Yes, as a Brit it is continually weird to see things about the IRA providing large financial incentives for low-carbon energy projects, I keep thinking 'huh, so that's what they're doing now'
This reminds me of a recurring "humorous" (loosely defined) traffic report feature that used to run on a Denver-area radio station in the early 2000s, which featured a voice actor as George W. Bush giving special addresses about the plans of "the terrorist organization known as CDOT" to unleash "weapons of mass disruption" on local commuters. (The joke being "CDOT" is the Colorado Department of Transportation and the reports were about road closures, detours, etc. associated with T-REX, a major highway construction project.)
I "liked" your reply, but am disappointed that there is no, "Damn, that makes me feel old" button! (I was in law school or had recently graduated when those ran.)
I REALLY dislike "insider acronyms." Matt, please define your abbreviation the first time you use it in an essay, even if it's widely understood in your circles.
+100 That, said, at least Matt capitalizes all the letters in them, so you know it's an abbreviation even if you don't know what it stands for! I'm driven to fits of apoplexy when reading British publications that don't just fail to define the abbreviation, but also only capitalize the first letter and write the rest in lower case (e.g., "Cia" for "CIA"), so unless the context is immediately clear you can be left thinking it's someone's name.
The convention used by some British newspapers (e.g. the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-a) is to use all-uppercase when the letters are pronounced individually (e.g. "CIA", "BBC", "SAS"), but title-case or lowercase when the abbreviation is pronounced as a word (e.g. "Nasa", "fubar"). I hate this, personally.
Title-case when the abbreviation is pronounced as a word, I don't mind nearly as much because that's intuitive when you "speak it" to yourself in your mind. "Cia" is my go-to example because it looks like it could be an actual name. ("Fbi" and "Naacp" look dumb, but you can pretty easily tell what they are referring to.)
I dislike title-case, myself. I think it introduces ambiguity about whether something is an initialism for negligible benefit, although I do see the argument for it.
What I cannot *stand* is the BBC's convention of refusing to use periods after contractions. Is "Gen Fukunaga" a high-ranking military officer, or someone who happens to bear the given name "Gen?"
I don't think I've ever seen "Cia" or "Fbi" - do you remember which newspaper they were in? I agree that they're significantly worse than "Nasa" or "Nato".
Unfortunately, I can't recall because this was quite some years ago. I just went to several major British newspapers' websites and tried both FBI and CIA in their search functions and the results came back showing all upper case for both terms so maybe it was an NGO publication? I just remember it very distinctly because whatever I was reading was something about terrorism and it referred multiple times to "Cia reports" and I kept thinking, "Who the heck is 'Cia'?" as I read it until there was also a mention of "the Fbi" and that's when the light went off over my head that it meant, "CIA," not somebody surnamed "Cia."
There was once a bad copyright law that was proposed called the Protect Intellectual Property Act. A friend of me at the time informed me by calling it the Protect IPA for some reason. My immediate retort was "I was not aware that India Pale Ale needed protecting.".
There was a joke in the Clinton administration when Clinton was flirting with partially privatizing Social Security. (Yes that bad idea existed in the Clinton Administration, although his version was far better than Bush's.) The proposal was to call them Universal Savings Accounts. USA!
Speechwriter Michael Waldman suggested instead they call them Universal Social Security Retirement accounts. USSR!
Your point was really good on how this could have been far worse if SCOTUS adhered to normal operations for cert grants at this time of year by scheduling oral argument for the next term, which would have been October at the earliest--thanks.
I once again recommend listening to Advisory Opinions to understand the legal landscape and avoid partisan "analysis" of SCOTUS actions. They covered the topic of immunity and timing in yesterday's podcast.
Yes. Certainly one of the odder choices of abbreviations for a piece of US legislation. (Like, I know that the IRA hasn't been committing much in the way of terrorism lately, but, given the average and median age of members of Congress, I'd suspect the vast majority of them are old enough to remember the 1970s and '80s.)
Always. But I am a Gen Xer who grew up in Boston at a time when a huge chunk of our city's undocumented immigrants were young men from Ireland, so that colors my interpretation.
Unfortunately with the old system it felt like you had to post your question immediately to have any hope of traction. These days there a multiple options, like ranked choice with Google forms, or contest mode on Reddit where comment order is randomized and votes are hidden to all but mods.
Matt did a pretty good job of not letting factors like comment time or number of upvotes sway his decisions of what he answers. I know most of my most upvoted questions didn't get answered.
Yes, meaning no disrespect to Matt Y, I prefer the old mailbag. It’s cool to try new things, but look how much lower reader engagement is. It’s 7 am on the West Coast, and we’ve got double digit comments. On an old-timey mailbag, there’d be >200 comments by now.
I'm still amazed at how that thread blew up. It had a very grab bag feel to it similar to the mailbags of the past that gave a little for everyone to talk about, which is what made the old mailbag comments high.
Gun control, Hilary Clinton and dishwasher efficiency -- I think you now have the key vectors of the SB audience psychograph. Please tell us you have crafted the GPT4 prompt and will share the output next week...
I want to give it at least a month to see how it goes--as it stands right now I prefer the old mailbag format, but I also want to be open for change (a Slow Boring classic staple when we talk about things like the problems of NIMBYs), and most importantly, I want to see if Matt feels like this is better for his writing.
EDIT: also, today's post is pretty dry, wonky subject matter--at least for me it felt more like a "good stuff to read, not much for me to say" type article.
Thanks for your patience! We are also interested in seeing how this goes and open to making a change if it's not working. It's not possible to give everyone exactly what they want, but we were seeing pretty significant drops in engagement on the old mailbag (comments are one metric we consider, but certainly not the only one) and wanted to try something that we thought would a) maintain some of the same spirit of reader engagement but b) result in something that more people were interested in reading. We were really impressed with the quality of the questions/topics that were submitted and hopeful that we're going to get some good columns out of this. We're grateful for the feedback and open to making some adjustments if needed.
> but we were seeing pretty significant drops in engagement on the old mailbag
If the question is one of engagement on the *Monday evening* mailbag threads, my impression is that it seems to have dropped when the reminder stopped being emailed. I always found this strange as it doesn't seem difficult to remember to swing by Monday at 5, but then again, people are busy.
FWIW, I don't have much opinion either way on the format and am happy to see how it goes!
I liked this post. I was disappointed when this was chosen, because I did not think I would like it. But I ended up finding it much better than I expected.
Not sure if anyone shares this perception, but it seemed to me like the quality of questions had declined a bit and I got less excited about the prospect of Matt answering them lately. I also recognize that I am mostly a lurker in this space and I could have contributed to question quality by thinking of my own (and I have submitted a few, none ever that were answered though)
“Men have been found to resist the most powerful monarchs and to refuse to bow down before them, but few indeed have been found to resist the crowd, to stand up alone before misguided masses, to face their implacable frenzy without weapons and with folded arms to dare a 'No' when a 'Yes' is demanded. Such a man was [Ben Krauss]!”
― Georges Clemenceau as quoted by Hannah Arendt in "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
Late commenter here -- reading the thread it sounds like things will (or at least can) continue to evolve. Maybe they'll end up doing one old-school mailbag per month or something like that. There's plenty of room between all and none.
They don't engage in serious, remotely objective policy analysis. They don't review existing academic analysis in a serious objective way. They don't do serious objective political opinion surveying, even within their erstwhile constituencies.
Have they always been this bad? I feel like no, but I am not sure.
1) Young people express goal or opinion, described in moral terms
2) Older people think of second order effects and/or potential unintended consequences of youth tactics/strategies/goals
3) Older people say nothing because they think that either the youth are right about how immoral the older people have been, or that they will be accused of opposing the goal out of personal immorality
There’s been a very real leadership void, even while a great many people could foresee obvious consequences of certain tactics. We are going to see (are already seeing) a lot of think pieces etc, rediscovering obvious truths. A great many people will read this stuff and think “duh, most of us knew this all along”.
