gehringer_2

yeah - the rule is really pretty simple - stay away from relationships with anyone on your direct reporting chain. I mean that still leaves 50K university employees if you are Larry Lonely so how hard should it be?

I don't mind a #1 for a player that is at least average quality and has at least 5-7 good years left - that's a good return on a middle round #1 if you had the pick. But it's worth noting what we are talking about here can be achieved at a lot less cost than Hughes would have been.

I don't believe this is objectively true. The stars of the NFL are mostly the QBs and teams are very successful keeping their star QBs - at least until they are no longer wanted! It does make it harder to keep a lot of expensive players, but that's what drives parity. But any NFL team has an equal shot at signing their most important player, and that is not true in baseball.

In the NFL the cap helps mid level guys move but gives each team at least equal chance to keep their biggest stars. When teams are up against the cap well payed good players teams don't need badly are cut loose and go improve other teams that have more need at that position and so are willing to use more of their cap space on it so it drives parity. In baseball half the teams can't compete economically to keep their stars so they end up the most mobile players and mostly to the same rich teams. Anti-parity.

If he thinks he's getting economic rights back in S America by force without keeping a standing army there he hasn't paid much attention to history. There probably isn't a Venezuelan alive that won't back even Maduro if it comes down a choice between that and US 'gunboat' diplomacy.

just a guess. It surely wasn't because we were getting much from Duren!

every dollar the Federal government spends on healthcare for ordinary people is another increment in the political necessity to start seriously controlling health care costs in the US. That's a big gravy train you are threatening with billions of dollars of campaign contributions connected to it. Now I'll grant you that is not an argument about the public's interest at all, but since when did that matter in modern US politics? Today it is everywhere and always about the campaign money.

I agree. They are finally near a turning point with the blue line corp. You have two excellent, one developing and one generally decent Dman. Get the third pair just to the point of "not outright bad" and that will be a big swing.

I think this is true, but in the NFL some of the teams that held that 'super' status have been GreenBay, Dallas (before the Tx economy exploded), Kansas City, New England. So while I agree with the idea that having era dominant teams that fans can get to get familiar with is good for a league, I don't believe it is necessarily true those have to be the perennially richest in a league or get there by poaching everyone else's players and that they therefore have to be the same teams for all time. Also, super teams that drive interest do it even better when stars stay put, and the current system in baseball is an absolute team continuity destroyer. That's a semi-separate issue than the pure economics but inter-related. Imagine if the basic agreement in the NFL had made it impossible for the Chiefs to keep Mahomes or NE to keep Brady

I've gotten to the point with Trump where I hope he lives long enough to see his name taken off every single thing he has polluted with it, and that will happen.

you need an old style line-printer to go with a LLAMA so it can spit out its results.....

now, can they still pass it whenever it finally comes to the vote or will Trump bludgeon a couple of them into submission before then?

also true. And of course the events that made what happened in East Europe possible when it happened were tied to the ones happening in Russia, which is a whole 'nother history. For a brief shining moment the Russian state lost its taste for brutal repression. Seems to have now regained it in spades however.

well, the Lions used to be a parody of a football team, but I don't think that ever helped their ratings...... 😉

I didn't find it that bad when there was a lot of traffic, you just went with it, but get out on the road where you are by yourself and you suddenly realize you've ended up on the wrong side! For me the worst thing was that a right side drive car is not mirror image to a left side drive, which is what my brain wanted it to be. If I'm sitting on the right I want the turn signal on the left!

fans can hype the %, it was still only a couple of thousand votes. In modern US politics elections are won by who shows up. When nobody shows up it just doesn't tell you much, no matter what people would like to read into it. Nobody is saying it's a bad outcome, just a fairly insignificant one.

of course you could also say that Czechoslovakia took from 1968 to 1989.

when you start driving west from Sydney, the geographies change pretty dramatically and pretty fast going from habitable to a lot less habitable. A bit like driving up the Columbia river from the Pacific to Idaho.

Nice. Pulling things out of datasets that were only in there implicitly was something I did a lot of when I worked as a process engineer. You could amplify the time calc a little bit by subtracting the minimum 2min per half inning inning break from every game (minimum of 34 min for a home team win) plus a couple of extra minutes twice in each game for brooming the field.(maybe 5 min) which is guaranteed dead time - the order wouldn't change but the %difference and the net time per pitch would be closer - but still not that close given all the umpire time-outs, to the real number. The other thing that *might* play into this is the amount of foul territory in the ball park. If park has a small foul area, there probably is less time spent after a ball goes out of play, than if the foul ball stays on the field and either a play is made or it has to be retrieved by a ball boy or player. But this factor would follow the park, not the team.

less than one in ten registered D's were motivated to vote. I find the apathy pretty appalling. Dems could have lost this if the GOP had thought to call a couple of MAGA preachers and ask for a good word.

Sorokin just wasn't using his head.

ESPN has a non-paywalled story on the Hughes trade to the Wild. You almost wonder if as good as Quinn is, if you get him signed you might have second thoughts about taking on the drama that will come when the brothers become FA's and the pressure is on to bring them together, maybe when there isn't actually a productive fit. It's the kind of thing that could become a soap opera for what ever team has any of the brothers at that point.

1st is good.

IIRC corectly, early on it was Exxon that was in the middle of the argument over embargoing Vz oil because they had spent big $$ to outfit at least one of their gulf coast refineries to run it (it's very heavy stock - fairly unique processing requirements) and were unhappy about the prospect of having an unusable multi-billion $ investment if the flow from VZ stopped. That was a number of years ago when Maduro was beginning to make himself an outcast, but that's the kind situation where money, corporate political pull and Secretaries of State that are ex Oil Co CEO's reduce the likely hood that the US is actually going to pursue productive foreign policies.