Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 178

trade-offs

It seems to me that human beings in general, and Americans in particular, stubbornly resist the idea that life often presents us with trade-offs — opportunity costs, as the economists say, or incompatible goods. Isaiah Berlin says something especially hateful to most of us when he asserts that “Some among the Great Goods cannot live together…. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.” 

I’ve reflected on this point over the past few days as silly people have insisted that the state of Texas should obviously have prepared its power-generation plants for every eventuality: Arctic cold as well as Saharan heat.

The silliness here is twofold. First, it’s practically unfeasible: the financial cost for Texas to build its infrastructure around the possibility of Chicago-like winters is just as outrageous as would be the cost for Seattle to prepare its infrastructure for Texas-like summers. 

But there’s a second and deeper point to be made: What if there are circumstances in which it’s actually not possible to prepare for every possible eventuality, because the opportunity cost of preparing for one extreme is failure to prepare for the other? 

See, for instance, this Wall Street Journal article on the design of Texas’s power plants: 

The state’s plants are designed to shed heat instead of keeping it in, which helps in hot months but can be detrimental during cold snaps, according to researchers at the Electric Power Research Institute. But on Thursday Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who criticized the performance of his state’s grid operator this week and called for changes amid a public outcry, recommended that Texas plants winterize their equipment and that the state should supply the funding to make it happen…. 

Given the state’s normally warm climate, not all of Texas’ power plants are fully equipped with winterization measures — protections plants use to prevent freezing of pipes, sensors, motors and other components. In northern climates, many winterization measures are permanent and plants are housed within entire building structures for protection from the cold. But experts said that because of Texas’ summer heat, plant operators need to keep components exposed.

What if sometimes you have to choose between two goods? What if you actually can’t have both? Wow, that would really suck. Therefore it cannot be true. 

Why do Democrats want to forgive student debt but not, sa...

Why do Democrats want to forgive student debt but not, say, the debt that someone incurs by buying a truck that enables him to have his own home-renovation business? Because college graduates tend to vote Democratic and people who do home renovation tend not to. It’s the same principle that has Ron DeSantis vaccinating people who are likely to vote for him.

Bandcamp should be Substack for musicians

I’m sure someone else has written this, but it’s on my mind, so…

I’m waiting and hoping for some major musical artist to say, “Screw this. I’m taking my music off all of the streaming services, and instead will sell it from my website and on Bandcamp.” I don’t understand why this hasn’t happened already.

Of course, many artists don’t have the choice as long as they are under contract with a record label, but there must be some artists of stature who are between contracts and who could therefore make this move. Maybe the economics aren’t what I think they are, but everything I’ve read about the minuscule payments the streaming services offer musicians suggests that artists who already have a following stand a very good chance at least of breaking even by selling rather than streaming; and moreover could set an example for others that might lead to a breaking of the streaming services’ hold on music.

And I say advisedly “hold upon music” as opposed to “hold upon artists,” because as has been amply documented, the way that the streaming services work has exerted enormous power on every aspect of the songmaking process, down to the details of composition. Just listen to this BBC radio documentary for the ugly, ugly details. For instance, because listeners have to stick with a song for 30 seconds on Spotify in order for the artists to get paid, some writers are putting the choruses at the beginning of songs in order to grab people’s attention right away. The very idea of a song building slowly to a climax, or taking an unexpected turn partway through, has become a financial impossibility. In other words, the streaming services are Taylorizing everything about the music industry, which was headed in a Taylorized direction anyway. (Seventy-two songwriters worked on the assembly line called Beyoncé’s Lemonade.) 

And yet, with Bandcamp and, in a somewhat different way, SoundCloud, we have options to do things differently — and thereby to preserve the integrity of musical creation. Bandcamp in particular is well-positioned to do for musicians what Substack is doing for journalists: offer them a way to escape a broken system full of roadblocks and perverse incentives. I’m really hoping that a musical act with a big following takes a chance on one of these options. It will definitely be better for the quality of music and in the long run, therefore, better for listeners like me. Even if it costs me a little more money. 

the next wave

  We’re spending much of the day harvesting snow so we’ll be able to flush our toilets when the inevitable comes: a period without water. When the thaw arrives, probably sometime tomorrow, frozen pipes will start to burst. As we near 32º I’ll turn off water to our property and hope for the best. The warming will be gradual, which I hope will help.

The situation itself has been difficult but obviously survivable, a condition that will continue if we lose our water for a while. I’m sure there are people in charge of various things here in Texas who could have and should have done their jobs better, but this is as close to a black-swan event as one is ever likely to see, so let’s please be reasonable in our criticisms.

