Wuff | just another blog

cars: they all step up then falter in EVs

Posted on 2025-03-28 by skierpage

The Nissan Leaf was the first mass market BEV in 2010. Nissan built battery factories and assembly lines on three continents to make it.

16 years later, Nissan has one new model in the USA, the Ariya. Meanwhile upstart Tesla is worth $875 billion and Nissan is worth $9.5 billion. But to reassure everyone that Nissan is really going to compete, it announced a new Leaf and

new 2025 Leaf.
And 15 years late, an INFINITI EV. Maybe.

Then from late FY27, an all-new Nissan EV is scheduled to commence production at Nissan’s Canton, Mississippi plant in the U.S. The all-new model will be an adventure-focused SUV. It will be joined in FY28 by a luxury INFINITI EV SUV (inspired by the Vision QXe concept) that pairs the brand’s latest Artistry in Motion design language with a suite of technology features.

Hold on, this gives me déjà vu. An INFINITI EV in 2028? That is 15 years late! Back when Nissan was riding high on the relative success from being early with the Leaf, it had similar big plans:

Infiniti set out to build a truly luxurious electric vehicle that will be worthy of the brand, while not compromising anything that an electric car signifies. A recent report says that the EV is still in the works, and Infiniti confirmed it would see production, but some delays should be expected. “There are some interesting advances in electric technology we hadn’t anticipated when we showed the LE, which, by delaying a little bit, we can incorporate into the car.”

— Andrea Cristea Ultimate Car Blog, July 2013

Those 2013 plans came to nothing, but this time it will be different, honest.

Nissan, Ford, Honda, Toyota, BMW all made a step forward with a decent BEV that got into production, then faltered (and in Honda and Toyota’s case, multiple times with the Honda EV/Fit EV/Clarity EV and two generations of RAV4 EVs). Business school graduates will be writing about their failures to make progress on the new path for decades. I suspect it’s due to open hostility from the managers and engineers in the rest of the company.

Posted in cars | Leave a comment

cars: SPAC collapse facts

Posted on 2025-03-23 by skierpage

The electrification of land transportation is inevitable and A Good Thing, but there’s a lot of carnage along the way! I read an article about the problem with SPACs; the article is not specific to EVs, but so many EV companies used a merger with a SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company or “blank check company”) as a shortcut to getting listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange in order to raise cash and so founders could cash out. That prompted me to assemble a list of all the EV companies that went public in a SPAC. The four companies I mentioned in Mullen, the king of EV stock scams and cars: more EV fiascos at Faraday, Nikola, and Canoo all went public in SPAC mergers.

Merging with a SPAC was promoted as a cheaper and less onerous way for startups to go public (“less onerous” meaning no official SEC disclosure of risks and detailed financial status). The article details how even though a SPAC’s share price typically stays around $10 when it announces a merger target, “the actual value of a SPAC has declined to ~$4-6 due to numerous costs, like merger and underwriting fees paid to bankers, accountants, and lawyers.” I didn’t realize Wall Street already pigged out at the trough before retail investors bought in to the newly-public company.

How are EV SPACs doing?

Arrival, commercial EV maker: bankrupt!
Canoo, only made a handful of pill-shaped vans: bankrupt (thank you grifter CEO Tony F.U. Aquila)
Electric Last Mile Solutions, would-be maker of commercial EVs: bankrupt!
Faraday Future “Intelligent Electric”, maker of a handful of way-overpriced EV SUVs: share price down 99.999% or a nominal $94,173 per share
Fisker, the eponymous car designer’s third attempt at a car company: bankrupt!
GreenPower Motors, Canadian EV bus maker: share price down 97%
Hyzon, would-be hydrogen truck maker: down 99.995% since its 2021 SPAC debut
Lightning eMotors, would-be commercial EV maker: bankrupt!
Lion Electric, EV bus and truck maker: bankrupt!
Lordstown Motors, would-be EV pickup maker: bankrupt!
Lucid, luxury car maker: down 96% from all-time high but a real car maker thanks to Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed Bone Saw
Mullen Automotive, pretending to make EVs while rebadging Chinese EVs: down 99.999…% or a nominal $268,690,500 a share – David Michery rivaling lyin’ Trevor Milton.
Nikola, purveyors of a fantasy of 600 truck stops making green hydrogen refueling hydrogen fuel cell trucks at a cheap all-in price: bankrupt, and never forget lyin’ Trevor Milton “was sentenced to 4 years in prison for engaging in securities and wire fraud in connection with his scheme to defraud and mislead investors.”
Polestar: a real maker of upmarket EVs: down a mere 88% from $13.86 to $1.11 a share.
Proterra, a real maker of battery buses: bankrupt!
REE, a wannabe commercial vehicle maker after no one wanted its in-wheel motors: down 98.74% or a nominal $303 a share)
VinFast, a real car maker selling cars to other parts of a Vietnamese crony tycoon’s business empire: down 95%, sort-of a real car maker selling itself cars
XOS, trying to make EV trucks: down 99.06% since its 2021 SPAC debut

All these companies were pitched as being the next Tesla in the ruinously cash-depleting sector of making expensive electric (or “clean” hydrogen) vehicles. Most startups fail, nearly all new car companies fail. Yet Hyzon and XOS were both briefly worth $two billion dollars!

EV-adjacent SPACs

The above list doesn’t include would-be makers of other kinds of electric vehicles that went public in SPAC merger: motorcycles, scooters, skateboards, unicycles, etc. And dozens more EV-related startups (battery companies, charger makers, charging networks) went public in SPAC deals, including Aeva, ChargePoint, EVBox, EVgo, FREYR Battery, Hyliion Holdings, Li-Cycle, Microvast,Nuvve, QuantumScape, Romeo (acquired by Nikola now bankrupt), XL Fleet, etc. I haven’t researched how all these companies are doing, but it’s safe to assume most are doing badly (I could ask a Large Language Model chatbot to go off and hallucinate a report…)

You don’t have to go public in a SPAC to go bankrupt, but it helps.

Other bankrupt EV companies include:

Arcimoto, would-be maker of tandem two-wheel sort-of-car EV
Bollinger, would-be maker of off-road EVs, acquired by scammers Mullen Automotive
Coda, importer of crummy early Chinese EV to the USA – I have a long memory!
ElectraMeccanica, would-be maker of compact three-wheel EV, acquired by XOS
Lightyear, wannabe maker of expensive solar-powered car
Smith Electric, maker of commercial EVs, originally made UK milk delivery trucks
Sono, would-be maker of a a solar-powered compact car
Volta, would-be EV truck maker

You don’t have to go public to struggle as an EV maker

Lots of other companies never went public or have yet to go public, which limits the amount of money they can raise. That makes it even harder to have the piles of cash you need to write the big checks to actual make cars. Since these companies aren’t public their financial state is opaque, but you can be confident it’s… not great.

Aptera, promising to begin production of a three-wheeled solar-powered weirdmobile for years
Einride, promised a wild-looking self-driving truck but seems to have pivoted to EV freight logistics
Motiv Power, selling a few commercial EVs
Phoenix Motorcars, would-be converters of shuttle buses and flatbed trucks into EVs
Quantron AG, would-be European maker of hydrogen trucks
Riversimple, would-be UK maker of crappy small hydrogen commuter car
Workhorse Group, would-be commercial EV maker, originally AMP Electric Vehicles; it transferred its pickup to defunct Lordstown.

