Stefan Szymanski

Since our org chart is going public, let me come clean as well: I am Antifa’s pastry chef.

Does he know IKEA is not in charge of the Nobel prize?

Been a while …Wonderful to be back at Detroit city fc with the ever fabulous Northern Guard

Just deleted the app formerly known as Twitter- feels like a liberation

Something for @sszy.bsky.social, if you are still interested in the origins of "soccer" as a word!

The Oxford Review has been digitized by the BNA. It covered the last university news during term time. This is the first mention of "Soccer" on the 7 March 1888.

That’s so cool- I was teaching this in class today - will share with my students- thank you!

New working paper with @sszy.bsky.social. If you are looking for a break from Commanders shenanigans, I can offer Chargers shenanigans. In the mid 1990s, San Diego offered to buy unsold Chargers tickets with no price cap. How much do you think ticket prices increased? papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Dismal ticket sales, grumblings from fans and clubs – is FIFA’s latest attempt to establish a global club game doomed before it starts? Soccer’s global governing body has long sought – and failed – to wrestle club competition dominance away from Europe.

Who's going to be watching the FIFA Club World Cup? theconversation.com/dismal-ticke...

economists for years have written papers purporting to show that players "shirk" or otherwise undersupply effort. This is bad science that does nobody any good

Just say no

The University of Severance We already passed an “Institutional Neutrality” bylaw to prevent anybody who wields institutional power here on campus to take a public stance “on political or social issues and events not directly re...

A letter from No Balls U
www.michigandaily.com/opinion/op-e...

Opinion | Anatomy of a Witch Hunt U. Michigan’s regents are guilty of a reckless power grab. Rachel Dawson is the victim.

I wrote about the firing of Rachel Dawson for the Chronicle. www.chronicle.com/article/anat...

Inside FIFA The official site of the international governing body of football with news, national associations, competitions, results, fixtures, development, organisation, world rankings, statistics, the Internat...

According to FIFA, clubs shelled out $2.3 billion in the January transfer window inside.fifa.com/transfer-sys... despite the fact that following the ECJ's Diarra judgment, there is no requirement to pay a fee if a player has already indicated they are willing to leave. This economist is puzzled.

Ate at Crevette last night - Ed Szymanski and Patricia Howard's new restaurant in NYC - fabulous food - highly recommended :-)

record.umich.edu/articles/it-.... What went wrong?

A modest proposal - let's make generative AI the referee - no human interference - and then fans can be happy raging against the machine

Taking a sabbatical in Philadelphia looking like a good decision right now

It’s wonderful, and yes, it happens more and more 😊

This is also high level trolling. Sulla was the first Roman to march on Rome and seize power, in 88 BCE. On leaving Rome, Cinna was elected consul and prosecuted Sulla for his crimes, supported by Marius. There were executions but not proscriptions akin to those when Sulla regained power in 82 BCE.

No- the phrase is not attributed to Sulla.

Musk is knowingly quoting Sulla, a Roman dictator who murdered his opponents en masse, rewrote the constitution unilaterally, and established a model of political action that brought a final end to the republic. Musk no doubt thinks Sulla got some or all of this stuff right.

How much musk knows about all this is not clear, but his repeated references suggest a level of trolling which no doubt he thinks is sophisticated. But the simple lesson is this - if someone quoted hitler’s speeches approvingly, you would conclude he felt hitler got some stuff right.

Within 50 years Julius Caesar made himself dictator and in less than 100 his nephew Octavian declared himself Augustus and established an autocracy that lasted in much of Europe for another thousand years.

But did he do this out of a desire to save the republic which was dominated by Roman elites, or was he a populist seeking to overturn the elites? Oddly, the prevalent view has been the former. Whatever it was, he was the beginning of the end of the republic. No one did as much to destroy its norms.

The property of the dead was sold off, and Sulla took much of the proceeds. Sulla then rewrote the constitution and retired- he died peacefully at home. Ever since, historians have argued about his legacy. Everyone agrees that the proscriptions were barbaric and condemn him for them.

It happened again. He marched on Rome, and then had himself appointed dictator- absolute power. He then issued the proscriptions- proclamations listing citizens who could be executed at will. Bringing the head of the victim could earn you a bounty. In this way half of the Senate was executed.

Sulla was a successful Roman playboy who had success as politician and general. When the senate withdrew his appointment he became enraged and marched his army on Rome- he was the first Roman to take control of the Republic by force. After his first assault things returned to normal. But then…

Musk just tweeted ‘ “Nemo me impune lacessit” – Sulla’ it is not the first time he has quoted the 1st century BCE Roman dictator. Most people don’t know who he was. My son William just completed his PhD at oxford about him, and in this way I’ve learned a lot. Here are some key facts:

This is cute. Annual production of Ford and Tesla over their first 21 years. The numbers for the latest year are almost identical. But get this: Ford did not beat its 1923 number until 1965, more than 40 years later...

...oh, and 1920 was when Henry Ford started publishing anti-semitic shit...

Yes, both are design issues (aren’t all sports issues? :-)). But look at the language - the Olympic story is one of outrage, the titans one of victory “Titans clinch…” - no one is accusing them even of breaching the spirit of the rules.