gehringer_2

I don't know if I'm considered a liberal or not () but I think we need to shift our whole understanding about media regulation from the free speech paradigm to the environmental pollution paradigm.

I'm not here to argue your points above, with which I agree, but to note that I really don't get how people lump Pelosi's fully decorous and completely symbolic act, into the same pot with things that are often crude, essentially aggressive and/or assaultive/disruptive in nature.

it's one thing to take them out of service for a short term geopolitical gambit, it's another to let the total investment go down the drain by leaving the damaged lines open to salt water to corrode into scrap. In fact I would actually invert the argument. If the Russians didn't want the line taken out of serivce - they would have moved to repair them immediately wouldn't they? That said, our side did have an interest in making sure Germany didn't backslide on its Russian epiphany. If the recent row over Leopards is any indication having discounted gas from those pipelines off the table may be doing as much as any single factor preventing more German backsliding. In this world it seems anything is possible, but to this point I'm still coming down on the side of believing it's another of Putin's 7 dimensional chess gone awry before I'm persuadimg myself that the incredibly leaky US gov took the risk they could do this without being found out.

You see this syndrom a lot, it's the desperate fight against the dying of the light for a person who was once relevant and is now fading into irrelevance.

Ahh. Indeed.

I'm taking Kerry Carpenter as my dark horse impact player. Guy's been underestimated/ignored at every level but just goes out and gets it done.

LOL - that's the one problem in major league baseball, you have have a huge number of candidate prospects and still have them all fail. 😢

This is spot on. And BTW the people that run Ann Arbor should have their eyelids pinned open (a la Clockwork Orange's Alex) and be forced to watch this until they get it.

I think this is the 1st time I've seen quite so interactive a SOTU speach. Probably a form or rhetoric more fitting for the times.

Old people can certainly get prickly, but I wonder sometimes if these feuds between old guys become almost a subconscious defense mechanism that gets them out from under the pressure of doing something they probably just don't really want to do anymore (i.e. pretend they are 20), but aren't 'allowed' step away from by fans/society....

and the thing is, so what if he did? (survive a primary). How are you going to vote for a 'good' GOP guy when all his presence in the legislature will do is empower the rest of GOP idiots? I get the idea there is some sense out there that people are looking for 'good' GOP candidates so they can feel better about voting GOP because........ Well because why exactly? Because it comforts their sense of tradition? That party needs to LOSE and lose BIG so the wackos currently controling it lose control of it. If there was any doubt remaining our recent "Three Days of Kevin" should have put them to rest. Filling in around the margins with sane people who will not control the party or even oppose it internally in any meaningfully useful way just perpetuates everything currently wrong in US politics. A Nickelson's Joker would put it - the GOP town needs an enema. The total cleanse.

they're being rope-a-doped.

yeah - I don't see how Meijer gets through a GOP primary process either.

that one surprised me. His results in his limited outings last season didn't offer much reason to retain him, but I guess he was showing something to the coaches.....

I imagine the answer to that is mostly to see what they can get away with, and gather intelligence from how and with what hardware and what methods the US responds. Low cost, low risk. Conversely, if this is not the 1st one of these (and it apparently is not) then you can guess the US has been sitting and watching for exactly the same reason - to see what China wants to try to get away with, figure out what information they were looking for (and thus value), and gather intelligence about what methods and hardware and command and control they are using. After watching several the value in that probably reaches the point of decreasing returns to the US decides the end the little game of mutual, symmetric gamesmanship. Spying is alwys a strange exercise, feints and feints within feints. It's never clear the spy doesn't betray more useful information to the side he is spying on than he (or it) gains. And each side usually believes they are thinking one move ahead of the other, even if neither are. I believe in trying to keep technologies to produce capabilities secret. but less so the capabilities themselves, and most of the rest of what each side tries to keep secret is probably counterproductive. It's ignorance that leads to paranoia and miscalculation and bad outcomes. If your enemy knows your capabilities, that *may* give them some kind of edge, but that's going to be less strategicaly dterminative than their realization that it's going to be really hard to succeed in whatever they have in mind if they are considering starting something stupid. More information is more stablizing than the secrecy buffs will admit.

This island is between Buffalo and Toronto, but it's sort of noisy at night...

Same Chinese manufacturer probably made those balloons for Google ten years ago....

I bet we give dictatorships too much credit for having their shit together sometimes. Just because a guy like Xi is the ultimate authority on everything and anything, doesn't mean he has a clue about everything going on in his government - no one person ever could. I would guess the truth is their bureaucracy probably works a lot worse even than ours- so you probably have all kind of PLA brass running around with their own bankrolls and pet schemes and you end up with stuff like this.

if the regiona RSNs are defunct they need to just open up gameday into one national service - pay the fee, watch any game, anytime. Nothing better you could do for the fan base. Of course you are going to have teams that are too greedy to let their TV revenue come back to them through the league.

Joking aside, didn't a C-17 go down a few years ago when some heavy ordinance it was carrying apparently became usecured, slide across the deck and put the plane into a unrecoverable attitude stall? Carrying armor on planes is not necessarily any picnic.

Romad would probably tell you if he could.....💣ys If I had to take a wild guess, the advantage of a balloon is that it more less loiters so it might be better for gathering data for signals analysis. Other than that I would have no idea. Well, it's a lot cheaper per pic than a satellite. Or maybe one of their intelligence satellites blew a fuse and they are trying to make up some of the deficit on the cheap.........

yes - a falling bullet shot at any high angle will be at terminal velocity when it hits the ground, which will be much less than muzzle velo, but still for a dense material like lead that can be plenty to cause a fatal body penetration. You can't do that accurate a calcuation by hand because a falling bullet tumbles so it's not presenting a constant cross section. But you can do a min/max calc to bracket the real value. To do more than that needs a fluid mechanics simulator. I could give you a rough range for a bullet if you want to pick a caliber and weight......🤓

QFT

I'm paying DirectTV $6/mo for Bally. I'm OK with that but I won't go to $20. If someone who watches as much Tigers and Wings as I do won't, there can't be much of a market out there at that price beyond Edman! 📺❌

I think it figures in the perception of the overall entertainment value even if not the reality - it would for me anyway. If I buy a premium stream, any time on any evening I can find something to stream. A sporting event you have to do on it's schedule and especial for Hockey or Basketball, it's only every other day during the season at best so in terms of paying for availability of a desired entertainment, so I'll take the entertainment stream if the prices are close and I have only 'x' $ to spend. You can DVR stuff (which I do) to make it more 'on demand', but if you are a fan odds are you already got the score. I'll still watch a hockey game after I know the outcome, but I would rate it's value lower, and I nearly never watch a baseball game after the fact unless there is some unique aspect - no hitter kind of thing etc. Obvious this is pretty YMMV kind of personal preference stuff.