Monday, April 8, 2024

If I had a slightly cynical attitude toward Elon Musk, I might be a bit suspicious of a couple of things here

 First of all, there's the timing of this.


 

The surprise Robo Taxi announcement certainly came at a fortuitous moment for Musk. Before the news broke, Tesla was having a really bad, awful, totally nogood year ...

 

 

 

... followed by a really bad, awful, totally nogood day thanks to the release of a Reuters story about the company ever so quietly canceling its plans for a low-cost EV. This was on top of tons of bad news about the companies inventory and other problems, not to mention the cybertruck managing to edge out the Ford Edsel as the ultimate cautionary tale of why not to overhype a new automobile. 

 At 4:49 in the afternoon, less than an hour after the stock dropped another 3.63%...

 

 And one minute later...


 


Longtime readers will be familiar with Musk's history of announcing incredible breakthroughs, often just as one of his companies is about to go over a cliff.

From May 25, 2022

About seven or eight years ago, Musk's promises started becoming unmoored not just from what his engineers were working on, but from what was even possible. As best I can tell, this started with the hyperloop.

[And before the rumbling starts again, though you have heard about hundreds of millions of dollars going into hyperloop companies, absolutely none of that money is going into Elon Musk s air cushion idea. Every proposal and protype you've seen has been for maglev. Companies like Virgin scrapped his concept but kept the name.]*

Part of the reason for these increasingly delusional boasts may just have been Musk getting high on his own supply.** Take someone with messianic tendencies, give them a full-bore cult of personality, and have even the most respectable journalists refer to him as a real life Tony Stark. You know it's going to go to a guy's head.

But these fantastic claims also served his financial interest. The huge run up in the stock of Tesla came after the narrative had shifted to over-the-top fantasy.

Maintaining his current fortune requires Musk to keep these fantasies vivid in the minds of fans and investors. People have to believe that the Tesla model after next will be a flying exoskeleton that can blow shit up.

To be blunt, the industry is nowhere near the level of self-driving functionality and Tesla in nowhere near being the leader in this field. Assuming we do not witness the company leapfrog the competition and unveil a major breakthrough in level 4 autonomy, what are we likely to see on August 8th?

1. Nothing. Elon Musk will announce that the big reveal has been pushed back to make the product even more spectacular.

2. An Optimus Style non demonstration where Elon will haul out a barely functional prototype years behind the competition in terms of sophistication and will spend the rest of the time talking about how incredible the next iteration will eventually be.

3. Low level fake. A painstakingly choreographed drive-through of carefully mapped course with selective editing to cover the remaining glitches. (see Optimus.)

4. High level fake. Everything in the low level fake plus a Mechanical Turk actually at the controls. Check out the right side of this video which was released to great fanfare.

 

Musk later added a note that the robot was not actually operating autonomously but of course, he wasn't trying to mislead anyone. 

* In the two years since this post, those hundreds of millions have been long been burned through with the biggest and best financed Hyperloop One/Virgin Hyperloop finally shuttering its airlock last year. 

** And we now know getting high on a lot of other things as well.

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Friday, April 5, 2024

Six years ago at the blog -- old tech April (before you get too judgemental remember Theranos edition)

"EMPLOYMENT OF HIGH-FREQUENCY CURRENTS IN THERAPEUTICS."

 I was about to start speculating about the propensity of Turn of the Century scientists to announce major discoveries only to have the effect sizes later turn out to vanish entirely, but then I realized I wasn't entirely sure that this was the case here.

I'm almost certain that this belongs in the same file with N-rays, but given the readership of this, I want to be extra careful.

From  Scientific American 1907-08-24

The patient is seated on a chair inside of a spiral coil of wire which is traversed by high-frequency currents. (Fig. 1.) The cabinet shown at the right of the photograph contains a transformer, which gives to the alternating current a tension 01 40,000 or 50,000 volts and a frequency of 500,000 or 600,000 alternations per second. This treatment, continued' for five minutes, reduced the arterial pressure from 10 to 7 inches. In a second treatment, given to the same patient a few days later, the arterial pressure, which had risen during the inteI val to 8 inches, was brought down below 7 inches in a few minutes. Repeated applications gradually reduce the arterial pressure to its normal value of 6 inches. In Dr. Moutier's very interesting experiments, the rapidity with which the pressure was lowered appeared to have no relation to the age or. gravity of the case, or the degree of hypertension, but to depend chiefly on the state of digestion. 





 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Thursday, April 4, 2024

A Few More Thoughts on Florida


 

  Josh Marshall had a recent post entitled "A Few Thoughts on Florida" that closed with this:

 Then we get to the question of the potential impact on the November election in Florida. I’d guess it could be fairly significant. We’ve all kind of concluded that Florida is now a red state. For Democrats that’s understandable because it’s been the scene of so many Democratic heartbreaks. But Trump won it by 1.2% in 2016 and 3.4% in 2020. The fact that Trump slightly improved his margin is definitely significant. But these are still very close margins. Winning Florida, I’ll still believe it when I see it. But with the abortion and weed amendments on the ballot I think the Biden campaign can at least make Trump fight and invest real resources in what for him is an absolutely must win state.

