EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

In 2021, I wrote this piece about how Ron DeSantis was trying to crack down on speech and about how the people who signed the Harper's Letter wouldn't care. And YOU were the example I used. That's how predictable and hypocritical the letter people were. https://t.co/UZX3l5FLxS

— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) February 9, 2023

In the last three days, Peter Coy, Matt Yglesias, and Jason Furman have all argued against Biden's push to make things in the U.S. It's fascinating reaction to the new industrial policy. pic.twitter.com/A3zauP1G9N

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) February 13, 2023

That’s extreme beltway brain right there

That Furman one is especially baby-brained because it's the end-run of economists thinking the ultimate good is optimizing the supply chain, globally, at all costs

Maybe it makes sense to have a materials/labor supply chain locally to support critical infrastructure, especially when we've had obvious international trade issues in recent years? It's not 10 bridges or 20 bridges, it's thousands and while a bunch are currently in need of replacement, things have a lifespan and there will be a rolling need for bridge maintenance as long as there are bridges. So you fund a labor force that's paid as if they work on critical infrastructure and keep them around to do the jobs we know need done

I mean, you could argue that they'll run out of work and there's the possibility of make-work like we've seen elsewhere where development overruns demand, but that's a separate issue entirely. idk if they run out of bridges make them work on high speed rail or something

According to the ASCE in 2021:

One particular concern is the condition of the nation's bridges. According to the Infrastructure Report Card, 42% of the 617,000 bridges in the U.S. are more than 50 years old, and more than 46,000 of them are rated as structurally deficient. That doesn't mean that they're in danger of collapsing but indicates that they are in poor condition. The number of bridges that slipped from good condition to fair over the last four years increased as well.

https://www.npr.org/2021/03/03/973054080/potholes-grid-failures-aging-tunnels-and-bridges-nations-infrastructure-gets-a-c

I'm not sure I even understand this as an economic issue, but as a public safety one it seems pretty dire

It’s absolute mind-boggling to me. My city’s been replacing the bridges over the river downtown at a rate of about one per year, and the one’s that still there is eroding rapidly. And these are relatively short bridges in both length and height. I still remember the Minneapolis bridge collapse in 2007 and worrying about several people I knew who lived in the area.

fwiw the commenters saying that maybe we don’t need as many bridges are being just as purposefully ignorant — a number of bridges in rural areas have been retired and/or deconstructed based on usage, some resulting in much longer routes for people in rural areas

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FuZW-doWAAEHSR_?format=jpg&name=medium

^hasn't aged well

did it seem more accurate 361 days ago?

No

The headline implies this, yes, but the article still reads pretty true

lol no it doesnt

Musk tweets as if he had been raised by the blue bird and the fail whale. ...
That’s a man who understands what Twitter truly is.

ha max wrong too

Musk’s stated agenda for Twitter is confusing mostly for its modesty. He’s proposed an edit button, an open-source algorithm, cracking down on bots and doing … something … to secure free speech. I tend to agree with the technology writer Max Read, who predicts that Musk “will strive to keep Twitter the same level of bad, and in the same kinds of ways, as it always has been, because, to Musk, Twitter is not actually bad at all.”

tbf i didnt think musk would change much either, but i also didnt think he was mr twitter the guy who gets it lol just a ridiculous thought, tho ezra prob didnt believe it either i mean what is belief to a hack

The CHUDs' attitude toward "blue check elites" is so baffling to people who aren't brain damaged that it was hard to predict just how much of a culture war issue they'd turn Twitter Blue into.

the whole situation is an alltimer, wild stuff lol

Goes both ways a bit tbf, the blue check removal saga is a delightful farce but too many of the people on the other side of the culture war have to pretend it's a tragedy.

Not gonna go back and read that Klein thing but I also thought at the time that Musk wouldn't change Twitter much and in retrospect still think he hasn't changed it much. In fact, I even agree with Klein that as of April 2022 Musk was good at Twitter, and one of the only things that's really changed -- though this is not a very big change if like me you don't live in the part of Twitter where you see his stuff a lot -- is that he's now quite bad at Twitter.

