Very cool thoughts thanks. One comment, on space necessary for renewables, numbers are better than adjectives, so in the case of the US, some 1% of the land surface would be needed, to compare to 41% of it used for meat production.
Great comparison. If we can get lab grown meat off the ground, it should allow us to cut that livestock and lifestick feed land use way down and leave plenty of space for wind and solar.
A big challenge is that the US is tied to a corporate utility model for producing and distributing electricity. The current structure needs power generated at a central location and distributed to users. The big revolution is going to be neighborhood power generation linked in a balancing grid that provides additional power as needed. This will result in less land demand for both production and transmission as a significant percentage of urban power demand can be generated within the urban area itself.
That’s not at all the study Klein is citing here. On a recent episode of his podcast, “The Single Best Guide to Decarbonization I’ve Heard”, he has on Jesse Jenkins from the Princeton net ZERO lab to talk about their incredibly comprehensive Net Zero America report, which attempts to clarify exactly how much US land area would be needed for a 100% decarbonized energy infrastructure.
The headline number is that solar and wind infrastructure would take up a physical area equivalent to Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts put together. And this is coming from a huge booster of renewable tech and decarbonization (whose ideology, by the way, I share also). I just think we should be honest about this, because numbers like “1% of us land area” are just wrong. We shouldn’t be gaslighting opponents to make our argument work.
**Unless you expect extraordinary innovation in the energy density / design density of solar and wind farms to occur in the next 10 years (like, tech innovation at an order of magnitude faster than the incredible innovation we’ve had in this space over the last 15 years).
Actually 1% should be plenty. Haven't listened to that podcast, nor have I done the sum for the states mentioned for their total surface are compared to total U.S. But the numbers are quite simple, and easy to compute.
Commercial panels are now at 20% efficiency, so 200 W/m2 of panels. You have then some corrections for % of farm space actually covered with panels (50%), load factor (ratio of power produced to rated power, about 20% for US farm - google NREL solar capacity factor for checks), then, U.S. power use and U.S. total land area. Pasting below if you want to check.
1% or a few % is what's expected in countries with less sun and more population density.
Panel efficiency (W/m2) 200 W/m2 of panel
Space of farm covered with panels 50 % of space used
Resulting mean power per m2 in farm 100 W/m2 installed on average
Capacity factor of panels 20 % capacity factor
Resulting average power per m2 20 W/m2 average production year-round
US electricity consumption 3930 terawatt hours
Mean power use in US 448 gigawatts
Farm area necessary for mean power 22 416 153 320 m2
22416 km2
Surface area of U.S. 9 826 675 km2
% of surface needed for current power use 0.228115342 %
"But even if he just continues on his current course, it’s hard for me to see, say, Democratic politicians and staffers embracing Twitter as wholeheartedly in 2024 as they did in 2020. The fact that it is so thoroughly Musk’s robs it of the illusion of being, in any real way, a demos."
It never was a demos, similarly to how Twitter never operated as a metaphorical "town square". The enumerable list of issues surrounding content and moderation alone are hugely problematic. Conservative voices censored, child pornography not censored. Erratic moderation. Moderation that was highly politicized. The great outcry from legacy 20th century media over the last month pertaining to Musk's acquisition is due to the loss of a vehicle for controlling the liberal narrative. When the NYT and Washington Post and the Atlantic and MSNBC, et. al., all coordinate to attack Musk personally, suggest Twitter is dying (it isn't), advertisers will flee (they are not), blue checks will move to Mastodon (let's check back in on that one in six months or so), it simply reeks of desperation. And the silence from legacy media on the suppression of laptop story, or of Covid "misinformation", the suppression of discussion on the lab-leak theory, etc. And what is really telling is that federal agencies, such as the CDC and CISA over at DHS, colluded to suppress speech on social media platforms, such as Twitter.
So I ask, where is the NYT reporting on this story? Where is the ACLU? If the liberal or progressive news reporting infrastructure or NGOs can't be bothered to defend free speech in the 21st century, then who will?
What's really eating a lot of conservatives is that the public is mostly "meh" — which only stands to reason, since people who use Twitter a lot place much more importance on it than the average citizen.
Did you even read the three articles you posted? Let's walk through the NYT "coverage" of the events.
1. The first article you sent mentioned the details of the Twitter censorship in a solitary paragraph.
2. The second was full of smears and loaded language.
3. The third, is well enlightening, to say the least. Let us take a look at the language of the article as it focuses on the "Twitter files" and Mr. Taibbi to see if we can play, spot the propaganda:
A. "It was, on the surface, a typical example of reporting the news: a journalist obtains internal documents from a major corporation, shedding light on a political dispute that flared in the waning days of the 2020 presidential race."
By beginning the article with the caveat, "on the surface", the author is instilling doubt into reporting, as if this is simply fake news or disinformation.
B. "The so-called Twitter Files, released Friday evening by the independent journalist Matt Taibbi, set off a firestorm among pundits, media ethicists and lawmakers in both parties."
Why are the files "so-called"? Why are we debating the name of what was reported?
