The Curious Engineer

West Coast Stat Views (on Observational Epidemiology and more)

2017–2021

1,414 posts

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2021 276

December 2021

  1. So would this be Happy Halloween een^297? *
  2. Why the right to a lawyer is so important
  3. Extrapolating out of range: education edition
  4. The biggest problem in California right now is that we don't have enough fires
  5. Against feral disinformation, the very liars themselves contend in vain.
  6. Merry Christmas from Little Nemo
  7. "Albert and Pogo's Christmas" by Walt Kelly
  8. Perfect last-minute gift idea
  9. If you've gone through the holidays without hearing "Sugar Rum Cherry"...
  10. The NYT weighs in again on California housing and it goes even worse than expected
  11. An almost complete checklist of the Fall 2021 NIMBY/YIMBY thread
  12. Food prices
  13. Disruption in Higher education
  14. Senior Epidemiology
  15. Is it time to step down?
  16. Our annual Toys-for-Tots post
  17. Why the SCOTUS stuff is so annoying
  18. Checking in on over-the-air television beat
  19. The rise of the Trump-over-the-Pope faction of the Catholic Church has been one of the most fascinating and disturbing developments of the past few years.
  20. Tuesday Tweets -- Special Edition
  21. Just got boosted...
  22. Elon Musk may not fully grasp the magnitude of the problem
  23. Five years ago at the blog -- the rise of secular evangelicals laid the foundation for the cult of Trump
  24. "But real estate investing in the metaverse still is highly speculative, and no one knows for sure whether this boom is the next big thing or the next big bubble." Actually, I'm pretty sure I know.

November 2021

  1. Why I despair sometimes of improving things.
  2. Great example of sarcasm in chart form
  3. Actual engineering is cool
  4. "As God as my witness..." is my second favorite Thanksgiving episode line [Repost]
  5. 'Spatiotemporal analysis" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but you should still read this
  6. Why gun vigilantism is so problematic
  7. Mainly just an excuse to run a cool video
  8. Gerontocracy
  9. A literal sign of the times
  10. In their report on the carbon footprint of food choices, All Things Considered fails to consider all sorts of important things
  11. While on the subject of Lysenko
  12. The war on data escalates
  13. Barry Ritholtz on the criminality of Jack Welch
  14. Elon Musk's Sardonicus poll
  15. Hiltzik explains the latest chapter in the Tesla story
  16. I take that never happened for 400 pic
  17. What we were saying in 2017. What we read in Talking Points Memo yesterday.
  18. After all, London is so much closer to California than New York is
  19. To Rug is now a verb (and sadly it has nothing to do with having sex on the floor)
  20. Start with the fact we have something called meme coins and the rest starts to make a weird kind of sense
  21. When readers pointed out a major problem with his story, NYT's Peters graciously thanked them for their constructive criticism... I'm kidding, of course
  22. Sahl for beginners
  23. What do disgraced turn-of-the-millennium politicians do for a second act?

October 2021

  1. The benefits of procrastination
  2. Lessons from the Russian Steppe
  3. While we were out...
  4. Institutional accountability
  5. More on the Missy Cummings story
  6. Moving on from historical grievances
  7. Thursday Tweets
  8. I'm sure that Tesla fans will welcome having a leading AI researcher working with NHTSA...
  9. The trouble with posting your review five years before the book comes out is that you tend to get left out of the conversation.
  10. Either this is interesting or I'm doing something wrong
  11. Weekend video miscellanea -- housing and transportation edition
  12. What we were talking about in 2015 was the possibility of basically this...
  13. Urbanism
  14. Tuesday Tweets
  15. Eleven years ago at the blog -- on a completely unrelated note, I've been thinking about how the hyperloop will revolutionize commuting
  16. Housing costs
  17. Does building where the prices are highest always reduce average commute times?
  18. Sure the money was small time by today's standards, but did Theranos have lions and tigers and iceless ice?
  19. Housing Metaphors
  20. Monday Tweets
  21. A couple of curious things about Fresno

September 2021

  1. At least Soylent was in on the joke
  2. What do disgraced turn-of-the-millennium financial gurus do for a second act?
  3. A primer for New Yorkers who want to explain California housing to Californians
  4. Did the NIMBYs of San Francisco and Santa Monica improve the California housing crisis?
  5. The trick is that the trick is...
  6. Yes, YIMBYs can be worse than NIMBYs Part III -- When an overly appealing narrative hooks up with fatally misaligned market forces, the results are always ugly.
  7. Here we go again
  8. Cage match continues on development
  9. Krugman then told how the ring of mountains almost kept the Challenger Expedition from finding the lost city of Los Angeles
  10. The cage match goes wild
  11. Yes, YIMBYs can be worse than NIMBYs Part II -- Peeing in the River
  12. They used to wait till the last minute
  13. Lifetime caps on dementia costs
  14. Is the US Supreme Court political?
  15. Yes, YIMBYs can be worse than NIMBYs -- the opening round of the West Coast Stat Views cage match
  16. Friday Spyday -- It takes a lot of balls to do this job
  17. How we got here -- a 2016 flashback
  18. Tuesday Tweets on Wednesday
  19. Another quick hit
  20. Quick Hit
  21. It's Labor Day, so we're taking time off and running a repost
  22. Where we ended, where we started
  23. Thursday Tweets
  24. A bit of historical context

August 2021

  1. More Baumol
  2. And then back to unsupported hypothesis?
  3. Isaacson knows how to nail a job interview
  4. Self-driving cars and reverse centaurs -- are we approach autonomy backwards?
  5. Repost: "A propaganda-fed base has no capacity to self correct, rather it continues follow unsustainable paths that only gain momentum"
  6. Housing shortages
  7. It's not just we're going to have more fires; it's that we need more fires.
  8. Should we be concerned that the good response is the only one that won't get you published?
  9. If ever the road to political hell was paved with reformers' good intentions...
  10. Self-cons and lies of obfuscation
  11. “Teslas are running into stationary objects. They shouldn’t be.”
  12. "Why does he mean more to you than us?”
  13. Ten years ago at the blog -- Conservation of Cynicism
  14. To quote Robin Williams, "Does the name Custer mean anything to you?" -- more on feral disinformation and sane vampires
  15. America has a children of famous parents problem
  16. They literally call these "pump and dumps"
  17. Autogyros were cool
  18. For some reason completely unrelated to the rest of the post, this classic science fiction story came to mind
  19. Europe envy
  20. The good news is I can run it again since nothing has changed. The bad news is I can run it again since nothing has changed -- Mega-fire repost 3
  21. The good news is I can run it again since nothing has changed. The bad news is I can run it again since nothing has changed -- Mega-fire repost 2
  22. The good news is I can run it again since nothing has changed. The bad news is I can run it again since nothing has changed -- Mega-fire repost 1

July 2021

  1. Andy and the anti-vaxxer
  2. The Greatest Post-Script in TED Talk History
  3. Counterfactuals and age
  4. Feral Disinformation and Sane Vampires
  5. Feral Disinformation
  6. For those of you who joined us recently (after 2013), I thought I'd rerun this favorite passage from Pauline Kael
  7. Tony Soprano was a piker
  8. Hiltzik on Robinhood
  9. Monday Tweets
  10. Marshall (almost) goes there
  11. One Twitter thread and one tweet. Presented without comment.
  12. "Musk is not in it for the money."
  13. I have to admit, that’s one future of work development we didn’t see coming
  14. Perhaps "the most energy-efficient, environmentally clean, and cost-effective space conditioning systems available" is something we should be talking about
  15. Friday Tweets
  16. This is a trivial story. You may want to skip it.
  17. Picking up on the business travel thread from a year ago
  18. The Toucan in the Coal Mine?
  19. Seriously, do not listen to the Get Smart cover
  20. The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart was closer in time to Kitty Hawk than it is to us
  21. Similar to plans to empower investors include raising credit limits at casinos

June 2021

  1. Eleven years ago at the blog -- the times, they aren't a'changin'
  2. “Pastel QAnon.”
  3. Monday tweets
  4. Intellectual diversity
  5. David Graeber on future envy
  6. Working majorities
  7. Even in California...
  8. Eleven years ago at the blog
  9. Flying cars are still out of range
  10. Aducanumab
  11. Judges and politics
  12. Some context for the thread
  13. ‘Uber Meets Tesla in the Air’ -- hopefully not in an "autopilot" malfunction sense
  14. Weekend videos: tortured artists and critical musings
  15. Parody is a protected form of free speech as long as it isn't too good
  16. I'm guessing Dwyer had the complete set of Wacky Packages stickers
  17. Who's afraid of the big bad wolf's big bad lawyers?
  18. Who's afraid of Naomi Wolf?
  19. Ten years ago at the blog
  20. Linette Lopez: "Cryptocurrencies are for speculators, criminals, and cosplayers"
  21. Mid-week tweets
  22. The Lab Leak Hypothesis -- tell me why I should care (6/1/21)

May 2021

  1. Thoughts on the complexity of trade
  2. Muskmas in May
  3. "He knows Elon knows"
  4. Content accumulates. Intellectual property rules.
  5. While we're on the topic of old TV shows...
  6. A billion dollars would go a long way in Mayberry
  7. The nice thing about writing a post on tax increases is that you can dust it off in ten years later and be confident that most people still won't understand marginal tax rates.
  8. At least some of them are wearing masks
  9. I vaguely remember that bars had a simple and reasonably effective way of checking who was legally allowed to drink. Perhaps we could do something similar.
  10. Better than Trump is no longer good enough -- we need to address the CDC train wreck
  11. "It's OK to say I'm vaccinated because..." [Why people might not honor the honor system.]
  12. The tragic waste of a sunny day
  13. Mark's views on the Republican party become more mainstream
  14. Sane Vampires and Unrecorded Votes -- more notes on a defenestration
  15. Is Cheney being patriotic? Notes on a defenestration
  16. I am so goddamn sick of hearing things we've done in the past described as undoable.
  17. Virus Consulting
  18. When it comes to pandemic defeatism, even New York Times Music wants to get in on the act
  19. Perspective
  20. "Well, maybe one will come up"
  21. Perhaps cultivating learned helplessness is not the best strategy for fighting the pandemic
  22. Josh and the toasty warm take

