Month: October 2021

It looks like the Democrats' wealth tax has hit a snag:

The billionaires tax, officially unveiled early Wednesday morning, may have died before the ink was dry on its 107-page text. Mr. Manchin, speaking with reporters, said, “I don’t like the connotation that we’re targeting different people.” People, he added, that “contributed to society” and “create a lot of jobs and invest a lot of money and give a lot to philanthropic pursuits.”

Connotation? Hell, the proposal does target different people—with extreme prejudice. There's no connotation necessary.

This all just gets crazier and crazier. Do Manchin and Sinema have any funding source to offer? They seem to be opposed to taxes on the middle class, taxes on the rich, taxes on corporations, taxes on labor, taxes on capital gains, taxes on people who are evading taxes, and any other kind of tax you can think of. Maybe we could just tax Facebook? That should be popular these days.

It's been a while since I've put up a COVID-19 chart, so let's make up for lost time. The good news, I guess is that deaths in the US seem to finally be falling—maybe. The bad news, as usual, is that thanks to our low vaccination rates we're still dying at far higher rates than our peer countries in the rest of the world.

Everybody is crazy these days:

Apparently we're down to only 42% of Republicans who think global warming is happening. Note that the question here isn't even about whether humans are responsible for global warming. It's only about the actual fact of warming itself, something that literally no one disputes. But thanks to Fox News this has become more a sign of partisan loyalty than a simple question of looking at thermometers.

On the flip side, 83% of Democrats think oil companies are responsible for climate change. This is laughable. We built highways in the '50s because we the people wanted them. We built gas guzzling cars because we the people wanted them. Oil companies sold us gasoline because we the people wanted it. And absolutely nothing has changed over the past three decades even as it became absolutely clear to everyone—regardless of what oil companies said—that climate change was a real thing. Even when we all knew it, we still insisted on buying gasoline and driving SUVs and overheating our houses.

We the people are responsible for climate change and we the people have consistently refused to do anything about it if it requires even modest changes in our lifestyle. Placing the blame on oil companies is just a way of trying to evade our own responsibility.

This picture is three years old but I've never gotten around to using it. It was taken at Bennett's ice cream shop at the Farmer's Market in LA. What do you suppose this guy was thinking?

Former Los Angeles city councilman Jose Huizar is currently on trial for engaging in widespread and routine corruption with developers who wanted to build stuff in LA. Huizar doesn't even deny most of it:

In a recent court filing, Huizar’s lawyers argued that many of the steps he is accused of taking to help those businessmen, such as setting up meetings and recommending consultants, were too informal to qualify as the type of “official acts” that meet the definition of bribery under federal law.

....The filing is Huizar’s most detailed defense yet against allegations that he ran a racketeering enterprise out of City Hall to enrich himself and his allies by shaking down developers. If U.S. District Judge John F. Walter grants his request to sharply scale back the 41-count indictment, it would effectively gut the prosecution’s case, leaving such charges as tax evasion and lying to the FBI.

Thanks, Supreme Court! By defining down "corruption," guys like Huizar can make the venerable "but everyone does it" defense and have a chance of making it stick. Nice work.

I'm not sure how the consortium assigns different Facebook topics to different newspapers, but apparently the Washington Post won the topic of how Facebook's news feed algorithm has been tweaked over the years. This is finally something interesting to a numbers nerd like me!

The core of the story is Facebook's decision in 2017 to give users more options for responding to a post than a simple Like or Dislike. The new options were emojis for “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad” and “angry,” and they were weighted much more strongly than Likes. This was all part of Facebook's effort to highly weight posts that generated interactions of any kind, since that produced ongoing conversations that kept people engaged on the site.

Needless to say, it's the "angry" emoji that caused all the trouble. But the story here is pretty interesting. First, there's this:

It was apparent that not all emotional reactions were the same. Anger was the least used of the six emoji reactions at 429 million clicks per week, compared with 63 billion likes and 11 billion “love” reactions, according to a 2020 document.

Yowza! The "angry" emoji is little more than background noise. Still, Facebook engineers recognized a problem:

Facebook’s data scientists found that angry reactions were “much more frequent” on problematic posts: “civic low quality news, civic misinfo, civic toxicity, health misinfo, and health antivax content,” according to a document from 2019. Its research that year showed the angry reaction was “being weaponized” by political figures.

