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One guess ... 😁 What I wonder as I see this picture is, what are these military people actually thinking as they are watching this shambolic farce? These aren't rank and file guys in their late teens and early twenties, are they? If they are at a Pentagon briefing, they must be highly ranked officers with decades of service across multiple administrations. Do they actually respect Bob Ritchie as a symbol of American military strength? I guess the Mike Flynn-types would, but that can't be most of them, can it?

If I don't recognize a number, I don't answer. Let them leave a message if it's so important. They almost never do. Occasionally, if I am annoyed enough, I will log into my Google Voice, which is under a different number, and call the number back to see whether it's real and if so who it is. Vast majority of the time, it's not even a valid number, or if it is, a recording tells me some flavor of "we are not available to answer your call". So, number spoofing, because of course it would be. On the other side of the ledger: One of my favorites when I call a bank about an issue is the menu items (which I have to listen to in its entirety because it has recently been changed 😏). The first option is usually, "to check your account balance, press 1", and I'm thinking, how old and/or offline do I have to be to have to call a bank on the phone to see how much money I have with them? Do people actually choose that option often? Last one: whenever I call a utility like DirecTV for customer service, the first three options are usually about sending them money: "To make a payment by phone, press 1; to make a payment by credit card, press 2; to make a payment by check, press 3 ..."

If the Red Sox fired the manager and staff this early, they were probably contemplating making a change in spring training. It’s not as though Cora was setting the world on fire with this team. He inherited one of the greatest teams in history and cruised to a ring in 2018, but ever since, they’ve been kind of flailing, clustering around .500, never winning another division, and missing the playoffs more than making them. Another thing to remember: Cora was not this front office’s guy. He belonged to the Dombrowski front office. Craig Breslow gets to reshape the on-field coaching in his image now, but then he gets full blame if they end up flailing, too. I sure wouldn’t want to be a Red Sox fan right now.

The kids’ll love it, the kids’ll love it …

Many retail stores have LED digital shelf tags showing price posted in front of products, which presumably are Bluetooth-enabled and thus can be changed online. So the idea, I guess, would be to triangulate your position in the store via GPS with the products they know you buy frequently through your loyalty program via a persistent cookie on your phone, and then as you position yourself closer to the product, the price on the shelf labels increases. Either that, or, they have no shelf label posted showing price, then when you pick up the product and have it scanned at the register along with your loyalty ID, they apply a “special” price “just for you”. Now that I spool it out, the latter seems more likely as long as people get used to not seeing prices listed on shelves.

This is why I’m thinking their strategy might be to not to stop the election beforehand as some people believe, something the American people are not close to being ready to accept, but to tie up the results in court instead, to the point which Congress will not be ready (or willing) to seat representatives on January 3, and we would be without a Congress for an indefinite period of time. (lol, I know big loss.) That, or Republicans might refuse to accept the results of Democratic wins, Mike Johnson will still claim speakership, he will seat a quorum of Republicans, including election losers, in order to act as a rubber stamp for Trump for as long as they can manage to (i.e., an “anticongress”). Either way, it would solidify the unitary power of Trump and lead to who knows what after that.

In other news, Nixon was not a crook.

I take you at your word that you believe I am mischaracterizing you and that you do understand the real dangers we are facing. If I have done so, it's because I've interpreted your replies to people's—OK, to my—legitimate fears of this regime as dismissing their seriousness, by reasoning that this regime is so stupid and incompetent, no reasonable person could suppose they could ever succeed. That, to me, argues that you're diminishing the threat, because in my view, their stupidity and incompetence does not automatically disqualify any ability to post big wins for a long, long time, including beyond my lifetime and perhaps yours, too. You may recognize this as well, so I can admit that maybe I've been missing the fine needle you're threading with your position. Just a few housecleaning issues: I think it's going to take a lot more than voting and donating and protesting to finally beat these guys, but since that's all people like you and I can do, hopefully we can maintain the energy to keep it up and inspire real action by the people on our side who actually can make a difference on the inside. Their terror campaign in Mpls has not been won in the end, because we're not yet at the end. Minneapolis won't truly be over and won until Trump and his successors are out of power for good, their philosophy roundly repudiated and driven underground where it belongs, and true reconciliation achieved. Until then, they can always come back for more, and even smarter about it. Fingers crossed that poll numbers continue to matter.

