EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

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

did it seem more accurate 361 days ago?

No

The headline implies this, yes, but the article still reads pretty true

lol no it doesnt

Musk tweets as if he had been raised by the blue bird and the fail whale. ...
That’s a man who understands what Twitter truly is.

ha max wrong too

Musk’s stated agenda for Twitter is confusing mostly for its modesty. He’s proposed an edit button, an open-source algorithm, cracking down on bots and doing … something … to secure free speech. I tend to agree with the technology writer Max Read, who predicts that Musk “will strive to keep Twitter the same level of bad, and in the same kinds of ways, as it always has been, because, to Musk, Twitter is not actually bad at all.”

tbf i didnt think musk would change much either, but i also didnt think he was mr twitter the guy who gets it lol just a ridiculous thought, tho ezra prob didnt believe it either i mean what is belief to a hack

The CHUDs' attitude toward "blue check elites" is so baffling to people who aren't brain damaged that it was hard to predict just how much of a culture war issue they'd turn Twitter Blue into.

the whole situation is an alltimer, wild stuff lol

Goes both ways a bit tbf, the blue check removal saga is a delightful farce but too many of the people on the other side of the culture war have to pretend it's a tragedy.

Not gonna go back and read that Klein thing but I also thought at the time that Musk wouldn't change Twitter much and in retrospect still think he hasn't changed it much. In fact, I even agree with Klein that as of April 2022 Musk was good at Twitter, and one of the only things that's really changed -- though this is not a very big change if like me you don't live in the part of Twitter where you see his stuff a lot -- is that he's now quite bad at Twitter.

the only change in twitter post-musk that has affected my ux is the following/for you tab. imo it’s a good improvement over the previous status quo where you had to click a star/plus sign symbol to turn algorithmic feed off, and it was always ambiguous which one you were on since it would switch back randomly

all the other changes (10k character limit, blue check, bookmark and views counters) haven’t affected me personally and/or i haven’t noticed. maybe the farcically bad business moves they’re constantly making mostly affect power users, celebs, orgs etc

flopson must not read the comments (replies) and I respect that

I even agree with Klein that as of April 2022 Musk was good at Twitter

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Sunday, April 23, 2023 5:36 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

you loike meme mate

this is primo stuff

pic.twitter.com/Vn0Rv0yQ5q

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 15, 2020

he got engagement of sorts but I don’t think engagement alone is being good at twitter. he’s like the guy who introduces the most popular minions memes on a local grandparents facebook group by copying them from the regional one

Pronouns suck

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2020

Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 19, 2020

pretty funny to think if he wasnt a billionaire with a pr team thats spent a decade plus boosting his brand hed just be some 47 follower reply guy instead of tanking $50b and his reputation buying twitter

as for whether hes changed twitter a lot im going to vote a definitive yes, for one hes instigated a year long mod war its become the talk about elon site, tons of good posters have left because of it, he made dril break character lol, this whole blue check situation which as mh mentioned has really gummed up the replies, various reliability issues, but id say most of all hes sent twitter into a death spiral, its over folks, and theres no change bigger than death

dril breaking character is actually weirdly super upsetting, it feels like a watershed

the jig is up

Whenever any lefty asks me why society ought to have billionaires, I say "Because otherwise they'd be warlords", and if recent events don't make this point abundantly clear I don't know what to tell you

— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) April 23, 2023

As bad as Ezra and Matty are, it gets worse.

lol its true you go far enough down the centrist pundit hole and matty and ezra seem totally normal in comparison

i mean tbf ezra is normal mattys a freak tho