EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

Klein meanwhile is a duller writer but his steady crunching of numbers is ultimately educational.

yglesiases willingness to be ambitious and wrong is imo what makes him compelling - like i understand theres danger in utopian thinking but still reimagining the world and its institutions is def one of my hobbies

who has better trolls?

― goole, Monday, January 3, 2011 11:51 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

to answer my own q, i don't really know. klein's comments are pretty boring but i have noticed yglesias' "community" to be especially vicious and repetitive. neither of them seem to really care much but i think both have made gestures to get more involved. terrible drudgery, sounds like, to me.

as far as blogger gossip goes, can anyone verify that there are, in fact, paid trolls out there? i'd hate to think it was mere dedication causing the same people to say the same things in the same place every day

theres only one blog i can think of that has good comments, really feel like 'comments off' should be the default

TNC i assume?

your bløg has good comments joe

yah tnc and lol of course goes w/o saying my blog

btw how much does this trolling gig pay, who do i contact

i know, right

i saw an interview w/yglesias where he was like all my readers really hate me i have no idea why they come to my blog

he was k funny tbh

eh i've watched a few of his bloggingheads's and he comes off like a jerk imo, interrupting, going on and on

ha yeah ive never been able to bring myself to watch a blogginghead and in general id much rather read than watch any news type thing but for some reason i saw this it was a friendly interview at a like blogg convention where they we just joking around

anyway my head says klein but my heart goes yglesias, not sure what to do, prob follow my heart

yglesias is good on urban issues - not that he says anything new, but at least he's talking to relatively wide audience. but still...super annoying on a personal level. I like klein.

Yglesias is a philosophy major in every word he writes and this is awesome about him.

ugh this is gonna be like that week i read glenn greenwald isnt it

neither of these guys is much like glenn greenwald

unless you have some sort of distaste for american journalists, then yes it'll be like that lol

these guys are on the sensible/technocratic side of the great progressive blogger divide - greenwald exists on the polemic/activist shore - which is not to say hes any more or less otm, just that hes harder to take

nah, that was what i liked abt greenwald its just that in the end i was like "wtf this is not my country i dont care"

haha

yeah but usa is in charge of the rest of the countries iirc

when krugman is updating regularly i don't have much of a reason to follow klein too closely - i don't hate him or anything though

[Yglesias is] a shitty writer imo

Actually, typos aside, he's not. He's remarkably concise and clear even if he liberally sprinkles his posts with "negative externalities" this and "regulatory capture" that jargon.

yglesias is embarrassed about having been a socialist and will occasionally mix in some right wing tinted bullshit to try and build a bit of center cred. i have grown to hate him. klein is kind of a young dinner party blogger but i keep the feed there to flick thru. i enjoy greenwald's secular fire and brimstone and i get angry about the same things as him. his biases are so transparent that is is v easy to think critically about what he writes.

maybe ill face the winner of this one off w/greenwald

can't wait

feel like klein is getting sold short here - he was hands down the best all around guy on health care reform

his coverage was comprehensive but his opinions were so milquetoast it was like reading a blog by that dude on gawker

feel like his opinions were pretty otm especially compared w/almost everyone elses which basically added up to OMG PUBLIC OPTION

they both kind of remind me of how a lot of people move to dc and get kind of absorbed into the weird political networky culture here at a pretty young age. dc is so conservative.

would love to run into these guys at a bbq and get into a drunken political argument

since the democratic primaries, even when drunk i try to sidestep political arguments. i ran into weigel at a bar one time but did not pick a fight. he is a good dude imo. that's actually one of the few blogs i regularly read - don't have time/energy to slog through a lot of content anymore.

yeah ive had v little exposure to it but dc political culture seen close up seems v strange

seems so unbearable. lotta people wearing new balances on the weekend and shit.

they r not sexy rip

never trust a libertarian

or a journalist

lol i own 2 pair of new balances

just sayin if u cannot figure how to dress how are u gonna run the country

daria i seen the shoes youre buying, you know what youre doing

new balance are great sneakers, just dont wear them on the weekend or max will shun u

you pride yourself on living in the mouth of the dragon but being fireproof, and then one day you realize it is saturday and you are in whole foods buying ingredients for a cool mac n cheese with a twist recipe you found online, wearing new balance sneakers

^^ gets it

i mean tbh i would rather live in boston than dc, at least some people there have accents

where would ilx end up siding on a boston vs dc poll?

it would turn into an argument about pizza

harDCore

whole foods, new balance sneakers, check. i don't really care about recipes

boston sucks, accents there are horrible. i hate boston

in that case the poll would require a 'neither' option xp

i am in boston with an accent. thx daria.

