My one ESPN+ piece this week covered the possibility of realigning the minor leagues, possibly contracting several dozen teams or demoting them to nonaffiliated leagues. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.
Over at Paste, I reviewed Era: The Medieval Age, the new game from Pandemic designer Matt Leacock. It’s a roll-and-build game that reimplements his own Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age, but gives it better components and a spatial aspect absent from the first game.
My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be out on April 21st, 2020, from HarperCollins. You can pre-order it now through that link (and please do so!).
You should also subscribe to my my free email newsletter, because I said so.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Shane Mitchell writes for Bitter Southerner about the long transatlantic history of okra, a global plant that came to the west a few hundred years ago from Africa and that is now essential to the cuisines of the American south. I love it dipped in cornmeal and fried, or in a deep brown gumbo.
- Why do people hate vegans? They’re a convenient punchline, says George Reynolds of the Guardian, but their dietary choices force us to confront harsh environmental and medical realities about the meat-centric diet of the west while also running up against a longstanding association of meat with prosperity.
- Psychologist Hans Eysenck’s work has been highly influential but also criticized on multiple grounds, including his dubious support of work that claimed there was a link between race and IQ. Cosmos details a bigger scandal, that Eysenck and a longtime collaborator may have faked data and conclusions, including studies that claimed your personality could influence your chances of getting cancer or heart disease. If all 61 papers co-authored by Eysenck are eventually retracted, he would become, per Retraction Watch, the most retracted psychology researcher of all time.
- Jerome Groopman writes in the New Yorker about brain science and successful ways to break bad habits. I don’t think these are panaceas, but they’re more likely to work than negative reinforcement, self-shaming, or just trying to beat bad habits with willpower. Excuse me, I feel like I need some Oreos after typing that…
- Since Prince’s death in 2016, his estate has been releasing some of the trove of unreleased material the singer and multi-instrumentalist left behind – even though he was very protective of the same music while he was alive. Paste‘s Richard Aaron looks at the ethics and implications of listening to this music, some of which has been quite good, while some was clearly never intended to see the light of day.
- In my chat this week, a reader sent a link arguing that wealth taxes failed in Europe. This is at least misleading, if not outright false, according to this editorial from the Washington Post, which highlights how much easier it is in Europe to evade taxes, how loophole-ridden their wealth taxes were, and how competition across the borderless EU made it easier to just pick up and move.
- Philly magazine looks at the rise of food co-ops in the city, asking how well they actually serve the communities in which they’re located.
- Amazon has spent nearly $1.5 million to defeat a socialist incumbent on Seattle’s city council. Kshama Sawant led the push for Seattle’s higher minimum wage, but lost (in the end) a battle to tax large corporations on a per-employee basis and use the funds to serve the city’s large population of homeless people.
- Gun sellers at a show on the Iowa State fairgrounds used Nazi symbols and racist/anti-Semitic imagery to sell guns and explosives. The state fair’s CEO passed the buck, saying that they don’t control what independent companies that rent the space do once they use it.
- Author Alex Berenson name-searched himself and showed up in my replies to harass one of my longtime readers on Twitter this week. I wasn’t familiar with him or his work before, but it appears that the scientific consensus on his book about cannabis is that it’s alarmist and highly misleading.
- A new California law designed to curb abuses in the so-called ‘gig economy’ appears to hurt freelance writers more than anyone else because it would set such a low bar for the number of pieces someone could write before they’d have to be considered a full-time employee.
- “Prime editing” could correct up to 89% of disease-causing errors in our genes, although the research and techniques are in their infancy. As someone with an inborn error of metabolism, I’m intrigued, but can we ‘fix’ one gene (two, in my case, since it’s autosomal recessive) without causing any other unforeseen consequences?
- California’s state medical board has now targeted a second doctor accused of writing bogus vaccine exemptions for schoolchildren, asking that her license be suspended or revoked entirely.