C. "The tempest began when Mr. Musk teased the release of internal documents that he said would reveal the story behind Twitter’s 2020 decision to restrict posts linking to a report in the New York Post about Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son, Hunter."
Why is there a "tempest" if the reporting is factual? Who is creating the "tempest", the reporter or those reacting to the reporting?
D. "Mr. Musk, who has accused tech companies of censorship, then pointed readers to the account of Mr. Taibbi, an iconoclast journalist who shares some of Mr. Musk’s disdain for the mainstream news media."
Note the meaning of an iconoclast, i.e. a person who attacks cherished beliefs or institutions, as an ad hominem attack that does not address the issues or facts raised by the journalist. It is also an appeal to authority, "cherished institutions", e.g. the legacy corporate media, which is a logical fallacy.
E. "Mr. Musk and Mr. Taibbi framed the exchanges as evidence of rank censorship and pernicious influence by liberals. Many others — even some ardent Twitter critics — were less impressed, saying the exchanges merely showed a group of executives earnestly debating how to deal with an unconfirmed news report that was based on information from a laptop that appeared to be Hunter Biden’s."
Given that the FBI had possession of the laptop in August 2020, the repoair store owner reported the laptop as "abandoned" and the argument that Twitter executives raised to ban the NYPost's account temporarily was due to Twitter's prohibition of tweets containing "hacked materials" it is hard to see how the news reporting was "unconfirmed" when it was published in October 2020.
F. "Former Twitter executives, who have lamented Mr. Musk’s chaotic stewardship of the company, cited the documents’ release as yet another sign of recklessness."
"chaotic, "recklessness". Do you see the pattern here? Also relevance.
G. "Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, said that publicizing unredacted documents — some of which included the names and email addresses of Twitter officials — was “a fundamentally unacceptable thing to do” and placed people “in harm’s way.”"
. . .
H. "The central role of Mr. Taibbi, a polarizing figure in journalism circles, set off its own uproar."
Is calling a journalist, "polarizing", a positive or negative thing. Again, ad hominem.
I could go on.
So, what is the takeaway here? What is eating a lot of woke liberals is that Twitter is no longer censoring conservative voices, so the propaganda machine at the New York Times goes into overdrive to counter any journalism that counters their narrative. As most journalist are liberals, at least at the legacy corporate news media outlets, an independent journalist like Taibbi, or Weiss, or the substack crowd, or writers on alternative new platforms like the City-Journal where Chris Rufo writes, the Daily Caller, Unherd, etc. are a threat to the establishment.
Because they can tell there version of the truth and in doing so, make the commentators at the Times and the Post and other legacy corporate media look bad and untrustworthy. Which they can be at times.
Agree. I don’t like “the coverage” either. Because I’m an adult and don’t need to be spoon fed my attitudes about what happens. The NYTimes is a paper I’ll never read again, except to see what the arrogant self styled elite class wishes the great unwashed to believe.
Thanks for this. Wokesters can’t even detect state propaganda because they think they are part of the ruling class. They’re not. Neither are the useful idiots who are paid a pittance to shovel their views down our throats. Having been on the planet awhile, I know what reporting the news looks like. This is an editorial disguised as a news story.
On decarbonization, I don't know why Ezra's talking about land being covered with solar panels when there's suitable space on rooftops with existing infrastructure in place. Secondarily, solar is fine as an adjunct power source but economically it' doesn't make sense--you have to buy the panels and then you have to buy the battery storage (to stabilize it's erratic nature). That's even more lithium to be mined and the dirty little secret no one talks about is there's not nearly enough Lithium on the earth to fully decarbonize. Solid state batteries or other future solutions with more Abundant (snark) materials may ameliorate this but my vote for now is to re-embrace nukes and getting building SMRs--constant and green energy. That and for God's sake quit eating so much beef---not only is cattle production sucking up half of CA's prescious water it's contributing greenhouse gasses on a scale with transportation. Take a drive through the Imperial and Colorado River Valleys and on through Arizona's fertile belts--alfalfa and hay inhaling scant Colorado River water under the blistering desert sun.
I agree, he like other progressive abundance advocates are not able to admit that cheap available cleaner energy is what abundance needs: more nuclear power, more fracking for natural gas to replace coal & biomass, less wasting lithium for grid/house storage when it is needed for mobile uses - and requiring/subsidizing full battery electric vehicles when the same number of batteries can power five times as many plug-in hybrid vehicles and reduce more CO2 that way.
The EV-versus-hybrid thing is an issue where thinking on the margin genuinely isn't necessarily the right choice due to the perfect actually *being* the enemy of the good here.
On the margin, replacing 5 full-ICE vehicles with 5 priuses is almost certainly a great play. But that also has significant path-dependent downstream effects that leave us needing to support legacy investments in a dead-end carbon emitting technology (and a significant group of people with a vested economic interest in not letting those legacy investments become stranded assets) 20 years down the road - an issue that isn't necessarily present if we bite the bullet an go full EV for a higher upfront cost but a lower legacy burden.