April 2021

  1. Sometimes it's useful to stop and think about what really fast progress looks like
  2. The fact that I could probably pass off a ten year old post on AVs as new suggests that the technology may not be advancing quite as fast as initially promised
  3. Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as modern gold
  4. "None had ever performed such wonderful things in so short a time"
  5. It actually takes some effort to devise arguments this conventional and this wrong
  6. ‘The pastrami must be amazing’
  7. Effect sizes and vaccination
  8. Clash of the Regulatory Titans
  9. The lies we tell ourselves about technology and the future have real costs
  10. If you've been following the Tesla story, you'll recognize some of these threads
  11. Dispatches from Ford vs. Tesla
  12. Mathematically impossible profits are often an indicator of questionable business practices
  13. Another example of the non-prophesies of science fiction: The first newscast happened earlier than you thought (unless you're a regular reader)
  14. While I'm being a killjoy... retconning sci-fi predictions
  15. How to be a 21st century tech visionary in two easy steps
  16. The sad part is this makes me ever-so-slightly homesick
  17. This has to be peak something
  18. Vaccine passports
  19. The Three Sillies
  20. At least it's less than the Netherlands
  21. A spiked pedrail would be really cool
  22. "Hydrodynamics is what a five-year old would do, if a five-year old had a PhD."
  23. The almost perfect 2021 business story: funded by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, feted by goop, it was a massive fraud built around a literal shit company

March 2021

  1. "Every fool aspired to be a knave"
  2. Even if scoundrels and fools get huge returns, that doesn't mean the reasons for avoiding scoundrels and fools no longer apply
  3. Vitamin D
  4. AstraZeneca dust-up
  5. Repost: I wonder where Republicans got the idea that they could get away with using false claims about election fraud to justify voter suppression
  6. He came to extend the light of consciousness to the stars and we accused him of having a messiah complex
  7. There's also a Laffer connection if you follow the links
  8. E.W. Niedermeyer points out an important paradox with autonomous systems -- if Tesla's FSD didn't suck so much, it would be dangerous
  9. When we said drones will revolutionize the industry, we should have been more specific
  10. The story is "Tesla has one message for customers and investors, and another one for legal authorities." The meta-story is that the bastion of conventional wisdom is telling this story.
  11. I love LA... Penultimate Snow
  12. Vaccine nuance
  13. If David Wallace-Wells was all that concerned about vaccine hesitancy, maybe he shouldn't have promoted the myth of a West Hollywood autism epidemic
  14. This is getting dumb
  15. Defunding the police
  16. The sad part is this actually makes the first one look rational...
  17. As I type this, it is snowing in the City of Los Angeles
  18. With high flying stocks, most buy arguments are actually sell arguments
  19. The self-proclaimed "next Warren Buffett" is perfect for the age of Trump and Musk
  20. A small point on Kevin Drum
  21. Just imagine what they could have done with blockchains -- a proto-SPAC repost
  22. He's gotta a great big house on the cliffside, 'nother great big house beside it
  23. Tesla, the Sinatra of car companies
  24. Bitcoin thoughts
  25. Mega-repost: "The next big story, but one which we believe will dominate American politics for at least the next decade or so will be how the Republican party deals with the unwinding of the Trump cult of personality."
  26. We have reached the point where stating the obvious is an act of courage

February 2021

  1. Video Obscura alert: The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (because the Amazon Prime recommendation engine sucks)
  2. Controlling the boards of both companies may have helped with the negotiations
  3. Covid-19 updates
  4. "Musk is not in it for the money."
  5. FT Alphaville: "We kind of have the feeling that Mirabaud has someone in mind, but we can’t for the life of us think of a large listed company that ticks these boxes. We are stumped."
  6. "7 minutes of terror"
  7. I could put a positive spin by saying that I agree with Musk that we should be pursuing better tech than SpaceX rockets
  8. Matthew Yglesias -- "Approve the AstraZeneca vaccine! Yes, their trial was messed up. But it clearly works."
  9. The one Tesla metric that feels the most Ponzi adjacent
  10. Ramping up for some Tesla posts
  11. Terror attacks
  12. Something new in marketing
  13. "You knew this day was coming"
  14. HODLing with diamond hands
  15. Gloating over Pyrrhic Victories
  16. Elon Musk got what he really wanted out of the GameStop bubble and he didn't have to invest a penny
  17. If you haven't seen this clip, you really need to check it out.
  18. Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary and Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, with GameStop’s logo shining above them."
  19. I do not understand US politics
  20. All the little guys... you know... Fidelity, Vanguard, BlackRock
  21. It's like a David and Goliath story where David slays Goliath then Goliath falls on David crushing him to death

January 2021

  1. Please make it stop
  2. Be very wary of the standard Gamestop narrative
  3. If I had waited three years, I would have had much better examples
  4. Smullyan's vampires and and insane humans might come in handy
  5. This may not be the perfect bitcoin story, but it's pretty damned close
  6. "So it would appear that, in August of the election year, we have a political party not so subtly suggesting that its nominee should drop out."
  7. Back in 2013, we suggested that the Conservative Movement was losing control of its disinformation machine and the result threatened the GOP...
  8. It would have been wrong somehow if the Trump administration hadn't seen a Bitcoin resurgence
  9. For some reason, this feels like the real end of 2020
  10. Real World Evidence and the covid-19 vaccine
  11. Vaccination is the ultimate stimulus
  12. Martin Luther King’s Acceptance Speech, on the occasion of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, December 10, 1964
  13. A must read from Marginal Revolution
  14. Another old post that seems relevant
  15. One of the many benefits of media consolidation
  16. We are about to enter a period of great retroactive courage
  17. As a friend of mine put it, "if your base is sending you pipe bombs, they're no longer really YOUR base"
  18. Perhaps the most powerful man in the world is a narcissistic con artist propped up by a cult of personality (and don't get me started on Donald Trump)
  19. We are still the nation that rolled out three liberty ships every two days
  20. How we saw it then -- III
  21. How we saw it then -- II
  22. How we saw it then -- I
  23. David Wallace-Wells has been pushing anti-vaxx talking points for years. When it comes to Covid-19 vaccines, he can keep his damned mouth shut.
  24. WW84 appears to have lost hundreds of millions of dollars. Just imagine the damage if it hadn't "exceed[ed] box office projections"
  25. For those just joining us...
  26. Must Read: Tyler Cowen on VA vaccinations
  27. Happy New Year from Windsor McCay and Little Nemo

2020 297

December 2020

  1. Watch the body language
  2. Follow-up on one dose vaccine strategies
  3. Pólya would have been proud
  4. One dose of mRNA vaccines
  5. The handling of the Western mega-fires is another reminder we live in a solution-phobic society
  6. Maybe we should state all days as Eve powers
  7. Little Nemo Meets Lieutenant Kijé
  8. Merry Christmas from Little Nemo
  9. Twas the night before Christmas...
  10. It's the thought that counts
  11. If you've gone through the holidays without hearing "Sugar Rum Cherry"...
  12. Fifty-two years ago
  13. Even the hitchhiker with the axe is nervous around the hitchhiker with the chainsaw
  14. Dr. Jill Biden
  15. Do professors still put New Yorker cartoons on their doors?
  16. "[Quibi] was bedeviled, from the beginning, by the very antiquated belief that in order for a startup business to succeed, it must actually succeed."
  17. Working from home brings its own set of distractions
  18. Yes, IP matters
  19. Noah Smith draws an essential distinction in the progress and innovation debate.
  20. Rolling Stone: "Elon Musk is the Messiah" Vanity Fair:"Hold my beer"
  21. Sir Arthur strikes back
  22. Our annual Toys-for-Tots post (pandemic edition)
  23. So what is the business strategy now?
  24. On the bright side, how much damage could one of the world's three richest men with the personality of a cult leader do?
  25. Hyperloop stories really demand Gawker-level snark
  26. Perhaps not that unexpected
  27. How to be a Tesla bull -- keep repeating EVs = Tesla
  28. “[H]as the potential to cause some problems with GOP messaging.”

November 2020

  1. Please make it stop: deficit edition
  2. This may be crazy talk but there might be a subtle flaw in the tactic of telling your base votes don't matter
  3. "As God as my witness..." is my second favorite Thanksgiving episode line [Repost]
  4. Six years ago in the blog
  5. Sub-groups in clinical trials
  6. Some data quality issues in a published paper
  7. Twitter and media freedom
  8. "The Denialist Playbook"
  9. One of the many nice things about not having the long shot pull off a win this election is that we don't have to listen to endless told-you-sos from people who stumbled into a correct guess.
  10. Wrong about the Wright brothers
  11. You'll be shocked to learn that one of the most popular TED Talk stars is pretty much just lying to your face
  12. XKCD's Electoral Precedent 2020
  13. 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.
  14. IMDBtv -- Corner Gas fans are going to feel I buried the lede
  15. Next time we'll talk about what everyone misses about Lord Peter Wimsey
  16. In 1968, Gulf+Western had already figured out how to co-opt the counterculture
  17. We're having a good week in California. It would be better if we capped it off by starting some fires.
  18. a.k.a. Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane
  19. Oh, that's where that came from
  20. I need to take a break and this one's worth repeating
  21. The greatest comedy ever put on film
  22. Schrödinger's election
  23. Rethinking Likely Voter Models
  24. Russian Roulette Odds
  25. Today’s post is brought to you by the letter J

October 2020

  1. A few quick lunch time notes on making sense of the early and “late” votes -- UPDATED
  2. Are Nate and Elliot and Andrew klever enough to kope with a K
  3. Rethinking modeling assumptions in 2020
  4. Wednesday Tweets -- these anti-mask activists really get in your face
  5. The good news about Tesla's Full Self Driving technology is that it's not advanced enough to lull you into a false sense of security
  6. The autonomous driving equivalent to Elon's bolting wheels on the side of the car
  7. The standard narrative on the Uri Geller/Amazing Randi conflict comes from the New York Times, which apparently got it from Uri Geller
  8. Farewell, Quibi. We hardly had time to mock you
  9. The war on data revisited -- Again, Trump says the quiet part out loud
  10. You could argue that 2020 was scary enough as is
  11. Repost -- checking in on the work-from-home thread
  12. "The stakes are too high..."
  13. US Supreme Court
  14. From Dennis the Menace to Vlad the Impaler
  15. Tuesday Tweets -- if you held a gun to Werner Herzog's head...
  16. The alternative theory is that they're making a big play for those three DC electoral votes
  17. Trash, Art and the Comics
  18. More on the great unwinding -- the post-Trump GOP is probably inevitable but still unimaginable
  19. A year ago today at the blog
  20. Tuesday tweets -- the great unwinding (plus a really cool snowball fight)
  21. Two years ago today -- well, that worked out
  22. Events have gotten ahead of me
  23. Maybe we should all lighten up -- more Thursday tweets

