Slate Money - The "Smoking Up Behind the Bleachers" Edition
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 8 November 2014
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This year’s midterm elections produced big gains for Republicans – and pot smokers. On this week’s episode of Slate Money, host Felix Salmon of Fusion, Slate's Jordan Weissmann, and Cathy O'Neil of Mathbabe.org discuss the rise of legal weed, private funding for public schools, and Taylor Swift's breakup with Spotify. Here are some of the links and references mentioned during this week's show:Felix’s article on Taylor Swift yanking her entire catalog from SpotifyMore Slate takes: Chris Molanphy on “Why Taylor Swift Is the Super Bowl of Pop” and the Culture Gabfesters split bitterly Tay-tayCathy pointed out the crowdsourcing project Price of Weed: A Global Price Index for MarijuanaFederal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen on education and inequalityUSC’s Lawrence O. Picus’ New York Times op-ed, “School Fundraising Is Unfair But Unavoidable.”Felix mentioned the addictive site Import IO: Instantly Turn Web Pages Into DataCathy’s number for this week was inspired by this study, which was the subject of an Economist article.Slate Money will appear every Saturday in the Slate Daily Podcast and its own feed.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Smoking Up Behind the Bleaches edition of Sleep Money, your guide to the Business and Finance News of the Week. |
| 0:15.3 | I'm Felix Salmon of Fusion here in our New York studio, and on today's show, the midterm elections, I know, they're |
| 0:23.7 | boring. We're not going to talk about Democrats and Republicans. We are, however, going to talk |
| 0:28.2 | about pot smokers who managed to pass marijuana referendums in Alaska, Oregon, Washington, D.C., |
| 0:36.4 | and Guam. We'll look at the rise of legal weed. |
| 0:41.1 | What does it mean for the price of marijuana, for the future of the smoking business? |
| 0:48.4 | And private funding for public schools, when you write some checks for your kids' school, are you really just |
| 0:56.7 | entrenching the advantage that rich kids have over poor kids? And of course, because this is |
| 1:02.8 | slate, we can't possibly go an entire podcast without talking about Taylor Swift. We are going to |
| 1:08.7 | talk about her fight with Spotify. What does this mean for the |
| 1:13.6 | rise of streaming music? And of course, the numbers round. But first, let me introduce my regular |
| 1:22.0 | guests. We have Kathy O'Neill, the data scientist and blogger at mathbabe.org. |
| 1:28.2 | Hi, Felix. |
| 1:29.1 | And Slate's own moneybox columnist, Jordan Weissman. |
| 1:33.1 | Felix, I just want to ask why we would want to go an episode without talking about Taylor Swift. |
| 1:38.0 | I feel like that would be a bad episode. |
| 1:41.2 | It's. |
| 1:41.5 | Well, I mean, it would be okay if you talked about Katie Perry, but we will come on to that in about, oh, 15 minutes or so, because first of all, you, Jordan, are going to talk to us about marijuana. |
| 1:56.6 | Yeah, so, again, midterms happened. |
| 2:00.0 | Kathy and I couldn't bear to talk about the main results. |
| 2:02.6 | I don't think we would be able to keep ourselves from crying by the end of the episode. |
| 2:06.0 | However, good news. |
... |
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