Was “data journalism” a failure? What went wrong at FiveThirtyEight @ Disney?

https://www.natesilver.net/i/148340021/was-data-journalism-a-failure-what-went-wrong-at-fivethirtyeight-disney

Phil B asks:

I would like to hear more about how Nate’s ambitions for data journalism have evolved since he started 538. What did “conquering the world” mean back then? What changed? Also, with the rise of US sports betting and mainstream sports media coming to terms with that fact, what does Nate think about the prospects for a more data-oriented approach in sports journalism?

Thanks for the question, Phil. This is already a long newsletter, and I was tempted to break this response out into a separate post rather than burying it here. But having multiple threads for SBSQ wound up being confusing last time. I’m going to warn subscribers that I may adapt this response for a standalone post in the future, though — it will go on the Rainy Day List.

The early days of FiveThirtyEight @ Disney, circa 2014-2016 and originally under the auspices of ESPN, was a period I consider unsuccessful despite being presented with a very generous opportunity. I think I made a lot of mistakes and I frequently think about what went wrong. FiveThirtyEight, in my biased opinion, developed into an excellent site by ~2018 (until Disney basically let us stop re-hiring open positions by ~2021, a sign of trouble to come). But those early years were rough, and I was unhappy, so here’s an inventory of Mistakes That Were Made — or really Mistakes That I Made — should any of you find yourself in a similar position

Lessons in Freedom From the Puritans

https://www.persuasion.community/p/lessons-in-freedom-from-the-puritans

The Puritans offer a cautionary tale of what we should and should not do in our own attempts to secure a more robust freedom. John Winthrop was completely correct that the freedom to do whatever we want does nothing to differentiate man from beast, and can cause society to degenerate into a war of self interest. In our contemporary moment, we have perhaps forgotten this important reality—veering heavily into a culture where everyone is submerged in an ocean of their own selfishness. If you walk up to the average person on the street and ask them what freedom is, they will likely say some variation of “doing whatever you want.” This understanding of freedom as license is appealing for obvious reasons, but it has led to a selfish, unhappy, and restless generation.

At the same time, the Puritans also warn us to be careful about how we correct the individualism of the modern age. Many who understand society’s ills move in the opposite direction—they see a listless civilization and argue that the only cure is harsh moral prescription. In truth, neither laissez-faire liberty nor reactionary morals are the solution to the ills that plague our society. We have to find a middle ground. After all, there would be no greater tragedy than vanquishing the despotism of the self only to plunge into the despotism of the collective.

Do tech workers have a reason to love monopolies?

https://alexgaynor.net/2025/feb/19/tech-workers-monopoly-and-monopsony/

This provides the possibility that for tech workers, their employers being monopolists may in fact be a best of both worlds situation.5 Tech workers benefit from their employers' monopolies because those monopolies produce excess profits from which tech workers can be paid substantial salaries, while also reducing the necessary quality of their work.6 At the same time, tech workers face effectively no risk of monopsony, and thus benefit from typical competitive dynamics with respect to their employment, while also not being significantly impacted by output reduction. A market with many buyers, where all of them have lots of cash, is a great market in which to be a seller.

Which means we may have an entire class of employees who have a structural incentive to want their employers to be monopolists.

DOGE Understands Something the US Policy Establishment Does Not: Technology is the Spinal Cord of Government

https://www.techpolicy.press/doge-understands-something-the-us-policy-establishment-does-not-technology-is-the-spinal-cord-of-government/

For the US Digital Service, broken websites or applications were often the tip of the spear that would enable us to go beyond the visible problem, and both understand and address the real problems that were in the invisible layers below it. Those problems might be the technical system itself—or more likely procurement, hiring issues, outdated or misinterpreted policies, convoluted business processes, or some combination of all of these things.

Technology (and implementation more broadly) has long been dismissed as an afterthought by policy experts both inside and outside of the government. Over decades, the US government systematically outsourced technology to the private sector through multi-billion dollar contracts. Today, government employees largely do not design or build products or systems, they “manage” implementation of systems developed by contractors or consultants.

In this formulation, technology is subordinate to the policy work, when the truth is that policy is inextricably entangled with technology. Separating policy from the technology it depends on has been a root cause of much of the dysfunction we have grappled with across government for decades.

Technology is not an extra thing that you add onto government programs and services—it IS the service. It’s not an extra thing that you add into the institution—it is the spinal cord of the institution. Sort of like how cars are no longer mechanical, they are now computers wrapped in metal. People working in tech understand this implicitly.

Rifling Through the Archives With Legendary Historian Robert Caro

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/rifling-through-archives-legendary-historian-robert-caro-180985956/

Caro laughs. “It’s not going to happen,” he says. “Because I’ll tell you why. Because it’s all outlined. It’s one book. His presidency is Vietnam and the Great Society. They’re not two different things. He’s doing Vietnam and doing the Great Society simultaneously. So the book is definitely one book. In this book, there’s an ending. I have my ending, and I have all the things leading up to it. It’s not just Medicare. In ’65, he passes Medicare, Medicaid, seven different education bills. Everything we think of: student loans, college construction, reforms the immigration bill and does other stuff. At the same time, he’s escalating the Vietnam War. It’s one story.” [...]

