The End of an Era, Local Edition
Last time out, I wrote about how things are changing at Liverpool as they say goodbye to four key players. At home, though, we are at the end of an era ourselves. Allison’s last day at Brea Vet was last Wednesday, Elizabeth’s promotion ceremony was Thursday (she won a few awards, so I got to do the proud parent thing), and then Friday was her last day in elementary school. This will also be her last year at her summer camp and somewhere in there, Sebastian moved up in karate from the Green Belt class to a Brown Belt. So it’s a time of change here, too. Mostly good change, but also very much in the “they grow up fast” way.
Pain at CNN
I know it’s at least in part who I read, but, man, does that Tim Alberta story on Chris Licht have some reach. Like Dan Drezner, I don’t think the people Licht describes going after are out there:
And here’s the problem for Licht and CNN: no one under the age of 75 will turn on CNN — or any cable news network for that mater — for fun. Younger generations will rely on social media to capture the lurid highlights of any cable news segment. Short of a real-time breaking news story, watching CNN is not on anyone’s to-do list. Licht’s ham-handed effort to cater to Fox News viewers has alienated the MSNBC demographic. And his attempt to woo those Fox watchers is bound to fail because those viewers do not want to watch the news, they want to hear reassuring conservative platitudes.
I also think he’s right about the moments in which CNN still seems to have reach:
That said, Licht is correct in noting that viewers will turn on CNN in times of crisis — at least, I think he’s right. This means that one should view CNN as like inventory — something that is absolutely necessary in case of emergencies but otherwise operates as a deadweight loss.2 Licht gets at this when he tells Alberta that it is fine if CNN is not profitable: “This is a reputational asset for the company. It is not a profit-growth driver,” Licht said. The trouble is that Licht can’t then define “reputational asset” to Alberta.
Also, his bit about Taleb is funny; go ready the whole thing.
For what it’s worth, it also sounds like chaos has ensued since the piece was published. And it’s not like Alberta, who comes via Politico, National Review, and National Journal is some liberal hitman. It’s a tough look for Licht.
The only real thing I have to add to the discussion is that I think the extent to which he seems not to have learned from media mistakes during the 2016 campaign shows up in the Trump town hall. I couldn’t manage to get through all of it—I can only allow so many brain cells to leak out of my head. But I was surprised to see Kaitlan Collins, not so long ago working for The Daily Caller, pushing back on Trump as much as she did. Then again, the Trump White House did ban her when she pushed him on Putin back in 2018, so maybe I hadn’t taken her full measure. In any event, literally everything else about the structure of the event seemed designed to bring heat rather than light. There might be money at the end of that road—I’m not sure—but there isn’t anything else of value there. At this point, I already don’t see a path to an ending that works for Licht, Zaslav, and the American people.
The LFC Section
Mark Ogden and Gab Marcotti weigh in on what to do with everyone in the Liverpool first team. No real qualms with any of it, but they do point out an interesting problem. Liverpool has a bunch of young guys in midfield who look like they might be able to play (Jones, Elliot, Bajcetic, Carvalho), along with some holdovers (Fabinho, Hendo, Thiago), and presumably at least two guys who are going to play major roles (Mac Allister sounds like he’s close already). Perhaps you can get away with Bajcetic hanging around on the periphery of the team for another season, but the other three guys pretty much have to play somewhere at this point. If you aren’t going to give them at least 900 minutes and preferably more, you either need to loan then out or try to engineer a transfer if the value is there. If you try to split minutes up too finely, you might end up in a position where none of them truly develop enough to contribute on an ongoing basis.
Also: I have not always felt well-served by VAR as a Liverpool fan, but I guess the “LiVARpool” thing is at least partially correct this season.
Rooting for Sarah
I feel like Sarah Langs has become a lot more famous over the last week.
I read a million baseball writers and fans and I think they all love her. I only know her as a reader/viewer, but she’s one of those people who is just so positive that the rest of us pull for her as much as we can manage: StarsForSarah.org and EndALS4Lou.
