- Damn straight: Chavvy, it’s time to hang up the spikes
- Best use of the word “vestigial” ever in a movie
- Whoa. I’m guessing … Michael Hutchence Disease.
- Dept. of Radosh Media Betes Noires:
Or an e-mail joke circulating among Iranians: “The Election Commission has announced in its last statement regarding the election that writing names such as monkey, traitor, fascist, silly, and [expletive] on the ballots will be considered a vote for Ahmadinejad.”
- { snerk }: No. 1 glove (I usually just wash my hands afterward)
It is time for us to act on what everyone knows to be true: DLD + game thread 060409 167
167 thoughts on “It is time for us to act on what everyone knows to be true: DLD + game thread 060409”
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… and this (specifically, Comment #6) is why I will never be a true film geek:
Seems like you have to be involved in making films to be interested in that sort of stuff.
Not necessarily. You could just have way too much money to spend on home theater equipment.
It would still take a lot of effort and years of wasted time to even get a reasonable grasp of what they’re talking about.
Exactly my point.
No, exactly my point.
Actually it doesn’t take too much time to learn it. The real irony is that most filmmakers don’t give a shit.
Shall we multi-task this as a game thread? If so, allow me to suggest that as long as Cunningham is in the starting lineup, every A’s player needs a Happy Days nickname. I nominate Crosby for Potsy and Rajai for Ralph Malph.
FIRE
ARNOLDAL NOW!!!Giambi: The Big Ragu
Ellis: Leather Tuscadero
Buck: Pinky Tuscadero
Chavvy = Chuck Cunningham
Mazzaro: Chachi
Time for me once again to recall one of my favorite brushes with celebrity: I served ice cream to Marion Ross. She was wearing a full-length white fox coat. (Later that same year, I served ice cream to Ralph Nader. He was also wearing a full-length white fox coat.)
I object to your stunt-casting. Malph has to be Kielty. In a pinch, Hatteberg, Outman, or Gallagher.
And I don’t think there’s anyone to play the Fonz but Swisher.
If you’re gonna hit someone, hit AJ for cripes sake.
re: Carradine – Michael Hutchence was my first thought as well
I didn’t click the link, and when MB said Michael Hutchence disease, my first thought was who knocked his head on the curb and lost his sense of smell? Pretty much means I paid too much attention to VH1’s behind the music.
My second thought was Thai gamblers.
Oh my. Today’s lineup is even worse than yesterday’s. Pity Geren couldn’t have, say, started the H2N3 Virus at second instead of Kennedy.
Cust’s back still hurting, Sweeney’s knee banged up (to get MRI)
Maybe Crosby’s old glove was cursed, and he’ll finish the year strong and win AL MVP.
David Carradine dead:
The article has already been rewritten:
I once ran into Carradine in SF, he was hanging out on the sidewalk with a much younger and much more attractive lady friend. It took me a minute to recognize him and I didn’t remember his name, so I asked him if he was the guy from Kung Fu. He was annoyed that I didn’t know his name and ignored me, but the lady confirmed it and told me his name. This was before Kill Bill (which I’ve only seen ~20 mins of b/c I fell asleep and skipped part two altogether).
At least we know Outman was in Chicago.
Have you added your thoughts on the finale of BB yet?
Yes. I wrote it last night after watching Up (another good Pixar movie), so I don’t know how coherent it was, but it’s in that thread.
I was hoping he’d just post that message again in the BB thread (yes, so as to be circuitous and self-indulgent).
Yep.That kind of self-gratification really isn’t necessary on FK b/c unread comments from old threads still make the sidebar widget.
Self-gratification is something I know a lot about considering how long it’s been since I last touched a woman.
< xbx discovered on floor of server by nm with ethernet cable around his neck >
How did you miss the easy joystick joke?
By going for the Carradine reference instead.
Self-gratification? Oh was that like retarded sarcasm or something? I never look at the sidebar widgets or look at any of the threads below the top two.
Not even
“Unread Comments”on my personal website, EnormousTwat.net?Jesus… if you’re such a fucking genius have you got around to
reading my previous commentquantizing gravity yet?Man, someone really stole xbx’s No. 1 glove this morning.I, monkeyball am a passive aggressivebitchengorged clown phallus.I posted a different response to that comment, but it’s in some other thread, maybe even on another site altogether.
Maybe someone will find it one day.
Why was the hotel maid sitting in a wardrobe?
I hope you didn’t call her his “special lady.”
“hourly female acquaintance.”
This is right up there with your missing the Blade Runner reference.
That was me – although to be fair it should have been “Queen to bishop six, check“
We’re all in massive fail mode today, apparently.
