Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Tuesday tweets – – when you have to dig up one-year-old professional wrestling clips to find signs of social progress

Seeing a lot of comments along these lines from Trump watchers along with a lot of what does look like groundwork from the Trump camp. Not sure if I'd go 60%, but I won't be shocked if it happens either.


 

Why would they be worried?


The key to understanding Trump's speaking style has always been to think of him in terms of a second tier Vegas insult comic, at least on the level of a Jack Carter. This is not damning with faint praise. It takes an unusual level of real talent work a crowd for an hour or more the way the former president does. Some of his crazier quotes actually do make sense as part of a Vegas lounge riff when you hear them in context. By the same token, many of the things that he and his followers have tried to explain away as jokes such as the Nancy Pelosi/Nikki Haley confusion are even more obviously brain glitches when you actually listen to the clips, and those brain glitches have been getting more common.


"A washing machine to wash your dishes"



This has also been getting some news.


One of the lessons of 2016 was that non-endorsements of Donald Trump aren't all that significant, but for a Republican this is still remarkable.


On an unrelated note.



At least Trump still as the nepo-baby support.


I seem to recall us telling idealists in the education reform movement around a dozen years ago not to put too much trust in some of their allies





Anyone else getting a no more Mr. nice guy vibe from recent Democratic campaign ads?


Yes, the Republicans still have a vetting problem.

Then there's this.

The bank he leads, Utah-based Sunwest, last month was named as a co-defendant in a California lawsuit that accuses a senior living facility partly owned by the bank of elder abuse, negligence and wrongful death.

And possibly a reverse coattails problem.




Don the Dove





When the headline writer for the Onion calls something beyond parody...


For a NYT writer, when the narrative can't be reconciled with the facts, go with the narrative,

AI






This is a perfect rundown of how the techno-optimist crowd thinks about fusion.



Rep. Jack Kimble is about to be your new favorite politician on Twitter.




Always read the bio before replying.









Mock if you will, but I find this genuinely encouraging.

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Monday, June 24, 2024

Campaign Cash -- the spending side

We have to be careful about how we talk about money in an election, particularly in this election. With financial questions, we're used to thinking  in terms of businesses or (two perhaps a lesser degree) household finance where more money coming in is almost always better, as is less money going out. In those situations, the money can usually be seen as end to itself. Whoever ends up with the most wins.

In politics, money is a means to an end. Turning a profit is not an objective. The only good reason for not spending the money is so that you can spend it next time. Normally, this is so obvious we don't have to put a lot of thought into the matter. It is sufficient to ask me how much each candidate is bringing in and how wisely it is being spent. In 2024, however, we can't assume anything is normal.

One of the odd things about the role of campaign funds this time is how little Donald Trump is spending. This was somewhat obscured by the fact that, until his recent surge in fundraising, the GOP simply had far less cash on hand which certainly constrained its expenditures, but even taking that into account, the lack of money going out has been little short of amazing.

I checked in with my friend from Georgia over the weekend. He continues to encounter regular Biden/Harris ads on both television and the radio (and not just Georgia). In the bluer parts of town, there are plenty of Biden yard signs. By comparison, he has seen no ads for Trump and has actually come across more upside down American flags that he has Trump yard signs. It's not as if Trump had a great deal of local earned media in Southeastern swing states. Unless I'm missing an obvious counterexample, he has recently done more campaign events in New Jersey, New York, and Texas than he has in either Georgia or North Carolina.

Yes, the Republicans were cash poor, but they weren't exactly bankrupt. Based on statistics I've seen and anecdotes like this, the level of ad spending, local organizing, and get out the vote operations has been bizarrely low. Even now, after what has supposedly been a very good month of fundraising, if there have been announcements of major ad buys or plans to open dozens of field offices, I've not heard about them. 

There is an exception, albeit an exception so odd that no one seems to know what to do with it.


There are also some questions about exactly how much money we're talking about, but that's a topic for later.

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Friday, June 21, 2024

Meta-panic and the Importance of Timing

June 19th...

One day later...

And this from Josh Marshall:

But the heart of the [Axios] piece comes at the top with a quote (emphasis added) from someone described as a “Democratic strategist in touch with the campaign.”

“It is unclear to many of us watching from the outside whether the president and his core team realize how dire the situation is right now, and whether they even have a plan to fix it. That is scary.”

I spend a lot of time trying to avoid the twin perils of wallowing pessimism and empty optimism. But when I read this, I at first literally checked to see whether I had done a search of my email that had served up an Axios newsletter from last January. (Literally not kidding about this.) We’ve been reading about these fearful strategists for months.

