Economics — Page 2

→ February 22, 2019
→ By keith

Innovation and Its Enemies.

The late Calestous Juma died shortly after the publication of his last book, Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies, which may be why the book is still so little-known despite its obvious relevance to our fast-changing, tech-driven economy. Juma was a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School with a longtime focus on international development, especially the application of new technology to developing countries and to boosting sustainable development. While the prose is a bit on the academic side, Juma uses very well-known technologies and even other inventions that you might not think of as ‘technologies’ but that still drove massive cultural and economic changes that led to substantial societal, religious, or political opposition.

Juma’s main thesis is that there will always be forces that oppose any new technology or invention that offers the potential for change, and he tries to categorize the reasons for and the types of opposition that any innovation might face. Some of the case studies he covers are ones you’d expect, like the printing press, refrigeration, and genetically modified crops, but he also covers less-expected ones like margarine and coffee. Margarine was invented in the mid-1800s and faced a torrent of opposition from dairy farmers, leading to the development of dairy associations that lobbied Congress and state legislatures for absurd laws that restrained or prohibited trade in butter alternatives, from requiring labeling designed to scare consumers to requiring the stuff to be dyed pink to make it less appetizing. To this day there are still regulations that overtly favor dairy butter that date from decades ago, although the discovery that the trans fats in traditional margarine are deleterious to heart health has made such laws anachronisms.

Coffee might be the most fascinating story in the book because it appeared and spread like a new technology, even though we don’t think of it as one. Coffee originated in east Africa, notably Ethiopia, and spread across the Red Sea to Yemen, from which it began to permeate Arab societies and faced its first wave of opposition from Muslim authorities who feared its stimulant effects (with some imams ruling it haram) and from secular authorities who feared the culture of coffeehouse would give rise to organized political groups. The same two forces applied when the drink spread to Europe, where it also faced a new group campaigning against its spread: producers of beer and wine, who feared the drink would replace theirs – in part because all three were safer than drinking well water at the time – and employed every trick they could find, including getting “doctors” (such as there were in the pre-science era) to claim that coffee was harmful to one’s health. While there are still some religious proscriptions on coffee, the drink’s spread was eventually helped by its own popularity and by the split among many authorities on its beneficence and value, with monarchs and even the Pope coming out in favor of the drink.

The two chapters that look at the ongoing controversy, most or all of it fabricated, over transgenic crops is probably the most directly relevant to our current political discourse, as genetically modified organisms are probably required if we’re going to feed the planet. Juma shows how GMOs suffered because regulatory authorities were consistently behind the technology and had to react to changes after they happened, and then often did so without sufficient guidance from technology experts. No example is more appalling than that of a genetically modified salmon called the AquAdvantage salmon that grows to maturity in about half the time required for wild salmon, and that thus has the potential to reduce overfishing while providing a reliable protein source that also has less impact on the environment than protein from mammals or poultry. The U.S. government was totally unprepared for the arrival of a genetically modified animal designed for human consumption, which also gave opponents, from Alaskan legislators (including Don Young, who openly promised to kill the company behind AquAdvantage) to fearmongering anti-GM advocates (look at the “Concerns” section on the Wikipedia entry for the fish), time to maneuver around it, blocking it through legislation and excessive regulatory obstacles.

Where Innovation and Its Enemies could have used more help was in how Juma organizes his conclusions. There are common themes across all of his examples, from the natural human fear (especially those of adults over age 30) of change to concerns over job loss to questions about environmental impact, but the choice to organize the book’s narrative around specific case studies means that the conclusions are dispersed throughout the book, and he doesn’t write enough to bring them together. A book like this one could be extremely valuable for policymakers looking to create an environment that encourages innovation and facilitates adoption of new technologies while providing sufficient regulatory structure to protect the public interest and foster trust. It has all of the information such a reader would need, but it’s scattered enough that a stronger concluding chapter would have gone a long way.

Next up: Mikael Niemi’s Popular Music from Vittula.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: business, Economics, highly recommended, non-fiction, Nonfiction, technology

→ January 12, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/12/19.

