This is hilarious. Anne Hathaway shows great comedic talent.

There are certain players you know you just can’t trust to stay healthy. Carl Pavano is their president, but last year was already the last straw, and the team was not counting on a single inning from him. But there are other players who deserve zero trust going forward as well. Jason Giambi is still a beast when healthy, but he’s basically lost two out of the past four seasons to injure or poor health. He just can’t be counted on to stay healthy. With injuries that have whipped out most of his past two seasons, Phil Hughes may qualify for this classification, but he still has some time to heal up and enjoy a long career.

Baseball Prospectus‘ injury guru Will Carroll has recently written about another type of player teams should be cautious with regarding their future health, the aging iron man. Think Hideki Matsui and Jorge Posada. These are players who were previously the epitome of health, but eventually the injury bug strikes. Because these players have so little experience with injuries and rehabilitation, they lack the “skill” to heal that a player who’s been injured a few times in the past have learned. They may also attempt to rush back from injury, further compounding the problem. And of course, Matsui and Posada are getting up there in years, injuries will now lag a little longer than they would on a twenty-seven year old.

Johnny Damon is a similar type player, but rather than suffering a single serious injury, he is slowly dying the death of a thousand small nicks and bumps. For the future the Yankees need to be cautious with Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and Mariano Rivera. All three of these players are used to playing full seasons, or in Rivera’s case being amongst the league leaders in relief innings, all three are on the wrong side of 40 and all three will more than likely attempt to rush back prematurely because the team depends on them.

And lastly there are the freak injuries. There is a reason the American League doesn’t require pitchers to run the bases and Chien-Ming Wang discovered why. Joba Chamberlain as a younger pitcher was more susceptible to injury than most, but the Yankees have taken proper caution with his development and use, and yet sometimes injuries just happen.

Going forward Brian Cashman needs to take health into account when building the 2009 Yankees. $200 million can buy a good team only if that team actually takes the field. He needs to let go of aging players with injury flags like Jason Giambi and Bobby Abreu. Both have been healthy this year, but that is no guarantee they will be healthy next. Likewise, Johnny Damon and Hideki Matsui should be let go for 2010. Mike Mussina should be thanked for this season and sent on his way as well. Maybe he can pull a Jamie Moyer and throw over 200 innings for the next five seasons, but the odds are against it. It’s worth the risk to offer Andy Pettitte a one year contract, plus he’s a True Yankee®.

Thinking free agents, the Yankees need to target healthy players in their twenties. Luckily, some of the biggest stars in the market, CC Sabathia and Mark Teixeira, fit that bill exactly. Despite his health this season, Ben Sheets is not a good consolation prize to Sabathia, nor is Oliver Perez. If Adam Dunn doesn’t resign with Arizona, he could be an interesting alternative to Teixeira as a potential convert to first base, but a position change is also a health risk. Dunn will be only 29 next year, and he’s played at least 150 games the past five years. Theoretically Pat Burrell could be signed and transitioned to first as well, but with three years on Dunn that’s probably not the best idea. Besides, Burrell just seems like a player who’s ready to miss half the season with a knee injury. Needless to say, Milton Bradley and Rocco Baldelli should be avoided like the plague.

If Brian Cashman returns as general manager, he needs to evaluate players with the understanding that health is just as important a skill to the Yankees as contact, defense or throwing power, if not more so.

I have to assume that real economists have better statistics, but either through ignorance or bias the media keeps shoving the same old misleading statistics down our throat.

I feel that the net size of an economy tells us very little about that economy, other than it is large. It is common to note, often in fear, how fast the Chinese economy is growing, and that one day it may overtake the American Economy. Really? America is a nation of around 300 million people, China can cover that 300 million and add a billion more. It’s not a problem that China’s economy overtakes ours, instead it’s a problem that China with four times our population, can’t even come close to matching our own.

Gross numbers are fun to play with, but if we want an accurate picture of how the common person is living, it is far more useful to look at the average figures. GDP per capita is a start, but a straight mean average can be distorted by large amounts of wealth accrued at the top, and distort the conditions of the common man. Median income figures would give a more accurate assessment.

I feel that even median income gives us only a partial picture, because as we all know, we aren’t allowed to keep all of the income we earn, a good portion is taken away in the form of taxes. Thus I favor after-tax income figures, to pre-tax. The median after-tax income (normalized for inflation, when comparing between years) seems like a pretty good number to describe the economic condition of the common man. For more fun, use quartiles to get a picture of class economics.

Another pet peeve of mine is throwing around the GDP without taking into account the government debt of that year. If the GDP grew by $300 billion, but the government took on $500 billion of debt, did the GDP really grow?

Speaking of debt, too many people freak out over our national debt looking at only the raw numbers, but taking them entirely out of context. Yes, a national debt of over $9 trillion looks bad, but when you compare the ratio of debt to GDP and then compare that to other industrialized nations like France, Germany, the UK or Japan, our debt is nothing special. Now this shouldn’t be an excuse for unrestrained spending or taking on further debt, while it’s ok to be in the middle of the pack, it’s even better to lead.

So this is probably all information that economists have long figured out, and more than likely bettered, I still find the general economic information to be sorely lacking.

Each year over $150 billion is spent on advertising in the United States alone. I can only assume that businesses expect to at least match that investment with increased revenue. Thus advertising is related to some increase in economic activity.

However, during the WGA strike of 2007 and 2008, networks were forced to air reruns in place of fresh scripted shows. Those reruns led to lower ratings, fewer people watching television, fewer people watching television commercials, fewer people buying products and services as a result of watching commercials. Thus some depression of economic activity was a result of the WGA strike. I guess the harder question is just how much the strike affected the economy, and was that effect statistically significant or relatively trivial?

Wow, just wow. From the television show Ghostwriter.

Hat tip, xkcd