gehringer_2

At this point best offers are on the table - I imagine the teams are at the point of "If you can get a better offer, take it, goodbye and good luck" but Bregman still thinks he can wring out something more so 'game of chicken' as someone described it, is probably the apt description. I'd say that the one piece of real evidence that isn't getting much play is the mode of the Flaherty signing. Note that what the Tigers put on the table to Jack was a 'fall-back' offer; the deal to pick up when negotiations with other teams on a long term deal fell through. Taking that precedent as a guide, you might guess that if they are 'in' on Bregman it's along the same lines - they've made a fair but short term offer. But that's just one more guess.

Yup. What we have is a President who is in open opposition to the 'Establishment' clause, and his opposition is in support of a part of the 'Christian' church that is functioning in open opposition to their 'establisher'.

Everyone in the NHL loves JT - even one of the Elias Petterssons, just not both.....

it's unfortunate that the year under Monty was probably a wasted development year for all of them.

I get the frustration, the regular system is broken, almost 100% because of the way it is funded, which at this point is 100% because of the Supreme Court. Unfortunately that takes time and vision and persistence to change, and the public doesn't have it. Even the Democratic party, who should not have spent more than 10 minutes since it was decided without keeping Citizen's United in voter consciousness has failed utterly to keep doing the long slow work to bring campaign finance to public awareness and consensus. So Trump is the 'short cut'. Unfortunately there isn't going to be any bread crumb trail left to get back home after we lose our republic in the Trump woods.

peer review is a system in trouble writ large. I don't know what the answer it but it doesn't work anymore. Of course, in the technical sense, I'm not sure a good grad student might not be be a better reviewer than a tenured greybeard who has mostly been a research CEO for decades. Of course not necessarily fair to the grad students that get tasked, but maybe not the biggest reason the review process is in trouble in terms of not weeding out bad research.

I suppose in the end leadership always makes a difference. There are no lack of complaints at any University about academic politics etc., but where ever the problems were in the Engin School, I wasn't near them. We had a long tenured and much loved dean over most of my time there. They are now on the 2nd since he retired so I suppose things could change at any time! And part of that may just be the way incoming funds are shared/not shared at a college. Different schools do it in different ways - some of which lead to more or less collegiality! The performance pressure is certainly real for tenure track staff, and it doesn't get much better with tenure because there is still an expectation to take on grad students and bring in the money to support them.

This is a very good point. I don't actually think it's as bad for people doing basic research for industry, I think the people that feel this the most are the R&D research and engineering types who run into the conflict that in most corporations everyone except those lucky enough to be in long term basic research ultimately report to sales. And if you are a data/truth driven worker you find out pretty fast that truth is about the first thing that goes down the drain when there's a customer to be sold. After a while that gets ....fatiguing....to deal with. Sure did for me.

There are a lot of theories one could spin. One that appeals to me is that with all the noise and distraction and entertainment, fewer students have the habit of really being able to concentrate for the extended amount of time it takes to wrap your head around and understand a complex math/engineering/programming problem. So the net result is that too many that do end up in STEM are the introverts because they never liked the noisy distracting stuff anyway because they always had something they were concentrating on - so in the end they are the ones that have those concentration skills. But then the rest of the kids see that most of the STEM kids are not the cool kids and the whole thing just re-enforces. I think for a lot of those kids, it's not until they can get into a big engineering/science environment like a major university where they are members of big socially independent cohort that has its own social reward system that they finally get to do what they like and be the cool kids too.

i.e. convenient.

Apropos of this but otherwise unrelated, many years ago sitting on a jury I was amused by a prosecution detective who tried to snow a college town jury with some very inventive ballistics physics that gave the academics that he had the bad fortune to have on the jury a good laugh back in the jury room. Always know your audience!

naw - she's just a liar - and at this point her act is pretty stale.

small fly in the ointment is that the Congress passes laws to establish the size and scope of the federal government and the executive branch's responsibility is to discharge them. For the executive to usurp the authority of Congress is not the system you swore an oath to, so does that mean your word is only good when you find it politically convenient for you?

well that would be quite the course shift for the org.

If I had to guess, it would be that if there is anything interesting in there it will be stuff that relates to US covert activity in Cuba or related to the Bay of Pigs. Stuff that got pulled up in the investigation but turned out not to relate to the assassination directly but was generally embarrassing to the US or people possibly still alive in the US or Cuba at the time or since. Or alternately info that the FBI had be watching Oswald but then lost track of him.

Odds say Jeimer is probably due for another good year after a poor one. His career average OPS+ is sitting at exactly 100, with a low of 70 and high of 137 in his full seasons. So a net cost of $15M to be rid of Maeda, have a base level of insurance or 3rd, and 1st. I'd think pretty hard about it. You aren't getting much, if any, better for the money, but some depth that's likely to be useful.

I wouldn't paint Duren with the Drummond brush though - at least not yet. Duren seems to have a better motor than Drummond ever did - so that gives him better odds to keep improving than Andre ever had.

Torres had a great second half and finished last season really strong with the bat. If that's who he is this season, everyone will love him well enough. Torres isn't quite in a class with Candelario in this regard, but there is a little bit of the same "Was it a streak or is it real" or "Which guy do you get" with him as we had with Jeimer.

I have to say the FCPA is pretty weird to work under. I was working for an oil industry services company and we had to drill on FCPA all the time, and in fact one of our divisions got nailed by it once which put the whole company under extra oversight. It's been a number of years and I probably have the details wrong at this point, but IIRC the weird thing is that FCPA doesn't (at least the state of the law then) actually prohibit bribery in general, only the very specific act of giving a government official money for doing something that is part of his official duties. It's very narrow in that regard. So under FCPA you can still toss money around in a developing country like crazy. You can pay off the president, as long as you don't pay off the official who is supposed to approve your permits. I get the idea, and I suppose some FCPA is better than no law at all on this end, but I don't believe it drove any stakes through the heart of overseas business bribery and so the general objection from US business was that it didn't do enough good to justify the compliance cost. Now of course they *would* say that even if it weren't true - and I was never high enough on the food chain to evaluate the claim one way or the other. 🙈🙉🙊

🤔 ...✔️

Of course if you manage to stay in the major for 10yr you probably won't need that pension much.... The one that isn't on there is the education benefit for draftees - but I don't know if you even need to get to the majors for that.

Should note that WCF's role at FoMoCo was never comparable to Musk's at Tesla. The operation at Ford was in Henry II's hands in the Pinto era. In fact Lee Iacocca was running Ford division during Pinto development, and was the main force pushing Ford to build smaller more efficient cars.

yup. Shooting the key for him. That's really the story across the league for all these athletic kids coming in from one and done only half cooked. The ones that develop some shooting skills can go a long way.

the 1st half was fun just to see KC get their hat handed to them after escaping so many games they could/should have lost this season. The 2nd half was definitely a snooze fest other than the Mahomes bombs at the end. I was at least a bit surprised/disappointed in Andy Reid though. He has one of the most escapable QBs in the NFL and hardly rolled him out or reversed or screened, or basically did anything to try to freeze the Philly D-line penetration. Maybe he decided they were too over matched for anything to work.

Ha! But you can survive almost anything with the right genes. I had one grandparent that smoked unfiltereds until a death at 93 unrelated to smoking. The other side of the family lung cancer killed about 75% of the men long before 90!