My annual ranking of the top 25 MLB players under 25 is up for Insiders, as is another draft blog post on Vanderbilt’s Carson Fulmer and Dansby Swanson. My weekly Klawchat transcript is up.
I also appeared on actor Nate Corddry’s Reading Aloud podcast, talking mostly about books and pizza with a little baseball chatter thrown in.
And now, the links…
- English college student Ione Wells wrote a letter to her assaulter as a statement of strength for herself and other victims of sexual assault. It’s absolutely worth reading (and re-posting, since I tweeted to it on Wednesday).
- Anything with David Simon is an auto-link for me; with Baltimore in flames earlier this week, he’s a a natural commentator, and you might say he has some thoughts on the matter. The failed War on Drugs comes up, as you would expect.
- Hugh Acheson and Empire State South barista Dale Donchey will open a new coffee shop called Spiller Park Coffee in Atlanta’s Ponce City Market, with a projected opening date in September. They’ll use a selection from a small number of the best small/third-wave roasters in the country.
- Nearly all economists agree free trade is good, so why are some members of Congress fighting renewal of the President’s Trade Promotion Authority? Why is Elizabeth Warren, by all accounts a fairly intelligent person, on the wrong side of the table here – along with a good chunk of her fellow Democrats?
- The New York Times was strong this week, between that op ed and this investigative report on the deep, unspoken support for the drone program within Washington’s inner circles of power.
- Chipotle, the most responsible of all national food chains when it comes to sourcing ingredients, will no longer serve food made with GMO ingredients. That’s too bad, as it feeds into FraudBabe-style anti-science woo-woo; GMOs are completely safe to eat and can improve crop yields, although they have negative externalities regarding pesticide use. (I still favor GMO labelling, as it’s the consumer’s right to decide what to consume, even if they want to be stupid about it.)
- Rubella has been eradicated in the Americas. You know why? Because vaccines. It’s the third virus that infects humans to be wiped out in this hemisphere and the fourth virus in total (including rinderpest, which infected mostly cattle and buffalo).
- NPR’s Fresh Air dedicated a show to an interview with journalist Mark Arax about California’s water wars, especially the current conflict over almond farms’ use of water.
- A short but potent piece from Ta-Nehisi Coates on Nonviolence as Compliance in Baltimore.
Oh boy, that Mankiw link is absurd. There are legitimate concerns with the IP protections and dispute resolution procedures in the TPP. This isn’t a straight up free trade deal, so let’s not pretend it’s idiocy or populism driving opposition.
I’m not sure I get the recent spate of pro-GMO opinion in a lot of locations that normally express well considered opinions on other topics (read “things I agree with politically”). Yes, the science says they’re not a problem from the standpoint of safety. Really what’s genetic modification but a little more precise version of what Gregor Mendel was doing?
But the part that’s bothersome is the line that gets thrown in and thrown off in most pieces, that GMOs will lead to increased pesticide (and/or herbicide) use. This is a big deal. These increases are bound to have environmental impacts well beyond farm fields. It’s also not exciting to me that GMOs are going to lead to more control over our food supply by the GlobalHyperMegaCorp companies.
The anti-science crowd is wrong, but they’re on the right side of the coin for the wrong reasons in my book.
I agree with you on the objections to the business of GMOs, including restrictions put on farmers by corporations that patent seeds and sell various -icides to those farmers without sufficient research on those chemicals’ effects (e.g., the ongoing hypothesis about certain pesticides causing bee colony collapse).
I also think that if we label everything with GMOs in it, there will be so many foods labelled “contains GMOs” that consumers will have to educate themselves further – or will just ignore the GMO labels entirely. GMOs are too pervasive in our food supply for most people to avoid them entirely. (I don’t.) But I can’t get behind the idea that we shouldn’t let people know how stuff is made because we’ve given them such a shitty education that they won’t process that information correctly.
