Ten years ago at the blog: for a while it looked like this tweet was going to age badly

 The mid-teens were not a good time to be a Disney skeptic. The company had a very good run and to be honest, I might have been a little less eager to repost this under the heading "Five years ago at the blog." For a while there it looked like they really could let their budgets increase without apparent limit, safe in the knowledge that no matter how much they spent, the box office and the merchandising would more than keep up. Now, though, we're getting some indication that there still are upper bounds. (Except, possibly, for James Cameron.)

 Disney’s Harsh New Reality: Costly Film Flops, Creative Struggles and a Shrinking Global Box Office

 

Monday, July 15, 2013

Call me suspicious...

But I've gotten to the point where I look for signs of manipulation in all business news and brokers' recommendations. Case in point, Disney had a bad week recently. As you've probably heard, the Lone Ranger reboot is on track to lose a lot of money (the figure $100 million keeps being tossed around), but that doesn't cover the full drop in expected value. Disney was shooting for another Pirates franchise (complete with the same writers, director, producer and star). The first four installments of that series have done almost four billion in box office and the fifth and sixth chapters are in the works. And that box office total doesn't include toys and tee shirts and all of the other ways Disney could make money off something like this. Investors who had priced in the possibility of this being another Pirates will need to recalibrate.

Disney is a huge company, but even there the old saying applies -- "a billion here... a billion there... pretty soon you're talking about real money." Not enough to threaten the company but worth taking into account when thinking about stock price. Fortunately for Disney, this terrible news was balanced out by quite a bit of good (enough to bump the price up a bit). Credit Suisse analyst Michael Senno estimated a global take of $1.2 billion for Star Wars Episode VII and Motley Fool* ran a string of positive stories arguing that Disney was adding value to Marvel and that "Buena Vista Pictures is earning as much as ever." That second claim was supported with a year over year comparison:

Disney won't be as fortunate with The Lone Ranger, which is why so many are comparing this flop-in-the-making to John Carter, last year's $250 million box office bomb that effectively ended the Disney career of former studio chief Rich Ross. 

If only he knew then what we know now. John Carter, for as big a disaster as it was, did nothing to diminish the House of Mouse's theatrical prowess. Here's a closer look at the year-over-year numbers from Jan. 1 through June 30: 

Buena Vista Year-Over-Year Comparison
                                    YTD 2013          YTD 2012          Change  
Number of films            10                       12**                   (2)
Total U.S. box office    $886.8 million      $949.8 million     (6.6%)
Per-film average           $88.7 million        $79.2 million       11.9%
Source: Box Office Mojo.
** Includes a 3D rerelease of The Lion King. 

After achieving $800 million in domestic box office receipts only once since 2000 (in 2010), Disney has done at least that in both 2012 and this year. Impressive may be too timid a word for how well Buena Vista is doing right now.

Notice anything missing? How about budgets, marketing costs, performance of comparable films from other studios? Keep in mind that in absolute numbers, John Carter did pretty well:

John Carter earned $73,078,100 in North America and $209,700,000 in other countries, for a worldwide total as of June 28, 2012 of $282,778,100.

In relative terms, not so much:

Paul Dergarabedian, president of Hollywood.com noted, "John Carter’s bloated budget would have required it to generate worldwide tickets sales of more than $600 million to break even...a height reached by only 63 films in the history of moviemaking"

(According to the New York Times, the Lone Ranger would have to hit $800 million to break even.)

How about Disney adding value to Marvel? The only real example I saw in the article was the willingness to cough up extra money to hold on to talent like Whedon and Downey. Probably a good investment but old news and a case of maintaining, not adding, value.

And that incredible prediction for the Star Wars reboot? Not credible about covers it.

Perhaps I'm too cynical, but given the low quality but excellent timing of these analyses, I have to believe that some folks at Disney have really been working the phones.

* I'm going by the Motley Fool posts and not the videos that accompany them. If anyone out there wants to take one for the team and watch them, let me know if anything of value is said.

Thanks

 

The bad news is that the NYT is still credulously accepting Uri Geller's dubious version of events; the good news is that the rest of the latest article is so terrible that this part no longer seems so bad.

It's going to take more than one post to describe just how bad David Segal's profile of fake psychic Uri Geller is, lousy with pseudo-profundity and cheap zeitgeisty asides, leaving out essential context that completely changes the story, with a central thesis that simply isn't true. We'll get to those gems later. For now, we'll start with one we've covered before, the claim that Randi and the other debunkers actually made Geller a star.

It’s a fortune he might have never earned, he said, without a group of highly agitated critics. Mr. Geller was long shadowed by a handful of professional magicians appalled that someone was fobbing off what they said were expertly finessed magic tricks as acts of telekinesis. Like well-matched heavyweights, they pummeled one another in the ’70s and ’80s in televised contests that elevated them all.

Geller has been pushing this line for years (see below). It's not difficult to see why he favors this version; it preserves his dignity and even paints him as a winner, but there's no reason to accept it and considerable reason not to. Before Randi starting exposing his tricks, Geller was being taken very seriously.

From the foreword to the Magic of Uri Geller:

 Leon Jaroff, 1975

Thanks largely to James Randi, Geller would never again be studied seriously or courted by the military and other big players. Instead, by the late 70s, he would start the long slide toward post-celebrity celebrity. Despite the story he would tell later, he clearly saw his leading debunker as a threat and launched a barrage of harassment suits that would end up costing Randi nothing in damages but hundreds of thousands in legal fees.

Friday, October 23, 2020

The standard narrative on the Uri Geller/Amazing Randi conflict comes from the New York Times, which apparently got it from Uri Geller

RIP Randall James Hamilton Zwinge

James Randi, a magician who later challenged spoon benders, mind readers and faith healers with such voracity that he became regarded as the country’s foremost skeptic, has died, his foundation announced. He was 92.

The James Randi Educational Foundation confirmed his death, saying that its founder succumbed to “age-related causes” on Tuesday.

 ...

On a 1972 episode of “The Tonight Show,” he helped Johnny Carson set up Uri Geller, the Israeli performer who claimed to bend spoons with his mind. Randi ensured the spoons and other props were kept from Geller’s hands until showtime to prevent any tampering.

The result was an agonizing 22 minutes in which Geller was unable to perform his tricks.

 

 

 

 

For Randi, those 22 minutes of magic tricks not being done would ironically become the high point of the magician's biography but there was one more twist in the story

Adam Higginbotham writing for the New York Times Magazine in 2014.