Going public in an IPO is no guarantee

Rivian went through the arduous process of making a proper IPO (initial public offering, which raised a lot of cash. It’s a real maker of upmarket “adventure” EVs that are excellent cars (I rented one for a day to carry 7 tourists around in style and comfort) but it’s lost $billions and loses $tens of thousands on every car it makes.

Way back in the 1990s ZAP imported and tried to manufacture various battery vehicles, including a tiny truck and commuter vehicle: defunct since 2016.

Atlis Motor Vehicles went public and was developing an electric work truck. It looks like AMV went public on NASDAQ Sept. 17 2022 in a “Registration A process brings private shares to the public market” (not a SPAC or IPO). I think they’ve renamed themselves NXU, claim to make innovative battery packs and storage systems, and are once again public.

Cash is king

Supporters of these companies like to cite successful companies that went for years without any profits. But what kills them is running out of cash. To make cars you have to write a lot of big checks, so if the company isn’t profitable just look at “cash and cash equivalents” in its 10-Q and 10-K reports and you get a sense of how close it is to shutting its doors. As I remarked in earlier posts, the key to survival is to not enter production, but instead hype your company and stock.

Elon Musk: “Prototypes are easy, production is hard”, also “Production with positive cash flow is extremely hard.” (You can be a narcisstic right-wing troll spreading misinformation at all hours instead of working for your companies, and still have important insights.)

Posted in cars, finance | Leave a comment

design: dimmer light switch de-evolution

Posted on 2025-03-20 by skierpage

Classic white toggle dimmer switch in a white wallplate — Perfection

The electrical industry came up with the perfect light switch over 60 years ago: a plastic thing you flick up to turn on and down to turn off. You can see by looking at it which lights are on and off. You can feel in the dark how to turn one on and off. For dimming, the switch evolved so at the bottom of travel it positively clicks off and the rest of the travel changes the dimming level; you can still see at a glance how close it is to full brightness.

Clueless designers have messed this up for decades. The Lutron Decora switch has a big clean panel, but you can’t see if it’s up or down. Designers made rotary switches (more effort to turn full on or off), and separated the on-off function from the dimmer slider (looks ugly, can’t feel in the dark, more effort for no reward). Then designers made it worse with presets, memory, and columns of tiny LEDs to suggest how bright the light is (I have eyes!! I can see how bright it is). Then, years before smartphones, they added tap functionality. The switch is now a featureless rectangle, with actions {turn on to last setting, max brightness, decrease brightness, increase brightness, quick off} randomly assigned to {tap, double tap, press and hold, tap and hold, triple tap, stand on one foot and smear peanut butter on switch}. If the light is dim and you want it brighter you wind up tapping and holding like a drunken Morse code operator. I visited a fancy venture capitalist’s high-end home and the light switches in its entrance hall had printed instruction labels next to them!

So many choices, all terrible. There’s only one (#10) that indicates the brightness level

Why does Ariadni (#1 and #4) have two controls?! #2 is perfection! (#3 is in a two-way circuit whose other switch is the dimmer.)

When we remodeled our house we had to fight to get the platonic kind of switch. We got goggle dimmers for incandescent lights but the electrician said the model that we specified doesn’t work with low-voltage lights. So we had a mix of ideal switches and Lutron’s Ariadni switch with a separate dimmer slider (which makes the on-off switch thinner, flimsier, and uglier).

Perfection lost

That was 2006. I recently replaced some more MR16 halogens with LEDs, and they don’t work well with the Ariadni dimmers which are designed for magnetic transformers: most of the travel does nothing and then the LED pops on and barely dims. So once again I tried to get the unimproveable perfect light switch, and I failed. Searching for “toggle dimmer wallswitch” mostly didn’t work, just like my iron search; I scrolled through dozens of results before managing to find actual toggle dimmers by GE and Leviton for sale by Home Depot and Walmart… and both were discontinued.

AI hallucinates help

I asked Claude.ai about this, and it kept suggesting specific light switches using all the terrible designs. I got pretty fed up:

ME: No. I don’t want touch, double-tap, memory, or anything else. And it’s not a “three-way” switch. GE called it a “toggle on/off dimmer switch,” but it was for incandescents and is discontinued. Oh well.

Claude: I understand now – you’re looking for an actual mechanical toggle switch that physically moves through positions for off, dimmed, and full brightness, similar to the discontinued GE toggle on/off dimmer for incandescents.

You’re right that these have become quite rare for LEDs. The older mechanical toggle dimmers worked well with incandescent bulbs because their dimming method (typically using a simple triac circuit) was compatible with resistive loads. LED bulbs, being electronic devices rather than simple resistive loads, require different dimming technologies.

The closest modern equivalents I can think of would be:

Lutron Skylark Contour – has a slide dimmer with a push button at the bottom, not exactly a toggle

Cooper Wiring Devices AI106 – an older model that might still be compatible with some dimmable LEDs

…

Me: I think you hallucinated part AI106 from Cooper Wiring Devices, there’s no such product.

Claude: You’re right, and I apologize for the error. The “Cooper Wiring Devices AI106” I mentioned isn’t a real product – I made a mistake by providing incorrect information.

(Instead of hallucinating a non-existent light switch (code-named “AI“!) to meet my want, a truly helpful AI would have spat out a 3-D design for the right kind of light switch and contracted for its construction in China.)

Posted in design | Leave a comment

web: how sites like Facebook track clicks

Posted on 2025-03-14 by skierpage

tl;dr: don’t click on links to web sites, because they track your web activity and build profiles of you on multiple sites. Instead open a new private/incognito tab and either go to the web site yourself or use the more-privacy-respecting web search site DuckDuckGo.com to search for the specific web page.

How Facebook turns a 30-character URL into 590 characters of tracking information

Esperanza Spalding (Emily’s D+Evolution still my favorite 2000s album) made a Facebook post about her new tour that included the web site link
https://esperanzaspalding.com/
But if you mouse over the link in most desktop browsers which show the URL in the bottom status, or if you right-click on the link and choose Copy link address and paste it into a text editor, the link’s web address (URL) is actually this huge thing:

https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fesperanzaspalding.com%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR0GFfm_1kNBGO8_Gj5Jw1yGNg7CcESNuQF_BwID8lNHTPulAv6H0EslEZY_aem_5TmhPsgLAsxp1wYoL52Olw&h=AT3MDVKiM2DFcwX9GNPmFN2eoFP7Al_qnUE95-rD5yu0MPBLkdOYnabANAdpSdtJ8cb6H6KCI8Nt6-RvE-Xg9u1d1afpPlFwIWcB_eUnHbBSzuAP5LDRyXjw-BG7h3GGJxsCpA&__tn__=-UK-R&c[0]=AT3GgPrSUnTQeXGiptq8As6-BdI4v5mUNBKKmoUnmqp9gHqtwaojHVJuXEcRt0DzR1TWKGZVx3maNMdkLwelWZOI1rAULuMQQXFpiMiLH19bndn2Mqi64ggPmK82XxUEh59CayTdVi2Y2ynCr2tOushkNrrwoDDf9JjyVaQWEr8KVDoVmo72gBkaHm-NzOidIV1ydh9H7WXxqubMK49m7-Xs4-ZqQJjMqUZsm_mpZPXgf377qsWTFs5cRA

If you squint you can see the esperanzaspalding URL in there, but it’s surrounded by a bunch of crap.

