Would you like to take your mind off Twitter and our worries about how they're destroying free speech in America? Then read about India instead, and its last big independent television station:
Some Indian observers say that the impending hostile takeover by Gautam Adani, the third richest man in the world, of what in 1998 became India’s first 24-hour news channel could signal the death knell of independent voices in India’s mainstream media outlets. NDTV, they say, has been the only remaining Indian broadcast network that continues to question Modi’s Hindu nationalist agenda. The other nearly 20 English or Hindi news channels across India, they assert, have taken to brazenly touting the party line.
....The future of NDTV, founded by Dr. Prannoy Roy and his wife, Radhika Roy, came into play in August when Adani covertly acquired a third-party company that had the largest stake in the network. The Roys tried to fight him off, but apparently in vain. As of last week, Adani owned a 29% stake and has an open offer on another 26%. As a result, the Roys have resigned as directors.
Now that's a threat to free speech:
Adani and Modi both hail from the western state of Gujarat and have had a lengthy relationship. When Modi became prime minister in 2014, Adani’s net worth was $7 billion. Today, it is $147 billion, making him India’s richest man.
In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Adani addressed concerns that his taking over NDTV could end its independence. “Independence means if the government has done something wrong, you say it’s wrong,” Adani said. “But at the same time, you should have the courage when the government is doing the right thing every day. You have to also say that.”
All things considered, I wonder how long India will continue to be the world's largest democracy.
A couple of days ago Jonathan Turley wrote in the New York Post about the big ol' Twitter scandal. Here's a smattering of language from his column:
infamous censorship program . . . silence critics . . . hoax . . . biased and even criminal conduct . . . back channel . . . influence peddling, nepotism, and other forms of corruption . . . censor for the Biden campaign . . . major scandal . . . corrupt selling of access . . . “made man” . . . company’s chief censor . . . open political bias . . . bury a story.
Whew. Like most conservatives, Turley simply assumes that the past four years have been ones of epic Democratic corruption and then proceeds from there. It's a whole private universe for right-wing lunatics.
Even more bizarrely, the supposed point of the column was the revelation that a guy named James A. Baker had emerged as the ringleader of all things corrupt. Note that this is not James A. Baker, the famous former secretary of state, but James A. Baker, the former general counsel for the FBI through 2017 and then deputy general counsel for Twitter. Baker has a pretty solid reputation in DC, but he worked at the FBI during the Trump administration and was therefore around during the Russia probe and everything else the MAGAnauts fear and loathe about the FBI.
Even at that, he didn't really do anything. He passed legal judgment on starting the Russia probe. He agreed to meet with friend-of-Hillary Michael Sussman to review some important information Sussman said he had—and then passed it on for review. He was replaced when Christopher Wray took over and wanted to bring in his own team. He got caught up in some weird and unrelated leak investigation that went nowhere. Donald Trump once wrote a nasty tweet about him. And then he left the FBI, eventually landing at Twitter, where he apparently weighed in once on the laptop controversy, saying:
I support the conclusion that we need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked. At this stage, however, it is reasonable for us to assume that they may have been and that caution is warranted. There are some facts that indicate that the materials may have been hacked, while there are others indicating that the computer was either abandoned and/or the owner consented to allow the repair shop to access it for at least some purposes. We simply need more information.
I think you could fairly accuse Baker of being completely unhelpful here, but you sure can't claim he was being a partisan hack. And for what it's worth, there was reason to think the Post story might have been based on hacked material. It turned out not to be true, but at the time there was no way to know that.
Anyway, this is how the right-wingers see things. They live in a world based on the axioms of Russiagate, Biden family corruption, the FBI's malfeasance, and Twitter's obeisance to the Democratic Party. With that as foundation, it's hardly difficult to construct a conspiracy based on James Baker mysteriously popping up everywhere as a puppetmaster for liberal interests.