“I sat there for 22 minutes, humiliated,” Geller told me, when I spoke to him in September. “I went back to my hotel, devastated. I was about to pack up the next day and go back to Tel Aviv. I thought, That’s it — I’m destroyed.” But to Geller’s astonishment, he was immediately booked on “The Merv Griffin Show.” He was on his way to becoming a paranormal superstar. “That Johnny Carson show made Uri Geller,” Geller said. To an enthusiastically trusting public, his failure only made his gifts seem more real: If he were performing magic tricks, they would surely work every time.

 It's a great tale except that there's little reason to believe it actually happened that way. Start with the fact that Geller seems to be the main source, which should have raised some red flags for Higginbotham.

 How about the appearance on the Merv Griffin Show? Wasn't he invited shortly after the Carson debacle? Not exactly. He was invited back. 

From IMDB:

The Merv Griffin Show (1962–1986)
Alfred Drake, Pamela Mason, Uri Geller, Captain Edgar Mitchell
TV-PG | 1h | Comedy, Family, Music | Episode aired 19 July 1973

The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962–1992)
Ricardo Montalban/Eskimo-Indian Olympians/Uri Geller
1h 45min | Comedy, Talk-Show | Episode aired 1 August 1973

The Merv Griffin Show (1962–1986)
Eartha Kitt, Richard Dawson, Michelle Phillips, Uri Geller
TV-PG | 1h | Comedy, Family, Music | Episode aired 15 August 1973

 [Late Edit: He'd also made appearances on Jack Parr's show before doing the Tonight Show -- MP]

 Geller's telling makes it sound like it was the Carson appearance that got him on Griffin, but he was a returning guest and there's no reason to believe he wasn't invited back simply because he had done well a couple of weeks earlier.

Nor is there evidence that Geller's career took off in late 1973.

If anything, it looks like Randi's debunking of Geller starting with the Tonight Show and culminating with 1975's The Magic of Uri Geller was what brought the charlatan down.

Journalists love people-are-stupid narratives, but, while I believe cognitive dissonance is real, I think the lesson here is not "To an enthusiastically trusting public, his failure only made his gifts seem more real" and is instead that we should all be more skeptical of simplistic and overused pop psychology.

An incredibly well-kept and badly kept secret

Picking up from where we left off with

Extraordinary claims (used to) require extraordinary evidence OR the gray lady and the little green men

and

There were lots of red flags with the NYT UFO story

Here's another hard to swallow aspect of the whole thing. 

The proposed conspiracy is, at the same time, both an incredibly well-kept and badly kept secret. We'll talk about the first part at length later in the post, but as you're reading this remember there are, according to both the primary sources and the team of reporters from New York Times, lots of people in the government who insist that they've gotten second hand-accounts of these programs. Officials not on a need to know basis are routinely getting access to  and sharing the most highly classified information and documents imaginable (though never the physical evidence they assure us is out there).

Despite these recent security lapses, for almost a century, numerous governments have supposedly been hiding extensive physical evidence of what is probably the biggest secret any government in history has tried to conceal, and they have managed to do so despite the secret frequently getting out in a limited way.

From Wikipedia:

[David] Grusch elaborated on his claims in a subsequent interview with the French newspaper Le Parisien on June 7. He said that UFOs could be coming from extra dimensions; that Pope Pius XII had "back-channeled" the existence of a UFO crash in Magenta, Italy in 1933 to the United States, the remains of which were kept by Benito Mussolini's government until the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), coordinating with the Five Eyes, procured it in 1944 or 1945;^[20][21] that he had spoken with intelligence officials whom the U.S. military had briefed on "football-field" sized crafts; that the U.S. government transferred some crashed UFOs to a defense contractor; and that there was "malevolent activity" by UFOs.^[18]

As a quick side note, conspiracy theorist love to throw in the Vatican whenever possible, so that's a bit of a red flag but we'll put that aside for now.

You can keep dormant secrets almost indefinitely but keeping an active secret for a long time is extremely difficult. Any government that has access to such potentially world changing technology is not going to store it away in a Raiders of the Lost Ark warehouse. Keep in mind, Grusch describes this as an ongoing race. 

Think about the sheer number of people who are read into this. We are talking about multiple countries around the world all maintaining large operations to detect possible crashes and recover their wreckage, then to transport, store, and maintain what was found. Other teams to analyze the partial and intact spaceships and to study the alien bodies, both of which requires big cross-functional groups of researchers. You also have the surrounding bureaucracy, not to mention the witnesses to these numerous crashes.

It gets worse. This isn't just one conspiracy, it is one conspiracy for each country and institution. If any one of these gets careless, the game is over. On top of that, remember that this collection implicitly includes the Soviet Union and explicitly includes Italy, two governments which have collapsed in the interval we're discussing. We should probably add Germany to that list. It's possible that Italy kept the secret to itself, but if you had access to technology that could turn the tide of the war in your favor, wouldn't you want Von Braun and Heisenberg seeing what they could do with it?

A bit more on the USSR. For starters, Soviet spies were devastatingly successful during the post-war era, particularly in the UK. Remember, Grusch claimed that the US got its first non-human spacecraft through the Vatican and the Five Eyes, an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, so the Brits knew about this before we did and the Soviets would certainly have known shortly after. Add to that what they would have gotten from the German scientists who ended up in Russia.

While the USSR was big, the Soviet sphere of influence was huge. Add to that formidable naval presence and experience with deep sea salvage.  Remember, one of the key claims was that there were multiple crash sites where wreckage and bodies have been recovered. A lot of those crashes would have been in areas of Soviet control. If we accept the story, we pretty much have to assume Moscow got its share.

Think about the chaos at the end of WWII and at the collapse of the Soviet Union, and yet despite hundreds of people with direct knowledge and tons of evidence, no artifact or photograph or credible account made it to the public. And in the 60s and 70s, when books like Chariots of the Gods were selling millions and spin-off lucrative "documentaries" and TV shows, no underpaid government scientist ever managed to cash in. The biggest secret ever kept under the worst possible conditions.

It's almost hard to believe.

Once you told us you have aliens' bodies and spaceships the size of football fields, it's hard to get excited about some tiny metal balls

But the press is giving it their best shot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

      

 Avi Loeb, is one of the world's leading astrophysicists, but recently (with the help of the press) he's been feeding his reputation into the wood chipper.