For several years, almost no one was willing to tell the groups why they might fail, because pointing out tactical flaws was received as opposing goals. I think nature is healing in this regard, we’ll see
The thing is the Groups provide money and footsoldiers, and money and footsoldiers are really important to politicians.
Same reason the religious right is so important to Republicans, even though they are even more ridiculous in their demands than the Democratic aligned Groups are.
I would but 2nd order effects are tough to describe in a pithy comment line. There's little about social media comment facilities that lend themselves to good interactive discourse.
Can’t say if it’s always been this way, but the incentives of a low-paid activism job in an expensive coastal city are going to tend to attractive a certain kind of person who maybe is less concerned about results and is more into using it for self-actualization. (rich kids)
Some of this may be the reason for red state activists often being more effective (see: Houston making inroads on homelessness, the Music City Star commuter rail line in Nashville, etc)
Then the is the more basic question why don't "advocates" advocate for more efficient ways to doing what they want done? These are mainly college educated folks. Don't they have anyone on staff who took an Econ course? And the same question applies to people who cover these issues for MSM? Why no headline, "LNG 'pause" Advocates Do NOT KNOW How Much CO2 Decision Will Avoid"
The people who cover this stuff in the remaining relatively low-paying MSM jobs are ...... activists. I'm astonished at how much activist narrative passes as journalism.
There are advocates who take both approaches. But the inefficient approach relies on making a maximum amount of noise as a strategy to "raise awareness" so you hear all about them. Meanwhile, we just don't code the wonks focused on nuts-and-bolts as "the groups."
Now, why don't the inefficient people become more efficient? It's wrong theory of change, it helps them raise money, they don't know how to do the technical stuff, or it's way more fun to do with their friends.
I would not necessarily assume the level of knowledge of what needs to be done to deliver change in developed economies to be very widespread, even among educated people with policy experience. I work in public policy and the percentage of people in key positions who are experienced in developing policies *and* analysing their effects through the principles of economics including quantification + an awareness of second-order impacts *and* have a strong understanding of law-making processes and judicial interpreyation *and* political economy/feasibility *and* project management *and* implementation through collaboration with private or arms length state actors is fairly small. It doesn't help that so many key staffers are in their 20s or early 30s either.
I'm with you. And I'd put the politicians in with the activists as far as their poor communication with the general public. Conversations with the general public would have rooted out these problems early. And even if you want to say Manchin knew transmission was going to be an issue with more renewable electricity coming online, he was ineffective at communicating it.
A lot of big decisions get made that affect the general public without their knowledge; and decisionmakers/activists act surprised when there's pushback when it comes to light.
If the activists/politicians don't want to learn the lesson they need public support to implement their ideas, I don't think you can attribute delays to public processes. It's like the activists and politicians are refusing to do their homework and then carping about not getting an A. They won't be effective until they learn their lesson and do more to engage the public ahead of time.
"Thanks to the wisdom of senate procedure, it is possible to create a lot of subsidies for clean energy in a budget reconciliation bill, but it is not possible to rework permitting for electricity transmission projects or renewables siting."
This is so, so bad. Pumping in a lot of money into a sector without a more reasonable way to expand the supply of that sector just leads to higher prices with little actual increased supply. We've seen this in plenty of other sectors.
As someone who works in this sector I will say in this case it’s not just bad Senate procedure - electricity transmission is mostly dealt with by independent service operators. And some ISOs are basically captured by utilities who really hate transmission projects because they are afraid interconnection will make their assets unprofitable. The sympathetic utilities are ones with nuclear power plants. The backlog is real though - some ISOs will let you pay to play and get your project hooked up to the grid faster and pretty much all renewable developers take that option which adds to costs.
I thought this was going to be the "That's the joke" clip, but I at least guessed correctly that that it was going to be The Simpsons, and that's another classic that needs to be shared more.
Regarding accurate analysis, ofc it's fucking important but do you have any suggestions about getting it to matter more in politics? In certain areas -- especially climate, crime and immigration, there seems to be strong incentives not to do or pay attention to the modeling as it might lead you to have to advocate for policies that don't signal the kind tribal/value signals the coalition concerned about the issues seems to value.
Has social media just changed the incentivizes to make paying attention to this kind of analysis less beneficial and can we do anything?
"If you are not on TV you are not governing." - Matt Gaetz
Congress has become a den of performance artists rather than politicians and statesmen. That is primarily due to cultural change, especially among dedicated primary voters. MAGA views politics as entertainment and the Left views politics as religion. Owning the enemy and feelings of righteousness are more important than effective governance. I have a few ideas that could improve these conditions on the margins, like getting rid of primaries, getting video cameras out of Congress, and more extremely, passing a constitutional amendment banning all private money in federal election campaigns. But I don't think any of these ideas will actually happen, nor solve the underlying change in culture. We need like a civil Great Awakening.
The story of Newt Gingrich giving thunderous speeches to an empty House floor in front of CSPAN cameras marked the beginning of this trend. I fully agree, the media and now social media's role in gamifying politics has been deeply corrosive to American democracy.
I don't think these changes came out of nowhere. People are always the same. I think they reflect underlying changes in the incentivizes for individuals largely as a result of social media.
That cat doesn't go back in the bag but it does suggest that other things could potentially change those incentives as well.
The big hope would be Web 2.0 style social media turns out not to be the future but a passing fad. The good news is that there is already evidence to suggest that might turn out to be true. The bad news is that there's no guarantee whatever fad replaces it will be better or improve the incentives.
His prediction that the open internet at large (ie, non-paid content), particularly social media, will be flooded with AI content, eliminating the ability for human content creators, particularly influencers, to monetize through ads. With people having to pay for non-AI content, we’ll be balkanized into disparate communities (eg, substacks) and social media will die.
> In this I do, with reluctance, adopt an accelerationist view of progress; call it r/acc: regretful accelerationism. I suspect we humans do better with constraints; the Internet stripped away the constraint of physical distribution, and now AI is removing the constraint of needing to actually produce content. That this is spoiling the Internet is perhaps the best hope for finding our way back to what is real. Let the virtual world be one of customized content for every individual, with the assumption it is all made-up; some may lose themselves to the algorithm and AI friends, but perhaps more will realize that the only way to survive online is to pay it increasingly little heed.
I don't think the problem is that we are influenced by big social media influencers.
WE are the problem not the victims. It's the role of posting content to our acquaintances to advertise values or that we belong to the same tribe that's the issue and that isn't in any way fixed if AIs kill paid content creation.
Maybe I am misreading Matt H but I think the idea is that the free tools we currently use to signal will become so overwhelmed with garbage as to be useless for that purpose. Doesn't mean we will get any smarter but it might mean certain tools we have been using lately to make each other stupider in particular ways vanish from relevance.
I propose worse and it isn't close. Facebook's virtues are precisely that it's less interesting, less addictive, less optimized for harming attention spans, and not controlled by the Chinese.
“This legislation WILL NOT GENERATE STEEP DECARBONIZATION unless you make COMPLEMENTARY POLICY CHANGES TO ADDRESS TRANSMISSION” and “this legislation WILL GENERATE STEEP DECARBONIZATION as long as you also make complementary policy changes to address transmission” have the exact same truth conditions.
Actually, being a logic stickler, this is not true. The first statement is of the form p->q. The second is of the form q->p. That is, if you accept the first statement, decarbonization occurs (p) ONLY IF complementary legal changes are made (q) (complementary legal changes might be made, and decarbonization still might not happen). If you accept the second statement, if you make complementary legal changes (q), then decarbonization happens (p).
"They need to understand, though, that the IRA really has put zero-carbon electricity on a path to outcompete fossil fuels if and only if complementary regulatory changes are made"
I would probably switch p and q in in this analysis as a matter of convention, to have p be the complementary policy changes and q be steep decarbonization.