What you see isn’t where your browser goes

Point 1: the link text that you see in text on computers and phones is not the URL that your browser goes to when you click or tap the link. This isn’t surprising when the link text is, e.g. best power trio jazz-funk-rock-pop album of all time , but when it looks like a web site address, you might expect to go to that web address. (And this is how spammers get you! The link text can be www.apple.com/getRefund, but the actual link is to a fake login page on a phishing web site.)

So the link you click doesn’t go to her site, it goes to a special Facebook site l.facebook.com, where ‘l‘ probably stands for “Facebook’s Links processing”, with a bunch of parameters (everything after the question mark) that include the actual web site you thought you were going to visit and a bunch more tracking. In addition, Facebook’s web page can do special tracking in JavaScript when you click (or move the mouse at all) and this could add even more crap to the network request.

Advice 1: right-click and copy URLs. It’s harder for web sites to track your menu actions than your normal mouse clicks.

I followed a guide for Firefox to track actual network activity and it turns out Facebook doesn’t dynamically change the URL when you click; the URL that you can, with effort, view is the same one your browser requests.

What is all 591 characters of crap in the URL?

The great and good inventor of the web Sir Tim Berners-Lee specified how all the parameters after the question mark have to be encoded: briefly each is separated with & and certain characters are represented specially (e.g. colon ‘:‘ becomes %2F), and usually the parameters are name=value, so we can decode them. I used the JavaScript function uuDecodeComponent() and then put each one on a separate line for clarity:

https://l.facebook.com/l.php
   ?
   u = https://esperanzaspalding.com/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR0GFfm_1kNBGO8_Gj5Jw1yGNg7CcESNuQF_BwID8lNHTPulAv6H0EslEZY_aem_5TmhPsgLAsxp1wYoL52Olw
   &
   h = AT3MDVKiM2DFcwX9GNPmFN2eoFP7Al_qnUE95-rD5yu0MPBLkdOYnabANAdpSdtJ8cb6H6KCI8Nt6-RvE-Xg9u1d1afpPlFwIWcB_eUnHbBSzuAP5LDRyXjw-BG7h3GGJxsCpA
   &
   tn = -UK-R
   &
   c[0] = AT3GgPrSUnTQeXGiptq8As6-BdI4v5mUNBKKmoUnmqp9gHqtwaojHVJuXEcRt0DzR1TWKGZVx3maNMdkLwelWZOI1rAULuMQQXFpiMiLH19bndn2Mqi64ggPmK82XxUEh59CayTdVi2Y2ynCr2tOushkNrrwoDDf9JjyVaQWEr8KVDoVmo72gBkaHm-NzOidIV1ydh9H7WXxqubMK49m7-Xs4-ZqQJjMqUZsm_mpZPXgf377qsWTFs5cRA

The first line shows that the request goes to the “page” l.php on the web host l.facebook.com. This isn’t a web page that shows something in your browser, it runs a special program which takes all those parameters and does lots of processing of your request to track everything it possibly can about you on Facebook’s servers, and then tells your browser to go to another site. You normally don’t see any visible output in your browser from this link tracking; maybe if you watch carefully you’ll see the URL in your browser’s location field change.

I’m guessing, but the ‘u‘ parameter is likely the actual URL your click should go to. Note that this passes its own nested parameter fbclid, which stands for Facebook Click ID, Meta explains it as:

a Meta-generated parameter that is passed with the URL of an advertiser’s website when a user clicks an ad on Facebook and/or Instagram. Sharing ClickID can help you attribute more conversions and reach more people, which may drive better ad performance.

So esperanzaspalding.com can use this ID to track how people responded to her Facebook post. I have no idea what the rest of the parameters mean, it’s lots of information that Facebook is sending itself when you click.

Strip everything after the question mark!

In general if you copy the URL of a news story or web page and then paste it into your browser, you can and should remove the question mark and everything after. For example, here’s an MSN link to a news story:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/with-democrats-help-senate-votes-to-avert-a-government-shutdown/ar-AA1AW73B?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=2a12bbe42a494edbb0af4b04b8f38dfc&ei=35

The ocid and cvid are probably yet more tracking IDs, who knows what ei does (“economic indicator” net worth level?).

Advice 2: To remove the tracking, open a private/incognito browser tab, then paste in the URL, then delete the question mark and everything after it. In this example, the URL becomes

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/with-democrats-help-senate-votes-to-avert-a-government-shutdown/ar-AA1AW73B

and only then press Return or click the → arrow to go to the site. But this doesn’t work for Facebook and an increasing number of sites, because the URL you go to is not even the destination web site. If I strip the question mark and everything after from Facebook’s URL for EsperanzaSpalding.com, I just get https://l.facebook.com/l.php, which doesn’t go to her site.

You are in a maze of tracking

Cookies and site data

There are other ways for sites to track you. They can set “cookies” on your browser or store data other data on your computer or phone, such that every request to the same site re-sends all the cookies it has set and data it has stored on your computer. This is yet more tracking, which is why you should browse in a private/incognito window, and regularly clear cookies and other data that sites have shoved into your browser. If you’re just trying to read a web page, there’s no reason for that web site to store any information.

Advice 3: clear cookies and site data. To clear this information a site has shoved into your browser: in Firefox, while visiting the site, click the shield icon next to the location bar and choose “Clear cookies and site data…”; in Chrome, I think it’s click the lock icon next to the URL, select Site settings, and then Clear data to remove the cache for that specific site. You can set Firefox to “Delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed”, adding exceptions for sites you want to stay logged into or remember your shopping cart: go to Settings > Privacy & Security (about:preferences#privacy) and set this up in the “Cookies and Site Data” section.

Advice 4: browse as much as possible in a private/incognito browser tab. If you browse sites in private/incognito browser tabs, your browser stores less of the information sites tell it to store.

Advice 5: block “third-party cookies.” That’s where one web site tries to set a cookie on a different web site. There is no legitimate reason to do this except laziness from web site developers, and it’s 99.9% of the time used by data brokers and advertising services.

Link shortening, link trackers

And if the Facebook post uses a link shortener like bit.ly , that is doing its own processing to track your information before directing your browser to the actual site you want to visit. I’ve followed URLs (using the command-line tool curl --dump-header - http/complicated/URL?here, more details below) that go through four or more web sites. And every single ad and “share this on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/TikTok” button on the original web site (Facebook) can track your mouse movement with JavaScript and send information to a data broker even if you don’t click on the ad or the sharing link.

Advice 6: browse with Firefox and the uBlock Origin ad-blocking extension. It’s a hassle and web sites will break.

So enter web sites or search for them yourself

The only surefire way to avoid nearlly all of this tracking is to open a new private/incognito browser tab, and enter the URL of the web site itself: esperanzaspalding.com Or, if you want to read a particular web page on a site, you can use a search engine that tracks you less. In general links in DuckDuckGo search results just link to the actual web site with a lot less of these intermediaries and tracking parameter malarkey.

TODO: how does Google do it?

Google search results appear to go to the simple URL of the site. Google must be using JavaScript to send HTTP updates to Google.