We talk some more about perhaps his most enduring theme: power. He’s all too aware of the truisms. “I don’t believe that power always corrupts,” he says. “Power reveals.” His work has shown, over and over, that as people fight their way to power, they often hide what they really think, who they really are. But once they have power, the truth—good or bad, ugly or admirable—inevitably reveals itself.

u/turd_ferguson7111 on the death of HVAC

https://www.reddit.com/r/homeowners/comments/1ir2xvn/advise_from_an_hvac_technician_to_homeowners/

A lot of the smaller shops that provided the type of service I was taught as an apprentice have disappeared. When I started in the late 90’s a lot of the owners were baby boomers. These owners started to want to retire in the early 2000’s and that’s when private equity began to buy shops up because they were essentially recession proof. With all the influx of money more people jumped in purely to profit. Then the cycle of private equity turning smaller companies into giant regional companies began. They charged unreal amounts to the customers and mainly preyed off homeowners ignorance and lack of patience. It became more about getting into a service call purely for maximum profit without real intentions of looking out for the customers. This lead to record profits and a trend just about every owner in my industry regardless of size jumped on. It became a money grab. [...]

I truly mourn the death of the industry I knew. Now I’m on my way out since I’m basically a dinosaur in this industry with my ethics. My ask to anyone who can answer what is a good industry for a guy with mechanical skills and ethics?

James Murdoch on mind games, sibling rivalry, and the war for the family media empire

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/04/rupert-murdoch-family-succession-james-murdoch/681675/

Lachlan had by now spent years building the case to his father that James was plotting a coup. In the fall of 2022, an unauthorized biography of Lachlan had been published in Australia containing an incendiary quote from an anonymous source about James’s purported plans: “Lachlan gets fired the day Rupert dies.” When the quote made international headlines, Lachlan told Rupert that James’s camp was responsible. A few months later, in January 2023, the Financial Times ran a story detailing “how the scions could battle for control” of the family trust after Rupert was gone. Once again, Lachlan pointed the finger at his brother.

As it turned out, according to evidence that would later surface at trial, James had no involvement in either story—but Lachlan did. It was McKenna who had, with Lachlan’s approval, spent more than 14 hours giving anonymous interviews to the biographer. And Brian Nick, an executive at Fox, had anonymously briefed the Financial Times. (Nick denied providing information to the Financial Times.) But to Rupert, the stories only confirmed that he needed to act decisively.

[...]

Isn’t it true that Fox is the top cable-news outlet because it respects its audience and gives them what they want? the lawyer asked him.

I would disagree with the idea that respect and giving people what they want are the same thing, James countered.

But the lawyer didn’t seem interested in the distinction. Are you aware that Fox News lost a significant part of its audience when it called Arizona for Biden in 2020? he asked. James said he was. And you know that Fox won back most of that audience through its election-denial coverage, right? the lawyer said.

Milchick and the Ethical Plight of the Decent Middle Manager

https://www.reddit.com/r/SeveranceAppleTVPlus/comments/1ip8uc1/milchick_and_the_ethical_plight_of_the_decent/

Most of my personal career has been as a supervisor/manager in warehouses, which is a much more blue collar atmosphere than Severance is depicting, so the comparisons only go so far, but I had a brief (BRIEF) stint working for a chinese-owned company that had expanded into having a few locations in the states, and most of their upper management came from their facilities in China and Thailand, which were legitimately sweatshops. All things it would've been great to know going in, but they massaged that truth quite a bit going in. Their employee base was largely immigrant populations, and given that this was Arizona, well, you can do the math there. Anyway, about a month in I was already looking for a way out and had a one on one with my direct manager who "had some concerns" with the way I was handling my department, namely that I was being too nice with them (i.e. we were hitting all production goals, but I was treating them like human beings too frequently, vis-à-vis bathroom breaks when requested and so forth). We spent like half an hour going back and forth with me not understanding what he was actually trying to tell me to do because he wouldn't just come out and say it and finally he just got this insane fucking smile and said "I need you to tighten the leash." I realized that it wasn't about the numbers. I mean it was about the numbers, but it's not about the numbers TODAY. It's about sustained numbers, and their ethos was that the only way to do that was complete and utter control. Dehumanization. Management is HERE, you are THERE, and I wasn't getting with the program. I left shortly thereafter.

A drone damaged the outer shell of Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear plant.

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-chernobyl-zelenskyy-71d781dbd66754d0a548edd388f3447a

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A drone armed with a warhead hit the outer protective shell of Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear plant early Friday, damaging the structure and briefly starting a fire, in an attack Kyiv blamed on Russia. The Kremlin denied it was responsible.