Annie Lowrey has a fascinating short piece in the Atlantic that I missed when it first appeared last month. The subject is our national housing shortage, which various experts tell her is around 4-7 million homes. But then she immediately makes a sensible comment:
None of the estimates capture what I’ve come to think of as the affordability gap: the difference between the housing we have and the housing we would need in order to ensure that working-class people could once again live in our big coastal cities for a reasonable cost. Freddie Mac does not purport that building 3.8 million units would make New York accessible to big middle-class families and end homelessness in San Francisco. The National Association of Realtors is not contemplating whether janitors can walk to work in Boston.
This is the real question Lowrey wants to answer, but the answers aren't there:
No one can say just what it would take to make Brooklyn affordable for workers who don’t have a college degree, render San Francisco accessible to families with kids and elderly couples on fixed incomes, or allow extended-family members in Boston to buy apartments within a few blocks of one another. .
No one can say, but it turns out that housing experts are pessimistic:
As a general point, “it’s really hard to imagine the most expensive cities becoming significantly cheaper,” Schuetz told me. For one thing, creating new units would cause an increase in household formation: Young workers could opt for studios rather than shared apartments; multigenerational households could break apart. For another thing, high-income, high-cost cities have so much pent-up demand that any one city would have trouble becoming much more affordable on its own. If San Francisco built thousands of units, new parents would stay in the city rather than decamp for the East Bay. Newcomers would move in from around the region and across the world.
But what would happen if, as housing activists would like, our most crowded cities set aside most of their building restrictions and just let the free market adjust to whatever number of people wanted to move there? The numbers are staggering:
San Francisco would have an employed population 510 percent bigger than it does today—implying an overall population of something like 4 million, rather than 815,000, with 2 million housing units instead of 400,000. The Bay Area as a whole would be five times its current size, the economists estimated. The average city would lose 80 percent of its population. And New York would be a startling eight times bigger. Some back-of-the-envelope math (mine, not theirs) suggests that the United States would have—deep breath here—perhaps 75 million more housing units in its productive cities than it currently has.
I don't know that I believe these numbers, but they certainly provide a flavor of what it would take to accommodate everyone who wanted to live in New York or San Francisco. And it's obviously not within light years of being realistic.
I very much doubt this is a conclusion that Lowrey wanted to reach, but there are two main takeaways from all this:
A large but not ridiculous amount of new construction would probably have only a very small effect on prices.
If we lifted building restrictions enough to allow people to afford to live where they want, it implies a level of new construction that's wildly beyond plausibility.
None of this means we don't need to build more housing, especially in California, which accounts for the lion's share of the US shortage. But is there anything we can do to make big, desirable cities genuinely affordable? Probably not.
The Sun King, as depicted on the wrought iron fences surrounding the palace of Versailles. It all makes sense to me except for the hand in the upper right. What is that supposed to symbolize?
UPDATE: It's the hand of justice, apparently. Okey doke.
According to a 2022 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “on average, the number of ongoing drug shortages has been increasing and are lasting longer.” The root cause of that problem, per a report from the Food and Drug Administration, is the economics of the pharmaceutical market itself.
No, that's not what the report says. The NASEM report says that a 2018 FDA report says that. Specifically, the FDA report says that "the number of ongoing drug shortages has recently been increasing after declining from a peak in 2011, and drug shortages have been lasting longer."
But wait. This only goes through 2018 because that's when the FDA report was written. What does it look like now?
It turns out that 2018 was a fluke. As of 2022, new drug shortages are at their lowest point in 15 years.
Why do I care? After all, the NASEM report is mostly about how to improve our pharmaceutical supply chains, and that's a good idea regardless of the precise number of drugs that happen to be in short supply. I care because I'm weary of outrage journalism. The Vox piece is hardly up there with Fox News, but it does insist on painting a dire picture of drug shortages that's entirely belied by the facts.
And what's the point? To scare people? To provide a hook for the piece? Or is it just a lazy repetition of something that "everyone knows"? Whatever it is, just knock it off.