In December 2017, Loeb cited ʻOumuamua's unusually elongated shape as one of the reasons why the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia should listen for radio emissions from it to see if there were any unexpected signs that it might be of artificial origin,^[40] although earlier limited observations by other radio telescopes such as the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array had produced no such results.^[41] On December 13, 2017, the Green Bank Telescope observed the asteroid for six hours. No radio signals from ʻOumuamua have been detected.^[42][43]

On October 26, 2018, Loeb and his postdoctoral student Shmuel Bialy submitted a paper exploring the possibility of the interstellar object ʻOumuamua being an artificial thin solar sail accelerated by solar radiation pressure in an effort to help explain the object's non-gravitational acceleration.^[44][45][46] Other scientists have stated that the available evidence is insufficient to consider such a premise,^[47][48][49] and that a tumbling solar sail would not be able to accelerate.^[50][51] In response, Loeb wrote an article detailing six anomalous properties of ʻOumuamua that make it unusual, unlike any comets or asteroids seen before.^[52][53]

On November 27, 2018, Loeb and Amir Siraj, an undergraduate student at Harvard College, proposed a search for ʻOumuamua-like objects which might be trapped in the Solar System as a result of losing orbital energy through a close encounter with Jupiter.^[54] They identified four candidates (2011 SP25, 2017 RR2, 2017 SV13, and 2018 TL6) for trapped interstellar objects which could be visited by dedicated missions. The authors pointed out that future sky surveys, such as with Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, could find many more.^[55]

In public interviews and private communications with reporters and academic colleagues, Loeb has become more vocal regarding the prospects of proving the existence of alien life.^[56] On April 16, 2019, Loeb and Siraj reported the discovery of the first meteor of interstellar origin.^[12] Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, a popular science account concerning ʻOumuamua, written by Loeb,^[57] was published in 2021.

 

As with Oumuamua, Loeb's latest argument for evidence of alien technology comes in three parts:

1. Data indicate that the object is interstellar;

2. The object appears to have some anomalous properties;

3. I reallyreallyreally want to believe this. 

 "It has material strength that is tougher than all space rock that were seen before, and catalogued by NASA," added Loeb, "We calculated its speed outside the solar system. It was 60 km per second, faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun. The fact that it was made of materials tougher than even iron meteorites, and moving faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun, suggested potentially it could be a spacecraft from another civilization or some technological gadget."

It seems like most of the heavy lifting on this project was done by the grad student Amir Siraj, whose account in Scientific American is considerably more sober. Perhaps, still being in his twenties, Siraj would like to keep his reputation in one piece for a few more decades.

The story began in April 2019, when I found what’s thought to be the first known interstellar meteor, hiding in plain sight in publicly accessible data sourced from the U.S. government. Called IM1, this object had burned up in the atmosphere and rained fragments down into the ocean off the coast of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, five years prior, registering as an anomalously speedy and bright fireball in the sensors of secret spy satellites operated by the U.S. Department of Defense. Working with my then-adviser, the Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, I analyzed the U.S. government data to show how the trajectory and other properties of IM’s fireball were consistent with the meteor having an interstellar origin.

...

 In the months leading up to the expedition, which would take place aboard a ship called the Silver Star, I focused on the scientific planning while Avi concentrated on funding and logistics. Using archival seismic data from terrestrial instruments that had picked up the sonic boom from IM1’s fireball, I was able to pin down the resulting debris field to some 50 miles offshore of Manus Island, in an arc of open water seven times smaller than the area provided to us by the Department of Defense. This localization would allow for a chance, albeit slim, of success in realizing my dream of holding a piece of history—a bona fide interstellar object—for the very first time.

...

These spherules are tantalizing, especially given that many of them show compositional anomalies relative to typical ones. Could some of them represent the first material ever recovered from an interstellar object? Or do they belong to the background population of spherules from “local” solar system meteors, which have accumulated on the seafloor over geological time? Or were they produced by humans, through high-temperature processes like welding?

A definitive answer will emerge from studying the isotopic signatures embedded within the spherules. Compared to spherules from run-of-the-mill meteorites, an overabundance of rare isotopes (or an underabundance of common isotopes) in the ones collected from our search region would be compelling evidence for IM1’s interstellar origin. This isotopic analysis is currently underway at the University of California, Berkeley, and will soon begin at Harvard University.

Spoilers for NetFlix's the Diplomat (Big Spoilers -- you are warned)

This is Joseph.

At the end of Game of Thrones, I was shocked out of the political thriller by a decision to appoint a very poorly set up character as king and the complete lack of any political calculation of anybody around this person. Bret Devereaux skewered the bad politics here. His post is a classic of needing to be realistic in how you think about how other players would act.

The diplomat has a core plot that is destroying my enjoyment of another otherwise excellent series. The issue is that the husband of the vice-president stole a $7 million research grant from the NIH. HAHAHA. The writers have never been near a university grants management office. The idea that this is doable is . . . dubious to begin with. A reporter is on the trail and sometime (i.e., in exactly six months) they will need to replace her. So they ship an effective diplomat to be ambassador to the UK to groom her for the role, knowing she hates speeches, pomp, and such but is good in a crisis. 

This is from the 25th amendment:  

Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.

Ignore the insanity of the timing (the reporter will take six months), a small cabal of insiders (which does not actually include the president) are going to skip over his whole list of political allies to appoint an outsider so she can help craft foreign policy. An old president with serious health issues. Carefully note that an outsider with no independent political support would be easy to vote against. The people voting against her will either be from the Opposition Party (which controls the house in the actual script) or members of his own party (who might want the job). 

This is absurd.

Even worse, it is actually the wrong job. You want this paragon as secretary of state. That would actually drive the plot forward and make the current secretary of state's animus make a great deal more sense. Unlike the VP, who has almost no formal powers, they have an entire department dedicated to exactly the activities that they want her to do. Or, it is is minding the president, that job is called Chief of Staff. This is a lot of work for a short period of this person as VP. 

Now, the other reason for your protagonist to be VP, is that they would then succeed the president. Tom Clancy used this trick. But doing this for a junior diplomat is just silly. It made a tiny amount of success as the president was the driver for Jack Ryan to be nominated. Maybe a new and popular president with a great deal of political capital could get an end of career and extremely connected member of government promoted.

But an outsider who is not a confidant of the current president and who hates the important parts of the job (it is a political job) and who lacks a dense network of supporters? Keep in mind, everybody else notes "old and sick president" too as well as the advantage that being a VP would bring. Plus, the current VP could either resign early, or simply take the innocent spouse route. It seems unlikely her own party would agree to impeachment because her spouse became a crook. 

Anyway, it is unfortunate because the acting is good and the plot is interesting. But this whole VP thing just feels insanely unlikely. 