Rough starts for Willis and Wang.
Anderson is throwing strikes. This is awesome.
Why was I not informed?
More to the point, why does gamecast say Anderson threw a 79 mph changeup and then an 81 mph two-seamer?
They need to get their pitch ids figured out.
Have he and Anderson faced each other before?
Is that Valero guy singing “Ragweed rockin on the radio…”
what does that even mean?
Boy, I really hope we don’t acquire any more ex-Angels. Geren’ll be bunting like mad.
Big Raguuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!!!!!!!!!11
MSNBC employs known holocaust denier, praised for presenting opposing viewpionts
MSNBC’s deafening silence on Buchanan’s Holocaust denial forum
Further incontrovertible evidence of MSNBC’s leftwing bias.
Well, the link is a 404.
When their token right wing guy’s 1930s isolationism is anti-war enough to be palatable to their left-wing audience, pro-labor enough to be palatable to their left wing audience due to his protectionist and anti-immigrant views, and willing to stick it to the Republican party by running as a third party candidate, then apparently they will overlook his anti-semitic and holocaust-denying views. (And PB is certainly not the only MSNBC employee who complains about the jewish/Israel lobby’s influence over the US government)
So they should have a more mainstream conservative like Rush, Cheney, or Newt?
No they should replace the rest of their lineup with someone from the Green Party.
So you still seem to think Scarborough — the former Republican congressman and active hyperpartisan moron — doesn’t count? Not to mention the more debatable Andrea Mitchell, Brian Williams, and entire Dateline crew?
To wit
All the people speaking there are guests, not hosts, right? Obviously there are successful unionized companies, but I would say GM is the most successful American company, with success defined as “providing benefits for the largest number of people.”
That quote is awfully confusing. They say
which seems to imply that they would be better off not making and selling cars. But as I understand it (admittedly I could be mistaken) that isn’t the case: the operating loss includes the huge amounts they are paying for pensions and health care for retirees.
Also the scare quotes around “workers” indicate that the author, in addition to being intellectually dishonest, is an asshole.
Correct, the Big Three don’t literally make a loss on every car the sell, he’s factoring in the benefits, maybe that’s intellectually dishonest or maybe he assumes people will make the connection because the benefits are what he discusses in the paragraph immediately above that one.
If “workers” indicates that the author is an asshole, what does all the data showing they simply can’t make reliable cars indicate?
Japanese carmakers dominate Consumer Reports reliability survey
I’d blame that on GM’s “management.”
In the sense that if the A’s have bad offensive production, it’s management’s fault for relying on players like Crosby and Hannahan?
Exactly!
Plus, the A’s are economically crippled by the massive pension and medical benefits payouts to Chavez.
I would assume that the poor quality of the cars is the fault of the car designers, who are not what we would think of as “workers.” The health-care/union issues would create a situation where it should cost the U.S. companies more to produce a car of similar quality to Japenese/European cars, but the failure to produce good cars at all seems like an entirely separate issue unless the problem is that U.S. cars are faulty because of frequent assembly line mistakes which I doubt.
Wait… did you just put “workers” in quotation marks? Asshole.
Do you really not concede that whipping assembly-line workers is a dick move?
It isn’t manufacturing defects that make American cars bad, and I’ve seen no evidence from anywhere that the union rank-and-file don’t work hard.
Re: 2, I guess you learn something new every day.
Re: 3, I’ve heard the Malibu is one of the better deals on the market these days.
Re: 4, Odd that it didn’t give you a vertical scroll bar. I just tested on mine and it certainly does. What browser are you using?
Using IE on Windows XP, but I haven’t had this problem before today on the same rig. And I have a verticle scroll bar, but not a horizontal one, which is the problem…my text runs off to the right for perhaps thirty or forty characters past where I can see before it returns to the left of the grey box where I can see it. As though the right margin were set too far to the right beyond the viewable area.
That’s even stranger. Maybe it was a formatting hiccup or something.
Did it do that on this comment too?
(I’m home now posting on Mac/Firefox).
But on the comment above, yes, it did have the same problem, but right before I clicked post the text “snapped back” into properly aligned text which I could see in its entirely. Weird indeed.
TWHS
The better analogy would be “If Geren orders every player to sacrifice bunt every time, you can’t blame the players for not scoring runs.”
Do you mean the paragraph where he refers to their core (and profitable) business as a “loss-making auto subsidiary”? Even having already mentioned the benefits issue, why would he say that, or “lose money with every vehicle they sell” unless he is trying to intentionally cloud the issue? I suppose there is a remote possibility that he isn’t intellectually dishonest, but merely extremely confused or a poor writer.
