gehringer_2

right. Not even in the same family.

Was give given a copy of 'the Dawn of Everything' which looks to be arguing Rousseau and Hobbes were all wrong. I'll let you know if they succeed in drowning the Leviathan.

the biggest problem with this view is the technological society. The needed for pooled action is easy to see in the case of crime/security. If the bad guy is young, 6'8" 275lbs and/or has a gun, you want society organized to bring the strength of the full society to your aid. But the idealization the individual can navigate the modern advanced technology market on his own scientific competence, or that the market can manage resource utilization decisions fairly or safely in the absence of accounting systems that actually capture true social costs, idealizations that underpin libertarianism, are fantasies. No individual in 10 life times can gain knowledge of enough sciences and technologies to make only informed market choices, so like we pool physical strength, we are forced to pool knowledge collectively in the form of the regulatory state. Likewise no economy has yet devised a accounting model that forces the external costs (health/safety/environmental) of their operations on corporate actors. Again, this demands the pooling of social judgement on the advisability of economic activities in the form of the regulatory state. It actually is exactly the same case as crime/violence with the same validity. So this is where/why libertarianism agitprop becomes the favorite charity of the robber baron class. The easiest way for the Koch's or Exxon or GM to clear the way for whatever irresponsibilities they are motivated to commit in the name of profit is to proselytize for the libertarian case across the country. When it comes to the libertarian argument just follow the money. When you see who is paying the bill, that should give you pause to understand you are being co-opted if nothing else does.

is it still the largest offer he has received to date? What he says he wants and what he gets might end up being quite different. If the Tigers looked around the league in their judgement no-one was going to give him what he wanted, they had nothing to lose by making an offer they were willing to pay. Call it due diligence, or just keeping some faith with the fan base. True, the internal contradiction is that over the years it's pretty obvious the Tigers always want to do their business early, but a "you know you aren't really going to get what you want offer" to a player is more likely to yield a deal if it comes near the end of the FA process than the beginning. Of course the other thing we don't know is how many teams had already made Correa other offers he had rejected.

LOL, $50K Xmas present

I don't even think you know what Marxism is if you think it has anything to do with anything in this thread. But be that as it may, expecting people to make some level of accommodations in their own lives for the benefit of their fellow travelers is not called tyranny, it is called civilization. Try parsing this sentence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Do you notice the 1st principle is "LIFE" and the the rights are meant to inhere in *all*. Read some John Locke (the guy the Founders cribbed all this stuff from). Government exists to take us of out of the natural state of warfare every individual would otherwise be in with every one else. It is the reasonable expectation that your liberty will be proscribed by necessity of helping other people also gain their lives and liberties. The US right seems to want nothing more than to return exactly to some kind of state of individualist state of warfare as though it were some kind of virtue. Nothing could actually be further from the motivating principles for the founding of this nation.

Trump only wanted to deny the virus required any actions that might affect the economy and reduce his chances of re-election. He was perfectly happy to talk up the virus in terms of him being the country's savior from it. So for Trump like *everything* else, his relation to facts about the virus were completely transactional: If they helped him they were true, if they impeded him, they were false.

isn't most of surveillance provided in downtown Detroit provided by Bedrock rather than the police? Not quite the same as having their people in the street but a case of a private org directly contributing to or supplementing police activity.

and he is probably still 3-4 yrs away from peak strength - if he can stay healthy.

the number that cross the border and the number that get caught are both pretty meaningless. There is a large flow of Mexican nationals in both directions all the time.

wow. Don't think it's common for a brain tumor to go un-diagnosed to so long and then kill you so quickly. Then again, having known at least one BT victim, the long drawn out case may be worse.

No scale to judge the size of the hole on top but at the right size I'd day candle holder?

good news bad news story about Omicron in the NYT today. Good news: Data from England/Scotland says that Omicron infections results in fewer hospitalizations per case. Bad news: that may because many Omicron infections are re-infections of people that have already had delta. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/12/22/world/omicron-covid-vaccine-tests and also this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/22/south-africa-omicron-coronavirus-cases/

if true, silly move politically. Oil Co's will drill if prices stay high - period. Don't need to waste your breath one way or the other.

If I had it to spend, I would rather spend most of $22M on relief arms than Myers.

yeah, that was alarming.

People who have non-serious cases of the flu are not dead, their experience doesn't add into into the counting fatalities at all. People who go to the hospital with serious cases are tested for flu virus. (in fact most people that enter a hospital for any reason during flu season are tested for flu). There is little ambiguity in the results of a clinical flu test - certainly nowhere near enough to affect aggregate statistics.

a vaccine NEVER works until a person has been infected. The question is how much the virus duplicates before the immune system catches up to the infection. With no vaccine about 1% of COVID patients will die before that happens. With the vaccine that is going to happen to ~90% fewer people. With Omicron the vaccine replicates more before the immune system catches up than with delta, but the evidence so far is that even though with Omicron enough replication takes place that you reach the point of being infectious yourself, your immune system is still going to catch up before you get seriously or in most cases more than slightly sick. From a epidemiological stand point you'd prefer a vaccine that is better at stopping the spread, but clinically it's still important to have one that saves peoples' lives.

if you are funding the build out of a new energy industry and you aim some of those development dollars into ex coal areas that is certainly a better shot at giving those guys a leg up than having all the HW come from China.

True, though a lot of the ‘hues’ in the ME today came from the Roman era but even more so from the crusades. In my ME family the joke goes back generations that that the blue eyed among us were “Crusader Babies”. The odds are good that the ME was more ethnically homogenous in 6 BC than it is even today.

Pretty bad when the coal miners understand the future better than leadership. People will accept the future if it comes with a “we in it together” vibe rather than a “good luck buddy” one.

the average American is too steeped in American myth to believe the government could so south here. To entertain the idea violates too much of their identity system. What they do respond to is stuff like Charlottesville or Jan 6 - because "That kind of thing shouldn't happen here". Politically the value is the same - it does drive people away from the right, but it's more reflexive, emotional and abstract than a concern about fascism. And you get the same effect from city riots in the other direction. It's less a particular politics as social embarrassment to be associated with bad stuff.

that is going to be the story of his season the rest of the way.

well that is my point, it is *becoming* visible, but how much more visible will it need to be before it creates real political pressure? The case in point would be FL. If climate change is still not a big political issue across the political spectrum there based on observable evidence, then it's hard to expect it to be other places.

Yes - disregard of American wage earners is a sin the Dems are going to have a hard time atoning for. And to be honest, other than Biden (and I suppose Bernie if you want to consider him "in" the party) I'm not sure much of the rest of the party still gets it.