failed state.

“As climate change ravages the Golden State, earthquakes could become the least of residents’ concerns,” said the New Republic, which also questioned whether California is still livable.

Checking in with John Oliver -- Compounding Pharmacies

Another one for our health care thread.

I ain't scared of reposts

Halloween with Orson and the gang.

The debut production of the Mercury Theatre of the Air, Dracula.




And, of course, the Mercury production of War of the Worlds.



While we're at it, here's a tour de force from Welles' favorite actor, Agnes Moorehead (don't let the corny intro turn you off) Sorry, Wrong Number.

Repost: This view from two years ago is a bit dated, but it still fits in with the great unwinding thread

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

The Republicans' 3 x 3 existential threat

I've argued previously that Donald Trump presents an 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.

Tuesday Tweets

... On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge...” - Raymond Chandler, The Red Wind, 1938

— Steve Lawton (@srlawton) October 27, 2019

MIT Media Lab Scientist Used Syrian Refugees To Tout Food Computers That Didn'T Work IEEE Spectrum - IEEE Spectrum https://t.co/3AcZecGUAo

— Carl Zimmer (@carlzimmer) October 27, 2019

Very few Horatio Alger stories start with being born the son of a humble CEO.

LMAO. "My grandfather was a cop, okay, and my mother was a schoolteacher..." Why would Donny leave out that his father was the CEO of an ad agency, which he then took over

— Andrew Perez (@andrewperezdc) October 27, 2019

(Thread)

Trump operates by putting people in fear.
This includes Republican Senators.

Once the walls were closing in on Nixon, he resigned.

This National Review article by @RichLowry explains why Trump won’t (reprinted in OK) 👇https://t.co/ETwll0Zw2F

— Teri Kanefield (@Teri_Kanefield) October 26, 2019

A very good traditional epidemiology degree makes you an extraordinarily good technician. Like all good technicians, you have a blueprint to how to do a good study in your field and an impenetrable jargon about how to do things well.

— Dr Joseph Delaney (@Canadian_JACD) October 27, 2019

I’m guilty as charged, of course, but this is not a positive development: One in five newsroom workers lives in New York, Los Angeles, D.C. ⁦@pewresearch⁩ https://t.co/LVQOWZS1IK

— Margaret Sullivan (@Sulliview) October 24, 2019

In the report back to the client, the target had been killed 16 times.

— Tony Haile (@arctictony) October 25, 2019

2,000 employees fired as Adam Neumann walks away with an additional $1.7B — $850,000 per employee https://t.co/peGod1srHj

— Scott Galloway (@profgalloway) October 22, 2019

Yes, the new WeWork guy actually said "we got to drink our own Kool-aid"

It's remarkable how often the self-awareness meter can't even get a reading on C-level executives. [emphasis added]

In an exclusive recording obtained by Recode, on Wednesday the company’s new executive chairman, Marcelo Claure, SoftBank’s COO and the former CEO of Sprint, addressed WeWork’s worried staff in his first all-hands meeting. He confirmed reported layoffs but he declined to give details about how many jobs, or which ones, will be cut. He did promise that the people who leave will do so “with dignity,” and that the ones who stay will have to work hard to help the company make a historical comeback.
...

So it is definitely a big area of focus because we got a, you know, we got to drink our own Kool-aid, we got to make sure that if we’re selling this magic to others, we got to have this same magic in our spaces, in our first-floor employee workforce. So you can rest assured that what works stays and what doesn’t work, you know ,we’re going to change it and we’re going to innovate to make sure that we have a very high-satisfaction workforce. And we’re going to measure that because it’s easy to say you have a happy workforce, easy to say you have a great culture, but we’re going to measure it and we’re going to be very honest with each other.

For those coming late to the party, you can get a quick introduction here and here.

The maybe-you-aren't-special heuristic

I'm going to make this one quick and messy (I really need a better phone dictation app) because my schedule is getting tight and when this happens, my idea-to-attention span ratio gets even worse than normal, but I want to make sure to get this point in print reasonably quickly because it's likely to feature in some upcoming and ongoing threads.

Everyone is aware of the dangers of assuming that your perspective is representative. There is, however, an opposite error in reasoning which largely goes undiscussed despite occurring frequently and being often just as dangerous.

If we limit ourselves to extremes, assuming that your experience is completely unrepresentative makes even less sense than assuming it's completely representative. If you picked a person at random out of the population, you wouldn't start out with the assumption that he or she was an outlier. You would certainly admit it was possible, after all, n = 1, but you would probably consider it more likely that he or she was somewhere closer to the mean.

At this point, we need to make the distinction between assuming a fact vs considering a possibility. While you shouldn't assume that what you see is what everyone else sees, unless you have some reason to think otherwise, you should always allow for the possibility.

