Dazey and the Scouts was recommended to me by a student last month and they are indeed pretty good, especially that song. They’re a little same-y over their whole album. I recommended Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods to her for something less same-y but still aggressive.
I used to read Yglesias back in the early 2000's when blogging was becoming a thing and he was just a fucking machine. He'd post several times a day nearly every day. Some of them were just quick hitters, what would likely be tweets now a day, but he'd also have plenty of middle and long length pieces and his output was relentless.
I loved this week's pieces on takedowns and eugenics. Social media trending chatter invokes, for me, an image of a load of bullies who are also weirdly terrified of not being seen to be terrified about everything.
Great interview with Hanania. You mentioned the Gini coefficient, which is the current standard, but I suggest you start looking at the income level of the top 1% (99 percentile) compared to the median (not avg) income, as reported (pre- or post- tax) to the IRS.
If the income growth of the 99% is faster than the growth of the 50% median, than the overall gov't tax policies are not "fair". And we should be striving for less than fair, we should be striving to reduce inequality with MORE median wage growth than top 1% wage growth.
I also think the USA, thru some states, first, should be looking for a "job guarantee". You claim to believe that "everybody has something to contribute". We should have a gov't job program which assumes that, and offers everybody a job. Maybe for women, day care/edu assistant or health care hospital assistant; for men manual construction or health care assistant. Different programs.
Great early discussion about how charter schools are so similar to gov't schools. (You should replace "public" with "gov't", wherever folk, like kids, don't have a choice to opt out.) Richard didn't push back on the reality of similarity being, to a large extent, required by the gov't laws and regulations. We urgently need law revisions to allow more experimentation and trials of alternative methods, with required additional info to the parents. (more experimentation possibly certainly means more scams & corruption possible.)
The Let’s Talk College podcast was a great conversation. I figured I’d bail on my workout after 30 minutes, but I kept going just to listen. You touched on so many things that I experienced in administration.
1. Faculty making themselves non-essential by demanding reduced teaching loads and refusing to serve as advisors. Every time a FT faculty retired, we were so happy because it meant we could save money in the budget. But when advisors left, we had to replace them.
2. Accreditation sucked up a ridiculous amount of time. It took up the faculty’s time too, because we had to make a big show of including them in the process. Faculty didn’t produce much written work (we had to do that), but we had endless committee meetings about every little thing. So much of it felt like busy work.
3. Treating bad debt as revenue. This happens in government but also at institutions with tuition that isn’t covered by financial aid for whatever reason. We’d ban them from coming back and withhold their transcripts, but it was rare to actually get paid. However we couldn’t admit it was bad debt because then we’d have to subtract it from the budget. So the students couldn’t finish degrees to get some return on the investment.
4. Terrible graduation rates. The press always blamed us, but so many students should not have been there in the first place.
Also it was sweet how he was nervous to interview you, and left all of that in the recording.
Still relevant archive: "political Calvinism ... - the way that totalizing identity critiques render individual choices and morality irrelevant."
Any system which excuses bad behavior because of "systemic problems", will avoid reducing such bad behavior, and thus have more bad behavior.
Considering carrots and sticks - if bad morality doesn't get a stick/ bad punishment, more folks will do more of it.
And that's what we see, and will continue to see until ... the incentives change. (Which is what I thought the Friday incentives post would note more generally.)
Erin, the retail ecosystem consists of 10% malls and 90% open air centers. Mall sales are 80% clothing and accessories, which means malls are just giant department stores. Only about 8% of sales in open air centers are from clothing. With the success of online ordering, we now have too many malls. There is a wide consensus that over the next decade we will reduce the supply of malls by 50% and cull the bottom half of the herd. But malls will not disappear, instead, they will account for 5% of the retailer ecosystem and open air centers will be 95%. You were still find your Bath and Bodyworks, but you might have to drive a little further than you did in the past. Fear not, your grocery store, hair salon and Starbucks will remain just around the corner. It’s simply the circle of life.
When a universally beloved geriatric public figure is trending on Twitter there should be a clear 'dead' or 'alive' label slapped next to their name.
Playoff Freddie in the house!
Dazey and the Scouts was recommended to me by a student last month and they are indeed pretty good, especially that song. They’re a little same-y over their whole album. I recommended Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods to her for something less same-y but still aggressive.
