gehringer_2

US Admin has an insurance scheme for tankers, I don't think any of the operators are going to be too wild about sending anything through the straight without a full escort. The USN probably doesn't have enough ships left in the fleet to do that, and Iran would probably love nothing more than a bunch of US Navy hulls in the narrows of the straight to take pot shots at hoping one gets through.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oil-market-chaos-deepen-more-163727122.html

exactly. Perfect in fact. Sadly the dems are themselves so foolishly weak kneed they will probably cave just when they have a success in their grasp.

Iran claims US attacked a water desalination plant, Iran returned the favor targeting one in Bahrain. Desalination is the only thing that allows the nations around the Persian gulf to support their populations in the desert. If desalinaiton plants are knocked out entire populations will have to flee, fast. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/08/world/middleeast/desalination-plants-iran-bahrain.html

OTOH, guys don't have a magic switch they can push to suddenly start seeing and hitting the ball better or getting more guys on the 26th either. Stats don't matter because the numbers from what happened the first couple weeks don'tmatter, but if by the last week or 10 days of ST they are still looking flat, odds are they are still going to be flat come opening day. I don't know exactly why but I don't have a good feeling about this team at all this season. Feels like it's going to be Tarik and the 24 dwarfs.

nobody is saying that (well maybe Jimmy Carter did once - Drive 55!). Stupid thing about destroying Iran's infrastructure is that when the shooting is all over, the loss of that production capacity from the world market just makes it easier for the other producers to get a higher price....

Tiger O seems to be picking up pretty much where it left off. I heard Harris say he didn't want them to so over emphasize contact to where it was counterproductive to overall offense, but I hope 26th in team OBP (where they are in ST currently) is at least a little worse than he wanted to see.

yup, standards of living correlate pretty closely to how much energy an individual can afford to command. But efficiency also play a role. We can get more output with a lot less input in a lot of what we do. Look at what is happening with cars. IC engines have a peak thermodynamic efficiency somewhere maybe in the 30% range, and the way we use them they are operating at maybe 15% of that most of the time, so as an energy consumer, you are only getting a few percent of the energy you put in as gasoline in useful transportation distance out. Compare that to the 'new thing', the EV, where you are running an electric motor at 80-90% efficiency, charging it at probably 90% efficiency. The overall yield to you getting moved around is much better than 50%, something like an order of magnitude better than a gasoline engine car in terms of motion out vs total energy in. And even after you add in the losses to make the electricity you are still way ahead. So even as economies apply more net energy as living standards go up, their rate of gross energy input can/should go up more slowly than GDP as tech improves.

They brought LeCarre in as consultant with the British TV serialized TTSS - he'd had an on-again/off-again relationship with previous movies of his work - going back to not really liking the Richard Burton version of "the Spy Who Came in form the Cold" which first catapulted him to fame. But he was so taken with Alec Guiness' portrayal that he wrote "Smiley's People" expressly for Guiness. Gary Oldham is no slouch either, but having to do it 127 min instead of 350 made it a lot harder to get the complexity of the plot without it getting confusing.

50% in 15 yrs is only 3%/yr, so it's not that big a lift - I'd guess the regulatory hurdles are worse than the construction constraints - especially on the transmission line end. EVs are going to be a big draw on the up side. On the down side, the number of data centers that get built is likely to be less than forecast and the evolution of electronics tech in place by the time they are built will mean they consume less power than currently forecast.

when you start getting to very short charge times heat management becomes a constraint. It looks like they have made a very system with a very high surface/volume ratio so it can dump heat very fast. That also a minimum of ~1000 amps going through the charging cable!

I was half expecting to see a rush for the door at about 3:45 today but nothing really materialized - a little attempt at a rally actually but it fizzled. I guess it's good news if people aren't panicking.....so far.

I don't imagine RFK has taken the time to read this (Medscape 2/17/2026): "As the US measles cases soar following 2025’s record-shattering outbreaks, experts warn that healthcare practitioners and parents may be unprepared for the virus’s hidden threat: immune amnesia. The condition is pretty much what it sounds like. The virus destroys immune memory, wiping out memory B cells and T cells and forcing the immune system to rebuild its defenses from scratch. “Nearly every unvaccinated child who gets measles can be impacted,” said Patricia Stinchfield, CPNP, past president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. Rebuilding immune memory leaves patients vulnerable to new exposures, and infections, hospitalizations, and missed work and school can linger for up to 5 years, casting a long shadow after recovery. Immune amnesia was officially recognized in 2015, but clues emerged before that. Scottish scientists in the 1700s described waves of infections and deaths in measles’ wake. When measles vaccines arrived in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, researchers noticed unexpected drops in seemingly unrelated health problems. And looking back at prevaccination records, they documented higher rates of infections and deaths in kids for several years after they had this highly-contagious childhood illness. Lots of deaths. “Half of all childhood infectious-disease deaths were related to immune amnesia caused by measles,” said Michael J. Mina, MD, PhD, an infectious disease expert and former assistant professor of epidemiology and immunology, Harvard Medical School, Boston. Mina’s landmark research, published from 2015 to 2019, helped illuminate the measles-immune amnesia link. “Before vaccines, it was difficult to see the connection because virtually everyone got measles. There was no one to compare them to.”

Yeah - I think Axel has been improving. Seems to be having more success using his speed to avoid being hit, and when he's not on his butt, his skills are OK.

so who Is now the 7th D man? ASP or JBD, or do they both become 6 1/2?

The last President that told Americans they needed to sacrifice over bad economics was Jimmy Carter. Didn't end well for him. And the joke is that at least Carter's economic issues were not ones he engineered himself.

Pre-open futures just fell through that.

Diesel fuel up $0.41/gal. Which gets added to just about every single thing you buy.

Oil at $85 and Market futures down another 1%. So much winning.

the analysis makes all kinds of sense, but a team that is as dedicated to handedness as the Tigers is going to give a SW every benefit of the doubt in the choice.

6 hrs. Tick..tick...tick.

Perez's can make good plays, but the consistency of his concentration level as a fielder has left something to be desired. Vierling has not graded particularly well as a CF. If neither Javy or Meadows can hit enough to stay in the lineup the team is going to suffer it.

Does give them another RH shot. Don't how much one can expect from a 37yr old journeyman though 17 1/2 hours of hope left, dwindling fast.

I think one of them is going to get a lot PA though because I don't really see a reasonable CF choice for that ballpark beyond those two unless Clark shows up early in the season. BTW - what are we calling it now that Comerica is in the corporate dustbin? Are they really going with the completely non-sensical '5th/3rd' moniker? There won't be an out of town announcer that recites that with a straight face.

back in the day there was a word for that that has pretty much disappeared : Stalking Horse.