Appendix: Following what the browser does

A link sends your browser to a particular web site. But for a link tracker like l.facebook.com or bit.ly, instead of it showing you a web page, that web site redirects you to the actual web site by putting special instructions in its response to your browser. You can follow this on the command-line with the excellent curl utility. You enter:

curl --dump-header - 'https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fesperanzaspalding.com%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR0GFfm_1kNBGO8_Gj5Jw1yGNg7CcESNuQF_BwID8lNHTPulAv6H0EslEZY_aem_5TmhPsgLAsxp1wYoL52Olw&h=AT3MDVKiM2DFcwX9GNPmFN2eoFP7Al_qnUE95-rD5yu0MPBLkdOYnabANAdpSdtJ8cb6H6KCI8Nt6-RvE-Xg9u1d1afpPlFwIWcB_eUnHbBSzuAP5LDRyXjw-BG7h3GGJxsCpA&__tn__=-UK-R&c[0]=AT3GgPrSUnTQeXGiptq8As6-BdI4v5mUNBKKmoUnmqp9gHqtwaojHVJuXEcRt0DzR1TWKGZVx3maNMdkLwelWZOI1rAULuMQQXFpiMiLH19bndn2Mqi64ggPmK82XxUEh59CayTdVi2Y2ynCr2tOushkNrrwoDDf9JjyVaQWEr8KVDoVmo72gBkaHm-NzOidIV1ydh9H7WXxqubMK49m7-Xs4-ZqQJjMqUZsm_mpZPXgf377qsWTFs5cRA'

and, oops!, curl responds

curl: (3) bad range in URL position 339:

because Facebook is perverting Sir Tim’s design for HTTP requests by putting square brackets in c[0]=blahblah without encoding them. We can tell curl to ignore this violation with its --globoff command-line option, and now you can see that site sends a location header that tells the browser where to go:

curl --dump-header --globoff - 'https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fesperanzaspaldingblahblahblah rest of long URL

location: https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fesperanzaspalding.com%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR1AHkbuvUzs5O-eggNLo_AYJBT8QW_ENsUyJB99MwLv_anJ6B_x2ZGe-ot8XCTLIw0SYZOTaCz51jjGuG3HB_weYA3G05lh02b1H1V6K4UmRROtpDBPXYi23QM4ZuHQRmn0YqzUfdtP11SJi36hVMCXaFph-5myrQt4vGGEfuswb4qQR_WoBlnGxQvQ

But wait, it’s just redirecting to Facebook’s link processing site again, but with an even longer fbclid parameter! We have to add the --location flag to tell curl to keep following these ^%$#@! redirects. This shows that the second request issues a different header:

refresh: 1;URL=https://esperanzaspalding.com/?fbclid=IwY2xjawJB0VVleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHUAeRu69TOzk756CA0uj8BgmyrIstxiKk_O6bKot3tHPBLVAZuf52tMAKA_aem_O0mc9-kOVUE1oYyShfB9uQ

And now, finally, your browser winds up on the site you thought your click would take you to. Facebook is probably pulling other crap when it detects that an actual browser is making the request.

Posted in web | Leave a comment

design: Parker pen pals

Posted on 2025-01-05 by skierpage

TL;DR: bring back the Parker 25!

photo of Parker ballpoints with text summarizing them: Jotter (too slim!), Jotter XL (not modern), Vector (too light and short), and 1970s 25 (perfect, so revive it!) — Stainless steel barrels somewhat different

I’m interested in pens, but as with watches (and hi-fi, ski pants, rain coats, etc.) once I find what seems the best design, I’m done. Until I lose it or it wears out.

I wasn’t a fan of the Parker 25 ballpoint when it was introduced in 1975. Its aggressive modernity, with a flat rectangular clip with a cheap plastic shield (Wikipedia calls it a “tassie”?) replacing the classic Parker arrow-shaped clip, bothered me back then. Over time its future-optimistic brutalist-lite aesthetic grew on me. Also, as I get older I want a fatter barrel, so that shape is perfect. So a decade ago I got a second-hand one as a present and declared victory.

What comes close?

The problem is I lose pens, and the 25 has long been discontinued. I want a pen I can easily replace. I used to rely on the Parker Jotter, with its lovely top and cheap plastic barrel. I got a couple of branded ones from a friend, and lost them. When I went looking, it turns out there’s a 70th anniversary “Originals” version of the Jotter, “a fresh update of an iconic design,” and Pen Boutique had it in navy for only $8 (plus $7 shipping), bizarrely cheap. It didn’t come in a Parker box and the ring around the push-button is a bit scratchy.

(As an aside, the merchant’s generic “thanks for ordering” card is an AI-generated image of a dog holding an unrelated pen, and the weird “MONT BLAWANC/BLIANC” text is probably because in 2023 image AIs were bad at text (and fingers).)

A thank-you card from Pen Boutique with an AI-generated image of a dog writing a note, with garbled MONT BLAWANC/BLIANC text — Awww, but “MONT BLAWANC”?

An iconic British American brand, now made in France!?

I was taken aback to read on parkerpen.com “crafted in France,” considering that Parker was an iconic British brand and the Jotter comes in colors like Bond Street Black, Kensington Red, Chelsea Orange, etc. Then I learned from Wikipedia that the Parker Pen Company was founded in the USA in 1888! It’s another American company that in England seemed as British as can be, like Heinz beans and Hoover vacuum cleaners. It turns out that after a management buyout in 1986 the company has bounced around various conglomerates; Gillette owned it, now Newell Rubbermaid’s Sanford Stationery Division owns Parker along with half-a-dozen other famous pen brands. And it closed Parker’s USA and UK factories.

Getting the platonic Parker ballpoint

Parker Jotter ballpoint pen with navy blue barrel — Parker Jotter with navy barrel, cheap and OK

So I don’t use a pen much and again, I’m not a collector; but for a low price it’s nice to have the best design (for me). I like the Jotter, but it’s narrow. It turns out that since 2018 there has been a wider-bodied Jotter XL, so I ordered the Monochrome Grey stainless version for only $33. It’s an improvement, but it doesn’t feel modern.

Parker Jotter XL in monochrome grey (stainless steel) — Parker Jotter XL in Monochrome Grey, upsized

I remembered a variant that had a modernized arrow clip; it turns out that’s the Vector model, which Parker USA still makes in stainless steel. There’s a multi-function black/red/pencil Vector from Japan, and Parker’s Indian licensee makes a stainless steel Vector with a gold clip… so I ordered that from India! I like the modernized arrow, but it’s too light and dainty and short.

Parker Vector with goldtone arrow clip, all the way from India — Parker Vector goldtone, dainty

There’s also the fancier Parker Sonnet with the traditional gold arrow clip ($95) that’s also available in Parker’s famous Ciselé “chiselled squares” pattern for a lot of money ($236). Pen Vibe (sounds NSFW) has a page detailing all the Parker ballpoints, including more India-only variants and the strange Duofold. There are many other web pages that nerd out: all the different refills that fit Parker ballpoints and an extremely detailed table graphing pen widths and centers of gravity. It’s a fun rabbit hole and I admire the dedication of collectors, but in the end I just want one great pen.

Parker Sonnet stainless steel ballpoint with gold accents — Parker Sonnet, another classy but old design

Revive the Parker 25 in 2025!

stainless steel Parker 25 "Flighter" ballpoint — my O.G. Parker 25, perfection (though it could be fancier)

These all have some appeal and I don’t regret the $70 ($15.26 + $38.48 + $16.27) I spent on stainless steel ballpoint pens, but the Parker 25 “Flighter” (Parker’s name for a steel pen with a brushed satin finish) is very special. I’m not alone, the fan MoreEngineering has pages dedicated to the Parker 25, including an exhaustive list of every Parker 25 variant. His history page says British industrial designer Sir Kenneth Grange came up with the design, so I wasn’t wrong to associate the pen with 1970s British optimism about design engineering in the space age; that optimism brought us the Concorde supersonic airplane, the Intercity 125 high-speed train (which Grange also designed), and some groovy hi-fi equipment. I hope Parker’s current corporate owner will reintroduce the 25 on its 50th anniversary so I can use one without worrying about losing it. Parker should make a fancier version, for example it could replace the blue plastic badge/tassie that wears out with a beautiful lacquered square clip with a gold arrow, similar to the Montblanc “snowcap” shape (see below); it could put something similar on the top that’s nicer than the recessed plain colored plastic dimple. Are you listening, Parker?

