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Tokyo is biiiig, and there are a lotttt of people ...

Eye-opening.

Some will say yes, and sooner than later.

I refuse to take any customer service survey in which the very first question is, "Would you recommend (our service) to a friend?" That's when I know for certain all they are looking for is a verifiable marketing metric, and not for serious feedback on what's good about the service and what they can do to improve it.

Also, literally blaming Teh Left's rhetoric for forcing them to have to execute a citizen they'd already subdued.

Thanks for clarifying that one. Maybe they're trying to tweak the blue-leaning state with the ruby red county, so that they fight each other. That also tracks because the last thing this administration wants is for people to reconcile and get along. That doesn't help them.

I didn't even like him particularly as the person he was presenting as. Not that he was a bad guy, necessarily, although he did get caught up in several bad guy things. But I always imagined it would be more likely he would bully me around for kicks than have a beer with me. Honestly? I'm glad he and Tigers have apparently cut ties with one another and he's not hanging around the team trying to maintain his thumbprint on it. His time with the team seems like a hundred years ago to me, probably because the last seven years he was just so bad at baseball. He was, in fact, the worst player in baseball who was allowed to come to the plate at least 2,500 times during those years. https://www.sports-reference.com/stathead/tiny/cbWJt

Good point. Maybe that’s why they’re going after old ladies and restaurant workers and children. They don’t fight back and are easy to subdue. Actual criminals would tend to give these guys a fight.

I dont understand why they don’t just build all these concentration camps in the Deep South, or upper Midwest or mountain states, or Arizona, instead of trying for blue states areas in Virginia? For one thing, the political climate is favorable for them there. For another, they would be able to weaponize the natural climates in these regions against detainees, which would further degrade the conditions housing them and probably save them some money operating the camps. Unless the underlying purpose is to make a show of forcing a blue-leaning county in a swing state to declare themselves to be anti-Trump by refusing to house the concentration camp, which presumably would mobilize the slack-jawed yokels to show up at the polls for them in a mid-term election? As part of a broader underhanded campaign, that kind of tracks, too.

One of the things I love about soccer broadcasts is that there are no commercial breaks during each entire half, and very few other on-screen ads or mentions. By contrast, the more frequent commercial interruptions during baseball games, including RSN crawls, bumpers, billboards, drop-ins, play sponsorships, betting odds, and between-batter commercials, has made our favorite sport that much less pleasant a viewing experience. You really notice it whenever you view a game from 50 or 40 or even 25 years ago on YouTube.

So this point just now really registered with me. Seeing how league minimum is already somewhere near $800,000, did you mean to say greatly increase league minimum to $2,500,000? Because hell yeah that would be a player win. Just trying to understand in the context of your whole post.

If the several ownerships I alluded to are basically harvesting their franchises, then I’m not really sure what could incentivize them to spend to compete, since they happily see revenue and valuation gains occur completely irrespective of the on-field performance.

Just saw that Al Cowens died an early death, age 50, from a heart attack. I could see him having the stress of being angry all the time. That takes a toll on your body.

Fair enough. The only possible cover they could have claimed is that Trump did not actually engage in this murderous activity during the first term. Now he has, everyone can see he had, and anyone who still supports him supports the citizen murder that has been documented during this term. There is no cover, no way around it, any more. Either you support discretionary citizen murder by your government for any reason it chooses, or you abandon Trump. There is no longer any middle ground to stand on.

I won't blame him for enabling fascist authoritarianism in America—it took millions and machinery to get us to that point—but I will blame anyone to the degree that they approve the public murders of people by shadowy militia figures employed by the government for doing nothing more than nothing wrong.

You have exactly right, except you also have it backwards.

I remember the Free Press running a picture Cowens and Farmer standing at home plate st Tiger Stadium shaking hands, in a show of burying the hatchet I guess, and they looked for all the world like they still wanted to kill each other.

Except Ty Cobb also had to learn the requisite skills to be able to hit the best pitching in the world to the level that he did. It was more than eyesight. I had 20-15 eyesight once. I couldn’t catch up to a decent fastball to save my life. OK, Ty Cobb is a bad example for me to defend. He started playing at age 18 in the early 1900s; there was no coached developmental path for the guys who played it; the game was not mature enough to filter all the best athletes who could have been pro baseball players toward it; it was not yet a truly national sport in terms of drawing talent; and large swaths of American were prevented by custom from playing it at the highest level. I’ll update my defense of the eyesight thing to Mike Trout.

All except Chicago—that’s a lost cause for Republicans. If we were to ever get to the point to which Chicago is contestable for the president, we’d be looking at a Nixon 1972-level landslide and, really, one-party rule.

Maybe you start one and I will hit like on posts within it?

I believe the effort to reduce payroll inequality among teams has to focus on incentivizing small market teams to start spending and become actually competitive, at least as much as clamping down on the biggest-spending teams. The ownerships of too many organizations are phoning it in because as owners they will get good and paid, with increasing franchise valuations, anyway, no matter whether they win eighty games or seventy or sixty. I don’t have to out which organizations—you already know who they are. Fix that end of it and they will fix a big chunk of the competitive balance problem—if Baseball even acknowledges there is one, or even cares, both of which are legitimate open-ended questions.

Sure, I said it in a flip way to be entertaining, and of course soccer is a sport that requires great skill to play at the highest level. I would never say otherwise. At the same time, a sport in which several players with multiple teenage years remaining can play in the very top league in the world can’t be as challenging to master at the very top level as, for example, baseball. Most of the guys who are athletically gifted enough to play big league baseball even in their early 20s are considered to be too inexperienced to play at the top level, requiring additional seasoning to master the sport so they can play at that top level.