It's popular these days to declare that freedom of speech is in grave trouble. But is that so? Do you feel any restrictions on what you can say in public?
I confess that I'm not very bent out of shape about college kids deplatforming speakers they don't like. Or about schoolteachers who are required to teach a particular curriculum. Or a social media service that needs to remove white supremacists or child porn if they want to keep their advertisers happy. Or some local library that decides to remove Heather Has Two Mommies.
All of these are things that ought to be watched, as well as other particular violations of free speech that crop up here and there. Overall, though, I'd like to make the case for judging the state of free speech two ways. The first is the simple think tank approach:
Both of these rely on surveys that ask people in different countries for their views on various free speech issues. Other think tanks commission experts to take a look at countries around the world and compare both their de facto and de jure approaches to free speech. Either way, pretty much every ranking that comes out of a think tank places the US at the top of the world or very close to it.
Generally speaking, these results are appalling. Between 10-50% of Americans think that people with particular beliefs ought to be prohibited from speaking in public. Back in 1972, all of these were bunched together, as if Americans were simply opposed to First Amendment rights for anyone who was vaguely controversial. Today, the lines have all split apart, and disapproval rates are quite different for different groups. Almost no one wants to ban gay people from speaking, while more than half the country would ban a racist from speaking.
If I squint, I think I see a vague downward trend in these lines. But only barely. A lot of people think it's perfectly OK to stop people from speaking if they hold objectionable views.
The good news, such as it is, is that there's nothing new here. Lots of Americans are fickle toward the First Amendment, but they always have been. Compared to this, Twitter's problems with content moderation strike me as fairly trivial.
A few days ago the OpenAI Foundation released ChatGPT, a version of their AI language engine that's been trained to have natural conversations with people. It has stunned nearly everyone who's used it:
Still blows my mind there’s zero mainstream coverage of the only thing everyone in tech is talking about
It’s like we just split the atom and everyone is talking about football
High marks! It could have added something about wage-price spirals, but it was probably best not to. So high marks for judgment too.
(My original version of this question was about inflation today, but ChatGPT informed me that it was not connected to the internet and its knowledge cutoff is 2021.)
ChatGPT is capable of far more than my little question suggests, and does a creditable job of carrying on a conversation. If you try this, you'll probably be impressed but left thinking that it's not really all that bright. And you're right:
It's best not to take this too seriously, but an IQ of 83—or anything in the vicinity—is spectacular. Why? Because it means that language models with an IQ of 100 or 150 aren't far away. On that note, it's worth reading the whole thread to see what ChatGPT's shortfalls are. They may seem fairly humorous at first, but if you read them in the context of an IQ of 83, they're suddenly far more understandable.
The progress of large language models is due to advances in both software and hardware. In particular, the GPU revolution has kept hardware processing power on an upward path long after the naive version of Moore's Law ran out of steam.
None of this means that artificial intelligence is here. It's not. Nor does it mean that millions of people are going to lose their jobs in the immediate future. But AI progress continues to be stunning, and the greatest progress is likely to be in tasks that are purely cognitive and don't require much, if any, interaction with the physical world—which turns out to be quite difficult.
But all of us wordslingers? We'd better watch out.
I have increasingly been turning to wages as a measure of underlying inflation. That’s not because I think greedy workers are driving inflation — they clearly aren’t. But wage growth is probably a pretty good indicator of how hot or cold the overall economy is running (and you can’t have a wage-price spiral without spiraling wages).
Unfortunately, this morning’s employment report was bad news on that front. Until this morning, it looked as if wages were slowing, but some of the old data have been revised up and the latest number was high. So a big decline in inflation may be a way off.
I don't really get this. Here is the Employment Cost Index through September:
Since the start of 2021 it's been rising less than the rate of inflation. I don't understand how overall compensation that's rising significantly less than inflation can indicate an overheated economy.