Parker 25 promotional picture showing many variations — MoreEngineering actually tracked down and acquired all these variants of the Parker 25, and many more

Fountain pens

Some day I’ll blog about my fountain pens. (Do people even know what that term means any more?)

what even is this thing? (my Mont Blanc Noblesse fountain pen and its ink reservoir)

Posted in design | Leave a comment

web: online shopping non-assistance

Posted on 2025-01-01 by skierpage

Amazon and other online stores are drowning in returns, yet they still do a terrible job of helping customers locate the right product. Our ironing board and wall holder accept an iron at most 5 inches wide, and modern irons have turned into bloated SUVs. Can I filter on irons less than 5 inches wide? No. Is there a smart product comparison page that shows me what I care about? No. Surely an eleventy-billion-parameter AI chatbot trained on Amazon’s data can help me? See the screenshot for how Amazon’s chatbot Rufus fails.

Screenshot of Amazon product page showing its Rufus AI chatbot unable to answer a basic question. — Smartest mind in the shopping galaxy…

Put a ruler on it

Amazon listings have turned into glossy advertisements many screens long that don’t inform. Product size is one of the key things that determines if something will work. So Amazon could and should require sellers to post a picture of the assembled item next to a ruler. That would also help weed out useless sellers that just resell goods, though I guess they would just rip off or hallucinate images with a ruler.

Warranty? what’s that?

And for ^$#! sake, prominently show the warranty offered by each manufacturer. I cannot locate them on Amazon, which violates the intent of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act and FTC rules:

Since 1975, the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act and two rules promulgated by the FTC have governed how and where the terms of consumer product warranties are communicated to consumers. Specifically, manufacturers and sellers of consumer products that include warranties are required to provide consumers with detailed information about the warranty coverage in writing prior to the consumer’s purchase of the product. Warranties must contain certain specified information about the coverage of the warranty in a single, clear, easy-to-read document and the information must be available prior to purchase.

Obviously people will prefer and pay more for the product with a 5-year warranty. (Briggs & Riley luggage and Osprey backpacks FTW with their lifetime warranties.)

Why don’t retailers care?

Writers at The Atlantic have written a series of articles about returns and return policies. As Amanda Mull wrote in 2023:

In the best-case scenario, efforts to limit returns also mean that retailers clean up some of their own bad behavior—by, say, listing products more carefully or providing people with more detail so that they’re more likely to buy stuff they want to keep. …
Listing products is labor- and data-intensive work that’s prone to errors, and retailers that rapidly expand their selections or rely on third-party sellers to make their own listings forfeit some of their ability to ensure that what they’re selling is presented truthfully. Bad listings beget bad return rates, and so does prioritizing growth over all else.

Posted in disintermediation, web | Leave a comment

art: Tamara de Lempicka’s supreme shaded style

Posted on 2024-11-10 by skierpage

Tamara de Lempicka "Portrait d'Ira P." oil painting, 1930 — *Portrait d’Ira P. (1930)*. Her belly must be overjoyed.

Tamara de Lempicka is melodramatic swagger, backed up by superb shading of colored areas (chiaroscuro?); it reminds me of Georgia O’Keefe’s landscapes yet the complete opposite. Look at the heart shape in the draping of her lover’s dress, it’s phenomenal. https://artondemand.famsf.org/…/artist/tamara+de+lempicka has all her best paintings, but they feel silly when they’re not life-size. Go see the show, it’s excellent with many pure pleasure pictures.

This item from her wall bio cracked me up

Her homelife is stormy; Tadeusz grows intolerant of his wife’s affairs, cocaine use, late nights spent at clubs followed by valerian-induced sleep, and long work sessions listening to Richard Wagner at full volume

substitute e.g. “Cheap Trick” or “Eminem” 😄

Posted in art | Leave a comment

cars: more EV fiascos at Faraday, Nikola, and Canoo

Posted on 2024-10-01 by skierpage

I blogged about EV scam company Mullen Automotive and its bat-sh*t insane stock price shenanigans: a single $MULN share that today costs $3.64 was theoretically worth $1.926 billion dollars 12 years ago! There are other joke companies that are still riding the EV wave despite no prospect of ever making a profit, or even 100 vehicles…

Faraday Future fakery

An earlier scam I followed with grim fascination was Faraday Future. Billionaire Chinese entrepreneur Jia Yueting “YT” wants to build his own revolutionary EV, so he hires top-notch talent from BMW and Silicon Valley. Except he only has a billion, and it’s not enough due to spage’s law (#4). Furthermore, the company wasted time, resources, and money on a ridiculous FFZERO1 single-seat concept hypercar, on helping out on YT’s Le’Eco car for the Chinese market, and a billion-dollar gigafactory in Nevada that never happened. The Verge had a series of masterful reports on the chicanery. Jia Yueting eventually filed for personal bankruptcy. Faraday Future did manage to make a prototype of its expensive ($309,000!) fast FF91 SUV, but that’s not impressive because as Elon Musk has repeatedly said and tweeted “Prototypes are easy, production is hard” (also “Production with positive cash flow is extremely hard,” his succinct summary of spage’s law #4).

Faraday Future FFZERO1 concept car prototype — Faraday Future showed this pointless useless waste of time (how do you even get in?)…

Faraday Future's FF91 big EV crossover — … and eventually made a few of this BIG handsome enough EV for $309,000

But $FFIE is still going! It merged with a SPAC, a sure sign that its stock was overvalued garbage. (Edit: I wrote a post SPAC collapse facts about the failures of most EV companies that went public in a SPAC deal.) It has delivered a handful of the FF91s, but only to company friends and dealers. By not making more than a handful of cars, it can keep going for years, just like Mullen.

Update March 2025: Faraday Future Intelligent Electric renamed itself Faraday Future AI because “FF is making significant progress in developing its All-AI Mobility Ecosystem”. Scammers gonna scam.

Nikola (not-Tesla) Motors, the name alone is suspicious

Next up is Nikola Motors

Utah scammer Trevor Milton (“it’s OK to scam non-believers for the greater glory of the Mormon church”) pivoted from cheating his partners on a gas-turbine truck to making a hydrogen fuel cell truck. The chicken-and-egg problem with hydrogen is there are no hydrogen fuel stations, so nobody buys the vehicle, so there’s no demand for hydrogen fuel stations. (Unlike BEVs, which enjoyed an immediate market of millions of people who drive short distances and have an electrical socket in their garage.) Trevor Milton solved this with an audacious plan to build 600 truck stops each producing green hydrogen to refuel the Nikola fuel cell semi truck, and Nikola would include the cost of the truck and the fuel and servicing in a fixed-price lease; “Nikola plans to bill customers for its vehicles a flat rate of $0.95/mile over the life of the 7-year, 700,000 mile lease.” Brilliant, audacious, and requiring both billions of dollars and deep engineering skills. Nikola had neither.

Nikola's Power — because when you’re trying to build a hydrogen truck and its infrastructure, the most important thing is to announce a bunch of CGI renders of lifestyle vehicles.