But who am I kidding? The most simply annoying element of the whole situation has been the constant noise of axes grinding among the politicians and commentariat, whether the lefties gleefully mocking Texas as a “third-world nation” — their rhetoric is indistinguishable from Trump’s, with his sneers at “shithole countries” — or the right-wingers blaming everything on wind turbines and/or Joe Biden’s powers of weather manipulation. (Between Biden attacking Texas with his crack team of polar vortices and the Rothschilds wielding their cleverly targeted space lasers, these sure are hard times for solid Christian folk like me.) The greatest frustration I have with American axe-grinding is the way everyone always grinds the same axe, grinds it to absolute powder, then grabs a clone of it and starts grinding that. For partisans on both sides, every story has a moral and every story has exactly the same moral. And they never stop chanting it, transfixed as they are by their politico-verbal OCD.

Okay, time to fetch more snow.

two quotations on journalism

Michael Brendan Dougherty:

[James] Poulos holds that the old mass-media mandarins are trying to “encode” their ethical dreams into the new digital-media world, before it is too late. One can see this most clearly in the moral panic about social media and which speakers get a platform on it. The New York Times doesn’t report on what is being said on new social-media networks such as Clubhouse; it reports on what shouldn’t be said there….

The new digital media has its own biases. It also has elements of fantasy. But its currency and legitimacy — its value as a business — comes not from ethical dreams, but the secure database management of events, which it interprets as truths. Many Silicon Valley founders and thinkers have intuited this and tried to make themselves fall in love with the idea of hard and unpleasant truths — the things that cannot be uttered ethically at places like the New York Times.

The conflict between one clerisy and another is just beginning.

Freddie deBoer: 

I try to avoid looking at Media Twitter as much as I can; spending more than a few minutes in that space leaves one needing to decontaminate as if recently exposed to radiation. So I don’t know for sure if this is true. But I’m going to make the easiest bet in the world and say that media Twitter loves [Cade] Metz’s [hit] piece [on Scott Alexander]. And they loved it because, again, Alexander is not one of them. He’s not in the New York media social rat race, so he’s not a part of their culture. He’s not on Slack. He doesn’t tell the same tired, shitty jokes that journalists make on Twitter literally from the minute they get up to the minute they go to bed. He’s not performatively filling his feed with only women writers and artists, because he’s just not that interested in cishet men anymore, man. He doesn’t make references to whatever shithouse bar in Nolita media people used to go to after work to snort coke. He doesn’t use Twitter as an outlet to scream his dedication to BIPOC to the world, knowing this will look good on his resume. He’s not a thirty-three year old white person who speaks like a Black teenager, like half the journalists on Twitter. And most importantly, he jumped the line. He didn’t get paid $250 a week by Refinery79 for 60 hours of work for two years to climb the latter. He had the audacity to think that he could circumvent the system and challenge the official narratives…. 

Again: Alexander is an outsider. His readers don’t pay the Times for access to their shitty recipes. He’s probably never heard of Clubhouse. Unlike everyone on Media Twitter, he’s got a real job. He’s a lost cause. They will always hate him because he’s indifferent to climbing their rancid social hierarchy, the thing they care about the most in the whole world.

cold Texas

Some years ago, when I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s outstanding Science in the Capital trilogy — later condensed into a single volume called Green Earth — I thought that Robinson deftly executed a bold move in setting the second volume in a Washington D.C. beset by unprecedented cold. After all, might that not confirm the suspicions of certain skeptics that climate change is just a hoax, that “global warming” isn’t happening at all? But Robinson wanted to make the point that while climate change certainly will mean a gradual warming of the entire earth, it will also make the weather all over the earth considerably less predictable and often more extreme. 

Over the past couple of days, something else unprecedented has happened: Each of the 254 counties of Texas — yeah, Texas has 254 counties — has been under a winter storm warning, all the way down to the Rio Grande. My house was without electricity — and therefore without heat — for two days, as the temperature dropped yesterday morning to 5º F. My wife and I closed off the one room where we have a fireplace and sheltered there, with our long-haired dog who was delighted by the cooler temp. The cellular phone network (though not the data network) stayed up, so we were able talk to friends and get some extra firewood, which required some driving on slushy roads and through one intersection slicked with ice from a broken water main. We stayed warm enough, though the rest of our house was literally freezing.

We have a small battery-powered generator that’s useful primarily for charging phones and running lights, and we have some battery-powered lanterns, so we could see where we were going and stay in touch with family on the phone. We were told by Fox News-watching family members that Texas suffered from a failure of wind turbines, but that was the least of our worries, as Joshua D. Rhodes has explained. A few turbines may have frozen up, but the overwhelming cause of the power shortage was the failure of natural-gas-fueled power plants, some of which were under maintenance when the storm hit and some of which failed because their gas wells froze. Texas already generates more wind power than any other state — a quarter of the nation’s total — but we’d have been better off if we had invested more heavily in wind, not less.

