My latest draft blog post covers six top prospects I saw in the last week and a half, including Riley Pint, who hit 100 mph on my gun. ESPN also posted a free lookback at my old reports on Aaron Hicks. I held my regular Klawchat on Thursday, going about a half hour longer than usual.
And now, the links…
- I’ve always thought the UN was worse than useless, but boy, does this take the cake: Their own Nepalese peacekeepers caused the ongoing Haitian cholera epidemic that has killed upwards of 10,000 people. And they’re covering it up, with help from our own federal government.
- Thieves are stealing nuts from California farmers and it’s actually a serious problem.
- The NY Times weighs in on transgender bathroom hysteria with an op ed that emphasizes two aspects of these hateful laws: They don’t make anyone safer, and they carry real economic consequences for states that pass them. Not mentioned is how such laws blatantly pander to the evangelical base of the right wing, and how such voters seem to fall for it.
- Charles Pierce’s column on the two names we’ll be saying till the election was spot on and very entertaining to read.
- This Slate piece on the fake Craigslist ad asking for a “feminism tutor” is super weird and creepy. The piece identifies the serial harasser as a Penn State student, but the school’s directory shows zero results in a search of his name.
- Sarah Palin claimed that she’s as much a “scientist” as Bill Nye is, which is a bizarre sort of ad hominem attack.
- The University of Georgia paid Ludacris $65K to perform before a spring football game but remember there’s no money to pay the players because amateurism.
- I found this 2010 Science post called Things I Won’t Work With: Dioxygen Difluoride highly amusing.
- The Onion reports what other news outlets won’t: Pharmaceutical Industry Reeling As More Moms Making Vaccines At Home.
- The 1970 Miami High School baseball team was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame this past week. “If it happened today — 24 innings thrown in one 346-pitch game by a high school junior — the coach likely would be fired or maybe even worse.” I don’t know if that pitcher, Alberto Zamora, was a major prospect before that outing, but he never made it to full-season ball.
- Don’t believe positive reviews you see online, even if they seem well-written and specific. A Fusion write created a fake business and bought likes and reviews for $5 a pop.
- The sister of the late Harris Wittels, Parks & Recreation writer and actor as well as creator of the Humblebrag, wrote a searing piece on the end of empathy and the awful shit people say online. Within her piece is a subpoint to which I can certainly relate: People will say awful things to total strangers when behind the comfort of a keyboard and a pseudonym. Someone came here the other day to say he disagreed with my comments on C.J. Nitkowski’s post and that he wouldn’t be a reader any more, and ended with “Fuck you.” He might have said the other stuff to my face. The last bit? I doubt it.
- Millenials prefer straight cash to stupid office perks, and Bloomberg is on it.
- Vox has a thoughtful piece on smugness in American liberalism; everything in there is at least somewhat accurate, but couldn’t you make the same points about any such community, especially online? Vaccine deniers, conspiracy theorists, evangelicals, atheists, vegetarians, Trump supporters – they all thrive in environments where they can limit their exposure to people with differing views, creating a feedback loop that further convinces them that they are right and everyone else is wrong. It’s human nature, and I don’t think it’s limited to any part of the political spectrum.
- Finally, did you know I’m a “liberal firebrand?” I didn’t realize believing in flatter taxation, a balanced budget, and free markets made me a left-wing nut job. Or that believing in equal rights for everyone put me anywhere but with the majority.
Please explain, ESPN, why you fired conservative firebrand @gehrig38 for his opinions and allow liberal firebrand @keithlaw to express his?
— Dan Curry (@dancurry) April 21, 2016
I think the general idea behind a balanced budget (fiscal responsibility) is sound, but I also think that there’s a lot of government spend with long-term payoff (education, welfare, recession recovery) that is variable in nature, which makes the concept difficult in practice. For example, the 2009 stimulus probably wouldn’t have been possible with a balanced budget, due to decreased revenues and military commitments.
In some circles, all it takes to be branded a “liberal firebrand” is a basic understanding of evolutionary science and a propensity for reading. Seriously, though, are the folks who crying bias over Schilling’s dismissal even aware that you, too, have been suspended by ESPN for what appeared to have been related to a social media issue?
It also wasn’t Schilling’s first run in with ESPN’s management. Nor his second. Or third. I do like his excuse for not seeing the email saying don’t post political stuff because it went to his spam folder, Given the frequency of posting rather inflammatory posts in last few months it seems he thought he wouldn’t get fired. Eventually, whatever benefits you bring an organization can be outweighed by the negatives.
http://ftw.usatoday.com/2016/04/a-12-year-history-of-curt-schillings-outspoken-political-stances
Dan Wetzel at Yahoo Sports had an excellent article on what athletic departments are doing with all the extra money they are getting. Hint: Basically building new stadiums and lining the pockets of the higher ups in the athletic department.
http://sports.yahoo.com/news/how-college-athletics-has-become-a-boondoggle-for-everyone-but-the-students-232051705.html
Just wait until someone labels you a “libertarian firebrand”.