Nikola built a fuel cell truck prototype and Milton claimed “this thing fully functions and works…this is a real truck”, but it quickly pivoted to a bunch of joke renders of hydrogen lifestyle vehicles from its Powersports division: the WAV watercraft, the NZT off-highway adventure vehicle, and the Reckless “military grade fully-electric tactical OHV.” Then it announced a fuel-cell pickup truck and in September 2020 a huge deal with GM where GM would supply hydrogen fuel cell tech, engineer and build the pickup truck, and get $2 billion in newly-issued $NKLA stock (a great deal for GM who had given up on hydrogen fuel cell cars and hoped to sell its fuel cell tech to anyone with a checkbook). But then Hindenburg Research (great name!) wrote the War & Peace of financial investigative reporting, Nikola: How to Parlay An Ocean of Lies Into a Partnership With the Largest Auto OEM in America, that revealed so much fail:

the Nikola One prototype wasn’t operational
the parts in front of the truck were pilfered from the truck
Nikola claimed proprietary technology but had none. Some of the parts it claimed it built in-house parts were commercial parts with black tape over the manufacturer’s name
Nikola’s video of it driving along a road was filmed on the longest straight continuous downhill road in Utah (they even bent a sign to preserve the illusion the road was flat)
Nikola’s VP of hydrogen production was Trevor’s brother who had previously been paving driveways in Hawaii, and its head of building out the 700 hydrogen station network was formerly manager of a golf club
Nikola had never made a single kg of hydrogen. It didn’t even have solar panels on its facilities.
etc., etc.

There is some justice that Trevor Milton was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to four years in prison (he’s still appealing the sentence). But other people at the company who were in on the con took over.

Nikola managed to convert Iveco’s European S-Way truck into the battery-electric Tre, and unlike most of the zombie EV wannabes, it actually did make hundreds of trucks and “sold” them to dealers (who parked them in front of their premises to look green). Alas, four batteries caught fire, so all the trucks were recalled and parked in the desert. It never did build the hydrogen truck stops or make any hydrogen, instead it has a “HYLA” subsidiary which sets up staffed hydrogen refueling locations by simply parking a truck trailer tank full of hydrogen that it ordered from… someone and having an full-time attendant operate the refueling. It has managed to make dozens of the fuel cell version of the Tre, but for those it has to provide hydrogen, so every truck that actually enters service represents huge losses. Unlike Mullen and Canoo Nikola has substantial cash, so it can probably make a hundred or so more trucks before it runs out of money.

Update March 2025: bankrupt!

Canoo, SOP lies are standard operating practice

Canoo was founded by executives who fled from Faraday Future’s insanity. They had a neat idea for a pill- (suppository?-) shaped EV on a platform that could easily support a commercial van design, a recreational van, a pickup truck. Not terrible, but almost every EV shares this “skateboard chassis” concept.

Promised (SOP) start of production in 2022, then 2023, then… never. And Canoo just announced a reverse stock split.

Update March 2025: bankrupt!

No cash no cars

These clown EV companies pretend that they can somehow produce cars despite having pathetically little cash, and suckers believe them. At June 30 2024 Canoo (GOEV) only had $4.5M in cash and cash equivalents, Workhorse only $5.3M, and the king[*] of scam reverse stock split hell (a single MULN share has “lost” $2 billion in value!) Mullen Automotive only $3.5M.

But FFIE takes the cake. Its Q2 2024 press release doesn’t mention cash at all, but I found its 10-Q: it went from having $17M in cash in June 2023 to just $793,000!!

Actual car makers like Rivian and Lucid can survive losing $50,000+ on each car they make because they have billion-dollar cash cushions. Now imagine what FFIE would lose making a $300,000 EV in tiny quantities. If it makes three cars it would immediately go bankrupt.

[*] I lied, one share of Top Ships Inc (TOPS) has lost $1.014 trillion dollars from its theoretical peak pre-splits. So FFIE could keep this scam going for years.

spage’s law #4

EV startups can lose $millions a month promising to enter volume production “soon,” or they can actually start cranking out vehicles and immediately lose $100M+ a quarter.
Aptera, Canoo, Einride, ElectraMeccanica, Faraday Future, Mullen (total scammers), Nikola (back to promising HFC production after the battery Tre fiasco), Phoenix Motors, REE, XOS, etc. are all in this zombie state. Lucid and Rivian exited it, but they had $billions in cash. Fisker tried to avoid it by paying Magna to build cars but that didn’t work. RIP Arcimoto, Arrival, Bollinger, Coda (I have a long memory!), Electric Last Mile Solutions, Lightning eMotors, Lightyear, Lordstown Motors, Proterra, Smith Electric, Sono, Volta, Workhorse Group, etc.; all bankrupt or have abandoned electric vehicle manufacturing, and of those I think only Proterra and Smith Electric manufactured hundreds of vehicles.

Posted in cars | Leave a comment

Mullen, the king of EV stock scams

Posted on 2024-09-29 by skierpage

I care about the environment, so I care about transportation, so I care about EVs (or better yet, not carting your sorry ass and a laptop and/or a few kilos of groceries around in a 2-ton manufactured product), so I care about new car companies that might move us off fossil fuels. But a lot of those car companies have turned into outright stock scams preying on clueless investors hoping to make a fortune on “the next Tesla.” Some day I’ll blog about Faraday Future’s doorless race car debacle, Canoo re-wrapping the same handful of prototypes with different potential customer’s logos, and Nikola (not-Tesla) Motors’ 600-station hydrogen trucking fantasy (update: I did, read “cars: more EV fiascos at Faraday, Nikola, and Canoo“).

Enter Mullen

These EV companies circling the drain pale next to Mullen Automotive, the most extreme and audacious con going. Here is the stock price history for $MULN. It is bat-sh*t insane!

Mullen Automotive stock chart showing share price dropping $1.92 billion

Don’t glaze over! Look at the line starting 3.64 USD. That says the price of one share of Mullen today is $3.64. Then in red, it says that one share has dropped in price from $1.926 billion dollars (for one share!!), a loss of 100%.

The chicanery of reverse stock splits

Except one single share of this junk EV wannabe maker was obviously never worth $2 billion dollars. To remain listed on a “reputable” exchange like the NASDAQ, your stock has to trade for more than a dollar, otherwise it’s a penny stock. So Mullen repeatedly has reverse stock splits. This isn’t Nvidia saying “Our stock price has risen a lot but we want one share to cost around $200, so we’ll turn each share you own into 10 shares; you’re welcome” and after this 10→1 stock split the price of one Nvidia share drops to 1/10 what it was. Instead Mullen says “You thought you owned 500 shares in us each only worth pennies, but ha-ha sucker, now you only own 20 shares” so in theory after this 25→1 reverse stock split each share is worth 25 times more and the share price briefly rises to a few dollars before continuing its decline. Both kinds of stock splits don’t change the size of the slice of the company that you own, but one direction hides the fact that you’re holding a slice of a s**t sandwich.

Printing money shares soon to be worthless

Mullen has done this six times (100 shares→1, 100 shares→1, 9 shares→1, 25 shares→1, 10 shares→1, and the original 10 shares →1 back in 2016). As financial sites like CompaniesMarketCap point out (caution: they get confused and run out of digits), “One MULN share bought prior to May 25th, 2016 would equal to 4.4444444444444E-9 MULN shares today” One share shrank to 4 billionths of a share. But in between these reverse splits over and over to keep its stock price up, Mullen also issues millions of new shares to pay its corrupt CEO David Michery money and pay a few bills. Insanely, enough investors fall for this that the scam has continued for 10 years.