The reality is that in much of the western US (east of the Sierra and Cascades) through the plains states full EV is not possible, perhaps ever. You are not going to truck the huge windmill blades and towers into where the wind really does blow in the west with EV's. Have you ever witnessed windmill blades as the largest Oversized Load ever seen in your life? It takes the largest of special purpose diesel tractors to haul this. And the massive coal and oil and container trains that move throughout the western US are all Diesel (w/ electric drive for the 0rpm torque). The common saying at group meetings (at a DOE National Lab) on a large hydrogen energy project (using hydrogen boranes) when we had yet another mediocre experimental result, was nature had perfected hydrogen storage and it was hydrocarbons. It seems unlikely that for some uses, like aviation, long-haul remote transport, heating in cold climates, .... we will be able to eliminate hydrocarbons. I think about my high-end backpacking stoves, will EV's ever replace hydrocarbon stoves in this arena or high-altitude climbing? No.
I've seen in scientific communities arguments that to get around this problem, electric vehicles might one day include trolley poles for highway driving. Yes, like the buses in San Francisco and Seattle or like the Delorean in the 1955 Hill Valley in "Back to the Future."
It's actually ancient technology but would require redesign for smaller vehicles. A big rig would be relatively easier since the technology is already used for buses, vehicles with similar weight, length and power requirements.
The batteries will exist already. They will be in EV cars. The chargers and cars can be programmed to charge in off-peak hours and provide storage for demand during peak hours and night-time. They could be programmed to never go below a half-charge in the battery so you can easily do a commute the next day even if the battery has not been fully recharged. You could press a button that says the battery is unavailable if you need to do a long road trip the next day. Many cars spend a lot of time parked, often for days at a time. A car could become a profit center if charged with off-peak grid electricity or your own solar panels and then sell power back into the grid at peak demand at a higher price than it cost to charge.
That sounds promising, maybe with solid state batteries as they can handle more discharges. We'll still need power plants for heavy lifting though--like running the CA Aqueduct pumps over the Tehachapiis or steel making plants.
We're 10,000 years past the glacial minimum and temps should be neutral or cooling; instead they have taken a steep trajectory upwards. That's fine if you don't agree with meteorologists, but what will you do when the cheap oil runs out? We have about 50 years of proven reserves and I can guarantee the last decades of that supply will skyrocket in price if we don't begin fuel diversification. It will take a decade just to get some this stuff running so I vote showing up to the race on time.
I can never understand talking about "abundance" and "decarbonization" and "building" without a single mention of using the clean energy that is 2,000,000x more dense than coal and for which we have billions of years of supply, nuclear fission. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> I’m halfway surprised Meta hasn’t opened up a barebones clone for people to cluster around.
Isn't Facebook quite similar to Twitter? There's a news feed, posts, ability to share images, reshare, etc. Guess I'm showing my cards by asking this (not a Twitter user) but what would be different about it? A mode where all posts are public by default and length is even more aggressively capped?
I guess the reason there isn't another Twitter on the horizon is that running such a site really sucks. Zuckerberg clearly burned out on social media years ago, hence retreating into the metaverse. Everyone is out to get you, especially activists/advertisers/activist advertisers who won't be satisfied no matter how much you spend on moderation/censorship - it's a financial black hole that can easily suck up more than 100% of your profits if you let it. That seems to be what happened to Twitter, which has never been financially attractive and whose shareholders got lucky with the timing of the Musk deal.
Why would anyone sign up for that? I have the technical skills to build something like Twitter and have recruited developer teams in the past, but there's no way I'd want to create a Twitter competitor even if Twitter itself went down in flames completely. I guess if Twitter does go bankrupt someone will do it anyway, but more likely there's going to be a fragmentation across several services openly committed to hyper-liberalism backed by philanthropists, so the vexing problem of making money can be ignored, and you face less of a problem with activists if the whole product was created to please them from the start. But these competitors won't be able to secure a large userbase and those who are on it will find it unsatisfying, as they'll rapidly become dominated by choir preaching and, in the absence of a wider cross-section of society to dunk on, intra-tribal fighting (Mastodon seems to have already gone that way).
Could be wrong though. I never used Twitter but thoroughly enjoy Substack. The return of long-form writing can only be a good thing.
I think the problem with any form of internet communication media is that there's a carrying capacity for being able to carry on a conversation, and the speed and near zero cost of transmission of information via the internet quickly overwhelms that capacity.
No form of internet communication is immune to this. It's happening with TikTok, Facebook and Twitter now. It has happened with blogs and newspaper comment boards. It's a longstanding problem on YouTube comments. It famously happened with Usenet newsgroups, which inspired the "eternal September" meme (i.e., Usenet veterans pinpoint the downfall of Usenet to the day AOL opened its newsgroup gateway to its horde of free-trial disk accounts; all sense of community and decorum broke down from then on).