Not Rooting for John
It’s hard for me to look at the A’s-to-Vegas plan with anything but revulsion. It’s just BS all the way down. Yes, I have a sort of fondness for the mid-mod architecture that the Trop—the casino Trop—still features in some measure. I get that you want massive scale on the strip, and so the Tropicana would have to be redeveloped at some point, but I do think Vegas is losing something—not least of which is a big pile of cash—in Bally selling off the property.
Past that, though, is the stuff that really bothers me. The economics of all of this are abundantly clear at this point. Stadiums are not massive drivers of economic development; to the contrary, per dollar, they aren’t good investments at all. Virtually all the research that hasn’t been bought suggests that sports spending almost entirely displaces other kinds of personal consumption. Victor Matheson points out that, in the case of Vegas, it might be even worse than that from a net revenue perspective:
Though Matheson said that baseball can generate some additional tourism, even up to “a few hundred additional hotel room nights” in baseball cities such as Minneapolis and Cleveland because tickets are affordable, he said games could actually contribute to a loss in tax revenue because someone could spend $25 to see a baseball game versus “spending $200 going to Britney Spears or spending way more than $200 losing the money in the casino.”
The park being pitched is a stadium with a partially retractable roof. In Vegas, of course, this is a necessity. I’m not unusually parochial about this, but baseball is a sport often played outdoors with the height of the season coming in summer. Even if you never schedule a day game in Vegas, it doesn’t seem that the sport/seasonal alignment is perfect—that roof is going to be closed 80% of the time. Vegas is also a small market, he 29th largest MSA in the country, sandwiched between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. It has a bit of a growth trajectory, but that’s going to be constrained by the water crisis. Phoenix, which is much larger, has started restricting building for the first time unless new water sources can be identified.
If the pull side, then, is not what it appears, the push side is worse. The Athletics have a perfectly viable site now. They don’t have a contemporary-class stadium; I don’t think anyone would argue that. But the current site has both public transit and freeway access—even the airport is just a short shot up Hegenberger—and the city was amenable to working with the ownership group to help build up the Coliseum/Sports Arena complex. I’m not trying to be blind about it; the surrounding area is mostly either industrial or socioeconomically disadvantaged, although it it surrounded by properties which, in that Bay Area way, also tend to be million-dollar (or at least high-six-figure) properties. I’ve done the site a million times; it’s not any more unsafe than any other American stadium or arena. They also had an option they gave up on Howard Terminal; there were, to be fair, a bunch of lawsuits surrounding the site, but the challenges to the EIR had already been dismissed in court. The site isn’t as favorable from a transit perspective, but it is right there on Jack London Square, which would make it extraordinarily valuable property on which to build a stadium. The main problem for both of these sites is that they’re in a city in California, and our appetite for public financing of sports teams is lower than other places, as SoFi and Oracle attest to.
And, of course, the Athletics are now going the full “Major League” to force Oakland’s hand. To be as fair as I can be, there’s certainly a different version of events where at least some of the guys—Kaprelian, Laureano, Aledmys, Trevor May—could be significantly better than they have been this year. But this team has been absolutely stripped for parts without a good young core coming up behind them; there are guys all over the place who have no business being anywhere near a major league roster. They are on track to be easily the worst MLB team of my lifetime, though I have to think that will normalize at least a little. Their run differential is more than the three next worst teams on the list combined. They are $20 million behind the 29th lowest payroll in baseball, the Orioles, who just brought up an extraordinary class of young guys. That they are drawing about half what the Royals draw is only the logical response of a fan base denied anything vaguely resembling a major league product.
And, as Neil deMause notes, John Fisher, et.al., have already started shaking Vegas down:
So let’s unpack this: Jeremy Aguero, the A’s paid consultant, warned the Nevada legislature during his endless testimony last Monday that if it didn’t approve public money for an A’s stadium, Major League Baseball would require A’s owner John Fisher to pay a relocation fee, rumored at $300 million. But if Nevada sent Fisher $500 million in tax proceeds, MLB “could” tear up Fisher’s relocation bill, saving him even more money!
This is … not really how one does a threat? If you don’t send this unlikeable billionaire a whole of money, his billionaire pals won’t either! doesn’t exactly make a great magazine cover, and it’s honestly not clear what Aguero was thinking here. Though “not clear what they’re thinking here” has pretty much been the vibe for this entire Vegas move threat, so really it’s par for the course.
