Andy Kessler

WSJ: Beat the Blues With Music Flicks

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/beat-the-blues-with-music-flicks-11609103299

Locked down again? Finished the gambit of everything on Netflix, Prime, HBODisneyHuluMax+ and even all 201 episodes of “The Office”? Follow me on a magical musical tour down one last rabbit hole before the lockdown looney tunes end. Music will set you free.

You’ve probably seen zillions of concert movies, from “Woodstock” and “The Song Remains the Same” to “American Utopia.” But I think a choice list of movies can lead us all the way to the essence of the 1960s-to-’80s music scene. Forget reading a book; that’s like swimming a marathon—we’ve got to see and hear the story.

Maybe we warm up with the daddy-issues biopics “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Rocketman.” Or the raunchy “The Dirt” about Mötley Crüe, who just have issues period. Or “Sid and Nancy.” But forget fiction. Let’s hear from real musicians. Don’t stop me now.

We’re ready for “Echo in the Canyon” about the music scene in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles—lots on Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of the Byrds (the Beatles’ favorite American band, it turns out). Their unique sound came from Rickenbacker guitars made in nearby Santa Ana. John Lennon played a Rickenbacker, and when someone from the company invited the band to a New York hotel to see the second-ever-made electric 12-string guitar, George Harrison grabbed it and changed pop music forever. Americans supplied the weapons Eric Clapton and other Brits used in the Invasion. We’ll learn the beginnings of the Beach Boys, mixing in The Mamas and The Papas, plus Stephen Stills and Neil Young of Buffalo Springfield. Is this that essence we’re searching for? Maybe, but it certainly reveals the origin of decades of American music.

The narrator of “Echo” is Jakob Dylan, Bob’s son. So next watch Martin Scorsese’s “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story.” It’s about the 1975-76 ragtag bus tour of Dylan and a collection of musicians—there’s Joni Mitchell, and hangers-on like Allen Ginsberg. Be warned, there are a lot of fake Easter eggs in the documentary, including actress Sharon Stone in a Kiss T-shirt joining the tour.

To keep Scorsese rolling, next watch “Shine a Light,” a two-day 2008 Rolling Stones benefit concert at the Beacon Theatre in New York. Benefiting who? The “get what you need” Clinton Foundation.

WSJ: How Tech Got Ready for 2020

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-tech-got-ready-for-2020-11608499711

Woody Allen was onto something when he said “80% of success is showing up.” Sure, that gives short shrift to all the work we put in— Thomas Edison’s “99% perspiration.” But never has showing up been more important than in 2020. You had to be ready when panic and turmoil and lockdowns hit.

Lots of things didn’t show up on day one: N95 masks, ventilators, toilet paper, kettle bells, flour and common sense. But so many things did show up during lockdowns. Teleconferencing has always been lurking in the background, but Zoom was ready. Where would we be without it? Same for the cloud computing it runs on, which was ready to scale. Add broadband to the list. Europe, with foolish network-neutrality laws, had to throttle speeds.

Telemedicine was ready. I wrote last year that I had fired my doctor and taken up telemedicine and I got tons of emails telling me I would die soon. I’m still here, and now you probably use it. Streaming via Netflix and a dozen other services was ready, and then some. Next year major studio films will appear simultaneously in theaters and on streaming services—previously unthinkable.

The “ready” list was amazing: Contactless payments (though Apple Pay didn’t work with masks), meal delivery, grocery delivery, retail logistics, e-billing, ticketless travel, airport-security line-cutting retinal scans, motion-sensing Purell dispensers. Amazon was ready with essentials, but six weeks to deliver a book? Yes, I’ve heard of Kindle. And weirdly, ballpark crowd noise sold to videogame companies was sold back to teams. Accidentally ready!

You can probably name dozens of others. But the bigger question is: Why was all this stuff ready to go?

The history of digital technology is littered with examples of lowering costs—ever since chips were invented in 1958, things have magically gotten smaller, cheaper, faster, better.

WSJ: Dear NASA: What’s in It for Me?