No ESPN+ content this week, as I’m working on the prospect rankings and saving those extra bullets in the hope that someone like Bryce Harper or Manny Machado will eventually sign. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest review for Paste covers the deduction board game Cryptid, one of my top ten games of 2018, in which each player gets one clue, and you need to deduce all other players’ clues to identify the one hex on the variable board where the Creature is hiding for that specific board and set of clues. It’s quite fun, like a board game with a puzzle at its heart.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Many of you have already seen Malcolm Gladwell’s story asking if marijuana is really as safe as its supporters claim. His general answer, that we don’t know, is the correct one, and the reason is important: Puritanical federal policy has prohibited not just the use of marijuana but nearly all research into its benefits or side effects for decades. I’m ardently pro-decriminalization, including purging records of people arrested for personal possession, but there is a lot we don’t know about the effects of THC or CBD, and the burgeoning market for marijuana itself and extracts of it would benefit from evidence-based regulation.
Marie Claire has an excerpt from Abby Ellin’s new book about how she nearly married a con man.
Gizmodo profiles a family in South Africa whose house is mistakenly identified as the location of over a million IP addresses, a colossal error created, at the start, by the U.S. government.
ESPN’s Baxter Holmes wrote a delightful piece on the Portland Trail Blazer’s daily coffee routine, which warmed the heart of this coffee snob (I prefer V60 to French press, but let’s not quibble).
My Twitter friend Jane Coaston has a great piece on Vox about how Tucker Carlson has sparked a big debate on populism within conservative social media circles, arguing – as you would also hear on the progressive side of the debate – that economic inequality is a massive problem for developed countries. She spoke to Carlson, who, when not race-baiting on his Fox News program, always seems thoughtful and intelligent when speaking about serious issues. It’s a shame that person disappears when the red light goes on.
Nature looks at a father’s efforts against bureaucracy to get access to a novel drug for his two sons, who have a rare genetic disorder called alkaptonuria. The drug in question is nitisinone, which was originally developed as a potent herbicide but disused because of its harmful effects on fish – yet the same pathway it disrupts in plants contains the metabolic error in people with alkaptonuria.
Craig Calcaterra wrote about the bad news beneath MLB’s record revenues in 2018, signs the revenue may not be sustainable, which could also lead to further labor strife in the sport.
James Middleton, brother of the Duchess of Cambridge, went public with a first-person account of his battle with depression.
A 50-year-old French novelist said recently that a 50-year-old woman’s body is “unlovable,” while the body of a 25-year-old woman is “extraordinary.” The Guardian‘s Zoe Williams calls him out on this self-serving, pretentious nonsense, but the real kicker is the caption under the novelist’s photo.
The central African state of Gabon experienced a failed coup attempt this past week. South Africa’s Mail & Guardian examines why the coup failed, calling the country a “pseudo-state that is still run from Paris.” The family of current President Ali Bongo has ruled the oil- and timber-rich country for 50 years; Bongo’s father, who preceded him as de facto dictator, had 53 recognized children, many of whom run the state and its client companies while drawing off its resources for personal gain.
There are protests in British Columbia over the building a private pipeline across a First Nations enclave, with RCMP officers clashing with the protestors as the latter try to block access to the building site.
A Saudi teenager who was granted refugee status by the UN after fleeing her abusive family and holing up in a Thailand hotel room has been granted asylum in Canada. Rahaf al-Qunun says her family abused her and had threatened to kill her for renouncing Islam, sparking her flight from the repressive kingdom.
This was a big week for anti-vaccine bullshit. There’s a chicken pox outbreak at a Waldorf school in Asheville, NC, a school with a high “vaccine exemption rate,” which would be easily addressed by eliminating non-medical exemptions.
An Israeli father who didn’t feel well insisted on visiting his prematurely born son in the NICU. It turned out the father had measles, so the hospital chose to vaccinate more than 80 babies even though the MMR vaccine is typically given on a child’s first birthday. (Tangent: I had to get the MMR shot twice, because I’d originally gotten it the day before my first birthday, and the college I attended wouldn’t accept that, so at age 17 I got it again.)
A longer read on a new anti-vaxxer crank story: Sharyl Attkisson, with whom I was sparring on Twitter this week until she blocked me, styles herself as an “investigative journalist,” but is anything but, as she hosted a program syndicated on Sinclair stations last week (including Seattle’s KOMO) that dredged up the long-discredited hypothesis that vaccines cause autism. Her main “source,” with whom she may not have actually spoken, is Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, who made an extraordinary claim in 2008 about a solitary case of developmental delay in a child with mitochondrial disorder, but again, that hypothesis has also been debunked. There’s a lot of bullshit to unpack in here, but if you read it and have a Sinclair-owned station near you, call or email its news director to voice your objection to them running this fraudulent report.
Researchers at Dartmouth say they’ve found evidence that hysteresis, where a force’s impact remains even after the force is gone, occurs in the sphere of public opinion, such as the persistent, false belief that vaccines cause autism. Deniers get stuck in a so-called “hysteresis loop,” one that traps them in confirmation bias and makes it extremely difficult to shake them of their delusions.
A woman whose parents refused to get her vaccinated has gone very public as she’s gotten all her vaccines as an adult. She says that she got the flu “every year” as a kid and has extensive allergies even though one vaccine-denier delusion is that vaccines lead to allergies (they don’t).
Great news, there’s a new filovirus, like Ebola and Marberg, present in bats in China.
A bunch of North Dakota legislators (guess) want to require Bible study in public schools. I want them to pass this law just so they can lose spectacularly in court.
A federal border agent confessed to killing four Latino women he deemed “disposable” back in September, and was only discovered because a potential fifth victim escaped.
A new study found that people over the age of 65 were much more likely to share fake news online, regardless of party affiliation. That’s unsurprising; as we age, our lateral prefrontal cortices become weaker, reducing our cognitive inhibitions and making us more prone to believe things we’d find obviously false or absurd in our 30s or 40s.
The Trump Administration’s proposal to allow coal plants and other manufacturers to dump more mercury into the environment is “an affront to economics and the environment” according to Rutgers Professor of Public Policy Stuart Shapiro.
Jezebel spoke to Wende Curtis, owner of a major comedy club in Denver, about why she turned down Louis CK when his camp approached her about a gig on his would-be comeback tour.
New York‘s Intelligencer argues that raising the top marginal rate to 70% is actually a moderate, evidence-based idea, citing research that such a rate on extremely high incomes discourages rent-seeking among top executives who are likely to earn seven- or eight-figure salaries.
I enjoyed the unintentional comedy of this Politico piece on how mainstream Democrats want to “rein in” Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, in large part because they’re afraid she’ll boost primary challenges to Democrats led by more progressive candidates. To which I say: good. And I’d rather have her in front of the cameras proposing new ideas, even ones with which I disagree, than Chuck Schumer delivering more of the same, or, in the highest comedy of the week, the irrelevant Joe Lieberman.
Tweet of the week:
[blind date]

JEFF BEZOS: I brought you flowers

HER: Oh thanks. That’s very sweet

JEFF BEZOS: I see you’ve liked flowers. Perhaps you’d like these other flowers

— Todd ‘Papi’ Carlos (@TheToddWilliams) January 9, 2019

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, baseball, coffee, Economics, environment, longreads, north dakota, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ November 14, 2018
→ By keith

An Economist Gets Lunch.

EDIT: As of March 2020, when Cowen argued that elite universities shouldn’t worry about paying their service workers, I can no longer recommend Cowen’s book for any reason whatsoever.

One of you was kind enough to give me a copy of Tyler Cowen’s book An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies earlier this year, buying a copy for me at Politics & Prose for me to pick up when I spoke there at a book signing in June. The book was very much up my alley, combining my passion food with my newfound interest in behavioral economics, as Cowen offers a breezy look at why we eat the way we do, and how someone who wants better food can use a little rational thinking to try to identify new places to eat. It’s a quick read, and maybe a little too nonchalant in spots when Cowen talks about foreign food cultures, with more than enough information on our modern food culture and economy to satisfy me (especially since I didn’t pay for it – thanks again, Haris!).

Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University who tends to favor a more libertarian, free-market approach to domestic policy, and that philosophy is very apparent throughout this book, as the focus is very much on taste rather than other modern foodie concerns like sourcing, environmental impact, or fair labor practices. Cowen’s survey of the modern food scene explains why, for example, chain restaurants will nearly always provide inferior food (they have to aim for the largest possible market, which means standardizing flavors and avoiding anything near or at the extremes that might alienate a large share of customers), or why so many highly-rated restaurants lose their edge within the first year after opening. I’d say I probably already knew much of this, just because of my years of exploring the food scenes in American cities and my conversations with so many people working in the industry, but would also guess that most American diners haven’t thought about these questions to the same extent because they don’t eat out as often as I might (due to travel) or Cowen does (because I think he just loves to eat out).

The early parts of the book cover things like the above-mentioned “how American food got bad” or how the typical supermarket has helped ruin our diets. Cowen mentions visiting Asian supermarkets around him that offer better and less typical produce at lower costs – but, more importantly, are organized entirely differently than the U.S. groceries are, with more square footage devoted to produce, meat, or fish, and less on packaged goods … and, I suppose not shockingly, to cheese, since lactose intolerance is higher in Asian populations. To some extent, his suggestions of visiting multiple stores to prepare meals is a manifestation of privilege – I work at home, so it’s nothing for me to split my weekly food shopping between Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and a local farm stand, but I also recognize I have the flexibility in my schedule to do so where many other people don’t.

