My one new piece for Insiders this week covers the Cubs signing Yu Darvish to a six-year deal. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.
I reviewed the new, light strategy board game Majesty: For the Realm for Paste this week.
I’ve been sending out my free email newsletter a bit more regularly now that the prospect work is over. Also, Smart Baseball will be out in paperback on March 13th; you can pre-order it on amazon or elsewhere, although at the moment the hardcover version is about $1 cheaper.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: This New Orleans Times-Picayune story on a photographer’s friendship with former NFL player Jackie Wallace, who has intermittently gone missing due to his ongoing substance abuse problems, is beautifully written and devastating at the same time.
- This 20,000-word piece profiling the Resnicks, the biggest farmers in the United States, manages to touch on water shortages & fights, how companies treat their employees, and the marketing of food in a wide-ranging and brilliant article that doesn’t directly take sides.
- A Georgia con artist failed to fulfill a FEMA contract to deliver hot meals to Puerto Rico and is now suing the agency for $70 million. Tiffany Brown had no disaster relief experience, but got the contract anyway, even though you can see on Yelp that she’s been accused of small-scale fraud.
- The New Yorker looks at SHIFT, a massive, ongoing research project on sexual behavior on campus located at and funded by Columbia. The goal is to find small, structural changes they can make to student life to reduce the incidence of unwanted sexual contact.
- Michael Lewis looks at the Trump Presidency from inside and without, including spending time with a thoroughly unchastened Steve Bannon, in a long piece for Bloomberg News.
- Can technology help reduce the sugar in gelato and other desserts? More importantly, why would we want to?
- The Asheville Citizen-Times reports on the huge rise in children entering foster care because their parents are hooked on opioids, a problem particularly affecting western North Carolina and other parts of the Appalachian Highlands. The issues range from infants born with up to eight different drugs in their systems to older children dealing with untreated or undertreated post-traumatic stress disorder.
- Climate change may release tons of mercury into the atmosphere, well beyond previous projections, because permafrost soil – which may not be so “perma” after all – contains more of the metal than earlier estimates held.
- A record number of scientists are running for office this year, spurred by the federal government’s unconscionable, irrational lurch towards denialist policies on everything from climate change to clean water.
- Geothermal energy is gaining increased attention as a renewable energy source, which means the current Administration will likely target it with tax hikes and tell us more about “clean, beautiful coal.”
- A Pennsylvania Republican is trying to impeach state Supreme Court justices who struck down the state’s gerrymandered map for Congressional seats. Cris Dush, who represents a rural part of western PA, says it’s not about their ruling, but their process. The state’s Democrat governor discussed the gerrymandering ruling with the Washington Post.
- Pennsylvania is no isolated case; the Republican Party is benefiting from a long-range, planned effort to gerrymander states across the country to try to hold power in Congress even though they consistently lose the popular vote.
- Want to hear a Polish joke? The country passed a law making it illegal to say Polish people collaborated with the Nazis, part of a rising tide of anti-Semitism across Eastern Europe. The country’s president signed the law, drawing a rebuke from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
- An Alabama high school teacher compared Obama to Hitler and assigned an overwhelmingly conservative summer reading list, including Liberalism is a Mental Disorder.
- Over 100,000 people protested in Athens … because they don’t like the name of the country Macedonia. I suppose in a country with a 21% unemployment rate, it’s not like these people have anything better to do.
- Paul Ryan’s office tweeted about a woman thanking him for a tax cut that gave her an $1.50 a week … and then deleted it in the face of widespread criticism and mockery. The tax cut gave a disproportionate benefit to higher-income earners, even though it’s far from clear that this will do anything to stimulate the economy; there’s a competing school of thought that savings and/or consumption do more to drive growth.
- Slate ran a junk-science article claiming backpackers don’t need to filter or treat stream water before drinking it; Discover had one of the best rebuttals of this nonsense, although it still wasn’t enough to convince Slate to correct or take down its post and the dangerous advice therein.
- A publicly-funded college in Ontario is launching a diploma program in the pseudoscience homeopathy.
- My current home state of Delaware reported its fourth flu death of the season last week, as new flu cases for the last full week of January were double those of the same week last year.
- A Colorado man whose rape conviction was overturned after he spent 28 years in prison is suing the state … and the state’s Attorney General is fighting his $1.9 million request.
- A new Kickstarter for the board game CO2: Second Chance, an update and reissue of a climate-change themed game from 2012, blew past its funding goal in the first few days last week.
- Asmodee’s acquisition binge continued this week with the announcement that they’re acquiring Mayfair Games and Lookout Games. Mayfair, which announced it was shutting its doors after 36 years in business, was the longtime publisher of Catan, while Lookout published Uwe Rosenberg’s biggest titles, including Agricola and Patchwork.
“The tax cut gave a disproportionate benefit to higher-income earners, even though it’s far from clear that this will do anything to stimulate the economy; there’s a competing school of thought that savings and/or consumption do more to drive growth. ”
I’m not following this. Savings (that is, investment) is the opposite of consumption, no? What I don’t spend, I save (and the bank lends to someone, so it’s an investment). High earners are more likely to save more, since low earners have to spend most of their income just to get by. If savings/investment is driving the economy (as I believe), the tax cut might stimulate the economy (though it’s never enough to offset its own cost); if it’s consumption, this tax cut won’t do it.