With some trepidation, I think Marshall (who is the best political commentator we have) is missing some important points, starting with how much of a powder keg we're talking about. Marshall says "there’s at least an argument that abortion should poll better" in Florida than in Kansas or Ohio, but we can go much further. Based on pre-Dobbs polling, Florida was way more pro-choice than either of these states coming in just one spot below California.

State     Mostly Legal     Mostly Illegal     Net support     

Florida      56%                     38%             +18     

Ohio         52%                     43%             +10   

Kansas      48%                     47%             +1    

Add to this that Florida now has effectively a six week ban on abortion.  As many have pointed out, that means that by the time most women find out that they are pregnant, it will be too late to do anything about it. Yet another reminder that Nate Cohn's argument that "Polling suggests an overturning of Roe v. Wade might not carry political consequences in states that would be likeliest to put in restrictions." has not aged well. 

How about the argument that Trump will divert resources to Florida? I could see that going either way.

While it's true that Florida is a must-win state, it is highly unlikely that it will be a tipping point. If things are going so badly for Trump that the dubiously named Sunshine State is in play, it might well be over. Given that the RNC has opened zero offices in key swing states while the Democrats have opened dozens, it is easy to imagine Don and Lara freezing out Florida in favor of places like Arizona that have some chance of putting him over the top.

 The real consequences in that case are likely to be down ticket. For example, more than 2/3 of the state's house delegation are currently held by Republicans. That is a lot of previously safe seats that now need to be defended. Add to that the statehouse and various state races. 

Either way, this is bad news for the GOP. They can spread their thin resources even thinner or they can put a number of elections at risk.


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Wednesday, April 3, 2024

Six years ago at the blog -- old tech April (the one who wasn't Georges Méliès edition)

Segundo de Chomón and the pushbutton age

 Regular readers have noticed we've been spending a lot time on the history of technology, particularly the explosive changes around the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One of the things I find most fascinating about the period is the number of concepts that are now so familiar as to be a part of our intuitive view of the world which didn't exist until the time in question. The idea of remote control, virtually instantaneous nonmechanical action at any terrestrial distance. You touch a button, you throw switch, and lights go on, doors open, motors start. This went from being impossible to completely mundane with remarkable speed.

The pushbutton age was still fairly new when Segundo de Chomón made the groundbreaking film electric hotel. The though overshadowed by Georges Méliès, de Chomón was, for my money, probably the better filmmaker and his work with stop motion animation would prove more fertile than any of the trick effects his contemporary is remembered for.








Another piece of new technology.




No stop action, just a personal favorite.



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Tuesday, April 2, 2024

Abortion and IVF -- more data points

 Last Friday's post was running long so I decided to put the reproductive rights tweets in a post of their own.

Lots of political analysts argued in the wake of Dobbs that this issue wouldn't be that big of a deal. One of the many mistakes they made was assuming that support for abortion was a fixed quantity.


Plenty of tweets about the Comstock Act recently.


Hiltzik walks us through the history of Comstock and it's every bit as embarrassing as you'd expect.

Anti-obscenity crusader Anthony Comstock, lampooned in a 1915 periodical. The caption read: “Your Honor, this woman gave birth to a naked child.”

 


Of course, it wouoldn't be a tweet post without a weasily framing from the NYT.


Democratic candidates however, are feeling no need to play nice.

 

Democrats from Biden/Harris down to statehouse races are running hard on this issue, particularly since Alabama's recent IVF ruling. 

Speaking of which...

 

Given the way fundraising has been going, Democrats are on track to spend an extraordinary amount of money tying Republicans to national bans on abortion and IVF.



 

A functional political party, seeing it was being dragged down by positions this toxic would back  away, push moderate candidates, and generally try to avoid scaring voters (which has become a concern for the GOP), but that's no longer an option under MAGA

(Here's the link.)



A functional party would avoid nominating guys like this.


And then there's Florida.






Just to be clear, this doesn't mean that any statewide office is seriously in play unless something much bigger happens, but there are a lot of races in Florida and a few flipped seats of its 28 representatives could easily decide control of the House.


And as Ornstein points out, the question of resources might even be more important. Republicans have a huge disadvantage when it comes to money which is already showing up in swing state party organizations and GOTV operations. Now it looks like the GOP needs find some money places like Florida and Alabama.

Though we've never been in the prediction business, I could be persuaded to put my money on the "Dobbs will be a big deal" side of the bet,

 

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Monday, April 1, 2024

Six years ago at the blog -- old tech April (Muzak edition)

 

Muzak has been around a disturbingly long time.

