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 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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