Hasn't Got the Juice - The Economy, Energy, Plagiarism, and Elon
The Economy
We have talked about America's obsession with vibes-based economic policy. We had a year of interest rate hikes and talk of sending the country into a manufactured recession because 'inflation', which was bad in ways only economists seemed to understand.
Now that we're nearing the climax of our country's perpetual election cycle machine, polls citing a general dissatisfaction with the economy are being used by the political press to manufacture the horse race their paychecks rely upon.
The data, however, say otherwise:
The hard data is telling a story of a strong recovery: Frontline workers and lower-income households have been riding a turbocharged job market that has boosted GDP growth.
Household wealth is the highest its ever been. The government dumping trillions into the economy has been helpful to the poor, but it's been a windfall for the well-off.
But the 'soft data' (aka polling) indicates Americans think the economy stinks. Why?
It may come down to the people inclined to respond to polls. The recent recovery wasn't visibly good for the managerial class:
Nonmanagerial workers saw their wages surge during the pandemic, jumping by 6% between February 2020 and its peak in April 2020. Inflation ate away at some of those gains, but the average nonmanager now earns 3.4% more an hour than they did at the end of 2019, even when accounting for inflation.
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It's a very different story for managers. While they also saw their real wages surge during the pandemic's acute phase, inflation-adjusted average hourly earnings sank for 25 straight months — from January 2021 to January 2023 — and are now down by more than 7% compared with the end of 2019.
To which you might say: don't managers earn a lot more to begin with? Yes! A whopping 83%, as it turns out. That doesn't prevent them from complaining about a lack of raises, though.
It's also worth examining who is being hit hardest by inflation, irrespective of their income:
Which, again, does not mean the top 60% of households have it bad. It just means they aren't enjoying the same rapid accumulation of wealth they're used to. And they're not happy!
What does this have to do with consumer confidence and economic sentiment polls? Well, you'll never guess who is more likely to answer said polls:
The [Census Bureau's] ASEC data uses a very large sample to provide the best possible insight into households' economic well-being, with more than 75,000 households participating. Nonresponders skewed lower income, with the average responder earning about $5,000 more than nonresponders in 2020 and 2021. We can't know for certain what other kinds of nonresponse bias might be lurking out there, but we know concretely that even very large, comprehensive samples undercount lower-income people.
When the government tested, it found that higher-income people were more likely to respond to its polls, which makes sense. Older people, people who aren't working multiple jobs or stressed about economic insecurity do seem like the types who'd spend thirty minutes on the phone complaining to a stranger from the government.
So, what we're left with is a dissatisfied managerial class who, though they far out-earn their employees, feel mildly squeezed by a combination of increased prices on things they buy and animosity towards ever-rising wages for the working stiffs.
Those same managers are more likely to talk to pollsters and - critically - the press, many of whom inhabit the same economic class. Stories about inflation, consumer confidence, and white collar layoffs dominate the news cycle, giving the impression things are worse than they actually are, because they're worse for the people writing and being written about:
None of this is to say that things are good for the middle and lower income classes, or that they should have any reason to be happy about what they've received and not ask for a lot more. But it's important to point out that the people driving the 'economy bad' news cycle are doing just fine, and are often using their own dissatisfaction as an excuse to tamp down wages for the people who've only just barely got a leg up thanks to the last few years of unprecedented economic prosperity.
Energy
The US, like many developed countries, has given lip service to spending a lot of money modernizing the electrical grid to deliver more power for our cars, clean homes, etc. Some of this money is supposed to go to green energy, though it's being blocked by conservatives and NIMBYs at a local level.
So what about the grid itself, and the various energy sources currently hooked into it? Well, turns out that in many places, we've got nowhere near the amount of supply that will be required in just the next few years:
Northern Virginia needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to serve all the new data centers planned and under construction. Texas, where electricity shortages are already routine on hot summer days, faces the same dilemma.
Much of the shortfall will occur not because everyone has rushed to buy electric cars and heat pumps, but because we've been building too many datacenters without adding additional capacity.
And now, the AI hype bubble has led to a more rapid expansion of computing power. While tech firms chase paper returns, local utilities are struggling to keep up.
The way things have worked for awhile now is that big tech firms and datacenter companies identify locations where they want to build, and local and state officials bribe them with tax breaks and cheap land to do so, assuming they'll receive some sort of long-term financial benefit, or jobs, or whatever. Because datacenters are essentially concrete fortresses full of computers and HVAC units, they don't require many people to operate, the benefits never materialize, and the firms go shopping for new targets.
