The NFL playoff field is set 🍿 pic.twitter.com/qPpeYYkXOH

— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) December 30, 2019

The best, worst, ugliest, and most encouraging of 2019.

Here’s a thread on the differences between the populist left and socialist left. Off the top of my head, here’s a summary of each. The populist left opposes high concentrations of wealth, while the social populists want to create a utopian society where…I guess production of goods, services and wealth are shared by everyone. (Sorry if these are bad definitions.) How do you guys feel about these categories? Where do your politics line up, including if they fall outside of these two categories?

1. I’ll be spending a bit more time teasing out different strands of thought on the American left. There are two traditions. Left-populism, a pro-business tradition set against monopoly/finance. And socialism, an anti-business tradition setting workers against business/capital.

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) November 24, 2019

Thread to discuss the games.

thread

I’m really not that interested in talking about this again, but I read a passage (about an entirely different topic) that made me think about this. Here’s the passage:

You can flip a coin 100 times and have it come up tails 60 times. It’s an unlikely result, but it happens. About 3 percent of the time, you’ll get 60 or more tails.

You can flip it again the next day, and it can come up tails 60 times again. This is possible, and no doubt has been done before. (Again. Don’t do this. It is so boring! Read more football instead. That’s a good use of your limited time on our doomed planet.)

If you flip the coin 100 times for 100 days, though, you’re not going to keep getting tails 60 percent of the time. Regression, the most powerful arm of probability, will tug the percentage back toward 50 percent. It just will. It doesn’t have a choice, and neither does the coin.

I’ll go over what stands out in the comment below.

I hope to try to post some reviews soon.