What makes Substack high-quality and what makes social media unnerving comes down to specific interest vs. general interest and self-sorting communities vs. general communities. When someone like Noah launches a Substack and intends to give a narrow focus on economics, and occasionally things like geopolitics (e.g., Ukraine), this kind of works as a filter as it might deter someone without a working knowledge of or interest in economics from participating in conversations. You have a smaller group of commenters, but even with real-world differences there's enough of a common ground to set norms and boundaries.
This does not happen with general communities. On mass-appeal social media like Facebook and Twitter, writer Charlie Warzel calls the phenomenon "context collapse" -- there is no time, no distance and no measurement. You enable subject matter experts to be in direct competition with ignorant haters; facts, falsehoods and feelings compete side by side for mind share the way Coke and Pepsi compete for market share; and these fights all occur within a normative vacuum.
The only way to stop this context collapse is not to provide the conditions to let it occur in the first place.
But what does that mean concretely? That's why I keep coming back to length. It's crude, but even if you look at Substack or general blogging it's somewhat Twitter-like in that there are people posting their thoughts, people replying with similar-sized comments, a notion of following etc. The main thing lacking I guess is resharing and the ability to @mention people. Maybe those are fundamental. But it feels like the primary determinant of decorum, values and so on is length. On Twitter, complex thoughts don't fit. On blogs they do.
Newspapers publish long stories, but when they decided to use comments sections like an automated letter to the editor, they become cesspools of hate speech, spam and other forms of crap speech.
Popular Science made a decision to turn off its comments section in 2013. And this is a magazine with a niche in scientific developments, not a general interest site like a newspaper or social media. It posted a long explanation why: https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-09/why-were-shutting-our-comments/
Comments were detracting from the coverage.
Length is also no safeguard toward antisocial behavior coming into or emerging from the community itself. Last year, the rationalist blog Slate Star Codex was the subject of a New York Times profile, and the community lost its wits and retaliated against the writer. All over ... the journalist insisting on the newspaper's policy of using the blogger's full name. (Scott Alexander Siskind, who had not been using his surname to maintain semi-anonymity because of his psychiatry practice, shut down Slate Star Codex but then relaunched the active community on the Substack Astral Codex Ten and turned SSC back on as an archive.)
Length is one facet of maintaining positive discussion, or to borrow a radio communications metaphor, a high-signal message. The others are a narrow range of subject matter, a commenter community that does not grow too large, and a set of moderation guidelines in place to have free discussion with boundaries for the publisher and commenters.
Great; might have liked more mention of Gavin Newsom who knows how power and politics work better than any governor in recent memory. Newsom is actually steering the ship to the extent it can be steered. More attention to him please!
Wonderful.. I’ve been fantasizing about a conversation between my two favorite writers and now here it is. So how about Ezra interviewing Noah in the near future?
I look in on here from time to time for the midwit opinion. You never fail to provide it. Thanks to you and human grease-stain Klein for the entertainment.
My question to you or Ezra Klein is: in which areas does the government have an advantage over non-government actors, and why?
Many people, including economists, quickly respond with "public goods" or "higher risk" activities - but those arguments don't seem to me to hold up to scrutiny.
So many words. So little insight. Klein hides his true progressive urges (Vox is as far loony left as it gets) in a cascade of convoluted I’m not sures that betray his own seeming convictions. Progressives remain yucky. Lofty utopian goals, and no way to accomplish them without destroying the American system that has allowed them their voice. There is a flabbiness that pervades this interview and makes it not only hard to read, but also difficult to comprehend.
> How do the costs of all this construction not just fall on those without the voice to oppose them?
Maybe we need an explicit policy that requires the costs to fall on those who oppose the loudest? (Kind of trolling here, but only kind of... this idea has some nice game-theoretic properties to curb the excesses of NIMBYs and the like.)
Could have the would-be builder declare up front how much they expect each month of delays to cost them, with a proportional deposit (to discourage overstating such costs), then if some NIMBY raises objections which are ultimately rejected as frivolous, they have to pay for the resulting delays - money to be split between the actual builder and the inspecting agency.
Obvious potential downside would be a chilling effect on legitimate complaints, but that same factor might also help keep activists properly focused on finding ways to fully shut down the projects they consider unacceptable, rather than treating a temporary injunction as the finish line.
Klein's ideas on abundance are very innovative despite the fact that they sound familiar. I hope the progressives are listening. There's this fanatical environmentalism that seems to stop everything.
Very cool thoughts thanks. One comment, on space necessary for renewables, numbers are better than adjectives, so in the case of the US, some 1% of the land surface would be needed, to compare to 41% of it used for meat production.
Great comparison. If we can get lab grown meat off the ground, it should allow us to cut that livestock and lifestick feed land use way down and leave plenty of space for wind and solar.
Various estimates have been made that potentially 50% or more of electricity production could be done using existing suitable roofs for roof-top solar. https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/a-solar-panel-on-every-roof-in-the-us-here-are-the-numbers/
Also, transparent solar panels are starting to be used in skyscrapers which makes downtown cores significant generation centers for the first time since manufactured gas plants and coal fired power plants existed in the hearts of cities: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/09/transparent-solar-panel-windows/#:~:text=Solar%20windows%20look%20like%20regular,square%20metres%20of%20glass%20surface.