The problem is that state utilities are then expected to provide all that energy while also being told they need to cut back on fossil fuel plants to hit green targets. And, listen, this is the last place you will find anyone defending energy utility monopolies, but the problem is real and states will soon be faced with a dilemma - cut power to datacenters, or jack rates up on actual residents.
The tech firms are doing little to help fix the problem they've created. Their big-brained solution is, in fact, to deploy their catastrophically energy intensive AI models to...figure out how to build more power plants:
Microsoft and Google are among the firms hoping that energy-intensive industrial operations can ultimately be powered by small nuclear plants on-site, with Microsoft even putting AI to work trying to streamline the burdensome process of getting plants approved.
Also, they've bought into the ridiculous Altman wishcasting to use AI to solve fusion because sure, why not:
Microsoft has also inked a deal to buy power from a company trying to develop zero-emissions fusion power. But going off the grid brings its own big regulatory and land acquisition challenges. The type of nuclear plants envisioned, for example, are not yet even operational in the United States. Fusion power does not yet exist.
I, too, will sell Microsoft power from my experimental fusion plant, the moment it comes online.
Things have become so gridlocked thanks to partisan federalism that we aren't even running transmission lines for our existing energy sources:
The amount of new transmission line installed in the United States has dropped sharply since 2013, when 4,000 miles were added. Now, the nation struggles to bring online even 1,000 new miles a year. The slowdown has real consequences not just for companies but for the climate. A group of scientists led by Princeton University professor Jesse Jenkins warned in a report that by 2030 the United States risks losing out on 80 percent of the potential emission reductions from President Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, if the pace of transmission construction does not pick up dramatically now.
So we passed the IRA, with its lofty climate goals, but because we can't get our shit together to actually build anything to support all the energy we're definitely going to need, that'll be a waste and we'll end up doing...what? Burning more coal so tech firms can shovel cash into AI, a technology less popular than our presidential candidates? Or so Bitcoin miners can be paid not to create new magic beans?
When it comes to energy, drastic steps need to be taken at a federal level - why do we need 50+ different state-run utilities again? - or we're going to see a cascading series of failures at the local level. There simply isn't and won't be enough electricity to go around, sooner than later.
Plagiarism
Sometimes, an artist will make an argument that even though a thing they created looks an awful lot like another thing, it was merely inspired by and not copied. Or, two people can have very similar ideas and interpret them similarly. Art is, by nature, an interpretive pursuit. Artists often walk in the footsteps of their predecessors, etc.
What if, instead of any of that, you simply stole someone else's script, and made a movie that got nominated for (and won) Oscars? It sure seems like that may have happened in the case of The Holdovers:
[Simon] Stephenson wrote, “the evidence the holdovers screenplay has been plagiarised line-by-line from frisco is genuinely overwhelming – anybody who looks at even the briefest sample pretty much invariably uses the word ‘brazen.’”
Stephenson, an accomplished writer with multiple movie credits, wrote a screenplay called Frisco where a middle-aged children's doctor get stuck caring for a 15-year-old patient. In 2013, the script was so well-regarded it made the Black List, a survey Hollywood agents use to rank quality unproduced screenplays and find new projects.
Alexander Payne, director of The Holdovers, had seen the Frisco script at least twice, according to email evidence:
Four months later [in 2013], UTA’s Geoff Morley seemed to indicate that Payne had read “Frisco,” writing: “I spoke to Alexander Payne’s exec Jim Burke directly a while back and he said that Payne did like it but was not interested in prod or directing it.”
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On Dec. 6, 2019, Woodward wrote to Stephenson and Seghatchian: “Sorry to say that Alexander has now read but says it is not quite what he is looking for.
So Payne had twice considered Frisco and passed on it. Then, in 2019, Payne called David Hemingson - an unremarkable TV writer with no film credits to his name - and they 'wrote' The Holdovers. Payne has since given interviews claiming he got the 'premise' from an old movie, and also that Hemingson had come up with a similar idea, but that didn't explain why the film was valued so highly and the no-name writer was given such prominent billing:
Ultimately, “The Holdovers” was independently financed on a $13 million budget. It was a negative pickup for Focus, which bought “The Holdovers” for $31 million at the Toronto Film Festival, marking the biggest worldwide rights deal ever at that market. Unusually, Hemingson received a full producing credit on “The Holdovers,” a rarity for a screenwriter, let alone a first-timer.
