Jack

Biography here

[Jack @jack_condren]

@1960Root @RBPundit Yeah, a local guy here made molds for pumpkins. Our ancestors had a greater tolerance for the freaking horrifying.

[Jack @jack_condren]

@BulwarkOnline

[Jack @jack_condren]

If this keeps more kids from feeling a slight breeze and then flopping around like an epileptic at a strobe convention, I'm for the clubs bilking the loons out of their $15K. Metric Kickball is an assault on basic decency.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

In Germany, a talented 14-year-old earns his club money. In America, his parents pay the club $15,000 a year.

That single inversion explains why "we will not" is the most accurate line ever written about US soccer.

FIFA built a global system for this. Training compensation and solidarity payments send a cut of every transfer fee back to the clubs that developed the player, from age 12 onward. Develop one future pro and your academy gets paid for a decade. Barcelona's La Masia, Ajax, every Bundesliga academy runs on this logic. The kid is the asset.

US Soccer refuses to enforce those rules. When Seattle's Crossfire Premier claimed its $60,000 share of DeAndre Yedlin's transfer to Tottenham, it got nothing. Claims on the Dempsey and Bradley transfers died partly because the federation couldn't even produce the youth training records.

So American clubs earn zero dollars when a kid turns pro. They earn when a kid enrolls. Which makes the parent the customer, and the product is whatever keeps the parent writing checks: travel tournaments, hotel weekends, $500 showcase events, private training at $100 an hour. Elite pathways run $8,000 to $20,000 a year. A comparable academy spot in Italy costs about 120 euros.

Follow the incentive one level deeper and it gets darker. A club dependent on fees can't cut its weakest paying players, so rosters optimize for retention over development. The scouting pool shrinks to families who can afford the cliff, which appears around age 11, exactly when development matters most. The country runs a talent filter sorted by household income instead of ability.

Every four years someone proposes fixing this. The proposal always requires the people profiting from the $15,000 model to vote themselves out of business.

They will not.

[Jack @jack_condren]

@adrianmckinty I swear a week doesn’t go by where I don’t quote something from Politics and the English Language.

[Jack @jack_condren]

@VixenRogue As always, Dave explains it well.

[Jack @jack_condren]

@EsotericCD I've never been able to get past the feeling that Pavement is just a twee Pere Ubu.

[Jack @jack_condren]

@JeffMightBWrong This is a "McDonalds is the best food, look at the sales!" sort of argument. Also, this picture.

[Jack @jack_condren]

@janecoaston @wil_da_beast630 Having to check "Caucasian" on every government form does have consequences, as stupid as they may be.

[Jack @jack_condren]

@SonnyBunch Yay. I can't wait for the Starship Trooper-ization of another of my favorite novels growing up.

[Jack @jack_condren]

@ClevelandFanLOL @jarvis_best That said, the greater positive impact would be just not subsidizing professional sport. That ship has sailed, however.

[Jack @jack_condren]

@asymmetricinfo And it only took huge increases in federal law enforcement decades to break the mobs that they ran. I'd call it a success! (All Irish ancestry here and... somewhat joking. Somewhat.)

[Jack @jack_condren]

@brodigan @GmorganJr Honestly, I am surprised there are so many people there jumping. I would think they would all denounce such movements as "ableist". And let's not even get into the aggressive yelling and clapping. To the DSA camps with them all!

[Jack @jack_condren]

@jimgeraghty To be fair, if you take money from advertising markets that allow porn adverts, you take money from porn companies.

[Jarvis @jarvis_best]

People are dunking on her, but under the old patronage system, Republicans would hire Republican civil servants and Democrats would hire Democrats, but we wisely got rid of that system so that no matter who was elected President, the federal workforce would always be Democrats.

[Jack @jack_condren]

@Pithy_Galore @CLEdwardsID @shannonrwatts "...a wonderful component of our family who, nevertheless, should have been killed."

[Jack @jack_condren]

@MorlockP @pegobry_en See also: haka.

[Jack @jack_condren]

@karol This reads like a lyrical hook for a post-punk song whose demographic skews older. Look, what I'm saying is get Robert Smith on the phone.

[Jack @jack_condren]

@Super70sSports Guys, I'm not joking when I say that the monkey bars were in the middle of the asphalt parking lot behind our elementary school. They let us play with hammers and nails in a place out of sight of the rest of the KINDERGARTEN classroom.

America was always great.

[Jack @jack_condren]

Replace the dog with a baby and use the tagline from the new campaign: “Having a dumb boyfriend is a universal experience, having one as the father of your children doesn’t need to be.”

[New York Post @nypost]

Chet Hanks to mock himself in morning-after pill campaign https://t.co/J7P1zk3Tqe