Baseball is my favorite sport, but it already has done enough in the last 15-20 years with its economics to annoy the hell out of me. This particularly egregious extortion of public funds to enrich a billionaire is unconscionable.
Sebastian Unboxing
Just some joy from (for?) a Rush fan. Sebastian Bach unboxing the 40th Anniversary “Signals” box:
Why, yes, I did in fact buy this for myself. I try to keep the indulgences to a minimum, especially ones that take up a bunch of space, but it’s still wonderful.
I just keep throwing the shade…
Joyce Vance: Can we call it fascism yet?
Noah Smith: In which David Sacks and Balaji raise a false alarm about the jobs numbers. The VC guys are just killing themselves these days, trying to demonstrate that they aren’t nearly as bright as they think they are. I don’t mean that they don’t get to weigh in—they have every bit the right that I do—but they just keep showing over and over again that, while they think they have this massive transdisciplinary intelligence, they in point of fact are allergic to doing the actual homework.
Sam Fischer/Axios: YouTube reverses misinformation policy to allow U.S. election denialism. I mean, clearly a bad call, at least in that “future of the Republic” sense.
Reuven Blau/The City: City Jails No Longer Announcing Deaths Behind Bars, Angering Watchdogs. As a rule of thumb, I am against decisions that work against transparency. I would think this plays a role in the decision.
Madison Hall/Business Insider: The spam and the scam: What's driving those incessant political fundraising email and text campaigns blowing up your inbox. I think at some point, there’s going to have to be some kind of legislation on this; too many people are getting too frustrated with the flood and we’re well past the point of diminishing returns, even for the people who are asking for the money. The quote they use off the top—“the spam equivalent of a high pressure sales pitch at a mattress or guitar store”—seems really weird to me. It’s been a while since I went to a music store, but I used to go often and I don’t ever remember getting the hard sell. I remember going to the now-lamentedly-gone Bass Center a million years ago and basically having them patiently bring me at least a dozen basses to play that would be at least $4000 in today’s dollars without any pressure at all. Then again, maybe that’s why they’re gone.
Short Cuts
Jane Manchun Wong has moved to San Francisco. There are lots of reasons why that might potentially make sense for her, of course. But, especially given current conditions, she may need to learn to drive.
Classical Studies Memes for Hellenistic Teens: The Decline and Fall of Latin in New Zealand. I continue to be amazed at the extent to which a classical education increasingly only belongs to the very-well-off.
Brad DeLong: Trying to Think Through Our Crisis of Liberal Democracy, Part I. The opposite of Balaji and Sacks in terms of doing the homework.
Micah Lee/The Intercept: Is Bluesky Billionaire-Proof? “Proof” probably overstates it, at least until it federates, but I am one of those naïve “protocols not platforms” guy, which is probably just “GNU’s Not Unix” for a new generation.
Melissa Giannini/Elle: Searching for Meg White. She really has just disappeared from public view, hasn’t she? I suspect for good reason.
Nate Silver: My 4-step plan for non-fiction book writing. Nothing I’m planning on putting to use, but I am always interested in how people do the work they do.
Today’s Theme, Musically
I posted this on Tumblr back in April. According to Last.FM, it’s the song I’ve listened to most this year, although not all of my listening gets scrobbled, so it might actually be the Karmakanic—or, for other reasons, any number of songs from “The Sound of Music.” But it’s a good song for a time of transition:
It is unique, to my way of thinking, as a Punk song that I think you can call “beautiful.” Not meaning “great”—though it’s that, too—but something that has a specific kind of melodic and chordal content that sits nicely. I’m trying to think of what else might be on that list: “When The Angels Sing” by Social D, “See How We Are” by X, “Adam’s Song” by blink-182. I guess “Good Riddance,” “Taillights Fade,” and “The Kids Aren’t Alright” would qualify if we are allowed to count them as Punk. Bad Religion has a few songs that are in that ballpark. But it’s to their credit that Bouncing Souls could write a short, noisy, earthy song that still takes you on a journey and feels a bit transcendent.
Feels like a good song for today.