September 2020

  1. More on omnicompetence
  2. Revisiting a post from 2017
  3. I have to admit, it’s kind of a pleasant change to be making fun of trivial things again…
  4. Mono-causal explanations
  5. Still working my way through Deadwood, though
  6. “There was only one good thing about the fire. It made people talk about the things that really concerned them.”
  7. West Coast wildfires -- Marketplace gets it right
  8. And it's hard to get more boring than charcoal
  9. More important, none of the new tunneling machines are as cool as the Sigafoos.
  10. OK, I'll admit it. The post I was working on is taking a bit longer than expected.
  11. The wildfire conversation we need to have right now.
  12. Welcome to the post-Gawker world
  13. Given that we need to burn off an area of California roughly the size of Maine, this would seem to be an important finding
  14. Weekend Videos -- You need this
  15. Labor Day Tweet -- 3 days too late
  16. Probably a good time to dust off this discussion of self-selection and volatility
  17. "California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire"
  18. Happy Labor Day Repost
  19. Is age a cause?
  20. The truth about Western megafires is the narrative no one wants to hear.
  21. Bad predictions
  22. It's a fun show (Tom Ellis is is great) but...

August 2020

  1. Musk also promised you could use it to mentally summon your Tesla
  2. The perils of aggregation in complex systems
  3. Would "North Dakota" have been funnier than "Wyoming"?
  4. Another old post that's feeling newly relevant
  5. Tuesday Tweets
  6. A cigarettes and cocaine argument
  7. Friday video miscellanea
  8. Franchises for Netflix are like full self driving for Tesla. Big, companies-saving breakthroughs that are always around the corner. The key difference is, with Netflix when a car crashes and burst into flames, it’s all CGI.
  9. Getting into Match King territory
  10. Tuesday Tweets
  11. He basically came out and admitted they're playing a short term game and no one noticed (Damn, Netflix is good at this)
  12. Analog recording without analogs
  13. Yes, more on Netflix, Avatar and the New Yorker.-- controlling the narrative
  14. Whatever-day-of-the-week-it-is Tweets
  15. Andrew Gelman is worth reading
  16. I just remembered, we've picked on the New Yorker's Culture Desk before
  17. More on that New Yorker Avatar piece -- timelines
  18. I am contractually obligated to mention that it snows every year in the city of Los Angeles
  19. "Everything looks worse in black and white"
  20. "And he mortgaged the house..."
  21. Tuesday Tweets
  22. There's something almost quaint about discussing Netflix's business model in 2020

July 2020

  1. Does posting a TED talk show we're open minded or does it just mean we've lowered our standards?
  2. "You know that theory, that the White House makes the man..."
  3. Paul Krugman has no shame -- Wednesday Tweets
  4. Implosions don't normally work this way
  5. Tales from the V-shaped recovery
  6. Misc -- Tolstoy, Fairy Godfather statistics, reactionary ghosts, Lenny on Dmitri
  7. “If you see that kind of disconnect, it doesn’t go on indefinitely.”
  8. Wednesday Tweets
  9. A couple of plot turns in the Tesla saga
  10. The Wages of Strauss -- “I think I made a mistake. I thought this was a hoax.”
  11. Lockdown Jukebox
  12. It's a V-shaped recovery if you start with a V that's almost a right angle and you tilt it sharply to one side.
  13. There is no argument so dumb it cannot be recycled
  14. We have a major stock bubble driven by hype, fraud, daytrading, and denial in the middle of an economic collapse in the middle of a pandemic. This would seem to be a bad thing.
  15. And given that the world's most valuable car company currently sells less than one percent of the world's cars, competition might be something investors should be thinking about.
  16. IMDB -- Composer (519 credits)
  17. The superpower of 2020 is making parody normal
  18. Maybe I should just start calling them Wednesday tweets
  19. Another newly relevant old post
  20. "The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage."
  21. Disinformation and dysfunction
  22. What we were making fun of ten years ago
  23. When a disinformation bubble designed to constantly ratcheting up fear and rage runs into the genuinely catastrophic...
  24. One of these days I'm going to have to write something about the consequences of years of playing along with myths of tech messiahs, unmooring "success" from viability, and generally letting rich people get away with anything-- but for now some totally unrelated deferred Tuesday tweets

June 2020

  1. Our take from three years ago: "a propaganda-fed base has no capacity to self correct, rather it continues follow unsustainable paths that only gain momentum"
  2. I hate to spoil another blogger's joke...
  3. Tesla context -- Why the red flags matter
  4. Some thoughts on recent reporting on Tesla
  5. The standard journalistic definition of bias is absurdly narrow but at least it’s self-serving.
  6. Tuesday Tweets
  7. To misplace one billion dollars may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.
  8. Jengaville -- "The culture that produces $2B of fake revenue doesn’t produce ‘isolated’ frauds."
  9. Welcome to Jengaville
  10. Friday blogging -- lots of big posts coming next week, but for now I'm kicking back
  11. If only the government would get out of the way of these Silicon Valley visionaries.
  12. Deferred Tuesday Tweets -- "Let's you and him fight."
  13. Daycare
  14. If the next generation of Teslas turns out to be a line of hovercrafts, I’ll have to retract this post.
  15. Another Friday post -- this probably fills our Ernie Bushmiller quota for a while.
  16. Well, that's reassuring
  17. Mask-wearing and social distancing on the homefront
  18. I don't like giving too much weight to historical analogies.
  19. Four years ago we said that the New York Times was about to be in a lonely place. Now they are trying weasel out of it with scapegoating and revisionism
  20. In which a film critic reviews his own early work and realizes he'd been a huge asshole.
  21. And the view from a year ago.
  22. Reviewing our take on the state of the GOP seven years ago.
  23. Deferred Tuesday Tweets
  24. LA is still not burning
  25. A few points to consider when reading about Tesla (2020 edition)

May 2020

  1. University as a business
  2. Q-ing theory
  3. Believe it or not, this is actually an improvement over the NYT's 2016 coverage.
  4. Pharmacoepidemiology in debate
  5. Tuesday Tweets -- "NEW from Aristocratic Murderer: Columbo Not As Smart As He Thinks He Is"
  6. More on journalistic context
  7. The New York Times is incapable of learning part 4,234 -- Ignoring context is not part of balance
  8. The infection fatality rate is not a single number
  9. There’s about to be a huge business travel shaped hole in the economy and we need to start thinking about how we are going to fill it up.
  10. "In Georgia, either the numbers are being cooked, or they’ve accidentally fallen into the stew pot." -- a whole bunch of Tuesday tweets
  11. Challenge Trials
  12. How did we get here?
  13. What we said before, only worse
  14. This post was perfect
  15. Ideological versus partisan -- pandemic edition
  16. Tuesday Tweets -- the wheels come off the Tesla
  17. There’s a lot to talk about here, and I mean that in the worst possible way.
  18. Weekend
  19. Kevin and the Stegosaurus -- special Thursday tweet post
  20. "Not like those bumbling polynomial people"
  21. Tuesday Tweet Dump -- double Bayesian edition
  22. "Kevin (Dow 36,000) Hassett" should be more than just a cheap shot. It needs to be a reminder. UPDATED
  23. Transparency
  24. Weekend Morricone

April 2020

  1. Lowering the line
  2. Did anyone see this one coming?
  3. A GOP strategy that asks seniors to sacrifice themselves for the economy may, in electoral terms, have a subtle flaw
  4. The Onion hires Nostradamus and other Tuesday Tweets
  5. Flattening the curve doesn't accomplish that much if you lower the line
  6. Media and editorial judgement
  7. Think of this as your weekend starter
  8. At least, it's under $21 billion
  9. The politics of covid-19 start to bite
  10. Why low estimates matter
  11. Tuesday Tweets -- Dr. Elon will see you now
  12. More on CA infection rates
  13. It’s not about the economy versus public health – – more on the framing of the COVID-19 debate
  14. Some covid-19 study thoughts
  15. Rhetorical Orthogonality
  16. Ahem
  17. What I did last weekend
  18. How they put the hype in hyperloop
  19. Another old post we're standing by
  20. The strange bedfellows of hydroxychloroquine
  21. More on Tyler Cowen and IHME
  22. Tuesday Tweets (now actually on Tuesday)
  23. A reply to Tyler Cown's questions on Epidemiology
  24. Yes, Covid-19 will finally bring knowledge work practices into the Twenty-first Century -- a rerepost
  25. The challenges of bicycling commuting
  26. Quarantine Viewing part whatever week this is
  27. Of course, the economist can never view the world through the innocent eyes of the epidemiologist either...
  28. Tuesday Tweets -- One for Gelman, a hydroxychloroquine collection, and a covid miscellanea
  29. Chait on Trump and Lysenkoism
  30. Hospital beds
  31. How we got here repost
  32. How we got here repost
  33. About to revisit this in a big way
  34. You know all those films you've been pretending to have seen?
  35. Credit where credit is due (not to mention blame)
  36. Don't make me invoke Liberty Ships again