More interesting EV news for any rational human who doesn't listen to earnings calls:
Ford's EV division lost almost $4.7 billion. They announced the delay of a prior planned $12 billion in EV investment. The CEO straight up said: "Our Gen 2 vehicles won't launch unless we can get to a profit and a return on that capital ". For all those who wonder why Tesla's market-cap is 10x more than GM and Ford ... this is why. The expected ROIC to manage this EV transition is negative. These companies have turned into capital furnace burning engines to keep up with Tesla and it's getting towards check-mate territory.
This is basically the innovator's dilemma, right? The big company making the legacy profit doesn't want to lose money investing in the new products, because they make less money (or lose money).
Liike, it wasn't profitable for NCR to make personal computers, so they kept making mainframes. And it wasn't profitable for Iomega to make hard disks, so they didn't. The problem is that eventually you are the proud owner of a company that makes products that nobody needs or wants anymore.
I see it differently. I think in an innovator's dilemma the incumbent has the right to win but financial models prevent them. I see this more as an obsolesce story. I don't think the legacy OEMs have the capabilities required to compete.
I think that producing pure EVs is sufficiently different from producing ICEs that the incumbents don't have a big built in advantage. And the numbers bear this out. If producing an EV were simply a matter of repurposing existing capacity (similar to how you can produce an Escape and a Bronco from the same line), then there's no chance i would believe the claims about how much money they are losing.
You also see this borne out by how Tesla, Rivian, etc build different infrastructure. They are not just building auto manufacturing plants from scratch. Further, futurists are speculating a lot about the form of EVs. They kind of look and perform like ICE cars do now, but they don't need to. So much of the form factor of an ICE car evolved around the need to put the engine somewhere, and to account for the fact that flammable fluids need to move about, etc. All that can be re-thought, and will be as the technology evolves -- but not by a company that wants to use an ICE manufacturing facility to build the EV to save costs.
I find myself quite depressed that so many things are going to end up not happening just because we weren't able to close the deal on bipartisan permitting reform.
The Democratic party had to end up being the vehicle for people who actually want to govern the country and do things, but it's saddled with so much baggage, including the idea that deregulation is inherently a bad thing and environmental regulations are always good. Just so ridiculous that aging boomer hippies' main contribution to world history will end up being the strangling of American prosperity and decarbonization.
You pin the failure of bipartisan permitting reform on the Democrats.
In which hypothetical would permitting reform have a better chance: Democratic control of Congress, with at least 60 Senate seats, or the same thing for the Republicans?
The simple answer is "Republicans" because they like deregulation. The correct answer is "Democrats" because permitting reform will most benefit renewable-sourced electricity and Republicans only like certain types of deregulation.
"So EVs are doing fine, as climate policy. To the extent that there’s an issue here, it’s maybe an issue with the industrial policy aspect."
Just spoke at another auto industry conference. Shocking how negative the EV sentiment inside the industry has turned and how quickly. Every data point that comes out makes the situation worse (e.g., margin profile, inventory levels, accident rates, accident severity, repair cost, repair cycle time, insurance costs, storage costs, storage safety regulations, coming scene of accident fire risk regulations). 100% the view is now Toyota had the right strategy the entire time if you're a legacy ICE OEM. Everyone is going to unwind their 100% zero-emission vehicle goals. From a singular climate policy perspective, it makes sense. Everything else is a complete mess.
Basically that EVs will only serve a market niche and a roadmap to 100% EVs is stupid. They were ridiculed for their 1:6:90 rule that showed the same amount of raw materials that could build a single EV could be used to build 90 Hybrids and result in 37x higher carbon reduction during EV mania but the market is now proving them right.
I am curious how much of that is aversion to change. It seems to me like there are not a lot of EV options (esp. if you want an SUV or truck) and many of them have terrible range. Like, there isn't much experimentation with midsized trucks and SUVs + the EVs sold by major auto companies are very different from the EVs sold by electric-only companies, so it feels like there is more room for innovation and experimentation.
Weak/strong mayor had still been leading the last time I looked at the survey and I was hoping for it to be the winner too. We need to empanel a committee to investigate possible use of Chinese-printed ballots and Venezuelan-run voting machines to influence the outcome!
I wonder if the lack of serious modeling may be being made worse by McCain-Feingold. Say what you will about donors like the Kochs but those big money donors tend to get into it seriously and be swayed by results on effectiveness.
No ofc it doesn't change their underlying political affiliation. The Kochs aren't going to start arguing for more government regulation but large donors are relatively influential as to what happens and in that context people tend to care alot about consequences so do care about models and that makes the recipients of their money care.
OTOH any movement that's largely supported by small donors/occasional volounteers has the opposite incentives. Those donations are about identity and the donors don't have the time or inclination to study detailed modeling. Indeed, I wonder if that's a big part of why the environmental lobby tends to be some of the worst offenders here.
They don’t, actually. My boss at DDHQ, Scott, used to do projects for the Kochs; he found that none of the interventions worked; they didn’t care and still funded them.
I don't know about their other projects but I looked into their criminal justice stuff and found it pretty well based on data. I don't expect them to be perfect but if they are even producing reports and funding someone to look at efficacy that's a lot better than most small donors.
But I'm curious as to what in particular you are referring to. Because, as I said I don't expect it to make a difference on big ideology issues just on narrow questions. And certainly not on the parts of lobbying the Kochs are doing just for their buisness interests (there the real effectiveness they care about is profit).
Ohh, I expect that those are cases where they may say they want something but really have some other end they care about. Yes, that's unfortunate and I don't mean to suggest big donors don't also have issues where the policy is a secondary concern. You rarely persuade people on things they are directly invested in but I'm arguing that on points they don't have a strong direct emotional investment in one outcome they are more likely to be influenced by questions of effectiveness a bit more (certainly not always) than the small donors.
So I suspect we just have different standards here. My sense is the small donors voter essentially never responds to questions of effectiveness so even a marginal impact is better.
And the mere existence of the job you spoke of does suggest a modicum of care -- though I wouldn't be at all surprised if they cared more about how it looked to their friends than about effectiveness -- I hardly think big donors are saints.
That's certainly true. However, I think trying to avoid that is asking for too much. If someone's real motivation is that they believe in the right to own guns they may release some statement about how guns are important for keeping your family safe but that's not actually what they care about so you can't expect them to reverse their course because you show thats not true.
What you can hope for is that they face pressure to actually care about effectiveness in doing X.
People want what they want and there will always be conflict there but you can hope to avoid the pure losses where people do things that don't help even achieve what they do want.
Now sometimes it may be the case that what the person wants isn't actually a policy goal. Maybe they just find environmentalism annoying so want to kneecap it for no policy reason whatsoever but often people, especially those with real power to change things, do want policy outcomes and if we can increase the incentive for them to care about effectiveness that's good.
Also, I think the bare claim that guns make people less safe isn't that hard to demonstrate. It's just that the comparison with the world where there were magically no guns in civilian hands isn't the comparison relevant to most debates and people don't see all deaths as equivalent (ppl care if the people being killed are innocents or not).
Ahh, poor wording. I was thinking the "your" was part some sort of generic address to the country and was interpreting it as I replied but I agree that wasn't clear.
Of course .. and your point is? That seems like caring a great deal about the effectiveness of outcomes. They really want to succeed in ensuring policies help the buisness be profitable. It's not always best to advertise your true goals.
It's not a good goal or one I support but it seems like it's absolutely one where they care about actually achieving a certain outcome effectively.
--
In contrast many environmentalists really do care about the planet but yet often don't pick effective ways to achieve that goal.
I expect that they'd do better at it if their money was funnelled through large environmental foundations than in the situation now.
Sure, but people are going to pursue there real motivations and that's a hard thing to change.
However, as the case discussed here about LNG suggests, there is the tragic problem of people who I believe really actually do care about the environment who end up hurting it . We could hope to at least minimize the extent to which that happens and I'm suggesting that if they were incentivized to give their money to some massive "Green Democrats" fund which in turn could dole out the money to whoever it felt was helping the most we'd see less of that unfortunate issue. It's a problem when the individuals deciding where to send the money are donating small amounts so the cost to determine what's best and convince others they really believe that (eg aren't secretly just fans of natural gas companies) is too high to incentivize them to actually pick the best outcome.