A couple years back we got close to labeling GMO foods, but the anti-crowd took a wrong turn at the last minute and demanded the label basically look like a giant green skull and cross bones. Labeling is actually supported by many in the ag and food world, as long as it’s a federal label and consistent state to state.
Before you conclude that skepticism about GMOs is “anti-science,” you might want to take a look at this recent statement by 300 European scientists, which contests the claim that the science on GMOs is settled (linked to and summarized here: http://www.foe.org/news/archives/2015-02-are-gmos-safe-no-consensus-in-the-science-scientists).
In my view, the “anti-science” label is much too quickly and easily given these days, used as a way of shutting down arguments. It’s a form of intellectual impatience, representing an issue as clear-cut and straightforward, when really it is complex and as yet uncertain. Picking up on John’s good point, I would add that increased pesticide use is not just an unfortunate by-product of GMOs. For many people, it’s the central concern.
I was juuuuust about to post a “what about joc pederson for top 25 under 25” but then I decided to, you know, read the methodology at the top of the piece. I look like an idiot so much of my life anyway but it’s always nice to avoid it every now and again.
The idea is to have me say something about players I wouldn’t otherwise be discussing. We keep rookies off this list since I just wrote 45K words on them in January.
I agree with Ben completely on this one. The Mankiw link is absurd. (Though it did provide me with one small smile as I remembered the old Bloom County cartoon where Binkley dreamed that two economists came to visit and he asked them to talk about anything but the economy.)
Just using the word “Free” doesn’t mean that it is a free trade deal. Dean Baker does some wonderful heavy lifting on this subject, incidentally. http://www.cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/correction-to-mankiw-economists-actually-agree-just-because-you-call-something-free-trade-doesn-t-make-it-free-trade
I enjoyed that link, so thanks for posting it. I’m pretty sure that he’s misstating the labor numbers, though; nonfarm employment now is its highest ever per the St. Louis Fed.
Glad you enjoyed it! Gross participation is certainly higher, but from reading Baker’s other pieces and books I think he is talking about millions based on labor participation rather than gross numbers. http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CIVPAR
My inflation adjusted two cents is that part of the drop is because of the aging baby boomer population, but not all of it can be attributed to the aging population. However, the spread between U-6 and U-3 was around +4% for better than a decade leading up to the great recession and is still sitting at +5.5% though it is much better than the +7% of 2010.
http://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate
Sorry, I have a filter set up to hold any comment with more than one link for moderation.
Coates is so money.
Usually
I haven’t read the links in the comments, so maybe some of this is already addressed, but…
There are real reasons for the working and middle classes to oppose the TPP. The IP protections are anti-competitive, and the investor state arbitration provisions undermine consumer protections, environmental protections, and labor rights laws. As well, free trade works to replace the jobs that are overseas only if training for new jobs is within the grasp of the working class. Right now our educational system is so expensive that training is getting out of reach, and college is increasingly losing its ability to be a path to the middle class, so losing more jobs overseas probably won’t help the working and middle class even in the longer run (and certainly not in the short run, while we are already short on good jobs).
Because TPP isn’t a free trade agreement, it’s more corporate welfare for the people who already have way too much.
Re: GMO-labeling
Where is the line between what we should require to be on labels and what we shouldn’t? Should foods high in cholesterol be labeled as such? Foods that use imported ingredients? I mean, consumers might want to know that stuff and choose accordingly? So if we know that GMOs aren’t dangerous, why mandate labeling in the name of “consumer choice”?
We do label cholesterol content, and we do label country of origin (“product of Molvania”). The latter is particularly important for produce, since U.S. safety standards typically exceed those of the countries who send us produce in our offseasons.
That doesn’t really address the crux of my question: Who decides what needs to be on labels? Produce, yes, has country of origin. But I have no idea if my Corn Flakes make use of ingredients foreign or domestic.
So, again, why GMO-labeling and not other forms?
Why shouldn’t consumers decide? I think that’s the default position and we need a very good argument against it before we decide that consumers don’t have the right to know something they say they want to know.