the only change in twitter post-musk that has affected my ux is the following/for you tab. imo it’s a good improvement over the previous status quo where you had to click a star/plus sign symbol to turn algorithmic feed off, and it was always ambiguous which one you were on since it would switch back randomly

all the other changes (10k character limit, blue check, bookmark and views counters) haven’t affected me personally and/or i haven’t noticed. maybe the farcically bad business moves they’re constantly making mostly affect power users, celebs, orgs etc

flopson must not read the comments (replies) and I respect that

I even agree with Klein that as of April 2022 Musk was good at Twitter

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Sunday, April 23, 2023 5:36 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

you loike meme mate

this is primo stuff

pic.twitter.com/Vn0Rv0yQ5q

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 15, 2020

he got engagement of sorts but I don’t think engagement alone is being good at twitter. he’s like the guy who introduces the most popular minions memes on a local grandparents facebook group by copying them from the regional one

Pronouns suck

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2020

Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 19, 2020

pretty funny to think if he wasnt a billionaire with a pr team thats spent a decade plus boosting his brand hed just be some 47 follower reply guy instead of tanking $50b and his reputation buying twitter

as for whether hes changed twitter a lot im going to vote a definitive yes, for one hes instigated a year long mod war its become the talk about elon site, tons of good posters have left because of it, he made dril break character lol, this whole blue check situation which as mh mentioned has really gummed up the replies, various reliability issues, but id say most of all hes sent twitter into a death spiral, its over folks, and theres no change bigger than death

dril breaking character is actually weirdly super upsetting, it feels like a watershed

the jig is up

Whenever any lefty asks me why society ought to have billionaires, I say "Because otherwise they'd be warlords", and if recent events don't make this point abundantly clear I don't know what to tell you

— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) April 23, 2023

As bad as Ezra and Matty are, it gets worse.

lol its true you go far enough down the centrist pundit hole and matty and ezra seem totally normal in comparison

i mean tbf ezra is normal mattys a freak tho

this whole blue check situation which as mh mentioned has really gummed up the replies, various reliability issues, but id say most of all hes sent twitter into a death spiral, its over folks, and theres no change bigger than death

So otm. Aside from all the Twitterati who have already jumped ship, why would any new (and sane) celebrity/influencer join Twitter when the main feedback they will actually see is blue check birdbrains harassing them for not coughing up $8/month and otherwise generally just being as toxic as possible?

I mean Twitter reply threads always sucked as a nobody, that’s the one massive advantage Reddit had (before it was captured by the alt right concern trolls).

With all this talk about cloning Twitter circa 2019, what about combining the best of Twitter and Reddit? Personality-based but with actual intelligent sorting of replies so that it can function as an advanced discussion forum as well.

Posting is over

ILX WILL NEVAH DIE

Nothing based on a less-than-24 hour life cycle like Reddit or Twitter can be useful for discussion. Niche forums just need to make a comeback (but you’ll never go viral on 2023 Something Awful and get $20 to advertise something your follow up posts).

Reddit used to have some pretty good discussions in the more heavily moderated subreddits. I agree it’s very difficult to scale though, I’m probably thinking of the time when the total activity there was at most 10% of what it is now.

no offense to any itt but reddit is the absolute pits the whole voting sorting format is just the deepest nerd hell

also not everything has to be a deep discussion twitter was never really about that it was about other things

most of all hes sent twitter into a death spiral, its over folks, and theres no change bigger than death

See, I guess this is where I disagree -- my expectation is that a year from now, two years from now, I'll still be using twitter about the same amount and with about the same experience as I do now, which is about the same as it was pre-Musk.

i suspect youre wrong but also a single user doesnt really tell the whole story

The biggest reason why eephus is unlikely to be using Twitter in exactly the same way two years from now isn't necessarily that the buggy software issues and chaotic new policies will impinge heavily on eephus's user-experience, but rather that the continuing exodus of advertisers who bankroll the system will lead to the complete failure to cover the interest payments on the multi-billion dollar loans used to take Twitter into private ownership.

theres that and also once an exodus of users starts its hard to stop

Well, we're still here?

I do hope Musk manages to kill Twitter because (a) it would be the funniest outcome and (b) I spend way too much time there.

no offense to any itt but reddit is the absolute pits the whole voting sorting format is just the deepest nerd hell

Lmao I don’t identify with Reddit in the slightest, no offense taken. Just idle speculation from a ‘reply guy’ about how text-based social media can survive in the era of TikTok. It’s true that downvotes are just horrible.

also not everything has to be a deep discussion twitter was never really about that it was about other things

It doesn’t have to be a deep discussion to be better than Twitter ffs. The benefit of Reddit is that you actually see replies to replies, so there’s some actual exchange of ideas.

(Not to harp on Reddit but it’s also much worse since they totally revamped the site maybe ~7 years ago. It made it more like Twitter/FB to zero actual benefit for the user.)

Exchange of ideas sucks ass

I prefer hoarding ideas