I really liked this article. Usually, I just like MY's quick wit, good writing, and hot takes on current events. But, this took research and deep understanding. If losing the mailbag means more of this, great. (But, honestly, not sure MY can keep this up. I can't imagine this being a weekly feature in addition to everything else he does).
I have noticed three big problems in the American EV market that are not inherent to EVs as a product:
1. There are not a lot of SUVs and trucks available, limiting choice of what type of car you want. A lot of the EVs marketed as SUVs are more like large sedans. I also don't think there is an affordable midsized truck with decent range.
2. A ton of EVs have terrible range, limiting choice. Some EVs have good range (Rivian has an SUV and a truck with 350 miles), so idk what the limiting factor is there.
3. Dealers don't understand EVs. It's hard to get questions answered and I wonder how much EVs get pushed vs ICE cars.
It seems to me like the big 3 are still learning what works in the EV market and how to build these cars, and just haven't figured it out yet.
Well the problem with SUVs and trucks is that weight and boxiness hurts your battery life resulting in extremely heavy batteries to compensate. Towing and trucky things also kills range. Hybrids probably a better idea for anyone who uses their truck as a truck, see the trains that use hybrid tech for freight.
As far as the target markets, the rich people who are still okay with sedans and crossovers can go find a Tesla. Trying to make an affordable car for the masses is a problem for Big 3 trying to ramp things up while Tesla is still in the space.
"Switching to Tow mode comes with some ominous foreshadowing, as the R1T's indicated range disappears, instantly going from 270 miles to 103. So, for all intents and purposes, cross-country trailering with the R1T is like trying to go on a road trip in a Mazda MX-30, a car with 70 miles of range at 75 mph."
Apparently very much not. That range estimate might even be high.
#3 Dealerships are pretty heavily incentivized not to push EV options. Most dealerships make almost half of their profits from parts and services. EV's don't require much regular service other than tire rotations and possible body work until they need a new battery. ICE cars are just a better long term deal for the dealership.
For anyone who's not familiar with Aptera (https://aptera.us/vehicle/), I recommend checking them out (and not just because I'm an investor). They're a startup nearing production, with multiple, well-designed prototypes (an earlier version was demoed by Jay Leno) that has great potential as a second car for families, or a primary vehicle for DINKs and singles. The best part is that it's not only electric (with built-in solar charging), but it's actually much more efficient and the team has made a serious effort to re-imagine what's really necessary in terms of vehicle design and structure, which allows it to overcome the range anxiety trap that usually leads to a (often-wasted) weight spiral in most conventional EVs.
Short answer: no. Automotive manufacturing is capital intensive, and as discussed throughout this thread, the EV market seems to be struggling recently. That being said, Aptera has survived over the last 4+ years where many other EV start-ups have folded, and they have a distinctive niche mostly (if not entirely) to themselves, with a lot of passionate hopeful future drivers (they just closed a round of $20M+ crowdfunding), a group in which I count myself. If you're interested, here's two videos from last year discussing Aptera's investment prospects, from a channel that covers Aptera enthusiastically (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5I5uLoM9Do), but also critically (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoJs-DrNI94).
Climate change is all well and good but I read “pandas are coming back” and thought this means they finally found a way to make them reproduce properly and increase their population in the wild ! What a disappointment to discover this was actually about them coming back *to the us* via strings attached Chinese diplomacy! Sad.
Does anyone else always read IRA as Irish republican army?
Yes, as a Brit it is continually weird to see things about the IRA providing large financial incentives for low-carbon energy projects, I keep thinking 'huh, so that's what they're doing now'
Yeah usually they use a lot more carbon.
Both the Irish IRA and the American IRA were both pretty revolutionary.
Only one was a terrorist organization, though.
This reminds me of a recurring "humorous" (loosely defined) traffic report feature that used to run on a Denver-area radio station in the early 2000s, which featured a voice actor as George W. Bush giving special addresses about the plans of "the terrorist organization known as CDOT" to unleash "weapons of mass disruption" on local commuters. (The joke being "CDOT" is the Colorado Department of Transportation and the reports were about road closures, detours, etc. associated with T-REX, a major highway construction project.)
I kid you not, hearing this on the radio was one of my earliest childhood memories.
I "liked" your reply, but am disappointed that there is no, "Damn, that makes me feel old" button! (I was in law school or had recently graduated when those ran.)
My grading software was called ISIS, until one day in 2014 - without explanation - they said that it would henceforth be called SIS.
Isis was also a mobile payment app, until 2014 when it was renamed to Softcard:
https://www.cnbc.com/2014/09/03/isis-wallet-rebrands-to-softcard-to-avoid-confusion-with-militants.html
Or, if you're old like me, Individual Retirement Account.
Use of the definite article with "IRA" is what skews me towards thinking of the Irish Republican Army first instead of Individual Retirement Account.
The IRA/Irish Republican Army jokes I kept making at the credit union everybody else got tired of pretty quick. I never did though.
If only they had named the other kind of retirement account MS-13 rather than 401(k).
I REALLY dislike "insider acronyms." Matt, please define your abbreviation the first time you use it in an essay, even if it's widely understood in your circles.
Noted, thanks for flagging!
+100 That, said, at least Matt capitalizes all the letters in them, so you know it's an abbreviation even if you don't know what it stands for! I'm driven to fits of apoplexy when reading British publications that don't just fail to define the abbreviation, but also only capitalize the first letter and write the rest in lower case (e.g., "Cia" for "CIA"), so unless the context is immediately clear you can be left thinking it's someone's name.
The convention used by some British newspapers (e.g. the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-a) is to use all-uppercase when the letters are pronounced individually (e.g. "CIA", "BBC", "SAS"), but title-case or lowercase when the abbreviation is pronounced as a word (e.g. "Nasa", "fubar"). I hate this, personally.
I think fubar has become its own word now but not NASA
I am driven nuts when the Guardian doesn't capitalize Supreme Court, it looks so horribly off.
Title-case when the abbreviation is pronounced as a word, I don't mind nearly as much because that's intuitive when you "speak it" to yourself in your mind. "Cia" is my go-to example because it looks like it could be an actual name. ("Fbi" and "Naacp" look dumb, but you can pretty easily tell what they are referring to.)
I dislike title-case, myself. I think it introduces ambiguity about whether something is an initialism for negligible benefit, although I do see the argument for it.
What I cannot *stand* is the BBC's convention of refusing to use periods after contractions. Is "Gen Fukunaga" a high-ranking military officer, or someone who happens to bear the given name "Gen?"
I don't think I've ever seen "Cia" or "Fbi" - do you remember which newspaper they were in? I agree that they're significantly worse than "Nasa" or "Nato".
Unfortunately, I can't recall because this was quite some years ago. I just went to several major British newspapers' websites and tried both FBI and CIA in their search functions and the results came back showing all upper case for both terms so maybe it was an NGO publication? I just remember it very distinctly because whatever I was reading was something about terrorism and it referred multiple times to "Cia reports" and I kept thinking, "Who the heck is 'Cia'?" as I read it until there was also a mention of "the Fbi" and that's when the light went off over my head that it meant, "CIA," not somebody surnamed "Cia."
Surely someone has named there kid Cia...even if it sounds like SeeYa
The best was the other day in a Hanania Substack where he just started using "HBD" without an explanation (Human BioDiversity, apparently).
Happy BirthDay!
I think he probably *wants* outsiders to have difficulty decoding that one.
Thank you! I ran across this abbreviation somewhere else the other day and had no idea what it meant.
DEFINE YOUR TERMS, PEOPLE
Ahh, to be innocent and not know what that means. I may envy you.
There was once a bad copyright law that was proposed called the Protect Intellectual Property Act. A friend of me at the time informed me by calling it the Protect IPA for some reason. My immediate retort was "I was not aware that India Pale Ale needed protecting.".
