I’m pretty stoked about the game I reviewed this week for Paste: Charterstone, a competitive, legacy game that incorporates so many great things from other games, plays in just an hour, and changes the board, cards, and rules in each play.
I had Insider posts on this week’s three-team trade (AZ, NYY, TB) and the JD Martinez signing. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.
Smart Baseball comes out in paperback on March 13th! More details on the HarperCollins page for the book. List price is $16.99 but I imagine it’ll be less than that at many retailers.
And now, the links…
- I posted this last Saturday night on Twitter, but it’s important enough to repost here: The BBC Inquiry podcast asks why is Cape Town running out of water? The reasons are obvious, yet authorities didn’t see this crisis coming, and the story has serious implications for cities in arid, warm regions around the world, including our own Phoenix and Tucson.
- The Guardian‘s longread of the week looks at the rise of Italy’s proto-fascist movement CasaPound. The country is expected to lurch to the right in elections in two weeks; incumbent leader Silvio Berlusconi, a corrupt lecher with endless political lives, has embraced the far-right to try to stay in office.
- The Washington Post has a long article about Rachel Crooks, whom Trump sexually assaulted in a Trump Tower elevator in 2006.
- Ben Lindbergh wrote a great profile of sabermetrics pioneer Sherri Nichols, whose Defensive Average was the first great public defensive metric (and changed the way I thought about how we discuss defensive values).
- Twitter cracked down on a bunch of alt-right trolls, including hoaxers claiming the Parkland kids were ‘crisis actors,’ and their general counsel explained the moves in a thread that deserves more attention. Yes, Twitter needs to do more, but this sweep was a big step.
- One of the kids targeted by these hoaxers directly responded to his accusers.
- My alma mater’s alumni magazine interviewed Tom Nichols on the death of expertise and the public’s rising refusal to listen to people who actually know things.
- Digg has a piece on a disease I’d never heard of, one that causes thousands of deaths each year with just a 50% survival rate: melioidosis, a.k.a. Whitmore’s disease, a bacterial infection endemic in southeast Asia and northern Australia.
- Author, astronomer, and atheism advocate Lawrence Krauss has been accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, something that seems to be too common in the skeptic community (where Michael Shermer has also been accused of sexually harassing or assaulting multiple women). In a movement that prides itself on demanding and then accepting evidence, you’d think these women would find more support.
- Pennsylvania Republicans are willing to dismantle the state’s democracy to retain power, moving towards impeaching the state judges who ruled against their gerrymandered map. They’re also suing yet again to stop the redistricting. One wonders what they’re so afraid of.
- The great ProPublica gets a profile of how it’s taking its watchdog approach to Facebook, Google, and other tech giants.
- Some good news on the vaccine front: Trump appears to have abandoned his vaccine-autism commission idea. The UK is having its own vaccine-denial problem, prompting the Guardian to also issue this editorial on how we need to hear parents’ fears, and make them immunize their kids anyway.
- An Idaho group brought 183 small coffins to the Boise state house, one for each kid who died in the state because their parents were ‘faith healers,’ going back to 1970. You have a right to practice your religion, but you do not have the right to let your kids die for your faith. The latter is something you get with so-called “religious freedom” laws.
- Kyle Lobner, formerly of BrewCrewBall, is starting a newsletter version of his Frosty Mug daily links roundups, aimed mostly at Brewers fans, and you can support his efforts via Patreon.
- Sorry, but it turns out that Nigerians just don’t care about their bobsled team.
- A brief post from the founder of the Environmental Voter Project argues that the NRA is effective because its voters show up, not because of money. The answer, of course, is to boost turnout of people opposed to the NRA’s agenda.
Keith, how would charterstone fare in your two player game rankings?
I haven’t played it with two. I worry it might be too easy because you’d rarely compete with opponents for anything – but I don’t know for sure.
My group is only about 4 or 5 rounds into Charterstone, but we’ve had some wildly differing lengths of time for each round. I think one was as little as 45 minutes and one lasted almost 3 hours, just because of different strategies (the long one, no one was opening crates or building anything, and it only ended because two people ran out of influence tokens). Have you experienced that, or was this just kind of a fluke of what crates we opened/when we opened them?
We have not because all three of us keep opening crates for the points and potential benefits.
