gehringer_2

Every year they let Weaver make another draft pick is going to be another year wasted.

Yeah - The truth is more likely that prescription drugs sales are far higher in areas where people have better insurance coverage thus stores in higher income areas are more profitable. And in other breaking news, the Sun will rise in the East tomorrow.

If anything, Henning is kind of a goof ball - always speculating out to the extremes. But for me it just mostly his writing style is so over the top with the adjectives that it's amusing - like he's trying to impress a 12th grade creative writing teacher. But that part has nothing to do with what he's trying to say. He seems like an OK guy otherwise.

What the Pistons have accomplished is legendary. They've taken a team in a sport where it usually only takes upgrading two players to make a team competitive and put themselves in the position where it's going to take 4, starting with zero tradeable roster capital. They would be three years away minimum working through the draft - if they had a front office capable of making an intelligent draft decision - which they don't. I can see little hope for this team short of pix emerging of Gores in Klan robes.

I wonder if in an odd way, the fact that both the Spurs and the Pistons are a such a mess simultaneously inhibits the league from doing anything about ether team for lack wanting to end up in the middle of a debate about 'why not the other one' or having to deal with both of them at once.

I enjoyed it. Like all Nolan movies, keeping track of the time lines is a bit of wild goose chase, but that is Nolan's thing. But it is always a little odd watching 'historical' films of events or people or events you have direct memories of however. I'm not old enough to remember WWII(!) but some of those people were still around in my own memory. For instance I'd seen a lot of Edward Teller and some about Isador Rabi when they were still around so that forces you out of 'suspension of disbelief' a little more often than for other kinds of films. I'm also curious about whether the conversation with Einstein was based in fact or was dramatic interpolation. I suppose I could look it up - guess I'm not *that* curious!

They have to come out of the gate hitting though. We can't see a repeat of the last two years where nobody hits until May and they are already 10 under.

Yzerplan needs an update to the goaltending section. Don't have a lot of confidence in this group.

and even younger if they do want to make a longer term offer during the season.

Yup. 5 of them have significant injury history. Odds seem close to unity one will be lost for the season.

Lots of injuries - oblique and shoulder. He maybe needs a pitching whisperer less than just staying healthy. He was pretty good when he was good, so I guess at $14M you call this one high risk/high reward. And if he does recover form he'll be an attractive deadline offering if there are guys like Gipson-Long who are challenging for promotion to the rotation. If Meada and Flaherty both start 30 games, then one of Mize, Manning, or Olsen is not in the rotation - or maybe they figure to limit Mize and Manning's innings such that together are only going to total about one starting spot.

I would say only this with respect to the Bomb and this discussion: It didn't exist when the US decided to pursue total war against Japan, thus it was not part of the calculation in answer the question on Dec 8th 1941, "What is our response to Japan going to be today." I think you can go back to the age old dichotomy between strategy and tactics. To me the parallel between the US in '41 and Israel now is the strategic decision to pursue Hamas to it destruction, and that parallels the US decision to pursue the elimination of the Imperial regime in Japan, and I would argue the reasons in both cases follow from fairly similar logic. The tactical issues of weapons and acceptable conduct of in pursuit of the overall strategy will not necessarily be particularly similar as the two cases are in vastly different place and time and in particular Israel is operating under more international (and US) constraint than the US did in WWII. That's just a reality that I certainly don't question.

The Fed signalled three. If they get to 6 that probably means a recession has started so I'd as soon not see that.

Also - to correct myself - Tojo had been removed from office before the end of the war.

FWIW, I would guess the Israeli generals are telling the political side that they can't exhaust their supply of their best weapons in Gaza because of the cost and because it would make them more vulnerable to an attack on a second front as Iran is still a dangerous presence in Syria/Lebanon. Despite all the fine video released, most of what we used in Iraq/Afgh was dumb stuff for the same reason, and the odds of us facing a second front war at the time was probably lower. But another tough question for Israel is 'what is enough?' A simple political statement like "we have to destroy Hamas" is easy to announce, but what does it mean in practice? They will never get every last fighter, so they have to have some kind of end game for what is enough and what to do the day after. It they don't manage that part, they will also deserve plenty of criticism. Again - the US lesson from Iraq.

