Matt Yglesias

Jul 17th, 2009 at 6:14 pm

Endgame

Weekend!

— Compelling charts on inequality and the debt boom; keep an eye on Norway!

— Will Portland sign David Lee?

— Can’t stop linking to stuff about the Teacher Incentive Fund.

— If affordable housing is built in the wilderness but nobody knows it exists does it make a sound?

— I might be willing to adopt FedEx’s point of view on a dispute with UPS for as little as $1 million.

Song of the day: I discovered that some people are not aware of Local H’s cover of “Toxic”. Makes me think more rock bands should contract with Britney’s Swedish songwriters.






33 Responses to “Endgame”

  1. 24AheadDotCom Says:

    - Weigel’s source won’t confirm the impression he’s trying to give. Someone really needs to sit down with him and explain this issue to him before he gets in too deep.

    - Here’s today’s “Awwwww (no really)” SOTD.

  2. kitsune Says:

    No, Portland will not sign David Lee. Lee is way overrated, or at least his stats are widely skewed over what he could do in Portland based on the Knicks’ style of play and his position for them. He would never play center for the Trail Blazers and his rebounding would drop off considerably.

    The Blazers used their cap space to cripple a leading division rival, and now have it available for an uneven trade. The trade, however, will probably not come until mid-season when other teams are desperate to get under the luxury tax.

  3. Ted Says:

    In this case, I really don’t see the need for a cover. “Toxic” is a song that Britney handled pretty well.

  4. just some guy Says:

    The difference between ACU’s price and WaPo’s (admittedly for different “services”) is sort of painful.

    For another fine Toxic cover, I recommend Nickel Creek’s rendition on mandolin, fiddle, and guitar.

  5. Ted Says:

    @4: Now *that’s* a cover! You’ve got to do more than add guitar.

  6. ben Says:

    One more vote for Lee staying in NYC. He wants more than anyone should pay him and wouldn’t get enough minutes at the 4 or the 5.

  7. Ken G Says:

    Weird thing about that cover, I actually listened to the lyrics for once.

  8. Song of the Day Says:

    Dave Weigel is never going to fuck you, 24, no matter how much you stalk him.

  9. The Lorax Says:

    Norway has oil, too. So that’ll help it.

  10. James Gary Says:

    For another fine Toxic cover, I recommend Nickel Creek’s rendition on mandolin, fiddle, and guitar.

    That one’s not bad, but my favorite by far is the outlaw-country version by the Boss Hoss:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIVcMjuVdX4

  11. El Cid Says:

    Is there some reason AssForAHeadDotConned can’t get readers to his own blog and has to come over to a more successful liberal blog and continually whore links over here?

    Oh, right, it’s cause it’s a shitty blog from a paranoid.

    On the plus side, Moon-landing hoaxists must be crying because NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed the Apollo landing sites. You can see the equipment still there. Right beside it there is a tiny hut where Obama was born and which has the machine they used to forge his birth certificate.

  12. Song of the Day Says:

    24 won’t even release his website stats reports to the public because they show how no-one actually clicks on the links he whores. Clearly a coward as well as a paranoid birfer racist stalker.

  13. joe from Lowell Says:

    Shut up!

    That libertarian I obsessively write about is stalking me!

    PS – I am not a crank.

  14. 24AheadDotCom Says:

    For the record:

    1. I’m not “stalking” anyone.
    2. My sitemeter stats have always been public. There’s a graphic on each page.
    3. The reason for lies like those told above is because whoever it is can’t match me in debate and is so cowardly they have to hide behind a fake name.
    4. I will most likely be taking legal steps in this issue, and I’ve contacted MattY requesting that he preserve the personal information of the person leaving comments above.

    If that person would like to be man enough to sort this out, let’s do it right now. Act like a man and tell me what your issue is.

  15. Fencedude Says:

    The issue is that you are an obnoxious twat who adds nothing to the dialog and simply linkwhores his own shitty blog because eh quite literally has nothing better to do with his life.

  16. El Cid Says:

    The reason for lies like those told above is because whoever it is can’t match me in debate and is so cowardly they have to hide behind a fake name.

    While I have my own reasons for a pseudonym (it’s more fun this way, and to be honest I really don’t care who some internet commenter is unless they’re claiming special knowledge based on biography), I haven’t told any lies about you.

    I just think you write shitty, paranoid, and usually completely off-point crap just so you can try to beg more visitors to your blog.

    I mean, c’mon, you’re still at it with this professor and ex-Dallas city attorney who said some shit in 1967 as though La Raza had Sotomayor training in the jungle to commit genocide against whitey. It’s sad, it’s pathetic, it’s irrelevant, and as a white man and Southerner, you’re embarrassing me with this cowardly pants-pisssing.

  17. 24AheadDotCom Says:

    So, El Cid, are you saying that you’re “Song of the Day”, the user from #8 and #12? If so, how do I know you aren’t Dave Weigel? And, if you’re “Song of the Day”, why are you trying to make people think you might be Weigel?

    What sort of man are you, El Cid? What’s your real name? Do you have a website? My name’s Chris Kelly, I’ve had a site since ‘95 and I was online before then. What’s your name, “El Cid”. Stand up like a man and take responsibility for your words.

  18. Turgidson Says:

    If Portland’s gonna make a play for another free agent, why wouldn’t it be Lamar Odom? Portland has a bunch of average SFs – he could start there, or he could back up both forward spots as a super sub. He made the most sense for Portland all along, in my view. He can even play some point forward when Roy gets his brief rests.

    Or Portland could go after Hinrich some more, though the most likely scenario there was a 3 way with Utah sending Boozer to the Bulls. The Milsap offer and match might have poisoned that well.