March 2020

  1. Tuesday Tweets -- Epitaph for a hack.
  2. We don't need another hero -- all those stories about 3d printing N95s and DIY masks are doing more harm than good
  3. "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die"
  4. And a plot twist we should have seen coming
  5. Quick hit
  6. A way forward as the present becomes the future
  7. Tuesday Tweets -- the plot twist we didn't see coming
  8. Employment under covid-19
  9. Plutocracy
  10. I don't like to post TED Talks but this one has aged well
  11. When threads collide
  12. Will Covid-19 finally bring knowledge work practices into the Twenty-first Century?
  13. Tuesday Tweets
  14. The wages of Strauss are death (as in this is literally about to kill people)
  15. "Cast Your Fate to the Wind"
  16. Paul Krugman draws an interesting analogy
  17. What if pretty much all of them were HermanCainHermanCainHermanCain? -- repost
  18. Tuesday Tweets -- If you're in a hurry skip to the end. It's essential reading
  19. Converging narratives on Covid-19
  20. When language loses meaning: NYT has a rare bad moment
  21. Barry Ritholtz on the Jack Welch legacy
  22. This would probably be due a repost on its own, but the passing of Jack Welch is a good excuse
  23. The probabilistic forecasts debate -- That's nice fellows, but I'm kinda focused on that iceberg
  24. Some post-Saturday, pre-Tuesday thoughts

February 2020

  1. "Just as hard as I could" -- Ben Cooper 1933-2020
  2. Repost: We'll be coming back to this.
  3. Electability
  4. Daycare and what does work pay for?
  5. Still out sick
  6. Out Sick
  7. Didn't even get to Thiel's Cato Institute essay on women's suffrage
  8. Tuesday Tweets
  9. High SF housing prices are forcing Silicon Valley workers to make slightly shorter commutes
  10. RIP Robert Conrad, good work Kai Ryssdal
  11. The Saudi sovereign wealth fund bet big on Uber.. That didn’t work out too well for them. Then they backed WeWork. This time though, I think they picked a winner.
  12. I started to make a "Vulture" joke, but I realized carrion play an important role in the ecosystem
  13. Tuesday Tweets
  14. Since it's probably quicker to list the people who aren't losing their goddamn minds, let's start with Paul Campos
  15. RIP Kirk Douglas -- Don't watch the trailer...
  16. More appetizing than Milton Friedman's Underwear Index
  17. Josh Marshall on the reaction to the impeachment
  18. Tuesday Tweets
  19. On a related note, I completely believe the claim that losing their top viewed shows had no negative impact

January 2020

  1. Sure, but that's seven billion over twenty years
  2. The way you define your metrics determines what you measure -- Netflix edition
  3. I shouldn’t have to say this, but earth is nicer than Mars
  4. Tuesday Tweets -- quantity has a quality all its own
  5. The situation has evolved in the past three years, but...
  6. Remembering the remarkable Mr. Jones
  7. Rhetorical Orthogonality
  8. Return of the Space Libertarians -- Quest for the Philosopher's Stone
  9. Tuesday Tweets
  10. Back to the 80K question – part 1: why it matters
  11. "Now, if we wanted to take the children to see a Komodo Dragon..."
  12. Two reposts
  13. The Golden Globes are a perfect example of journalism's non-news addiction
  14. Tuesday Tweets
  15. Efficient infringement -- when it's your fiduciary responsibility to steal stuff
  16. A media post on Star Wars
  17. Two more tech spots from CollegeHumor
  18. College Humor -- "If Internet Ads Were Salesmen " -- repost
  19. The people who brought us the greatest TED Talk ever
  20. "Cosmic Crisp" is a stupid for a pretty tasty apple
  21. Tuesday Tweets
  22. Part of my framework for (what we used to call) the nightly news
  23. The greatest film comedy ever made just entered the public domain
  24. In the world of educational technology, the future actually is what it used to be
  25. Happy New Year from Windsor McCay and Little Nemo

2019 269

December 2019

  1. Some good news for the new year
  2. Monday Tweets (because spending New Year's Eve on Twitter would just be wrong)
  3. "East of Lincoln"-- updated
  4. American political journalism is better than has been in a quarter century.
  5. White Christmas in LA -- drive carefully
  6. Merry Christmas from Little Nemo
  7. It's the thought that counts
  8. "Albert and Pogo's Christmas" by Walt Kelly
  9. Sixties television was filled with heart-warming Christmas episodes often featuring orphans
  10. "The unicorn is a mythical beast."
  11. Revisiting the catharsis thread
  12. If you've gone through the holidays without hearing "Sugar Rum Cherry"...
  13. Tuesday Tweets
  14. More on data science
  15. Choice of metric: the perils of data science
  16. Thursday Tweets (Having an exceptionally busy schedule had nothing to do with this scheduling decision.)
  17. Normalizing the Ponzi Threshold
  18. Tuesday Tweets -- If Andrew Gelman were on Twitter, I'd @ him on the first one
  19. What if Mayor Pete is HermanCainHermanCainHermanCain?
  20. "I paint what I see" -- RIP Gahan Wilson
  21. If you built your Potemkin village entirely out of houses of cards
  22. These stories are a lot funnier when the victims are Silicon Valley VCs and the Saudi sovereign wealth fund
  23. Which could explain why it looks like a DeLorean hatchback -- Tuesday Tweets
  24. Perhaps the part about the laws of economics not applying should have been a tip off.

November 2019

  1. Flaky New Age conspiracy theories are becoming more relevant. Here's some historical context [repost]
  2. Our annual Toys-for-Tots post
  3. "As God as my witness..." is my second favorite Thanksgiving episode line [Repost]
  4. In LA, we're dreaming of a white Thanksgiving
  5. Tuesday Tweets
  6. Worst moral hazard argument ever (and that's a competitive field)
  7. A couple of thoughtful video essays by Bob Chipman
  8. When your opponents face a no-win scenario, it's in your interest to see that they finish the game
  9. Another example of Left/Right convergence
  10. Tuesday Tweets
  11. Fun with Political Trivia
  12. Voting Referendum
  13. "This strategy is cynical enough when the victim is something like Toys ‘R’ Us; it’s a societal crisis when it comes for journalism."
  14. "Yes, $100 million is certainly likely to buy a whole lot of indifference."
  15. "Many years ago, on Monday" -- More Tuesday Tweets
  16. A bit of perspective on 2016
  17. One essential point to keep in mind about "Los Angeles": it's not just bigger than you think; it's way bigger than you think.*
  18. Thursday Tweets (because it's been that kind of week)
  19. Four years ago (more or less) -- something to remember when reading the latest analysis from Nate Cohn (and a lot of others)
  20. Tuesday Tweets
  21. To all my friends back East, we're all doing just fine here in LA
  22. Checking in with John Oliver -- Compounding Pharmacies

October 2019

  1. I ain't scared of reposts
  2. Repost: This view from two years ago is a bit dated, but it still fits in with the great unwinding thread
  3. Tuesday Tweets
  4. Yes, the new WeWork guy actually said "we got to drink our own Kool-aid"
  5. The maybe-you-aren't-special heuristic
  6. Though we have to draw some inferences to get there, it appears that most, quite possibly all terrestrial superstations have a higher profit margin than Netflix
  7. Read the whole thing. Make notes. We'll be coming back to this.
  8. Tuesday Tweets
  9. Twilight of the Unicorns -- Blue Apron and the importance of unasked questions
  10. More of Tex Avery's World of the Future
  11. Disappointed by the omission of MoviePass, but...
  12. Companies with monopsony power abuse monopsony power
  13. Tuesday Tweets (mostly non-political edition)
  14. Trump as stressor -- Shep Smith edition
  15. Cars of futures past/Class Foghorn Leghorn (Google it)
  16. Four years ago (more or less) -- Wishful Analytics
  17. Hyperloop as terrorist target
  18. Tuesday Tweets -- Great Unwinding* edition
  19. Out with the Wages of Strauss, in with the Great Unwinding
  20. I do, however, believe Elon Musk can deform flatware with the force of his mind
  21. We expect to have the 3-kilometer test track completed by 2021 or 2119, whichever comes first
  22. Tuesday(ish) Tweets
  23. Four years ago (more or less) -- taking all the fun out of lying

September 2019

  1. Overproduction of elites
  2. Imagining the future of 1960
  3. Trump and the GOP -- Jenga time
  4. The Stag Hunt Framework
  5. Twilight of the Unicorns -- WeWork ReCap
  6. Bright 2's future not 2 Bright
  7. Democracy
  8. Though I have to admit it will be cool seeing Hanks driving the crawler
  9. Health Insurance Addiction
  10. Michael Hiltzik eviscerates WeWork's business model.
  11. Tuesday Tweets
  12. Four years ago (more or less) -- Fringe candidates
  13. Shaw on dirty money
  14. I always used pith helmets in my version, but other than that...
  15. Eric Levitz: "On Climate, Sanders and Warren Must Go Nuclear"
  16. Tuesday Tweets
  17. Of course, Nissan never bolted wheels to the sides of a Leaf and ran it down a tunnel, so they're still behind on that front
  18. Thinking about how times have changed
  19. We need to talk more about WeWork.
  20. Has it really been just two years since Bodega Vending forever disrupted retail?
  21. Tuesday Tweets
  22. Happy Labor Day

August 2019

  1. Townsville has always been a hub of evil science innovation
  2. This is a lot of money for an awfully short suborbital flight.
  3. Bethany McLean made her name covering Enron, which is never a good sign
  4. Tuesday Tweets
  5. The hyperloop is a masters' class in controlling the narrative
  6. Let's kick the weekend of right
  7. "A public-private partnership" ... nothing ominous about that phrase
  8. One of the advantages of having been blogging this long is that when someone says something really stupid, you've probably already written a rebuttal
  9. Tuesday Tweets
  10. The essential takedown of the Mars delusion
  11. 3 Martini Shots from Rob Long
  12. After following Uber and Lyft, it's almost refreshing to find a tech company that's competent at being evil
  13. Agent-based simulations and horse-race journalism
  14. Tuesday Tweets
  15. Repost, repost, repost (I want to revisit this thread)
  16. I have to admit I winced a little when he made the guided missile comparison
  17. Tesla's claims are not just unbelievable; they aren't even internally consistent
  18. As the consequences of the conservative movement's media strategy grows more costly...
  19. Tuesday Tweets
  20. Persistence of Narrative -- Netflix edition
  21. 11 songs that more people should know -- Special Guest Blogger
  22. What Nate silver has in common with Bob Dylan, Tom Wolfe, and Pauline Kael.