There was a joke in the Clinton administration when Clinton was flirting with partially privatizing Social Security. (Yes that bad idea existed in the Clinton Administration, although his version was far better than Bush's.) The proposal was to call them Universal Savings Accounts. USA!
Speechwriter Michael Waldman suggested instead they call them Universal Social Security Retirement accounts. USSR!
LOL. Also, nice job explaining the Trump immunity claim discourse on Twitter yesterday!
Thanks. I was shocked how that blew up. Almost half a million views of that tweet!
Your point was really good on how this could have been far worse if SCOTUS adhered to normal operations for cert grants at this time of year by scheduling oral argument for the next term, which would have been October at the earliest--thanks.
I once again recommend listening to Advisory Opinions to understand the legal landscape and avoid partisan "analysis" of SCOTUS actions. They covered the topic of immunity and timing in yesterday's podcast.
https://thedispatch.com/podcast/advisoryopinions/sore-losers-and-dr-phil/
My wife is a speech language pathologist, so she talks about IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) all the time.
That IPA is really cool too--helped me realized just how screwed up the English alphabet is.
I have similar thoughts after a few IPAs.
Do your phonemes under the IPA change after a few IPAs?
Nah, my joke would have made more sense as a weed joke. "Bruh the English language is WEIRD."
Neither does isopropyl alcohol!
I used to protect several IPAs from expiration on any given weekend
Anything I drank at a frat party doesn't need protecting.
That's some bougie-ass frat party that served an IPA. (Unless they found a keg that was about to go bad and was discounted for quick sale.)
I wonder what the geographic breakdown between Natty Light vs Milwaukee’s Best schools looks like…
Putting bitter beer in a beer bong sounds like a hazing ritual.
My lowest stakes conspiracy theory is that Joe Biden did that on purpose.
Yes. Certainly one of the odder choices of abbreviations for a piece of US legislation. (Like, I know that the IRA hasn't been committing much in the way of terrorism lately, but, given the average and median age of members of Congress, I'd suspect the vast majority of them are old enough to remember the 1970s and '80s.)
Freedom fighters, if you ask Biden
Also, always in my mind is that BLM is the Bureau of Land Management, and CRT is cathode ray tube.
As an Idahoan I imagine your BLM definition has more salience
That should be the case in pretty much the entire West.
Certainly in the inland West
The fun part is mixing and matching the definitions. Individual Reduction Army, anyone?
Inflation Republican Account!
Irish Retirement Act!
Always. But I am a Gen Xer who grew up in Boston at a time when a huge chunk of our city's undocumented immigrants were young men from Ireland, so that colors my interpretation.
This Australian sure does. I had to read the article for 2-3 paragraphs before I fully cottoned on.
Yes and I get annoyed about it every time it hits me
Sean Bean from Patriot Games comes to mind....good thriller for your youngsters who are unaware.
Perhaps you can sell it to them based on its adherence to the Sean Bean meme.
This is a nice article but the old mailbag was my favorite part of slow boring. I'm very disappointed at this change.
Now I read it as Individual Retirement Account.
Working for the IRS has completely flipped which one of those comes to mind first for me
Not detracting from this article - but the reader mailbag was my favourite feature of the week, and I am quite sad to see it go!
It's not gone forever! We're just switching it up a bit.
Yall turned the mailbag into the McRib.
Oh, come on, it’s not that awful.
Yes, it's awful that the McRib isn't available at McDonald's every day of the year!
De gustibus non est disputandum.
Unfortunately with the old system it felt like you had to post your question immediately to have any hope of traction. These days there a multiple options, like ranked choice with Google forms, or contest mode on Reddit where comment order is randomized and votes are hidden to all but mods.
Matt did a pretty good job of not letting factors like comment time or number of upvotes sway his decisions of what he answers. I know most of my most upvoted questions didn't get answered.
Yes, meaning no disrespect to Matt Y, I prefer the old mailbag. It’s cool to try new things, but look how much lower reader engagement is. It’s 7 am on the West Coast, and we’ve got double digit comments. On an old-timey mailbag, there’d be >200 comments by now.
That could be because everyone got commented out yesterday!
I'm still amazed at how that thread blew up. It had a very grab bag feel to it similar to the mailbags of the past that gave a little for everyone to talk about, which is what made the old mailbag comments high.
Good point. This feels like more a normal post while the prior format felt like the comments could go in a bunch of different direction.
Gun control, Hilary Clinton and dishwasher efficiency -- I think you now have the key vectors of the SB audience psychograph. Please tell us you have crafted the GPT4 prompt and will share the output next week...
I want to give it at least a month to see how it goes--as it stands right now I prefer the old mailbag format, but I also want to be open for change (a Slow Boring classic staple when we talk about things like the problems of NIMBYs), and most importantly, I want to see if Matt feels like this is better for his writing.
EDIT: also, today's post is pretty dry, wonky subject matter--at least for me it felt more like a "good stuff to read, not much for me to say" type article.
Thanks for your patience! We are also interested in seeing how this goes and open to making a change if it's not working. It's not possible to give everyone exactly what they want, but we were seeing pretty significant drops in engagement on the old mailbag (comments are one metric we consider, but certainly not the only one) and wanted to try something that we thought would a) maintain some of the same spirit of reader engagement but b) result in something that more people were interested in reading. We were really impressed with the quality of the questions/topics that were submitted and hopeful that we're going to get some good columns out of this. We're grateful for the feedback and open to making some adjustments if needed.
> but we were seeing pretty significant drops in engagement on the old mailbag
If the question is one of engagement on the *Monday evening* mailbag threads, my impression is that it seems to have dropped when the reminder stopped being emailed. I always found this strange as it doesn't seem difficult to remember to swing by Monday at 5, but then again, people are busy.
FWIW, I don't have much opinion either way on the format and am happy to see how it goes!
Thanks for chiming in. It is nice to know that this is being heard, no matter what eventually comes from it.
I liked this post. I was disappointed when this was chosen, because I did not think I would like it. But I ended up finding it much better than I expected.
Yeah, I liked the broad survey of Matt’s perspective on issues that I might not really care about a deep dive on.
Or topics that don't even lend themselves to deep dives (e.g., a whole lotta pop culture stuff, which Matt otherwise seems to enjoy).
I still have a whole list of joke questions, and I have no idea what I am supposed to do with them.
Not sure if anyone shares this perception, but it seemed to me like the quality of questions had declined a bit and I got less excited about the prospect of Matt answering them lately. I also recognize that I am mostly a lurker in this space and I could have contributed to question quality by thinking of my own (and I have submitted a few, none ever that were answered though)
I personally welcome the change. I mostly had stopped reading the weekly mailbag.,
me too
It can still come back if Ben has the courage!
True courage doesn't bend to the whims of public opinion.
“Men have been found to resist the most powerful monarchs and to refuse to bow down before them, but few indeed have been found to resist the crowd, to stand up alone before misguided masses, to face their implacable frenzy without weapons and with folded arms to dare a 'No' when a 'Yes' is demanded. Such a man was [Ben Krauss]!”
― Georges Clemenceau as quoted by Hannah Arendt in "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
Whooo!
Shortly after Ben's speech to the electors of Bristol, they promptly elected a new moderator.
Late commenter here -- reading the thread it sounds like things will (or at least can) continue to evolve. Maybe they'll end up doing one old-school mailbag per month or something like that. There's plenty of room between all and none.
Somewhere between all and none sounds like a really good idea!
Same, I miss having lots of different prompts to discuss.
The groups are not serious people.
They don't engage in serious, remotely objective policy analysis. They don't review existing academic analysis in a serious objective way. They don't do serious objective political opinion surveying, even within their erstwhile constituencies.
Have they always been this bad? I feel like no, but I am not sure.
Pattern during the lass decade
1) Young people express goal or opinion, described in moral terms
2) Older people think of second order effects and/or potential unintended consequences of youth tactics/strategies/goals
3) Older people say nothing because they think that either the youth are right about how immoral the older people have been, or that they will be accused of opposing the goal out of personal immorality
There’s been a very real leadership void, even while a great many people could foresee obvious consequences of certain tactics. We are going to see (are already seeing) a lot of think pieces etc, rediscovering obvious truths. A great many people will read this stuff and think “duh, most of us knew this all along”.
