gehringer_2

LOL - I suppose, but don't forget there are a couple of schools adopted by Tech Bros to broaden the field. 🙄 I seem to be done with college sports anyway. I'm not finding the rent-a-teams interesting at all. We have a group of close close friends, we're all UM alums, and they are all excited about the Tourney now - it just leaves me cold, and that's never been true before.

I've been assuming for some time now that Sweeney is out of any immediate plans for the 25 but particularly if McGonigle comes north, they'll want another SS at Toledo anyway.

ST is still a small and questionable sample to look at, I'd rather we had seen what he did in 300 AB at AAA, but BB/K and OBP sure seem to be holding up so far, and where ever his D settles out, he has shown that his arm is fine and the glove is reasonable. Fitting him in is going to be tricky. It would certainly easier to send him to Toledo and bring him up when someone is inevitably hurt so that it wouldn't be so much of a line-up juggle, but that's what they pay Hinch the big bucks for.

IDK about 'dead', but for sure there is going to be some buyer's remorse over setting up conferences with a lot of 4+ hr by jet trips.

Would you rather that US justice be moving toward or away from being like Iran? And if you are sitting on death row in Arkansas or Tx you might might be forgiven for not being aware of the difference.

He was tried and convicted of murder. Was it trumped up? Probably. But we have a Supreme Court here in the US that says you can't reconsider our cases of capital punishment even given evidence of innocence because outcomes 'must have finality'. It's fine to call out Iran's practices of state murder as barbarous, but consistency would at least require we do the same for ourselves.

If he's speaking in English you can pretty much ignore what he's saying, much like the same is true when Arab leaders speak in English. What they say in English is what they want us to hear, what they say to the listeners at home in Hebrew or Arabic is what they mean.

Things have climbed down a little this afternoon. The Admin put it out that the Israeli strike on Pars was against US wishes. That's proabably 100% backfill fabrication but at any rate prices are back down to Brent at $101 and WTI at $93.

You can't make this up: Bissent says they are considering lifting sanctions on *IRANIAN* oil already at sea.

couldn’t have happened. Didn’t TH tell us Iran’s fighting capacity has been destroyed?

65,000 registered voters in Dist 98. Americans don't deserve Democracy.

Should improve the Dems general election prospects. AIPAC took a beating in the Dem Senate primary as well.

The harvesting of Cocoa in Ivory Coast has been unsustainable and heading for disaster for a couple of decades at least. Deforestation, child labor and slavery, climate change, soil exhaustion from over production, all the things you can imagine can be wrong in a desperately poor place doing extractive export agriculture. Production is falling, prices are rising.

They think they have Iran down to a level where they can't retaliate effectively. We'll see.

Wholesale prices up between 5% and 8% per annum depending on which basket, Brent near almost $110 as I type. The fed has more leeway than just fiscal spending to work with, not that that isn't plenty. They can buy or sell other securities, such as mortgage bonds, which gives them plenty of additional space to manipulate things. And monetization isn't their only tool. Control of short term rates drives interbank lending volume which also drives the number of dollars available in the system.

I think with Trump there is also the basic sales shtick idea run amok. I've known guys in sales orgs that learn the art of making up anything and everything they can throw at a customer to close a deal. There are two problems when Trump runs this a President. The 1st is that he *is* too dumb to know or remember to make mostly unverifiable or difficult to verify or ambiguous claims, which a good salesman will keep himself to. The second is that unlike a guy making one sale who is going leave that possibly dissatisfied customer to his customer service org and go on to his next deal, as Pres you don't get to walk away Tuesday from the countries, voters, legislatures you tried to snow on Monday.

