Stick to baseball, 12/15/18.

This week’s MLB winter meetings weren’t great, but I did write up a few moves: Cleveland’s trades for Carlos Santana & Jake Bauers, the signings of Joe Kelly and Jeurys Familia, the Lance Lynn signing & Tanner Roark trade, the Rays’ signing of Charlie Morton, and the Phillies’ signing of Andrew McCutchen.

On the board game front, I wrote up every game I tried at PAX Unplugged for Paste, and reviewed the Terraforming Mars app (on Steam) for Ars Technica.

I resumed my free email newsletter this week, after a longer break than I wanted due to those same stupid meetings and stupid prospect calls getting in the stupid way, but you should join the over 5000 current subscribers for even more of my words.

And now, the links…

Comments

  1. The DHS press statement currently has appropriate articles and grammar; did they change it, or did Splinter News just do a parody?

  2. God, this push here in New Jersey is embarrassing. Fuck the NJ Democratic party. Governor Murphy is opposed to the effort (as is Eric Holder), but it won’t go to his desk for a signature. If we can’t successfully shame the legislature out of stopping this lunacy, it will go before the voters as a ballot referendum next year. It’s going to take a really big educational push to strike down this lunacy.

  3. Speaking of water issues, the podcast The Dollop did a really good episode on how California’s water crisis was exacerbated by decisions made in the mid-90’s that privatized some of its water distribution:

    https://pca.st/Ch4t

  4. Speaking of water issues, the podcast The Dollop did a really good episode this week on the California water crisis and how it was exacerbated by decisions in the mid-90’s to privatize some of its water distribution infrastructure.

  5. Brian in Ahwatukee

    I’ve been bugging my Phoenix city council member, who may be the dumbest politician I’ve ever encountered and I know who is president, to vote correctly. he voted against the water hike. Because he thought it would cost too much. It’s maddening. Yes, make water expensive so vast swaths of grass won’t be cheap. How is this hard?

    Now for the arena he is more non-comittal because it would be very exciting to him to lick the boots of a billionaire. I am totally grossed out by him and can’t wait for his term to be over so we can get another sane person in there

  6. Re: bread, wheat, grains, etc…if Sid Meier’s Civilization taught me anything, it’s that you can’t do jack unless you build a granary.

  7. The basic coverage of nj doesn’t quite do the complexities justice. See for example
    http://election.princeton.edu/2018/12/15/nj-redistricting-amendment-mistakes-in-news-coverage/#nerdery1

  8. https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2018/12/14/lin-wang-charles-barkley

    Keith, kind of random, but did you happen to see this NPR story about Charles Barkley and his randomly awesome friendship with a Chinese cat litter scientist? You probably encountered it already, but a really neat story, nonetheless.

    • I did, thank you. Someone else forwarded it to me a few hours after this post went up, so I have it saved for next week (although by now it might be too widely-seen to bother including).

  9. I hate that I’m defending that asshole Dan Bongino but I watched that video and at no point did he claim Obama was also guilty of “paying off mistresses”.

    It’s pretty clear the context of his “exact same thing” comment is in regards to the Obama campaign being guilty of campaign law violations, not the specifics of said campaign law violations.

    Claiming Bongino believes Obama also paid off women is pretty disingenuous.

    But hey, republicans are a bunch of racist morons who only deal in alternative facts so we can assume the worst intent in every ambiguous statement they make right?

    • republicans are a bunch of racist morons who only deal in alternative facts

      Nobody said that, Chris. The topic is that particular show, which does indeed deal in alternative facts, and which unfortunately has influence over the President.

    • But even that is a ridiculous false equivalence. It’s like saying a shoplifter is the same as Danny Ocean because they both steal stuff. Not all campaign finance violations are the same thing.