A big challenge is that the US is tied to a corporate utility model for producing and distributing electricity. The current structure needs power generated at a central location and distributed to users. The big revolution is going to be neighborhood power generation linked in a balancing grid that provides additional power as needed. This will result in less land demand for both production and transmission as a significant percentage of urban power demand can be generated within the urban area itself.
That’s not at all the study Klein is citing here. On a recent episode of his podcast, “The Single Best Guide to Decarbonization I’ve Heard”, he has on Jesse Jenkins from the Princeton net ZERO lab to talk about their incredibly comprehensive Net Zero America report, which attempts to clarify exactly how much US land area would be needed for a 100% decarbonized energy infrastructure.
The headline number is that solar and wind infrastructure would take up a physical area equivalent to Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts put together. And this is coming from a huge booster of renewable tech and decarbonization (whose ideology, by the way, I share also). I just think we should be honest about this, because numbers like “1% of us land area” are just wrong. We shouldn’t be gaslighting opponents to make our argument work.
**Unless you expect extraordinary innovation in the energy density / design density of solar and wind farms to occur in the next 10 years (like, tech innovation at an order of magnitude faster than the incredible innovation we’ve had in this space over the last 15 years).
Actually 1% should be plenty. Haven't listened to that podcast, nor have I done the sum for the states mentioned for their total surface are compared to total U.S. But the numbers are quite simple, and easy to compute.
Commercial panels are now at 20% efficiency, so 200 W/m2 of panels. You have then some corrections for % of farm space actually covered with panels (50%), load factor (ratio of power produced to rated power, about 20% for US farm - google NREL solar capacity factor for checks), then, U.S. power use and U.S. total land area. Pasting below if you want to check.
1% or a few % is what's expected in countries with less sun and more population density.
Panel efficiency (W/m2) 200 W/m2 of panel
Space of farm covered with panels 50 % of space used
Resulting mean power per m2 in farm 100 W/m2 installed on average
Capacity factor of panels 20 % capacity factor
Resulting average power per m2 20 W/m2 average production year-round
US electricity consumption 3930 terawatt hours
Mean power use in US 448 gigawatts
Farm area necessary for mean power 22 416 153 320 m2
22416 km2
Surface area of U.S. 9 826 675 km2
% of surface needed for current power use 0.228115342 %
The crossover we didn’t know we needed. But the one we deserve.
"But even if he just continues on his current course, it’s hard for me to see, say, Democratic politicians and staffers embracing Twitter as wholeheartedly in 2024 as they did in 2020. The fact that it is so thoroughly Musk’s robs it of the illusion of being, in any real way, a demos."
It never was a demos, similarly to how Twitter never operated as a metaphorical "town square". The enumerable list of issues surrounding content and moderation alone are hugely problematic. Conservative voices censored, child pornography not censored. Erratic moderation. Moderation that was highly politicized. The great outcry from legacy 20th century media over the last month pertaining to Musk's acquisition is due to the loss of a vehicle for controlling the liberal narrative. When the NYT and Washington Post and the Atlantic and MSNBC, et. al., all coordinate to attack Musk personally, suggest Twitter is dying (it isn't), advertisers will flee (they are not), blue checks will move to Mastodon (let's check back in on that one in six months or so), it simply reeks of desperation. And the silence from legacy media on the suppression of laptop story, or of Covid "misinformation", the suppression of discussion on the lab-leak theory, etc. And what is really telling is that federal agencies, such as the CDC and CISA over at DHS, colluded to suppress speech on social media platforms, such as Twitter.
So I ask, where is the NYT reporting on this story? Where is the ACLU? If the liberal or progressive news reporting infrastructure or NGOs can't be bothered to defend free speech in the 21st century, then who will?
>>So I ask, where is the NYT reporting on this story?<<
Do you own a browser that will enable you to use a search engine?
NY Times has covered the Twitter/Musk/Taibbi etc story extensively, as have all the other usual suspects in the MSM (CNN, WaPO, LA Times, etc)
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/technology/elon-musk-twitter-shakeup.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/business/musk-twitter-fauci.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/04/business/media/elon-musk-twitter-matt-taibbi.html
What's really eating a lot of conservatives is that the public is mostly "meh" — which only stands to reason, since people who use Twitter a lot place much more importance on it than the average citizen.
Did you even read the three articles you posted? Let's walk through the NYT "coverage" of the events.
1. The first article you sent mentioned the details of the Twitter censorship in a solitary paragraph.
2. The second was full of smears and loaded language.
3. The third, is well enlightening, to say the least. Let us take a look at the language of the article as it focuses on the "Twitter files" and Mr. Taibbi to see if we can play, spot the propaganda:
A. "It was, on the surface, a typical example of reporting the news: a journalist obtains internal documents from a major corporation, shedding light on a political dispute that flared in the waning days of the 2020 presidential race."
By beginning the article with the caveat, "on the surface", the author is instilling doubt into reporting, as if this is simply fake news or disinformation.