(UPDATE: More on this from the Texas Tribune. A noteworthy item there: It’s standard practice for power plants in Texas to undergo maintenance in the winter, because the demand for power is so much less in our mild winters than in our torrid summers.) 

I’ll be very interested in the coming investigations of the failure points here, but I don’t expect anything from the ones pursued by legislators because they will simply be exercises in blaming and posturing. (Nothing and nobody in America could possibly be more completely useless than our elected representatives.) The explorations pursued by the energy industry will be of infinitely more value. They will probably suggest some changes in policy and procedure, but I think we all need to be adult enough to realize that it’s impossible for the energy sector — or any other organizations, institutions, and businesses — to prepare for every weather-based eventuality. What to Expect When You’re Expecting Anything and Everything would have to be, paradoxically enough, a very short book. 

Our power is back for now, but maybe not for long — we’ve been warned to expect “rolling outages” for a while — so I think I’d better hit the “Publish” button. 

mendacity on Eighth Avenue

The other day I posted what I thought was a rather witty little aside in which I said that the New York Times might have more interesting material than Fox News but might also have lower journalistic standards. It was meant as a joke, because, of course, Fox News doesn’t have any journalistic standards. But now that I’ve read the Times’s smear of Scott Alexander and Slate Star Codex, I’m not sure that I see my post as a joke any more. It is astonishingly dishonest from beginning to end. What’s not an outright lie is a wild distortion; what isn’t a wild distortion is an undisguised attempt to mislead. It is a festival of mendacity from beginning to end. 

If you want more details, Scott Aaronson has them. (And Aaronson doesn’t think as badly of the hit job as I do.) Aaronson’s key point:

The trouble with the NYT piece is not that it makes any false statements [ED: I think it does], but just that it constantly insinuates nefarious beliefs and motives, via strategic word choices and omission of relevant facts that change the emotional coloration of the facts that it does present. I repeatedly muttered to myself, as I read: “dude, you could make anything sound shady with this exact same rhetorical toolkit!”

Jesse Singal has more on the piece’s straightforward dishonesty. And here’s Scott Alexander’s own response.  

Alasdair MacIntyre once called the New York Times “the parish magazine of self-congratulatory liberal Enlightenment.” Now, despite having some of the best columnists in America, the paper’s reporting side is just the Fox News of the semi-literate left. 

Kafkaesque

Is it just because I was teaching Kafka last week that I keep having these Kafkaesque experiences? Or is it the state of our civilization?

Example A: I needed to make an appointment with my primary care doctor, so I went to the website to make an appointment online. I received the message that I am not “certified” for booking online, though I have done so before. So I tried to find the hours during which I can call to make an appointment, and saw this information: “Call our office to find our current opening hours.” I did, and got a recorded message: “We are currently closed. Please call back when the office is open.” Click. I felt like Joseph K.

Example B — and this one’s a doozy: At Baylor we’re all doing weekly covid tests, which is a very good thing, and we’ve been sent emails that link to a webpage where we are told “Go to this page and fill out the form to sign up for a time.” So I went to the page and discovered that all of the times, forever, are “not available.” Hmmm. I tried the page in different browsers, on different devices: same result everywhere. I wrote to our HR department to tell them what happened and ask how I am supposed to book a test. Five days later I got an email message asking me to log into our new “portal” to find my answer. The answer, as it turned out, was just an email, but an email that they make you go to the portal to read. So let’s recap: They send me an email telling me that I have am email that I cannot read in my email client but must log into a “portal” to read.

Okay then. I read the reply, and it said, “Go to this page and fill out the form to sign up for a time.” That is, whoever replied to me copy-pasted from the webpage whose inaccurate information had led me to write in the first place.

So I made a phone call. Wait, hold, transfer, etc. Explained the situation to a new person. She said, “The message you received gave you inaccurate advice, I’m really sorry.”

… Okay. So it’s not just me, nobody can book a covid test on that page?

“That’s right.”

So maybe you all should delete that page and correct the website, don’t you think?

“I’ll make a note of that. Can I do anything else to help you?”

Yes, you can tell me how to book my weekly covid test.

“Oh, you don’t have to book it, you can just walk in.”

weighed in the balance

I have never watched Fox News, but I used to read the New York Times. I therefore view both from a distance. But based on what I’ve seen, it seems pretty clear that I would find more to interest me in the Times, but Fox News has slightly higher standards of journalistic ethics. 

two weather forecasts

Accessed right now. I know which one I hope is correct.