  19. Song of the Day Says:

    Sitemeter? Open up your webalizer stats and let’s see your full referrer count, paranoid birfer racist. Give us all something to laugh at.

    Or you can just keep whining like you have the right to piss on other people’s websites like an unbroken puppy.

  20. Aaron Swartz Says:

    Those other Toxic covers are OK, but the one by Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra is simply magical.

  21. El Cid Says:

    So, El Cid, are you saying that you’re “Song of the Day”, the user from #8 and #12?

    No, I’m not saying that. How stupid could you be to think that’s what I was saying? I’m not David Wiegel either. What the fucking fuck? Can you not tell how I differentiated a general response from some particular lover’s spat you’re in?

    Further, I don’t give a flying fuck who you are. If you think it makes you tough to say who you are, good for you, and also fuck you, you pathetic whiny little blog-whoring failure.

    What sort of man am I? I’m a native white Southerner who works real jobs, served in the military, and goes on the internet to read interesting things and to have some entertainment by visiting various websites I like and posting comments when I feel like it.

    Other than that, you should be able to tell what “sort of man” I am by what I god-damned write, which is way more than a pants-pissing shitbag like you would ever deserve to know of me.

    I think it’d be easier to tell you who I’m not, and I could do that just by pasting a link to your shitty blog which so desperately, painfully, and failingly tries to get readers by continually coming over to this vastly more successful and noted liberal blog and whining about every tiny little fart you’ve posted about some poor white man who cried when a brown dude looked at him funny 30 years ago.

  22. Steve Says:

    Local H is way underrated.

  23. Colatina Says:

    How about Richard Thompson’s cover of “Oops I Did It Again”?

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAS4ltt7DzI

    Britney really mangles some pretty decent songs. Maybe she could just star in videos of good bands singing “her” songs?

  24. Mattyoung Says:

    It is not Klein’s Theory of inequality and instability. It naturally falls out of the mathematics of closed, square integrable systems. It has been talked about for five yeas at least that I recall.

    It is the reason why a raise in progressive taxes ends the Treasury Bubble.

  25. AJS Says:

    My 1 year old daughter started dancing and head banging when Toxic played. Thos eSwedish song writers are on to something.

  26. joe from Lowell Says:

    For the record:

    1. I’m not “stalking” anyone.

    PS – I am not a crank.

  27. live Says:

    It’s kind of worth clicking the link above to 24’s site (I did it just this once) and reading that post, just to appreciate what a nut he really is. It’s pretty classic.

    See also: I will most likely be taking legal steps in this issue, and I’ve contacted MattY requesting that he preserve the personal information of the person leaving comments above

    Gold!

  28. hugo Says:

    I didn’t like the Nickel Creek version. Musically it was great (Toxic is actually a pretty good song) but I didn’t like the ironic hamming it up. If you’re going to do a song like that, I’ve always believed you should get into it and play it straight.

  29. 24AheadDotCom Says:

    El Cid: if you aren’t the person leaving the smears, then perhaps you shouldn’t have gone off on your tear.

    My earlier comment applies to the person leaving the smears: be a man and take responsibility for your words.

    Perhaps this will help with that:

    For your safety, you should assume that we will turn over log file entries if we are presented with a court order, subpoena, warrant, or other legal demand originating from a non-totalitatarian government entity. We do not have the resources to mount legal challenges. We do not know our users, and thus we cannot contact them to allow them to mount a challenge. In practice, we may elect to decline to comply with law enforcement demands that we deem inappropriate, if we are outside their jurisdiction.

    Act like a man, “Song of the Day”.

  30. Jeffrey Davis Says:

    I noticed in the story on the debt boom that the tech bubble burst in 2001. The tech bubble originally burst in 1999, but apparently the tech bubble was made from one of those do-it-yourself kits for bubble making that use lots of glycerin. The bubble first bursts and then wiggles around in the air for a long time before it finally collapses into a visible stain on the ground. Not all bubbles are born with the same fragility and capacity to disappear instantly.

  31. Song of the Day Says:

    The paranoid birfer can wiggle his micropenis and make as many empty threats as he likes, but he still hasn’t opened up his webalizer stats.

    What have you got to hide, 24? Scared to show off your pathetic referrer traffic?

  32. urban legend Says:

    The TIF and its ilk are such a waste of national energy. There is not one iota of evidence that failures in our educational system have any connection whatsoever to failure to give income advantages to teachers who perform better than others. It is fundamentally flawed from a theoretical standpoint: the teachers who perform better now are the ones who went into the profession not so they could compete with their fellow teachers for extra money, but because they care about teaching kids and are talented at doing it. They are the very same ones who will win the awards, but there is no reason to believe their teaching will be any stronger than it was before such awards were given. The others will only be de-motivated by such a system, so we end up with a net loss in motivation to put in the extra effort.

    Instead of listening to successful businesspeople who never set a foot in the classroom and have no idea what they are talking about — but have the arrogance to think their success in the business world gives them special knowledge to tell educators how to do their jobs, and have the marketing expertise to make others think they are specially anointed — how about listening to the actual experts on what works and doesn’t work in the schools? Who is that? Why the teachers, of course, and 99% of them know that all these cockamanie schemes to try to emulate an imaginary system of compensation in the private sector — one, that is, that seldom can be found actually to exist — are genuinely stupid.

    This doesn’t even get to the massive bureaucracy that will be necessary to administer a public system of this nature in an equitable manner. It’s unfortunate that Obama has fallen for this time-wasting crap, when there are so many real things, like more early childhood education and getting rid of the worst teach-to-the-test demands of the NCLB Act, that can be and need to be done.

  33. donovan Says:

    the yael naim cover of toxic is the best, by far. it’s haunting.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5pP55u9s10


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