Thursday Tweets -- there is no joy in Muskville

Spoke to my wife while twitter was down. She seems nice. A nurse apparently

— Raheel (@raheels88) July 1, 2023

 

If you know the story up till now. this is perfect.

Downfall: Rate Limit Exceeded pic.twitter.com/90GS2KTbTF

— FriendlyKozak 🇺🇦 (@KvotheTheArcane) July 6, 2023

If not, Josh Marshall will catch you up.

The ups and downs of social media platforms aren’t usually a focus of my writing. But they interest me to the extent they intersect with politics and public conversation in this country. You may have heard that over the weekend Twitter went into a kind of extended meltdown, rapidly introducing a series of “rate limiting” restrictions because the platform was having a hard time staying online. Behind the jargon of “rate limiting,” this essentially meant the site was forced to start rationing Tweets and the ability to engage with them, an ominous move for a company whose business is literally selling engagement. The site’s owner, Elon Musk, later claimed that this was in response to various online bad actors overwhelming the site’s infrastructure. The site’s (for the moment) CEO later claimed that it was all done out of the blue to catch the online bad guys unaware and off guard. Giving any advanced warning (even to employees, it turns out) would have given the online bad guys a heads up and allowed them to escape.

This is all such transparent nonsense that it beggars belief that even a company as chaotic and mercurially managed as Twitter under Elon Musk would try to claim it with any kind of straight face. We don’t know the precise details of what happened under the hood at Twitter. But the big picture is pretty clear. And you don’t need to be too versed in tech to understand it at that level. Think of it this way: You have an amusement park with 10,000 visitors a day. You cut staffing and ride maintenance so you can only accommodate 5,000 visitors a day. What happens is elementary: Things start falling apart and you’re forced to limit how many people can come in the front gate. That’s your “rate limiting,” rationing tweets.

 

It should be noted that many saw this coming (and that a few did not).

Let's say you are a huge platform on AWS, like Twitter is, and you aren't paying your bill. The first thing they're going to do is meter your usage, then they're going to throttle your usage. So, what Elon is really admitting is that he DIDN'T PAY HIS F--KING AMAZON BILL. /2

— Rubin Safaya (@rubinsafaya) July 1, 2023

Truth Social works fine.

When Devin Nunes is running a smoother operation than you, you ain’t doing things right.

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 1, 2023

For the first few days, Twitter's titular CEO was noticeably silent,

I love doing my job at Twitter, where I am CEO. My job is liking the tweets of my CTO, who is also my boss. I have made no formal statement about my company effectively shutting down on a holiday weekend, and have left this up to my CTO/boss, who seems confused all the time pic.twitter.com/3wE713ff03

— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) July 2, 2023

We found it: the dumbest tweet of the past 24 hours. https://t.co/sONSpPPM8F

— James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) July 2, 2023

Let me get out my Niall Ferguson decoder ring.

“The childless have little stake in the future.”

George Washington, father of our country, and James Madison, father of our Constitution, would like a word. https://t.co/B5TIkHBhYr

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) July 3, 2023

One of the great ironies in the Musk fiasco is that I would have gladly paid for a better Twitter, and *a lot* more than 8 bucks. It would be worth it to me personally and professionally to pay for a well-functioning, secure, reliable Twitter. But this hot mess? Not one cent.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 4, 2023

Lol pic.twitter.com/sXD6s2QIJO

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 4, 2023

In the future, every Twitter alternative will be popular for 15 minutes.

— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) July 6, 2023

And it wasn't even erotic.

"In 30 days, users must be Verified to access TweetDeck."

Cause of death: self-asphyxiation https://t.co/y49gsN9zth pic.twitter.com/jTeMrodEWA

— Will Saletan (@saletan) July 4, 2023

On to politics.

Scott Baio pic.twitter.com/iRP7dxl511

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 5, 2023

Graham spent years licking Trump's feet and turning on old friends and shredding any reputation he had - just to win over these exact people.
Hahahaha.
Even the people strategically arranged behind the podium are booing him. And it went on all speech. https://t.co/uCs1hXcqAd

— Helen Kennedy (@HelenKennedy) July 1, 2023

I generally have a no Messenger policy but this was too good to pass up.

— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) July 3, 2023

🧵 Truth matters. When I took this job, I wasn’t pro-Hunter or anti-Hunter. I am pro-data and facts.

Forensics make clear that considerable information linked to Hunter Biden is questionable.

1/2 https://t.co/a6KMtodonu

— Denver Riggleman (@RepRiggleman) July 5, 2023

The question is: What do I have on everyone else?

Have a nice day.

— Denver Riggleman (@RepRiggleman) July 5, 2023

This damning quote says the quiet part out loud about No Labels funding: “Merritt, who added that he backs Trump over Biden in a two-person matchup. “I’d vote for anybody who would keep the Biden liberal bunch out of office.” https://t.co/ydcBizahin

— Joe Trippi (@JoeTrippi) July 3, 2023

Instagram post by Trump. pic.twitter.com/dCsvIWUm0W

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 5, 2023

Looks like it's time to reread Sontag's "Fascinating Fascism"

Weird thing is the first half of this ad is pure gay/trans bashing but then shifts into a kind DeSantis Full Official Beefcake/He Man weirdness. are Ron and RFK jr gonna do some gonzo scenes together? https://t.co/e4lPifu2jE

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 2, 2023

I considered leaving due to Elon’s incompetent hubris. But things like a George Santos-Ron Desantis feud over whether the men in Desantis’s ad are gay or alpha keeps me coming back. pic.twitter.com/Vm6PPRLDAD

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 2, 2023

For the folks here assuming that before 1977 when the Department of Energy was created that nuclear development was handled within the DoD...no, it wasn't.

It was overseen by the Atomic Energy Commission, a civilian agency. DoD hasn't handled this directly since 1947.

— Bret Devereaux (@BretDevereaux) July 5, 2023

This is how you do it, folks.

Cardona: Markwayne Mullin had more than $1.4 million in pandemic loans forgiven. He represents 489,000 eligible borrowers that were turned down today. Marjorie Taylor Greene had more than $180,000 forgiven. She represents 91,800 eligible borrowers who were turned down today pic.twitter.com/SUaHaYChGc

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 30, 2023

You love to see great journalism at embattled mid-sized dailies and Charleston's Post & Courier has a gem in @ClareFieseler. Read her piece on the effort by @VivekGRamaswamy to get red state pension funds to invest in his anti-woke asset mgt firm Strive. https://t.co/6zfCIkpIha

— Jonathan Weisman (@jonathanweisman) June 30, 2023

These poor Russian billionaires! What have we done???? https://t.co/w4k5PmIacW

— Gary Shteyngart (@Shteyngart) July 5, 2023

 

The PayPal Mafia's favorite military analyst...

