BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-05-06 Sa
GMs plans for in-automobile content as a service; banks hit the wall; once again, full self-driving is near; I agree with Josh Marshall that there is unlikely to be any debt-ceiling negotiation...
ONE VIDEO: On GM’s “Entry” into Software Content Delivery:
Jim Farley & Joanna Stern: Ford CEO on Apple, Google, & EVs…
ONE IMAGE: Banks Hitting þe Wall:
MUST-READ: Full Self-Driving Is Near Once Again!
I confess that in the past whenever I have concluded that someone is a swivel-eyed loon—or is cosplaying a swivel-eyed loon as a grift: it is hard to tell—I have been right. Not, mind you, that they have wound up poor and ignored, or even despised. Often the process of “cooling out the marks” works. Many times. And then there are the times when pump-and-dump works and they get away with the money without bothering to cool out the marks.
Drew Dickson talking his book at the FT:
Drew Dickson: The trouble with making Tesla’s economics work at any cost: ‘Management… chose to devote the whole of a four-hour presentation to the planned streamlining of production and reducing of production costs. There was no mention of when to expect a new mass market vehicle (temporarily dubbed the Model 2), nor the Cybertruck (announced in 2019; now delayed until 2024)… no mention of the impact of the aforementioned price cuts, nor of any delivery metrics…. If Tesla were seeing a positive response to the price cuts, why would Musk and his underlings choose not to give the market some production or delivery metrics to support the previous claims?… The elasticity that Musk had claimed to be seeing was either not real, or something happened in March that prevented it from developing. It turned out that Tesla couldn’t sell every car it made…. Elon—and this was either an act of brilliant diversion or complete absurdity—had this to say to everyone during the first quarter results: “Tesla is in a uniquely strong strategic position because we’re the only ones making cars that technically we could sell for zero profit for now, and then yield actually tremendous economics in the future through autonomy.” This was a shocker of a comment…. One wonders if the Tesla CEO is implying that a “full service” full-self-driving vehicle is really, finally, just around the corner…. For what it’s worth, in June of 2022 Elon said… “[Our] overwhelming focus is solving Full Self Driving. So, um, yeah, that’s essential. That’s really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money, and being worth basically zero”…
But this time may well be different. Perhaps. Maybe China will dominate EV production, and Elon and Tesla will fine a durable niche as their front brand for high-priced EV exports.
Very Briefly Noted:
Paul Krugman: In Defense of Debt Gimmicks…
Dan Shipper: AI Is Transforming Media Forever, Here’s How: ‘Dispatches from the frontier of technology and the written word…. It’s right to be apprehensive about the impact this will have…. De-risked content is going to get automated… AI unbundles research and narrative… unwritten stories will be written…
Dan Davies: Plumbing Is Not Architecture: ‘Plumbing… can be changed…. In normal times, the plumbing “just works”…. In big crises, the rules get rewritten…. There’s only a short transitional period during which knowing about plumbing is useful—when the constraints are just beginning to bite, but before they become such a big problem…
Ben Cohen: Warren Buffett’s Formula for Success: One Good Decision Every Five Years: ‘Berkshire Hathaway has obliterated the market in his 58 years at the company. He credits roughly 12 decisions…. Amex… Coke… Mr. Munger… the 1967 deal for insurer National Indemnity… the 1999 deal for the company now called Berkshire Hathaway Energy… Burlington Northern… Gillette… Geico… Bank of America in 2011… Apple… in 2016…
Jean-Louis Gassée: Intel: Just You Wait, Again: ‘A succession of Intel CEOs chanted the same mantra: Just You Wait…. The bravura became an embarrassment…. US tech… would be better served by Intel providing a better alternative…. We The Taxpayers are funding efforts to stimulate our country’s semiconductor sector at the tune of $52B…. I fervently hope Pat Gelsinger succeeds…
Jordan Schneider: Xi Talks AGI + The UK’s S&T Policy Renaissance:
‘Can the Politburo solve the alignment problem?… The first time the phrase “AGI” made it into a statement attributed to Xi himself…
Martin Wolf: US-China relations have entered a frightening new era: ‘Economic co-operation with Beijing will be harder than recent speeches by Janet Yellen and Ursula von der Leyen suggest…
John Gruber: ‘Nice Twitter Handle You Have There. Would Be A Real Shame If Something Happened To It’: ‘This is a shakedown, pure and simple. What a message to big brands and celebrities: stop posting to Twitter and they’ll reassign your longstanding username. It’s bizarre that Musk thinks this might prompt NPR to start posting to Twitter again...