B. "The so-called Twitter Files, released Friday evening by the independent journalist Matt Taibbi, set off a firestorm among pundits, media ethicists and lawmakers in both parties."
Why are the files "so-called"? Why are we debating the name of what was reported?
C. "The tempest began when Mr. Musk teased the release of internal documents that he said would reveal the story behind Twitter’s 2020 decision to restrict posts linking to a report in the New York Post about Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son, Hunter."
Why is there a "tempest" if the reporting is factual? Who is creating the "tempest", the reporter or those reacting to the reporting?
D. "Mr. Musk, who has accused tech companies of censorship, then pointed readers to the account of Mr. Taibbi, an iconoclast journalist who shares some of Mr. Musk’s disdain for the mainstream news media."
Note the meaning of an iconoclast, i.e. a person who attacks cherished beliefs or institutions, as an ad hominem attack that does not address the issues or facts raised by the journalist. It is also an appeal to authority, "cherished institutions", e.g. the legacy corporate media, which is a logical fallacy.
E. "Mr. Musk and Mr. Taibbi framed the exchanges as evidence of rank censorship and pernicious influence by liberals. Many others — even some ardent Twitter critics — were less impressed, saying the exchanges merely showed a group of executives earnestly debating how to deal with an unconfirmed news report that was based on information from a laptop that appeared to be Hunter Biden’s."
Given that the FBI had possession of the laptop in August 2020, the repoair store owner reported the laptop as "abandoned" and the argument that Twitter executives raised to ban the NYPost's account temporarily was due to Twitter's prohibition of tweets containing "hacked materials" it is hard to see how the news reporting was "unconfirmed" when it was published in October 2020.
F. "Former Twitter executives, who have lamented Mr. Musk’s chaotic stewardship of the company, cited the documents’ release as yet another sign of recklessness."
"chaotic, "recklessness". Do you see the pattern here? Also relevance.
G. "Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, said that publicizing unredacted documents — some of which included the names and email addresses of Twitter officials — was “a fundamentally unacceptable thing to do” and placed people “in harm’s way.”"
. . .
H. "The central role of Mr. Taibbi, a polarizing figure in journalism circles, set off its own uproar."
Is calling a journalist, "polarizing", a positive or negative thing. Again, ad hominem.
I could go on.
So, what is the takeaway here? What is eating a lot of woke liberals is that Twitter is no longer censoring conservative voices, so the propaganda machine at the New York Times goes into overdrive to counter any journalism that counters their narrative. As most journalist are liberals, at least at the legacy corporate news media outlets, an independent journalist like Taibbi, or Weiss, or the substack crowd, or writers on alternative new platforms like the City-Journal where Chris Rufo writes, the Daily Caller, Unherd, etc. are a threat to the establishment.
Because they can tell there version of the truth and in doing so, make the commentators at the Times and the Post and other legacy corporate media look bad and untrustworthy. Which they can be at times.
See https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-remains-near-record-low.aspx
Ahh. so you now acknowledge there's been plenty of coverage. You *just don't like* that coverage. Good luck with that.
Agree. I don’t like “the coverage” either. Because I’m an adult and don’t need to be spoon fed my attitudes about what happens. The NYTimes is a paper I’ll never read again, except to see what the arrogant self styled elite class wishes the great unwashed to believe.
Thanks for this. Wokesters can’t even detect state propaganda because they think they are part of the ruling class. They’re not. Neither are the useful idiots who are paid a pittance to shovel their views down our throats. Having been on the planet awhile, I know what reporting the news looks like. This is an editorial disguised as a news story.
On decarbonization, I don't know why Ezra's talking about land being covered with solar panels when there's suitable space on rooftops with existing infrastructure in place. Secondarily, solar is fine as an adjunct power source but economically it' doesn't make sense--you have to buy the panels and then you have to buy the battery storage (to stabilize it's erratic nature). That's even more lithium to be mined and the dirty little secret no one talks about is there's not nearly enough Lithium on the earth to fully decarbonize. Solid state batteries or other future solutions with more Abundant (snark) materials may ameliorate this but my vote for now is to re-embrace nukes and getting building SMRs--constant and green energy. That and for God's sake quit eating so much beef---not only is cattle production sucking up half of CA's prescious water it's contributing greenhouse gasses on a scale with transportation. Take a drive through the Imperial and Colorado River Valleys and on through Arizona's fertile belts--alfalfa and hay inhaling scant Colorado River water under the blistering desert sun.
I agree, he like other progressive abundance advocates are not able to admit that cheap available cleaner energy is what abundance needs: more nuclear power, more fracking for natural gas to replace coal & biomass, less wasting lithium for grid/house storage when it is needed for mobile uses - and requiring/subsidizing full battery electric vehicles when the same number of batteries can power five times as many plug-in hybrid vehicles and reduce more CO2 that way.
The EV-versus-hybrid thing is an issue where thinking on the margin genuinely isn't necessarily the right choice due to the perfect actually *being* the enemy of the good here.