One particularly interesting if specific chapter delves into American barbecue, explaining why regional variations in the cuisine arose and how developments like mechanical pits have changed barbecue (I’d argue for the worse). The chapter opens up some gaps in Cowen’s knowledge of culinary history, however, as he gives short shrift to the cooking method’s roots in Africa, something that comes up a few times as the book progresses – his lens on cuisines is very much that of an American, and the concluding chapters on what foods to hunt when traveling in various foreign cities read like the words of a tourist, not a native or an expat who’s lived in those places.

Cowen doesn’t ignore other topics than the search for better food at a cheaper price – there’s a chapter that touches on environmental concerns, called “Eating Your Way to a Greener Planet,” although the complexity of ethical eating is enough to fill a book or two – but that’s very much his core philosophy. It’ll work for a lot of readers: Often that is just what we’re trying to do – cook better food for less. I’ve at least changed my own eating patterns, in part because I have the time and means to do so, to try to make better choices for the planet and the people involved in growing, preparing, and selling me the food I eat. That made Cowen’s book an interesting read for me, but perhaps more of a novelty than a work that changed my outlook on food.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Economics, Food, food writing, non-fiction

→ October 27, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/27/18.

My most recent piece for ESPN+ subscribers wrapped up my Arizona Fall League stint, looking at 25 players from 13 organizations. I also had a free piece on ESPN with food, coffee, beer, and travel tips for Boston and Los Angeles leading into the World Series. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest board game review for Paste looks at Nyctophobia, a one-versus-many game where most players play with blackout glasses. Only the villain can see the board; everyone else must play by touch and by talking to their teammates.

If, like Dave Gahan, you just can’t get enough, you can sign up for my free email newsletter, with more of my writing, appearing whenever the muse moves me.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This 2013 essay by Adam Cayton-Holland on his sister’s suicide, his own grief, and trying to heal was the best piece I read this week.
Dinosaurs took over the world thanks to a massive climate change event that ended the Triassic period; within that period came the Carnian Pluvial Episode, a smaller climate catastrophe that opened the door for dinosaurs to rule, likely caused the eruption of oceanic volcanoes that pushed carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and acidified the oceans … which should sound familiar.
GoodFundies looks at the history of media reports of the Wilpons’ meddling in baseball operations in a very, very long post that briefly mentions my comments on the Jeurys Familia trade fiasco. Shorter version: They’ve meddled so often, and so much to the team’s detriment, that you can see why so many candidates appear to have declined to interview.
In the wake of multiple revelations about Donald Trump’s businesses and his inheritance from his father, the New Yorker asks if fraud is simply embedded in Trump’s business model. It’s a feature, not a bug.
Why are some folks so threatened by transgender people? Because that threatens their beliefs that there are only two genders, while perhaps undermining the prejudiced person’s sense of self as a man or woman, according to some recent research on the subject.
The United States is withdrawing from the International Coffee Agreement, continuing this Administration’s policies of anti-globalization and protectionism, which will hurt American consumers and international coffee producers (including farmers who depend on export markets for their livelihoods).
The former Secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions wrote a piece titled I Respected Scott Walker. Then I Worked for Him. in the Atlantic. It’s as damning as you’d expect: Walker pushed policies that would hurt middle and lower class Wisconsinites because he thought it would play well with the national party.
South Carolina is asking the Administration to allow ‘faith-based’ foster care agencies to discriminate against Jewish or other non-Christian parents who wish to foster children. This is theocracy in motion, in a state where more than 20% of residents identify as something other than Christian.
Alt-right trolls are very mad online over posters in New York City that are actually satirical street art, not official city posters. The artist in question, Winston Tseng, appears to have deleted his entire Internet presence in the last 48 hours – his Twitter account is gone, his Instagram is locked, his website has vanished.
Voting machines in Texas are changing some voters’ choices, either making their Senate choices blank or in some cases switching their vote from Beto O’Rourke (D) to Ted Cruz (R). The state agency overseeing the election has said it’s aware of the problem and is powerless to fix it.
ProPublica has reported on voter intimidation in Texas during early voting, such as “a partisan poll watcher looking over voter’s shoulders as they cast their ballots and questioning voters on their politics.” (That person was eventually removed from the property by police.) The ACLU has a guide on what to do if you face voter intimidation at the polls.
Meanwhile, in Georgia, Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp, the leader of the state’s attempt to subvert democracy, took off his hood this week when he said he was concerned about Georgians exercising their right to vote. In DeKalb County, nearly 5000 requests for absentee ballots were “lost” by county officials, according to a complaint by the local Democratic Party branch. Meanwhile, a local investigation found that Kemp owes over $800,000 in loans to a bank he helped create, but won’t answer any questions about the loans, such as the terms of the agreement.
Iowa Republican Steve King went full white nationalist in an interview with a far-right Austrian outlet, talking about his belief in the “Great Replacement,” where immigrants from Latin American and Asian countries will ‘replace’ white Americans (or Europeans) in their – “their” – home countries.
An Idaho-based white supremacist group is making racist robocalls to support Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis, whose opponent, Andrew Gillum (D), is African-American.
And then there’s North Dakota, which is working like hell to disenfranchise Native American voters, as New York Times reporter Maggie Astor explains in this unrolled Twitter thread.
There’s been a lot of news and opinion about vaccine deniers this week. Endocrinologist Lubna Mirza writes that fear and misinformation drive non-vaccinators, and says that spreading such nonsense is “irresponsible, to say the least.” In Texas, a Republican backed by anti-vaccine nuts is running for House District 114; she’s also dropped some racist dog-whistles along the way, so if you live there, vote for John Turner, her Democratic challenger. The Republican candidate for Governor in Connecticut was caught on video saying of vaccinations that “We shouldn’t be dumping a lot of drugs into kids for no reason,” which is wrong on at least three points (vaccines aren’t drugs; they’re not being dumped; there’s a very good reason, preventing debilitating and often fatal diseases). That’s why Dr. David Gorski, also known as “Orac,” writes that the Republican Party has become the anti-vaccine party: Not all vaccine deniers are Republicans, but the Party has chosen to pander to anti-vaxxers on local, state, and national levels.
Physicist and prominent atheist writer Lawrence Krauss stands accused of multiple instances of sexual harassment and has agreed to resign at the end of the academic year. He’s denying the claims, although I find his rebuttal weak and that he fails to understand why what he’s accused of doing was wrong.
Microplastics are so pervasive in our environment that they’re showing up in our excrement.
Seattle’s minimum wage law has helped many workers but may have hindered new entrants to the labor market, according to a second study by the same authors whose paper a year ago implied that the law hurt workers on the whole. As with many economic policies, there are winners and losers, and the crux will be whether there are more of the former and if that outweighs the societal costs paid by the latter.
A Guardian essay asks if reading is really helpful for depression. I am fortunate in that, while I’ve felt the black dog on my shoulder, I have never been so depressed that I felt unable or unwilling to read.
Hawai’i got a bit smaller this week as a hurricane washed tiny East Island off the map, a potential disaster for sea turtles that nested on the 11-acre island.
The white man who killed two black people in a Louisville Kroger’s has a schizoaffective disorder and had previously lost his right to own firearms due to previous violent incidents.
A city commissioner in Lakeland, Florida, who shot and killed a shoplifter in his store, has been charged with murder after his ‘stand your ground’ claim was rejected. That’s nice to hear, but if ‘stand your ground’ convinced the killer to pull the trigger, then the problem with the law remains.
Starling Games, the publishers of Everdell, have a new Kickstarter up for Anomaly, the second game from designer Thomas Dagenais-Lespérance.
Finally, the Tweet of the Week:

FOUNDING FATHER: we must always have an electoral college and 2 senators per state

ME: ok but what if 40 million people live in california

FOUNDING FATHER (spits out tea prepared by a slave): there’s HOW many people in WHAT

— Ben Rosen (@ben_rosen) October 22, 2018

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, climate change, coffee, Economics, environment, florida, guns, links, mental health, mental illness, metoo, north dakota, racism, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, voter suppression, wisconsin

→ August 22, 2018
→ By keith

Rebel Talent.

I heard Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino on a recent episode of the Hidden Brain podcast, discussing her new book Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life and her thesis that ‘rebels’ are more successful innovators in the workplace and that bending or breaking some societal mores can lead to greater happiness as well as productivity. That concept is certainly an appealing one – who doesn’t like the idea of pushing boundaries and then proving to the world that you were right to do so? – and in cases where Gino can back up her insights with data, rather than merely with anecdotes, it’s compelling. The book varies too much between those two poles, however, with so much of it supported by individual observations, that I wasn’t entirely convinced that her hypothesis was as generalizable as she wants it to be.

Much of Rebel Talent is built around Gino’s profile of and visits with Italian celebrity chef Massimo Bottura, whose restaurant, Osteria Francescana, has received three Michelin Stars and appears regularly on lists of the best restaurants in the world. (It also shows up in one episode of season two of Master of None.) Bottura is the exemplar of the rebel in Gino’s definition; working within the tradition-bound world of Italian cuisine, Bottura has introduced the sort of deconstructive, modern approach to cooking popularized by el bulli (where he worked for a summer) and Noma, turning classical Italian preparations inside out, often with a gently mocking tone to the new versions. Gino cooked in Bottura’s kitchen for a night and devotes a fair amount of time to describing a few dishes, such as one called “the crunchy part of the lasagna,” a specific dish that gives the diner the almost-burned, crispy edges that form around the top edges of that baked pasta dish, which many people (myself included) will tell you it’s the best part. As someone who’s generally interested in food and cooking, I enjoyed these passages on their own merits, although the narrative would drag when Gino would shift from talking about Bottura’s approaches to food to his approaches to managing his staff (still relevant to her premise, but come on, I’m here for the cooking ideas).

There are long parts of Rebel Talent where Gino deftly defends her arguments with a blend of such anecdotes and with real data. The chapter “Uncomfortable Truths” looks at the value of diversity in the workplace and in life, that there is hard evidence that diverse teams are more productive and more creative, while people are often happier living or working in diverse environments. (Diversity in these instances refers to demographic diversity, rather than diversity of educational or employment backgrounds.) A team of all white men will tend to be less productive or creative than a comparable team with even one person who is nonwhite or non-male. Such additions can also help to reduce discriminatory attitudes on the parts of the dominant subgroup in the environment. It’s the most compelling individual argument anywhere in the book – if you want teams that innovate, and even go beyond the norms of your workplace, then mix it up by hiring a diverse employee base and putting people together in heterogenous teams.

However, too much of the book leans very heavily on a handful of individual examples, and it was hard for me to accept the generalization of those specific cases to the workplace or society as a whole. Gino does a masterful job of retelling the heroic efforts of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who was the pilot of US Airways flight 1549 when birds disabled both of the plane’s engines, forcing an emergency landing that Sully decided in a matter of seconds he had to make on the Hudson River. Did he make this decision because he was, in Gino’s terms, a ‘rebel?’ I think it’s just as easy to argue that he made this decision based on years of experience, a calm demeanor in the face of unimaginable pressure, and the preparations afforded to him by his training and the in-flight checklist that, at least, he and his co-pilot could begin to use before time ran short and Captain Sullenberger had to made an immediate decision to land in the water rather than trying to get to a runway in New Jersey. There’s a similarly stirring anecdote Gino uses multiple times about then Portland Trailblazers coach Mo Cheeks coming to the aid of a young girl who panicked while singing the national anthem before a playoff game and forgot the words. Cheeks realized she was in trouble, walked over to her, said “it’s all right,” and started singing with her so she could pick back up where she’d trailed off, with the entire arena joining in. It’s a beautiful and emotional story, but was Cheeks a rebel, or just a dad and a good human being, helping a child who needed someone?

Rebel Talent is a bit of a swerve from the books in the business genre I usually read, which tend to be more data-driven and grounded in disciplines like cognitive psychology; it’s written for the mass audience, clearly, and thus lighter in prose and tone. It gave me plenty of food for thought, pun intended, and is an encouragement to be bolder and more innovative in any of my various endeavors. I’m just not sure Gino sufficiently supported her broader points, beyond these one-off individuals who rebelled and succeeded (where many others have likely failed) to justify her bigger claims about the value of rebels at work and in life.

Next up: Kory Stamper’s Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: business, Economics, non-fiction, psychology

→ July 28, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/28/18.

Trade writeups for Insiders:

• Jeurys Familia to Oakland
• Zach Britton to the Yankees
• J.A. Happ to the Yankees
• The Eovaldi, Andriese, and Oh trades
• Cole Hamels to the Cubs

I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

On the board game front, I reviewed Istanbul: The Dice Game for Paste this week; it’s fun, and quick to learn and play, but not as good as the original Istanbul.

At 1 pm today (Saturday) I’ll be at the Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton, Massachusetts, talking Smart Baseball and signing books. I hope to see many of you there – and some more of you at Gen Con in Indianapolis next week as well, where I have a signing scheduled on Friday at noon and am happy to sign books any other time during the con.