They don't have to worry about people pointing fingers at them, because neutering the effectiveness of doing so is what the preemptive projection they constantly engage in is all about. There are countless examples, but here's a low-hanging one: without evidence (as usual), Trump accused Democrats of stealing the 2020 election on Election night itself, even before all the votes had been counted. Then, over the next two months, the Trump cabal laid the groundwork to steal the 2020 election, culminating with the January 6 raid, which was completely botched, so it didn't actually work that time. But it wasn't a total loss, because afterwards, anytime anyone accused Trump of trying to steal the 2020 election, it looked like a mere back-and-forth accusation without any teeth. Trump accused the Democrats first of stealing the election, then the Democrats accused Trump of trying the steal the election, then back and forth, back and forth, difference of opinion, tomato tomahto. That's how it's played out, and that's one of the reasons there's no consensus on the 2020 Election Theft issue, obvious though it all was. That's the genius of the whole projection scheme, and no, it has nothing to do with Trump being an evil genius or some such rot, because he didn't come up with the idea. It's been in the Russian playbook for centuries. The reason it's been working so well in a sophisticated, reasonably well-educated, multicultural society such as ours is that we weren't used to it. But we're starting to get used to it, and in a hurry. Now we have to figure out how to fight it, and win.

This makes sense. Bottom line: players got good eyes.

I disagree that ridiculing the Trump cabal as a bunch of weirdos isn't downplaying the threat, and the same goes for ridiculing them as stupid and incompetent. They are all those things, yes it's true, but to focus on the stupidity and incompetence and weirdness takes the pressure off their evil and, as importantly, leads us to forget that their hands are on the levers of more lethal power than any other ruling body in the history of the world. This thinking leads us into the false sense of security that they are too stupid and incompetent to control the world for even a second, and then we assume it will be their stupidity and incompetence that will bring them down, and so all we have to do is play the waiting game, which most D-leaning people believe will be this November. There is a valid historical parallel because the Nazis seemed so weird when they themselves started out, so nobody took them seriously, until all of a sudden, everyone had to. I'm sure practically everyone agrees that Trump aspires to absolute power, but if you think he wouldn't want to wield it in the way Hitler did, with the power of life and death over an entire population, then you haven't been paying attention to the effusive praise Trump unabashedly heaps on Kim Jong Un for the way he has an entire nation at his beck and call, maintained through his own Hitlerian tactics. I am all for making fun of this regime's stupidity and incompetence and weirdness. It's a great release valve during arguably the most stressful and uncertain time of our lives. What I am not for at all is sitting back and believing it is their very stupidity and incompetence and weirdness that must inevitably bring them down all on their own, and that we need do nothing more than wait them out.

I wish I had any confidence conservative voters who typically vote Republican would en masse be disgusted by this brazen antidemocratic tactic and withhold their votes from their R candidate, if not switch their vote to the D candidate, and maybe a small sliver will. But it feels very likely the vast majority of Trump voters are hooting and hollering and yeehawing at what they see as a winning move, because in the end, their wish is not to win democratically free and fair elections—crossing your fingers and hoping to win fair elections is for suckers—but to destroy the Democratic Party, become a one-party state, hijack the judiciary and the media, and vanquish once and for all the only way they could ever lose power: democracy itself. I'm not saying I know they're going to succeed. This might fail spectacularly, with the whole thing blowing up in their faces, and their being called to account for it in a court of law. That's within the range of outcomes. What I am saying is this is what they wish for, and this is what they're going to try to make happen.

I am less impressed with the A Pox On Both Their Houses position than ever before. Not only is it wholly inaccurate at those time, it actually lets the right off the hook for their obvious iniquity by equivocating the left to the same degree.

They sure do. But then, the Nazis sounded like a bunch of weirdos for their first ten years, too.

Yup, this was always the direction they’ve wanted to go in. All they need is the right match to ignite the gasoline.

He gets his ballroom and he’ll never have to go out and sully himself by having to be around the Great Unwashed ever again. Real populist Man of the People ****.

It doesn’t take any evil genius to fake an assassination. All they have to do is follow the playbook given them by their benefactors. It also doesn’t take any level of evil genius to use stupid **** like this to detract from the really awful **** they do that hurts real people but doesn’t get reported on properly because everyone is focused on stupid **** like this.