On the margin, replacing 5 full-ICE vehicles with 5 priuses is almost certainly a great play. But that also has significant path-dependent downstream effects that leave us needing to support legacy investments in a dead-end carbon emitting technology (and a significant group of people with a vested economic interest in not letting those legacy investments become stranded assets) 20 years down the road - an issue that isn't necessarily present if we bite the bullet an go full EV for a higher upfront cost but a lower legacy burden.
The reality is that in much of the western US (east of the Sierra and Cascades) through the plains states full EV is not possible, perhaps ever. You are not going to truck the huge windmill blades and towers into where the wind really does blow in the west with EV's. Have you ever witnessed windmill blades as the largest Oversized Load ever seen in your life? It takes the largest of special purpose diesel tractors to haul this. And the massive coal and oil and container trains that move throughout the western US are all Diesel (w/ electric drive for the 0rpm torque). The common saying at group meetings (at a DOE National Lab) on a large hydrogen energy project (using hydrogen boranes) when we had yet another mediocre experimental result, was nature had perfected hydrogen storage and it was hydrocarbons. It seems unlikely that for some uses, like aviation, long-haul remote transport, heating in cold climates, .... we will be able to eliminate hydrocarbons. I think about my high-end backpacking stoves, will EV's ever replace hydrocarbon stoves in this arena or high-altitude climbing? No.
I've seen in scientific communities arguments that to get around this problem, electric vehicles might one day include trolley poles for highway driving. Yes, like the buses in San Francisco and Seattle or like the Delorean in the 1955 Hill Valley in "Back to the Future."
It's actually ancient technology but would require redesign for smaller vehicles. A big rig would be relatively easier since the technology is already used for buses, vehicles with similar weight, length and power requirements.
The batteries will exist already. They will be in EV cars. The chargers and cars can be programmed to charge in off-peak hours and provide storage for demand during peak hours and night-time. They could be programmed to never go below a half-charge in the battery so you can easily do a commute the next day even if the battery has not been fully recharged. You could press a button that says the battery is unavailable if you need to do a long road trip the next day. Many cars spend a lot of time parked, often for days at a time. A car could become a profit center if charged with off-peak grid electricity or your own solar panels and then sell power back into the grid at peak demand at a higher price than it cost to charge.
That sounds promising, maybe with solid state batteries as they can handle more discharges. We'll still need power plants for heavy lifting though--like running the CA Aqueduct pumps over the Tehachapiis or steel making plants.
C02 has never been proven to drive climate.
We're 10,000 years past the glacial minimum and temps should be neutral or cooling; instead they have taken a steep trajectory upwards. That's fine if you don't agree with meteorologists, but what will you do when the cheap oil runs out? We have about 50 years of proven reserves and I can guarantee the last decades of that supply will skyrocket in price if we don't begin fuel diversification. It will take a decade just to get some this stuff running so I vote showing up to the race on time.
Very good interview. Thank you! It helps me to see the situation more clearly!
I can never understand talking about "abundance" and "decarbonization" and "building" without a single mention of using the clean energy that is 2,000,000x more dense than coal and for which we have billions of years of supply, nuclear fission. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> I’m halfway surprised Meta hasn’t opened up a barebones clone for people to cluster around.
Isn't Facebook quite similar to Twitter? There's a news feed, posts, ability to share images, reshare, etc. Guess I'm showing my cards by asking this (not a Twitter user) but what would be different about it? A mode where all posts are public by default and length is even more aggressively capped?
I guess the reason there isn't another Twitter on the horizon is that running such a site really sucks. Zuckerberg clearly burned out on social media years ago, hence retreating into the metaverse. Everyone is out to get you, especially activists/advertisers/activist advertisers who won't be satisfied no matter how much you spend on moderation/censorship - it's a financial black hole that can easily suck up more than 100% of your profits if you let it. That seems to be what happened to Twitter, which has never been financially attractive and whose shareholders got lucky with the timing of the Musk deal.
Why would anyone sign up for that? I have the technical skills to build something like Twitter and have recruited developer teams in the past, but there's no way I'd want to create a Twitter competitor even if Twitter itself went down in flames completely. I guess if Twitter does go bankrupt someone will do it anyway, but more likely there's going to be a fragmentation across several services openly committed to hyper-liberalism backed by philanthropists, so the vexing problem of making money can be ignored, and you face less of a problem with activists if the whole product was created to please them from the start. But these competitors won't be able to secure a large userbase and those who are on it will find it unsatisfying, as they'll rapidly become dominated by choir preaching and, in the absence of a wider cross-section of society to dunk on, intra-tribal fighting (Mastodon seems to have already gone that way).
Could be wrong though. I never used Twitter but thoroughly enjoy Substack. The return of long-form writing can only be a good thing.
I think the problem with any form of internet communication media is that there's a carrying capacity for being able to carry on a conversation, and the speed and near zero cost of transmission of information via the internet quickly overwhelms that capacity.