What am I missing?
My understanding is that, when interest rates are ~0.00 from the Fed, tax cuts are unlikely to stimulate investment since investment cash is already readily available. The argument is that, since there’s already more than enough available cash to meet the current demand for investment, then adding more via a tax cut is just going to give investors a surplus that will go straight into their pockets rather than back into the economy (which many of the larger companies have already said is exactly what they plan to do with their tax cuts). Tax cuts can stimulate the economy when investment capital is scares and/or expensive, but there’s a lot of skepticism that cutting taxes now (and paying for them with massive deficits) will have much impact on investment.
A shame that his equivocation of Hitler to Obama prevented him from assigning “Mein Kampf”. I guess he could have substituted “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” as It would have fit in nicely with some of those other titles. Guess I’ll go drink a beer and lament this missed opportunity for the next generation of bigots from Alabama.
Of course, if we want to make presidential-fuhrer parallels, the better one is Donald Trump. I do an exercise about demagoguery where I change eight words from Trump’s announcement speech, and it plausibly looks like a passage from Mein Kampf.
Gerrymandering only seems to be bad when Republicans are drawing the maps. The Democratic Party needs a strategy to win more races down the ballot and it will be their turn to draw.
I don’t understand the outrage of the $1.50 per week tweet. Some people just think that way. If I can save $5 per week on something I think it will add up to something nice over the course of the year.
I prepare about 110 tax returns each year and about 10 of my clients have $0 liability. They won’t get a tax cut because it is impossible to pay less than $0. My wife and I paid about $30k of income tax alone in 2016. I figure I will save about $3k. I am not sorry that I get to keep more of my money.
No, gerrymandering is bad when anyone does it. It’s just that the GOP made it a big part of their long-term strategic plan, since they knew/know they are the minority party. So, they are the ones being criticized. The only state that is majorly gerrymandered in the Democrats’ direction is Maryland, compared to about a dozen that are majorly gerrymandered in the Republicans’ direction (Texas, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin, West Virginia, etc.) And it’s sad that your solution is that two wrongs make a right, as opposed to, “Let’s hope SCOTUS strikes down partisan gerrymanders in Gill v. Whitford.”
Do you really not understand the problem with the $1.50 tweet? That it’s a tiny, tiny amount of money, compared to the vast sums that will be given back to the very wealthy and/or corporations? That it looks wildly out of touch for a party that has also proclaimed that a $1,000 tax break is enough to buy a car or renovate your kitchen?
And similarly, do you really not understand that you getting to keep more of your money could, quite conceivably, have long-term consequences that mean that you get to keep less of your money? That unwise short-term economic policy can do severe long-term damage? If you are unclear this point, I suggest you take a look at what happened in Kansas in the past four years. Or during the Bush presidency.
1) Gerrymandering reduces the number of competitive districts and increases political polarization. It disenfranchises citizens and is bad for democracy. The solution shouldn’t be for the opposite party to gerrymander in their own favor following wave elections.
2) It’s a little tone deaf for a wealthy individual to congratulate someone making a lot less on their newfound $80. But as a libby lib, I’ll concede that there is confirmation bias when it comes to noticing things like this.
3) I dont’ begrudge someone for being happy about more take home pay. I am annoyed that extremely wealthy individuals get a larger percentage cut (not just raw dollars, but percentage of income) than the middle class. And I do believe that the increasing deficits will be used later as an excuse to cut entitlements down the road. I also find the most of the Obama presidency deficit hawks to be pretty hypocritical right now.
My father has worked to set up foster care facilities in nearby Hendersonville, NC, as well as homes for abused mothers and their children. The opioid crisis there is indeed horrific, and not made better by the attitudes of many locals — at-risk populations need housing close by to other services for the poor, as they typically lack their own transportation. But the downtown areas of these small cities are hugged closely by residential areas, the inhabitants of which tend to fight the zoning variances that these facilities often require.
Not that I am arguing for coal but something that really isn’t talked about is how you are essentially cooling earths core with geothermal energy. What kind of impact could that have if we actually used geothermal on a wide scale?
That’s a misconception. Geothermal can’t cool the earth’s core.
Its not the size of your paycheck that matters, its what you are able to do with it. The whole discussion about tax cuts is fucking stupid, because, as a nation, we look at about 1/4 of the relevant information and decide thats all thats important. There is less than zero chance that the tax cut that the middle class is seeing is going to increase the purchasing power of the middle class. On the other hand, there is a very large chance that this tax cut will shift a significant percentage of the nations wealth upwards to the already obscenely wealthy.
Mayfair Games? They are a seriously venerable company. Long before Catan they published gems like Empire Builder and the 18XX rail games, great beer and pretzels card games like Family Business and Encounters (I would kill to find a copy of Encounters.) Lookout is a good mobile company, hopefully the new stewards of Mayfair’s legacy realize the historical importance of their acquisition.
They cancelled the homeopathy program – http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/georgian-college-diploma-homeopathy-pseudoscience-1.4529339
Thanks. A rare bit of good news.