gehringer_2

HA! the truck thing certainly benefits by not having to do any forming of the stainless. I wonder if they stress relieve the welds though - or will they all end up with stress corrosion cracking from road and sea salt?

I have a cousin on the faculty at Western Mich. She loves her field but the teaching drives her insane. She's not really allowed to demand anything from the little princes and princesses without getting blow back all the way from the admin and of course they have no idea how unprepared they are because no-one is allowed to make them face reality- it would make them uncomfortable...... Now I saw tons of brilliant,motivated kids at UM and it's easy to get lulled into a false sense of security about the national future until you realize what a small bit of the total cohort you're seeing. They're not the real world, or at least not very much of it.

Thinking about the PO - it would be interesting to get someone (probably not Musk!) who could think outside the box of paper a little. What if the PO set up a gov ISP that would allow you to go to the PO (or use a verified account from home) and sign a document and then have that reproduced and verified at the other end electronically by a secure government chain of transmission? There are a private services that do that now but it's kind of mess of various nethods and operators and you never really know if you can trust any of them with your info or $$.

I didn't think they'd even make it through to the end of the campaign before there were fireworks. I guess while it's rare, there have been some people that been able to stay close to Trump over long periods - Roger Stone comes to mind.

I hate the very idea of loans for education. A society that doesn't have the brains to pay to educate its own citizens or at least make it affordable without incurring debt is well on it's way down the tubes already, and of course the biggest unintended consequence of the increase in available loan money has been a reduction in the pressure for cost control at colleges. The former absolutely has driven the latter.

If he turns the nation's MAGA global warming deniers into green car drivers I'll live with it! but just as possible his involvement in government will end up ticking off even more potential buyers of all stripes than his political activism already has, and if Tesla's sale don't pick up accordingly the share prices can go down as easily as it went up. A possible winner for Musk would be a postal service contract for EVs.

the issue with DOE for educators is that every $ comes strings that end up costing dollars in administrative costs. I guess districts have judged that they get more than the cost or I suppose they would leave the programs, but DOE has been a driver for increased non-teaching payroll at every educational level. That idea of getting rid of the overhead and keeping the money is probably attractive to a lot of people who think doing away with DOE would be nice, but they are doomed to be disappointed. Bureaucracy is more powerful than party - I don't think there is any way they ever get the $$$ without the strings.

I'm as big an opponent of private schools feeding at the public trough as anyone, and it's a topic that stands on its own in any discussion, but I don't see any direct connection to the existence of the Department of Education. The voucher battle has been playing out for decades at the State level. The only way it becomes an issue is if the Fed were to offer a direct private voucher - possible but seemingly an unlikely expenditure choice to come from a GOP Congress - though I freely admit one never knows!

This feels right. Tork's swing is a beautiful thing now, it's what he chooses to swing at, or maybe what he needs to be able to get his swing on that he hasn't in the past, that needs to change. I've though for a while that his biggest problem was plate coverage, and I think Harris said as much in the post-season presser. In that sense maybe he has to learn to/become more willing to, take what he regards as a less than perfect swing to defend the zone better.

Can "Protegor" be far behind?

the existence of the dept of Education is simply an org chart choice. The real question is what happens to the legislation that directs the department's current mandates? Before there was a department of Education there was a division within the former Dept or Health, Education and Welfare (HEW). The president can reduce his cabinet by one chair (assuming he gets Congress to go along - TBH, 15 direct reports is a large number for any admin) but the rubber meets the road at what Congress does with all of DOE's current tasks. If they just all get moved into another administrative unit inside say, HHS, then not much changes. It's not like any one knows who the Secretary of Education is or he/she has any great pull in inside the executive branch now. Just for context, the nation managed to educate the largest cohort in his history before DOE existed (est 1979). This is actually the kind of thing I hope Trump spends all his time on. Stuff that is red meat to the base but in basically re-arranging deck chairs. Improves the odds he'll have less ambition to screw up important stuff.

is it really, or is it just that the Biden/Obama voter didn't show up? If your people don't show up every sub group is going to look shifted to the other side. The real question is were minds changed or just voting reliability that changed.

