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.

Summer in Texas means it's time for a ground source heat pump repost

Happily, both of the nuclear units that were out of commission are back online producing 5,000 megawatts. Unhappily, there are still nearly 18,000 megawatts of coal and gas plants offline as this climate change-fueled heat wave sets in. #txclimate #txenergy pic.twitter.com/0XgsO1MjCS

— Doug Lewin (@douglewinenergy) May 25, 2024

Put in XKCD terms, if you're trying to heat your house on a very cold day (or, reversing the process, cool it on a very hot day), you're going to have to squeeze really hard, which is going to put additional strain on the grid, but as far as your ground source system is concerned, the days are never very hot or cold. It's always in the mid-50s.

Of course, for the walls of your house it's still below zero or in the triple digits and you'll have to run the system more, but this will still go a long ways toward flattening out the spikes and avoiding the deadly power outages that have become a regular part of living in Texas.

Thursday, November 12, 2020

Ground source heat pumps are "the most energy-efficient, environmentally clean, and cost-effective space conditioning systems available," but maybe we can get journalists to talk about them anyway.

I'm joking but I'm not kidding. 

If Elon Musk or some other Silicon Valley visionary proposed some laughable plan based on non-existent technology, reporters would be scheduling interviews within the hour, but a solution supported by experts based on mature, tested systems will get little to no coverage.

One of the biggest crises facing California is a failing electrical grid, particularly during summer heat waves which are going to continue becoming more frequent and severe as the planet warms. Ground source heat pumps and similar technology could greatly alleviate pressure on the grid, especially when coupled with roof top solar. On top of that, its efficiency reduces demand for fossil fuels.

If we're going solve our problems, we can't go on being disinterested in solutions. 



From Wikipedia:

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has called ground source heat pumps the most energy-efficient, environmentally clean, and cost-effective space conditioning systems available. Heat pumps offer significant emission reductions potential, particularly where they are used for both heating and cooling and where the electricity is produced from renewable resources.
...
Ground source heat pumps are characterized by high capital costs and low operational costs compared to other HVAC systems. Their overall economic benefit depends primarily on the relative costs of electricity and fuels, which are highly variable over time and across the world. Based on recent prices, ground-source heat pumps currently have lower operational costs than any other conventional heating source almost everywhere in the world. Natural gas is the only fuel with competitive operational costs, and only in a handful of countries where it is exceptionally cheap, or where electricity is exceptionally expensive. In general, a homeowner may save anywhere from 20% to 60% annually on utilities by switching from an ordinary system to a ground-source system. However, many family size installations are reported to use much more electricity than their owners had expected from advertisements. This is often partly due to bad design or installation: Heat exchange capacity with groundwater is often too small, heating pipes in house floors are often too thin and too few, or heated floors are covered with wooden panels or carpets.
...
Capital costs may be offset by government subsidies, for example, Ontario offered $7000 for residential systems installed in the 2009 fiscal year. Some electric companies offer special rates to customers who install a ground-source heat pump for heating or cooling their building. Where electrical plants have larger loads during summer months and idle capacity in the winter, this increases electrical sales during the winter months. Heat pumps also lower the load peak during the summer due to the increased efficiency of heat pumps, thereby avoiding costly construction of new power plants. For the same reasons, other utility companies have started to pay for the installation of ground-source heat pumps at customer residences. They lease the systems to their customers for a monthly fee, at a net overall savings to the customer.

Two pieces of satirical press criticism from Mitchell and Webb.

The Alien Invasion sketch is very good and sharply observed, but Train Safety (from the team's wonderful radio series, That Mitchell and Webb Sound) is the essential one here. Every news editor should be required to listen to this every morning.

"Not Your Father's Apple Fail" (another video you didn't know you needed)

Bob Chipman takes a deep dive into Apple's disastrous and quickly aborted ad introducing the new iPad, approached in terms of marketing, cinema, and cultural/consumer history (the title is a hint to that last one.) I'll admit that when I started the video, the length seemed a bit excessive but it more than of my attention to the end. If you're not a fan of film criticism and bad marketing, your results may vary, but it's still a genuinely thoughtful video essay.

Has anything nonviable, stupid and/or evil come out of Silicon Valley without funding from Andreessen Horowitz?

Example 14,305:




From the indispensable Stephen Findeisen, a.k.a. Coffeezilla.

Eating Eric Roberts – – rational versus irrational desperation

Think about these two scenarios.

