gehringer_2

the Hen's D this season has been a work in progress to say the least.

this is just more proof, as if any is needed, that opinions within groups are fixed, the variability in turnout for each group is going to swamp any error in assessing each candidates standing within a group or any movement of people from one cohort to another. And each pollster is can do nothing more than guess how turnout is going to break - it's very hard to survey what people are actually going to do vs what they say they intend to do.

Hurters seems to be a split personality guy, great outing, then he gets bombed - then a great outing...

what did we get for Chafin again?

You still haven't offered your idea of a better solution. If you don't have one to further the discussion, then as has been suggested, time to drop this to the bit bucket.

LOL - Lots of athletes of both sexes are epic crybabies. Remember John McEnroe for instance? Do you think we are going to get to good social policy based on the over-wrought emotional responses of losing athletes?

Or the other possible take is that maybe because Dough Emhoff is already so close to the ticket, all the anti-semetic stuff is already in play so adding Shapiro isn't going to make it any worse - he's pre-inoculated in a way. I don't know if that's how it would play or not but I'm sure the people doing the election analysis will consider that possibility..

don't ask a Maga, 'they' all look the same to them anyway.

so since you like to complain about this so much, what is your solution? Are you just going to ban XY individuals who expressed female biology from birth? Ask them to compete against men? Or just exclude them, divide humanity into haves and have nots in just one more way? "It's not fair they have an Y chromosome", OK, what about an XX girl born 6' 4" playing in the WNBA, is that "fair", most woman are not that tall - is it fair. What about Yao Ming, he is about as rare a male specimen at 7' 4" as an XY female is, should he have been banned from the NBA because he was 'unfairly" tall. I'd guess fewer than 1 person in a million is born with the combination of hand-eye coordination, strength and neuro-conduction speed genes Miguel Cabrera was born with. Clearly a genetic freak that should have been banned. In the final analysis, the whole basis of athletic competition is sorting people out by how lucky they were with the genetic set they were born with, and virtually every high level champion is a genetic freak at some level, so how do *you* decide which kinds of 'lucky' are less acceptable than others?

yeah - I wouldn't call Sweeney a 'failed' prospect -- it sounds like he was drafted partly on the physical upside but the skilla haven't developed as hoped.

news out of Iran today that the Heniyah attack was a short range missile. Earlier reporting had been the room was rigged long in advance. No real reason to believe either account. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/08/03/iran-hamas-haniyeh-killing-israel/

DFAing McK wasn't my suggestion! McKinstry doesn't bother me as a bench player, but like with all bad teams, he's a player getting too many PA for his proper role because there is no-one better. People talk about Jace but the person that replaces McKinstry has to be at least semi competent at SS and no combination of Jung, Keith, Ibanez and Urshella gives you a backup SS. Kreidler hasn't shown anything in his auditions. So they are stuck, with McGonigle at least another year away IF he pans out. Puts me back in mind that letting Iggy walk was another big roster value loser.

so something I did notice looking at Tork's numbers (because I think someone here mentioned it!) is that his K rate is up significantly at Toledo. Now nobody goes down a league and strikes out more unless they are making a conscious effort to swing at more pitches, so to me that is evidence that Tork *is* working on stuff. I hope, that based how tiny his major league heat map was, they told him he had to learn to cover more of the zone and if he is K'ing more, that would be what you expect to see as he tries to learn to do that. Anyway, that's what I hope we are seeing.

IDK - the ball boy in the RF corner made some nice plays this week.... 😉

So Ezra Klein did an hour with Tim Walz (NYT Podcast) and Walz made one of the more perceptive observations about how people react to politicians, and it was that what people react to is whether the pol projects that he likes his voters, more so than whether the voter thinks he would like the pol. Which partly explains Trump's appeal. He may be unlikable, but his emotional neediness toward his fans comes through loud and clear. And it fits Hillary exactly as well. It wasn't her appeal as a person you might like as much as her dismissiveness toward other people, that if you met she wouldn't like/give you the time of day. That's what she couldn't hide. Which is why 'basket of deplorables' became so devastating for her - it confirmed an impression she already projected. And again, it may not be true of Hillary - I certainly don't know the woman, but it is how she comes across. This observation is probably also at the heart of why female candidates have so much more difficulty threading the needle with many male voters. When men judge other male pols, they don't have as much reaction to whether they think the pol would like them, men tolerate other men they don't like all that much relatively well. But if a man thinks a woman doesn't like him, then it become a judgement on his manhood, so the reaction level goes exponential.

If a team were going to have two Jaces, it would have to be SF.

I've some some work with F350 (about 2 ft across) quadcopters - nasty suckers. Put graphite fiber reinforced props on one of those suckers at about 8K RPM and it take a finger off before you know it.

Diesel-electric. I guess we wont be seeing any caviar that glows in the dark.

Not so much investment, but economics related - if you wonder why gasoline prices in MI have risen, the storms on the 15th took down Exxon's 250,000 bbl/day refinery in Joliet Il. It's takes more than a week just to completely restart a refinery, and that's after you've fixed whatever the shutdown may have broken.

LOL - different LEO segments on incompatible communications equip is the oldest screw-up since Marconi and it's still happens.

to me you are taking the most extreme take which I would argue is a bit of straw man. I'm not trying to say the guys are going to lay down on the field. The difference between enough success to win vs lose particularly for hitters, is very tiny, marginal loss of concentration in one or two AB a week, and the psychological factors in any group dynamic are real. Plus in baseball having a bad team objectively multiples your players' difficulties. Your pitchers are under more strain when the bats aren't behind them, your hitters are easier to pitch the shorter your line-up gets or when you are always behind. I probably short-handed it wrong in the initial post - to put it more accurately I'll put it that loss of talent can have a multiplier effect on a team that can be greater than just that of the individual player lost - part of which is strategic and part of which can follow from team morale and obviously the effect will vary with any particular group. If you don't think it happens, that's fine, but I'd argue that management thinks it matters. Teams are always trying to find players and managers who build team chemistry because they believe it can have a multiplying effect. But if you believe that can be true, you must also see that events can drive those same factors in the other direction. If you don't believe either is true, that's consistent and a valid take I won't argue.

Tech has been oversold and corrections there are dragging the indexes.

Fox has sufficiently shat the journalistic bed for the last generation that no-one should feel obligated to appear there for anything.

Depending on what kind of cover was available and what kind of flying skill he had, that might not have been so trivial a task. I have no idea what he had, but you can build a drone with very little metal and small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, and operate it from the 2.4ghz 802.01 band where there are literally hundreds of simultaneous encrypted digital signal in the air at any given moment in time.

The equilibrium for 'prime' interest rate loans should normally sit a couple of percent above the inflation rate expectation. Having use of money has a value, and if you have money and you loan it, it must make some profit over the inflation rate or you are not going to loan it. So that sets the real economic limit. Also the longer you loan it for, the higher margin over current inflation you want because you are taking a bigger risk in offering the loan. The Fed can play around and push things one way or the other for a certain amount of time - esp in the short term, but the market always wants to force long term rates to what the inflation expectation plus a reasonable profit, determines. If the economy goes into the doldrums, no-one wants to borrow and invest and inflation falls to less than the Fed target, then I could see rates under 3% (like the aftermath of the crash and the pandemic). But if the Fed manages inflation at 2%, long term rates are not likely to end up below 3.5% - 4%. The other big drag on consumer spending that was keeping things slow and rates artificially low in the post 2008 crash era was the boomers transitioning into a lower spending part of their life cycle, but the demographics are over the hump on that now.