Ignoring the stock price graph, how is Mullen Automotive doing? In its financial results for the quarter ending June 2024 it reported that it only has $4M cash in the bank, only made a measly $65,000 in revenue, unsurprisingly lost $91M on that pathetic revenue, yet it paid its CEO $47M in 2023. It keeps cranking out press releases touting orders for its EVs coming in from around the world and new dealers and overseas partners… and it’s all fake. In three months it got paid for one imported Chinese EV van.

spage’s law #4 and Elon Musk’s wisdom

People somehow get caught up in magical thinking. “I like the prototype, as do lots of other people, the company says they have thousands of orders/reservations/letters of intent… just make the cars and the money will roll in.” So why doesn’t Mullen actually make and sell some electric vehicles?

You can let Elon Musk explain it. He’s said and tweeted: “Prototypes are easy, production is hard”, also “Production with positive cash flow is extremely hard.” But people refuse to grasp the import of the latter seven words. As I’ve started posting when people gush over some cool prototype from a struggling EV maker,

spage’s law: EV startups can lose $millions a month promising to enter volume production “soon,” or they can actually start cranking out vehicles and immediately lose $100M+ a quarter.
Aptera, Canoo, Einride, ElectraMeccanica, Faraday Future, Mullen (total scammers), Nikola (back to promising HFC production after the battery Tre fiasco), Phoenix Motors, REE, XOS, etc. are all in this zombie state. Lucid and Rivian exited it, but they had $billions in cash. Fisker tried to avoid it by paying Magna to build cars but that didn’t work. RIP Arcimoto, Arrival, Bollinger, Coda (I have a long memory!), Electric Last Mile Solutions, Lightning eMotors, Lightyear, Lordstown Motors, Proterra, Smith Electric, Sono, Volta, Workhorse Group, etc.; all bankrupt or have abandoned electric vehicle manufacturing, and of those I think only Proterra and Smith Electric manufactured hundreds of vehicles.

That “lose $100M” is real cold hard cash, not sequences of numbers in a financial report. You need to actually pay suppliers for the parts, and factory workers to screw them together into a vehicle, and someone to ship the vehicles to customers. If you don’t have cash to write those checks, you go bust. End of story. Yet company fans and the remaining abused stockholders continue to believe these zombie companies will sprout wings and fly: any day now they’ll put thousands of compelling vehicles into the hands of happy customers and start chasing Tesla, or at least Rivian. Nope. Not gonna happen!

Rubber-necking at a train wreck

The Tragic Downfall of Mullen Automotive is a grimly entertaining video from serial doubter Wall $treet Millennial on this ridiculous company. A plastic fake Ferrari, an ex-felon hawking a magic box with wires poking out that “increases range 60%!”, repeated failures to ever ship a car then getting sued by the latest Chinese partner that was going to build them, etc. It’s easy to laugh. But real people really did invest tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into the company because they liked the idea of EVs, and now have one share worth less than a Big Mac.

Edit 3: Mullen Automotive: The Reverse Split King’s Stunning Ability to Stay Alive from Financhle (?) focuses on $MULN’s crazy stock issues, dilution, and reverse stock splits.

Edit: Top Ships lost a trillion quadrillion dollars per share

Apparently this insanity isn’t limited to wannabe EV companies. One share in Top Ships, “an international owner and operator of tanker vessels,” has “lost” $500 trillion since inception, and was briefly “worth” $1 quadrillion per share compared with its current stock price of $9.05. Spoiler: the entire company was never worth even a millionth of that much money, let alone a single share. Top Ships had so many reverse stock splits in 2017 they overlap on every historical graph that shows them.

Top Ships stock chart showing share price dropping $1.92 billion

CompaniesMarketCap has a table of its stock splits. If you had one share of Top Ships at the start of March 2008, you would theoretically have 22 quadrillionths of a share now. If your holding in $TOPS back then was equivalent to a kilogram of beef, you would own much less than a single muscle cell now. But the company survives and has even made a profit in two of the last 15 years.

Date	Split	Multiple	Cumulative multiple
2023-09-29	1:12	x0.083333333333333	x2.2045855379189E-14
2022-09-23	1:20	x0.05	x2.6455026455026E-13
2020-08-10	1:25	x0.04	x5.2910052910053E-12
2019-08-22	1:20	x0.05	x1.3227513227513E-10
2018-03-26	1:10	x0.1	x2.6455026455026E-9
2017-10-06	1:2	x0.5	x2.6455026455026E-8
2017-08-03	1:30	x0.033333333333333	x5.2910052910053E-8
2017-06-23	1:15	x0.066666666666667	x1.5873015873016E-6
2017-05-11	1:20	x0.05	x2.3809523809524E-5
2016-02-22	1:10	x0.1	x0.00047619047619048
2014-04-21	1:7	x0.14285714285714	x0.0047619047619048
2011-06-24	1:10	x0.1	x0.033333333333333
2008-03-20	1:3	x0.33333333333333	x0.33333333333333

Edit #2: apparently $CEI/CEIN is another crazy stock.

Posted in cars, eco, laws | Tagged Mullen Automotive, MULN | Leave a comment

web: let me link to a song, not a service!

Posted on 2024-09-19 by skierpage

I blog a lot about music. I want you to be able to play the songs I write about. You probably pay for a music streaming service that has millions of songs on it including the ones I discuss; you might even have a downloaded .mp3 file of the song on your computer. But I can’t put a “Listen to this track” link on a web page 😢😠.

The obvious thing to do is have a standard music intent on web pages: ⏵click to listen to “the song ‘I’m Mandy Fly Me’ from the Japanese 2008 reissue of the 10cc album How Dare You” and the song starts playing in your music system of choice. The same way I can put a tel:+1-212-555-1234 link in a web page and if you click it your smartphone offers to make the telephone call.

But there’s no such thing. The best I can do is embed a YouTube player featuring some rendition of the song that I found on YouTube. In cases where the artist doesn’t have an official presence on YouTube, I’ll link to a popular video uploaded by some random fan, that doesn’t have too pointless a “video” display of album covers and random pictures, and hope that their video remains online.

Considerations

As my example suggests, I might want to feature a very specific instance of the recording. YouTube Music irritatingly seems to pick the most recent version of the track, often from a compilation, that has been remastered (damn loudness war). It would be nice if your music streamer could say “I don’t have the particular version, but I have an edited version from the 1970s Go Pop compilation”.

I need to be able to control the playback, to say “Listen to the harmonies at 1:28 in ‘I’m Mandy, Fly Me’.” (This shades into the issue that videos and web pages are poor multimedia experiences, which I blogged about.)

What’s a suitable ID?

Wikidata Q number for a track?

Wikidata actually has an item for the song “I’m Mandy Fly Me,” Q12317871, which links to the song’s ID on Discogs, Freebase, and MusicBrainz. So maybe just have a play-music:Q12317871 intent and make streaming services look this up when the user’s browser starts it and hands it this URL. But I think Wikidata only covers songs that have an article on some Wikipedia, it doesn’t have items for all of the millions of songs uploaded every year. It seems (see “nerd alert” below) that Wikidata only has items for either 30,000 or 670,000 music tracks, a tiny amount . Maybe Bandcamp could take this on, but not all musicians are on Bandcamp.

ISRC?

