My top 100 prospects ranking ran on Monday for subscribers to The Athletic, followed by the players who just missed the list, and then my ranking of all 30 farm systems. I held a Q&A on Monday, which the site excerpted for a separate article. I also held an old-fashioned Klawchat here on Friday. The team-by-team top 20s will start to run on Monday.
On The Keith Law Show, I spoke with Steve Ives, writer and director of the upcoming documentary Ruthless: Monopoly’s Secret History, which will run on PBS’s American Experience and stream online on February 20th. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I’ve been keeping up better with my free email newsletter recently, and I’ll get back to it again this upcoming week once I get through the last nine team reports.
And now, the links…
- The Atavist has the story of a family caught up in the world of YouTube influencers, including one star’s mother accused of inappropriate behavior against a number of her daughter’s co-stars.
- Mother Jones looks at the troll site Kiwi Farms, and how driving it offline hasn’t worked to stop its users’ campaigns of doxing and harassment.
- The new emerging microbe threat around the world? Infectious fungi taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic by exploiting people with damaged immune systems.
- Cory Doctorow examines what he calls the “enshittification” of TikTok and other sites that built up massive user bases on one premise and then switched to another model to make some money – a digital bait and switch of sorts.
- The New Yorker looks at NY Times opinion columnist Pamela Paul, whose columns seem designed to push buttons and have often engaged in TERF-like arguments.
- Chuck D spoke to Rolling Stone about the new documentary series Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World, available now via PBS.
- Even a mild case of COVID-19 leads to a massive increase in heart disease risk.
- Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announced a plan to block all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs at state colleges.
- Dan Rather wrote about DeSantis’ platform of white grievance.
- Florida teachers are removing all books from their classroom for fear of prosecution by the white police state. Here’s more on the policy behind this.
- Meanwhile, the craven College Board, whose entire business model is built around making it more expensive for students to go to college, bowed to pressure from DeSantis and eviscerated its A.P. African American Studies curriculum.
- Republicans continue to push anti-abortion laws, proposing 105 bills and counting just this year alone, even subverting democratic norms to do so. They’re also forum-shopping to try to ban the abortion pill.
- Abortion bans often include exceptions for rape or incest. They’re mostly meaningless, there to make people feel better about discriminatory laws against providing medical care.
- Utah passed a law banning transition health care for trans kids.
- Arizona’s legislature passed a law allowing lawmakers to delete all emails after 90 days, which isn’t suspicious at all.
- Some businesses are warning Missouri lawmakers their culture war is going to harm the state’s economy.
- An off-duty cop in Providence, RI, shot an unarmed kid, and a jury acquitted him of all charges.
- Georgia cops killed a protestor fighting the construction of a massive training facility in the woods around Atlanta. They’re claiming he shot first. I do not take the word of police as truth.
- Texas election deniers raised funds to build a mobile hospital in Ukraine. They failed, and it’s not clear where the donated money went.
- Harvard Prof. John Comaroff has been accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, leading to a mass walkout of his first class back from suspension last week.
- Tom Verlaine, founder of the essential American art-punk band Television, died last week at age 73.
- Many consumers say that tipping is getting out of control. This isn’t a yes/no question, really; I think you can say tipping for some services is obligatory, and for others is unnecessary.
- Noted free speech absolutist Elon Musk took down a video critical of India’s hypernationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the government’s request.
- The FBI infiltrated a major ransomware group called Hive, gaining the group’s decryption keys to allow victims to recover their locked files.
- Rolling Stone’s EJ Dickson asks, “Can we please just let the M&M’s fuck?”
- The Guardian looks at Daybreak, the upcoming cooperative board game about climate change co-designed by Matt Leacock (Pandemic, Forbidden Island).
- The role-playing game based on the Hugo-winning novel The Fifth Season is now on Backerkit.
Judge shopping is becoming a huge problem as we learned a few days ago when the 5th Circuit (what a shock) decided you can’t stop people with restraining orders due to domestic violence from owning guns. If that’s not a reasonable regulation, you might as well just give everyone an Uzi and have Purge Day.
In regards to tipping, I’m of two minds. I hate the system and think getting rid of it would be a good idea. The notion that we as consumers should be forced to cover the restaurant’s wage obligations directly feels gross to me. It also invites a lot of implicit bias issues (for example, I’m guessing female servers and bartenders who flirt with male customers get more in tips than male counterparts). However as long as the game exists and servers can be paid sub-minimum wage, I feel an obligation to tip as well as I can especially at places where I’m a regular.
Oh, that fungi story is old news. According to the new HBO documentary “The Last of Us,” the fungi apocalypse dates back to 2003…
Hey Keith love the posts. Check the RI story though he was not killed
thank you, I fixed the post
Here’s the problem with the automatic assumption of tipping, as summed up by the barista quoted in the article:
Schenker says it’s hard to sympathize with consumers who are able to afford pricey coffee drinks but complain about tipping. And he often feels demoralized when people don’t leave behind anything extra — especially if they’re regulars.
“Tipping is about making sure the people who are performing that service for you are getting paid what they’re owed.”
No, buddy, it’s not up to me to make sure you’re getting paid what you’re “owed.” What you’re owed is determined by the business that hired you and what you accepted to work there.
It’s written into the tax code, practiced nearly universally within our borders, and represents a significant share of the available jobs in virtually any US market…but, please, continue your lecture.
So, yes it’s pretty well known and not altogether shocking that covid is associated with post-infection issues like heart disease. But there’s some pretty important caveats to that and other similar studies that limit its generalizability/usefulness/impact:
1. The COVID cohort is based off of having a positive test before 1/15/2021, so it’s almost entirely pre-vaccination, giving it limited applicability to current/future infections with >99% previous immune memory from vaccination/prior infection/both
2. It’s based entirely on VA patients, who are less healthy on the whole than general patient populations
3. Finally, studies based on medical records like this one are inherently limited, even when (like in this study) they spend time constructing a control group. Not only are there clearly missing COVID diagnoses in the control group, but there’s the problem of people who register one medical problem in the system being more likely to register their other ones as well. Basically, some people go to the doctor a lot and others don’t, and this is only somewhat tied to the underlying health of the people in these two groups
The quote is from someone making $15 an hour before tips, though, so it’s not quite the same as criminally underpaid waitstaff who really don’t make a living wage without the tips. Generalizing from that example probably isn’t fair either way.
When you’re working a 30-hour work week, as is typical for the industry, even $15 an hour doesn’t get you all the way to the simple goal of a dignified life. We relentlessly monitor the earnings on the lower end of the pay scale in the context of the recent past, which has famously been wholly insufficient for some time now.
I think we’ll eventually figure out this whole tipping thing. We’re in the middle of a sociological shift in how it’s done and there’s always going to be people arguing both sides of things when that happens. And both sides have a point here. Speaking for myself, I probably do feel bullied into tipping at industries I would not have otherwise tipped had they not forced the option on me, so in a way, it’s having the desired effect of getting more of my money into the hands of the worker. My alternative is to not go to those places, but I’m willing to admit it hasn’t dissuaded me yet, and likely won’t. That right there makes it tough for me to argue against the practice. Maybe we were doing it wrong all along.
The one thing I would like to pump the brakes on is when the system gives me four options. It used to be 15%, 18%, 20%, and other. Now I’m seeing the options beginning at 18%, along with 20% and 25%.
Come on, now.