March 2022, Macgregor said "The war is really over for the Ukrainians."

Sept. 2022, he said "Things are going very very badly" for Ukraine.

Now it's "Ukrainian forces are in the verge of collapse."

His prognostications are worse than worthless. https://t.co/5bhJkDJql2

— James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) July 3, 2023

The Russian Propagandist now on Twitter to add that to the lies he feeds right-wingers daily on Fox and podcasts. And they lap it right up. pic.twitter.com/tVhY29cMMU

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 3, 2023

Yup all of them. 🙄

Just like Trump won in 2020 but for CIA/Italian meddling, which McGregor also claimed.

Not sure when McG went from breaking the phalanx to breaking his brain, but it's plenty broke https://t.co/vpwZHr7hog

— David Burbach (also @dburbach Mast/Post) (@dburbach) July 2, 2023

Here are three real quotes. Use them. There are more. pic.twitter.com/UP8FMJtYph

— QuietFriend (@QuietFriend31) July 5, 2023

 

pic.twitter.com/zvo7CCwpPD

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 5, 2023

 

Not entirely sure context helps your case here.

At Moms for Liberty's Philadelphia event, North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R) says dictators like Hitler, Stalin and Mao are being taken out of context and promotes reading their writings.

"...It is time for us to get back and start reading some of those quotes." pic.twitter.com/TDXusaIUMZ

— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) July 5, 2023

Wow. Right wing leaders continue to tout Stalin, Hitler and Mao as examples of the direction they want to take the country in.

Liberty University's Ryan Helfenbein at the Faith and Freedom coalition gala said: "What we're discovering as parents and conservatives is education… pic.twitter.com/2PBzNf7Dq3

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) June 25, 2023

Is anyone at all surprised that fist pumper Josh Hawley's wife, Erin Hawley, brought the FAKE 303 Creative case in front of the Supreme Court?

They cloak themselves in Christianity, while they lie, cheat & subvert the rule of law in order to achieve their hateful agendas.

Sick. pic.twitter.com/9AA07dYrdZ

— Jo🌻 (@JoJoFromJerz) July 3, 2023

One hell of a damning thread, mostly in Vogel's own words.

Ken Vogel, formerly of Politico and now the NYT, is one of the worst, most misogynistic journalists. Vogel stalked Neera Tanden's 78 year old immigrant mother for a quote that made Tanden look bad, & lied to her that she was on the record. He never retracted the story. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/sYgXfx74V5

— Salad Shooter (@saladshooter9) July 6, 2023

It’s funny. Tech people and gold people love to talk about how the government manipulates CPI data, and that some private company with modern techniques could do a better job characterizing the real numbers.

And then a company does it and says inflation is just over 2% https://t.co/FJHRDP1gvf

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) July 3, 2023

 

New from @RenMacLLC. It's time for Wall Street's recessionistas to give it up: "Despite the year-plus in which analysts have been arguing that a recession is imminent, none of the arguments behind the predictions stand up to scrutiny."https://t.co/aafeJq8vPP

— Bob Bryan (@RobertBryan4) July 5, 2023

How to lie with...

Column: How Mississippi gamed its national reading test scores to produce 'miracle' gains https://t.co/KO6o0asJ7M

— Michael Hiltzik (@hiltzikm) July 5, 2023

We should move Independence Day to August, July is clearly a dangerous time to shoot off fireworks https://t.co/Jeoz1PbcQb

— James Medlock (@jdcmedlock) July 5, 2023

assuming this article isn't sponsored content, MSNBC is apparently unaware that VR and Metaverse are two different things...? pic.twitter.com/a9eUjpnewO

— Dan Nguyen (@dancow) June 26, 2023

Is there a lesson here somewhere: "According to Insider, McKinsey claimed that the Metaverse would bring businesses $5 trillion in value. Citi valued it at no less than $13 trillion. There was only one problem: The whole thing was bullshit." @thenation

— Reed Hundt (@rehundt) July 4, 2023

The thing about goldbugs, crypto nuts, and some tech folks is that they inhabit this mindset where the state and entire economy are less than 24 hours from collapsing. And they've inhabited that mindset for decades despite all evidence to the contrary. Catastrophism is addictive.

— Stephen Diehl (@smdiehl) July 3, 2023

The worst was the New York Times. Which I can only describe as completely economically and technically uninformed in their coverage. And willing to bothsides the most absurd of ideas https://t.co/9l798afmQZ

— Stephen Diehl (@smdiehl) July 5, 2023

> "Did the “creative class” learn anything from buying into a product that was obviously destined to flop?"

No. They'll do it again the next time around too.https://t.co/poZmRaYzO6

— Stephen Diehl (@smdiehl) July 5, 2023

Sometimes the problem with innovation is that while an idea might be new, it is not actually very useful: it is a solution looking for a problem, says Jemima Kelly https://t.co/rpaP1qSRbN

— FT Opinion (@ftopinion) June 25, 2023

Most misconceptions about AI would be cleared if folks had a decent understanding of the distinction between skill and intelligence, and between memorization and generalization.

— François Chollet (@fchollet) June 30, 2023

pic.twitter.com/agCyTYXxWC

— Cheri Jacobus (@CheriJacobus) June 23, 2023

Every number of the form ABABAB (basis 10) is divisible by 37

— Fermat's Library (@fermatslibrary) July 1, 2023

We had a neighbor who (we learned rather suddenly) kept his ammo with his propane so I'm hard to impress, but this is pretty good.

Outstanding. pic.twitter.com/0sBG802brF

— jamie (@gnuman1979) June 28, 2023

Yes, the New York Times owns the UFO fiasco

Though we've talked about this before in

Extraordinary claims (used to) require extraordinary evidence OR the gray lady and the little green men

and

There were lots of red flags with the NYT UFO story

 I don't believe we ever stopped for an overview.

Just to recap, this all started when the New York Times hired Leslie Kean, a paranormal true believer with a questionable track record to cover the UFO beat along with the veteran Ralph Blumenthal who presumably was supposed to keep his younger partner in check, a bit like Scully and Mulder, with roughly the same outcome. The result was a run of sensationalistic and badly reported articles. Eventually the stories the reporters were handing in got so over the top that the NYT put the brakes on at which point Kean and Blumenthal went to an obscure publication on their own with hearsay claims of extraterrestrial crash sites and alien technology.