I seem to remember this happened last year, too, where our wOBA fell well short of our xwOBA. So I did a little digging and found something that kind of startled me. xwOBA—the expected wOBA a player or team should achieve given quality of contact factors such as exit velo and launch angle—has been around as a stat since 2015, so I went to FanGraphs and downloaded the full season data by team since then—eleven seasons, 30 teams each season, 330 data points—and compared their xwOBAs to their actual wOBAs across time. I created a separate column subtracting expected from actual to see whether the team's wOBA was under their xwOBA, or over it, and counted how many of the eleven seasons each team either underachieved their xwOBA, or else overacheieved it. Here are the results, ranked by worst average underachievement for the past 11 years. Spoiler alert: the Tigers are historically the very worst at overachieving their xwOBA with a better wOBA: Team Under Over Ave Diff MaxUnder MaxOver DET 10 1 -.0070 -.015 .000 OAK 9 1 -.0069 -.013 .006 KCR 9 2 -.0069 -.015 .005 SEA 9 2 -.0054 -.010 .005 PIT 8 3 -.0054 -.019 .006 LAA 10 1 -.0052 -.011 .004 STL 8 3 -.0046 -.014 .005 ATL 8 3 -.0034 -.012 .009 NYY 6 5 -.0034 -.020 .009 TEX 6 5 -.0024 -.016 .006 MIA 6 5 -.0024 -.011 .008 CLE 5 6 -.0020 -.017 .005 LAD 8 3 -.0019 -.011 .004 SFG 8 3 -.0019 -.011 .007 WSN 7 4 -.0015 -.013 .006 SDP 6 5 -.0014 -.016 .008 TOR 7 4 -.0011 -.007 .010 NYM 5 6 -.0008 -.013 .015 MIN 5 6 -.0008 -.017 .009 BAL 5 6 .0007 -.007 .019 CHW 4 7 .0009 -.017 .010 CHC 3 8 .0012 -.010 .009 PHI 4 7 .0012 -.006 .007 MIL 4 7 .0030 -.017 .014 ARI 2 9 .0030 -.009 .009 HOU 6 5 .0037 -.004 .016 CIN 2 9 .0043 -.017 .012 TBR 2 9 .0050 -.006 .013 BOS 3 8 .0070 -.001 .022 COL 0 11 .0139 .001 .027 ATH 0 1 .0144 .014 .014 (Read this table as: DET underachieved their xwOBA ten of eleven seasons and overachieved in one; the average difference for DET is -.007, or .007 lower wOBA than xwOBA; the maximum underachievement for DET was minus .015, and the maximum overachievement was .000.) In ten of eleven years, The Tigers' wOBA underachieved their xwOBA, and suffered the highest average underachievement of any of the 30 franchises. Only one other team, the Angels, experienced 10 out of 11 underachievements, but no other team's maximum overachievement was so low that it rounds down to zero at three digits, which itself is only a hair from an eleventh underachievement. This consistent underachievement of wOBA versus xwOBA is not something we can pin on Harris, because this happened not only for Harris teams, but for Avila teams, and for the Dombrowski team in 2015 (which, to be fair, had the sole overachivement of the eleven Tiger squads measured). Given this, and also given how persistent underachievers like OAK and SEA and LAA tend to play in tough-to-hit ballaprks while consistent overachievers like COL and BOS and CIN play in easy-to-hit ballparks, I'm given to hypothesizing that the xwOBA stat itself may not have sufficiently ironed ballpark factors out of the reported number.

You might have heard about this kind of thing: It's a ****ty thing when megacorporations can use the imbalance of marketplace information and technology power to maximize the separation of you from your money, but this article has some really good tips overall about how to minimize the probability of this, and they are relatively easy to implement if you just take a little care to do so: Delete cookies and cache regularly: This removes the tracking data companies use to determine pricing Use a virtual private network (VPN): VPNs mask your location data, which makes it difficult for retailers using dynamic pricing algorithms to raise prices Be wary of loyalty programs: These programs are ways retailers access your data to determine your shopping habits. The more data they have on you, the more likely they are to predict what you are going to buy, when and how much you're willing to spend. Shop with different devices: Before buying online, use your mobile phone and your computer, since prices can differ on each. Don't make repeated searches: If you're looking for a last-minute flight, chances are you're going to visit airline and travel deal websites to find the best deals. The only problem is that retailers can follow your searches, seeing your urgency and providing prices reflective of this. If you want to compare shops, use different browsers to do so. I've never loved the first one, deleting cookies and cache, because cookies can be very handy and the whole process of doing so is ... well, a process. The VPN is always a great idea, though, and I shop with different devices and use private browsing and the DuckDuckGo browser a lot to avoid being marked to a personal price hike.

I'm coming around to the idea that hitting has not been our problem. 😏

Tork is definitely amping up his trade value! :ducks:

Lee! Hao Yu!