Purely at a definitional level I don’t get how a tie race can be “dire.” How is that possible, even by the dictionary? Scary, yes. Not ideal, absolutely. But a tie can’t be “dire.” That’s just not what dire means.

...

I have no doubt that if we’re back here in mid-November and Biden lost some of you will be saying, “Well, what do you have to say for yourself now, Josh.” And I think my answer will be “I mean, he lost. It was close but he lost. And that sucks. I never promised he would win.”

But I keep coming back to “dire.” There’s something legitimately clinical going on here. Some of it is DC journalists being attached to a narrative, one they’re invested in for various reasons. But Democrats and “Democratic strategists” play a role here too, whether or not they have the initials D and A. I’ve made my argument at some length that runaway pessimism has real world campaign impacts, in addition to simply being an Eeyore-ly and undignified way to live life. But there is some disconnect here that is worth understanding, worth taking a hard look at quite apart from its potential negative impacts on the election outcome. I wish I could give a good explanation for it beyond the inherent GOP tilt of most national political press coverage and intrinsic Democratic worry-wart-ism, both of which are certainly playing a role. But I can’t. For now I can only point to it as a standout example of the way that certain press and political narratives can remain curiously immune to actual evidence.

He's right, the word "dire" is really telling. It goes to the point we've been making that arguments we've seen from Silver, Klein and others that Biden is so far behind that he needs to do something incredibly risky is bizarrely disconnected from the actual polling.

I find this a little less inexplicable than Marshall does, at least in part because I've been spending a lot of time recently going through memoirs, interviews, and statements from New York Times writers and particularly editors (not to mention the publisher) and the central theme is how terrified almost all of them are at the thought of being accused of liberal bias. Given the influence of the paper, I'm certain they speak for lots of other national journalists.

They went to absurd lengths in 2016 to avoid the appearance of favoritism, and yet the message that much, perhaps most, of the country took away from their coverage was that they underestimated the chances of a Republican victory due to a bias against Trump. From this they learned the wrong lesson and they learned it too well. Not only have they taken the most pessimistic and critical view of the Biden campaign possible, they have also apparently internalized it so that when critics point out the flaws and inconsistencies, they angrily respond that people are asking them to abandon their journalistic standards.

This was exacerbated by the extended period of denial about Trump's chances of winning the 2024 nomination. Go back and read the New York Times' 2022 "analysis" showing that DeSantis was actually the real front runner or Slate's article insisting that Trump wouldn't even run. Along similar lines, check out their wildly overoptimistic coverage of Haley and Ramaswamy. By convincing themselves that Trump would go away on his own, they could frame every Biden story in the most negative way possible and engage in constant mean-girling of Harris without worrying about the consequences. When reality set in, they were fully invested in their narratives.

We'll leave the last word to Doug J.



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Thursday, June 20, 2024

Unpasteurized Feral Disinformation

The fundamental rule of feral disinformation is that once a useful lie develops a life of its own, you can no longer depend on it remaining useful. Case in point:

For a long time, sowing distrust of health and safety regulations and of the agencies and research institutions behind them was good politics for the conservative movement. It aligned with the movement's antigovernment, pro-business agenda and it played to the pre-existing paranoia of much of the far right. In the case of the dairy industry, attacks on the EPA help producers get away with practices such as dumping wastewater while pressure on the FDA made it more difficult to introduce more regulations and labeling requirements.

On the whole though most businesses are not uniformly anti-regulation, particularly when those regulations shield them from lawsuits and costly reputational hits to their industries, making this story a decidedly mixed bag.

Chelsea Brasted writing for Axios:

Louisiana lawmakers approved a bill to remove the state's total ban on raw milk sales, joining the majority of the country where the product is already available, if and when Gov. Jeff Landry signs the legislation.

...

The big picture: Commentators for conservative media like The Blaze, QAnon, Infowars and Gab have been sharing what they describe as the benefits of raw milk, according to an analysis from left-leaning Media Matters.

  • The Blaze, for example, published what it called an investigation on "the truth about raw milk the government doesn't want you to know," calling raw milk "close to a perfect food" in its headline.
  • The Media Matters analysis found more than 13,000 TikTok posts with the hashtag #rawmilk, and the top 581 videos had amassed over 231 million views by May 3.

Reality check: Nearly all store-bought milk is pasteurized, a process that kills the bacteria that can lead to harmful diseases and illnesses like listeria, typhoid fever, tuberculosis and diphtheria, according to the Louisiana Department of Health.

And for you animal lovers out there...