Anyhow, Holdovers did win an Oscar for the excellent performance turned in by Da'Vine Joy Randolph, but it did not win a screenplay Oscar, which is either fortunate or unfortunate for the actual author. What does seem likely is that Stephenson is going to get an awful lot of money one way or another. Using art as inspiration is usually okay - stealing scripts word for word to win Oscars definitely is not!
Elon
We talk a lot around here about America's most medicated fascist technocrat, but did you know he's actually a major philanthropist too?
Hahaha, obviously I am kidding, but Musk does have one of the largest charitable organizations in the country with which he does essentially no actual charity:
Mr. Musk’s philanthropy has been haphazard and largely self-serving — making him eligible for enormous tax breaks and helping his businesses.
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Mr. Musk has not hired any staff for his foundation, tax filings show. Its billions are handled by a board that consists of himself and two volunteers, one of whom reports putting in so little time that it averages out to six minutes per week.
Huh! Imagine that. What the charity has been good for is allowing Elon to write off more than $2 billion in taxes when he had to cash out shares to buy Twitter.
Thing is, there are actually laws about how much a charity is supposed to give out each year based on its holdings, which Musk is obviously flagrantly violating:
In 2022, the last year for which records are available, they gave away $160 million, which was $234 million less than the law required — the fourth-largest shortfall of any foundation in the country.
I mean I am also now interested in the three charitable foundations somehow more stingy than Musk, but whatever. Half the donations from Musk's charity go to friends and businesses associated with himself, which is no surprise. He's also prone to making wild promises on Twitter and not following through:
Musk did donate a little over a million dollars to Flint, but when the city presented a detailed proposal asking for more, Musk found a way to be comically insulting:
Tesla sent a corporate development executive, who offered rides around the city hall parking lot in a company vehicle...
Anyhow, Musk is currently operating a multibillion-dollar fake charity that he uses for tax breaks and good PR, while mostly funding projects that benefit him directly. The worst the IRS can do, apparently, is fine him 30% of the yearly donation shortfall, which would take a long time to reach the $2 billion in taxes he avoided by moving bunch of Tesla stock to this slush fund.
Short Cons
CNN - "A longtime Mar-a-Lago employee who is a central witness in the investigation into former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents is now speaking publicly because he believes that voters should hear the truth about his former boss and the case before the November election."
Defector - "However neatly G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller might seem to fit the role of Deadspin's killer, he's not the arch-villain in this story. He's a symptom of what killed the site, which first had to be weakened enough that a shit-eating parasite like him could be in position to finish it off."
ProPublica - "Across New York City, hundreds of vulnerable people have been entrusted to New York Guardianship Services, one of roughly a dozen companies the courts rely on to care for “the unbefriended,” those without family or friends to help them."
Gothamist - "The city paid out $114.5 million in police misconduct lawsuits last year — nearly double what it paid in 2020, according to an analysis by the Legal Aid Society. Such lawsuits have cost taxpayers more than half a billion dollars since 2018, the analysis showed."
Polygon -"Many restaurant chains have tested AI-assisted drive-thru lanes, but the recent struggles of one AI company illustrate the potential shortcomings of this model."
CNN - "Car insurance rates are up almost 21% for the 12 months ended in February, according to new Consumer Price Index data released Tuesday. The last time car insurance rates rose that much on an annual basis was 1976, not counting January, which saw the same annual rate increases."
WIRED - "“IT’S NOT HARD,” reads one of the top results’ thumbnail images, while the title of another promises it is possible to generate a video with an original kids song “In Under 20 Minutes!” The virality fueled riches claimed to be on offer can be eye-popping. “$1.2 Million With AI Generated Videos for Kids?” one title suggests, while another proclaims “$50,000 a MONTH!”"
404 Media - "The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a legal complaint against two companies based in Cyprus on Wednesday that it claims are behind a wave of malicious pop-ups that trick people into downloading a fake piece of antivirus software that generated tens of millions of dollars for its operators, according to court records."
WaPo - "Recipes generated by artificial intelligence are increasingly popping up — and following, or trying to follow, them might lead to unexpected results, and not necessarily in a good way."
The Guardian - "A federal judge in Texas has granted a temporary order blocking the new requirements that would ascertain the energy use of the crypto miners, stating that the industry had shown it would suffer “irreparable injury” if it was made to comply."