Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When we show up, we win.

There is one struggling party in US right now, and it’s not the Democrats.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

You can’t love your country only when you win.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Somebody needs to explain to DeSantis that nobody needs to do anything to make him look bad.

There’s always a light at the end of the frog.

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

You cannot shame the shameless.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

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Those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear

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The ever clueless McMegan on Wisconsin unions:

There’s just one problem with this: if the union hasn’t managed to secure anything in the way of extra wages, benefits, or other concessions for the workers–if it is really true that all these things are close to the minimum required simply to attract workers–then who cares whether the union survives or not? What “power” is being taken away?

Gee, I wonder why people in a union might want to have the ability to bargain collectively even if they’re not asking for wage increases this very moment? Republican politicians have never shown any hostility to public workers; conservatives never have sexual fantasies about forcing teachers to “absorb the pain”.

While we’re at it, I wonder why African-Americans felt they had to form groups like the NAACP and the SNCC to fight for civil rights. Couldn’t they just have argued — calmly, civilly, seriously — as individuals? Assuming Hayekian principles, shouldn’t the free market have taken care of all of that?

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Megan McArdle is Always Wrong (Again!): Kitchen History Edition

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There are those who think the least snark directed Megan McArdle’s way is a waste of time — that her Our Lady of Perpetual Error persona is a considered ploy to grab enough attention to make it worth her masters’ while to retain her as Business and Economics Editor of the Atlantic. (Yes, the sound you just heard was Emerson spinning in his grave.)

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Me, I’m actually sympathetic to that view, for all the joy I’ve taken in McArdle gigging over the last few years.  It would be better for both the body politic and the culture at large if McArdle’s fifteen minutes simply dwindled to their inevitable end. Certainly, I’m not helping every time some new catastrophe evokes a bloggy response.

But the problem is that her quarter of an hour is not yet over, and McArdle is still The Atlantic’s most prominent economics blogger, and she continues to weigh in on a whole raft of stuff about which she willfully knows nothing, all in order to advance an agenda that has only one item:  to comfort the comfortable.

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So, despite the truth that each time someone points out she’s made another howler it only adds to her profile, I think there is a duty to do so. Once upon a time, in organizations that saw themselves as doing real journalism for audiences with an understanding of the term,  errors actually mattered.  Anyone starting out would get a chance or two, or even three.  But when gastritis broke your calculator once too often, you’d seek a new line of work.  You’d go become a shill, perhaps — a time honored retreat into expense account heaven for plenty of hacks who couldn’t hack the hard work of actually getting stuff right … or for whom, as in McArdle’s case, getting things wrong is a feature and not a bug.  That this hasn’t happened here is a problem for McArdle’s colleagues, I think, or it ought to be…about which a little more below.

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So what’s today’s problem post?  Nothing overtly political actually, which in some ways makes the case of McArdle’s unfitness for her claimed role yet more clear.   In her post, “The Economics of Kitchens,” she attempts to engage an ongoing discussion between Paul Krugman and Tyler Cowen on the pace of innovation.  Krugman and Cowen point out that there isn’t a whole lot new in kitchens today compared with those of sixty years ago.  Not so, says McArdle.  Rather, we live now in culinary paradise compared to those bad old days:

1953 kitchens did not have electric drip coffee brewers, stand mixers, blenders, food processors, or crock pots….

Err, no.  I’ll give McArdle this.  Electric drip coffee makers do first appear in the 1970s.  The electric vacuum coffee maker was, however, a common appliance and a very competitive marketplace. Not to mention that it was a technology that offered such incredibly cool options as the Faberware Coffee Robot:

Stand mixers in the 1950s?  Oh, you mean the standing mixer invented in 1908 by Herbert Johnson, sold to commercial bakers in 1915, and released for the home as the KitchenAid Food Preparer in…wait for it…1919?  Sunbeam released its cheaper alternative in the ’30s, and in 1954, (that kitchen of the 50s thing again) one could actually purchase a KitchenAid in a color other than white.

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This set down

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Now, look. I know that not all of you are accountants or economists or mathematicians or engineers. But let’s suppose I said to you that in 2003 the United States GDP was around 11 trillion and that is was expected to grow at an average rate of 4% or less over the next 20 years. You could get out a spreadsheet and come up with a reasonable upper bound of $327 trillion for the total GDP over those 20 years, right? Many of you could probably even do the rough estimate in your head that on average over those 20 years, it couldn’t be more than $20 trillion a year so that the total would be $400 trillion or less.

