gehringer_2

I hear they have this defenseman at GR. Also a forward. Both 6ft something or another....

two tigers thrown out at the plate in this game?!

LOL - talk about straw man. Read your own quote a little more carefully. You are quoting someone talking about the irresponsibility of propagating a totally outlandish claim, that of deliberate agency in the preparation and release. And he is completely correct. There is a huge difference between an accidental release by sloppy researchers and "engineered and released". The later being the seeds of a international political firestorm - basically an accusation of intentional Chinese biological warfare.

I'm not sure who wanted what. There is no motive for numbers of independent academics and docs around the country to have a particular agenda on this. There just isn't. The medico/scientific community were arguing from the data they saw. Now lots of outside people had agendas and pushed them for lots of reasons, but it's pure projection for the politically motivated folks to argue the science people were working from the same kind of agenda's they do. When academic people argue with each other in their break rooms they argue over data.

5 pitch inning for T. Alexander.

Dept of useless information: as of this moment on the MLB ST stats page, the Tigers are 2nd in HRs, also tied for last in hits.....

so if anything even less. So in 2020 90K per game during the pandemic as per below.. LOL - that puts them miles short of selling a million subscriptions. https://www.mlive.com/tigers/2020/10/tigers-tv-ratings-surge-in-2020-amid-pandemic.html#:~:text=That said%2C Nielsen reported that,18th largest among MLB clubs.

So when the virus 1st hit, it seemed to me the circumstantial evidence was strong that this was something that got loose from the Wuhan lab. You look at what they were working on, the proximity, the way the Chinese closed ranks. But as the more detailed scientific info started appearing the majority of the US epidemiological establish became skeptical of the lab leak hypothesis (as we all know) and from what I read their reasoning - based mostly on genetic signatures, appeared sound based on what was known. Then I pretty much stopped paying attention to the question because, in the end, the answer isn't relevant to my life. On the evidentiary side, the Chinese killed further productive investigation so you still have the 'obvious' circumstantial evidence vs the various scientific caveats arguing there are reasons to be skeptical of the 'easy' circumstance based conclusions. But it's a fundamentally un-productive argument when the possibility of resolving it has been foreclosed. In Philosophy 101 the Prof always harped on not arguing non-verifiable propositions.

Pickup Ramsey and you'd have 3 of the top 5.

according to this source, the Tigers TV ratings rating vary around 7.5-9.0 https://www.sportsmediawatch.com/2014/07/tv-ratings-tigers-down-on-fs-detroit-also-mlbespn-nbcsn/

I'm going to try a little back of the envelop finance: As per SB Nation, local revenue is 20% of the MLBs $10.9 B in media rev- so call it $2B. For lack of any other data lets cut it 30 ways - that something on the order or $70M/yr per team in local rev. The AHL subscription costs $65 for a season - lets assume they have good marketing data to support that price point. So the Tigers would have to sell a million subscriptions at that price to regenerate the gross income loss and they still have to produce the broadcasts out of that - but let's say the local ad revenue is a wash with actual broadcast costs. Is that feasible? IDK, but for certain I doubt the Wings, Pistons and Tigers could eash sell a million $70 subsriptions in our market...

HolyS.

Could. But what they could do in the sense what can be done techinically or logistically I don't think is so much the problem, it's how do the teams get paid? Right now Bally collects money from cable operators, some money from direct subscriptions, plus ad revenue, and then pays the team out of that income for the broadcast rights. It's that 1st part that is going away and probably not coming back. I have to think it's the organization of the money end that is going to be harder to figure out than who carries the games via what media.

you start getting into the accident scale effect. At one end you have car accidents that kill thousands but don't much scare anyone (their their small scale gives us a false sense of control?), at the other end you have nuclear power accidents, that have killed very few people but people tend to be scared shitless about because the potential worst case is so huge. Trains are really big - big train accidents have terrible scale (Lac Megantic) so they are pretty far up the fear scale.

any reason a streaming service has to run a full schedule? You live stream when there is a game, then you go dark......well, drop to a static web page...