July 2019

  1. Any conversation about electability has got to start with the fact that a white male has not won the popular vote since 2004.
  2. Tuesday Tweets -- “rapid unplanned disassembly“ edition
  3. Taking on the votes-don't-matter meme -- the EC doesn't always follow the popular vote, but that's the way the smart money should bet
  4. Family Friendly?
  5. Wonder when they stopped running Thunderbirds reruns in South Africa.
  6. Trickle-down innovation
  7. The Hype Economy runs on faith -- more on Netflix
  8. Tuesday Tweets -- One Small Step
  9. Netflix represents the overlap of the two great traditions of creative accounting-- Hollywood and Silicon Valley
  10. More Apollo reblogging
  11. Repost: Some context for the Apollo Anniversary
  12. Remembering the Moonshot
  13. Though I have to admit, Alex Jones' chocolate bone broth looks delicious
  14. Repost for the Death of a Dog Whistle
  15. Tuesday Tweets
  16. Robert Cialdini on the relationship between behavorial economics and social psychology
  17. How to write like Harlan Ellison (literally)
  18. Thursday Tweets
  19. If not for the development of the caterpillar tread, these would have been big.
  20. Keeping that stock up there – one day at a time
  21. I'm not looking for agreement, just a little conversation.
  22. We'll come back to Elektro the Moto-Man
  23. America versus the rest of the world
  24. Happy 4th
  25. And Josh Marshall wins the award for best use of the word "Timesian"
  26. "He changed me"
  27. Primary polls, noise and path dependency

June 2019

  1. Believe it or not, if I had more time, I'd tie Chucky in with the Joe Biden campaign
  2. You know the writers are running out of ideas when they start doing cross-overs
  3. Paul Krugman is just scratching the surface here, but it's a valuable scratch
  4. Tuesday Tweets
  5. There's even a Gwyneth Paltrow connection
  6. "Start your day a little bit better"
  7. Repost -- We'll be revisiting this again
  8. Running out of snarky Musk titles
  9. Tuesday Tweets
  10. The sad part is I'm sure this isn't the first time the worlds of cryptocurrency and Perlstein's "the Long Con" have collided
  11. Opossum is a real mood killer of a safe word
  12. And if we committed to tithing to Uber, the company would break even within the decade
  13. Once you're on the list, you're pretty much set.
  14. Tuesday Tweets
  15. Repost: Phoenix Interruptus -- just ashes
  16. Repost -- engineers were ambitious back in the day
  17. If only it were underground...
  18. "IEA: Nuke retirements could lead to 4 billion metric tons of extra CO2 emissions"
  19. Tuesday Tweets
  20. Even by Musk standards, the Boring Company has always been based on bait-and-switch.

May 2019

  1. Days of Futures Past -- Apple edition
  2. That 72% sounds bad until you look into it, then it looks worse
  3. Many Tesla bulls remain studies in faith
  4. Would Tesla be a healthy company today if it had never crossed the Ponzi threshold?
  5. Memorial Day Repost
  6. The lure of literalism
  7. What if venture capital is keeping a viable ridesharing industry from emerging
  8. Why Dubai -- the inevitable home of the hyperloop
  9. Seems like a good time for a repost -- Netflix + NBC/Universal
  10. “She’s a good ol’ country girl"
  11. A memorial repost
  12. One more note on the Uber fleet -- it makes surge pricing go away*
  13. Well, that pretty much just lays it out in the open
  14. What if self-driving cars will actually hurt Uber and Lyft?
  15. This does not bode well
  16. It must suck to have a hundred million dollar production come in second to happy little trees
  17. Maybe we just need to give Clarke a bit more time
  18. The final stages of TEDification include your own personal Netflix special
  19. Another reminder that the stakes for Mr. Musk are very, very high
  20. Drinking from the wrong pipe -- Bill Barr edition
  21. "Her Pilgrim Soul"
  22. Stephen Repetski actually read that enormous environmental assessment from Musk's Boring Company
  23. Repost: Netflix's social media problem

April 2019

  1. "The notion of singularity ... is a religion"
  2. Revisiting the New York Magazine pseudo-science thread -- now with consequences
  3. The fact that I had to Google the topic because I'd forgotten the name of the company should tell you something
  4. Hail Marys and the limits of the hype economy
  5. Elon Musk's self-confidence shouldn't inspire much confidence
  6. It's entirely possible for Netflix to be a fantastic success and a disastrous failure
  7. Elon Musk's latest sounds "worse than pointless"
  8. It's been an eventful week.
  9. “Uber for astrological readings” is still a more rational investment than the actual Uber
  10. I really should frame this in terms of the hype economy and magical heuristics, but you all have heard it before
  11. South of 92nd St.
  12. Back on the TV beat
  13. Misc
  14. “All the technology we need to do this already exists,” and other red flags
  15. It's so nice to not be debunking a tech story for a change
  16. Tweet of the Week
  17. Magical Heuristics -- the magic of destiny
  18. Netflix's Popcorn Problem
  19. A glimpse into the Hyperloop bullshit feedback cycle
  20. Some midweek tweets
  21. All hyperloop/Musk transportation proposals are bad, but each is bad in its own unique way
  22. This may seem a bit perverse, but I'm kind of with this guy

March 2019

  1. Still not even close to the most embarrassing news story to come out of Brexit
  2. Apple gives us another excuse to repost something on the content bubble
  3. Also, I'm switching to Amazon Basics
  4. "State to begin study of hyperloop technology, potential Pittsburgh-to-Philadelphia route "
  5. “It’s a car in a very small tunnel”
  6. An excuse to repost one of the few times probability, classic TV and horse racing collide
  7. Some stories I'm keeping an eye on
  8. SpaceX is betting on technological stagnation
  9. "Significant negative indicator" is a beautiful piece of understatement
  10. Possibly the biggest mistake the left ever made was demonizing nuclear over coal.
  11. Fascinating little oscar winning
  12. The appeal of elite schools -- old thoughts on a new controversy
  13. Guess which side I'm on...
  14. I don't say enough nice things about Ars Technica -- AV Edition
  15. A different perspective for a Monday
  16. We won't even get into the intellectual property theft angle and the original Captain Marvel
  17. What used to be called the Show Me State
  18. Consistency in news coverage
  19. OK, one comment
  20. Presenting without comment something that should have been presented with comment in that NYT hyperloop article.
  21. Andre Previn, "Like Young"

February 2019

  1. More on that terrible New York Times hyperloop articles -- the "skeptics"
  2. Repost -- a bit of historical context for the highspeed rail discussion
  3. Repost -- Proto-hyperloops
  4. The latest piece on the Hyperloop from the New York Times doesn't just take false balance to the next level; it takes it to the level after that.
  5. I'm a sucker for this sort of thing
  6. Cryptocurrencies pay for themselves in schadenfreude alone
  7. This is perhaps the worst hyperloop story I've read in any major newspaper (and that's a highly competitive category).
  8. I was going to come up with some sort of snarky left-handed compliment but I'm tired and my heart is not in it.
  9. Why the state of emergency might be Trump's least bad political option
  10. Two suspense campaigns
  11. When it takes the FOIA to get at the bad data behind a study
  12. Chipman wins Twitter
  13. Causal inference and policy
  14. Catharsis
  15. R.I.P. Michel Legrand and Carol Channing
  16. Centripetal journalism
  17. Looks like time for another drinking from the wrong pipe repost
  18. Rational actors, stag hunts and the GOP
  19. America is a country bitterly divided into two groups – – treatment and control.
  20. Howard Schultz is exploiting vulnerabilities in the system we've been pointing out for a long time.

January 2019

  1. We told you to keep an eye on Pennsylvania
  2. Political fantasies
  3. Howard Schultz is the latest example of the dangerous fallacy of omnicompetence
  4. The press still hasn't figured out what "Netflix original" means.
  5. More good work from Adam Ruins Everything
  6. Pdf tip im little embarrassed that it
  7. Another newly relevant repost
  8. This one might be worth revisiting, particularly the last line
  9. Can Tesla survive without the Musk hype and bullshit?
  10. A few more moments with the super one
  11. I’m not sure whether this is a cautionary tale about data manipulation or about concentration of economic power but I’m pretty sure about the cautionary part.
  12. I'd be nervous about overgeneralizing your findings...
  13. Just imagine what would happen if the New York Times were to announce the discovery of an advanced alien civilization?
  14. "Why Horse-Race Political Journalism Is Awesome" is prime Shafer
  15. Yes, this is what a content bubble looks like
  16. Graduated Capital Gains Tax
  17. What we were saying in 2013
  18. Now that Elon Musk has turned to turn-of-the-century amusement park tech... [Aquatic edition]
  19. Apologies if the blindfold metaphor is a bit on the nose
  20. Now that Elon Musk has turned to turn-of-the-century amusement park tech...
  21. Remember when we compared the Boring Co. demo to a 50s era amusement park ride? Turns out we were off by a bit
  22. More on the Elon Musk Chicago tunnel proposal
  23. Happy New Year from Windsor McCay and Little Nemo

2018 280

December 2018

  1. Maybe we should state all holidays as Eve powers
  2. Stop me if you've heard this one.
  3. Of all the strange turns in the story of the Elon Musk Boring company debut, this may be the funniest and the saddest.
  4. Elon Musk's baking soda volcano
  5. Merry Christmas from Little Nemo
  6. Do you ever wonder why?
  7. Twas the night before Christmas...
  8. Toys Were Us
  9. The Boring Company's big debut -- even worse than expected.
  10. Resisting the urge for an Uber repost.
  11. Tuesday is Zeppelin day
  12. What would you trade for Friends like these?
  13. Another recently relevant repost
  14. At last, a political scientist protagonist
  15. For the name alone...
  16. "Global, U.S. Growth in Smartphone Growth Starts to Decline"
  17. Our annual Toys-for-Tots post
  18. "The internet is broken, and we need to learn the right way to be wrong again."
  19. Oklahoma, school funding, and the meta-perceptions pre-thread (proto thread?)
  20. Some mid-week retro-future
  21. After the swans and tipping points – – a few quick and half-assed thoughts on post-relevancy.
  22. The politics of that pile of old comics -- repost