Does he really have stats that lead one to believe in his value? He puts up a lot of assists but a lot of TOs to go with them which pretty much negates that one stat where he does have a reasonably high league ranking. The team is bad but it's not rare for good players on bad teams to have better numbers than Cade. The argument has to be that the Pistons are so historically bad that there aren't any fair comps to his situation, and I suppose the Pistons do seem intent on proving that true! But given all that, the one thing that I can't get past with Cade is his inability to draw fouls. He did last night - but that was rare for him.

TBH, the focus was on US military casualties, not Japanese civilians. Concern expressed for the later is post historical gloss even if it may be true to an unknown degree. No-one really knows what Tojo and/or the Emperor could/would have driven Japanesse civilians to do.

Probably too fine a distinction for anyone who was a victim, but 'FatMan' and 'LittleBoy' were 'Atomic' bombs (~250kT), not 'Hydrogen' (aka "thermonuclear") which are a whole 2nd class of weapons developed later (not likely to get a good movie about Edward Teller - though his character does appear in 'Oppenheimer' with the idea already in mind) and are an order of magnitude or more more powerful (~10mT) than the WWII 'atomics'. The difference is that the first atomics were fission devices in which heavy elements such a uranium are split, the 'H' bomb is a fusion device in which heavy hydrogen is fused. The 2nd depended on the invention of the 1st because it requires a small atomic bomb in the payload to detonate the fusion part of the bomb.

I don't want to put too fine a point on it, the situation in Gaza is intolerable, but the point remains that it's very easy for a bystander nations to have 'serious' reservations about what other countries see as their vital interests. The problem for Israel is that it has worked hard to squander much of the West's willingness to accept what they are doing by being beastly to all the Palestinians they have not been at war with for the last 20 yrs. I have to believe if the Israeli public had ever voted in a government that was even remotely interested in working toward some solution in the West Bank other than the Likud 'solution' of somehow just eventually pushing all the Palestinians out of the West Bank, their international diplomatic leeway after the Hamas attacks would be greater. But now it is what it is. You have an Israeli government that deserves little sympathy, led by one of the 21st century's new blow dried wanabe-fascists on one side, and a group of completely malignant killers on the other. There is no question which side the Western choice ultimately has to fall, but that doesn't mean anyone has to like the choice. And how do Egypt and Jordan skate by the condemnation they should be under for keeping the Palestinian civilian population trapped in Gaza with Hamas? That is a piece of this equation that is missing. When the US was going after ISIS, the civilian populations were often able to flee the scene and leave the battlefield to the armed contestants. The Gazan civilians are caught in the middle by the choice of their supposed friends.

HaHa. Maybe not in miles, but one of the truly terrible 120 mile drives in America most hours of the day.

Additional Cunningham ranks for the season (qualifiied): Assists: 8th Scoring: 31st TRB: 137st eFG: 135th 3P%: 140th TO: 1st Wanted: nearby corner for recent 1:1 pick to turn.

Yup. remembering to take a jacket with you when you leave the house at 2p in 80F in SoCal because you won't be back until after dark doesn't compute to a midwesterner.

For baseball, parity still will not get a team a WS win on a regular schedule because winning a WS is fundamentally a random outcome within the subset of teams that make the playoffs. As has been discussed before, a small number of baseball games has too little power to reliably say anything about any team with a record good enough to get to the playoff. Thus it is easy for a good team to reach the playoffs repeatedly and still not win a WS - e.g. the 14 Braves teams from '91 to '05 just as a matter of bad random luck. But parity should guarantee that any team that manages its resources decently should have a a chance of an appearance in the playoffs proportionately often. I would look at annual win/loss % or playoff appearances rather than titles as per MB above

Agree that WWII is the pacific is actually the apt parallel. 2400 people were killed at Pearl Harbor. so WWII in the Pacific was anything but 'proportional' to that. But what Japan did on Dec 7 is like what Hamas did on Oct 7 in that it demonstrated that a nation was facing a hostile malignant power that had to be ended, not just 'responded' to.

That's what I would take it to mean - the idea that any team has roughly equal chance to be a good team if it brings a similar level of management skill to the table - that the league set up doesn't have a consistent bias against certain teams - which in the end means all teams should have similar resource bases.