One of the reasons there were a lot people that changed their mind early on was that certain sequences in the virus were the same as some lab sequences - that intitally seemed to be good evidence for a lab origin hypothesis. But then as more data came in, those sequences were found in other wild types, which kicked the legs out of that one and other factors not so favorable to lab origin gained greater weight. So there have been a lot of people whose ideas have gone back and forth as data evolved. That is how Science is supposed to work after all - best theory to fit the data as we know it today - and maybe tomorrow that is different. But the sample gathering ended some time ago and these various intelligence forays are mostly reprocessing the same old data as opposed to being able to add to it. That can be useful but clearly their need to qualify their own conclusions as 'weak' means nobody found any smoking guns. in the end, whether the virus jumped from a live animal or a petri dish has political implications but not really scientific ones. Virus research isn't going to/can't stop. And if the virus jumped in a lab it's only because risks that were already well understood weren't properly addressed. If that can be shown to have happened that's good for supporting better enforcement of reseach protocols, but it's not new science.

The good evidence is genotype evidence, and the Chinese didn't let enough of that be collected, or if they collected it aren't saying what they have. There are pretty good ways way to trace the evolution of a virus IF you have the data. If the data had been collected (or released?) the probability of an unambigous answer would have been pretty good. The fact that everyone is reduced to speculation is the result of a lack sufficient hard evidence. Different groups and can slice and dice their insufficent data sets to make any kind of 'weak' conclusions the like, does not increase what we actually know. When it comes to 'weak' conclusions, anyone's are about as good as anyone else's.

No, I think I believe I said right at the get go I didn't have a problem with his carriers dumping him. And your exposition on the commerical aspect is spot on, but it's maybe at a level one tier lower. Premise: SA said objectionable stuff->conclusion:the Plain dealer takes these justifiable actions. All sound. I'm always more insterested in how the premise "SA said objectional stuff" gets formulated as an accepted premise and by who. Granted these are purely general considerations - that once abstracted no longer bear on this case and it's not pearl clutching about it, it's just my tendency to want to abstract to the ideas that these cases make me think about. I guess in a sense my direct 'argument' such as it is would be with Rob's post. It suggests our judgments are all or should be ad hoc. While I understand Situation Ethics, I suspect that in reality they are not even if we think they are. There are probably some kind of rules we are working from whether we are concious of them or not.

that seems a pointless sentiment. My interest/enjoyment in the team doesn't follow the payroll. In fact I think it has to be more frustration to be a Ranger's fan and imagine the $$ going up in smoke as that team loses games.

Not at all nothing we can do. We can work to make sure there is more accountabilty and proper oversight. But that is always a *process*. There is no 'one and done' solution to this kind of stuff, which is what the politictians and pundits are always interested in.

I don't think the WSJ reported actually moves the needle on the debate much. There is not enough data to support any conclusion, so everyone just shades toward the explanation they like most for their own reasons. Researchers won't accept that is was a reseach accident without proof as that is critical of reseasrch, and the political types won't accept it wasn't the result of some activity by a foreign power they are critical of without proof. And there is no 'proof' because the Chinese have made sure there won't be proof, probably because the Chinese don't want to have to deal with the fallout from either answer.

You know how this kind of facility starts out as one thing, may morph into another. The same could have been at any US University. You build a bio reseach facility - then the you take on new areas of research. Where are you going to put them? Where the facilities already are - otherwise you can't afford it. Plus you need trained personnel, maybe you are joined to an academic institution - none of that stuff is going to be found out in the sticks in any country. The problem is that people get sloppy about safeguards because good protocols can be a pain to follow. The need to do the research on how diseases jump species is real enough - the devil is in the details. Part of the problem in China is that it's too easy for people who want to raise objections to things being done wrong to get railroaded out of the way. Hell you and I both know that happens too much here even given that our systems are supposedly 'open'. In China if there is political pressure to get ahead in some area of study, good luck. And it's not like the Chinese were completely off the resevation in proposing to do 'Gain of function' reseach. IIRC correctly researchers at Wuhan participate in same grant and approval processes at NIH and have had various US partners in their work there.

I don't shed any tears for Adams. I do worry generally about how and where and limits when it comes to thought-policing. This case may be fairly clear cut, but at some level it is important to understand why dumping on Adams might be more OK than dumping on someone else in the next case.

Unfortunate mismatch between the specie's evolutionary time scale and it's ability to mess up the planet. 🌎💤

also part of the broader phenomenon of not wanting to know how the sausage is made. Just give me my 21st century lifestyle and let me pretend it all happens by magic.