Anecdotally, it does seem like I've seen more and more newspaper reports about wage contracts with eye-popping raises. There's no question that both employers and workers are well aware that inflation is eroding workers' earnings and they need to make up for it. Nonetheless, when you do the arithmetic it always turns out that the increases, though high in nominal terms, are still lower than inflation—or perhaps right at it. It's not like the 1970s, when union contracts routinely included COLA baselines plus increased pay above that.
Of course, wages only accelerate if the labor market is tight, and I think it's an open question whether employment is even rising at the moment:
The other thing I don't understand is that Krugman, like everyone else, never seems to talk about lags. Surely it's worth mentioning that the numbers today, even if you'd like them to be even lower, are (a) declining, and (b) declining entirely on their own. The Fed's interest rate hikes haven't yet started to play a role.
Oh, and while we're at it, I'd still like to know what everyone thinks the bedrock, underlying cause of inflation is. I'm not saying there isn't one. I just want to know what it is.
Tyler Cowen linked today to a Substack post that he teased with the question, "Why are there so many right-wing scams?" The comments are a hoot all by themselves, but naturally I got suckered into clicking the link. I was amused to find that the essay starts off with an attack on the lead-crime hypothesis:
Liberals today blame lead poisoning. Of course they do, since the only alternative theories for what happened imply that liberals are wrong with regards to everything they believe about the causes of social problems.
....Regardless of whether liberals are correct, we eventually removed lead from the atmosphere, and yet never went back to the low rates of divorce, illegitimacy, drug use, and crime that we saw before the Great Society and the left-wing takeover of institutions.
There's a danger to making offhand comments without checking first. Here is divorce:
I didn't bother looking up the numbers for drug use since I already know they aren't correlated. Drug use is kind of weird and faddish, and it hardly seems to be correlated with much of anything. But I could have added, say, high school dropout rates or IQ scores if you wanted a few more things to blame on lead.
And while it may be true that things haven't literally returned to their 1950s levels—though measurements from 70 years ago are iffy—they've come pretty close. It's this very fact—that antisocial behaviors went up but then went down—that makes the lead hypothesis so powerful. After all, it's not as if the left-wing takeover of institutions has abated, has it? Ditto for racism, poverty, breakdown of the family, moral decay, and other favorite explanations of crime from both liberals and conservatives.
As for why right-wing scams are so common, the answer appears to be that Republicans have gotten too much like Black people. Or something. That remained a little unclear to me.
If you read the news last night, it looked pretty ordinary. An election in Georgia. War in Ukraine. College football playoffs producing joy and tears.
But if you were on Twitter you would hardly know any of that stuff was happening. Instead, the conversation was overwhelmingly about the actions of Twitter itself during a 24-hour period at the tail end of the 2020 presidential campaign. We'll get to that in a moment, but first, here's my best crack at a super-short bit of background.
Hunter Biden, Joe's son, has led a precarious life. He did lots of drugs. He traded on his name. He got himself involved in lots of dubious enterprises with lots of dubious partners. At one point he held a sketchy but well-paid board position with Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company.
But this was not the wartime Ukraine of today, led by the valiant Volodymyr Zelensky and supported by all right-thinking foes of Vladimir Putin. It was the shockingly corrupt Ukraine that existed in the wake of, first, the Orange Revolution, and then the Maidan Uprising. It is the Ukraine that formed the background of Donald Trump's first impeachment.
At the time our story starts properly (2015-16) the official position of the Obama administration was to pressure Ukraine to rein in its endemic corruption, and in particular to fire chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin. Obama made Joe Biden, then vice president, the point man for this, a job that Biden took on with his usual gusto. Eventually Shokin was fired and the US agreed to release aid funding.
Republicans then invented a story about this: namely that the real reason Joe Biden wanted Shokin fired was because Shokin was investigating Burisma and was likely to find some dirt on Hunter. The reality, unsurprisingly, was just the opposite: Shokin wasn't investigating Burisma at the time and posed no danger to Hunter. However, the new prosecutor did investigate Burisma, although he says he never found anything about Hunter. This all happened during the Trump administration, when Joe Biden was entirely out of power.
