Author: Haven Pell
I recently gave you the rules of this game in a post called Schadenfreude as Tax Policy. The original trolls, who lived under bridges and looked nasty, were actually a good bit better than today’s trolls, who gallivant about on social media picking fights. Today’s trolls are kind of like boys who can’t get dates, […]
Many years ago, when my daughter was in middle school, the mother of one of her close friends gave her daughter a cell phone. As far as I know, she was the first of her group to have one. At the outset, this seemed like a splendid thing and it was, no doubt, the source […]
Conjure in your mind the image of a terrorist who is sometimes called a fighter. If the latter there is often a prefix like ISIS, for example. The image rarely varies from a young male whose face is hidden by a bandanna or a ski mask. Sometimes he has the semblance of a uniform but […]
The first most important thing about taxes is to have someone else pay them. Sadly, most everyone knows this, and the others are busily setting about making you pay theirs. Hence, you are most unlikely to win this battle. The fallback option is to remember that if you want more of something subsidize it, but […]
Who’s Morfy? I have a son in law of Scandinavian ancestry and, when grandchildren appeared, I decided to find out about grandfather name customs from his part of the world. Turns out, they are defined by the relationship of the grandparent to the grandchild. As the father of the mother I became Morfar, now shortened […]
Michael Lewis’s Moneyball changed baseball forever. He described the progress from seat-of-the-pants player selection to a metrics-driven approach. A thoughtful team owner would like to know how much it costs to win a game. More importantly, how much does it cost to win the number of games necessary to make the most amount of money. […]
Twitter has decided to ban political advertising. Facebook has not. Political advertising is a bigger source of revenue for Facebook than Twitter, so this is not surprising. The controversy is about censoring lies in political ads. Facebook does not want to do that, likely because it would have a tough time deciding what was actually […]
The other day I listened to the 538 podcast, a show that injects data and analytics into political coverage. The four participants war gamed different strategies that the Republicans might follow in dealing with the possible impeachment of President Trump. They tended to color inside the lines though they accused each other of not doing […]
The Washington Nationals lost 7 – 1 last night. They lost all three games at home after getting us all excited by winning the first two in Houston. Now they have to sweep the last two road games to win the World Series. Their hitting has been a major problem because there hasn’t been any, […]