Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Mike Skinner (The Streets), 34.

While I wait for an answer, the good stuff:

1. Good Matt Yglesias point about not worrying about short-term panic in the markets. I wouldn't say it's not a cost at all, but it's a pretty minor one.

2. Greg Sargent spoke to Norm Ornstein and had a nice post on filibuster reform.

3. This John Patty post (via John) on the bargaining positions of the fiscal cliff players is excellent. Also, I really have no patience for reading this stuff. I'm pretty sure that's my failing, and not the fault of Congressional/game theory scholars. For what it's worth...Stan Collender gets there a lot more easily.

4. NYT Public Editor Margaret Sullivan deserves kudos for this one.

5. And Seth Masket watches Star Trek, is appalled. Well, sure. But we're watching with our youngest, too, and just saw the one where an accident which injured Scott was caused by a woman...which might, in McCoy's expert analysis, make Scott hate all women. Of course! It's still a great show, though.

4 comments:

  1. Never thought you'd be a Streets fan... shame he never quite matched OPM, though the concept album was pretty good at times.

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    1. I actually really only know "Grand Don't Come..." well; I've heard some of the later stuff, but just a bit. Maybe I'll check out OPM one of these days.

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  2. An interesting way to take the Patty/Collender discussion (for people like me, who actually are REALLY interested in the credibility of threats between the branches) is to take seriously the notion that the GOP is batshit crazy.

    Formal models of bargaining strongly suggest that this is Obama's game to lose. He holds all the cards; if Obama walks away from the table, he wins. Not a perfect win, but it's much closer to his preferences than the GOP's.

    I think those models aren't going to be right. I think the modern GOP is so batshit crazy that they might think a loss is a win. After all, if they vote for whatever happens, guess who gets to explain that vote in a primary 18 months from now? Note, however, that this doesn't make the GOP "irrational" in the sense of game theory; it just means they have prefernces that I (personally) find insane...but so long as those preferences are consistent, they can be "rational."

    Toss in a little Gilmour (preferring an issue to a law), and I find the whole practice of formally modeling this stuff to be a little...irrational. SO MUCH heavy lifting is to be done ordering the preferences that there's nothing left for the model to add insight to.

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  3. Mike Skinner is fine and all, but no love for this guy?. This august forum discusses musical influences, what says influence more than "young rock-and-roll up-and-comer plies his trade for the great Bob Dylan, causing Dylan to realize he's been going about things all wrong, thus dropping his Joan Baez/folk music/acoustic guitar bit while picking up the electric version of same"?

    Or even that you and me, not at all rock and roll legends, can nevertheless listen to Electic Ladyland, in particular that awesome transition from 20 minutes of ethereal futuristic music into the militaristic stylings of Hendrix' All Along the Watchtower, and even we can say, yeah, Dylan wasn't just making nice, he was right.

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