For several years, almost no one was willing to tell the groups why they might fail, because pointing out tactical flaws was received as opposing goals. I think nature is healing in this regard, we’ll see
The thing is the Groups provide money and footsoldiers, and money and footsoldiers are really important to politicians.
Same reason the religious right is so important to Republicans, even though they are even more ridiculous in their demands than the Democratic aligned Groups are.
You forgot 4) older people bitch about it on Matt Yglesias’ substack!
I would but 2nd order effects are tough to describe in a pithy comment line. There's little about social media comment facilities that lend themselves to good interactive discourse.
Hmmm. Does this logic apply to "NIMBY's" telling "YIMBY's" why many of their housing policies are unlikely to succeed?
Can’t say if it’s always been this way, but the incentives of a low-paid activism job in an expensive coastal city are going to tend to attractive a certain kind of person who maybe is less concerned about results and is more into using it for self-actualization. (rich kids)
Some of this may be the reason for red state activists often being more effective (see: Houston making inroads on homelessness, the Music City Star commuter rail line in Nashville, etc)
Sounds like some people at the EPA… (so much cherry picking and claims that they model something when they didn’t in that NPRM.)
Then the is the more basic question why don't "advocates" advocate for more efficient ways to doing what they want done? These are mainly college educated folks. Don't they have anyone on staff who took an Econ course? And the same question applies to people who cover these issues for MSM? Why no headline, "LNG 'pause" Advocates Do NOT KNOW How Much CO2 Decision Will Avoid"
Activists don't want improvement. They want to tear everything down.
None of them? And they just latched on to the environment as the best way to "tear everything down?"
The most prominent activist at my college had a sign on his window that said Fuck Shit Up.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/need-for-chaos-political-science-concept/677536/
The people who cover this stuff in the remaining relatively low-paying MSM jobs are ...... activists. I'm astonished at how much activist narrative passes as journalism.
You mean MSM would have to pay more for people who took Econ? :)
I mean people who took Econ probably want safer, higher-paying jobs.
There are advocates who take both approaches. But the inefficient approach relies on making a maximum amount of noise as a strategy to "raise awareness" so you hear all about them. Meanwhile, we just don't code the wonks focused on nuts-and-bolts as "the groups."
Now, why don't the inefficient people become more efficient? It's wrong theory of change, it helps them raise money, they don't know how to do the technical stuff, or it's way more fun to do with their friends.
I would not necessarily assume the level of knowledge of what needs to be done to deliver change in developed economies to be very widespread, even among educated people with policy experience. I work in public policy and the percentage of people in key positions who are experienced in developing policies *and* analysing their effects through the principles of economics including quantification + an awareness of second-order impacts *and* have a strong understanding of law-making processes and judicial interpreyation *and* political economy/feasibility *and* project management *and* implementation through collaboration with private or arms length state actors is fairly small. It doesn't help that so many key staffers are in their 20s or early 30s either.
Gosh, no. But an organization ought to be able to combine skills.
I'm with you. And I'd put the politicians in with the activists as far as their poor communication with the general public. Conversations with the general public would have rooted out these problems early. And even if you want to say Manchin knew transmission was going to be an issue with more renewable electricity coming online, he was ineffective at communicating it.
A lot of big decisions get made that affect the general public without their knowledge; and decisionmakers/activists act surprised when there's pushback when it comes to light.
If the activists/politicians don't want to learn the lesson they need public support to implement their ideas, I don't think you can attribute delays to public processes. It's like the activists and politicians are refusing to do their homework and then carping about not getting an A. They won't be effective until they learn their lesson and do more to engage the public ahead of time.
"Thanks to the wisdom of senate procedure, it is possible to create a lot of subsidies for clean energy in a budget reconciliation bill, but it is not possible to rework permitting for electricity transmission projects or renewables siting."
This is so, so bad. Pumping in a lot of money into a sector without a more reasonable way to expand the supply of that sector just leads to higher prices with little actual increased supply. We've seen this in plenty of other sectors.
As someone who works in this sector I will say in this case it’s not just bad Senate procedure - electricity transmission is mostly dealt with by independent service operators. And some ISOs are basically captured by utilities who really hate transmission projects because they are afraid interconnection will make their assets unprofitable. The sympathetic utilities are ones with nuclear power plants. The backlog is real though - some ISOs will let you pay to play and get your project hooked up to the grid faster and pretty much all renewable developers take that option which adds to costs.
There's a reason why utilities Made The List of rent seekers that I've been building, thanks for this.
“leads to higher prices”
No, no. You’ve got it all wrong: the law *reduced* inflation.
Inflation has indeed gone down since the IRA passed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw
I was hoping this would be the bear patrol clip!
I aim to please.
I thought this was going to be the "That's the joke" clip, but I at least guessed correctly that that it was going to be The Simpsons, and that's another classic that needs to be shared more.
But at least they could have pumped the money to the CO2 avoidance, NOT the investment in CO2 avoidance.
I sometimes wonder if the "environmental activists" are not secretly funded by fossil fuel companies to create obstacles to CO2 emissions reductions!
That was a good and informative read. Keep it up!
Regarding accurate analysis, ofc it's fucking important but do you have any suggestions about getting it to matter more in politics? In certain areas -- especially climate, crime and immigration, there seems to be strong incentives not to do or pay attention to the modeling as it might lead you to have to advocate for policies that don't signal the kind tribal/value signals the coalition concerned about the issues seems to value.
Has social media just changed the incentivizes to make paying attention to this kind of analysis less beneficial and can we do anything?
"If you are not on TV you are not governing." - Matt Gaetz
Congress has become a den of performance artists rather than politicians and statesmen. That is primarily due to cultural change, especially among dedicated primary voters. MAGA views politics as entertainment and the Left views politics as religion. Owning the enemy and feelings of righteousness are more important than effective governance. I have a few ideas that could improve these conditions on the margins, like getting rid of primaries, getting video cameras out of Congress, and more extremely, passing a constitutional amendment banning all private money in federal election campaigns. But I don't think any of these ideas will actually happen, nor solve the underlying change in culture. We need like a civil Great Awakening.
The story of Newt Gingrich giving thunderous speeches to an empty House floor in front of CSPAN cameras marked the beginning of this trend. I fully agree, the media and now social media's role in gamifying politics has been deeply corrosive to American democracy.
I don't think these changes came out of nowhere. People are always the same. I think they reflect underlying changes in the incentivizes for individuals largely as a result of social media.
That cat doesn't go back in the bag but it does suggest that other things could potentially change those incentives as well.
The big hope would be Web 2.0 style social media turns out not to be the future but a passing fad. The good news is that there is already evidence to suggest that might turn out to be true. The bad news is that there's no guarantee whatever fad replaces it will be better or improve the incentives.
I’m hopeful that AI will save us from social media following the prediction from Ben Thompson in, “Regretful Accelerationism”, https://stratechery.com/2023/regretful-accelerationism/
His prediction that the open internet at large (ie, non-paid content), particularly social media, will be flooded with AI content, eliminating the ability for human content creators, particularly influencers, to monetize through ads. With people having to pay for non-AI content, we’ll be balkanized into disparate communities (eg, substacks) and social media will die.
> In this I do, with reluctance, adopt an accelerationist view of progress; call it r/acc: regretful accelerationism. I suspect we humans do better with constraints; the Internet stripped away the constraint of physical distribution, and now AI is removing the constraint of needing to actually produce content. That this is spoiling the Internet is perhaps the best hope for finding our way back to what is real. Let the virtual world be one of customized content for every individual, with the assumption it is all made-up; some may lose themselves to the algorithm and AI friends, but perhaps more will realize that the only way to survive online is to pay it increasingly little heed.
I don't think the problem is that we are influenced by big social media influencers.