The story turned out to be bizarre in several ways. First, the lead reporter who worked on it refused to allow his byline to be used. He just didn't feel the story was credible. Second, the story was all about Hunter Biden and was based on a mysterious hard drive that was allegedly full of his emails.
But where did the hard drive come from? The Post explained that an unknown customer had dropped off a broken laptop for repair at a shop in Delaware. It was never picked up and apparently the customer never even left his name so the shop owner could contact him. Very peculiar. Eventually, for reasons that are unclear, the shop owner gave the laptop to the FBI, but first he made a copy of the hard drive, which—again, for unclear reasons—he turned over to Giuliani's lawyer.
This is . . . a very sketchy story at best. But that's the story they had, so that's the story the Post published. The rest of the media remained reluctant to publish anything because they couldn't verify the whole story no matter how hard they tried. The problem was that Giuliani resolutely refused to turn over a copy of the hard drive, which made it impossible to forensically analyze it, and without that there was nothing to go on. Maybe it was a fake. Maybe it was a Russian plant. In any case, why on earth would the guy who wants the story publicized refuse to make the hard drive available to reporters?
Federal law mandates that all news stories about Hunter Biden be accompanied by an embarrassing photo of him looking vaguely strung out.
Finally! We're now up to the present day and the eye of Sauron turns away from Hunter Biden and squarely onto Twitter, which was recently acquired by tycoon/showman Elon Musk. And Musk's supporters wanted answers. Why did Twitter ban links to the Post story? Were they in the tank for Hunter Biden? Currying favor with the Joe Biden campaign? Trying to do anything they could to hurt Donald Trump?
So Musk announced that, by God, he was going to get to the bottom of the whole sordid affair. He hired Matt Taibbi, a muckraking but hard-to-describe journalist, to investigate and gave him access to all of Twitter's internal emails and chat logs from around the time the decision was made. Taibbi dived in, and on Friday published his findings in the form of a long tweet thread.
So what bombshells did Taibbi expose during his tweet-by-tweet unveiling on Friday afternoon? Would you believe me if I said none?
Probably not, so let's go through what Taibbi found:
People sometimes ask Twitter to remove tweets.
In particular, presidential campaigns do this.
In particular particular, Joe Biden's campaign periodically asked Twitter to remove some tweets. Taibbi has a screen shot of one of the emails they sent.
In that case, the tweets turned out to be nude pictures of Hunter Biden. Twitter agreed to remove them because they were basically revenge porn, which Twitter doesn't allow.
When the Post story came out, Twitter execs engaged in a fairly normal, low-key conversation about what they should do. For various and obvious reasons, they thought the whole thing looked like a ratfuck and was quite possibly based on hacked material, which violated their rules.
So they banned links to the Post story. Then they spent the next day tying themselves in knots over whether they had done the right thing. Within 24 hours they changed their mind and rescinded the ban.
Neither the FBI nor the Biden campaign was involved in any of this.
Long story short, it turned out the material wasn't hacked and didn't violate Twitter's policies. The Twitter execs never displayed any kind of partisan bias here, but they did show some poor judgment. And even that's pretty understandable given the plain and obviously fishy nature of the Post story.
On a partisan note, I'll add that this whole thing was obviously an attempt to recreate the Great Comey Letter scandal of 2016, when a last minute bombshell about Hillary Clinton's emails sank her chances to beat Donald Trump. The Trumpies desperately wanted to replicate that stunning, last-minute victory, something that Rudy Giuliani all but admitted on national TV. The national press was keenly aware of all this, which makes it hardly surprising that they were reluctant to give the story much oxygen.
And where are we with the Hunter laptop story today? Same as always, I'd say. Most of the juicy details—drug use, dick pics, money problems, 10% for the "big guy," etc.—have been public for a long time. Hunter has been under investigation for tax problems for a few years, and charges might drop soon. But even if they do, there's simply never been anything implicating Joe Biden in any of it.