I’ve been sending out my free email newsletter a bit more often lately; you can sign up through that link and see archives of past editions.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Texas Monthly investigates how a waterpark owner from Texas built a waterslide that decapitated a Kansas boy in 2016 at the park’s Kansas City location. The boy’s death opened a window on the virtually unregulated industry of amusement parks.
Arizona is headed for chronic water shortages, according to this New York Times piece. I was hardly alone in seeing this coming; I wrote in 2013 that the state government’s climate change denialism, including total denial that water was a scarce resource, was a reason I didn’t want to own a house there and thus have a substantial portion of my material wealth tied up in an asset that might lose value very quickly when the water ran out.
Alt-right troll “Weird Mike” Cernovich, once arrested for rape and a frequent rape apologist, has moved from pushing Pizzagate to targeting liberals he doesn’t like by digging up old tweets and trying to get them fired from their jobs or entertainment projects. He took down James Gunn – whose tweets in question were, in my opinion, beyond inappropriate – and has targeted journalists who’ve dared write about his antics. Cernovich, who appears to enjoy the protection of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and fellow Pizzagate-bullshit promoter Jack Posobiec don’t like when people dare question or criticize them, doxing, harassing, and threatening their antagonists with the help of anonymous followers.
Will Leitch writes that baseball’s “steroid panic” appears to be finally be over, although I’ll believe that in full when Barry Bonds gets into Cooperstown.
My Paste editor Garrett Martin points out how giving in to these trolls encourages them to do it more, as now they’re targeting various comedians whose tweets are often offensive by design (in the service of humor) and fare poorly when taken out of context.
Digital devices are threatening to impact the climate more than the aviation industry, as more things are connected to the Internet and thus require more power, while public utilities continue to push back on renewable energy sources (and presumably some consumers won’t or can’t pay more for it).
A few veterans spoke to WBUR about the sports world’s fetishization of the military; Nick Francona, recently fired by the Mets, is quoted at length.
Conservatives who decry ‘outrage culture’ are outraged by a (rather boring) piece of art. I mean, there are some seriously full diapers over this one. It’s not even particularly good art, or that meaningful, but it is clearly protected speech.
Pulitzer Prize-winning LA Times restaurant critic Jonathan Gold died this week at age 57 of pancreatic cancer. A reader pointed me to two seminal pieces from Gold: his 1998 story “The Year I Ate Pico Boulevard” and his 1989 profile of rising gangsta rap act N.W.A..
Food writer Camas Davis learned how to butcher meat and wrote a book about it; she discussed what she learned and how it affects what she cooks and eats with NPR’s Terry Gross.
Bloomberg reports that workers’ wages have fallen since the Trump ‘tax cut’, which didn’t exactly cut taxes for everyone so maybe don’t call it that.
There’s a lot of talk about “socialized medicine” and “socialism” right now, often from people who don’t know what the terms mean but instead care about what they stand for. Socialized medicine is a buzzword; the goal is – or at least should be – to provide health care for all citizens, because it’s a human right, and because a healthier populace is more productive and puts less strain on public resources, thus growing the economy and making the country better off as a whole. Israel got this and reformed its health care system starting in 1995. Their results put them well ahead of the United States on many measures, including the percentage of GDP spent on health care.
Georgia Representative Jason Spencer – guess which party – went on Sasha Baron Cohen’s new gotcha show, and bared his ass while shouting the n-word on camera. He announced his plans to resign on Thursday.
Deadspin’s Albert Burnenko weighs in on Tronc’s evisceration of the Daily News to further profit its shareholders.
A candidate for Missouri’s state legislature – guess which party – is raffling off a 3-D printer that can make ‘untraceable’ guns. Of course, whether he ever gives away such a machine is immaterial: he’s already gotten a ton of free publicity for this stunt.
A climate-change denying Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate – guess which party – was asked about climate change by a voter, and his response was to belittle her for her youth. Scott Wagner has previously said that he thinks climate change is caused by … body heat.
Meanwhile, a Harvard climate scientist who has a geoengineering idea to try to spray particles into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sun’s heat discussed fighting misinformation and ‘chemtrail’ conspiracy theorists online and in the real world.
The federal government is halting reviews of pesticides that may threaten endangered species as a sop to the pesticides’ manufacturers; wild salmon are particularly at risk from the pesticides known as organophosphates.
Pursuant to my comment above about “socialism” and “socialized medicine:”

a separate point – worth exploring – but most of what is now branded 'democratic socialism' in the USA in 2018 is more or less the Truman presidential platform in 1948. so there are some definitional issues we probably need to work through.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 26, 2018

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, climate change, Economics, ethics, food writing, links, stick to baseball

→ July 14, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/14/18.

No new Insider pieces this week; I’ll have a Futures Game wrapup Sunday night and an updated top 50 prospects ranking out on Thursday. I did hold a Klawchat this past week.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the popular and very highly-rated new board game Rising Sun, from designer Eric Lang (Blood Rage, Ancestree), a $100 game with meticulously-crafted miniature figures but a fairly straightforward set of mechanics around area control and negotiation.

In just a few hours, I’ll be DC’s famed bookstore Politics & Prose with Jay Jaffe to talk about our books and sign copies. The event starts at 6 pm.