WE are the problem not the victims. It's the role of posting content to our acquaintances to advertise values or that we belong to the same tribe that's the issue and that isn't in any way fixed if AIs kill paid content creation.
Maybe I am misreading Matt H but I think the idea is that the free tools we currently use to signal will become so overwhelmed with garbage as to be useless for that purpose. Doesn't mean we will get any smarter but it might mean certain tools we have been using lately to make each other stupider in particular ways vanish from relevance.
Has the change in dominant social media platform from Facebook to TikTok been for better or for worse? Idk.
I propose worse and it isn't close. Facebook's virtues are precisely that it's less interesting, less addictive, less optimized for harming attention spans, and not controlled by the Chinese.
Has it shifted? Given the age differences I suspect that Facebook is more widely used by likely voters.
Get more power out of the hands of average voters and into the hands of elites.
I mean yes. Though I think it's better phrased as -- incentivize individuals to exercise power indirectly and via proxies rather than directly.
If it was up to me I'd open up bundling completely and encourage people donate their political money to intermediares who hand it out to canidates.
“This legislation WILL NOT GENERATE STEEP DECARBONIZATION unless you make COMPLEMENTARY POLICY CHANGES TO ADDRESS TRANSMISSION” and “this legislation WILL GENERATE STEEP DECARBONIZATION as long as you also make complementary policy changes to address transmission” have the exact same truth conditions.
Actually, being a logic stickler, this is not true. The first statement is of the form p->q. The second is of the form q->p. That is, if you accept the first statement, decarbonization occurs (p) ONLY IF complementary legal changes are made (q) (complementary legal changes might be made, and decarbonization still might not happen). If you accept the second statement, if you make complementary legal changes (q), then decarbonization happens (p).
"They need to understand, though, that the IRA really has put zero-carbon electricity on a path to outcompete fossil fuels if and only if complementary regulatory changes are made"
There you go: p<->q
I would probably switch p and q in in this analysis as a matter of convention, to have p be the complementary policy changes and q be steep decarbonization.
dork
More interesting EV news for any rational human who doesn't listen to earnings calls:
Ford's EV division lost almost $4.7 billion. They announced the delay of a prior planned $12 billion in EV investment. The CEO straight up said: "Our Gen 2 vehicles won't launch unless we can get to a profit and a return on that capital ". For all those who wonder why Tesla's market-cap is 10x more than GM and Ford ... this is why. The expected ROIC to manage this EV transition is negative. These companies have turned into capital furnace burning engines to keep up with Tesla and it's getting towards check-mate territory.
https://s201.q4cdn.com/693218008/files/doc_downloads/2024/01/FMC-2023-Q4-FY-Earnings-Calls-Transcript-_Factset_2-6_945.pdf
This is basically the innovator's dilemma, right? The big company making the legacy profit doesn't want to lose money investing in the new products, because they make less money (or lose money).
Liike, it wasn't profitable for NCR to make personal computers, so they kept making mainframes. And it wasn't profitable for Iomega to make hard disks, so they didn't. The problem is that eventually you are the proud owner of a company that makes products that nobody needs or wants anymore.
I see it differently. I think in an innovator's dilemma the incumbent has the right to win but financial models prevent them. I see this more as an obsolesce story. I don't think the legacy OEMs have the capabilities required to compete.
I think that producing pure EVs is sufficiently different from producing ICEs that the incumbents don't have a big built in advantage. And the numbers bear this out. If producing an EV were simply a matter of repurposing existing capacity (similar to how you can produce an Escape and a Bronco from the same line), then there's no chance i would believe the claims about how much money they are losing.
You also see this borne out by how Tesla, Rivian, etc build different infrastructure. They are not just building auto manufacturing plants from scratch. Further, futurists are speculating a lot about the form of EVs. They kind of look and perform like ICE cars do now, but they don't need to. So much of the form factor of an ICE car evolved around the need to put the engine somewhere, and to account for the fact that flammable fluids need to move about, etc. All that can be re-thought, and will be as the technology evolves -- but not by a company that wants to use an ICE manufacturing facility to build the EV to save costs.
I find myself quite depressed that so many things are going to end up not happening just because we weren't able to close the deal on bipartisan permitting reform.
The Democratic party had to end up being the vehicle for people who actually want to govern the country and do things, but it's saddled with so much baggage, including the idea that deregulation is inherently a bad thing and environmental regulations are always good. Just so ridiculous that aging boomer hippies' main contribution to world history will end up being the strangling of American prosperity and decarbonization.
You pin the failure of bipartisan permitting reform on the Democrats.
In which hypothetical would permitting reform have a better chance: Democratic control of Congress, with at least 60 Senate seats, or the same thing for the Republicans?
The simple answer is "Republicans" because they like deregulation. The correct answer is "Democrats" because permitting reform will most benefit renewable-sourced electricity and Republicans only like certain types of deregulation.
Matt says it the young college educated that are the main constraint, doesn't he?
"So EVs are doing fine, as climate policy. To the extent that there’s an issue here, it’s maybe an issue with the industrial policy aspect."
Just spoke at another auto industry conference. Shocking how negative the EV sentiment inside the industry has turned and how quickly. Every data point that comes out makes the situation worse (e.g., margin profile, inventory levels, accident rates, accident severity, repair cost, repair cycle time, insurance costs, storage costs, storage safety regulations, coming scene of accident fire risk regulations). 100% the view is now Toyota had the right strategy the entire time if you're a legacy ICE OEM. Everyone is going to unwind their 100% zero-emission vehicle goals. From a singular climate policy perspective, it makes sense. Everything else is a complete mess.
All downstream of failure to just tax net CO2 emissions!
Why can't we have a better environmental movement?
We should not expect government policy that chooses one technology over another will yield good results.
What is Toyota's strategy?
Basically that EVs will only serve a market niche and a roadmap to 100% EVs is stupid. They were ridiculed for their 1:6:90 rule that showed the same amount of raw materials that could build a single EV could be used to build 90 Hybrids and result in 37x higher carbon reduction during EV mania but the market is now proving them right.
https://fortune.com/2024/02/08/toyota-hybrid-vehicles-carmakers-strategy-electric-vehicles-hype/
https://www.teslarati.com/toyota-defends-ev-strategy/
I am curious how much of that is aversion to change. It seems to me like there are not a lot of EV options (esp. if you want an SUV or truck) and many of them have terrible range. Like, there isn't much experimentation with midsized trucks and SUVs + the EVs sold by major auto companies are very different from the EVs sold by electric-only companies, so it feels like there is more room for innovation and experimentation.
They were too busy trying to bail out GM (again) to listen to the much smarter people at Toyota.
Obligatory "Sacramentooooooo!" for the zoning news.
(Was hoping for the weak/strong mayor post since we're having mayoral elections now.)
Weak/strong mayor had still been leading the last time I looked at the survey and I was hoping for it to be the winner too. We need to empanel a committee to investigate possible use of Chinese-printed ballots and Venezuelan-run voting machines to influence the outcome!
I believe it’s the North Koreans who have cornered the market on fugazzi ballots.
I wonder if the lack of serious modeling may be being made worse by McCain-Feingold. Say what you will about donors like the Kochs but those big money donors tend to get into it seriously and be swayed by results on effectiveness.
No ofc it doesn't change their underlying political affiliation. The Kochs aren't going to start arguing for more government regulation but large donors are relatively influential as to what happens and in that context people tend to care alot about consequences so do care about models and that makes the recipients of their money care.
OTOH any movement that's largely supported by small donors/occasional volounteers has the opposite incentives. Those donations are about identity and the donors don't have the time or inclination to study detailed modeling. Indeed, I wonder if that's a big part of why the environmental lobby tends to be some of the worst offenders here.
They don’t, actually. My boss at DDHQ, Scott, used to do projects for the Kochs; he found that none of the interventions worked; they didn’t care and still funded them.
“DDHQ”
If IRA = Irish Republican Army, I can only assume that DDHQ = the Dunkin’ Donuts Headquarters in Canton.
