gehringer_2

That depends on whether some of our slumping ‘O’ can be laid at AJ’s feet for organizational systems he supports that may be hurting his hitters. I’m not proposing that this is the case, but it has to be admitted as a possibility that somehow this team is sabotaging its own hitters. Of course we won’t know unless/until the team either turns around on its own or AJ leaves/is replaced.

well, it's half the issue. The other is that Americans practice more self destructive health behaviors completely apart from the value received for their medical dollar. We weigh too much, eat too badly, do too many drugs and are too sedentary for any health care system to return competitive value on the dollar even if we had a system that could, which of course we do not.

He is a little old at 59. He can still put in 10 yrs, but I’d believe they started out looking for a somewhat younger candidate.

He had one good idea that was ideal for a particular circumstance Think of it like a musician that writes one great song and never charts again

Star chicken-hawk John Bolton throws US international relations under the bus trying to pass himself off as some kind of latter day Kissinger in a Jake Tapper interview. Bolton is an idiot

Hasn’t seemed to be much pressure in Canada in recent years to pull CAD closer to parity has there? That was more of a thing back in the day.

I guess the question would be whether it would make it politically more costly for a future GOP president to pardon Trump if he has been indicted.

That is a theoretical complaint I have against the primary system though. Hillary beat Bernie in a lot of states that the dems were going to lose badly anyway. If I’m running a party, I’d rather have a system that gives my voters more weight in the places I can actually win. Admittedly I can’t tell you exactly what that should look like, but I can’t escape feeling the dem’s current system works to their own disadvantage.

One hit, one walk. Now we wait to hear if his arm fell off this AM.

I think for now they won’t want to cut the spread between the one month and one yr rate, which is 1.5%, by more than half, which means 0.75%, but of course that is a pure guess!

Meh. It’s all psychological play at this point. Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter, but probably has little functional effect on business behavior at anything below 3% so it’s more a matter of trying to devine animal spirits than make an economic analysis.

Don’t bring facts in to upset the narrative.

Stocks should pay more dividends. The historically long appreciation in stock values after the 80's inflation followed by the IT/tech business explosion and the long, long period of continually falling interest rates left the market willing to forego dividends because valuations kept climbing. If we reach an era where things calm down, and esp if you have a level or slowly increasing interest rate environment for an extended period of years, it makes sense that demand by shareholders for regular dividends will increase.

Yeah - he does seem like a good guy. Maybe he and the team were just burned out on each other and he will get another shot somewhere else.

I'd have a hard time coming up with a dumber idea than central bank issued bit coin. Solution in search of problem.

as a practical matter, voters in MI have been showing their ID to vote for as long as I have been voting.

Michigan has two public petition options, one for proposals, one for Constitutional amendments. The abortion initiative is a Constitutional amendment. The legislature can have no input on that other than to try have the courts rule it is flawed in some way - but that is going to be nearly impossible with the simple language. The GOP did try that with the redistricting amendment and failed pretty miserably. The voter access proposal is a voter legislative initiative. The state legislature can short circuit one of these becoming law if it passes a substantially similar law. That is where there has definitely been some abuse and I really don't know the limits of what the legislature is allowed to change. There are some complexities around voter initiatives and things that require budget expenditures that the legislature has been able to use to thwart previous initiatives, but I'd have to look them up as I don't remember the details.

there is a bad metallurgy joke in there about the "The diecast isn't cast"

Because unless the guy has been kidnapped and is being held for ransom, you would not think he would be doing so much to torpedo any chance he has of being offered the chance to get paid in the majors in the future. It may an assumption, but it’s a pretty decent one. There just aren’t that many possible circumstances that would preclude him at least communicating. And the league has established diversion channels for things like substance abuse. So I’m guessing this does have to be either something really weird, which is what makes it interesting (possibly), or he just doesn’t want to play for Det., which would be irritating. And might also reflect back on FO incompetence for not having done adequate homework.

according to WaPo, Yamagami's mother sold two homes and signed the proceeds over to the Unification Church. Easy to see the source of his anger against the UC. But the media pretty much avoiding running down the connections between the UC and Abe or the Japanese political establishment. .......Very interesting. A few years ago a grad student I worked with went to Korea over summer break to be married in one of the Moonie mass ceremonies - thousands of couples. No lack of weird religious stuff out there.

so I'm beginning to suspect that the Tiger brain trust has come up with a 'system' for hitters in Detroit - maybe around the way scouting reports are presented or the advice for hitters on approach, or the nature of the film work being done or BP is conducted - or some combination of all of it that they are committed to but which simply doesn't work for a number of their hitters. I really can't think of any good reason that no-one on the staff is being held accountable for the horrible approaches other than that the players are actually trying to work inside the system they are being given, that the system is crap, and the Tigers won't move off it.

Right. I mean theoretically I suppose the Tigers could sue him to demand he perform the contract - i.e. come back and play. But even though that might be legally supportable, the reality is that the law can't enforce that a player play a high skill game well so that kind of legal strategy is generally worthless. It's not quite like suing a contractor who is late to demand he finish building your house!

Sadly it still matters because american media, which is also economically illiterate, still fixates on GDP, and that fixation will drive political outcomes.

Yahoo seldom has much on it's finance page that's interesting, but this is a nice recap on why GDP, it's rise and fall, and thus what are technically called economic growth and recession, are nearly completely uncoupled from the population's real economic well-being. For years, GDP went up and we called it growth even though the average worker continued to lose ground and all the income went to investors. Today, GDP is slumping but it's largely investors that are taking losses in the market while conversely the average wage earner's outlook is improving by better measures of the general population's economic well-being than GDP. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/millions-get-jobs-as-gdp-falls-155824972.html

Bingo. But the truth is that on that there has always been a certain kind of convergence between the radicals on the left and right when it comes to short cutting process in favor of coercive power. Just look at how the left and right in the middle 20th century both ended up with concentration camps as prime parts of their political program.