Rufo is not quite double the time

(for anyone who can’t be arsed isn’t granular enough to check, there are many episodes under an hour. Though tbf Klein did dedicate nearly as long to reviewing his own book as to Rufo’s ideas: What We Got Right — And Wrong — In ‘Abundance.’ What has the abundance movement actually achieved in the last year? Where has it fallen short? And what have the three of us learned from our critics?)

that sounds like a shitty performance review

the thing about abundance is that it's rebadging multiple things.

there are goofy regulations that create a keyhole-sized window that only entrenched interests can ever break into certain markets that need to be figured out. if you're, for example, trying to start a solar panel business and you need to navigate differing regulations in a dozen states, federal incentives that constantly shift, etc. then it discourages people from getting into that space. republicans will paint this as big government but are up to play the game when they can graft incentives for specific businesses in their districts on to the byzantine structure. efficient government doesn't necessarily mean smaller government!

that's the first part where they claim they're unlocking resources that are already there. the second part of abundance is attempting to rephrase the fact that we have sufficient resources available for everyone, they're just unevenly distributed or underutilized. any attempt to describe this honestly will always sound too much like "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" and you can understand why dancing around that is the norm. we need. more studies and means testing to make sure the wrong people don't get things

i just need to reiterate that Ezra Klein is about as much of a thought leader as a smart toilet.

https://i.postimg.cc/rsW-nJrkT/bafkreibk7geqjmwkxewrfzatak7hjkbw3n22fbmk5plmvbt746l4pvlbu4.jpg

I wish I could say they're stoned, but I have a feeling MattY don't toke.

For my part, I’ll say that my name is Matthew Yglesias. I have smoked marijuana in the past, and enjoyed it on occasion, but mostly I haven’t really liked it so I don’t expect I’ll smoke any more in the future.

https://archive.thinkprogress.org/i-have-smoked-pot-and-dont-really-care-for-it-b9e6bb4cbdaf/

Literal-minded guy.

I just get kind of annoyed with what seem to me like misconceptions about what motivates him.

Stan culture’s most gruesome mutation, centrist pundit Swifties.

Have I not criticized him enough?

I mean, accuse me of being a Jamelle Bouie stan, and I'll plead guilty. But Klein, not for a while.

I can certainly withstand criticisms of Klein (I have my own) -- I just wish a lot of them were sharper and less caricatured.

The way Abundance perverts and yimby urbanists really truly (actually probably not really) think the way to prosperity for the masses is building more shitty pressboard buildings is so wild. Like I’m sure there are specific (Granular, even!!) cases in blue states/ cities where maybe an archaic onerous regulation is keeping someone’s rich developer friend from minting millions.

Lol at “an archaic onerous regulation,” as if there is just one. There are many…speaking as a blue city/state person who deals with some of these things for work. (Berkeley and San Francisco are exaggerated versions btw, but if you really want to read some specific cases—- look up Berkeley and SF. )

I also like vacancy taxes in theory, but I know too much about rental real estate so I overthink how it wouldn’t work in practice.

What has happened imo is that there has been a hollowing out of middle class housing on top of the K-shaped economy. Expensive new housing doesn’t do much for those in the middle class on down. But it does make housing more affordable for the upper middle, which hey, they are overpaying as well, if you use HUD affordability metrics.

The persistent problem is affordable housing for households below 80% AMI. In many places, the cost to build ends up making it “not pencil” to build in cities, which is partly what has led to so much exurban sprawl.

Some of it is “greed” on the developer’s part, but it’s really “greed” all the way along the line: the big construction companies who inflate costs, the landowners who want to make a big profit from selling to developers, the architects, engineers, lawyers who do the pre-development work, then there are the banks and the investors! Everyone gets points on the package, including the cities which often charge fees that are literally percentages of construction value.

So the shitty pressboard buildings often get built because there’s a template (e.g. development standards) that has already been approved by the regulatory entities (planning, building, fire), so developers can save on the architects, engineers and lawyers, and probably the construction companies as well. Basically if you are building new construction, things that are nicer than shitty pressboard will be really expensive if done the standard way.

Then you get into subsidized low-income housing as an alternative… but the “greed” is still there, and in some cases, the tax credits and block grants just bring in a new layer of consultants who each get their points on the package….

Lol at “an archaic onerous regulation,” as if there is just one. There are many…speaking as a blue city/state person who deals with some of these things for work.

Well sure. I won’t pretend to know about SF or Berkeley. I can say that urban/ exurban areas in the southeast have been a shitty building bonanza and rents certainly have not gotten cheaper or even plateaued afaict. Even after being assured by the smartest and best boys that this would happen.

I mean we can blame greedy developers and everyone along the line getting a taste. But who’s going to actually do something about it?

i will

You got the Mamdani Method and the Mangionne Method and I suppose both have their pluses and minuses. Maybe there’s a secret third thing but I never see it clearly articulated

one issue is its a complicated problem another is a lot of powerful interests dont want to solve it

don't forget the Chuck Mangione Method

Smooth.

flugelbundance