gehringer_2

They could pack up and go before WARN just as easily. WARN serves a purpose but a fairly small one in the overall scheme of things.

The D was not good last season and they invested only moderately over the off-season so I don't know why anyone would have expected it to reach top echelon. Starting from last season, to achieve a middling D in one season was a realistic target, and that is about where they are. But with this offense a middling D still got them to 7-2

that is the key with Torkelson. After disastrous April, he righted the ship and his 2nd half OPS+ would have been closer to 120. He might not have been their best player over the season but he may have been over the 2nd half, which is what is promising going forward.

I suppose you can do anything you want if everyone agrees about how it's going to work before

Torkelson's _2 oWar were wiped out by his -2 dWAR. I'm not sure how much I care about that for a middle of the lineup 1B.

That started out being true, but I think most observers agree that politics and governance in Taiwan has evolved a long way since 1945. Certainly a lot further toward a modern open society than the mainland has in the same period!

Individual leaders and their personalities are important, I wouldn't underestimate that. The forces that Trump is riding are certainly bigger than he is, but they don't need to be channeled in the direction he takes them. I think we all agree the issue is the sense of disenfranchisement felt by large a swath of mostly the non-college educated population. But political nihilism isn't the only program that could channel that. Another movement could catch the loyalty of those people that had a far different set of priorities. Personally my biggest fear is over the country simply becoming less and less able to think intelligently. The educational system, the media, and even the business establishment, are failing miserably at producing, preparing, a population capable of making rational self-governance decisions. If we keep losing that, we are toast on all the other fronts anyway. I tend to see it as the tribalism being basically a reflection of ignorance. To transcend your tribal identity means you have spend time and effort thinking through and understanding why there are values more important than just the short term win for your side. When people are no longer equipped to do that, it's over.

Exactly. A fun narrative but not the reality.

Blaha's ability to paint a BB game on the radio is extraordinary. He developed a whole short-hand syntax of his own optimized for the listener to keep up with the speed of the game.

It depends on what you classify as a handout. The poor benefit when the government provides effective education, transportation and security services (as local business and employment cannot survive without safety) - all of which cost serious money, and in fact cost more to supply in depressed areas. The social utility of various direct subsidy programs has always been a matter of debate, but regardless of where any one comes down on any particular income transfer program, the truth is that the GOP is bad on all the things that do work as well as the things they claim don't work. So they are still worse for the poor than the Dems. (Rick Snyder having been standout counter example, until he self immolated in Flint!). And if you want to take a deeper dive into why there is so much urban poverty in the US in particular, it's because both parties have at various times since the beginning of the 20th century put policies into place that effectively destroyed the ability of the poor, and in particular the Black poor, to accumulate and maintain family social and economic equity. The two salient ones in my lifetime were "White flight" from US cities, which destroyed billions in family equity and employment opportunities in middle/lower middle class minority neighborhoods of US cities and from which cities like Detroit are still struggling to recovery 50 yrs later, and both political parties colluding in the collapse of US manufacturing employment. To ask whether one party or the other was more responsible for the 'suburbanization' of America or the embrace of 'globalization' are probably not even meaningful questions. The outcomes were cooked into the political process as a whole.

Not sure either team deserved to win that finish!

Lee, If I'm ever in the dock, I want you on the jury.

RIght. But you can be politically foolish/inept without constituting a clear and present danger to domestic tranquility and the survival of the constitutional republic. In fact being the former sort of guarantees you aren't the latter. Which is why Trump is dangerous.

I don't think the comparison is particularly apt. Hillary's comment was not bad because of the language or any implicit violence, but because her exact phrase "basket of deplorables" was a case of total class based dismissal. It was taken as a window into an elitist/privileged mindset that dovetailed so well with enough average voters' predispositions about the Clintons that it stuck. Trump calling people 'vermin' is classic fascist dehumanization agitprop which is always the prelude to the eventual moral justification for discrimination, abuse or violence against the targeted people. I don't think they are in the same league at all. One was political stupidity and a classic example of a politician saying what they really mean by mistake. The second has all the hallmarks of a much deeper and threatening moral degeneracy and spoken with intent to mean exactly what was said.

