For subscribers to the Athletic, I wrote a piece on the folly of the five-year deal for Edwin Díaz, based on the dismal history of deals of four years or longer for free-agent relievers. This was on the heels of last week’s ranking of the top 50 free agents this winter.
Over at Paste, I reviewed The Spill, a Pandemic-like cooperative game where players work to contain the damage from a Deepwater Horizon-like oil spill.
My free email newsletter returned last weekend, and with Twitter possibly on its way out, that’s one good way to keep up with everything I write. I’ve also set up accounts on counter.social and cohost, in case either of those proves a worthy alternative (the former is actually okay, if a bit quiet). Also, you can buy either of my books, Smart Baseball or The Inside Game, via bookshop.org at those links, or at your friendly local independent bookstore. I hear they make great holiday gifts.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Fiji is among the countries most at risk from the negative effects of climate change, so the country has begun moving entire villages before they end up drowned by rising sea levels. Meanwhile, Egypt is trying to discourage families from having more than two children because climate change is threatening its water supply.
- Intelligencer has a long profile of Axel Springer CEO Matthias Döpfner, whose empire includes Politico, Business Insider, and the highly influential German tabloid Bild, calling him part Murdoch and park Musk.
- Jane Gross was a pioneer among sportswriters, becoming the first woman allowed to enter an NBA clubhouse (to do her actual job) in 1975, paving the way for generations of women sportswriters who asked for nothing more than the same rights afforded to their male counterparts. Gross died this week at 75.
- Four conservative Supreme Court Justices attended a party held by the arch-right Federalist Society this week. Charles S. Pierce calls the four “lackeys” of the group that helped former President Trump shove the entire federal judiciary to the right.
- Molly Jong-Fast wrote about Twitter’s implosion and why she’s not leaving it (yet), while one of Twitter’s own lawyers warned that Elon Musk is putting the company at risk of incurring millions of dollars in fines.
- The Washington Post has a story on how Twitter & Facebook gave a free pass to GOP election deniers this year.
- Dr. Jen Gunter, author of The Vagina Bible, wrote about medical misinformation, social media, and the illusory truth effect, concluding with some advice on how to spot and deal with misinformation when you see it.
- 60 Minutes ran a segment last Sunday on how social media algorithms further polarize the electorate.
- It doesn’t help when Fox News “sources” a bogus story from the misinformation-purveying Twitter account LibsOfTikTok. The claim attacked Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and ran the night before the election.
- The midterm results were far better for Democrats than any polls or pundits indicated. Elie Mystal says that taking this as good news is the wrong response, given how Republican gerrymandering continued to artificially boost their results in the House and in state legislatures.
- Indeed, four states used gerrymandered maps that courts had deemed illegal in this election, including Ohio, where Republicans have flat-out ignored multiple rulings saying that their map violated federal law.
- Meanwhile, Tennessee has made it harder for people convicted of felonies to vote, resulting in over a fifth of its Black citizens losing this constitutional right. That’s on top of gerrymandering the shit out of Nashville to create a red district in a heavily blue city.
- I’m sure most of you have already seen this, but the plaintiff in the suit to stop President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program themselves took a $50,000 PPP loan and accepted forgiveness for it rather than paying it back.
- The lack of a response from fellow NBA players to Kyrie Irving spreading antisemitic propaganda on social media is disappointing, writes Candace Buckner for the Washington Post.
- If you can get past the clickbait tone, there’s a good parenting tip in this article from the mother of the CEO of Youtube and the co-founder/CEO of 23AndMe.
- Claims of an “immunity debt” from several years of masking and isolation are unsupported by science. Your immune system doesn’t just forget everything it learned because you weren’t exposed to more pathogens.
- The Dragonfly 44 Galaxy appears to comprise 99% dark matter, which would challenge existing ideas of how galaxies evolve.
- Board game news: Fit to Print, a new game from the publishers of Cascadia/Calico and the designer of Wormholes & Tiny Towns, is already over $100K raised on Kickstarter in just a few days. I just played Verdant, the newest game from Flatout (the publisher), last night, and it’s excellent.
Just wait for when a verified @kiethlaw posts “I love bunts, Hydrox cookies, and a little bit of Chicken Fried”.
But the account will refer to someone as an “idito” and the jig will be up.
As someone who worked to apply for many PPP loans and the forgiveness for them, I am definitely beyond annoyed, to put it nicely, by that asshole in the loan forgiveness lawsuit.
I’m confused by commentary like this. I also was in charge of PPP loans and their forgiveness. The loans without a doubt helped save the business I work for. The government shut down and then severely limited the business, and said, ok, we killed your revenue, this is how we’re going to (kind of) try to make you whole.
I also had student loans, and for me, there is no equivalency. It’s apples and broomsticks. One is a business that was shut down, the other is someone who made a decision to take out a student loan, entered into a contract, and then desires forgiveness.
