gehringer_2

Someday we get a constitutional convention when CA tells the rest of country to either rebalance representation or they are seceding. The US needs CA a lot more than CA need the US. There won't a civil war to hold the union together this time.

Looks like someone is going to tryu to grease the skids on the slippery slope....

in the 8 yrs between 2016 and 2024 something along the line of 30 million people will have been born and died in the US. 8 yrs is an eternity in the life of the electorate. That last 4 elections have been won by a total less than that.

LOL - Look at pop culture right now. What can't you go more than two places through a movie catalog without running into?... answer - a Super Hero. I don't believe the omnipresence of the meme is an accident.

so you know just how much what you did was the exception to the rule. In some places community colleges are trying to fill this role, but they are generally pretty poorly supported.

I'm speaking generally here, MC - from this perspective (i.e.having voted 13 times for president) it gets hard not to get tired with people who get all down and dumpy when the Pres doesn't turn out to be Jed Bartlett or Elivs Presley. When the republic is reeling and fundamental institutions are dying from lack of maintenance, we damn well better be able to get excited over a guy that has some kind of loyalty to principles and institutions and shelve the concerns about how much fanboy joy the Pres gives some cohort. The generation of kids that grew up with helicopter parents don't want to find out the hard way that they weren't done any favors by being led to believe someone else is going swoop in and take care of all the stuff for them that isn't entertaining enough to be fun.

It's more than the worker side however. Unlike say Germany, in the last 70 yrs the US has pretty much gotten out of the business of doing public vocational training. We have relied on industry to do their own, and for a long time that worked. But in the quest for ultimate ROI, American business has decided it's easier to steal skilled tradesmen from each other than spend the money to train them themselves - only to see them stolen by someone else. Net result is US trains a lot few tradesmen than it once did, thus perennial shortages. Of course the loss of defined benefit pension plans has also contributed to skilled workers' increasing willingness to move around as well. A lot of this kind of thing could be addressed if we had a politics that worked - we could do vocational ed again, incentives are out their make a company investment in workers lower risk. These are mostly not particularly partisan issues if properly framed. But there is usually at least on special interest that opposes whatever needs to be done. As long as the system is controlled by those willing to spend the most to protect the status quo on a political issue, we will continue to be unable to solve even simple problems.

It's also the the larger demographic trend. The very center of the baby boom is exactly at retirement age so you have an unprecedented number of people leaving the labor force. On the other end the cost of child care drives more parents with small children out of the low wage workforce because the income trade off is not good enough. Higher wages won't do much to stem retirements, but they could pull more parents who are at home back into the workforce.

population is still getting older, demand will still be weak once supply chain issues taper off so the long term trend will remain deflationary. On the inflation side the labor market is finally tight enough to produce some wage inflation, and the the stimulus on the fiscal side is large. But the monetary stimulus on the fed side has also been large and as the Fed tapers that the extra effect of the fiscal stimulus will be blunted. I can see the problem being that as the Fed tapers, it will depress the market and the Wall Street people will start screaming about it. One of the problems ever since 2008 is that too much of the stimulus in the economy has been monetary, and that money tends to flow too much to investors, compared to fiscal stimulus which flows into the economy on more of a bottom up basis. But we have a pretty spoiled investor class in the US now. The Fed should be able to control this inflation if politics allow it to.

well, they lost by less than they were out rebounded by.

Should they make the playoffs they should be a better team with Vrana and Bertuzzi ( and maybe Berggren) than what we see right now. So maybe a 4 or 5 game series where they lose close twice.

well, that didn't take long: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/sports/college/2021/12/10/fake-slides-now-against-rules-after-pitt-qb-picketts-trick-vs-wake/6462187001/?itm_medium=recirc&itm_source=taboola&itm_campaign=internal&itm_content=RightRailArticleThumbnails-Redesign

you know you could just gargle a 1/2 ounce of Tanqueray and get the best of both worlds.....

All, true. Long story short: I didn't say there weren't reasons for a tournament, only that a larger tournament would do less to determine which of the consensus elite teams was the best. That was supposedly the original motivation for instituting the current championship playoff. It was just too terrible to have to contemplate the possibility of two different schools finishing at the top of the two polls. Mich/Neb must never happen again! Now of course that is only one reason for a playoff. Whether it's best one or the only one is in the eye of the beholder.... A 12 team tournament may have any number of virtues, but resolving the old split poll situation to pick "the best" team from the one or two that rose to the top during the season isn't one of them.

be nice if they show up for this one since it's Friday night and I don't have any homework.

And the difference between Tx and Ca is more than just wages. For example, real estate costs for the franchise in CA are probably something like double on average.

But what does that mean? We know that the outcome of single game between two teams does not really resolve which team is 'better' in any general sense. If UM played OSU each week for 10 weeks I would not put a nickel on Michigan winning 5 or more. So of course if 12 teams play the outcome is going to have a high degree of randomness overlaying what ever 'real' difference there is in the quality of the teams. The initial idea of the tournament was to resolve the argument between which of the *small* number of teams that might all have some level of support for deserving the overall championship, i.e., those that got 1st place votes in a split poll. There is no way there are any number of people are contending the #12 team may really be the best in the country. There are reasons for having tournaments ($$$) but widening the tournament in football will just dilute the degree to which its winner is going to be the team most people believe is the best team - so that is not the reason this one will expand. The expanded playoff just moves you closer to the situation like the baseball playoff, where the winner is no-more than the team on the best short term run. The Braves may have won the WS, but would any sane baseball person exchange take the 2021 Braves in for the 2021 Dodgers or Giants?

the wings keep playing in their own end on 5 on 5 like they are short handed. They keep sagging off the puck carrier even when there is no odd man to worry about. You never get the puck back playing so passive.

terrible period. Seider caught flat footed on the 2nd goal. Leddy can't make an outlet to save his life tonight but the holding call on him was a joke

Kulfan went through the injury list for tonight in his daily column in the News and didn't mention anything about Seider being out.

Kulfans daily Wings update in DetNews now reports Hronek "playing through an injury" https://www.detroitnews.com/story/sports/nhl/red-wings/2021/12/09/red-wings-namestnikov-enjoying-increase-offensive-production/6446217001/

This is true, but I think it's only part of the equation. It doesn't matter if a coach is loved, but it does matter if he knows how to get inside the heads of his players to get them to perform. Case in point would be Scotty Bowman. But I think there that if you cross the point where most of a team really thinks the coach is an A-hole, where they have 'dismissed' him so to speak, his chances of being able to manage, let alone motivate, that team probably do get a lot worse (e.g, Patricia or Mike Babcock at the end of his Det tenure).

Al Borges on a recent Michigan insider talked about how as a coordinator you look out at a defense and think "This is available and that is available", but then you look at what your personnel can execute and you realize, "No, it's not....."

When I was young, I remember still seeing still immigrants coming to the USA from Western Europe and Scandanavia. You don't see may resident Euros in the US any more other than people on transfer by multi-nationals.

LOL - From 1976: https://www.nytimes.com/1976/01/04/archives/ftc-disputes-validity-of-research-on-listerine.html