gehringer_2

actually that is more or less where I was going. If you find both options that are viable candidates to win morally objectionable, no-one is forcing you to vote, but whether you don't vote or vote Quixotically you haven't helped your cause either way, which why I think the choice if you are concerned about an issue that is not at play between the viable candidates is to look for some other avenue to be active on that issue. But TBH, I don't think we are being particularly realistic by allowing the voter to say he *really* can't see enough difference between the two viable candidates to make a choice he believes is better overall. I'll allow that in 350M people I am sure there are some for whom that was really true, but most who parroted the cynicism that 'there was no difference between the parties' and then cast a 3rd party vote in any election since 2016 were either being willfully blind or unserious citizens. That is about as clearly as I can state what I believe on the issue.

Look - you engaged me in this thread - I was responding to @ewsieg. You asked me a question - I gave you an answer and you've got your panties all in a bunch. If you don't want an answer, don't ask a question.

No hand waving at all. Your vote did no good, it made no difference. That sucks when you want to believe voting is a chance to stand for what you want, but it's the reality of it. The reality of who may win an election and who can not is not a matter of my hand waving or yours it just is what it is. Not all change is in play in any given election, it may have to be worked at by other means. Which is why if there is no choice you can make that you can realistically believe is both useful and morally supportable, don't vote -- go work on the issue by other means.

The weakness in your logic is that your vote still did nothing to help keep your spouse stay alive and if it helped elect candidate A instead of candidate B maybe you helped kill someone else's spouse. In this hypothetical, your vote is going to make no difference to the policy that may kill your spouse regardless. You simply have to find other ways to work against that policy than your vote.

If a person seriously can't decide which of the candidates that has a chance to win is overall better for the country, my advice would be for them to stay home.

Every morning, I wake up, and I smoke a cigarette. And then I eat five strips of bacon. And for lunch, I eat a bacon sandwich. And for a midday snack? Bacon! A whole damn plate! And I usually drink my dinner.

Why does a person vote? Is it an exercise in ego gratification to make himself feel good, or is the purpose to try and make his country a better place for he and his fellow citizens? The fact that a person 'made a statement' with their vote does exactly who besides his own ego any good?

Easy enough to understand if Miller assumed Dunn had touched the ball - and since Dunn was signalling to Miller to pick up the ball why would Miller think anything else?

I take it back, I have just the answer, they can fill up all those warehouses that DHS is buying that have no other good purpose.

WTF is the Pentagon going to do with coal? Sit off shore of the South China Sea and chuck chunks of it at the Chinese PLA?

here's a link to a more complete story https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/11/joint-cartilage-aging.html I would guess the trick here is getting it to grow where you want but not where you don't want.

Labrum used to be Sayonara for a pitcher but the surgical techniques get better every day so we can hope.

yeah, nice to see JV in the old English D again but I'd rather have a healthy Olson.

but that wasn't the actually the point I was trying to make, which was about the raw visual stimuli value of watching something. If you are a baseball aficionado like us, watching a pitcher delivery a high leverage pitch has suspense and drama value and maybe we even appreciate the movement on the ball, but there still isn't much visual stimuli value there compared to a ball in play, where people are moving around on the field, possibly athletically, and compares still less to the kaleidoscope chaos of a snap in football with 22 guys in day-glow unis going every which way at high speed. All to say that to love baseball, you have to know baseball. The entertainment value is less in what you are seeing than in your understanding of what you are seeing means at higher levels of abstraction.

expanding the House would be a good step toward getting actual democratic balance back. And an anti-gerrymander rule that says re-districting must drive toward minimum boundary length. It's a simple rule and would cut down on maybe 80% of the abuse. The bigger problem is the Senate. I think a good system would be to have a 100 member Senate reapportioned by population but all the Senators in each state continue to be elected at large state wide and each state guaranteed only one. Or maintain two per state minimum but raise the total to 200. That would still be unbalanced but less than now. Of course to get there requires major Constitutional surgery, expanding the House does not.

any announcement from the Pistons on what they are doing?

this is a good point. Third parties here do get coopted for the purposes of the other main parties too often.

Snoop was a UM Dad at one point.

third parties have their primary value in parliamentary systems where they can be the swing votes to form a majority coalition if no party wins a majority. We don't have one of those. One party is going to win the presidency on its own in almost every possible election scenario. Doesn't leave national 3rd parties much potential leverage. In the US third parties can have a working presence in local Govs where seats on city councils can have swing leverage. We had a functioning third party locally in A^2 through a few election cycles in the 70's. Collapsed when they tried to go state wide. Democratic Socialists of America are alive and well in NYC.

Yeah. I think people are guilty of a lot of sloppy semantics. Human beings can and do become habituated to any behavior. Those issues can and are addressed successfully by people all the time. The dividing line between that and addiction may sometimes be somewhat hazy, but it exists.

The big change is that higher awareness has led to getting guys off the field when they are concussed and keeping them off till they are symptom free. The clinical question is how much difference does that actually make to whether continued high impact activity still causes long term damage. Maybe a lot, maybe not much. The assumption is that it does, I don't think the epidemiology exists to adequately resolve that question yet.

I agree some structure seems to be an organic necessity, but the idea that structure will continue to be based on the free association of a significant proportion of the ordinary citizenry certainly does seem to be in danger of extinction. If you look at PAC money - which already dwarfs party funding power, you can guess where the future is going.

you almost wonder if the game isn't played so fast on average now that you see less bursts of all out speed because players don't have enough left in the tank by half-way through a shift, or they worry more they'll end up out of gas when the play reverses before they can get off.

The CF projection for Javy is interesting. I think the probability he get 35PA out there is almost zero - I think he is either going to get put out there for an extended run or not at all, so I guess I take I'd that number as the average of a dumbbell distribution.

so the downside could be the typical American vandalism imperative to try to sabotage the device by feeding it some material deliberately compounded to screw it up.