Erik Loomis

Here's the second half of our NFL preseason podcast, focusing on the NFC. Should be fun tonight with the NFL starting!

As I've said many times, any capitalist who refuses to allow unions into their plants doesn't care about saving the planet. It's just more rapacious profit.

September 6, 1869, in labor history!

In 2006, a deadly fungus started killing bat colonies across the United States. Now, an environmental economist has linked their loss to the deaths of more than 1,300 children.

So I very much get why people in the political game professionally want to shoot themselves over how polls are seen, in the sense that for most people, the quality of a poll is entirely dependent upon their personal political preferences. This has nothing to do with the pretty broken state of polling, which I've written about from time to time, though taken as a big collective, they have some limited value. For example, there's no way to explain away the fact that Joe Biden was running 7-15 points behind every single swing state Senate Democrat. Polls are often wrong, but they aren't wrong in that way, despite the desperate attempt of Biden partisans in LGM comments to

This is the grave of Johnny Pacheco. Born in 1935 in Santiago, Dominican Republic, Pacheco grew up around music.

As Tallahassee renders its garments and gnashes their teeth, happening to only the single most loathsome fan base in the country, as anyone who has dealt with FSUTwitter can attest, there are games involving good teams this week. Here's the top 10, this time in order of time, which makes more sense than how I did it last week. Remember, I am using the Athletic ranking of teams from 1-134 to determine the best 10 games.

The historian Benjamin Fong has a good piece on the failures of unions to engage in successful large-unit organizing. Despite all the positive talk about unions these days, it hasn't really made much of a difference in terms of revitalizing the labor movement. One issue is that outside of higher ed and healthcare, unions are almost completely failed to figure out how to win large numbers of new members. Those are huge caveats though and we should be happy about it.

Former President Trump on Friday accepted the endorsement of the nation's largest police union and indicated he would pursue policies in a second term to bolster police immunity and encourage the use of controversial practices such as stop and frisk.

I don't get a whole lot of the very top students from high schools in my college classes because most of those kids are not going to mid-range public schools, even a small state flagship like mine. But you do need what the culture of high school does to kids, which is to create a ridiculous amount of stress over a decision that quite frankly DOES NOT MATTER. That decision of course is which excellent college you go to. They are all the same, unless your 18 year old has a very specific niche career desire. You want to go into marine issues, URI is a superb destination for your kid. You want to become a vet–go to Washington State. Most schools have a niche or two like this, but in the end, it barely matters for 90% of the kids. That's not to say that students shouldn't think it matters whether they go to Princeton or Western Oregon, yes, obviously there are differences. But especially at the elite level of education, or really at any level, schools clustered around the same quality are all exactly the same and it's total nonsense to push kids through this punishing high school scheudle to improve those college apps when any college graduate with even passable grades is going to do just fine in the world.