You might think this was as bad as it could get but, just as the NYT had been holding back its reporters from some of the craziness, it turns out that the reporters themselves were doing the same with their source. Once David Grusch hit the interview circuit, the shit really and truly hit the fan. Now we didn't just have stories of interstellar spaceships sitting in warehouses somewhere, we had an international conspiracy dating back to the 1930s and involving not just modern-day countries but the Axis powers and the Vatican.

Grusch elaborated on his claims in a subsequent interview with the French newspaper Le Parisien on June 7. He said that UFOs could be coming from extra dimensions; that Pope Pius XII had "back-channeled" the existence of a UFO crash in Magenta, Italy in 1933 to the United States, the remains of which were kept by Benito Mussolini's government until the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), coordinating with the Five Eyes, procured it in 1944 or 1945; that he had spoken with intelligence officials whom the U.S. military had briefed on "football-field" sized crafts; that the U.S. government transferred some crashed UFOs to a defense contractor; and that there was "malevolent activity" by UFOs.

The smart thing to do at this point would be to completely disavow this clown, but people are too invested. The reporters have staked their reputations on this guy and the NYT, (the paper with perhaps the strongest and most entrenched corporate culture of any major non-partisan news publication, which absolutely hates to admit it was wrong) has spent years ignoring questions about these two star reporters.

As far as I can tell, the paper has taken no serious steps to distance itself from this fiasco and, if we can take Ezra Klein as representing the company line (usually pretty good bet), the paper is approaching this obvious bullshit with the same" just asking questions," "keeping an open mind," "important if true" framing that they previously brought to the hyperloop, crypto and nfts, and the metaverse.

A 4th of July musical interlude

Listening to Cohan, it's easy to forget how controversial going to war in Europe was.

And finally, something appropriate from the great Jerry Goldsmith.

Notes on Titan

This was originally going to be part of an earlier Thursday Tweets, but that post was written and scheduled on Wednesday and the fate or the Titan was still in question, and I didn't want the it to go out on the same day that some bad news was breaking including some potential scenarios that were even worse than what appears to have happened. 

It is important that we show an appropriate level of respect for what was the equivalent in terms of human life of a bad two-car crash, at the same time, it is also important to have some perspective. Even in terms of aquatic disasters, this one was dwarfed by recent events. Furthermore, it's bigger importance lies not in the tragedy itself but in the familiar story behind it. 

I've got another post or two coming on this, but the tl;dr version is another comes-from-money Elon wannabe buys into the VC/Silicon Valley/radical libertarian tales of Randian supermen held back from greatness by timid, nanny-state regulators and envious, short-sighted regulators.  As was spelled out by Ben Taub in his excellent New Yorker piece, the result was a craft with so many critical flaws that the question wasn't if it would catastrophically fail, but when.

First, though, a reminder that the fate of the Titan was far from the most horrifying thing that happened on the oceans that week.

The sheer number of people likely drowned in last week's Mediterranean shipwreck is hard to fathom. Our story on who they were and why they boarded the boat that day.
By the time they understood the danger, it was too late to turn around. https://t.co/S1NdLiLJDB

— Louisa Loveluck (@leloveluck) June 24, 2023

 

With that bit of context in mind,  here was some of the real-time commentary on Twitter.

This is not good.https://t.co/sHWDhgWd2R

— Dave Jones (@eevblog) June 21, 2023

Move fast, break things, drown people.

Warned of a potential "catastrophic" outcome by experts, Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate, who is missing with the other occupants of his submersible, claimed that "industry regulation is stifling innovation."https://t.co/w2BYYYTbvi

— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) June 20, 2023

Wow. OceanGate, the company that owns the missing submersible, fired an employee a few years ago after he filed safety complaints against them. The employee specifically said the sub was not capable of descending to such extreme depths before he was fired.https://t.co/c3s2H3eVEr

— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) June 20, 2023

Somebody simply has to write the ultimate catch-all essay on disruptive, libertarian, private-sector-touting entrepreneurs simply begging and demanding for state intervention at the end of their journeys. (This is the Titan sub company's adviser.) pic.twitter.com/dsB9YLln8w

— Eve Fairbanks (@evefairbanks) June 21, 2023

What makes this argument quite unconvincing is that, from my understanding, there’s an establish technology framework that has given deep sea submersibles a remarkably strong safety record. They just didn’t use that approach. And it’s not … https://t.co/7rfJ9I3kHp

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 25, 2023

Someone who was invited on OceanGate’s Titan four years ago said he heard noises on the submersible and told the owner, Stockton Rush — who promptly did nothing, saying he was "tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation".https://t.co/am2cnrcPho

— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) June 25, 2023

 

You can listen to a survivor talk about dealing with this here https://t.co/BoQITFDzLK pic.twitter.com/TFfXUsQK4Z

— Hannah Davis (@hannahpearld) June 20, 2023

 

Tweets -- "“I would totally kick your ass, but my mom won’t let me." or "I wanted to be prepared for when I have my first psychotic break"

(Sometimes you just can't decide on a title.)

More fun with RFK jr (including the inevitable crypto moment).

Are we sure he's running for president of the US? pic.twitter.com/1JpRSqZNE4

— John Scott-Railton (@jsrailton) June 28, 2023

UPDATE: whoever is operating RFK Jr's twitter just pulled the tweet.

Here it is for posterity.

Permalink on @waybackmachine from @internetarchive: https://t.co/wKyxLq9Q6e pic.twitter.com/RsKFC84TU4

— John Scott-Railton (@jsrailton) June 28, 2023

Curious whether he was a Bitcoin freak before he got in with Bannon and musk? “inviolable right” lol https://t.co/C1MHQL5U7J

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 28, 2023

It's always sad when someone you admire espouses positions you find crazy, stupid or offensive. Fortunately, I've always considered Millar a talentless, third-rate Frank Miller wannabe and all around hack, so I'm pretty cool with this.
 

Mark Millar outing himself as a complete nutter (not a terribly surprising revelation for a lot of us) seems like a fantastic time to bring up this gem from Grant Morrison: pic.twitter.com/iNcyPJtSpO

— Josh Gilbert, Occasional Artist ✊🌘 (@ShokXoneStudios) June 29, 2023

 

And speaking of anti-vaxxers...

Whereby a bunch of unvaccinated MAGAs describe the symptoms of Long COVID without quite making the connection.

They are sooooo close to getting it. pic.twitter.com/VJN53MSCNS

— Brett Meiselas (@BMeiselas) June 25, 2023

So a conspiracy theorist dies & goes to heaven. God himself shows up & asks; do you have any questions?