I wonder if it has something to do with the number of players; we have all six, so maybe that contributes. If so, that’s another point in Charterstone’s favor in my opinion; I like games that play differently when different numbers of players are involved
It’s been such fun this week to see people like you, Keith, call me out as a sabrmetric pioneer! Thanks!
Defensive Average was a lightbulb moment for me. It wasn’t the stat, but the entire philosophy. It just made so much sense that it flipped my thinking on its head.
Regarding the Pennsylvania legislature, what is the proper response if they believe (rightly or wrongly) that the justices didn’t merely get it wrong but usurped legislative authority in drawing a new map? How different is it than calling for a recall of that California judge who let the Stanford rapist off with a slap on the wrist?
Appeal to SCOTUS? Which they already tried and were refused.
How different is it than calling for a recall of that California judge who let the Stanford rapist off with a slap
I think this is a pretty big false equivalency. First, a recall is voted on by the electorate and not the legislators–we should hold elected officials to higher standards. Second, there is a big difference between criminal cases and constitutional cases, where legal scholars can reasonably disagree. I am strongly opposed to the Citizens United ruling, but I sure as hell don’t want those justices impeached over it. SCOTUS is politicized enough without justices being removed due to partisan whims.
The ruling was based on the state constitution, which is why the SCOTUS route won’t work. Given that, the only way to change it is removing the justices from office. One way is to wait for them to be up for reelection, but impeachment is an arrow in their quiver. And while there is room for disagreement as to whether the court acted appropriately, there’s certainly an argument to be made that the court itself violated separation of powers. And I’d thats true, impeachment is an appropriate remedy.
I wasn’t clear in bringing up the California judge, which is my fault. Criticizing the Pennsylvania legislators for trying to remove the judges because they disagree with the ruling while also calling for the California life to be recalled is inconsistent. I don’t understand the significance of your full electorate point, but there’s a big difference between this and impeaching SCOTUS justices over Citizens United – the Pennsylvania justices are designed to be accountable to the voters, as they are elected and must run for reelection
Jason,
How many elected officials called for the Cali judge to be recalled? People were outraged by the decision and a small group called for his impeachment. That is very, very different from an entire state party rallying around impeaching judges’ whose decisions they don’t like.
i’m not seeing it laid out in detail in any of the links, so perhaps you could enlighten us as to why the court’s decision warrants impeachment (beyond the fact that the GOP could, theoretically, do it).
the Pennsylvania justices are designed to be accountable to the voters…
Voters, not the legislators. If this were a recall campaign, I would disagree with the political motivations, but would agree that this was a sound potential remedy. Impeachment is different. Impeachment in PA–and damn near everywhere else, as far as I can tell–has always been limited to gross misconduct or worse, not legal or political disagreements. Courts including the Supreme Court are often accused of “legislating from the bench,” but his has never been used as the grounds for impeachment. Impeachment should not be used as a legislative bypass of the judiciary. Only in our current hyper-partisan environment would this be considered even remotely appropriate.
Scott Pruitt is still a slimebag.
Am I the only one getting an error message instead of the Cape Town article?
This should be working now.
“If this were a recall campaign, I would disagree with the political motivations, but would agree that this was a sound potential remedy.”
FWIW, there is no provision in Pennsylvania law for recall elections. Impeachment is the only alternative to waiting until the next time the justices are up for reelection, and since PA Supreme Court justices are elected to 10 year terms that can be a long time.
And several states have life tenure similar to the US Supreme Court. In some states, justices are appointed instead of elected. I still believe that impeachment should only be invoked for serious crimes and misconduct, and not as a partisan remedy.
In this case, there’s no evidence that impeachment *is* the will of the people. The entire gerrymandering issue itself revolves around the will of the people not being accurately represented in the legislature. The GOP legislators themselves are conflicted in this – they’re saving their own skins – in contradiction to the court’s ruling that the composition of the legislature itself was flawed.
In this case, there’s no evidence that impeachment *is* the will of the people.
A good point, and I would go even further. Because the justices themselves ran in statewide elections, their view more likely represents the “will of the people” than the gerrymandered legislature. But this is moot unless one believes that impeachment is part of the partisan toolbox.
“But this is moot unless one believes that impeachment is part of the partisan toolbox.”
Replace “unless” with “until” and “one” with “the GOP” and “the partisan” with “their” and then add “and no one else’s because then it is a tool of elitist, unAmerican tyranny” and I think we’re getting warm.