"Rules" without an enforcement mechanism are not much more than invitations to hypocrisy. Which is the main reason they've never existed before - how do you institute an enforcement regime against SCOTUS justices is not a trivial problem. Another one the Founders never anticipated as they certainly never imagined the appointment of SCOTUS members would devolve into partisan food fights over candidates that had no business to have been nominated in the first place.

Greetings!

For much of history, grounds were allowed to be a size smaller than the neutral and line wires since there should not be any current flowing in them, so if you have old romex around you'd see "14/2 with ground" cable had a 16 ga ground wire. The electrical code has 'upgraded', so buy new romex and the ground gauge will match the conductor size. So whether your ground wires were applicable depends on whether they matched the gauge of the conductors.

yeah - that's there's the rub. In the 19th century 'Noblesse Oblige' was still a live concept. Now it's all about whether you can get a bigger Yacht built than that Russian guy. I never cared for Bill Gates when he ran Microsoft, but I give him some credit for bucking the trend. Buffett has always claimed he is going to give most of his away, it will be interesting to see what he actually does with it.

I think Income disparity is the single overarching problem for the political process in the US for this century. The European democracies have done a better job on this issue while the US has let the problem get so bad we may already be past the tipping point where reversal is even possible. But money is only power until there is blood on the street, then the rich have to run for cover just like everyone else - probably more so.

Though the odds are Harbaugh wouldn't accept it anyway, he'd have JJ or Corem take it. That's his greatest asset as a coach, he does always elevate his players.

I'm sure the Romanov's thought they were the real owners of Russia at the time too. Every country that falls apart looks like it won't until it does.

However, the political fact is that bad leaders do tend to get worse if given the chance and pathological personalities generally only get more pathological with time. I have no desire to give Trump the chance to be worse, and it would be a foolish risk for Americans dismiss the high likelihood he would be worse.

With a relief pitcher, a manager's decisions can make a big difference. Without a batter by batter analysis it's hard to know how much effort Thompson made to keep Soto in front of free swingers. But more significantly, if you look at his pitch usage, it's clear that from season to season Soto's slider command comes and goes. He had commanded it well in '21, and had a nice season for the Tigers. It disappeared in '22 and he was down to being pretty much a one pitch pitcher. This year in Philly looked a lot more like 2021 for him with his slider usage at the highest in in career so he clearly had regained better command of it. But looking at his record, you'd be hard pressed to not to believe it could disappear for him again at any time. Year/team/leag/FB%/SL% 2019 DET MLB 70.5% (95.4) 23.9% (85.0) 5.7% (88.2) 0.4% 2020 DET MLB 79.7% (97.3) 20.3% (87.8) 2021 DET MLB 62.4% (98.3) 37.6% (88.4) 0.7% 2022 DET MLB 77.4% (98.4) 21.6% (89.3) 1.0% (91.9) 0.4% 2023 PHI MLB 60.8% (98.3) 39.0% (87.9) 0.2% (92.0) 0.1

This. We don't see practice, we don't know the route designs. Maybe for all his talent he hasn't learned to run his routes as accurately as St. Brown or LaPorta and/or maybe Goff also has less confidence he knows Williams' speed well enough to have his timing down with him. Goff is playing the best QB of his career, based not in the least on success in his decisions about who he throws to. If this was a struggling passing offense, maybe Goff is more willing to elevate Williams in his read list, but it's not. Goff is basically in charge of the process on the field and he is going to work Williams into the game as his comfort level with him rises and probably not before.

Lions have the 4th most completions and yards in the league. It's not like the current receiver room is operating at a deficit. They don't need to push William's role.