Coates' intentions for the product appeared clear that day as she stated that "many people [are] looking for healthy choices and even be able to use it for their pets."

Brasted then quotes this article from the LA Times:

Federal officials say they have found high levels of active H5N1 — a highly pathogenic avian influenza — in raw milk. Observations and studies have show that barn cats who drank the contaminated raw milk have suffered horrific symptoms — including blindness, brain swelling and neurological issues — as well as death.

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Wednesday, June 19, 2024

Six years ago in the blog -- two vintage tech posts

 

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

"Oh, the things that you'll see."

To get a handle on turn-of-the-century mentality, you have to focus not just on the newness of individual technologies, but of the very idea of being able to do these now ordinary things. At the beginning of the 19th century, the only way to capture an image was to have a highly skilled artist draw or paint it. The process was inexact, expensive and so slow that anything that could not remain still for an extended period of time had to be represented from memory.

For people around 1900, viable photography was still a relatively recent development, very much in living memory. It would not have been difficult to find someone who remember the first time he or she saw a photograph. Furthermore, this fantastic advance kicked off a dizzying flood of ever more impressive innovations. Cameras and film became cheaper, simpler, and more compact. Pictures started to move. Photographs could be transmitted over telegraph. You could see images of the skeleton of a living human being and capture an instant in time.

One of the points we keep coming back to in this thread is that our concept of the future was the product of a generation of explosive and (even more importantly) ubiquitous technological growth which was the culmination of a century of exponentially advancing innovation. Our framework for thinking about the world that's coming was largely formed in a period of technological change unmatched before or since.

From Scientific American 1909/12/18







Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Steam-powered airplanes

I'm going to connect this up with some ongoing thread somewhere down the line, but for now I just thought I'd share this really cool list from Wikipedia of 19th-century experiments in steam-powered aircraft.


The Aerial Steam Carriage



The Henson Aerial Steam Carriage of 1843 (imaginary representation for an advertisement).





Patent drawing for the Henson Aerial Steam Carriage of 1843.











  • 1842: The Aerial Steam Carriage of William Samuel Henson and John Stringfellow was patented, but was never successful, although a steam-powered model was flown in 1848.
  • 1852: Henri Giffard flew a 3-horsepower (2 kW) steam-powered dirigible over Paris; it was the first powered aircraft.
  • 1861 Gustave Ponton d'Amécourt made a small steam-powered craft, coining the name helicopter.
  • 1874: Félix du Temple flew a steam-powered aluminium monoplane off a downhill run. While it did not achieve level flight, it was the first manned heavier-than-air powered flight.
  • 1877: Enrico Forlanini built and flew a model steam-powered helicopter in Milan.
  • 1882: Alexander Mozhaisky built a steam-powered plane but it did not achieve sustained flight. The engine from the plane is in the Central Air Force Museum in Monino, Moscow.
  • 1890: Clément Ader built a steam-powered, bat-winged monoplane, named the Eole. Ader flew it on October 9, 1890, over a distance of 50 metres (160 ft), but the engine was inadequate for sustained and controlled flight. His flight did prove that a heavier-than-air flight was possible. Ader made at least three further attempts, the last two on 12 and 14 October 1897 for the French Ministry of War. There is controversy about whether or not he attained controlled flight. Ader did not obtain funding for his project, and that points to its probable failure.[1]
  • 1894: Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim (inventor of the Maxim Gun) built and tested a large rail-mounted, steam-powered aircraft testbed, with a mass of 3.5 long tons (3.6 t) and a wingspan of 110 feet (34 m) in order to measure the lift produced by different wing configurations. The machine unexpectedly generated sufficient lift and thrust to break free of the test track and fly, but was never intended to be operated as a piloted aircraft and so crashed almost immediately owing to its lack of flight controls.
  • 1896: Samuel Pierpont Langley successfully flew unpiloted steam-powered models.[2]
  • 1897: Carl Richard Nyberg's Flugan developed steam-powered aircraft over a period from 1897 to 1922, but they never achieved more than a few short hops.



Ader Avion III


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Tuesday, June 18, 2024

538 + 1968 does not add up to meta-panic

 From Andrew Gelman:

"How would the election turn out if Biden or Trump were replaced by a different candidate?"


The piece is definitely worth reading, informative and well argued, but the problem is Gelman never actually discusses replacing either Biden or Trump. Admittedly, the passive voice does buy a little wiggle room, but not enough. Even if we assume the replacement has already occurred, the event itself would radically change the landscape. You can't simply plug another candidate in for either of these two men and make it anything more than an alternate history thought experiment.