combination of a good bullpen holding the line but also a symptom of a team that can't hit the breaking ball? Theory: relieve pitchers throw less spin than starters.

which is the sad part. So we 'blame' it all on the brown people when it's us that have created the framework within which they are just trying to do the best they can for themselves. If the country isn't going to let them in or stay, the first thing we need to do make sure the people in CA/SA understand the situation before they leverage probably everything the have to get here.

the approach was mostly wrong. If you want to slow the flow, the people coming need to understand they can't stay, not that it's harder to get across - there will always be ways to get across. And in fact we have little problem interdicting people who do cross, it has been that the process after they are interdicted is broken. The dems sort of went along with theoretical discussion that border 'security' was the problem because they didn't want to face changing the asylum system because it's a progressive marker. If you could close the border tight enough, you wouldn't have to face that the asylum system was broken. But 'sealing' the border is an illusion. You can't apprehend a crosser until they are in the US and as soon as they cross the line they can avoid being returned. That is where the bigger part of the problem has been for a long time now. And this doesn't even touch on the fact that small business owners (largely GOP) don't want stricter employment enforcement either. A dirty little economic secret is that the large number of undocumenteds in the workforce creates a constant downward pressure on entry level wages across the economy and that's just peachy with the Chamber of Commerce.

argh - sounds like suicide by cop.

Rule of thumb: If you look at your fingertips and see this color , turn it back up a little....

This. 1000%. Ultimately in a cap world you are going to have a hard time trading your way up, you must out draft other teams to make progress. You have the same GM as operated in the Tampa build - but he has surrounded himself with more of his old pals in this gig and I wonder if they are not performing at the level his Tampa staff did. Is he is more comfortable with them than he should be?

Can't say I've ever heard music on at either of the closest Kroger's to my house - and glad of it!

and they undoubtedly spent it, so WAD.

Bingo

no doubt. When he came back he was better, but he still wasn't great. Can he continue to consolidate whatever gains he made in approach? If he were to take another step equivalent to the step he took on his return he'd be in useful range - so that's the question - can he? I think they are going to give him the chance unless something literally fall into their lap for 1B. So we'll probably find out.

I believe the Constitution does not prevent states from voting their electors proportionally (there was a move to try to get Neb to do just that this cycle) but the problem isn't so much electoral college per se, but that the Constitution mandates any lack of a majority is thrown to the House, and in that vote all population based representation is lost and all large states are disenfranchised as there is only one vote per state. Thus every large state sees it in it's interest to elect it's electors on a winner take all basis to make sure someone is more likely to get a majority lest the mountain west's 15 people get to elect a president..... Since the executive and legislative elections are fundamentally separate, there is no way to build a ruling coalition out of two parties that have a majority of the presidential vote between them but where a third has a plurality. And that is the question that would have to be wrestled with if the US went to direct election. The only workable way would be setup for a run-off election between the top two candidates if no-one got a majority because there no mechanism to apportion the Congress by presidential candidate vote. In truth, whole system has to eventually crash though - the tension between so much Electoral power being non-population proportioned is going to bring the system down eventually, because at this point the small states will never allow an amendment to fix it. It's going to be like the NCAA, at some point the big states are going to dissolve the Union to get rid of the power of the little guys.

All fiat currencies exist in part based on what an author I'm reading (Yuval Harari: "Nexus" ) would call an intersubjective reality. For instance the dollar functions primary because people have a believe the US government and the Federal Reserve will act effectively to preserve it's value. Bitcoin functions solely because people believe there will eventually be someone out there that will pay more for it than they did. That's a lot less to go on than the full faith and credit of the US Gov, but it's been enough so far.

third parties can only work in proportional systems because nobody wants to run just be guaranteed to lose. Years ago we had a third party in SE Mi, that started local in A^2 and did win a seat or two on the city council, but couldn't break out of those limits.At the national level, Wallace, Jon Anderson and especially Perot had a lot of money and name recognition but didn't do much to further their agenda. Perot was a conservative but mostly helped a Dem get elected which I doubt was his intent. And that's the thing, most third parties are going to draw the most support from the side they are already most aligned with, thus splitting the vote and electing the side they have the biggest beefs with. That's just counter productive politics, but it's baked into the Constitution's structure.