” think the general idea behind a balanced budget (fiscal responsibility) is sound”
Its not. If the federal government has a balanced budget, average private savings per person HAS to go down, assuming a population increase, since the only way for more dollars to be in the economy is for the government to spend more than it taxes
This isn’t right. You’re assuming a closed economy.
No, paul is correct regarding the operational realities of government deficits. It’s an accounting tautology.
To quote Warren Mosler:
“Any $U.S. government deficit exactly EQUALS the total net increase in the holdings ($U.S. financial assets) of the rest of us – businesses and households, residents and non residents – what is called the “non government” sector. In other words, government deficits equal increased “monetary savings” for the rest of us, to the penny.
Simply put, government deficits ADD to our savings (to the penny). This is an accounting fact, not theory or philosophy. There is no dispute. It is basic national income accounting. For example, if the government deficit last year was $1 trillion, it means that the net increase in savings of financial assets for everyone else combined was exactly, to the penny, $1 trillion. (For those who took some economics courses, you might remember that net savings of financial assets is held as some combination of actual cash, Treasury securities and member bank deposits at the Federal Reserve.) This is Economics 101 and first year money banking. It is beyond dispute. It’s an accounting identity.”
Source: http://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/powerpoints/7DIF.pdf
I disagree with Mosler on some of his prescriptive views, but he is excellent at the descriptive side.
I haven’t taken an econ or accounting class in almost 20 years, so maybe I’m just clueless here. I probably am. But I’m definitely confused here.
Mosler says free trade is a net good for a country, which I think is true in theory and in practice. But then he claims in that link that the trade deficit is an unequivocal good for an economy (I couldn’t say if this is true, false, or both) and gives the example that Japan has sent us millions of cars for “next to nothing.” How is that accurate? US consumers have paid Japanese and now Chinese manufacturers for hard goods, and those companies’ shareholders have been able to buy real estate around the world with the same dollars – and not always real estate here. So how is that “next to nothing,” and wouldn’t that also mean that, in an open economy where inflows may not equal outflows, the tautology you cite does not hold? (Serious question, not rhetorical or sarcastic.)
The comments from Mike and paul regarding budget are disheartening, at best. Then again, financial/economic illiteracy is an epidemic in this country and why we’re on an unsustainable fiscal path.
The sanctimonious comment is hardly a compelling counter argument, Mark.
What’s “sanctimonious” about it? They both essentially insinuated perpetual deficit spending by our government is a good thing without supportive evidence. I hardly find what they stated a compelling argument. So why am I the sanctimonious one when they’re just as guilty of blowing nothing more than an unsubstantiated opinion?
I will say this, about the only “evidence” one could offer that a spendthrift government is a “good thing” is that we’ve been doing it as a country and haven’t really felt the repercussions as a result. Let me say in response – and this plays a little off of Keith’s point above about an open/closed economy – we get away with so much in the US with regard to reckless fiscal and monetary policy due to our military prowess and the dollar’s reserve currency status. You take that away, and the problems of profligate spending increasingly start coming home to roost. We’re starting to see more and more instances where countries are looking to push for non-dollar methods of settling accounts, and if this continues, it’s only a matter time until the dollar’s reserve currency status is gone. You take away the demand for greenbacks to settle international accounts, and you’ll see what kinds of problems arise when you spend more money than you take in with a currency that’s not so favored on the global scene.
“They both essentially insinuated perpetual deficit spending by our government is a good thing”
That I did not. I said it was sometimes a good thing, and cited an example that helped our recovery from the 2008 crash.
Not sure if you listen to Mike Duncan’s “Revolutions” podcast, but he just finished 19 episodes on Haiti with an incredibly depressing triple episode on Haiti from the end of the Haitian Revolution to present-day.
http://www.revolutionspodcast.com/
The Slate link doesn’t work for me …
Keith – don’t you know you’re only allowed to be “all liberal” or “all conservative” these days? There’s no room in the twitter-verse for centrists!
Whenever I post something online and receive a reply that is mean-spirited or demeaning, I respond as if that person’s comment is the most substantial contribution to a conversation that I could imagine and usually ask him a question or two as if I value his knowledge and hope that he can add to mine. He wants the exact opposite response so why give in?
Keith, have you read Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer yet? I’ll be interested in your thoughts once you do.
It’s next in my queue.