On the other point, I don’t think the crappy quality of the cars they make necessarily says anything at all about how industrious their workers are. Even with union pay and benefits, auto worker is a job that I don’t think most of us white-collar types would want, and they aren’t deserving of that kind of gratuitous jab, especially at a time when many more of them are finding themselves out of work and in places where unemployment is already quite high. But maybe I just don’t realize how hard it is to be a “political commentator and cultural critic.”
What is the cutoff line regarding how wealthy one must be before it’s acceptable for someone to take a gratuitous jab?
What percentage of people on this planet have jobs where the “total labor, health, and pension costs, dividing by the total number of hours worked” is around $70-73?
1. The median first-year law grad salary?
70 * 50 * 5 * 8 = $140,000.
So anyone who makes more than that (with, of course, overtime considered separately).
So, comparing them to the most reviled profession in our society? You certainly made a good point with that one.
Why do you always ask so many questions and never answer any?
What do you think of people who stage anti-war protests at soldiers’ funerals? Or criticize cops when three SWAT members have just been murdered?
(More seriously) how does saying “‘workers’ (I use the term loosely)” help make whatever case this
assholecultural critic is trying to make?Obviously I will have to respond with another question: What about saying “the objective fact was… they sucked” would that make someone an asshole?
You make it seem as though the total compensation package for these workers is $70-73 per hour (in fact, if you are not suggesting that, I have no idea why the figure is pertinant to describing their affluence). It is not. That $70-73 figure is the the total amount paid out to all workers, active and retired, divided by the number of active workers.
To wit, the sentence directly following the one you quote:
So, to paraphrase andeux: Are you bring intellectually dishonest, are you merely extremely confused, or are you simply a poor writer?
The entire article I linked to explains exactly that, so if that’s what I was trying to make it seem, wouldn’t I have been better off quoting one of the numerous articles linked within that don’t explain what the $70-73 figure means?
One day those current workers will be retired and need to be supported, so through their hours of work they are also earning those later benefit, which as a dollar amount will probably be far higher than whatever the currently retired workers are getting.
I was trying to quote what MediaMatters called “perhaps the best job explaining the misinformation at play” but apparently I’m a poor writer (shouldn’t that be “quoter”?) for cutting off the quotation one sentence too early…
1. The $70 figure is disingenuous and stupid and has no bearing on reality.
2. Given #1, why would you us that figure if not to be disingenuous? (because you’re like a thousand miles from stupid)
3. Why did you link to the Media Matters piece? It seems quite at odds with your intention. You seem to have been trying to vividly illustrate just how lucrative being an auto worker can be, yet you linked to a piece which is at pains to debunk the figure you use. And now you’re saying “well of course I knew that figure was a canard! Why do you think I linked to that article?” So what conclusion should I draw? I settled on “is just firing off comments, and not trying very hard to be clear”, but hey, I could be wrong.
I’m using the MediaMatters piece because I’m accepting their analysis of what that $70-73 figure means… that’s why I QUOTED IT.
So your initial retort …
… translates roughly to “actually, auto workers are compensated rather well, and to illustrate that, here is a figure that is totally wrong, click the link to read more about how wrong it is”?
Right, that’s why I said “that’s their salary”…nowhere. Some people don’t get health and retirement benefits.
Also, if you keep pissing me off, I swear to God I am going to see this film and post a glowing review of it (packed with reverent waxing about how it “explored the contradictions inherent in contemporary quasi-adulthood, but in a funny way”) to the pages of Free Kraut.
Please show us all what a “good writer” you are… maybe some day you can win an A’s blog Pulitzer.
Would you marry a transvestite arthropod with a North Carolinian accent? If it’s so important, why doesn’t Pete Sampras have a mustache? Maybe you don’t realize industrial strength copper polish has a 99.8% customer satisfaction rating AND is a net positive for the environment? What’s the difference between drool and slobber? Do blisters itch? If cantaloupes were purple, would people still eat them?
(Obviously I know the About.com piece advocates lemon juice and vinegar as an alternative to store bought copper polish. That’s WHY I LINKED TO IT.)
Here is where I come out:
Drool = Slobber + Anticipation: True
From the Felix Salmon link:
It’s a silly calculation/number to use, but that paragraph itself illustrates why they have a huge problem (inefficiency) with labor costs.
Absolutely.
Specifically, because they chose to offer (unfunded) benefits rather than raises for so many years.
They, of course, being management and not workers.