One. After a particularly fuzzy night you realize that you have spent most of this month's mortgage payment on strippers and cocaine. You decide to go to the track and try to get ahead by betting longshots before your wife finds out.

Two. You are thousands in debt to a loan shark and only have perhaps 1/10 of what you owe. If you can't come up with all the money tomorrow, you will be taken out to the desert, beaten, and shot in the head. You decide to go to the track and try to get ahead by betting longshots.

In both cases, opting to play the ponies is an act of desperation, but second case it is arguably a rational one. The odds are just as bad as they are for the first scenario, but assuming you have no other options, there's really no chance of your finding yourself worse off. If you lose you have the same outcome you would have if you didn't play at all.

(We discussed a related idea in our Ponzi threshold thread. If a company becomes sufficiently overvalued, it has an incentive to opt for business models with lower expected value but a better chance of having a huge windfall.)

The problem with this idea is that, while we can come up with endless hypotheticals sitting around in safe and, more importantly, calm surroundings, those conditions almost by definition seldom apply to real life desperate circumstances. Calculating expected values in complicated situations involving unlikely events is extraordinarily difficult even for those who keep their heads. For those who panic, rational desperation arguments are almost inevitably excuses for bad judgment.

Recent case in point is the small but still surprising number of respectable, center-left pundits continuing to call for the Democrats to somehow replace Joe Biden and second-in-line Kamala Harris with an unspecified dream candidate. There's a curious disconnect between the situation which is concerning but hardly Dukakis in October and the "solution," a plan with lottery ticket odds that, to the extent that it has precedents, follows the example of some of the most disastrous campaigns in living memory. It feels a bit like shipwreck survivors proposing setting the lifeboat on fire on the off chance that there might be a ship out there that could see the flames (which is basically an old Star Trek plot now that I think about it).

At least part of this curious reaction can be traced back to the mainstream press (with the exception of Amy Chozick and a few others) learning the wrong lessons from 2016. Rather than coming away saying perhaps we shouldn't use presidential elections settle old scores or allow ourselves to become accomplices of hostile foreign powers manipulating the election, the main take away apparently was we shouldn't of been so optimistic about the Democrats' chances.

For the rest of us, perhaps the best lesson for the rest of us is to try to keep track of who has been mostly right over the past nine years and who has been mostly wrong (at least when it mattered) over the same period, and to spend as little time as possible listening to the second group.

We'll close with perhaps the ultimate example of prematurely jumping to extreme measures.

Twelve years ago at the blog – – in 2024 the concept of persuadables is more relevant than ever, Red Lobster... not so much

This 2012 post its on one of the topics I've been meaning to bring into our election-year blogging. Persuasibility is one of if not the fundamental concept of marketing. The target audience of virtually all advertising is the persuadable segment of the audience. Given the large cash reserves of the Democratic party and the high stakes for this campaign, the question of how you identify persuadables and how best to reach them is going to be central to this race.

Now to review the basic concept:

Friday, August 3, 2012

A bit more on persuadables

Following up on the last post, persuadables are one of those ideas with a high utility to difficulty ratio. They aren't hard to understand but they come in handy. So I thought I'd tack on a simple but fairly realistic example.

You own a casual dining place, think Red Lobster. You're sending out good coupons -- a popular twenty dollar entree for  fifteen  (still leaving you a profit of about a few dollars) -- to a random selection of people in the area. You've seen an uptick in business associated with the offer and you're seeing new faces (always a good thing), but the mailings cost you a quarter a piece and with a response rate of about two percent, the campaign is costing you a lot of money.

So you hire a statistician who builds a logistic regression model that lets you rank recipients and you only mail people who are highly likely to respond. Your response rate is now ten percent. A while later, though, you notice that your number of customers since you started using the model is back down to pre-coupon levels and your profits are way down. What happened?

The explanation lies in the three primary kinds of people who got your coupon in the mail. The first group is non-responders. They cost you a quarter a piece. Next are people who normally wouldn't have gone to your restaurant but decided to because of the coupon. These are the ones you like; they bring in money and may go on to become regulars. Finally, there are people who used the coupon but would have come by even without it. Giving them a coupon represents five and a quarter in lost revenue.

Remember, the model was built to rank likelihood to respond and as a general rule, the people most likely to come by after receiving a coupon are the people who would have come by anyway. By mailing only to the top deciles, you effectively selected the worst possible customers to market to.

This may seem like an obvious mistake, but it's not that unusual. Most people  who've worked with marketing analytics can come up with a few examples, some of which came with hefty price tags.