November 2018

  1. Having a wonderful time...
  2. Some cool old airplane pictures for a Thursday
  3. More perspective on the atomic age mindset.
  4. Space exploration is hard.
  5. We all know the numbers, but sometimes you have to be reminded to do the math
  6. Kevin Drum makes a good point
  7. Roy Clark and friend
  8. "As God as my witness..." is my second favorite Thanksgiving episode line [Repost]
  9. Fifty years late and the Russians are the ones doing it, but otherwise...
  10. The point that no one wants to make about the bad news from Facebook.
  11. "The Case Against Quantum Computing"
  12. This John Oliver segment has a way of popping back into the relevant category
  13. Launching the USS Holland -- my big regret is that I couldn't work in a reference to the dynamite gun
  14. There's still nothing there (and other lessons journalists refuse to learn about Elon Musk)
  15. Another reason to have mixed feelings about the franchise model
  16. Some cool old pictures to start the week
  17. If Elon Musk had a radium drill, he could really go to town
  18. A few points on Willy Ley and "the Conquest of Space"
  19. Transportation cost overruns are nothing new
  20. If you need me, I'll be voting
  21. This nearly century and a quarter old discussion about rapid transit has a remarkably contemporary feel to it, starting with the phrase "rapid transit."
  22. You should be concerned about the quality of the polls, but it's likely voter models that should worry you the most.
  23. Our regular repost on drinking from the wrong pipe

October 2018

  1. Halloween Greetings form College Humor
  2. We can't finish October without playing this at least once
  3. I think it's important to define subsidized journalism more broadly than just native advertising.
  4. More spooky stuff (In no way chosen as filler because I had a busy week)
  5. A Mercury Theatre Halloween
  6. We'll largely skip over the author's fixation on casual nudity.
  7. Cult of the CEO
  8. It is always useful to go back and read the contemporary accounts.
  9. In case the aerospace allusions are getting a bit obscure, here's a week in video recommendation.
  10. Continuing visionary aerospace thread
  11. It also suggests that I chose the wrong major in college.
  12. There's a lot of bold, visionary thinking coming out of aerospace, just not from the people who are supposed to be the bold visionaries.
  13. The technology does not exist. The viability of the market is questionable. Obviously it's the regulators' fault.
  14. Brainwashing and subliminal manipulation – – another entry in our failed postwar technology series and an excuse to play a great movie clip.
  15. Sometimes I'm tempted just to rerun all of our 2016 posts
  16. Immigration and talent
  17. XKCD on what your curve-fitting choices say about you
  18. The tyranny of the mean or why most of the analysis you're about to hear on Kavanaugh's impact on the election may be wrong.
  19. If you're tired of the Mars rants, just skip to the Rocket Man cover
  20. Repost -- some thoughts on poll volatility and self-selection
  21. Fixed costs, marginal costs, and the Zeno project management rule of thumb.
  22. In 21st-century journalism, being completely debunked is no reason to drop the narrative.
  23. Hiltzik's Musk/Trump post is looking pretty damned prescient right about now.

September 2018

  1. Weekend Flashback
  2. Atomic airplanes and Kodachrome moments.
  3. "I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London."
  4. Ley on the pre-history of the space station
  5. Or you could have just taken away the bullets
  6. On the plus side, the von Braun and Ley Zeppelin designs would make for some very cool steam-punk art
  7. Fly me near the moon...
  8. Poetic economics
  9. If. Only.
  10. The nurturing of absurdity
  11. Michael Hiltzik's Donald Trump/Elon Musk analogy
  12. I posted this without realizing how
  13. Few 21st-century visionaries realize how old their future is – – Childhoods End edition
  14. More news on the terrestrial superstation front (and, yes, I will admit to a slight note of "I told you so" in this thread)
  15. Here there be [the original] monsters.
  16. "Wear gloves"
  17. Existential threats, soft landings, and the questionable ethics of access journalism – – a few more thoughts on that over-discussed op-ed.
  18. Paul Allen's childhood bedroom and other instructive stories.
  19. Revisiting the GOP's 3 x 3 existential threat one year later – – what got left out.
  20. A few notes on the Westside scooter invasion
  21. A Labor Day blast from the past

August 2018

  1. Friday Pop Culture Corner
  2. Back on the Musk beat -- actually, the Augean stables part is rather apt
  3. Pre-existing conditions and medical care
  4. Neil Simon (July 4, 1927 – August 26, 2018) Updated
  5. Don't feel bad if you haven't heard of Ecclesia College (Pat Boone didn't remember it and he's on their board.) -- UPDATED
  6. Daycares and zoning
  7. Hark the Herald Reporters Sing – – another magical heuristics post
  8. The complicated statistics and conflicting objectives of video recommendation algorithms
  9. Codetermination
  10. A few points to remember about the recent (ongoing?) Meltdown of Elon Musk.
  11. Shows with legs – – more background on the Netflix thread (and an excuse for a Friday post of MeTV promos)
  12. Trump and testifying
  13. Revisiting the Big Swinging Check Syndrome
  14. What does Netflix really want? Look at the content quadrants
  15. "Hype is the fog of business" or "you should've known something was up when Netflix bought the billboard company"
  16. A few moments with Dick Cavett
  17. Health Care and the poor
  18. The dangers of Twitter
  19. SCOTUS game theory
  20. Kevin Drum on Medicare for all
  21. Really? This was actually advanced as an argument?
  22. Socialism and its sub-textual meaning
  23. Netflix Exit Strategies -- Comcast?
  24. More on transit from Alon Levy
  25. Checking in on MoviePass

July 2018

  1. Understanding Netflix – – children's programming isn't child's play
  2. Light rail versus self-driving cars
  3. This is how you cultivate IP.
  4. Tech industry approaches in other fields
  5. Disney, Fox and Netflix
  6. Jonathan and Huell
  7. Libraries versus Amazon
  8. When Bell Labs got funky
  9. You thought I was exaggerating with the Muskmas line, didn't you?
  10. Deficits
  11. More on health care costs
  12. What next for health care costs?
  13. A follow-up to yesterday's post
  14. Jodi Beggs on employer monopsony power and mimumum wage
  15. Another in our series of revolutionary postwar innovations – – let's go to the tape
  16. Back on the urbanist beat
  17. Media Post: The Last Jedi
  18. "Back when fifty years was a long time ago" -- updated with new video links
  19. Images from 1896
  20. Fourth of July Americana from the great Jerry Goldsmith.
  21. Come to think of it, I'll bet we can find a venture capitalist who'll go for the discounted twenties plan
  22. The world's first photo booth

June 2018

  1. "The monster on your TV set"
  2. Thought for the day
  3. If you have Netflix's PR budget, your own journalistic genre is just one of the things you can buy.
  4. I'm afraid even the Brothers Grimm would have found Bitcoin a little too fantastic
  5. The name has always been synonymous with hype
  6. Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
  7. Another cool think-big engineering solution from the turn-of-the-century
  8. Elon Musk is a terrible engineer (and why that is important)
  9. A Krugman tweet from today, a WCSV post from last August
  10. The "Everyone I know shopped at whole foods" Effect and the Wonderful World of Next-big-thingism
  11. The idea of ancient astronauts is a bit more ancient than I realized.
  12. If you've been spending too much time watching the news...
  13. Perhaps the saddest part is that if some Silicon Valley billionaire gives this project $100 million, I won't be surprised.
  14. "The Genesis of Invention"
  15. Alon Levy alert! Omnicompetence at work
  16. Repost -- Has the NYT seriously addressed any of these problems?
  17. Or maybe they just liked really big things
  18. An alternate narrative of JFK's commitment to the moon
  19. I love the part about machines coming with their own fire extinguisher
  20. "We put a man on the moon. How hard can this be?"
  21. (Not so) reecent developments in wind power
  22. Muskification
  23. A few days ago, we ran a piece about something we call the "hype economy," -- UPDATED
  24. Elon Musk -- Then you will know the pravda, and the pravda will set you free.
  25. A bit of Samuel Clemens to close out the week.

May 2018

  1. I have to admit the school-within-a-school scam is a new one on me
  2. "The Telephone as a Promoter of Science"
  3. Theranos was not representative but it was indicative
  4. That's Mark W, Palko to you
  5. I shouldn't have to say this, but it's only a "proof of concept" if it demonstrates the parts of the concept that have not previously been proven.
  6. They weren't giving prizes for humility.
  7. Mars One: still a story too good to let facts get in the way
  8. I apologize in advance for the electricity pun
  9. Notes on the content bubble
  10. Things don't really get weird till you get "computer dating" in the 60s
  11. Crowdsourcing my work
  12. Life in the hype economy – – Moviepass edition
  13. "Oh, the things that you'll see."
  14. Yes, we're losing money on every transaction, but we have a plan to increase volume
  15. "Those thrilling days of yesteryear"
  16. Abstracts as pitches – – how a Wansink paper is like Will Ferrell's Land of the Lost reboot
  17. When you have to go from a world of sycophancy, story stocks, and magical heuristics to a world of reality, that first step can be a doozy.
  18. A few points on the Pennington airship
  19. Betting they wish they would have taken the check from Facebook
  20. It's been a long week. Let's just kick back and relax.
  21. These two tweets by Robin Hanson prompted a bit of a flashback recalling a thread from the early days of the blog.
  22. THE EFFECT OF INVENTIONS ON THE PEOPLE'S LIFE. (as viewed from 1896)
  23. Salmon on Amazon: apparently "demonstrably false" is not a fatal flaw in a popular narrative

April 2018

  1. In any other period, "one of the greatest inventions ever made" wouldn't seem like such hyperbole
  2. ..."and we'll visit the Man in the Moon"
  3. The headline actually was "This chart shows every major technological innovation in the last 150 years"
  4. Apologies, but I'm going to be a bit coy with the title. -- UPDATED
  5. "Or help you at the automat"
  6. The part about Disney's frozen head, however, is completely accurate
  7. More Retro-future (R.I.P. Chuck McCann)
  8. Electro-culture
  9. Remember, billboards are the billboards of the 21st Century
  10. A reply to Kevin Drum
  11. Career Thoughts
  12. People in the late 19th century fully expected to be commuting at a hundred miles an hour in the next ten or twenty years...
  13. An excellent/terrible piece of reporting on crypto currency from the New Yorker.
  14. Asking a favor from our regular readers
  15. "They've given you a number, and taken away your name."
  16. In case you were wondering what journalists learned from the Mars One fiasco, the answer is nothing.
  17. "EMPLOYMENT OF HIGH-FREQUENCY CURRENTS IN THERAPEUTICS."
  18. It's a shame "stentor" didn't catch on
  19. "East of Lincoln"
  20. Repost: Facebook's culture of unaccountability owes a lot to years of credulous coverage from places like the New York Times. (Why we need Gawker part 4,732)
  21. Segundo de Chomón and the pushbutton age
  22. Monthly repost of the media consolidation piece -- Sinclair edition
  23. Evaluations and zero sum games
  24. In other words, stop whining about the goddamn participation trophies
  25. Muzak has been around a disturbingly long time.