Well, was #Covid a hoax created by Big Pharma?

God replies; “Covid was real & vaccines saved millions”

Conspiracy theorist; “Damn this thing goes higher up than I thought”

— Sander van der Linden (@Sander_vdLinden) June 18, 2023

How about some politics?

good to note this. Close to the same in almost every cycle. About like polling people with - is everything awesome? Yes/no? https://t.co/1ZlBKAztmN

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 28, 2023

I called it. Trump came up with an excuse to back out of the debate because he is afraid of Bret Baier and Chris Christie. pic.twitter.com/888MOLIkKu

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 26, 2023

 

The fundamental flaw of the run-to-the-right-of-Trump strategy.

Between his new FL law and this new natl policy proposal, DeSantis has embraced the most extreme immigration/border positions of any major R in decades.

Like his 6 week abortion ban this stuff is deeply unpopular outside MAGA bubble, and is going to further degrade GOP brand. https://t.co/rVeXvbZR2x

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) June 27, 2023

 

Coming from the Bible-belt, MAGA's apocalyptic tendencies have long been on my radar.

Weird apocalyptic video posted by Trump on Truth Social tonight: “This is the final battle …” pic.twitter.com/lBzgqCRYz3

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 30, 2023

Without the socialism of Social Security benefits & Medicare payments, Florida as we know it would not exist. https://t.co/o7PgY9G2Oe

— Lawrence O'Donnell (@Lawrence) June 27, 2023

‘RNC Research’ cut this video right before Biden said, “Just joking.” Another clip going viral today. pic.twitter.com/pxU12JDEAd

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 26, 2023

Patel: I think it has absolutely enormous impact on Ukraine that tilts in the favor of Russia. pic.twitter.com/euUfZb5HiR

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 26, 2023

Speaking as a Watergate historian, there’s nowhere on thousands of hours of Nixon tapes where Nixon makes any comment as clear, as clearly illegal, and as clearly self-aware as this Trump tape. https://t.co/JFqyfcQb8g

— Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) June 27, 2023

Kyle Rittenhouse says that he empathizes with Trump because he was also persecuted. Ted Nugent, who just spoke at Trump’s last rally, then claims that Michelle Obama is really a man and the Obama kids are adopted. pic.twitter.com/PKIl7GHCuu

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 1, 2023

Yeah, that Turtledove.

This, btw, is the basic message of fascism. Return with us now to the golden days of yesteryear, when life was beautiful all the time--if you weren't black or gay or Jewish or anything else the powers that be didn't like.

So shove your Nazi-style gaslighting up your ass, Nikki. https://t.co/nWTSHKX71r

— Harry Turtledove (@HNTurtledove) June 24, 2023

New NBC New poll - '24 GOP WH

Trump 51%
DeSantis 22%
Pence 7%
Christie 5%
Haley 4%
Ramaswamy 3%
Scott 3%
Hutchinson 2%

---
General Election Match-ups

Biden 49%
Trump 45%

Biden 47%
DeSantis 47%

— Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) June 25, 2023

Am I the only one who doesn’t know what the tv screen looks like when it shows “someone’s laptop trying to connect to the TV.” I wanted to be prepared for when I have my first psychotic break. https://t.co/RlF5wYnBlf

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 25, 2023

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders pulled herself up by her own bootstraps, from her childhood home in the AR Governor's Mansion all the way up to her current home in the AR Governor's Mansion. Must be the content of her character. https://t.co/c1Z6VolySj via @arktimes

— Arkansas Times (@ArkTimes) June 30, 2023

Greg Abbott posts a fake item from the “Dunning Kruger Times” written by “Flagg Eagleton - Patriot” pic.twitter.com/P583zS06l0

— Christopher Hooks (@cd_hooks) June 25, 2023

Good point from Taleb.

About nothing in history has been more transformative than the automobile. Yet nothing would have bankrupted you more effectively than an investment in the auto industry.
Finance is the graveyard of first order reasoning.
(Robert is co-founder of #RWRI) https://t.co/r4nuPmeU9R

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) June 26, 2023

Sad Sacks and friends

The account he’s talking about was claiming a Russian attack was actually a Ukrainian attack on Ukraine and had killed a lot Nato soldiers. Purportedly an account from Texas. Sacks jumped on board and now going with just asking questions. Sad. https://t.co/Ssbn6onHhT

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 28, 2023

No wonder Silicon Valley is so screwed up. LoL.https://t.co/cuImNxG2Bm

— Zero Shorts (@zeroshorts) June 28, 2023

"Moment Tesla nearly blows stop sign during self-driving test" https://t.co/unjeGihnEU via @MailOnline

— Stanphyl Capital ❌ (@StanphylCap) June 25, 2023

“I would totally kick your ass, but my mom won’t let me,” is perhaps the funniest outcome of this whole scenario. pic.twitter.com/tDvz3rn2u9

— Mollie Heckerling (@mollieschmollie) June 26, 2023

 

Never cared for the show, but I have to admit this is a great tweet.

‘Later that day I started to wonder..are all men like Prigozhin..making big spectacular gestures but then refusing to commit at the pivotal moment? Was I, like Putin, running scared from true love? Was Miranda my Lukashenka, trying to pick up the pieces of my bad choices in men?’ pic.twitter.com/IYxNt86hMD

— John Paul Newman 🌻 (@johnpaul_newman) June 25, 2023

 

Today in tech with Grady Booch.

The noise to signal ratio of the Web is worsening.https://t.co/HLROxTjXLe

— Grady Booch (@Grady_Booch) June 27, 2023

"Do LLM understand?" is a question that yields passionate answers.

As for me and my house: no, LLMs do not reason and in fact are architectural incapable of reasoning.

Let's unpack that.

— Grady Booch (@Grady_Booch) June 27, 2023

This I found useful https://t.co/xpBsl8nfA1 wherein the author observes "The enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, but rather the illusion of knowledge; the feeling of understanding."

— Grady Booch (@Grady_Booch) June 27, 2023

Indeed; a great thread, Noah.

We and our machines....we co-evolve. https://t.co/Lqtbh06TVR

— Grady Booch (@Grady_Booch) June 25, 2023

And one for the 4th of July weekend.

These gender reveal parties, man… https://t.co/HtlfdvCW6J

— Charles Gaba isn't paying for this account. (@charles_gaba) June 29, 2023

 

 

A few thought's on Mark's post

This is Joseph.

Mark has an excellent post. Go read it, this reply will wait.