Two weeks from today, I’ll be at the Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton, MA at 1 pm to speak and sign copies of my book as well.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian goes deep on how the Caribbean island of Nevis, half of the country of St. Kitts and Nevis, has become one of the world’s most secretive offshore havens for money laundering and tax evasion.
Was rum invented in India, not the Caribbean as generally believed? It sounds like it – but to what extent was rum invented rather than discovered? It’s the distilled byproduct of the fermentation of molasses, which itself was the waste left over from sugar production; millers left the molasses out in the sun, using it to feed slaves, and the stuff would ferment into the precursor of rum.
There are anti-vaxxers even in the world of horses, and the result is a fight against a vaccine for an equine virus called Hendra, a very deadly paramyxovirus that can also infect humans, and is among the candidates for the next global pandemic.
No sooner do I praise Italy for the quality of life over there than the new right-wing government says parents no longer have to provide proof of vaccinations for schoolchildren. Some useful phrases for Italian learners: il morbillo, la parotite, la rosolia = measles, mumps, rubella.
Increased use of nonmedical (i.e., bogus) exemptions has driven down vaccination rates in Arizona, spurring fears of loss of herd immunity for highly contagious, deadly diseases already present in the state like measles and pertussis.
The “white nose fungus” killing bats is spreading to more states and more bat species. Bats serve a crucial role in human agriculture, feeding on many pests that would otherwise destroy crops or encourage further use of pesticides.
There’s a lot more talk about plastic pollution lately, even in our destroy-the-EPA life as it is right now. Recycling alone won’t solve this problem; we need to make less, use less, and think more holistically about the life cycle of plastics. And as of this year, China won’t recycle the world’s plastic waste any more.
Deadspin ran this crushing letter from a parent whose preschool-aged daughter was molested by a relative. One key line, from the therapist the parent consulted: “Kids that age don’t make this kind of statement up, you have to take it seriously.” Bear that in mind when you read excuses made for a certain Oregon State left-hander who pled guilty to molesting a child around this age, and now has tried to deny it.
The U.S. economy is approaching the mythical threshold known as “full employment,” although such figures generally ignore unemployed workers who have chosen not to continue seeking work, or who are unable to for whatever reason. But full employment isn’t NAIRU, the non-accelerating rate of unemployment, so high inflation is eating most workers’ wage gains.
People often ask how I ended up choosing Delaware when I relocated from Arizona back to the east coast. One reason was its low taxes, and it turns out that Delaware’s tax burden is the lowest of all 50 states after you adjust for cost of living. I actually think our property taxes could be higher, especially if the funds could help improve the dismal schools in the city of Wilmington and boost its police force.
The San Francisco branch of the Federal Reserve posted a note saying the 2017 GOP Tax Bill will boost the economy far less than promised, in part because the economy was already growing over the previous few years.
Mainers keep voting for Medicaid expansion and their racist governor Paul LePage, a Republican, refuses to implement it. He’s offered to go to jail rather than expand the program, to which I say, why not both?
I reviewed the new documentary about Fred Rogers the other day; the Observer has a piece on the ‘haunting doubts’ of Rogers and Paddington Bear, building off a line Rogers uttered to his wife shortly before he died, wondering if he’d been a good enough Christian in his life.
Stop ‘snitch tagging’ on social media. I block anyone who does this. If someone asks me about a player, don’t tag the player on my response. People doing that have largely driven me away from tweeting opinions on players, and leaving those opinions in chats or on ESPN.
A Republican state senator in Kansas who is running in a primary for a Congressional seat said “outside of western civilization is only barbarism”, and later clarified that he meant Judeo-Christian civilization … you know, the same civilization that enslaved over 10 million Africans not very long ago.
Neutrinos are one of the great mysteries of particle physics – long believed to be massless, now known to have unfathomably minuscule mass, interacting via the weak force and gravity, able to pass through entire planets without hitting anything – and for the first time, scientists detected neutrinos and identified their source galaxy.
The Daily Beast has a fun slideshow of the strange mix of stunning architectural styles in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Tweet of the week:

It’s so fucking weird that we scrape the seed pod of an orchid into ice cream and that flavor is considered plain.

— Michael Hoffman (@Hoffm) July 6, 2018

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: astronomy, caribbean, Economics, environment, italy, kansas, links, maine, physics, pollution, rum, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ May 30, 2018
→ By keith

The Tyranny of Metrics.

A scout I’ve seen a few times already this spring on the amateur trail recommended Jerry Muller’s brief polemic The Tyranny of Metrics, a quick and enlightening read on how the business world’s obsession with measuring everything creates misaligned incentives in arenas as disparate as health care, education, foreign aid, and the military, and can lead to undesirable or even counterproductive outcomes. With the recent MLB study headed by physicist Prof. Alan Nathan that found, among other things, that players trying to optimize their launch angles hasn’t contributed to rising home run rates, the book is even somewhat applicable to baseball – although I think professional sports, especially our favorite pastime, do offer a good contrast to fields where the focus on metrics leads people to measure and reward the wrong things.

The encroachment of metrics on education is probably the best known of the examples that Muller provides in the book, which is strident in tone but measured (pun intended) in the way he supports his arguments. Any reader who has children in grade school now is familiar with the heavy use of standardized testing to measure student progress, which is then in turn used to grade teacher performance and track outcomes by schools as well, which can alter funding decisions or even lead to school takeovers and closings. Of course, I think it’s common knowledge at this point that grading teachers on the test performance of their students leads teachers to “teach to the test,” eschewing regular material, which may be important but more abstract, in favor of the specific material and question types to be found on these tests. My daughter is in a charter school in Delaware, and loses more than a week of schooldays each year to these statewide tests, which, as far as I can tell, are the primary way the state tracks charter school performance – even though charters nationwide are rife with fraud and probably require more direct observation and evaluation. That would be expensive and subjective, however, so the tests become a weak proxy for the ostensible goal in measurement, allowing the state to point and say that these charters are doing their jobs because the student test scores are above the given threshold.

The medical world isn’t immune to this encroachment, and Muller details more pernicious outcomes that result from grading physicians on seemingly sensible statistics like success or mortality rates from surgeries. If a surgeon at a busy hospital knows that any death on the operating table during a surgery s/he performs will count, so to speak, against his/her permanent record, the surgeon may choose to avoid the most difficult surgeries, whether due to the complexity of the operations or risk factors in the patients themselves, to avoid taking the hit to his/her surgical batting average. Imagine if you’re an everyday player in the majors, entering arbitration or even free agency, and get to pick the fifteen games you’re going to skip to rest over the course of the season. If your sole goal is maximizing your own statistics to thus increase your compensation, are you skipping Clayton Kershaw and Max Scherzer, or skipping Homer Bailey and some non-prospect spot starter?

Muller mentions sports in passing in The Tyranny of Metrics but focuses on other, more important industries to society and the economy as a whole; that’s probably a wise choice, as the increased use of metrics in sports is less apt than the other examples he chooses in his book. However, there are some areas where his premise holds true, with launch angle a good one to choose because it’s been in the news lately. Hitters at all levels are now working with coaches, both with teams and private coaches, to optimize their swings to maximize their power output. For a select few hitters, it has helped, unlocking latent power they couldn’t get to because their swings were too flat; for others, it may help reduce flyouts and popups and get some of those balls the hitter already puts in the air to fall in for hits or go over the fence. But for many hitters, this emphasis on launch angle hasn’t produced results, and there are even players in this year’s draft class who’ve hurt themselves by focusing on launch angle – knowing that teams measure it and grade players in the draft class on it – to the exclusion of other areas of their game, like just plain hitting. Mike Siani of William Penn Charter has cost himself a little money this spring for this exact reason; working with a coach this offseason to improve his launch angle, he’s performed worse for scouts this spring, becoming more pull-conscious and trying to hit for power he doesn’t naturally possess. He’s a plus runner who can field, but more of an all-fields hitter who would benefit from just putting the ball in play and letting his speed boost him on the bases. Because many teams now weigh such Trackman data as launch angle, spin rate, and extension heavily in their draft process, either boosting players who score well in those areas or excluding those who don’t, we now see coaches trying to ‘teach to the test,’ and that approach will help only a portion of the draft class while actively harming the prospects of many others.

At barely 220 pages, The Tyranny of Metrics feels like a pamphlet version of what could easily be a heavy 500-page academic tome, recounting all of the ways in which the obsession with metrics produces less than ideal results while also explaining the behavioral economics principles that underlie such behavior. If you have some of that background, or just don’t want it (understandable), then Muller’s book is perfect – a concise argument that should lead policymakers and business leaders to at least reconsider their reliance on the specific metrics they’ve chosen to measure employee performance. Using metrics may be the right strategy, but be sure they measure what you want to measure, and that they’re not skewing behavior as a result.