One of the things that struck me listening to This American Life’s coverage of the 2008 financial crisis was that, at every stage of the process, people observed that their part of the system had extremely troubling problems but they were sure that this wasn’t representative of the system as a whole. They were, of course, wrong.

In an age of hype and AstroTurf, it becomes even more important to remember that you may not be the exception. When you find yourself having what seems to be an unusual reaction or holding a minority opinion you should remember that what seems to be a popular consensus is often a facade based on massive marketing and PR campaigns with budgets sometimes hitting the multi billion dollar mark.

I'm drawing a blank for musical accompaniment, so here's a catchy non sequitur for your weekend.

Though we have to draw some inferences to get there, it appears that most, quite possibly all terrestrial superstations have a higher profit margin than Netflix

Another data point in our long-running thread.

On December 10th, 2018, Katz Broadcasting (owned by the E. W. Scripps Company) announced that they would relaunch Court TV as an over-the-air network following the acquisition of the intellectual property rights to the Court TV name and the pre-2008 Court TV original programming library from Turner Broadcasting System and Warner Bros. Entertainment. Scripps announced affiliation deals with Tribune Media and Univision Communications at that date, in addition to existing Scripps-owned stations. Further deals with Meredith Corporation, Nexstar Media Group (which was in the process of acquiring Tribune; the deal closed in September 2019), Tegna, and Quincy Media were announced on May 2, 2019.

The relaunched Court TV features live court coverage with original Court TV anchor Vinnie Politan as lead anchor, Court TV and CNN producers John Alleva and Scott Tufts as vice presidents and managing editors. The network began broadcasting on May 8, 2019.

Busy week, but I want to make a few quick points on this one.

Six years ago, just as terrestrial superstations were taking off, Nielsen released a study claiming that the over-the-air market was small and shrinking. The National Association of Broadcasters said their data showed just the opposite. Every bit of news we've seen since then suggests that Nielsen was wrong.

Not only has the industry (despite a near complete lack of hype) grown at a rapid and, more importantly, sustained clip, but the companies pushing hardest have been the owners of large numbers of TV stations. Not only are they the ones with skin in the game; they also have access to the most complete proprietary data. Pretty much every company in a position to know what's going on has expanded their presence in the market.

Where we do have head to head comparisons, the granddaddy of the industry, MeTV routinely dominates its much better positioned direct competitors like TVland. That's probably why CBS went with Weigel and passed over Viacom when starting Decades.

In addition to more stations constantly popping up, the individual superstations are becoming more ambitious, which brings us to a couple of points specifically about CourtTV. First, I believe this is the first case of a cable channel (even a dormant one) making the transition to OTA. CourtTV is still a brand of some value and considerable name recognition. The fact that it's showing up over the air rather than on cable tells you something about the growth and profit potential of the two media.

Second, this was not done on the cheap by Scripps. They not only acquired the original name and talent rather than putting together a knock-off; they went one step further and bought the original content library. That's a strong indicator of a serious long term commitment.

(By comparison, at least one very heavily hyped media company own far less of  its content than most people including journalists and investors realize, but that's a topic for another post.)

Read the whole thing. Make notes. We'll be coming back to this.

Jeffrey Funk has a new essay up ("What’s Behind Technological Hype?"), and if you've been following any of our hype economy threads, you definitely need to check it out.

Online tech-hyping articles are now driven by the same dynamics as fake news. Journalists, bloggers, and websites prioritize page views and therefore say more positive things to attract viewers, while social media works as an amplifier. Journalists become “content marketers,” often hired by start-ups and universities to promote new technologies. Entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, university public relation offices, entrepreneurship programs, and professors who benefit from the promotion of new technologies all end up sharing an interest in increasing the level of hype.

Sometimes the beliefs behind political and technology hype merge. Think of libertarians who love cryptocurrencies, defense hawks who love new fighter jets, adventurers who think space travel is human destiny, train buffs who love hyperloop, health care professionals who love any technology that might prolong lives, anticorruption crusaders who love blockchain, social entrepreneurs who love financial technology (fintech), and environmentalists who love renewable energy and electric vehicles. Many of these special interest groups often believe their overall goals are far more important than more practical issues such as cost, performance, economic feasibility, and profitability, a problem made worse by the increasing polarization of the American public along ideological lines. As these special interests push their technologies on social media sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, they create echo chambers in which people repeat the same message until it becomes an unquestioned mantra, even though few economic details are presented.

And when one overhyped technology fails to solve the world’s problems, there is always another waiting to be hyped. Train buffs replaced magnetically levitated trains with hyperloop, social entrepreneurs replaced microfinance (remember Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus?) with fintech, drug companies replaced stem cells with gene editing, and environmentalists have forgotten about nuclear fusion, solar water heaters, hydrogen vehicles, and cellulosic ethanol. Hype-driven economic disappointments seem never to dampen enthusiasm for new cycles of irrational exuberance.

