gehringer_2

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.

well if he doesn't it won't be for lack of performance. Among hitters with >30AB he leads the team in walks and OBP by a wide margin and has done fine in the field. Of course performance wise Jace Jung has hit almost as well but probably still has no chance of making the team.

I suppose by definition, if it's a "platoon" it has to be left/right. Otherwise it's just being a bench player without a regular gig.

Yup. Nolan was more a the biological pitching outlier than pitching performance outlier. Agree the most remarkable arm of all time (along with Paige?) but not really close to the best pitcher. I remember in Nolan's years with Angels when we faced him it always about whether he could throw the curve for a strike consistently on any given day, because if he couldn't, which was often, you could sit dead red and eventually catch up or he'd walk himself into trouble. Still, whose starts did you anticipate more since if he was on it was a good chance of being a no-hitter?

Velo data isn't available before Clemens last season, when he was 44 and fangraphs has his vFA at 90mph. I don't remember that much about what he was doing late in his career with his half season appearances etc -- but for a lot it his out pitch was his split. Johnson with 100 mph 4 seamer - probably a good comp in that sense. With Johnson he was so long with a release point that made his FB really play up even more. JV has made his living on his FB spin/life. I guess another guy that pitched into his 40's with tons of FB spin was Bartolo Colon. Obviously he wasn't as good overall and didn't have the matching velo (low 90s at best) but guys still always had trouble catching up to the life on his FB even near the end of his career.

depends on the player. e.g - I think it's been a mistake with Keith who is not a confident or comfortable glove guy to begin with, but McGonigle looks a lot more like a baseball rat like Javy or McK. Might not bother him at all. You just hope Hinch can tell which is true.

Downside there is that guys with inconsistent command are a bigger risk in the BP since the 3 batter rule. He's 25 this season, so still at an age when command might improve and he's still under 800 IP for his total career. His demeanor seems solid though. Another guy that's 50/50 to still have unrealized upside.

Dan said JV had 7 wiffs on his 4 seamer. Amazing the guy can throw a swing and miss FB at 43. Has anyone else done that since Nolan Ryan?

7 of JV's last 8 pitchers were 4 seamers, all the pitches to Ramos were. So he was just airing it out at that point and Ramos could just look dead red. The good part was that JV's velo was still good at 75 pitches (~95), and that's big for him. only 4 baserunners for each team so far.

Skubal has a very controlled follow through, he never really loses sight of his pitches. JV is pretty similar - he falls off maybe a little more but not much.

But he could make the team and play 50/50 SS and 3b. Javy plays 50/50 SS/CF and maybe some 3b. Parker just plays 50% or doesn't make the team. Assuming they do keep McGonigle, there are too many combinations to contemplate until they also decide which of Meadows/Perez/Jung/Jones may also make Opening Day.

The problem with the interchangeable payload concept of the LCS is that is was put out there at the same time the US was reducing it's overseas basing platforms. It's not very practical in the heat of combat to have to steam all the way back to SanDiego or Norfolk for a reconfiguration. The other thing is that Navy ships are going through constant metamorphosis at each refit, you have all those off board packages sitting around and you are tying yourself down to their compatibility when you need new function elsewhere. It's one of those concepts that sound good on paper but turns out to be at odds with the way the Navy operates in practice. They also F'd up the powertrain design in one of them, but that's another whole story.

well, we know one team has. 😟