Next up: I’m currently reading Ray Bradbury’s short story collection I Sing the Body Electric!.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, behavioral economics, Economics, non-fiction

→ May 21, 2018
→ By keith

Thank You for Being Late.

Thomas Friedman’s Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations is a solid book about the fast-moving present and immediate future written by a man whose prose is firmly, almost embarrassingly stuck in the past. Friedman has obviously thought deeply about the topics in this collection of connected essays, and talked to many experts, and there are many insights here that would be useful to almost anyone in or soon to enter the American workforce, as well as to the people who are attempting to manage and regulate this fast-moving economy. It was just hard to get through the clunky writing and jokes that don’t even rise to dad level.

Friedman’s main thesis here is that the world is accelerating, and many people – I think his main audience is Americans, although it’s not limited to them – are unprepared for it. Technology has substantially increased the pace of change since the Industrial Revolution, and 100-plus years of accelerations now has the developed world changing at a rate that leads us to a point where it doesn’t even take a full generation of people to churn through more than one generation of tech. These technologies also collapse borders, threaten sovereignty of states, and increase economic inequality. Everyone reading this likely knows about the debate over automation and machine learning (please, stop calling it AI, they are not the same thing), but Friedman is arguing that we need policy makers at all levels to accept it as given and respond to it with policies that produce a populace better equipped to cope with it – and that people themselves accept that continuous learning is likely to be a part of their entire working lives.

Friedman refers to the cloud – a term I’m not 100% sure he even understands — as “the supernova,” a pointless and confusing substitution of a fabricated term for a more commonly accepted one, and then refers back to it frequently throughout the book as the source of much of this technological change. He’s certainly correct that the power of distributed computing has allowed us to solve more problems than we were ever able to solve previously, no matter how many chips you were able to cram into one box; he also gives the sense that he thinks P = NP, that this accelerating rate of growth in computing firepower will eventually be able to solve problems that, in nonmathematical terms, probably can’t be solved in a reasonable time frame. And Moore’s law, which he cites often, has changed in the last few years, as the growth in the number of transistors Intel et al can put on a chip has slowed from 18-24 months to more like 30, and with Intel projecting to hit the 10 nm transistor width this year, we’re probably butting up against the limits of particle physics.

The strongest aspects of Thank You For Being Late are Friedman’s exhortations to readers to accept that the old idea of learning one job and then doing it for 40 years is probably dead. Most jobs, even those we might once have spoken of dismissively as blue-collar or low-skilled, now require a greater knowledge of and comfort with technology. (There’s an effective CG commercial out now for University of Phoenix, where we see a mom working in a factory where all of the workers are slowly replaced by machines until one day the supervisor comes for her. She eventually pursues some sort of IT degree through the for-profit school, and the commercial ends with her walking through stacks of servers.) He lauds companies like AT&T that have already set up programs for employees to take new courses and then make it easier for those employees to identify new jobs within the company for which they qualify – or could try to qualify with further learning. He also discusses municipal and NGO efforts to build job sites that help connect people with skills with learning opportunities and employment opportunities.

There is, however, a bit of a Pollyanna vibe about Friedman, who refers to himself repeatedly as an optimist, and seems to think that more people in the American working class have the time to be able to take classes after hours – or that they have sufficient background to go get, say, a certificate in data science. I looked up some of the programs he mentions in the book; the one related to data science expected students to come in with significant knowlege of programming or scripting languages. He supports government efforts to support lifelong learning and to improve diversity in the workplace and in our communities, but doesn’t even acknowledge the potential government role in ensuring equal access to health care (essential to a functioning economy) or the mere idea of universal basic income, even if to just explain why he thinks it wouldn’t work.

And then there’s Friedman’s overuse of hackneyed quips that felt dated twenty years ago. “Attention K-Mart shoppers!” didn’t resonate with me in the 1980s, since there wasn’t a K-Mart anywhere near where I grew up; the chain has since been obliterated by competition from Wal-Mart and Target, and K-Mart operates 75% fewer stores today than it did at its peak, fewer than 500 nationwide. “This isn’t your grandpa’s X” is just lazy writing at this point; besides, if my daughter read that, she’d likely point out that her grandpa is a retired electrical engineer with two master’s degrees who already did a lot of the lifelong learning that Friedman describes.

Friedman’s writing is also dense, which I find surprising given his background as a newspaper columnist; perhaps he feels like he’s finally set free to prattle on as long as he wants, without anyone to stop him. There’s a level of detail in some parts of the story, such as his overlong descriptions of the halcyon days of the Minnesota town where he grew up, which I’m sure was very nice but probably not quite the Mayberry he describes.

There’s value in here, certainly, but I found it a grind to get through. This could have easily been a series of a dozen or so columns in the New York Times — that they wouldn’t run today because they’re too busy running columns denying climate change or explaining how so-called ‘incels’ need sex robots — rather than a 500-page book. He’s right about his core premise, though: Expect to learn throughout your working life and to see your job, whatever it is, change regularly over the course of your career.

Next up: Roddy Doyle’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Economics, futurism, non-fiction, social criticism, technology

→ April 29, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/28/18.

My one Insider post this week looked at four pitchers who could go in the first round of this year’s draft, led by Florida RHP Carter Stewart, who was second on my latest ranking of draft prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Ancestree, a light, filler game from the designer of Blood Rage and Rising Sun, but one that I think borrows too heavily from other titles.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback, and it’s a bestseller … (checks notes) in Sonoma, California. I’ll be at Washington, DC’s legendary bookstore Politics and Prose at 6 pm on July 14th to discuss & sign the book.