- Residents of Newtok, Alaska, are moving – yes, all of them – to a new village as climate change has eroded much of the land in Newtok and threatens to make the entire town unlivable.
- Antibiotic resistance – and evolution – in real time: It took just three weeks for a ‘superbug’ to evolve resistance to the drug of last resort.
- Board game news: Cities Skylines, the tabletop version of the popular citybuilder video game from Paradox Interactive, is now out from Thames & Kosmos. It’s a cooperative game, whereas I believe the video game version is competitive. I saw an early prototype last year, but at that point the game wasn’t co-op yet.
Really interesting piece on the realignment, Keith, and absolutely a different take than I’ve seen elsewhere.
Some of the location problems you talked about mirror what pro hockey has gone through over the last decade:
* a number of NHL teams – led by Toronto, but followed by Montreal, Winnipeg, Carolina, and Dallas, among others – moved their AHL (the top tier of the minors) affiliations much closer to them, whether by changing affiliates or actually buying teams and relocating them.
* a whole division has formed in the AHL around franchises that have relocated to the southwestern U.S., to be close to the parent teams.
* several franchises moved between the AHL and the ECHL (the second tier of the minors) due to market size and location.
It’s made it much easier for teams to move players up and down and to monitor their prospects’ development, and I suspect that teams would say that it’s made their spending more efficient, even if their costs might have actually gone up.
How do you know someone is an vegan? They’ll tell you.
That’s what bugs me. Just live and let others live. Half the time vegan food is far superior to non-vegan food. Let that carry the torch.
I have had this happen, but only because I offered someone a non-vegan dish. No holier than thou attitude, just so that they wouldn’t appear rude to decline. I suspect this is what happens frequently — someone is exposed to a principle they don’t happen to share, and so they get defensive about it.
On wealth taxation, I don’t agree that the original article was false. Wealth taxes have failed in Europe. The article defending the likelihood of success in the US seems to be written by the people who developed it, so of course they think it will work. I’d predict that, like many new taxes, a wealth tax will not raise as much money as its proponents claim, will be difficult to execute, and will be subject to much legal wrangling about the value of intangible assets.
Right, and it the article also unintentionally highlights the main skepticism about the difficulty of implementation. The U.S. is not suddenly going to become a one-party state, so the idea that loopholes and exemptions won’t emerge when the Republicans hold office (or even to gain enough votes to pass the initial legislation) is fanciful.
If it doesn’t gain enough votes to pass, that solves the problem, right?
And “we can’t pass this because the other party might gain power some day” is, to be blunt, the dumbest possible argument for not passing legislation you believe is important or useful.
That’s a pithy response, but Isn’t the relevant question what would raise the most revenue over time? In that case the likely policy adjustments matter a great deal.
I’m responding to the objections you raised. You cited “the difficulty of implementation,” not the revenue potential or, probably more to the point, the net gain to the government after the cost to collect and any loss of other revenues as a result of the policy shift.
My main issue, however, is with the article you cite which contends the U.S. would avoid the issue with European countries’ implementation because the Warren and Sanders plans have fewer loopholes and exemptions. Sure, their plans don’t include those provisions, but their plans aren’t what is likely to pass or remain in tax law over the next decade plus. The article’s argument does nothing to address the actual objection if taken seriously or understood correctly.
That’s a fair point, I’m probably using the word implementation too broadly. What I really mean is the combination of implementation (Treasury and the IRS under different administrations), amendment of the initial law, legislative changes over time.
I hadn’t heard of Alex Berenson or his book before now. There’s nothing quite as pathetic as a non-scientist insisting that a large group of reputable scientists are wrong about their own research. He’s either a soulless monster trying to make a buck, or a vastly overconfident buffoon. (Name-searching oneself on Twitter and insulting people who disagree is not a good look either way.)
Regarding the “link between race and IQ,” there is no question that there are racial group differences in IQ. This is to be expected in light of the socioeconomic inequalities that exist between races. The controversy in this area of research centers on claims that group differences in IQ are explained by genetic differences, claims for which there is no evidence.