More to the point, that's not what this conversation has been about up to this point. We have had prominent political commentators such as Nate Silver and Ezra Klein seriously proposing that an incumbent president having already easily cinched renomination, should withdraw from the race taking his vice president and heir apparent with him. What's more, these commentators have presented this as obviously the Democrats' best chance at holding on to the White House and preventing a disastrous second term for Trump.

In any comparison there are two quantities of interest, in this case, the probability of Joe Biden winning if he, more or less, continues doing what he's doing, compared to the chances of the Democrats winning if they make this desperate and unprecedented move. Let's look at that second number.

Josh Marshall and Scott Lemieux among others have already pointed out numerous holes in the arguments for what Marshall calls ThunderDome primaries, but while we are here let's do a quick run through. Though Klein and the rest have framed their arguments as data-based, they never really get past the level of underwear gnome plans and headless clown analogies. There's really no way they could. What's being suggested here is unprecedented, and to the extent there are partial precedents of shaking up the ticket, contesting primaries for incumbents, ThunderDome primaries, or trying big Hail Marys when running badly behind, they pretty much all undercut the argument.

Starting in 1952 (which is about as far back as we can safely go when looking for historical precedents) we have an interesting non-example where there was a great deal of pressure to dump Nixon. Eisenhower chose the calm and steady path and though we can debate as to whether or not the end result was good for the country, it does not appear to have hurt the party either then or in 1956.

In 1972, we have a twofer, a ThunderDome primary and a shakeup of the ticket. Though the Democrats' fate was probably sealed going into the election, I don't think anyone would argue these things help their chances.

In 1980, we have Ted Kennedy challenging the incumbent in the primaries. Once again, while it probably wouldn't have affected the outcome, it certainly didn't help

In 2008, John McCain tried to catch up with Obama with a big Hail Mary pass. He shocked pretty much everyone by choosing an unconventional and largely unknown but genuinely charismatic running mate who also shored up his support in the evangelical base. In many ways, Sarah Palin looked wonderful on paper, but few would now claim this was the senator's smartest move.

I skipped 1968 to save the best for last. This is the only time in living memory when an incumbent chose to step down, and this may be the only election on this list where we probably can draw some lessons, particularly if we remove RFK from the scenario. (While there is an RFK in this race, there is no one analogous to RFK, no big name obvious front runner waiting in the wings.) Ironically but unsurprisingly, based on polling I've seen of Democrats about the 2028 election, the candidate with the most support and name recognition is Harris, whom the meta-panic crowd also wants to dump.

Another really troubling parallel between then and now is a highly divisive antiwar movement, and as much damage as the Democrats saw in 1968, 2024 would have the potential to play out even worse. As angry as the pro-Palestinian faction may be, when you take out the Jill Stein voters and the heightened the contradictions leftists (sizable overlap there) who were unlikely to actually show up for Biden in November anyway, the sane faction who remain has a strong incentive to vote a straight Democratic ticket on election day. For all their threats, they know that a Trump presidency would make conditions far worse in Gaza.

In a ThunderDome convention, this anti-war contingent would have tremendous leverage and every incentive to demand costly concessions from the eventual candidate. According to the polling I've seen, most people are somewhere in the middle on this issue, appalled by both the terrorist attacks and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. For all its controversy, Biden had staked out the popular position. That wouldn't be an option without an incumbent as the nominee. Expect similar battles over issues like abortion. At the moment, the Democrats have an incredibly popular message in large part because Biden doesn't have to go into specifics beyond restoring Roe V Wade. We are sitting on the global maximum. Any move is a move down.

Other than being younger, the candidate who would emerge from this process would still have all of Biden's other weaknesses. Just as Hubert Humphrey inherited Vietnam, any Democrat running in 2024 will inherit the perceptions of a bad economy and the turmoil in the Middle East. Given the names currently being floated, they will be largely unknown and unvetted (or worse), trying to unite a party consisting of people who recently chose someone else in a bitter primary.

The chances of this producing a winning candidate are small at best, but what matters here is relative size. If Joe Biden's situation was looking like Mondale in September, it still probably wouldn't be worth the risk but at least you could make an argument.

What do the models tell us about Biden's chances at the moment?



Even if we go with the far less optimistic economist forecast, Biden is still at one out of four, hardly where we would like to be, but nowhere near the 1% or 2% level needed to justify the ThunderDome.

Of course, this whole conversation is beyond silly. None of this ever had the slightest chance of actually happening. What's important here is not the proposals themselves, but the fact that serious people (or at least people we treat as serious) made these suggestions and that they got so much traction.

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