The apartment tower overbuild is a good example of people not being willing to tell the truth in a command system.

and now that they want it to go away, it won’t. They suffer all the ills command regimes will always suffer, but they still have much better vision than the Sovs ever did. Unfortunately that is probably because after Mao they developed a reasonable method of succession that kept them out of another cult of personality dictatorship. There was Deng in the background for a long time but Deng was a one of. But now Xi has thrown a Monkeywrench into that process big time.And thus they are regressing. OTOH, on one score, I think predictors of demographic disaster as countries come to stable population numbers just need to look at Japan to see their arguments are overdrawn. I think it has a lot to with a simple misreading of economic data. If your population is growing at 3%/yr like people became habituated to, and your GDP goes flat, you’ve got a situation that’s going to cause deep social stress. If your GDP goes flat when your population has decreased by 1%, per capitas are still rising and the countryside stays happy as a clam. The only people it’s gloom & doom for are the local imperialists and pols paranoid their nation might “fall behind” some other nation in economic rank (we certainly get that one here) but populations don’t really care about that unless the demagogues work at it, the only economics people really care about are their own and maybe their neighbors’.

China is a weird place to us. They are dictatorial, repressive, tyrannical in lots of ways, and Xi has become a cultist. But we mistake them if we think they aren't also trying to build themselves a better country. In that regard they may have a better government than the 'people, earth and future be damned full speed ahead for quarterly profits" corporate serving government we have here today. They have massive coastal populations to protect and have no anti-science bias driving their policies and thus do not live in any political fantasy world about the risks of climate change. Even in the Pandemic, we criticized China for the level of repression, but that repression was because Xi thought he could prove to the world that China could save more of its people by the discipline available in China's society than the west could in their systems. He ended up having to back track, but it's worthwhile to remember that his objective was saving his people when you think about how China works. Xi was a student of the Soviets and is a dedicated Marxist, but the system in China is more Confucian, paternalistic than it ever was in the USSR.

Fed meets tomorrow. So I basically go with the monetarists - if the Fed causes an increase in the supply of money in excess of the rate of purchasing in the economy, all things being equal, the value of money relative to goods falls - you have inflation. If they squeeze the money supply too hard, you would get the opposite (if that ever happened). So along comes a blockade of oil supplies. Everyone says the fed may be faced with tightening because the increased price of oil will cause prices to rise and they must fight inflation. But from the standpoint of monetary policy, shouldn't there be a difference between an increase in prices when intrinsic product values are constant, vs an increase in prices because it actually has become more expensive in real terms to produce them? It seem like if the Fed becomes restrictive in the face of oil driven price increases, they are doing so to preserve a fictional price level in the face of things costing more to produce in real terms- which has to increase any forces driving toward recession. Maybe we'll get lucky and they at least get somewhat close to right. They way overshot what was needed for the Pandemic, which I can cut a little slack for since nobody knew how bad the future might be at the time. They'll probably err on the loose side again which may be closer to correct this time. (Unfortunately the overshoot after 2020 probably determined an election).

I think there could be difference in '26 vs '28 on this. The Dem have to try very hard and I would agree have a decent chance to tie GOP Senators to Trump and that might be enough to swing the Senate, once. But even now there are still states where the public majority still hasn't turned on Trump much less their Senator. But I'm afraid it could be short lived because in '28 the downside risk arises that you have Senators, some even elected before Trump was on the scene. Elected because the locals agreed with their policies. Then these guys all fell in line for Trump. So if they go out and campaign like this: "Well, yes turns out Trump was an aberration but we were bound by party loyalty to support him. Now he is gone and we've got a new guy (assuming they don't run Ivanka! 😱) and we are really the same guys you know and always loved, and BTW don't you still hate them silly cross dressing, brown people loving libruls?! They elected a SOCIALIST in NYC!" Give someone whose whole political social psychic identity is wrapped up in being a 'Murican 'hate them libruls' Conservative!' I'm not confident of those outcomes.

The problem is going to be persuading voters who finally do turn on Trump that they also need to turn on their Senators that enabled him or we can't get out of his mess. But the Dems are going to need candidates that the left wing doesn't like much to be able to do that in any red states.

well, that's one down, 76,999,999 voters to go.

So Iran is allowing negotiated passage of the Strait to non-aligned states like India and Pakistan. They are buying good will around the globe. Trumps is busy alienating the world.

Hard to see how anyone who slips up and tells the truth still has a gig in this admin.