I don't know about their other projects but I looked into their criminal justice stuff and found it pretty well based on data. I don't expect them to be perfect but if they are even producing reports and funding someone to look at efficacy that's a lot better than most small donors.
But I'm curious as to what in particular you are referring to. Because, as I said I don't expect it to make a difference on big ideology issues just on narrow questions. And certainly not on the parts of lobbying the Kochs are doing just for their buisness interests (there the real effectiveness they care about is profit).
Political persuasion efforts
Ohh, I expect that those are cases where they may say they want something but really have some other end they care about. Yes, that's unfortunate and I don't mean to suggest big donors don't also have issues where the policy is a secondary concern. You rarely persuade people on things they are directly invested in but I'm arguing that on points they don't have a strong direct emotional investment in one outcome they are more likely to be influenced by questions of effectiveness a bit more (certainly not always) than the small donors.
So I suspect we just have different standards here. My sense is the small donors voter essentially never responds to questions of effectiveness so even a marginal impact is better.
And the mere existence of the job you spoke of does suggest a modicum of care -- though I wouldn't be at all surprised if they cared more about how it looked to their friends than about effectiveness -- I hardly think big donors are saints.
That's certainly true. However, I think trying to avoid that is asking for too much. If someone's real motivation is that they believe in the right to own guns they may release some statement about how guns are important for keeping your family safe but that's not actually what they care about so you can't expect them to reverse their course because you show thats not true.
What you can hope for is that they face pressure to actually care about effectiveness in doing X.
People want what they want and there will always be conflict there but you can hope to avoid the pure losses where people do things that don't help even achieve what they do want.
Now sometimes it may be the case that what the person wants isn't actually a policy goal. Maybe they just find environmentalism annoying so want to kneecap it for no policy reason whatsoever but often people, especially those with real power to change things, do want policy outcomes and if we can increase the incentive for them to care about effectiveness that's good.
“…you show thats not true”
Except you really can’t show that.
It was an example.
Also, I think the bare claim that guns make people less safe isn't that hard to demonstrate. It's just that the comparison with the world where there were magically no guns in civilian hands isn't the comparison relevant to most debates and people don't see all deaths as equivalent (ppl care if the people being killed are innocents or not).
“…that guns make people less safe isn't that hard to demonstrate”
Of course: that’s pretty clear. But your earlier comment was about “someone,” not “people.”
Ahh, poor wording. I was thinking the "your" was part some sort of generic address to the country and was interpreting it as I replied but I agree that wasn't clear.
Of course .. and your point is? That seems like caring a great deal about the effectiveness of outcomes. They really want to succeed in ensuring policies help the buisness be profitable. It's not always best to advertise your true goals.
It's not a good goal or one I support but it seems like it's absolutely one where they care about actually achieving a certain outcome effectively.
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In contrast many environmentalists really do care about the planet but yet often don't pick effective ways to achieve that goal.
I expect that they'd do better at it if their money was funnelled through large environmental foundations than in the situation now.
Sure, but people are going to pursue there real motivations and that's a hard thing to change.
However, as the case discussed here about LNG suggests, there is the tragic problem of people who I believe really actually do care about the environment who end up hurting it . We could hope to at least minimize the extent to which that happens and I'm suggesting that if they were incentivized to give their money to some massive "Green Democrats" fund which in turn could dole out the money to whoever it felt was helping the most we'd see less of that unfortunate issue. It's a problem when the individuals deciding where to send the money are donating small amounts so the cost to determine what's best and convince others they really believe that (eg aren't secretly just fans of natural gas companies) is too high to incentivize them to actually pick the best outcome.
I really liked this article. Usually, I just like MY's quick wit, good writing, and hot takes on current events. But, this took research and deep understanding. If losing the mailbag means more of this, great. (But, honestly, not sure MY can keep this up. I can't imagine this being a weekly feature in addition to everything else he does).
I have noticed three big problems in the American EV market that are not inherent to EVs as a product:
1. There are not a lot of SUVs and trucks available, limiting choice of what type of car you want. A lot of the EVs marketed as SUVs are more like large sedans. I also don't think there is an affordable midsized truck with decent range.
2. A ton of EVs have terrible range, limiting choice. Some EVs have good range (Rivian has an SUV and a truck with 350 miles), so idk what the limiting factor is there.
3. Dealers don't understand EVs. It's hard to get questions answered and I wonder how much EVs get pushed vs ICE cars.
It seems to me like the big 3 are still learning what works in the EV market and how to build these cars, and just haven't figured it out yet.
Well the problem with SUVs and trucks is that weight and boxiness hurts your battery life resulting in extremely heavy batteries to compensate. Towing and trucky things also kills range. Hybrids probably a better idea for anyone who uses their truck as a truck, see the trains that use hybrid tech for freight.
As far as the target markets, the rich people who are still okay with sedans and crossovers can go find a Tesla. Trying to make an affordable car for the masses is a problem for Big 3 trying to ramp things up while Tesla is still in the space.
I hear that but hasn't Rivian shown that electric SUVs and trucks can be just as good as ICE?
"Switching to Tow mode comes with some ominous foreshadowing, as the R1T's indicated range disappears, instantly going from 270 miles to 103. So, for all intents and purposes, cross-country trailering with the R1T is like trying to go on a road trip in a Mazda MX-30, a car with 70 miles of range at 75 mph."
Apparently very much not. That range estimate might even be high.
#3 Dealerships are pretty heavily incentivized not to push EV options. Most dealerships make almost half of their profits from parts and services. EV's don't require much regular service other than tire rotations and possible body work until they need a new battery. ICE cars are just a better long term deal for the dealership.
There's a reason why car dealers very quickly Made The List of rent seekers...
Sigh, such a long list.
That's interesting. I wonder if that's why Tesla and Rivian have different dealership models.
For anyone who's not familiar with Aptera (https://aptera.us/vehicle/), I recommend checking them out (and not just because I'm an investor). They're a startup nearing production, with multiple, well-designed prototypes (an earlier version was demoed by Jay Leno) that has great potential as a second car for families, or a primary vehicle for DINKs and singles. The best part is that it's not only electric (with built-in solar charging), but it's actually much more efficient and the team has made a serious effort to re-imagine what's really necessary in terms of vehicle design and structure, which allows it to overcome the range anxiety trap that usually leads to a (often-wasted) weight spiral in most conventional EVs.
Any impartial analyses showing its a good investment?
Short answer: no. Automotive manufacturing is capital intensive, and as discussed throughout this thread, the EV market seems to be struggling recently. That being said, Aptera has survived over the last 4+ years where many other EV start-ups have folded, and they have a distinctive niche mostly (if not entirely) to themselves, with a lot of passionate hopeful future drivers (they just closed a round of $20M+ crowdfunding), a group in which I count myself. If you're interested, here's two videos from last year discussing Aptera's investment prospects, from a channel that covers Aptera enthusiastically (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5I5uLoM9Do), but also critically (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoJs-DrNI94).
For ACTUAL good investments, I rely on my portfolio of aerospace/defense ETFs to get back my small share of the billions we're giving to Ukraine/Israel/Taiwan (j/k, I'm mostly supportive), as well as to get some of the base defense budget that goes to multi-billion dollar over-budget underperforming procurement boondoggles (https://navy-matters.blogspot.com/2023/09/ford-costs.html) and billions in unaccounted for spare parts (https://taskandpurpose.com/news/army-equipment-storage-problems/), but definitely no to habitable barracks (https://taskandpurpose.com/military-life/army-general-isenhower-mold-barracks-discipline-adulting/) or Congressionally mandated incentive pays (https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2024/02/15/dod-slow-rolling-fair-special-pays-for-guard-reserve-advocates-say/).
Looks cool, but I’d want to see crash test results before buying.
Climate change is all well and good but I read “pandas are coming back” and thought this means they finally found a way to make them reproduce properly and increase their population in the wild ! What a disappointment to discover this was actually about them coming back *to the us* via strings attached Chinese diplomacy! Sad.
Also, bbmb (bring back mailbag).