No form of internet communication is immune to this. It's happening with TikTok, Facebook and Twitter now. It has happened with blogs and newspaper comment boards. It's a longstanding problem on YouTube comments. It famously happened with Usenet newsgroups, which inspired the "eternal September" meme (i.e., Usenet veterans pinpoint the downfall of Usenet to the day AOL opened its newsgroup gateway to its horde of free-trial disk accounts; all sense of community and decorum broke down from then on).
What makes Substack high-quality and what makes social media unnerving comes down to specific interest vs. general interest and self-sorting communities vs. general communities. When someone like Noah launches a Substack and intends to give a narrow focus on economics, and occasionally things like geopolitics (e.g., Ukraine), this kind of works as a filter as it might deter someone without a working knowledge of or interest in economics from participating in conversations. You have a smaller group of commenters, but even with real-world differences there's enough of a common ground to set norms and boundaries.
This does not happen with general communities. On mass-appeal social media like Facebook and Twitter, writer Charlie Warzel calls the phenomenon "context collapse" -- there is no time, no distance and no measurement. You enable subject matter experts to be in direct competition with ignorant haters; facts, falsehoods and feelings compete side by side for mind share the way Coke and Pepsi compete for market share; and these fights all occur within a normative vacuum.
The only way to stop this context collapse is not to provide the conditions to let it occur in the first place.
But what does that mean concretely? That's why I keep coming back to length. It's crude, but even if you look at Substack or general blogging it's somewhat Twitter-like in that there are people posting their thoughts, people replying with similar-sized comments, a notion of following etc. The main thing lacking I guess is resharing and the ability to @mention people. Maybe those are fundamental. But it feels like the primary determinant of decorum, values and so on is length. On Twitter, complex thoughts don't fit. On blogs they do.
Newspapers publish long stories, but when they decided to use comments sections like an automated letter to the editor, they become cesspools of hate speech, spam and other forms of crap speech.
Popular Science made a decision to turn off its comments section in 2013. And this is a magazine with a niche in scientific developments, not a general interest site like a newspaper or social media. It posted a long explanation why: https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-09/why-were-shutting-our-comments/
Comments were detracting from the coverage.
Length is also no safeguard toward antisocial behavior coming into or emerging from the community itself. Last year, the rationalist blog Slate Star Codex was the subject of a New York Times profile, and the community lost its wits and retaliated against the writer. All over ... the journalist insisting on the newspaper's policy of using the blogger's full name. (Scott Alexander Siskind, who had not been using his surname to maintain semi-anonymity because of his psychiatry practice, shut down Slate Star Codex but then relaunched the active community on the Substack Astral Codex Ten and turned SSC back on as an archive.)
Length is one facet of maintaining positive discussion, or to borrow a radio communications metaphor, a high-signal message. The others are a narrow range of subject matter, a commenter community that does not grow too large, and a set of moderation guidelines in place to have free discussion with boundaries for the publisher and commenters.
Great; might have liked more mention of Gavin Newsom who knows how power and politics work better than any governor in recent memory. Newsom is actually steering the ship to the extent it can be steered. More attention to him please!
Wonderful.. I’ve been fantasizing about a conversation between my two favorite writers and now here it is. So how about Ezra interviewing Noah in the near future?
Allen Whitaker-Emrich
I look in on here from time to time for the midwit opinion. You never fail to provide it. Thanks to you and human grease-stain Klein for the entertainment.
My question to you or Ezra Klein is: in which areas does the government have an advantage over non-government actors, and why?
Many people, including economists, quickly respond with "public goods" or "higher risk" activities - but those arguments don't seem to me to hold up to scrutiny.
I can be convinced otherwise.
But the status quo gets a political pass that new policies do not
My favorite sentence!!
Excellent Q & A
So many words. So little insight. Klein hides his true progressive urges (Vox is as far loony left as it gets) in a cascade of convoluted I’m not sures that betray his own seeming convictions. Progressives remain yucky. Lofty utopian goals, and no way to accomplish them without destroying the American system that has allowed them their voice. There is a flabbiness that pervades this interview and makes it not only hard to read, but also difficult to comprehend.
Incredible read from two thoughtful writers. This has been one of my favorite articles on Noahpinion.
> How do the costs of all this construction not just fall on those without the voice to oppose them?
Maybe we need an explicit policy that requires the costs to fall on those who oppose the loudest? (Kind of trolling here, but only kind of... this idea has some nice game-theoretic properties to curb the excesses of NIMBYs and the like.)
Could have the would-be builder declare up front how much they expect each month of delays to cost them, with a proportional deposit (to discourage overstating such costs), then if some NIMBY raises objections which are ultimately rejected as frivolous, they have to pay for the resulting delays - money to be split between the actual builder and the inspecting agency.
Obvious potential downside would be a chilling effect on legitimate complaints, but that same factor might also help keep activists properly focused on finding ways to fully shut down the projects they consider unacceptable, rather than treating a temporary injunction as the finish line.
Klein's ideas on abundance are very innovative despite the fact that they sound familiar. I hope the progressives are listening. There's this fanatical environmentalism that seems to stop everything.