gehringer_2

One additional thing to remember is that gasoline is light - you don't really incur much driving penalty for having a 20gal gas tank, and even then it only averages half full so you're only carrying around 10 gal - or about 65lb. Put that 720 mile capable battery in your everyday car - it's going to be about 180 kWhr, and you are lugging around nearly a ton of battery at today's tech level - all the time. That's why I think in the end the average person is going to end up with two different modes of transportation replacing their current car. Whether that means two different types of vehicles in your garage or a shift to specialty hi-range rental vehicles for long haul travel or even a shift away from long distance car travel., whatever - there is a significant penalty, both in vehicle efficiency, but also in the capital cost tied up in the battery, to hauling around a lot of mostly always unused battery capacity that is fundamentally different from the situation with liquid fueled vehicles, and at this point I have to guess the economics of that will eventually force change into new arrangements. And of course by tomorrow the tech situation may change!

absolutely. The key right now is lack of social imagination. The IC automobile and it's fuel distribution infrastructure has conditioned us that the same vehicle should be capable of a grocery run as well as a 3 wk cross country tour. That is the social learning that may have to give way to some new understanding based on some new technological or social investment outcomes. This is mostly an American problem. In Europe and Asia few people have any desire to take long trips in cars because there are good alternatives - primarily efficient passenger rail systems. The 5,000 mile car trip is sort of a US/Canada Unicorn because of the size of the continent as well the relatively empty 1000 miles in the middle in between the places a lot of people want to go. Obviously, if battery charging tech can get us to a 15 min recharge that doesn't destroy the battery on regular application, then technology may yet save us of from having to change our transportation expectations, but it's not going to be the end of world if it doesn't, we can figure out another way to go on trips. Or maybe the long distance liquid fueled auto never goes away but its use case becomes so limited that it's not a significant CO2 source. Right now we are in panic mode (and rightly so), but the truth is that the planet already cycles massive amounts of CO2 - we have just managed to overload it anyway. In the end, small contributions from it's inhabitants will not *need* to be regulated away if rational management can be found - which is questionable of course. But lots of future to yet to happen.

This is the thing. Communication is always a two way street and we have zero actual facts as to how clear everyone had actually made their positions to each other vs how much other people were making assumptions. I was less than today years old when I figured out that unsupported assumptions by management are pretty much par for the course everywhere there are managers.

US would be wise to support the Armenian factions that want to put an end to the conflict. Step one is leverage them away from the Russians who keep stirring the pot of the local conflicts to prevent unified opposition to them from coalescing.

So I'm not going to make any assumptions here as to who is telling the truth and who is doing something less, but just given the above as the hypothetical, my question would be: When did we reach the point where no-one is responsible to exercise their own agency? I can't help a feeling that is much broader than this case in particular, that we are reaching a point where we have begun to conflate true power relationships that become abusive with simple economic proposition relationships that one side decides didn't bear enough profit. Lets just say - hypothetically, that Tucker was overstepping his boundaries - why does she accept that? He does not hold any true institutional power over her as a contractor, but maybe he can be a useful ally in securing new business or a potential detriment in steering it away. So he has an indirect kind of potential to affect her life - primarily an economic one. But people win and lose business for a zillion irrelevant reasons every day based on other peoples' decisions. Do we really want to put the law - or some regulatory regime - into the arena when someone cultivates a 'personal' relationship for basically 'business (even if that 'business' is directed to a social benefit) reasons, and then it goes south? I wont accuse Tracy of this because I don't claim to have any idea who is telling the truth, but I can see that that is one of the possible explanations for what went down here - she doesn't want to just walk away because she doesn't want to tick him off because he can be a career aid. But to my view, that's tough cookies. There are hundreds of times in life you need to just walk away from something the might have benefited you but you didn't like the risk or ethics profile. That's part of adulthood. And I have this gnawing feeling that that is the direction the legal regime is heading, and I'm not sure it's where I would go. Now all that said, I'm fine if MSU wants to fire Tucker for terrible judgement and questionable moral sense, but I'm less certain how much weight I'd give this case as a matter of 'abuse' - so far.

Paredes moves around a lot less than our Tiger wanderers. He has played in 125 games, 103 of them he's been at 3b - 81 times a complete game there. Vierling's most common spot appears to be RF with 48 appearances, McKinstry even less in one place than that. TBF, a lot of my frustration around the constant position shuffling is that no-one in the cast of thousands can actually play 3rd at a respectable MLB level, so moving more guys through there just seems to highlight futility. For a few games Vierling looked pretty decent there but ulitmately was exposed just like rest have been. /...sigh.../

Yeah - the appearance of things has already begun to shift somewhat. Tucker is probably done at MSU regardless, but today (as compared to yesterday) I think the odds for him walking away with a lot more of his money have improved - so MSU as an institution will be screwed again.

the best use case for the 1st generation of EVs is moderate distance commuting - lighter vehicles with much smaller batteries than the market has persuaded itself it has to build. That probably covers 70% - maybe 90% of current fuel consumption? Instead everyone is chasing the corner cases - extreme battery life and heavier vehicles to create the 'one size can fit all' vehicle when most families have two anyway, and that really strains the available tech and so may end up over promising what is delivered and in turn souring the public on the tech. It's America - go figure.

I don't have occasion to watch the Bears, but even a team with a bad o-line will occasionally play a team with a bad D-line and in those games a QB like Field whose offense is constrained by poor line play should be able to put up a performance that gives you some hint into what he might be able to do if he had time on a more regular basis. Has Fields been able to do that?