March 2018

  1. Ironically, the turn-of-the-century printing technology looks worse because I used images compressed with early 21st century technology.
  2. As soon as the phrase "cartoonishly evil" pops up, you'll probably know where we're headed.
  3. Yes, if you promise something that you know you will probably never deliver, you are lying. Glad I could clear that up for you.
  4. After looking at this 1889 torpedo, you'll find the "Savage" in the name entirely appropriate
  5. One more post on the NIMBY/YIMBY debate
  6. Self driving cars
  7. "Adam ruins Facebook"
  8. Tech revisionism and the myth of the killer app
  9. Repost: Given Facebook's current scandals, this seems like a good time to revisit this argument
  10. THE PORTELECTRIC SYSTEM
  11. Echo Park Gentrification Watch
  12. The Twonky
  13. Repost Thursday -- Some threads Iwe'll want to revisit III
  14. Repost Thursday -- Some threads Iwe'll want to revisit II
  15. Repost Thursday -- Some threads Iwe'll want to revisit I
  16. Part of a wholesome breakfast
  17. When the NIMBYs were primarily motivated by racism and class bigotry, there was no NIMBY backlash. *
  18. We won't even get into the return of vinyl...
  19. The checkers speech was made in 1952.
  20. All of this would look remarkably modern if not for the horse drawn carriages
  21. Seems like a good time to reopen this thread.
  22. I guess I'll force myself to have a chocolate malt
  23. Hyperloop watch -- We are now reaching that part of the movie where the wife goes to the bank and realizes that her husband has given their life savings to the con man.
  24. Explaining the principal-agent problem
  25. Urban suburbs

February 2018

  1. "A space engine that could make flying into orbit commonplace"
  2. Another one from the turn-of-the-century Scientific American – – I can't decide between the Far Side or the Planet of the Apes joke here
  3. Small improvements
  4. I just realized that we haven't made fun of Gwyneth Paltrow for a long time.
  5. Non-sarcastic praise for Elon Musk (no, really)
  6. The stocks “couldn't be valued according to traditional methods because they represented a whole new era of the economy that was nothing like the past.” – Déjà vu all over again
  7. More memorable ads from the turn of the century Scientific American
  8. Profit laundering
  9. Alec Guinness was George Smiley
  10. Of course, modern researchers tried talking to plants so who are we to judge?
  11. Tech Boosterism
  12. Keep in mind that back then $600 million was quite a bit of money
  13. “I’m almost afraid not to take the chance,” – This is when it becomes a bubble.
  14. Laws and markets
  15. The Snow Bicycle -- wonder why this never caught on
  16. That New York Times piece on Tesla was even worse than I thought.
  17. “One of the most powerful influences for broadening human intelligence… has spread an even, highly developed civilization through the land… has unified the Nation.”
  18. "It’s not just the Second Avenue Subway"
  19. This is almost beyond parody
  20. I think Uber might be using the hover-plane design for its proposed flying taxis.
  21. Media Post: Game of Thrones and succession

January 2018

  1. Alon vs. Elon
  2. Steam-powered airplanes
  3. Tesla and the New York Times – – adding a historical component to the hype-and-bullshit tech narrative
  4. Add Adam Conover to the list of replication bullies
  5. A Turn of the Century Childhood's End
  6. Where quack medicine meets political corruption meets pyramid schemes
  7. The Grandiosity/Contribution Ratio
  8. Arthur C Clarke and the futurist's inflection point
  9. Removing the senate
  10. Feel kind of bad about making fun of Soylent now
  11. Double blind peer review
  12. Montclair SocioBlog makes a good point
  13. Infrastructure thoughts of the day
  14. Too busy for a real post...
  15. When the YIMBYs don't have the answer
  16. Another satisfied Comcast customer
  17. Linking health insurance and employment: does the saga ever end?
  18. Colleges and unions
  19. It took Coke a while to escape its patent medicine origins
  20. Self-driving cars would be wonderful
  21. Bitcoin skepticism
  22. All of Ryan's speeches sound better in the original Newspeak
  23. Retirement and the issue of social security
  24. Rethinking crossownership
  25. Happy New Year from Winsor McCay.

2017 292

December 2017

  1. Should we care that the congestion tax is regressive?
  2. The Last Jedi and narrative risks *major spoilers*
  3. Robots reanimating dead musicians
  4. And you think we're shrill
  5. Merry Muskmas to all
  6. Kids and Cars 2
  7. Kids and cars
  8. Christmas Greetings from Slumberland
  9. "Albert and Pogo's Christmas" by Walt Kelly
  10. If you've gone through the holidays without hearing "Sugar Rum Cherry"...
  11. Nine out of ten technomages recommend DNA-aligning essential oils for your essential oil needs
  12. A few more words about the official game of Kružno, Slovakia*
  13. As if you didn't have enough to worry about
  14. Our annual Toys-for-Tots post
  15. From the back of the Scientific American -- the ads they'd like you to forget
  16. Megan McArdle is worth reading today
  17. "All that lava rushing 'round the corner" – – A musical accompaniment for the post-Moore GOP mood
  18. Note to AI researchers: why don't you forget about chess for a while
  19. The sad part is, if you take away the joke bullet points, the list better than what you got in Car&Driver
  20. If we are going to talk about games, everyone should probably read this first.
  21. The powerful combination of effective marketing and a product that's literally addictive
  22. The dark magic of the market – – OxyContin edition
  23. Model Decay, Causal Mechanisms and Townhallophobia
  24. Consequences of budget deficits
  25. Adam ruins lab nice
  26. Agon
  27. Dilation and contraction.
  28. Insert obligatory what's-a-newspaper? joke here
  29. Non-belated Tuesday Tweets
  30. Want to see a 19th Century polar exploration balloon? Thought so...
  31. Yes, I know I've reposted this, but it keeps getting more relevant
  32. Lots of threads converging on this one

November 2017

  1. I'm running behind again so...
  2. Belated Tuesday Tweets
  3. Kruzno
  4. Another Tesla article from the Scientific American archives (along with some very cool train pictures).
  5. This is what a good job market looks like.
  6. "As God as my witness..." is my second favorite Thanksgiving episode line [Repost]
  7. Igon values, superstar coin flippers, and the Gladwell problem
  8. Tuesday Tweets
  9. Australia citizenship furore
  10. That sense of living in a science fiction novel
  11. Tax policy
  12. What if shame works?
  13. If you believe in n-rays, believing in mental radio is not that heavy a lift
  14. Cutting-edge solar power circa 1904
  15. Why do we still have cities?
  16. Hyperloops, red flags, deep dark tunnels, and the state of American journalism [UPDATED]
  17. The Sigafoos Tunneling Machine
  18. Repost -- we're letting this one stand
  19. Jet packs and Martian reality shows – – there's no penalty for tech writers getting the future wrong
  20. Partisan vs. Ideological
  21. Remembering the future
  22. Russians, Straussians, soft landings, and hamburger emojis
  23. We won't even get into ghosts of Mars

October 2017

  1. Rasputian Causality
  2. Richard Thaler and 401(k) contribution limits
  3. The TV movie Hyperloop may have looked cheesy, but at least you could stand up and walk around.
  4. Tax Policy
  5. I just realized we've been at this for at least six years.
  6. When we say the Mars/Tesla connection goes way back, we mean way back
  7. If the following consists of an old painting from Galaxy Magazine, you'll know I didn't finish today's post
  8. Baum miscellanea
  9. When I said retro-TV...
  10. The content bubble -- when reality sinks in
  11. The New York Times has a self-congratulations problem.
  12. Apropos of absolutely nothing (I mean, seriously, I can't think of a single 21st century example of this), here's an excerpt from the Big Con.
  13. Originally I was joking when I compared this to a hyperloop
  14. "How College Loans Got So Evil"
  15. You probably never thought of a hobbyist market for x-ray machines
  16. Repost 3: The Republicans' 3 x 3 existential threat
  17. Repost 2: The nuclear moose option
  18. Repost 1: GOP Game Theory -- things are still different
  19. Questionable statistics alert – – Whole Foods Markets edition
  20. I'd heard that "hello" as a salutation was popularized by the telephone, so I looked at the Ngram viewer.
  21. Hotels vs. Airbnb is Godzilla vs Rodan. You don't know whom to root for.
  22. Good thing Peter Thiel wasn't around to fund the goat gland doctor.
  23. Following up on the Equifax thread.
  24. Inevitably, the wacky billionaire and snake oil threads collide
  25. Everyone's missing the second scariest thing about the Equifax story.

