EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

its always hard to tell to what extent a pundit naturally dumb or just doing it for the job

have we seen this one yet

Going crazy upon learning that @mattyglesias thought basis points and percentage points were the same thing, and apparently frequently read sentences like “the yield on the 10-year treasury is up six basis points” and thought that was normal and fine? pic.twitter.com/JyzKOYqIbs

— cephalopod_v7 (wirefraud (parody)) (@macrocephalopod) January 11, 2023

he was literally a business blogger for years it was his job lol

the “counterexamples” people tried to find are even more confusing to the point I’m not sure if he knows what a percent is

maybe he does know what a basis point is but not a percent

idk as someone who makes math and coding mistakes and typos all the time it’s hard to judge the bond yield mistake. it’s pretty tricky. using premium bond to get around the debt ceiling is a good idea tho

you should charge people $40/yr to read your slightly more accurate takes

the flopstack seems doomed by name but readers may give is a fair shake

crazy to think that matty is actually good at his schtick and theres a whole ecosystem of subyglesiases out there

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FmcW1cYX0AATJiL?format=jpg&name=large

and that thread, which I made the mistake of reading with morning coffee a few hours ago, gets worse

if you dont want to see him anymore its very easy to get blocked

trying to remember why this guy banned me pic.twitter.com/PHLLYtNSEX

— br◎seph (@on3ness) January 14, 2023

I thought at first, he's snarking.

yeah hes actually dumb with terrible ideas

or at least thats how he pays the bills

matty finds a way, a true provocateur, i can only tip my cap

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FnmxDRjagAAWoiY?format=jpg&name=large

send matty into the drugs den first like that scene in serpico

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FnqBwyMXkAEDwBu?format=jpg&name=large

I didn't notice the significance of "Police For America" the first time I read it.

They're rebranding opposing banning books as "identity politics for librarians" pic.twitter.com/4dlXQ5Vf4i

— Lincoln Michel (@TheLincoln) February 9, 2023

Are there any Matt journalists who don't suck

Matt Levine!

AMAB (except for Levine)

Guy who thinks that instead of carceral solutions we should be offering the January 6 perpetrators affordable housing and good jobs.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) February 10, 2023

these same perpetrators who yell about personal responsibility and mommy having a job rather than staying home made her kid go bad?

once again Matty not entirely wrong about the carceral state but choosing to use it in a limited capacity and focus on poor beleaguered people who only tried to overthrow a government, like

what about everybody else who needs these things who aren't trying a coup?

Why is his twitter avatar bearded Moby?

Matty otm: Jan 6 is the coup de grace for prison abolition. The systemically unjust policing and the continual imprisonment and execution of innocent people is an externality of vital anti-coup deterrence

I think it should probably tell you something about the overall level of quality and attention to detail in Yglesias’ work that he seems to have critiqued my podcast without understanding that on every single episode one of us has read the book and one of us has not. pic.twitter.com/T1yfwUpPQF

— Michael Hobbes (@RottenInDenmark) February 10, 2023

so he read a dumb substack post about a podcast episode that he didn't listen to and responded to the original podcast based on that?

excellent source vetting

I also have no idea who Ned Resnikoff is but hoo boy are his conclusions really something

Policy director at California YIMBY

oh. ohhhh

in my podcast, the person who hasn't read the book (me) pretends to have read the book, while the person who has read the book (or wrote it) has to pretend that they've never read it. one of the long running gags is that the person who has read the book but has to pretend that they haven't read it "pretends" to be upset with me and to not understand what my whole podcast is about. we keep doing this until i get a job

what are the odds that matty himself has read 'the end of history'

lol he dirty deleted the original tweet

never go to war against @the_law_boy

as a side note, I've enjoyed the Michael Hobbes podcast format with one host explaining a book or phenomena to the other, but I've mostly listened to Maintenance Phase

A lot of people giving me shit in a way calculated to annoy me this evening — that’s your right, but I’m gonna block you if you do it.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) February 10, 2023

What a little worm

Matty Y acting like a hyena
Matty Y, what a little weiner

reading some of the tweets that went after him in the last 24 hours and I didn’t realize a guy could be murdered multiple times

link?

In 2021, I wrote this piece about how Ron DeSantis was trying to crack down on speech and about how the people who signed the Harper's Letter wouldn't care. And YOU were the example I used. That's how predictable and hypocritical the letter people were. https://t.co/UZX3l5FLxS

— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) February 9, 2023

In the last three days, Peter Coy, Matt Yglesias, and Jason Furman have all argued against Biden's push to make things in the U.S. It's fascinating reaction to the new industrial policy. pic.twitter.com/A3zauP1G9N

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) February 13, 2023

That’s extreme beltway brain right there

That Furman one is especially baby-brained because it's the end-run of economists thinking the ultimate good is optimizing the supply chain, globally, at all costs

Maybe it makes sense to have a materials/labor supply chain locally to support critical infrastructure, especially when we've had obvious international trade issues in recent years? It's not 10 bridges or 20 bridges, it's thousands and while a bunch are currently in need of replacement, things have a lifespan and there will be a rolling need for bridge maintenance as long as there are bridges. So you fund a labor force that's paid as if they work on critical infrastructure and keep them around to do the jobs we know need done

I mean, you could argue that they'll run out of work and there's the possibility of make-work like we've seen elsewhere where development overruns demand, but that's a separate issue entirely. idk if they run out of bridges make them work on high speed rail or something

According to the ASCE in 2021:

One particular concern is the condition of the nation's bridges. According to the Infrastructure Report Card, 42% of the 617,000 bridges in the U.S. are more than 50 years old, and more than 46,000 of them are rated as structurally deficient. That doesn't mean that they're in danger of collapsing but indicates that they are in poor condition. The number of bridges that slipped from good condition to fair over the last four years increased as well.

https://www.npr.org/2021/03/03/973054080/potholes-grid-failures-aging-tunnels-and-bridges-nations-infrastructure-gets-a-c

I'm not sure I even understand this as an economic issue, but as a public safety one it seems pretty dire

It’s absolute mind-boggling to me. My city’s been replacing the bridges over the river downtown at a rate of about one per year, and the one’s that still there is eroding rapidly. And these are relatively short bridges in both length and height. I still remember the Minneapolis bridge collapse in 2007 and worrying about several people I knew who lived in the area.

fwiw the commenters saying that maybe we don’t need as many bridges are being just as purposefully ignorant — a number of bridges in rural areas have been retired and/or deconstructed based on usage, some resulting in much longer routes for people in rural areas

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FuZW-doWAAEHSR_?format=jpg&name=medium

^hasn't aged well