As previously mentioned, there is a popular narrative among those trying to explain away the apparent failure of a new technology. The story goes that the under-performance is not due to the technology being badly designed or serving no particular useful purpose, but instead is due to the lack of a "killer app" that will someday appear to save the day. In these accounts, technologies frequently spend years languishing until someone suddenly realizes something like "hey, you could use this to play music."

Having spent a great deal of the past year or so looking at the history of this sort of thing, I've come to the conclusion that people normally hit upon these killer apps very quickly, Often before the technology itself is viable. Subscription services for broadcasting music to pubic places and alarm clocks that woke sleepers with music were being tried long before the tech existed to make either practical.

A couple of side notes on the first story. The evolution of synthesizers is a bit outside of the scope of our ongoing threads but if the subject interests you, definitely check out the history of the telharmonium. Also note the quote from Mark Twain. Twain was fascinated by the new technology of the era and we should probably devote some future posts to his take on the subject.

From Scientific American March 9, 1907











































 

From Scientific American  April 6, 1907










 

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Friday, March 29, 2024

Deferred Thursday Tweets -- Lava herders, Lawrence Welk, and why Sydney Sweeney should write for the Upshot

Starting off with a follow-up to Joseph's earlier post. Very much worth a listen.


PayPal Mafia and PayPal Mafia adjacent

As mentioned before, Peter Thiel's reputation as the smartest guy in the room relies heavily on the time he was alone with Elon Musk and David Sacks.



Musk... RFK jr... I'm starting to question this woman's judgement.





I never get tired of this joke.

 

And on the subject of clueless billionaires in general.


In the worse than Eisner dept.


From Reuters:
'Why do I need an all-Black cast?' ... "Black Panther" is the sixth highest-grossing domestic release of all time, according to the site Box Office Mojo, and was the first Marvel film to be nominated for Best Picture.

This reminds me of an anecdote from Harlan Ellison's Watching.



Dems in disarray


RNC Research continues to be tee-ball for Democratic bloggers.




It is almost impossible to overstate how much 2024 congressional Republicans hate each other.



Such as the hard work of being born the grandson of the Idaho Sheep King. 



Priorities...




Remember when House Republicans occasionally didn't say the quiet part out loud?

 

Great clip.


Wait a minute. That's not the narrative.

 

The NYT is still doing its best to prove its tough-on-Biden bona fides.



At least we can still put our faith in Harvard.


Schlapp-happy




 

There are, however, morons.


I assumed this was a hoax account or a joke tweet, but no.


Anecdotes like these may be coals to Newcastle at this point, but they still have a certain entertainment value.







My initial was "Never send a computer scientist to do a statistician's job." but even the other AI big guns are piling on.



And misc.



Makes me want to cut Madame Web just a little bit of slack.


Even in that orchestra, you know the drummer was cracking up.

No, really...




Click on the picture for the full effect.

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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Ten years ago at the blog -- reposted partially because the SAT is back in the news but mainly because this is one of my all time favorite titles

 

 

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Being a management consultant who does not suffer fools is like being an EMT who faints at the sight of blood

An April 1st post on foolishness.
When [David] Coleman attended Stuyvesant High in Manhattan, he was a member of the championship debate team, and the urge to overpower with evidence — and his unwillingness to suffer fools — is right there on the surface when you talk with him.

Todd Balf writing in the New York Times Magazine

Andrew Gelman has already commented on the way Balf builds his narrative around Coleman ( "In Balf’s article, College Board president David Coleman is the hero and so everything about him has to be good and everything he’s changed has to have been bad.") and the not suffering fools quote certainly illustrates Gelman's point, but it also illustrates a more important concern: the disconnect between the culture of the education reform movement and the way it's perceived in most of the media.

(Though not directly relevant to the main point of this post, it is worth noting that the implied example that follows the line about not suffering fools is a description of Coleman rudely dismissing those who disagree with his rather controversial belief that improvement in writing skills acquired through composing essays doesn't transfer to improvements in writing in a professional context.)

There are other powerful players (particularly when it comes to funding), but when it comes to its intellectual framework, the education reform movement is very much a product of the world of management consultants with its reliance on Taylorism, MBA thinking and CEO worship. This is never more true than with David Coleman. Coleman is arguably the most powerful figure in American education despite having no significant background in either teaching or statistics. His only relevant experience is as a consultant for McKinsey & Company.

Companies like McKinsey spend a great deal off their time trying to convince C-level executive to gamble on trendy and expensive "business solutions" that are usually unsupported by solid evidence and are often the butt of running jokes in recent Dilbert cartoons.  While it may be going too far to call fools the target market of these pitches, they certainly constitute an incredibly valuable segment.

Fools tend to be easily impressed by invocations of data (even in the form of meaningless phrases like 'data-driven'), they are less likely to ask hard questions (nothing takes the air out of a proposal faster than having to explain the subtle difference between your current proposal and the advice you gave SwissAir or AOL Time Warner), and fools are always open to the idea of a simple solution to all their problems which everyone else in the industry had somehow missed. Not suffering fools gladly would have made for a very short career for Coleman at McKinsey.

 

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