September 2017

  1. An exceedingly good point
  2. Thoughts on a Ouija board
  3. I suppose the short version is: "Never read any science coverage in New York magazine"
  4. It's like one of those "you provide the caption" cartoon contest except with blog posts and no prizes
  5. Fighting Gresham's law of journalism -- more "yes, it is just a god damn vending machine" blogging
  6. It was an age of wondrous sights, flying machines, moving pictures, white blackberries…
  7. Live by the hype, die by the hype
  8. Arguments for a content bubble – – revisiting 2.
  9. Bodega and the power of narrative
  10. Scientific American's embarrassing example of the premise story, or "yes, it is just a god damn vending machine."
  11. Even by Stephens' standards, this is bad advice.
  12. That's a disturbing premise
  13. A few notes on IBM's Watson, the battle against cancer, and what's wrong with the state of 21st century innovation
  14. Equifax
  15. Magical Heuristics – – you knew there'd be a New York Magazine example eventually
  16. More magical heuristics -- Levy's omnicompetence
  17. Magical Heuristics – we'll be coming back to this one
  18. The end of the networks
  19. More on Google not not being evil
  20. "None had ever performed such wonderful things in so short a time"
  21. Like we said before one more time, levels of automation, schedules of implementation
  22. The following video clip should challenge cherished assumptions about Tesla, Silicon Valley, and self driving cars (it probably won't, but it should)
  23. Good science reporting can be popular if it comes with enough obscenity and cute photo-shopped memes

August 2017

  1. If you indefinitely allow economic and political power to grow more concentrated and unchecked, it will be abused (even by those who promise not to be evil)
  2. “Bubbles and mere cheats"
  3. Conspiracy theorists don't just imagine improbable connections; they create them.
  4. Positive Thinking and Party Loyalty
  5. GOP's Dream Scenario
  6. I suppose I should've known it would involve Tesla
  7. Narrative bias at NPR
  8. The Republicans' 3 x 3 existential threat
  9. That's not to say that sleeping around can't be a plus
  10. Employer sponsored Health Insurance
  11. Feeling stressed? Overwhelmed? Give me three minutes of your time.
  12. War on science (outsourced)
  13. Sometimes threads collide and you don't even know it
  14. The GOP needs the crazies more than the crazies need the GOP.
  15. Yes, I am planning on making this another food stamps post
  16. Some days you just need some Rube Goldberg
  17. The Significance of "The Significance of the Frontier in American History"
  18. On the bright side, he's probably not smart enough to be a Russian agent
  19. Charter school movement reaches the every faction for itself phase
  20. Eventually you get to Elon Musk...
  21. It turns out that the key to bipartisanship is pseudoscience and bone broth
  22. The Enron, charter schools and related-party transactions
  23. A few points to keep in mind when reading any upcoming story about the Hyperloop (first off, it's not a Hyperloop)
  24. A tale of three talks

July 2017

  1. Bring red flags, lots of red flags – Part VI: Campbell's Law et al.
  2. The nuclear moose option
  3. Health care reform can have consequences
  4. The Trump-anchor paradox
  5. I want to point out a Vox article on self-driving cars
  6. Shame he didn't think of this before they did all those artist's renderings of elevated hyperloops
  7. "A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is."
  8. A few points to keep in mind when reading any upcoming story about Elon Musk
  9. The Disruption Fetish
  10. Brooks underplayed the only cultural signifiers that matter -- "All you need is juice and a whole lotta money"
  11. New York Magazine has a problem with pseudoscience*
  12. One more quibble with Goldfarb – – why Netflix and not Redbox?
  13. David Wallace-Wells, autism and bad science
  14. Maybe Brooks' lunch date was just a horrified food critic
  15. We could have just run this post weekly for the past six months
  16. In his first draft, he took her to Red Lobster for chipped beef
  17. "Every fool aspired to be a knave"
  18. Bring red flags, lots of red flags – part V: the Tesla of education companies is also...
  19. Bring red flags, lots of red flags – part IV:If your marketing is good, you don't have to be
  20. Yeah, "self-honouring" sounds much better
  21. Bring red flags, lots of red flags – Part III: burying the lede
  22. Haggling for medical services
  23. Bring red flags, lots of red flags – Part II: Maybe too-good-to-be-true claims might be too good to be true
  24. Copland and Bernstein, plus Cohan rebutted
  25. Bring red flags, lots of red flags – part I: "the Tesla of education companies"

June 2017

  1. Murphy Apartments
  2. An analogy for self-driving cars
  3. A hump-day post from Charles Mackay
  4. Asking me not to overbill you means you hate children
  5. The Goop criteria
  6. The sad part is that New York Magazine would probably write a puff piece for it
  7. An evergreen quote
  8. This 2016 post on journalistic homogeneity has just gotten relevant again
  9. Aspect dominance, competitive landscapes, and other reasons why the Amazon acquisition of whole foods may not be that big of a deal.
  10. The scariest quote you'll see on antitrust this week
  11. An alternate model for the rideshare business
  12. I know you've probably already seen this, but it's too good not to post.
  13. Keeping the Uber thread going
  14. A follow-up to Mark's post
  15. Ponzi Thresholds
  16. Even evil plans require a certain level of competence
  17. Explaining the upsell model with Porky and Daffy
  18. Sometimes, "I forgive you" is evangelical-speak for "____ you!"
  19. A few thoughts on Twin Peaks
  20. Immigration woes
  21. And how the hell do you make an adverb out of "grammar"?
  22. Living in a post-truth world
  23. Liz Spayd was a disaster for the New York Times because she was exactly what the paper wanted

May 2017

  1. War on Science -- part [really big number]
  2. For most politicians, the assault -- strike that -- the creationist dinosaur museum would be a low point
  3. In memory
  4. Keeping Mr. Magoo out of Class Foghorn Leghorn
  5. For most candidates, the assault would be a low point
  6. Let's hope "zombie companies" don't become a zombie idea
  7. The genre is sci-fi. The business model is fantasy.
  8. Bialystock's Paradox and von Hoffman's Dead Rat Problem
  9. Understanding Ailes
  10. The Content Bubble and the Consideration Deficit
  11. $99,744,920
  12. How things got this bad -- part 4,675
  13. Follow me on Twitter (no, I really mean it this time)
  14. Using the outcome as a conditioning variable
  15. Josh Marshall has my favorite ready-to-mix metaphor of the whole sordid affair
  16. Charles Pierce continues to hammer away at the differences between 1974 and 2017
  17. "Why doesn't anybody have enough anymore?"
  18. Information from hacking scandals
  19. Trying to imagine the pitches that get turned down...
  20. Preexisting conditions
  21. I have a small confession...
  22. The Bret Stephens story is about more than climate change denial
  23. Just substitute "dropping out of college" for "buying lottery tickets" and Peter Thiel for the stick figure...
  24. PhD Vouchers
  25. ESPN and the content bubble
  26. No-excuse charters and collateral damage

April 2017

  1. That's right, a Rube Goldberg machine as narrative medium
  2. All of the great ones make sacrifices
  3. Singapore Health Care Costs
  4. More on the possible WGA strike
  5. A duopoly never provides “sufficient competition”
  6. I love this helicopter
  7. "Southwest, where we beat the competition, not the customers."
  8. “Special Ed School Vouchers May Come With Hidden Costs”
  9. The rise of the secular evangelicalism started a long time ago
  10. Trying to get a handle on the plagiarism discussion
  11. Friday video inversions
  12. Bialystock's Paradox as explained by Jonathan Chait
  13. “New Choice!”
  14. They just want to help their children overcome the disadvantages of being rich in 21st Century America
  15. Is allowing a strike in the middle of a bubble ever a good idea?
  16. We haven't talked about the content bubble for a while...
  17. Two terrible things that are absolutely horrifying together
  18. "Left of Boom"
  19. Picking up on the self-driving thread
  20. On the plus side, "red teams" do sound cool

March 2017

  1. It's been too long since we've watched a video of a railgun test
  2. Jon Chait and game theory
  3. US Healthcare reform
  4. Without precedent, beyond analogy
  5. Maybe Paltrow and Tom Brady* could go into business together
  6. Self driving cars
  7. R.I.P. Chuck Berry
  8. Does this solution work at scale? A question we should ask more
  9. "Nobody told me there would be a test!"
  10. It's always reassuring when Josh Marshall agrees with you
  11. How did the press develop a top quartile worldview?
  12. Bialystock's Paradox: Paul Ryan, Supergenius edition
  13. iPhones versus health care
  14. “Raised the IQ of both places”
  15. Picking up immediately where we left off with the war on data
  16. The Washington Press Corps and the "Watergate debt"
  17. Take a deep breath, relax
  18. The War on Data -- Trump-Care edition
  19. Jason Chaffetz and the sewage metaphor
  20. Ayn Rand on native American rights
  21. Wow, it's like almost all of the Trump Threads decided to converge at 3:49 on a Saturday morning -- UPDATED
  22. Bialystock's Paradox: Obamacare edition
  23. There will be safe seats. There are no safe seats.
  24. More on Straussian communication matrices -- in retrospect, it's surprising it took us this long to get to the NYT

February 2017

  1. Pre-reading for tomorrow's post
  2. GOP Game Theory -- things are still different
  3. Sometimes problems are complicated
  4. Of course, watching video on tiny screens has made a comeback...
  5. Canceling then showing up anyway is probably my favorite
  6. Speaking of older posts
  7. Bowling Green is more than just a town in Sweden; it's an excuse for a repost
  8. Brexit and the problem of referendums
  9. Accusation-driven reporting
  10. Quote of the day
  11. Sometimes I post something just so I'll remember it later
  12. "Selling you pain"
  13. When you ignore bullshit artists, the pile does not get smaller
  14. Sometimes analogies are the most interesting when they break down -- UPDATED II
  15. You all get that DeVos is the one with the chainsaw, right?
  16. Let's close out the week with some satiric journalism
  17. The press does something right
  18. "Must read" is one of the internet's most overused phrases, but this time it applies
  19. Though, to be perfectly fair, Tennessee has always been a hotbed of leftist radicals
  20. Build it and they will come. Post it and they will provide you with examples. [updated]
  21. A useful footnote on Medival Iceland
  22. The NYT doesn't just bury the lede; they chop up the body and dissolve it in acid.
  23. When it comes to Straussians, everybody thinks they were the last to make the cut
  24. Tyler Cowen asks an interesting question

January 2017

  1. Media consolidation story of the day
  2. "Where the rules are made up and the points don't matter"
  3. Robot Origami
  4. "Cult of the Savvy " – this is one you need to read
  5. Beyond the hyperbole barrier
  6. We've talked about this before, right?
  7. Pauline Kael on Hollywood Leftism
  8. It's going to be a long weekend
  9. Kevin Drum on a pox on both houses style journalism
  10. Framing the policy
  11. The most troubling part of a troubling story
  12. As we've been saying for a very long time...
  13. "So the last will be first, and the first will be last."
  14. The law of unintended consequences
  15. They lose money on every ride but they make it up in volume
  16. NTA – the first Fox Television Network
  17. Urban Priviledge
  18. Yes, I do plan to keep harping on this
  19. Cracked has some fun with the lottery
  20. "The New Frontier In Stadium Ripoffs"
  21. Blacker is the new black -- more adventures in intellectual property
  22. Pushing privatization too far
  23. You can’t condemn the outcome and condone the process

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