In response to the publication of The Bell Curve, the American Psychological Association assembled a task force of scholars to summarize the scientific research on IQ. Entitled “Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns” their report still holds up pretty well, and it addresses a lot of lay misconceptions regarding IQ in a comprehensive and accessible way: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1996-02655-001. The Wikipedia entry on it is not too bad, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence:_Knowns_and_Unknowns
Agreed, and I would go further. While IQ differences are certainly heritable, there is a large body of evidence supporting large environmental effects on IQ. A couple of interesting (to me at least) examples: Adoption from a poor to rich home is associated with a 10-20 point gain in IQ, and East and West Germans had a 10-point IQ gap through the Cold War.
AFAIK, the computer version of Cities: Skylines is one-player only. It’s a really great-looking game.
The prime editing paper is really cool, but holy shit does the Broad over-hype everything. First, the reason that this is cool is that CRISPR has traditionally been very good at introducing mutations (by cutting the DNA at very specific sites and then having the cell make mistakes when pasting the DNA back together), but actually editing the DNA to repair specific mutations has been much harder. This new method works very well at making specific changes in the DNA sequence to repair mutations. Now the hype. The editing efficiency was still only ~90%, so ~10% of the time there were mis-edits that resulted in small deletions or insertions (that would very likely render the resulting protein non-functional–that of course can be very bad). They did not sequence the cells, so we don’t know if there were off-target edits (which would lead to causing mutations in other genes)–off-target effects are one of the big concerns right now with CRISPR editing. Finally, this was done with cells in culture, not live animals, where it has been notoriously tricky to ensure enough cells get edited. I still think we are likely 10-20 years away from clinical trials in genome editing, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it never happened in most of our lifetimes.
I see an interesting parallel between the release of Prince’s unpublished music and that of Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman”.
Keith, I understand your take of the Seattle Head Tax situation, as the national media outlets have used that messaging and left out the details of why the tax was repealed. The messaging from the Seattle City Council was to only tax large corporations (Amazon, Starbucks, etc). If the tax only affected the Amazon and Starbucks type companies, I believe most Seattleites would have supported the tax and obviously the city’s homeless situation is dire. The problem is that actual Head Tax ($1000/employee tax on companies with over $20mm in top-line revenue, not EBITDA) had a larger affect on small/medium size businesses as well. In all, over 500 businesses would have been taxed. The local news showed the council hearings that included affected low-margin businesses including Dick’s (a burger spot with 5 Seattle locations), grocery stores (there was a single store food grocer affected), and a minority-owned janitorial service company. The slogan became “Tax Amazon, Not Working People”, which why it was repealed. Again, I have yet to see a national media outlet cover this fairly.
It is accurate to say that there is a lot of animosity between the Council and Amazon since the early 2010s. It is probable that a Sawant-led initiative will attempt to tax on Amazon again (hence the $1.5mm). Amazon has a massive project across Lake Washington in Bellevue (https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-build-tallest-skyscraper-ever-bellevue-continuing-rapid-growth-outside-seattle-hq/), as well as the national HQ2 move. I believe Amazon will move out of Seattle all together (no Airplane joke reference intended), as quickly without disrupting core business units (they employ ~50,000 people currently in Seattle).
I truly don’t have a take on it; my purpose was to discuss amazon spending that much money to defeat one candidate. It’s hard for private citizens to compete on a financial basis with companies as long as the latter are allowed unfettered spending on candidates or causes. As for the head tax itself, though, I can offer no opinion.
Regarding Kshama Sawant….one of the reasons she is quite unpopular here in Seattle even with progressives like myself is the fact that she seems to want to allow the homeless to do pretty much anything they want, including breaking laws that the rest of us have to obey.
If your main concern with her is that cops don’t arrest enough homeless people, you were never “progressive” in the first place
I recently went to a dinner that finished with the history of okra/okra seed coffee at https://www.htxindigo.com/
Think you would enjoy the experience.