Month: March 2023

The Wall Street Journal reports that internal competition is brutal at Chinese social media companies:

Former ByteDance engineers say ByteDance is one of the most aggressive in executing a strategy known within the industry as “horse racing,” where multiple teams are assigned to build the same product or feature with slight variations. Once it becomes clear which version is performing better, the winning team is given more resources while the other versions are scrapped, these people say.

Not brutal enough! Multiple teams should compete on a yearlong series of product features, with the lowest ranked team at the end of the year being relegated to a lesser product. Meanwhile, the highest ranked team gets—

I don't know. What do winning soccer teams get? Just the thrill of victory? Or big cash bonuses?

Well, cash bonuses should do it. Along with the top team on the lesser product getting a promotion to the show. Now that's product development.

Which state has the most employers who allow employees to work from home at least part of the time? California isn't even close to the top:

The winner is Washington DC! And this is strictly a survey of private businesses, so this has nothing to do with government workers. DC just has a lot of businesses that allow workers to work from home. California ranks 23rd, right at the national average.

By the way, this survey suggests that WFH was way down last year. The percent of establishments with any WFH was 27.5% in 2022, compared to 39.8% in 2021. That's a big drop.

As of September 2022, when the survey was conducted, the number of workplaces with any WFH was up only four percentage points from before the pandemic (27.5% vs. 23.3%). This suggests that WFH is already almost back to its pre-pandemic normal.

This is Hilbert roaming around the backyard after the rain finally stopped. He is on our teak bench looking for a place to scratch an itch, and eventually he decided to stick his nose into the camera and give that a try. It didn't work so well for him, but it worked great for me. Just look at those lovely whiskers.

From the Washington Post:

Florida parents upset by Michelangelo’s ‘David’ force out principal

This story is all over the place. Why? A tiny charter school in Tallahassee fired its principal over some dumb thing. How does this become widespread national news?

For what it's worth, the Post's headline is typical even though the chair of the school's board says that David was only one among many issues involved in the firing. Furthermore, he says, the issue wasn't even with the sculpture itself:

We don’t have any problem showing David. You have to tell the parents ahead of time, and they can decide whether it is appropriate for their child to see it....No one has a problem with David. It’s not about David.

In previous years the school notified parents about their plans for teaching Renaissance art. This year they failed to do that. That's the school's side of the story.

I don't know who's telling the truth, of course. But if they've taught David before with no problem, it seems likely that notification really was the issue.

So here's what we've got: A few parents at a conservative school didn't want their sixth-grade children to see artwork of nudes. They wanted to be notified beforehand so they could pull their kids from that particular lesson. At about the same time, for this lapse and for other reasons, the board fired the school's principal.

In what way is this even much of a local news story, let alone a national one?

Total factor productivity is productivity growth after you've accounted for labor and capital. Roughly speaking, it's the share of productivity growth due to technological improvements:

TFP took a big jump in 2021 but then dropped in 2022. It is now back to its (sort of lousy) recent trendline.

Here's how much banks have borrowed from the Fed this month:

During the Great Recession, this number peaked at around $400 billion in October 2008. That's the highest it's been over the past 40 years. We're nowhere near that, but March 2023 is still in a strong second place.

Here are the results of my brain MRI:

FINDINGS: Study is limited due to motion artifact.
Small punctate T2 high signal changes 5 mm in the deep white matter region right frontal lobe, nonspecific, likely of small vessel ischemic changes. There is no evidence for intraparenchymal hemorrhage, midline shift or mass effect. No evidence for acute ischemia. There is no abnormal enhancing mass. Ventricles, sulci, and cisterns are age-appropriate in size and configuration. Major intracranial flow voids appear intact.

Motion artifact? And I thought I had stayed so still! Damn.

Anyway, everything is good. And for those of you who asked why I was getting a brain MRI, it's part of the routine set of pre-CAR-T workups. I never bothered asking why they needed an MRI in particular, but my guess is that it's related to the possibility of neurologic side effects from the treatment. If this occurs, I suppose they want the MRI as a baseline for comparison.

How satisfied are trans people with their transition? Here's part of an answer from a large-scale Washington Post poll of trans people:

Unfortunately, the poll doesn't dig down on this question. Of the trans people who are less satisfied, is this because they think they made a bad choice or because they didn't realize how much crap they'd have to put up with? It's a big difference.

I would really like to see Donald Trump indicted over his efforts to overturn the election results in Georgia. The problem is that it would be a tough case since Trump was savvy enough to avoid saying outright, "Hey, just invent the extra votes I need." Still, everyone knows that's exactly what he meant, and it's a serious crime. Trump deserves to go to prison for that.

Ditto for the classified documents case. The problem is not that Trump took the documents when he left office. That might have been a mistake, after all. The problem is that even when he knew he had classified documents in his possession and he knew that the government wanted them back, he refused to return them. That's why the FBI had to get a warrant to search Mar-a-Lago. Trump deserves to go to trial for that too.¹

But you go to war with the charges you have, not with the charges you wish you had. And right now, the charges we have are related to payoffs Trump made to a porn star. Here's my understanding of the case:

• In 2006 Trump (allegedly) had an affair with Stormy Daniels. This is not illegal.
• Daniels threatened to tell her story while Trump was running for president in 2016. This is not illegal. (Not for Trump, anyway.)
• Trump agreed to pay her off. This is not illegal.
• But Trump wanted to keep it a secret, so he asked Michael Cohen to handle the payoff money. Trump would then reimburse Cohen. This is not illegal.
• Trump reimbursed Cohen via payments from the Trump Organization. If this were a public company, that would be illegal. But it's not, so apparently it isn't.
• However, in order to maintain the secrecy, the payments to Cohen were labeled "legal expenses."

And that's illegal. Moreover, you can argue that the payoff was a campaign expense that Trump didn't report. That would be illegal too.

So the case against Trump is this: In order to keep his payoff of a blackmailer secret, he had it labeled as a legal expense.

This strikes me as pretty trivial, and I have my doubts that a jury would convict Trump if it goes to trial. We should probably save our legal firepower for something more serious.

And like it or not, public opinion matters too. One of the mistakes that Republicans made in their impeachment jihad against Bill Clinton was misjudging public opinion. To them, Clinton lied under oath, and a lie is a lie. It was an open and shut case.

But the public never really agreed. To them, it mattered what the lie was about. In Clinton's case, he was lying about having an affair with a White House aide. To most people, this seemed (a) not all that big a deal, (b) completely unrelated to his fitness as president, and (c) something that of course he lied about. Anybody would. Come on.

Democrats may be making the same mistake here. To us, Trump falsified his business records, and a lie is a lie. It's an open and shut case.

But the public, as usual, will care what the lie was about. They're likely to think it's (a) not all that big a deal, (b) completely unrelated to his fitness as president, and (c) something that of course he lied about. He was being blackmailed! Come on.

So tread carefully here.

POSTSCRIPT: The bizarre thing is that Trump did this in the first place. The traditional way of making payoffs like this is with a suitcase full of cash. If Trump had just done that in the first place he wouldn't be in any trouble.

¹But I'm not sure what the sentence should be if he's convicted.

This is sunset over the Sheephole Mountains, very near to the spot in the desert where I do my astrophotography. It's a Bortle 2 area, which means it's very nearly the darkest possible area for stargazing. That compares to Bortle 8-9 in my backyard.

Bortle 1 is the darkest sky possible. Death Valley is Bortle 1. Some of Northern California around Lassen and Shasta is Bortle 1. Most of Nevada away from I15 and I80 is Bortle 1.