While jobs were scarce briefly at the start of the pandemic, the market has never been better. Had the government shutdown persisted in limiting job prospects, then sure. But that’s not the case. Nobody needs to be made whole in this case.
Drew, I think your confusion stems from a few things:
1. Thinking of PPP loans as “loans” is a bit misleading. Yes, the money was distributed through forgiveness associated with a loan program, but that’s really only because there was no existing federal mechanism for straight cash transfers to businesses
2. The anger over PPP hypocrisy is not an either/or scenario as you present it…most who support forgiveness in one arena support it in the other. Rather it’s that a person who received money from the government themselves is suing to prevent such relief for others
3. The government did not hurt business’ revenue, the pandemic did. People weren’t doing their normal economic activities in March 2020 regardless of local government’s actions. For example, Sweden had relatively few restrictions but that policy led to only a very modest improvement in spending compared to others: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2010068117
4. “One is a business that was shut down, the other is someone who made a decision to take out a student loan, entered into a contract, and then desires forgiveness.” This is very weird framing, as a) pretty much any business owner also made a decision to take out a loan and entered into a contract, and b) many colleges were shut down while still forcing students to pay tuition
5. I don’t think you understand the reality of your “The market has never been better” statement. Temporarily low unemployment doesn’t change the long-term decline in real wages or increase in education cost. A relative preponderance of warehouse jobs and such doesn’t really help most people with student debt.
1. Agreed. They were meant to be handouts not loans, though they were framed as loans so that money would actually be used for the business and to hopefully reduce fraud.
2. “most who support forgiveness in one arena support it in the other”. No idea if that’s true, but that was the point of my post. They are very different programs, so why should there be any relation as to whether someone supports one or the other?
3. Saying the government did not hurt business’ revenue is untrue. The government told us we had to close. Sure it was in response to the pandemic, but it was the government that explicitly told us to close, and thereafter to severely limit our business under penalty of fine or shutdown if we disobeyed. Similar businesses only a half hour away were closed briefly, then reopened with no restrictions and revenue loss, and in some cases a revenue gain, as people went to where businesses were open. Your link is a study through only April 2020, so unfortunately doesn’t really have bearing on the restrictions we had imposed on us for a long time after that (which caused the PPP program, and as the restrictions endured, a second PPP round).
4. As you stated in point 1, it isn’t really a loan, so business owners knew that they weren’t taking loans as long as they followed the criteria for forgiveness. Colleges went online, but it is false to say they shut down but kept tuition.
5. Jobs availability across the board are at excellent levels, not just warehouse type jobs. Decline in real wages and an increase in education cost always occurs, it’s just a question of the rate, so why the handout? With that logic, we’d have handouts for infinite subgroups of people at any time based on any criteria.
I appreciate your response but it only solidifies for me the non-correlation of the two handouts and how it is irrelevant that the loan forgiveness lawsuit was brought by someone who had a PPP loan. One is a business who accepted a government replacement of lost funds, the other is someone who has a loan contract and seeks to alter it.
The PPP program was an attempt to make businesses whole. Student loan recipients did not have any loss, and therefore do not need to be made whole. Apples and broomsticks!
“Decline in real wages and an increase in education cost always occurs, it’s just a question of the rate, so why the handout? ”
These things do not “always” occur…they are political choices that have been constantly reaffirmed over 40+ years of neoliberal rule. Which not incidentally is why the comparison to PPP is apt. The government writ large has made the dual choices to shift the burden of education to individuals and to minimize worker power. These decisions have led to the student debt crisis much like the decision to restrict businesses during covid led to lost revenues. As such it is in no way a “handout” to mitigate that damage through debt cancellation.
If I read you correctly, your argument boils down to “there is a student debt crisis” and as such the government needs to make these students whole. This is where we fundamentally disagree.
I’d argue that in 2008 there was a much worse “student debt crisis” when kids graduated with terrible job prospects.
In actuality, there’s no student debt crisis. Jobs are available. If someone made a decision to take out a loan that they now regret, that’s unfortunate for them, but they made a decision. It’s no different than a person who regrets buying the bigger house and now has their financial freedom limited because of it. We all make decisions we regret. Nobody forced anyone to take out a loan. The government forced businesses to close.
Sorry man if you don’t understand that a system that forces seventeen year olds to have perfect wisdom about the future in order to avoid crippling debt is in need of serious redress then I don’t know what else to tell you. Glad you were made whole-I would ask you really wrestle with why you’re advocating so strongly against the same for others.
Whether or not student loans should be forgiven is a relevant debate. Comparing them to PPP “loans” in terms of forgiventss, however, makes no sense at all for the fact that everyone knew the PPP stuff was never going to be repaid from the word go. Not true for student loans.
Did you read under the volcano? I didn’t see it. Boring AF.