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/dear-nasa-whats-in-it-for-me-11607900349

Years ago I visited a friend at JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, and he asked if I wanted to meet the captain of the Voyager 2, the space probe launched in 1977, then headed toward Neptune. “Absolutely!” In the middle of a messy room sat a young woman drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette—the captain!—next to a toaster-size gray box with a white dimmer-like knob on top of it. Radio signals take hours to reach the Voyager, and between long stretches of boredom, the captain could use the knob to adjust its antenna. My friend was captain the previous week, and now it was her turn.

As we recalled during the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing last year, space travel is a great challenge, a destiny just out of reach—until it isn’t. It’s aspirational and inspirational. Even so, wise guys (like me) note that after billions poured into the space program, all we got were Tang and Velcro. Earthwise, that’s not so far off. It’s called space because, let’s face it, there’s not much in it.

Yes, communication satellites are important, as is GPS, which helps Uber steer a car toward you. But note that GPS first got off the ground in 1973 because it was funded for Nudet, or nuclear detonation detection—military tech, not space exploration. To be fair, NASA was an early customer of Silicon Valley, but quickly abandoned state-of-the-art chips in favor of highly reliable older ones.

Still, progress marches along. We now have a Space Force, founded a year ago this week. Boldly go! Last month, a privately funded SpaceX rocket and capsule safely ferried four astronauts to the International Space Station, an amazing accomplishment for all anti-big-government types. Astronauts will conduct experiments of unknown value to earthly pursuits. There have been 3,000 such experiments in 20 years, though nothing earth-shattering. Can spiders build webs in space? Not quite the right stuff. Last week Chuck Yeager died. Oh, and an Israeli former space officer says the Earth has been contacted by a “Galactic Federation.” Uh huh.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m fascinated by fiery launches and rocket stages that land on floating platforms for reuse. But I’m more in the “What’s in it for me?” camp. Communications, imaging and even travel benefit all of us. Going to Mars? I’m not so sure.

How about we mine asteroids for metals and even water?

WSJ: A Stimulus Dollar Is Only a Dollar

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-stimulus-dollar-is-only-a-dollar-11607279296

Wait for it . . . any day now . . . get ready for the “multipliers.” You know, the idea that a government dollar spent magically turns into multiple dollars in the economy. We ought to start hearing that silly word again as the lame-duck coronavirus stimulus negotiations kick in. Expect more multiplier mumbo jumbo as the Biden administration begins its tax-and-spend fiesta.

Let’s face it, the Democrats haven’t had a believable economic messenger since Robert Rubin during the Clinton administration. Since then they’ve presented a cast of characters— Larry Summers, Mr. Biden’s adviser Jared Bernstein, and lately Elizabeth Warren —who bend themselves into pretzels to justify higher spending and then higher taxes.

The New York Times described this trend during the early days of the Obama administration. The financial crisis team of Jason Furman, Tim Geithner and Mr. Summers were “carrying around this list of multipliers” taken from a chart by Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics. Every dollar spent extending unemployment insurance benefits would, the fairy tale went, boost the economy by $1.64. Sadly, a dollar in reduced corporate taxes would boost the economy by only 30 cents. But cheer up, every dollar spent on food stamps would spur a $1.73 increase in gross domestic product. Mr. Zandi called it “bang for the buck”—the proverbial free lunch. It’s more like “dud for the dollar” because it didn’t work. It never does. Multipliers are a canard, a Keynesian conceit.

The economy grew after the Great Recession, as it does after every recession. The stimulus didn’t stimulate. Shovel-ready projects weren’t ready. Many complained that the stimulus wasn’t big enough. More hooey. The Obama administration’s high taxes and heaps of regulation held the economy back. Is spending driving today’s recovery? Think back to the Heroes Act 2.0, Nancy Pelosi’s $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief bill. Economic growth in the third quarter of 2020 was 33% as lockdowns were lifted, despite—or because of—that gigantic stimulus package not becoming law.

The theory of multipliers is based on the Keynesian view that poorer consumers tend to spend a large amount of increased income, and the rich less so. But multipliers are half a story. Someone has to put up the original money that allegedly gets multiplied, taking it away from the private sector and negating whatever dwindling chain of transactions are hypothesized. It’s like two waves canceling each other out—you can’t just do the math on the additive public wave and ignore subtracting the private. This demand-side theory omits the principle of productivity, the real driver of economic growth and prosperity.

But no matter, expect multiplier talk to, er, multiply.