Ok, I have a couple of thoughts here. One of them is that the electoral college is actually a surprisingly good design. I know, I know -- it did create 2016. But that was a sin of many parents. But in a more general sense, I am not sure that the benefit of precise representation is ever as clear as one would like it to be and no system follows the popular vote perfectly.

In the US the congressional districts are supposed to be evenly divided by population, but both the largest and smallest deviations in 2020 were in the same state. In Canada, which has no elected head of state, the difference in riding size is as big as a factor of eight, as the government tries to allow sparsely populated hinterlands to have some say in government (the US uses the Senate for this purpose). 

What is nice about electoral districts is that challenges to an election will hinge on state by state recounts. There is no way to discover a huge bolus of votes in one state that changes the national total. Outstanding votes are only impactful in a handful of places. Further, it tends to increase margins of victory. The margin with electoral votes is often much larger than with actual votes, making it easier to discern a victor.

The place that this went really wrong was in 2000. There it really was a single state and a small number of votes (in absolute terms) that made the difference and this is always going to be a problem. But imagine how much worse this would have been with a national popular vote in 1888. The vote total was 5,443,892 to 5,534,488 (a 0.8% margin). But votes take time to arrive. Vote by mail, military ballots, absentee ballots, and provisional ballots all take time to process. If the vote was extremely close, one could imagine issues with just how closely ballots were studied.

But here comes another advantage. Elections are run by states. The states partisan control is likely very correlated with their presidential vote bias. So padding the vote in California, now, isn't really helpful because this isn't going to change the likely allocation of presidential votes. A last minute ruling on post-marks isn't going to change anything. But with 50 separate elections processes, the potential for an "appearance of impropriety" is actually higher. 

Now you could make presidential elections and election boundary drawing federal tasks. But that is a big change. The system will always be vulnerable to close elections in swing states. 

Now, Bush vs Gore has two parts.  The 7-2 decision is actually not all that bad -- the process in Florida had fallen apart. What I object to is the 5-4 decision certifying the election for Bush on equal protection grounds. No person is entitled to an electoral office and having an unelected court decide the issue was a problem. The constitution has a process for this, which was used in 1824, where congress votes for the president (with the winner of the most electoral votes not winning the one time this happened). It is not a great process, but it has the virtue of elected politicians needing to weigh in, who can be held accountable by their voters. 

In any case, I don't think Mark and I will agree on the electoral college but it is good that the blog has a diversity of opinions. But that's my defense of the electoral college. It is true that we could be like France and it would probably be ok, but my question is whether this is the point where reforms are most urgently needed. The, uh, imperial supreme court is looking like a much bigger deal in my view these days. 

Five years ago at the blog: unfortunately, this isn't as relevant now that the hype storm over AI has passed

 Tuesday, June 26, 2018

I'm afraid even the Brothers Grimm would have found Bitcoin a little too fantastic

I'm edging closer to the notion that the tools which we would normally use to critique journalism are no longer up to the task of discussing the 21st century technology narrative. Instead, the appropriate methods are probably those of the folklorist. We are rapidly approaching the realm of the myth and the tall tale. Why not start thinking in those terms?

It is standard practice when discussing something like a Jack tale to list the Aarne–Thompson classification. For example, Jack in the beanstalk fall under the classification AT 328 ("The Treasures of the Giant"). We could do something similar with the vast majority of tech reported. TakeTheranos. This and other accounts of college dropouts supposedly coming up with some amazing innovation can be classified under "wayward youth finds magic object."

 I've been getting quite a bit of thought recently to how magical heuristics have come to dominate the conversation about technology and innovation, but the idea of actually treating the narrative as folklore didn't hit me until I read this:

The paperclip maximizer is a thought experiment described by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. It illustrates the existential risk that an artificial general intelligence may pose to human beings when programmed to pursue even seemingly-harmless goals, and the necessity of incorporating machine ethics into artificial intelligence design. The scenario describes an advanced artificial intelligence tasked with manufacturing paperclips. If such a machine were not programmed to value human life, then given enough power its optimized goal would be to turn all matter in the universe, including human beings, into either paperclips or machines which manufacture paperclips.[4]

    Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans.
    — Nick Bostrom, "Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence", 2003

Bostrom has emphasised that he does not believe the paperclip maximiser scenario per se will actually occur; rather, his intention is to illustrate the dangers of creating superintelligent machines without knowing how to safely program them to eliminate existential risk to human beings. The paperclip maximizer example illustrates the broad problem of managing powerful systems that lack human values

Suddenly it struck me that this was just the magic salt mill ever so slightly veiled in cyber garb. In case you're not up on your folklore...

It is Aarne-Thompson type 565, the Magic Mill. Other tales of this type include The Water Mother and Sweet porridge.

Synopsis

A poor man begged from his brother on Christmas Eve. The brother promised him, depending on the variant, ham or bacon or a lamb if he would do something. The poor brother promised; the rich one handed over the food and told him to go to Hell (in Lang's version, the Dead Men's Hall; in the Greek, the Devil's dam). Since he promised, he set out. In the Norse variants, he meets an old man along the way. In some variants, the man begs from him, and he gives something; in all, the old man tells him that in Hell (or the hall), they will want to buy the food from him, but he must only sell it for the hand-mill behind the door, and come to him for directions to use it. It took a great deal of haggling, but the poor man succeeded, and the old man showed him how to use it. In the Greek, he merely brought the lamb and told the devils that he would take whatever they would give him, and they gave him the mill. He took it to his wife, and had it grind out everything they needed for Christmas, from lights to tablecloth to meat and ale. They ate well and on the third day, they had a great feast. His brother was astounded and when the poor man had drunk too much, or when the poor man's children innocently betrayed the secret, he showed his rich brother the hand-mill. His brother finally persuaded him to sell it. In the Norse version, the poor brother didn't teach him how to handle it. He set to grind out herrings and broth, but it soon flooded his house. His brother wouldn't take it back until he paid him as much as he paid to have it. In the Greek, the brother set out to Constantinople by ship. In the Norse, one day a skipper wanted to buy the hand-mill from him, and eventually persuaded him. In all versions, the new owner took it to sea and set it to grind out salt. It ground out salt until it sank the boat, and then went on grinding in the sea, turning the sea salty.

I realize Bostrom isn't proposing this as a likely scenario. That's not the point. What matters here is that he and other researchers and commentators tend to think about technology using the specific heuristics and motifs people have always used for thinking about magic, and it worries me when I start recognizing the Aarne–Thompson classifications for stories in the science section.