gehringer_2

If you’ve reached middle age and never had an episode where it took you 2+ Hrs at least once you are lucky. I’ve ended up in long lines in the Det burbs, Ann Arbor, Minneapolis. That’s the thing, its unreliable even in white suburbia. If you go to vote on a lunch hr, you never know if you are still going to get lunch. That may not make it “hard” by some definition, but it shouldn’t be the way it is

I don't know if Roberts is half right or half wrong. There was a time when discrimination was enforced by law, and the best way to end that is for the law to be colorblind. That is true - as far as it goes. The trick is that in American we have found lots of ways to create discrimination that don't depend on the law - for instance housing patterns that result in segregation, which in turn leads to resource withdrawal from minority populations does not come about because of any active support in law one way or the other. The question for society to face is how does a society based in law, change something without using law without the law itself becoming discriminatory. Roberts is right that that is the fist step down a slippery slope back to legally enforced discrimination - so it's a complex question and I don't think that as a society we have even figured out the correct formulation of the question.

This is pretty important. We have been down the path before where a western leaning gov and media have told us “our population is with us” only to find out that was”I guess not so much”

didn't happen to specify how many decades the exercise may take did they?

and of course while a narrow aspect of the argument like 'how many majority black districts' is relevant to the VRA, it actually has nothing directly to do with which side is favored by which map in practice. As has been seen in MI, dividing the city of Detroit vote actually favors the Dems and there has been much GOP wailing and gnashing of teeth over our new district maps even though one result may be the loss of a minority congresscriter.

that's the one saving grace of how extreme the right wing on the court is, they are driving Roberts to the middle, so we are creeping slowly closer to a 5-3-1 court than a 6-3 than the conventional wisdom would say. The question would be does he snap back if Biden happenes to get another appointment?

IDK, either he's getting close to the "I'm going to hold my breath until I turn blue, then you'll be sorry!" stage, or he really wants to start WWIII.

Kevin Sorbo is still alive?!

I can see Vincent having been written for Masden and he could have done a credible job, but it would have been a much different movie for sure. Masden would not have elevated the role to a clear 2nd lead opposite Willis the way Travolta did - it would have remained an ensemble role and more screen time would have been other stories. LOL - At the time QT may have been the only one who thought JT was even a good 2nd choice.

was the reservation about lack of progress specific to international signings? I lost track.

Good. Now can we hear it directly from Scholz?

case rate number collapse behind Omicron is amazing. In a sense it shouldn't be surprising because it's what everyone was waiting for from the beginning but there have been so many false lulls we've almost stopped expecting anything to go right.

Tough audience. The Tigers played 6 mo of 500 ball last season - I take that as progress for a team that lost 114 in the prior full season.

well, whaddya gonna do with all the co-eds now off limits?

the "Genuine Draft Bowl" brought to you by Miller.

#social construct

Fair question - we never got close enough for it to be interesting. Asian countries, Canada, Australia used pretty strict entry rules and have been able to avoid much re-infection from outside - granted that may have been much more difficult for the US. On the other hand, it's like anything else - the 1st world could afford to mitigate the problem world wide - or at least in enough of the world that travel for commerce could go on. Covid may well end up compounded into the annual flu shot or as as side by side with annual updates for variants. Again, that's really not a particularly big deal - something like 50-60% of the country already gets a flu shot every year - we already do these things at close enough to the scale needed that it's no great logistics challenge. Masks should go away when infection rates fall, which they inevitably have to, and in fact Omicron did us a backhanded favor in that regard. Between the vaccinated and the previously infected the numbers left are shrinking. It's a matter of probability, when there aren't many infected people around, there is no point in people wearing masks. Or the next variant may be even less virulent and at some point we won't care if it just circulates around causing the sniffles. Of course if the rest of the people would get vaccinated, this could all happen faster than waiting for nature to take its course.

It's pretty pointless to look back to spring 2020 assumptions since so many have turned out to be wrong. 'Flattening the curve' was based on two premises, one of which was correct and one which was incorrect. The incorrect one was that effective treatments would become available so that the people that went to the hospital would be saved in large numbers. Turns out that was by and large untrue. There has been some effective therapy progress but reality has been a far worst case than anyone ever imagined. That is beginning to change with a couple of drugs finally hitting, but overall the prognosis for those that ended up on a ventilator stayed pretty crappy for a long time into this. The other was to hold back wide scale infection as long as possible on the hope a vaccine would appear. Of course lo and behold the biotech guys got us the vaccine, and the idiot public has refused to adopt to a high enough degree to put an end to the generalized public health risk. So here we are in a position where there are still vulnerable people (immuno compromised, the 5% that don't respond to the vaccine, etc) that are left with a risk level that is unnecessary but for their uncaring neighbors. You mention "your risk tolerance"is low. Well it's not my tolerance, I worked in person with 18 yr old petri dishes right through the whole thing. It's the risk that I think it's fair to leave the vulnerable with when it's so unnecessary.

I think what is still missed when it is said that vaxxed people are still infectious with Omicron is that will still likely have a shorter period of infection - you may even be asymptomatic. You will shed virus for fewer days if you have an asymptomatic case than if you are unvaxxed and have symptoms for several days. CDC says you are infectious until X (5?/10?) days after your symptoms are gone so if they are gone sooner you are infections for less days. You count from the day your symptoms end. So you can spread under both circumstances, but since you will shed fewer days if vaxxed and have a shorter course, you will spread less over less time and so less in practice. That said, another argument with omicron was that it is *so* infectious that you don't get the R value to less than 1.0 even among a fully vaxxed population, but that has clearly not really turned out to be true because Omicron is fading fast and and clearly *everybody* didn't get it in this round.

And IIRC Rogers wasn't even the centerpiece of the trade, Perez was. I didn't like the trade because I thought JV would have paid back his contract in better attendance at his games so any money rational was probably nonsense. But it's a little unfair to criticize the return esp in the hindsight of the litany of Perez injuries. It could just have easily have happened that JV's UCL gives out in 2018 and Perez stays healthy and joins the staff. Injuries are pretty random.

This would be the Microsoft version of "Windows on the soul"?

The the new micro chip locks right onto the retina and your world will be rosy from then on......

and I think the recent CDC paper did another serious disservice by not making clear the distinction between masking as a personal protection strategy and masking as a public health transmission reduction strategy. They are different things completely and even the professionals constantly forget to keep the distinction clear. Masks don't have to be particularly effective at preventing individual exposure to still be effective at reducing community spread. This had been a fundamental and continuing point of confusion about masking from the beginning of the pandemic and the clarity on it just never gets any better.

that won't stop 'em

ROTL. Well, that is either a terrible slander that needs to be punished or ...very funny.