Suppose someone said to you that:

The (Iraq) war will certainly cost more than the $60b and change that the President is asking for. But it is not going to run us several trillion dollars (though even if it did, that would work out to less than 0.1% of GDP over the next 20 years.)

You’d register that “several trillion” means something like 3-4 trillion or more and say “nope, you mean 1% not 0.1%”, right? And if you yourself had made the 0.1% estimate and someone told you, nope, you’re wrong, it’s 1% and then explained to you in painstaking detail why several trillion is about 1%, not 0.1%, of $327 trillion, you would understand, right?

Because you know how to follow a link and operate a fucking calculator right?

Don’t be afraid to say that no, you couldn’t do any of this, that you can’t follow what it means to divide 4 by 400 and you have no fucking idea why 3-4 trillion is 1%, not 0.1%, of 400 trillion. Because if you can’t perform these simple calculations, then you too can be the Business and Economics Editor of the Atlantic, you too can earn close to 200K a year, and appear on shows like NPR’s Marketplace.

I realize this is my second post on this not-very-important topic. I’ve talked about this enough and I’ll shut up now.

Because the Atlantic comments thing is slow to load and so on, I am attaching a pdf this time. The thread I am describing can be found here.

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Sometimes the Snark Writes Itself, Megan McArdle edition

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Update, Correction, and (gulp) Apology:

As Megan McArdle notes below — very mildly, I’d add, given the provocation — there is a material error in this post, right there in the first line below this correction.

I said “She actually writes…” when, as she says, she did not.  The quoted lines below are from the Post itself.  McArdle was quoting the Post’s ombudman, Andrew Alexander.

Whatever one may think of the context of McArdle’s celebration of the Post’s errors, what I wrote was wrong, and I apologize to Ms. McArdle for the error.

Did that hurt to write?  Yes it did. But it is necessary.  Live by the snark, die by it, on occasion.

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So Megan McArdle actually goes there.  In a post titled “Department of Awful Statistics,” she busts on the Washington Post for its presumed tropism toward arithmetical mistakes.  She actually writes

I regularly hear complaints that numbers in Post stories don’t add up.

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…Many [errors] are inexplicable, such as last Tuesday’s A-section story that said new industry-wide health-care rules, “will affect about 180 Americans with private insurance” (it should have been 180 million).

This, from the woman who infamously mistook $250 for $25, and then proceeded to build an entire argument on why we shouldn’t bother allowing taxes on the rich to return to Clinton-era levels.  (Don’t worry — that link leads to the most excellent Susan of Texas’s blog*, in which Ms. McArdle is (metaphorically) gutted like a Grand Banks cod and left to dry on the margin.)

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Sometimes one fumes at the egregious “work” (sic–ed.) of the Atlantic’s Business and Economics Editor.  Sometimes one rages.  Here, it’s just a snort and a chortle.

A kinder person would simply avert one’s gaze and pass by in silence.

Me — I gotta laugh…and put put the boot in. Whereof that which is miscounted, those who cannot count must remain silent.

*I should note that Susan got there first with this snark too, but then she always does.  And hell — I come by the post honestly, having tracked McArdle down — with wonder — from the link at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ fabulous post on The Sons of Confederate Veterans celebration of slavery and the Times‘ miserable coverage of same.

Image:  Nicolas Neufchâtel, ” The Schoolmaster Johann Neudörffer and a Student,” 1561.

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Not much of a roll out

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I’ve yet to see any of the Villagers come out in favor of the Bowles-Simpson thing. Andrew Sullivan is excited, and is cheerfully heh-indeeding various Koch whores’ positive reactions to it all (while tsk-tsking hippie opposition), but even in today’s fucked up world of political discourse, no one is interested in Sully’s economic opinions.

Krugman hates it, but what does he know?

Update. And, yeah, stick this one on our society’s gravestone:

Much of it is way over my head in terms of the specifics of government programs and the ability to cut them. But the core proposal is honest, real, and vital.

Translation: I don’t know fuck all but the numbers, but I like the sound of serious, painful, sacrifice.

But credit where credit is due, David Broder won’t admit he doesn’t understand the numbers when he flogs it tomorrow morning.

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Fun facts

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On the road this weekend so not much time to post, but thought we needed something a little more light-hearted today, so….

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