I used to read Yglesias back in the early 2000's when blogging was becoming a thing and he was just a fucking machine. He'd post several times a day nearly every day. Some of them were just quick hitters, what would likely be tweets now a day, but he'd also have plenty of middle and long length pieces and his output was relentless.
Are you a modest mouse fan Freddie?
Erin E. is absolutely a top tier commenter. Recognition well deserved.
I loved this week's pieces on takedowns and eugenics. Social media trending chatter invokes, for me, an image of a load of bullies who are also weirdly terrified of not being seen to be terrified about everything.
Are you proposing a cage match vs. Matt Yglesias? A mouth off? Go for it!
Great interview with Hanania. You mentioned the Gini coefficient, which is the current standard, but I suggest you start looking at the income level of the top 1% (99 percentile) compared to the median (not avg) income, as reported (pre- or post- tax) to the IRS.
If the income growth of the 99% is faster than the growth of the 50% median, than the overall gov't tax policies are not "fair". And we should be striving for less than fair, we should be striving to reduce inequality with MORE median wage growth than top 1% wage growth.
I also think the USA, thru some states, first, should be looking for a "job guarantee". You claim to believe that "everybody has something to contribute". We should have a gov't job program which assumes that, and offers everybody a job. Maybe for women, day care/edu assistant or health care hospital assistant; for men manual construction or health care assistant. Different programs.
Great early discussion about how charter schools are so similar to gov't schools. (You should replace "public" with "gov't", wherever folk, like kids, don't have a choice to opt out.) Richard didn't push back on the reality of similarity being, to a large extent, required by the gov't laws and regulations. We urgently need law revisions to allow more experimentation and trials of alternative methods, with required additional info to the parents. (more experimentation possibly certainly means more scams & corruption possible.)
The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe is a book recommendation aimed squarely at me, and I do appreciate it. Going right on the ILL wishlist.
All great stuff, although I felt the quotation marks around “Western canon” were a bit squiffy. Sometimes a canon is just a canon.
Just got my $260 payout on the Bengals moneyline bet FYI
The Let’s Talk College podcast was a great conversation. I figured I’d bail on my workout after 30 minutes, but I kept going just to listen. You touched on so many things that I experienced in administration.
1. Faculty making themselves non-essential by demanding reduced teaching loads and refusing to serve as advisors. Every time a FT faculty retired, we were so happy because it meant we could save money in the budget. But when advisors left, we had to replace them.
2. Accreditation sucked up a ridiculous amount of time. It took up the faculty’s time too, because we had to make a big show of including them in the process. Faculty didn’t produce much written work (we had to do that), but we had endless committee meetings about every little thing. So much of it felt like busy work.
3. Treating bad debt as revenue. This happens in government but also at institutions with tuition that isn’t covered by financial aid for whatever reason. We’d ban them from coming back and withhold their transcripts, but it was rare to actually get paid. However we couldn’t admit it was bad debt because then we’d have to subtract it from the budget. So the students couldn’t finish degrees to get some return on the investment.
4. Terrible graduation rates. The press always blamed us, but so many students should not have been there in the first place.
Also it was sweet how he was nervous to interview you, and left all of that in the recording.
Still relevant archive: "political Calvinism ... - the way that totalizing identity critiques render individual choices and morality irrelevant."
Any system which excuses bad behavior because of "systemic problems", will avoid reducing such bad behavior, and thus have more bad behavior.
Considering carrots and sticks - if bad morality doesn't get a stick/ bad punishment, more folks will do more of it.
And that's what we see, and will continue to see until ... the incentives change. (Which is what I thought the Friday incentives post would note more generally.)
Erin, the retail ecosystem consists of 10% malls and 90% open air centers. Mall sales are 80% clothing and accessories, which means malls are just giant department stores. Only about 8% of sales in open air centers are from clothing. With the success of online ordering, we now have too many malls. There is a wide consensus that over the next decade we will reduce the supply of malls by 50% and cull the bottom half of the herd. But malls will not disappear, instead, they will account for 5% of the retailer ecosystem and open air centers will be 95%. You were still find your Bath and Bodyworks, but you might have to drive a little further than you did in the past. Fear not, your grocery store, hair salon and Starbucks will remain just around the corner. It’s simply the circle of life.