Tuesday Tweets

Check out the thread

[1/4] Ok this is really funny, check this out.
I was in the process of booking a flight via @OneTravel. Trying to make me book ASAP, they claimed: "38 people are looking at this flight".
Whoa, 38 is a lot, I have to hurry up. But first I have to check how they came up with 38 >> pic.twitter.com/UaGhaiCQrR

— Ophir Harpaz (@OphirHarpaz) October 16, 2019

This is a real chyron, I promise I did not photoshop it, I feel like that's an important thing to point out in this situation pic.twitter.com/hj6Tm77gZu

— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) October 18, 2019

More of a retcon than a retrofit, but still...

Mark Zuckerberg just publicly retrofit the reason for founding Facebook from a tool that could rate the attractiveness of female college students to an attempt to right the wrongs of the leadup to the Iraq War. You can't make this up

— Joe Bernstein (@Bernstein) October 17, 2019

The fake origin story of Facebook written for Mark Zuckerberg by the team of GOP political operatives who runs their DC office versus contemporaneous coverage of Facebook’s origins. pic.twitter.com/dUo7Yw4PrT

— Matthew EEEEK!-lesias (@mattyglesias) October 17, 2019

From our favorite Gawker-killing, anti-women's suffrage, vampiric lord of Ithuvania.

This excerpt from an occurrence in Peter Thiel's Stanford class on startups is a classic example of how "culture fit" is just tech company code for discrimination.

Any rejection based on "culture fit" when candidate is competent is usually sexism/racism/classism. https://t.co/0Sr84HbEnf

— Dare Obasanjo (@Carnage4Life) October 19, 2019

Inside TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes for Free https://t.co/T88U3WbA9i

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) October 19, 2019

Disney remains one of the best arguments against media consolidation.

ESPN is of course, owned by Disney, which has huge commercial interests in China. A senior ESPN executive specifically instructed ESPN staff to play down the NBA/China controversy when it first broke. https://t.co/yIDG7S8npn

— Matt Schrader (@tombschrader) October 19, 2019

There is no defensible journalistic rationale for how differently these stories were played. pic.twitter.com/hodQ0H4AwU

— Dan Lavoie (@djlavoie) October 19, 2019

Buried in this piece about the streaming rights for South Park likely selling for $500 million (!) -- Apple isn't bidding because they don't want to upset China. https://t.co/7OSVNrndYT

— Adam Conover (@adamconover) October 19, 2019

Twilight of the Unicorns -- Blue Apron and the importance of unasked questions

Blue Apron IPO'd in June 2017 at a $2bn valuation

Yesterday, it closed at a stock price of $9.01, representing a market cap of just under $120mm

What happened and what can we learn?

— Adam Keesling (@adam_keesling) September 25, 2019

When business historians try to make sense of the rise and fall of companies like Wework and Uber, the biggest challenge will be trying to reconstruct the thought processes of seemingly rational investors  and analysts. While there will probably be an inclination to dismiss the whole thing as a madness of crowds, if you followed the events closely in real time, the decisions are a bit more explicable if not defensible.

Perhaps the first thing these future historians will have to understand is the extent to which influential people were both invested in and protective of the age of innovation narrative and the hype economy. If you'll pardon the expression, the "thought leaders" circa 2010 to 2020 firmly believed that they were in the center of a period of wondrous developments where all of the old rules had gone away and the next big thing was just around the corner. This narrative didn't just give them an excuse to dismiss what should have been glaringly obvious flaws in these overhyped business plans; it made them openly hostile to the very mindset which raised doubts and ask disturbing questions.

Even after one of these multibillion-dollar borderline Ponzi schemes collapsed, there was a real reluctance to acknowledge the herd of elephants that had been stomping about the room from the beginning. With Blue Apron, the lead elephant in the metaphor was competition. Meal kits (the culinary equivalent of a canned hunt) are very probably limited to a niche market, but more importantly, it is a market with no barriers to entry and a truly daunting queue of well positioned potential competitors with deep pockets, economies of scale, and well-established brands. There's Amazon/Whole Foods, of course. Add to that Walmart, the Kroger and Safeway groups and other major grocery store chains all of which have been edging into the home delivery space for a while, and fast casual places like Macaroni Grill which would be a natural fit. Then there are celebrity chefs and Food Network personalities who might partner with companies such as Uber Eats and that's far from an exhaustive list.

Blue Apron spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to popularized the idea of home delivery meal kits, but even if they had succeeded, they never could have cashed in on anything more than a limited scale. The market would have immediately become so intensely competitive that the profit margins necessary to justify Blue Apron's valuation would have been impossible.

These issues have been obvious from the beginning, but even now analysts are reluctant to bring them up. When you start pulling one that thread, who knows what will unravel.