Does that mean to the point the Tigers wouldn't sign him if he was willing or just that they won't go out of their way to if they can spend comparable (or less) money on comparable value elsewhere? Otherwise, probably all we can say about Eduardo is that Eduardo is gonna do Eduardo and if it doesn't make too much sense to anyone else, too bad.

Yup - definitely can be a problem for guys that rocket through college/lower levels based on swings at out of zone breaking balls that MLB hitters will mostly let go by. And it's hard to get guys to work on throwing strikes with breaking balls when they know they don't need to against the guys they are facing.

Robin Yount split his career between CF and SS, won a gold glove at one, silvers sluggers at both, an MVP at both positions, and got himself to the HOF. No slouch there.

To me there is no downside to players being *able* to play multiple positions, the downside is when players are moved around so much you never get to a point where you have a cohesive defensive unit where everyone knows everyone else's tendencies, you stop getting communication breakdown misplays, and OF's get a chance to learn the field details at all the ball parks they have to play in. I believe there is a cross over point of decreasing returns where the search for the last marginal offensive advantage becomes counterproductive for these reasons.

Their off-season todo list isn't that bad this time. They have to sign or replace ERod, and a second arm would be nice. I think I might like to see Holton compete for a back end starting job which would let them look more for relief help - esp since Alexander and Faedo both can fill the long relief role. Torkelson, Greene and Carpenter have emerged as bona fide MLB hitters, that puts them 3 bodies ahead of where they were coming into 2023. If at least one more out of the group of Meadows, Malloy, Keith, Perez, Bigbie end up as legitimate bats, that puts them 2 hitters away from a better team than the Twins or anyone else in the Central can field. One starter, one starter/reliever, and two hitters in one off-season should not be a bar too high for a front office with virtually zero existing payroll constraints.

Analysts always love physical talent and Fields has that in wretched excess. Too bad for him QB is actually played mostly between the ears.

The assumption here is that management cares, hard to see how they do considering the already stunning wastage rates for pitchers and total lack of any institutional response from baseball to date. Coming from a heavy industry background I like to joke that if OSHA regulated baseball, pitching would have been outlawed decades ago. It's jest yet it's true that pitchers suffer predictable rates of injury that would be completely unacceptable in any normal workplace. And while many of them do get 10s or 100s of millions of $$ in ransom for their UCL's, many who suffer those injuries without ever reaching the majors don't.

SGL is one of those guys who, when he is on, make you wonder how he isn't already an all-star, yet whose overall body of work looks pretty mundane. Like a lot of guys who depend on being able to command an inventory of off-speed pitches, when he is good, he is very good, but consistency remains elusive. Sometime as these guy get older and log more innings, the consistency improves to were there they can have good MLB careers, but for just as many or more it never happens.

Yes and no. Their are sure to be completely unknown energy storage technologies out there just waiting for their discovery, but with respect to the device we call a 'battery', it's going to be hard to top Lithium for energy/lb unless we also get a new periodic table of the elements, which might well exist on the other side of whatever black hole our part of the universe is fated to eventually get sucked though, should anyone want to get there. 💥✨

I have no agenda in saying this, just the personal observation that it's is pretty weird how if you hang around long enough, everything that goes around, comes around again. In the 1950-1960s, tons of big orgs of all kinds had various kinds of non-fraternization rules of varying strictness. Every teacher and students were expected to remain perfect strangers. By round about 1980 people were supposedly chafing under the injustice being done to consulting adults who just happened to work for the same company or institution, and "lover the one your with" and all that, and down came all the barriers of all kinds. The Roman Polanskis of the world rejoiced. Fast forward another 30 yrs, and the very idea of 'consulting adult' is considered a facist construct and individual agency a myth in a world of implacable institutional power. (yes I'm being hyperbolic for fun here). The rebound of course isn't back to exactly the image of the prior status quo, but there is a certain template to it all that make it amusing to me.

To me the logic is faulty. If Fulmer had been all that, he would have been the first piece of the rebuild, still in his prime when they should have been ready to content again - which would have been about now, so why on earth would you trade him? OTOH, if he already established that he was fragile and had a flat fastball, you weren't going to get the moon for him.

Makes you wonder if MSU was hoping to negotiate some kind of settlement to make this go away. If so probably a pointless exercise but the kind of decision I can imagine would not have been unlikely.

If nothing else he needs to learn to eat the ball when there is no play. Risking putting a man a second with an attempted hero throw that has no chance to being with is not good baseball.

Lithium is not rare, but some of what is out there is harder to utilize. This will be a case where the least expensive to recover deposits will end up driving the others out of business, and even if you think you've found a low cost to recover source, it's hard to be sure you won't be undercut later because we are so early on the learning curve. No-one has spent a lot of time looking for lithium yet so I would expect more reports like this one are yet to come. WyandotteChem/BASF had a good business for decades making Soda Ash downriver in Wyandotte, by what was then the standard process, then someone stumbles across a natural deposit in Wyoming that needs almost no processing. Bye-Bye to a large chemical works. In the natural resource business, sh*t happens.

Of course you can never have to much pitching, but my guess is that they won't budget much for a 2nd starter signing (though I won't complain if they do!) because they expect Mize to be effective and no team wants to put 9 figures into a 6th starter. Turnbull's ambiguous status also adds to the uncertainty in the mix - if they part company with him in the off season you would think that would increase the chances they'd be willing spend for two starters.

in the early part of the season the Tigers were near the bottom in both runs scored and runs allowed. Runs allowed has improved quite a bit with ERod, Skubal, Manning, Olson pitching well and generally decent defensive play other than 3b, but run scoring has remained mired near worst in baseball. They should try to retain or replace ERod with at least comparable talent, but even if Keith and Malloy are both the real deal as MLB hitters they could yet add another hitter or two and still struggle to get to get to 750 runs