gehringer_2

Another reason get that militia well regulated: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/02/09/hearing-loss-republicans/

I think the interpersonal part remains the biggest part right up to the point when the $ figure is big enough to replace it. That point if probably an individual matter for every recruit but I imagine working rules of thumb will emerge that reflect the real world probabilities, something like maybe if you are more than $500k short of the competing offer, you don't bother elevating a contact.

QFT!

And can we guess where the PAC got the money?

Obvious by definition they are, but an Interesting question is whether moderated sites are even in the same conceptual space as 'social media' as it's commonly understood since they function so much differently. We had moderated message boards all the back to Compuserve in the 1980's and no-one felt they needed to have congressional hearings about it. 😉

NYT has really lost it's way with Trump. Possibly the one thing to say it its defense is that the editors know that a)their readers already hate Trump b)no Trump voters reads, or if they do believes, anything in the NYT anyway. Still, you have a responsibility to put that on the front page just as a matter of being a news source that is archived for history.

I loved the 1st, but Herbert lost me somewhere around 'Children' in the sequels. And not that I follow Hollywood all that closely, but has Lucas ever officially recognized how much he cribbed from Dune?

I can imagine some Smother's Brotheresque ribbing in the locker room of Raymond by Larkin "The officials must love you best"

From the time I knew her in her middle 50s, my grandmother always ran through the whole list of her children and grandchildren when she hollered at one of us. She lived to 94 and never had any dementia. I think that kind of thing is much more a matter of 'auto-pilot.' Almost the inverse of confusion - there are conceptual/emotional frameworks that you know so well you just pull them up from memory whole without having to think about them once they register as applicable, but since they may attach to multiple people, the specific subject doesn't come up with it.

QFT you know, Franbk Herbert - author of DUNE, makes reference in the book's themes about Humans needing 'Jihad' (note he was using the word in a literary way, years before Sunni fundamentalism came into public consciousness) , periods of war and chaos to mix up the gene pool and drive the race in new directions, which is basically what the story line in Dune is. I always thought conceptually that while it made for an interesting novel, the idea of their being a sense of species stagnation leading to eventual collapse and chaos was still a very odd idea. All these years later, I'm wondering if he was on to something.

not even a deranged mad *man*, but a deranged two year old in a man's body. He is the most infantile excuse for an adult I may ever have seen on the pubic stage going back 6 decades and as Sue says, our idiot populace laps it up. You have to wonder what these people's children look like if they indulge them in a level of childishness like Trump's.

It was a funny contrast because for as many hard hits and scrums out on the ice, I thought both teams were unusually disciplined about leaving out the typical amount of pointless pushing and shoving you get after every goalie save in a crowd.

another thing that is fun is that now we are starting to have stretches where the Wings are the team that brings the extra gear and runs the other team ragged, instead of it always being the other team doing it to a Wings team that couldn't respond.

there is no question that on the fly recall gets worse. OTOH, I still know (so far!) exactly who or what I mean even if the noun is AWOL. A interesting contrast was Biden referring to the President of 'Mexico'. The tongue slipped but he knew perfectly well he was talking about Sisi and referred to him by name correctly in the same sentence. Contrast to Trump thinking he's running against Obama or that Haley was Speaker of the House on 1/6. *That's* confusion.

and Gost almost had the turnover of the month in the 1st but Vancouver couldn't finish.

You don't see a lot of players with the kind of career batting arc Whittaker had much anymore, if you ever really did. When he came up the best thing he could do for an XBH was a hard ground ball right over the 3b bag, and he was pretty good at it. His value as a hitter was mostly oppo. But as he got older year by year became more of a turn on the ball pull hitting threat to where as an older player was taking full advantage of the short HR distance to right. Maybe because there is a lot more emphasis in the minors for guys to develop their power quickly and a lot less patience for low OPS glove guys in the majors? Maybe this relates back to the question of why two way players are so hard to find today. Maybe we wash more of them out who might have eventually have found some ISO in their late 20's but teams won't wait for it anymore.

If I had to choose I guess I'd rather go into a season with the possibility of upside surprise rather than waiting for the disappointment of how much our aging stars had fallen off. But that's just me being jaded by watching decades of too old teams. And even aside from analytics uncertainty, it's just human nature in the media and even among the players themselves to pay the most attention to the guys with established track records, even after the higher probability is that Father Time is going to take his toll. But there are always enough guys that do manage to stay good late into careers that teams full of stars, even aging ones, will still get the heaviest buzz.

When Avila took over, they could neither find nor develop players. Al did a lot on the 'finding' end, not much on the other. Would he have gotten there in time? Who knows? I think Avila's biggest problem wasn't not knowing what to do, it was not having nearly enough urgency about doing it - incremental change from year to year seem to be all he could manage. He wasn't backward in his approaches as much as just too slow, maybe too reluctant to break some china on his way.

The work to prep for and the grind of a major league season when you are almost 40 and your team is probably going to lose 90 is not an easy sales pitch. Blame ownership and the FO for not having a team on the field he wanted to play on.

Supposedly we can't lay Williams at Weaver's door and the fact that they are not at least at 10-15% better team with Cade back to play with Ivey/Duren/Stew is inexcusable. If you add talent and it doesn't add wins, then your coaching is literally being counterproductive. Possibly his hands were tied "Play Hayes, we're trying to get something for him" etc., but there is no excuse the rest of the season. The need to be significantly better or Williams has to go as well, regardless of the sunk cost.

I really think a lot them just are not all that bright and on top of that they are ideologically blinkered enough to protect themselves from having to see and deal with the real. Plus these are mostly folks who were climbers their whole lives, it's how they got there. The serious intellectuals on both sides are probably cul-de-sac'd at the district level or in law schools because anyone who really thinks is probably going to be too controversial for either side to get to the SCOTUS. Or you get a guy like Kavanaugh, who has just been a pilot fish doing the dirty work in the wake of bigger swimmers all his life who finally earned enough chits to get tabbed.

The one thing that you almost never know much about when an assistant gets the top job is how good they are at assembling a staff. Gonna find out quick with Moore.

If Workman or Kreidler had hit better you'd have a couple of better gloves. But to be fair, Jake is a good catcher, and if Meadows sticks and Jung gets here, you added two ave to above ave gloves.

Will he be with Kane today? Report the other day had the practice line this week as Kane with Compher and Perron.

Hronek has been doing his best to make the Wings regret that trade. Then again, he's probably benefiting big time form playing next to Hughes. I had thought his play was turning up before they moved him but I guess the Wings didn't believe it was real? C'est la vie.