I think it’s part of a more general problem with corporations which is that management at any given time has a huge incentive to increase short or medium term value of the company, but very little incentive to avoid back-breaking future obligations (like agreeing in the 1950s to let workers retire what we would now consider very early and collect pensions for 30-40 years) which will come back to haunt the company once the leadership personnel who made the decisions are retired and living on their own islands or dead.
Agreed, and not just corporations but also governments. The latter is getting a lot of play in the press now because of California’s perilous financial situation, but it’s been a growing problem for years already, and is nearly impossible to undo.
The #1 problem in California is direct democracy.
Well, prop 13 and term limits (but both are linked to direct democracy).
That was my point, and possibly even the point of the odious dude whose quote started all this.
I want to know why using that to suggest that US car companies are run inefficiently is disingenuous, and why it doesn’t mean anything.
To get “self-indulgent” here (it just seems appropriate for a blog read by approximately 20 people, which is probably 10x the audience of monkeyball’s other blog), at least this discussion of benefits (something I know almost nothing about) led me to google search my uncle* to find out what he did as head of India’s pension system:
That would appear to be something the Big Three – UAW also need to figure out.
*(Razr did you know about this?)
The reason it’s disingenuous is that a current UAW worker is not getting (and will never get) $70/hour. The extra cost is not that worker’s benefit cost (which, of course, does count in total compensation) but a number of other people’s.
Based on the numbers in MK’s post, it is in fact the compensation package of almost exactly 4 other people.
Here is where I come out:
“$70-$73 is an accurate calculation of pay + benefits: False”
What about pay + benefits to worker and worker’s family? The retired workers / surviving spouses now (how that number is calculated) are probably getting a lot less than those current workers + families will get in benefits, which probably makes up a good part of the difference in overall numbers. It’s not an “accurate” calculation because that’s not what it’s calculating, but it may still be closer to actual total “compensation” than “pay” is.
It’s just a stupid number to use though. There is no reason to divide retired people’s benefits by hours worked of current employees, no matter whether the resulting number is “close” to something else that we might want to measure. We might as well divide total labor costs by A’s plate appearances. Also, the present value for current workers of pension benefits would not be particularly high (who knows what it is?) and of course the company might default…
Okay well I can’t find the other number, but I bet my last sentence (closer) is correct.
Here’s the answer.
The cost to the company of the average GM, Ford and Chrysler worker is $55/hour.
I didn’t realize we were arguing about that dude. He is one of the most odious people on the planet.
I couldn’t find a relevant quote on Buchanan.org
The question is WHY are we “arguing about that dude”… The relevant point was “GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people” not whether some guy who wrote that is an odious asshole or not. Or, you know, why MSNBC continues to employ an anti-semitic holocaust denialist as one of its primary political commentators.
Let me conduct a little test that is appropriate for this thread:
< starts 50 comment discussion on Hitler >
If you know the identity of this American:
… then you know why Japanese cars are superior.
So, if I linked to a clip of, say, Joe Morgan saying “Name me a player who succeeds while striking out a lot,” you’d respond with a lengthy disquisition on David Ortiz (while ignoring Cust, Dunn, Howard, et al.)
You can say “name a successful company that does X” and whatever X is (assuming it’s relevant) there are probably plenty of companies one can name. Just like there have been plenty of sports teams that achieved success with a Morgan-like aversion to any and all stats.
But my point with GM was, isn’t that how we should define successful? Do you not agree with that?
“providing benefits for the largest number of people”? That’s not how I’d define success for a capitalist enterprise — more along the lines of delivering sustainable growth in shareholder value. If you want me, as a leftist, to take the bait and add in some societal externalities, I’d append “while fairly compensating all employees, obeying the law, and seeking to minimize negative ecological impact of firm activities.”
Isn’t providing health care and retirement benefits an essential part of fairly compensating all employees? Or should we just euthanize them once they are no longer productive members of society? Jesus, who’s the leftist around here…
Where did I say it wasn’t? I’d say that falls more under my “obeying the law” rubric (as in, contract law) than the fair-compensation one. (And, yes, before you get to it, they should honor any moronic back-scratching ludicrous executive-compensation packages under the same principle.)
It’s not as if every generation of GM execs has been unaware of those contractual payout obligations — they should have been figured into the business model, as well as a whole heck of a lot of other factors that don’t seem to have been.
Figured into the business model how?
Uh, as costs that they’d have to account and pay for, via revenue or untouchable funds? Like, uh, other businesses do?
What should they do if some Chinese company starts producing comparable cars for $10,000 less tomorrow?
Produce better cars than the Chinese company. Provide better service than the Chinese company.
If they can’t do that, then maybe they deserve to go out of business.