And now, the links…

The Guardian had three superb longreads this week, so I’m including them all. The first calls for universities to ‘bulldoze’ their business schools, as the author, a B-school prof himself, argues they do more harm than good. I have an MBA, and I agree with many of his points, as well as the additional evidence that expensive full-time MBAs do not provide sufficient ROIs to students. But some MBA programs include useful material, including accounting and operations research. There’s a worthwhile course of study in there somewhere, but perhaps under a new name.
The second looks at the challenge in updating the Oxford English Dictionary, producing a third edition in the digital era when language appears to be changing faster than ever. A good read for fellow fans of The Professor and the Madman.
The third is a bit weird, as it documents people who pretend to be wealthy influences on Instagram as a way to make money, somehow, although the main subject is more poseur than profiteer.
The Atlantic has a longread that argues that American democracy no longer accurately represents the will of the people. The anecdote that opens this story, in Oxford, Massachusetts, is absolutely infuriating.
Black students nationally are several times more likely to be suspended or disciplined than white students are for the same infractions. The Obama Administration had begun civil rights investigations into the practice in Texas, but this ProPublica/Mother Jones longread explains how Besty DeVos is ending the effort. If you can’t re-segregate the schools by law, do it by fact.
BuzzFeed investigates Facebook’s role in recent anti-Muslim violence in Sri Lanka, where the government temporarily blocked access to the site because Facebook wouldn’t take down bigoted posts and videos calling for Sinhalese Buddhists (!) to attack Muslims and Muslim-owned businesses.
The British morning show Good Morning Britain, hosted by Susanna Reid (who seems to be sharp) and Piers Morgan (a pile of wilted romaine lettuce in an expensive suit) ran a feature on people who didn’t vaccinate their pets for fear their pets would get autism. No, that isn’t actually possible, and some people are just really fucking stupid.
More and more research on behavior shows that changing attitudes isn’t enough to get people to do the right or smart thing, nor is giving them more information: If you want to change someone’s behavior, you need to convince them that everyone else is already doing what they should be. That’s why vaccine denialism is contagious, and why drowning out these cranks and charlatans with reminders that the vast, vast majority of parents still vaccinate their kids is so important.
Canadian fraudsters (they call themselves “homeopaths,” but homeopathy is just bullshit) are telling parents of autistic children they can ‘cure’ autism with diluted doses of vaccines. This nonsense, called CEASE, is just stealing money from desperate parents, and anyone who offers it should be tried for fraud.
A new study shows evidence that Trump’s election was driven by white racism, not by economic anxiety.
The Alfie Evans tragedy has been co-opted by grifters and vultures, looking to score political points off bogus claims of liberty that ignore the sad fact that there is no hope of recovery for the severely brain-damaged child.
Finland will not continue its Universal Basic Income trial after it reaches its scheduled end in 2019.
A former reporter for a Sinclair-owned station says she was pressured to include climate change denialism In her reporting on climate change itself.
Kansas gubernatorial candidate Kris Kodachrome mocked students protesting for reforming gun laws, and later in the week a law reporter found a huge gaffe in Kobach’s filings in the ACLU’s ongoing suit against his voter suppression law, which has done a great job of eliminating the voter fraud that didn’t exist in the first place.
Some Delaware news: a recent attempt to raise the state’s minimum wage to $9.25/hour failed, but it looks like a “red flag” gun bill will be signed into law soon.
Writer Rebecca Solnit, a contributing editor at Harper’s, asks who gets to control the narrative in a country that claims to want equality but is awfully abstemious about handing it out.
A fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School talked to the university’s alumni magazine about better ways to detect and fight the spread of disinformation online as we head towards another round of elections this fall.
Sacramento DA Anne Marie Schubert, who is up for re-election on June 5th, has a history of declining to prosecute police officers who injure black civilians or suspects in the line of duty. The Intercept reveals that she took $420,000 in donations from police organizations across her three campaigns. She may soon be handed evidence that would support charging the officers who killed Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man, in his own backyard.
Senator Marco Rubio writes for CNN.com that it is time to force Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro from power. I agree, but how? Sanctions, Rubio’s main solution, are unlikely to work in isolation. Maduro is planning to abolish more voting rights soon and has been raising capital by selling the “petro,” a new cryptocurrency that I’m sure is an excellent investment.
My employer ran a fairly favorable profile of Cleveland pitcher and climate change denier Trevor Bauer this week; Deadspin offered a rebuttal.
The EU is set to ban neonics, pesticides suspected of contributing to bee colony collapses worldwide. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., EPA chief Scott Pruitt proposed adding neonics to drinking water.
This essay on Theness.com makes a good point about GMO labeling: The government can’t regulate what it doesn’t understand, and in the case of GMOs, a functional definition of what O’s are GM and require labels may not be feasible.
Texas Monthly looks at the Texas gerrymandering case headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The 2014 suicide of a student-athlete at the University of Pennsylvania has spurred an ongoing focus on mental health among Ivy League athletes, including the “success culture” that may have contributed to her death.
Protests in Armenia against a power grab by the country’s outgoing President have led to his resignation, although the protests have continued as the ruling Republican Party refuses to relinquish power.
Ali Noorani, the Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum and the son of Pakistani immigrants to the U.S., writes for CNN about the controversy over the Simpsons character Apu.
The alt-right front group Turning Point USA has hired numerous employees with histories of racist and/or bigoted tweets. I wonder why that is.
Could a postal banking system help ‘unbanked’ Americans while also providing much-needed revenue for the US Postal Service? Lack of access to capital is a huge obstacle to the upward economic mobility that is, or at least was, a hallmark of capitalist economies.
The Ringer examines Netflix’ strategy of buying or funding original movies no one can find on its service. Grierson and Leitch have discussed this as well on their podcast – the Netflix algorithm doesn’t even seem to effectively push this content to viewers whose own histories would indicate interest in these indie films.
A study funded by the U.S. military on climate change and sea level rise found that nearly a thousand islands risk becoming uninhabitable this century as a result of man’s effects on the global climate.
Citing low sales and supply chain problems, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson is discontinuing production of a pump used by cancer patients that extends their lives by two years. The headline makes it seem like this is just an evil corporate decision, but the story is more involved than that.
A British activist with cerebral palsy is asking the government to rethink a proposed ban on plastic drinking straws, saying for people with movement disorders, straws are critical to help them drink. (Perhaps reusable, more durable plastic straws, or straws made from paper, would work?)
The CJR interviews Steve Fishman about his podcast, Empire Of Blood, the story of how he helped exonerate a man who served 22 years for a murder he didn’t commit.
The Guardian looks at how the Michael Cohen case has exposed the extent of Sean Hannity’s real estate holdings, which is now in turn leading to stories on substandard living conditions and poor treatment of tenants in his buildings.
Jeet Heer’s Twitter thread on Kevin Williamson and the “troll three-step” move resembles all too well how opinion writers with extremist views try to both appeal to their base and dance around valid criticism from the center or the opposite end of the spectrum.
Alexandra Petri follows this by writing about how she’s been silenced In a column for a small paper in Washington called the Post.
Asmodee Digital announced an upcoming adaptation of the Lovecraftian board game Mansions of Madness, due out on Steam early in 2019.
I loved the Bard’s Tale PC RPGs when I was a teenager, eventually finishing the first two (I never tried the third), so I’m stoked to see inXile is developing a new sequel/update more than 30 years after the series appeared to be finished.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Armenia, board games, climate change, Economics, gmo, guns, history of language, links, longreads, mental health, pseudoscience, racism, rpgs, social media, Sri Lanka, stick to baseball, texas, tv, vaccines, Venezuela, voter suppression

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