Ken White: Deserve’s Got Nothing to Do with It: ‘We have to demand that everyone be treated justly… not because he’d earned respite, but because we extend it to everyone…. as a measure of grace,… because it’s so foolish and perilous to let the state (or the mob) decide who deserves rights…. Neither the state, nor the mob, will ever conclude that you deserve justice if it sets its eye upon you…
Oliver Willis: The Media Hid Donald Trump's Physical Attack on a Reporter For 37 Days: ‘Can't Upset Their Cash Cow…
¶s:
Josh Marshall: ‘Mint the coin…. Fourteenth Amendment…. The debt-limit cliff forces the President to violate the budget law or the debt-limit… resolve the dilemma in favor of the budget law since the Constitution provides the guidance of the Fourteenth Amendment…. Consol[s]… bonds that have no “face value” but pay interest forever…. It increases the the government’s obligations but it’s not debt…. Thunderdome government shutdown. You’ll know it applies to you when your check doesn’t arrive…
Matt Levine: Bank Stocks Look Worse than Banks Do: ‘One way to think about it is that the stock market is supposed to be efficient and the market for bank deposits is not…. Well-informed hedge fund managers and hard-working analysts and Reddit-reading day traders are all competing with each other to find out information… to determine the fair value of its stock…. The point of a checking account is that you put your money there and don’t think about it…. Now, this is not always true. The classic story of a bank run is something like “deposits suddenly become information-sensitive, and you don't want that.”… But the story of… the second half of this week?… in the US regional bank mini-crisis seems to be that the stocks of some regional banks are very volatile, while their deposits are not. The shareholders are reading the news and alternately panicking and rejoicing; the depositors are not reading the news and just keep their money in their checking accounts. Kind of what’s supposed to happen!…
Henry Farrell: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Mastodon: ‘Mastodon (or at least the bit of Mastodon that I’m familiar with) has the strengths and weaknesses of strong community. Those with the community ethos and identity… find it not only welcoming but downright comforting. If you don’t fit in though, all that Gemeinschaftery is a whole other story. Strong communities tend to be really parochial, far more homogenous than they like to acknowledge (minor internal differences loom larger than they ought, because the internal discourse is organized around them) highly sensitive to outside criticism, and wary or hostile towards people who don’t look right…
Dan Shipper: AI Is Transforming Media Forever, Here’s How: ‘De-risked content is going to get automated… summarize… content arbitrage… create a format. Formats give structure to your creativity, which makes creating something new a little more like filling out a Mad Libs and a little less like alchemy. Matt Levine’s format is a few mini-essays reacting to finance news. Ben Thompson’s format is taking a piece of news about a large-cap tech company and then quoting old pieces he’s written about aggregation theory to analyze it. Axios’s format is smart brevity. Every has experimented with this a lot, too, with 3 Shorts and more…. Make it shorter and shallower… get a beat… sequels… interviews…. Interestingly, while each of these strategies de-risks a human’s ability to make pretty good content—they also make it easier for AI to automate…
Cory Doctorow: The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have a Point: ‘Mass protest in Oxford (England)… against the “15-minute city pledge”…. The anti-15-minute-city conspiracy theory holds that the 15-minute city is a precursor to a new generation of “climate lockdowns,” modeled on the COVID lockdowns…. [But] When they say they don’t trust vaccines because the pharma companies are corrupt and their regulators are toothless, that’s not your signal to defend the manifestly corrupt pharma companies who murdered 800,000 Americans with opioids…
I think that Shipper has left out the step after collecting the underpants.
OK, so you know Matt Levine's formula. It is "a few mini-essays reacting to finance news". Do *you* think you could beat Levine at his own game? Even knowing his formula? I know I couldn't, and, much as I am in awe of your talents, I am doubtful that you could either. There is more to Levine's success than *style*. He provides original insights! How is a LLM going to come up with "two theories of banking" if no one has ever written them down for it to read?
I'm a self-driving skeptic, but arguendo, let's say that self-driving is right around the corner. If *Tesla* can do it, then Pr=1 that several other companies can do it too. That's going to make the premium feature a little less premium. Worse: if Tesla can do it, then I would guess Pr=0.9 that some other company can do it first. How much cachet is there in a mini-me autonomous vehicle?