Eventually Claude.ai suggested I look at ISRC (International Standard Recording Code). I don’t know how many codes this has, but a search for the song by 10cc returned 41 results, one of which might be the right one So maybe play-music:GBF087500011 is the right link (Wikidata doesn’t have any ISRC for “I’m Mandy Fly Me”).

Discogs or MusicBrainz ID?

Discogs and MusicBrainz also have IDs for lots of tracks. Discogs (a great resource for musician/producer/songwriter credits) seems more for collectors tracking down different physical recordings of a song; Wikidata says “I’m Mandy Fly me”’s Discogs “master ID” is 280200 which brings up 22 different versions of the 45 RPM single. I think MusicBrainz is for fingerprinting different versions of a track; Wikidata says the song’s MusicBrainz “work ID” is 9812b3a5-68f6-4c62-b5a9-72b55c5e062c and it brings up dozens of versions of the song from different compilation albums, with slightly different lengths.

Song information matters

Another benefit of a play-music:songTrackID intent/link is the site(s) that maintain the information for songTrackID independent of a particular streaming platform could also provide all the song credit information that is so sadly lacking when you just stream or click play on a song. If there isn’t a Wikipedia article about the song or album, how do you learn who sang the backing vocals or where it was recorded? (Macy Gray’s version of “Tuesday Heartbreak,” I’m looking at you!) Roon (not a streaming service, but excellent software for organizing and playing back your own digital music files) has fantastic metadata for millions of songs so you can explore other songs featuring the same drummer or produced by the same producer, but this information arguably should go with the song, not be dependent on a third party.

Wikidata has a whole data model for this, for example there’s a producer property and a performer property, as you can see for the track Imagine. Ignore the very dry data-centric presentation on the Wikidata site, and imagine this tuned specifically for information about a song. The data model does propose adding Amazon/Deezer/Melon/Shazam/Spotify/Tidal track IDs for tracks, but I don’t think this has happened yet. Wikidata doesn’t include lyrics, undoubtedly due to murky copyright considerations, but many streaming music players now show them so lyrics can be left to the user’s music player.

Also playlists

After you’ve read my words of wisdom, you might want to access a playlist of all the songs I’ve written about. This is especially important for long pieces or interviews that mention dozens of songs. But the best they can do is embed a Spotify or Apple Music songlist player, ignoring everyone paying for Amazon Music, Deezer, Qobuz, Tidal, YouTube Music, etc. Here’s what NPR does:

screenshot of the two playlist widgets on an NPR web page, one for Spotify and the other for Apple Music — sucks to be you if you don’t pay for Spotify or Apple

NPR also has a “Here’s the song, you figure it out” approach. If you click (⏵) View the Tony Bennett show playlist on its Tony Bennett Profile , you get a static text list:

screenshot of a static window listing songs played on an NPR show — Here’s the information, you figure out how to locate and play the songs

Third-party solutions abound

I DuckDuckGo’d and found web pages like “14 Best Music Smart Links in 2024” and “Your Ultimate Guide to Music Links: Accessing Key Music Resources.” From the former

Smart music links can be created using a music url generator, such as SoundLink, Linkfire, Linktree, ToneDen, Hypeddit, Soundplate, Songwhip, Feature.fm …, and many more. Users can use these services to create custom landing pages for their music, where they can choose which platforms to include and customize the page’s look and user experience.

The landing page these services provide looks something like this:

screenshot of Soundiiz landing page for a sample track, with its links to play it on a few music streaming services — No, I want a playlist on my web site that works with the user’s music player

But this is the wrong approach. I don’t want to involve a third-party “music link platform” that provides a separate landing page that figures out links while also tracking my users; I want my reader’s computer to resolve a music intent link to play a song or load a playlist.

There are all kinds of “schemes” you can put in a URL (or a URN? a URI? I can never remember the difference); IANA has a list of official ones and Wikipedia lists some of the unofficial but common ones. There’s no sign of a play-music: scheme.

Efforts to solve this

Tomahawk resolver

Tomahawk (archived site) got some press back in 2013 when it tried to come up with a standard player for music.

Tomahawk is a free multi-source and cross-platform music player. An application that can play not only your local files, but also stream from services like Spotify, Beats, SoundCloud, Google Music, YouTube and many others. You can even connect with your friends’ Tomahawks, share your musical gems or listen along with them. Let the music play!

but the startup went nowhere and the player hasn’t been updated for years. It’s a shame because “In short, given the name of a song and artist, Tomahawk will find the right source, for the right user at the right time” is close to what I want. This is implemented by Tomahawk’s separate resolver code (likewise code that hasn’t been updated for 6 years) which figures out how to locate the track on dozens of music services: “Given a tuple of Artist,Track (or a triple Artist,Album,Track) return a stream URL (and some metadata about it) so that one can play this track.” Great idea. Maybe a triple is better than a single ID for every track, although it doesn’t specify a particular version of the song. The resolver can also open an artist URL, an album URL, or a playlist. Tomahawk also came up with a bookmarklet that “can generate playlists from within web pages. So, if you’re browsing on a site like NPR’s All Songs Considered, and find a song you like, just click the bookmarklet and Tomahawk automatically searches for all the songs listed on the page.” But, again, why involve a third party? I should be able to have a service-independent playlist on my web page, and my reader’s computer should hand it to her chosen music streaming service. And Tomahawk’s demise shows how crazy it is to leave this functionality in the hands of a single third party.

Data Transfer Initiative’s playlist transfer

The Data Transfer Initiative works on policy and technology to empower users to transfer data from one online service to another. One specific example of this is a playlist transfer tool that “allows users of Apple Music and YouTube Music to transfer music streaming playlists between the two services.” Neat, but they don’t seem to be promoting a standard representation of a playlist that I can put into a web page that “just works” in my reader’s music player.

Nerd alert: how many tracks are on Wikidata?

I asked claude.ai to help me count the number of items that are “audio tracks” in Wikidata. It gave me the query to use

SELECT (COUNT(?item) AS ?count) WHERE {
  ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q7302866.
}

and the Wikidata Query Service returned count 7524.

But when dealing with ontologies and knowledge graphs you’re in a maze of has parts and subclasses and such. I asked “Does this include subclasses of a track like a single or a song?” and Claude replied

That’s a great question. The query I provided earlier does not include subclasses of audio tracks. It only counts entities that are directly instances of “audio track” (Q7302866). To include subclasses like singles or songs, we need to modify our query. Let’s create an updated version that includes subclasses.

SELECT DISTINCT ?subclass ?subclassLabel WHERE {
  ?subclass wdt:P279* wd:Q7302866.
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}

but that resulted in a list of 43 things related to an audio track, like “instrumental cover,” “bonus track,” “re-recording,” etc. Eventually Claude came up with a query that includes subclasses of “audio track”:

SELECT (COUNT(DISTINCT ?item) AS ?count) WHERE {
?item wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q7302866.
}

and this returned count 31056. Then it suggested a query for Q2188189 (musical work):

SELECT (COUNT(DISTINCT ?item) AS ?count) WHERE {
  ?item wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q2188189.
}

which returned count 674057. Again, I suspect these are mostly items created from Wikipedia articles about significant musical works (I’m Mandy Fly Me has its own article). Considering that the big music streaming services each have over 100 million tracks on them, and 120,000 new tracks are uploaded to them every day (!!), Wikidata currently falls far short as a comprehensive repository of audio track information. It’s nothing that a bulk upload couldn’t fix.

Posted in music, web | Leave a comment