What any business should do — beg the government for money so they have to neither adjust their business model nor go out of business.
Before they’re euthanized, though, I’d smash their reading glasses and send them to reeducation camps.
I think the more important point here is that in order to be REALLY “fair and balanced” for every link to Andrew Sullivan, Talking Points Memo, etc. FK needs one link to a mainstream conservative holocaust-denying website like Stormfront.
So, you’re implying Sully is a leftist because he’s to the left of you?
No, I’m implying he’s on the left because he supported the more left of the two presidential candidate in at least the last two elections.
Sullivan aside (because who the hell knows how to label him):
There were a shitload of reasons for conservatives to vote against Bush and McCain that have nothing to do with being “left”.
I would also like to clarify that I have never stated that anyone is left or right based on their political positions relative to mine, and I’m not even sure Sullivan is to the left of me (unlike pretty much everyone else here, imo).
Also, I’m saying that he’s left-of-center now, but he was pro-Clinton administration until shortly after he actually got into office, then he flipped, as he did again in 2003 or so. We’ll see how he changes in the coming years, but it’s possible he just finds it easier to be anti-incumbent than to actually worry about the responsibilities and tough decisions that come with running the country, which makes it a bit difficult to take his strident commentary seriously.
QUALITY KRAUT QUADRUPLE-SINGLE
I misread that as “QUALITY KRAUT QUADRIPLEGIC,” and thought there’d been a Chavvy sighting.
Nope, I did see some A’s players though so it still works.
Gaah, the grating inanity of Glen
nKuiper. I would rather listen to the Hawk call an A’s dinger.Alright, everyone — enough with the histrionics.
I’m not saying the result wouldn’t be the same with the parties reversed, but I am saying that’s indicative of the tribalism problem we’ve discussed before.
That doesn’t really address the main issue, which is Are anti-racists anti-white?
Ten million years of primate laughter including audio of, amongst others, a chimpanzee.
Por Dotel, base VORP proves able to drop.
Ock’s gonna have to have his value calculated in Kelvins.
Can the bottom of the order really hit for the cycle here?
C’mon triple!
Can Casilla close this out?
Those 3 extra insurance runs are looking pretty sweet right now.
The fantasy league I play in gives the full SB penalty to pitchers. I owned Dotel for two or three games until I realized the problem. He has allowed 10 SBs this season.
The, um, confluence of the radishes, cabbage, and potatoes is … suggestive.
Grow victory cabbage, get plowed.
Yes! There will be growth in the spring!
I think I saw these ground-breaking police methods in a Jackie Chan buddy cop movie first
Along those lines, this is really kinda cool.
You forgot to put “police” in scare quotes.
No way, Chinese police officers don’t earn enough money.
Ah, but you’re disingenuously leaving out their pensions and healthcare. As well as the incalculable externality of the value of propping up the state.
Baby-jumping!
Via a really idiosyncratic chain of google searches in trying and failing to find an image to make a bad pun, I found … a human-hair-embroidery portrait of Bill Clinton.
Can the Giants bullpen blow Johnson’s 300th win? Medders, Affeldt & Wilson combine to load the bases in the bottom of the 8th …
… but Dunn K’s looking.
Son Volt refreshes their site, streams a (muddy, unremarkable midtempo) song from the the new album
Let the date not go unmentioned: it’s the 35th anniversary of the Ten Cent Beer Night
riot“worker” uprising.It is also mb jr’s 8-month birthday.
Nester Shylak had it coming.
This seems rather pointless, as it (a) disregards poor physical management of players that includes playing/not playing them while injured but notDL’ing them, and (b) should really look at something like projected WS/VORP/RC-days lost rather than simple unadjusted days.
(b) No it shouldn’t. To the extent that it reflects “organizational health management aptitude” there is no particular reason to distinguish good and bad players unless there is reason to think that teams can or do protect there good players to a different extent from their bad players or vice versa.
(a) I’m not convinced that this aspect, which you like to harp on, would change things much (or change the A’s place on the list; I’m not convinced the A’s handle that type of situation differently than most clubs.)
(c) Nevertheless, I would assume that the list is pretty useless as a reflection of “organizational health management aptitude.”
Color photos of Hitler (from Life, not Buchanan.org)
reztips, you ask? Turns out it involves an all-consuming zealous crusade to drive the always tiresome Berkeley Daily Planet out of business, as an (apparently) critical front in Israel-Palestine struggle.
For you old AN hands…familiar?
Jehovahhavohej, what an asshole.You mean after AN, we can go on to be famous?!
Now there’s the person Stormfront members should be sending their comments to, if she’s willing to publish anything…