In 2018 Facebook downgraded the importance of the "angry" emoji. In 2019 they tweaked the algorithm to demote content that was receiving an excessive number of angry responses. In 2020, as evidence continued to flood in, the "angry" emoji was downgraded again, along with a couple of other emojis. Finally, a few months ago, it was downgraded to zero. In addition to the political weaponization of the "angry" emoji, Facebook discovered that users didn’t like it when their posts received angry reactions. And in the end, it didn't cost Facebook anything:

When Facebook finally set the weight on the angry reaction to zero, users began to get less misinformation, less “disturbing” content and less “graphic violence,” company data scientists found. As it turned out, after years of advocacy and pushback, there wasn’t a trade-off after all. According to one of the documents, users’ level of activity on Facebook was unaffected.

So what do we take from this? Giving users additional ways to respond to posts isn't a bad thing. Experimenting with the news feed algorithm isn't a bad thing. Trying to promote conversation isn't a bad thing. Responding to the ill effects of an emoji isn't a bad thing. And eventually killing it altogether isn't a bad thing.

But. It seems as if the thing that finally caught Facebook's attention wasn't the effect of the "angry" emoji on disinformation or conspiracy theory swill. It was the fact that users didn't like it and it didn't seem to be working anyway. If that hadn't been the case, would Facebook have done the same thing just for the sake of being a good corporate citizen? It seems unlikely.

POSTSCRIPT: Is Facebook less toxic now that the "angry" emoji isn't used to weight posts? We need research! And this kind of research seems like it could be done even without Facebook's cooperation. Let's get cracking, grad students.

Apparently one of the big issues in the Virginia governor's election is whether Toni Morrison's Beloved should be banned from high school curriculums. This is part of a decade-long campaign by a GOP activist who says her son had night terrors after reading the book in his AP English class:

“Beloved,” told from the perspective of a mother forced to kill her 2-year-old daughter to protect her from being returned to slavery in the years after the Civil War, features scenes of bestiality and rape. It is one of the most frequently assigned books for high school English classes, and is on the American Library Association’s list of the most frequently banned books.

Times sure have changed. It's been many years since I read Beloved, but I remember distinctly that it's chock full of gang rape, sexual abuse, and sexual humiliation—including its famous scene of Black slaves in a chain gang being forced to perform oral sex on their overseers. Even if it were a book with nothing but white characters, it would be a very adult read.

But I guess high school seniors are pretty close to being adults, and there's no guarantee that any book will be 100% trigger free. Complaints about the book from students seem to be pretty rare.

Still, it's easy to see why some older parents would be sort of shocked. This kind of stuff just wasn't assigned back when people our age were impressionable youths. But it's a different world today, even if lots of people continue to resist the idea.

Here's the latest on the $3.5 $1.5 $2.0 BBB bill:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California told Democrats they were on “the verge of something major,” according to two people familiar with her comments, who disclosed the private remarks on condition of anonymity. She called the legislation “transformative, historic and bigger than anything else.”

....The emerging compromise could spend around $1.75 trillion over 10 years, though leading Democrats were trying to nudge Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a key centrist, closer to $2 trillion. Mr. Manchin and other moderates have resisted significant pieces of the plan, including environmental provisions, health care expansions and tax increases designed to pay for the spending.

Well, we can hope, can't we? Let's wait to see the details, though.

Here is climate change policy in a nutshell:

Almost everybody is willing to make promises for 2030 or 2040 or 2050. But almost nobody is willing to make promises for 2022 or 2023 or 2024. I leave the rest as an exercise for the reader.

As part of the "consortium" of media outlets releasing embargoed stories about Facebook today, the Atlantic tells us that if you think Facebook is a problem in the United States, you ain't seen nothing. In the rest of the world it's an even bigger cesspool. In particular, it's a cesspool of Hindu nationalist hatred in India.

I have absolutely no problem believing this. The thing is, even as someone who follows Indian politics only casually, I'm keenly aware that Hindu nationalism has been growing for the last two or three decades. The Hindu nationalist BJP party has been gaining strength since the mid-80s, and anti-Muslim hatred metastasized seven years ago when the BJP's hater-in-chief, Narenda Modi, took office as prime minister. In other words, Indian Facebook is a cesspool because Indian politics was a cesspool first.

The obvious question, then, is whether Facebook is merely reflecting Indian society, or if it's actively inciting even more hatred. But how can you test this? Here's a chart for you:

On a wide variety of measures, Indian society became suddenly less democratic the moment Modi took power. This was in 2014, well before Facebook could have had a significant impact.

Still, has Facebook made things even worse since then? I don't know. I don't even know how to go about trying to figure it out. Maybe some kind of fancy difference-in differences natural experiment or something?

More generally, any communications medium is going to reflect the society it's embedded in. If a third of Americans believe the 2020 election was stolen, that's going to show up in newspapers, TV, books, and social media. Some of those mediums might be contributing to this belief, but most are simply reflecting it. And there's really nothing you can do—or should want to do—to prevent a medium from reflecting the reality of your society.

But which is which? I don't know. I just don't know.