“Unlike in pool—where the winner of a frame is the player who clears all of his or her balls from the table first....”

Passenger rail in europe is thriving though. And if airlines are “cutting into” the prices, isn’t that the point? The competing models should drive the overall cost of each down— competition is part of the point.

Most of the delays are do to political resistance, and back-pedaling in sacramento (and D.C.), not problems with the model.

Actually, when you take into account the environmental costs associated with competing forms of transit, and the relative shares of public subsidies involved in building something like a highway, or an airport, they are cost-effective. Only by looking at them in a vacuum, rather than in comparison to other…

Good Germans read the fine print.

No doubt. Muuuuuch less of a dick than Connors, who literally reveled in his dick-headry, and thought it was cute. That dude was an unforgivably arrogant fuckwit— Kyrios just seems legitimately tortured a lot of the time, and grappling with it, pretty successfully these days it seems. Much nicer guy than Connors ever…

Plus he’s a stupendously good player, and kind of a refreshingly honest guy in interviews; and most of the other players (wawrinka excepted) seem to actually like him, which is usually a good sign.

Yeah, this is a funny one. On one hand, we are obviously in an era of unparalleled access to a richer musical landscape than ever before. Any style of music you like is being made by somebody, and you can access it easily. It feels like regardless of one’s personal sentimental or nostalgic attachments to any…

This is the draw of death. I’d bet on a motivated Kyrios, but betting on Kyrios to be motivated is a fool’s bet.

Steve Tignor is good.

I mean it’s like, go back to arguing with Yves Smith about MMT, it’s what you actually know something about. Popular resistance, activism and movement-building, otoh, are decidedly not.

I think Krugman’s skill set stopped being up to the needs of the moment at some point during the last election cycle, if not earlier. He’s fine arguing the finer points of stimulus multipliers; crying alarums about the perils of populism just exposed the incredible narrowness and banality of his political imagination.

Before the injuries, Juan Martin didn’t take it easy on the backhand at all: it was a flat, heavy beast of a shot, the shot that ultimately played a major role (pun intended!) in beating Federer at the U.S. Open. Kind of amazing that he’s managed to compensate so well for the change in his game.

Fed takes it earlier now than Agassi ever did, and Agassi I think was the cleanest, earliest ball-striker of his era.

Except that typically, your entire lifetime of tax payments added together wouldn’t pay for a single trunk sewer line serving your neighborhood, or in many cases even pave your street. Your tax payments, alone, are inadequate to pay for *any* of the infrastructure you use, period.

This is the business, not the individual side, but same deal: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/magazine/why-are-corporations-hoarding-trillions.html

Actually, hoarding of liquid capital is, according to economists, currently a massive problem, the fix for which is two-fold: much higher taxes, and low interest rates to incentivize investment in higher-return enterprises. In case you haven’t been paying attention, companies and individuals actually *are* sitting on…

Compared to democratic socialist welfare states with far more (public-serving) state intervention? Fuck no.

Actually, some recent studies are finding that political positions formed in youth and young adulthood are lasting, and the strongest predictor of political belief is the political/economic circumstances confronted during early political consciousness.

Also Bennie’s descriptions of both socialism and capitalism are wrong and stupid in the way a moderately bright sixth grader who has never studied either in any depth, but has quickly read a single book (*maybe* two) on the topic for a class paper, and writes only from that source combined with all the weird shit…