chasfh

We haven't signed him yet ... 😏

I think it's apples and oranges to compare Chicago with either Toronto or Juarez, since they are all in different countries, since they have different social structures, even beyond different policing and justice structures. Is 485 murders in New York City what you would consider within control?

Some of them might—and some in my own neighborhood might—if they personally see crime, or know people who do, or who are in the game. They would definitely have a different opinion on it.

This is what I mean by a media-induced approval bump. The only reason most people conclude that crime is spiraling out of control is that they are being told that. And it works the other way, too: if people’s main exposure to the police is via media stories of their killing unarmed black people, their approval of the police would plummet accordingly. If most people were responding only to what they see in their own lives, their opinions of the police would be unchanged, since most people don’t see out-of-control crime, or encounter the police, on an personal basis every day.

What number would be within control?

Right, and even among less elastic products there can be tradeoffs consumers can make. With gasoline, there's driving less; with cigarettes and alcohol, there are cheaper brands. Point being, it's not as easy as here you go, customer, pay for my price increase. If it were that easy no one would ever go out of business due to cost increases.

Was access to testing completely dependent on Biden? Was he the difference Maybe it was, I don’t know. I wasn’t aware of it. I do know that they were really conservative about allowing heathy people under 65 to get the vaccine and booster, which may have led to marginally more hospitalizations and deaths, although I always thought that was more CDC reticence than administration incompetence. Could Biden have overruled them by executive order?

Well, that sure was a lot more than I was talking about! 😅 I wasn’t making a one-on-one comprehensive comparison between the two. Referring only to their shared ability to use their personal charisma to motivate people already primed to respond.

ECON 101 taught me that businesses can’t always just turn around and pass 100% of cost increases on to customers, because higher prices pushes demand down, customers buy less, inventory builds up, and businesses start incurring greater losses than from just the price increases. Businesses can successfully pass on costs only if demand for their products is relatively inelastic.

Makes sense. In an environment in which literally every day the local media is hammering the idea that crime is out of control, people’s opinions will be shaped to be sympathetic to the only organization that their entertainment shows tell them will save us all.

“Look” is a holdover from the Obama administration. It seemed like the answer to every question from everybody top down started with “look”. It felt like “look” was mandated as a rhetorical tactic, but it might have been merely a mirroring tactic taken to the extreme.

Relying on front-end participants is risky. Better to control the back end machinery.

His power is in mobilizing people with pre-existing grievances, and being charming enough to them to hold them in thrall. Whether not for nothing or a propos of nothing, that was Hitler’s power, too.

Granting for the discussion that Biden’s approach is not working, how much of that is due to his own and his administration’s incompetence, and how much of it is due to Republican obstruction? Also granting that R was never going to cooperate under any circumstances, what could Biden have done, within solely his power, that would have significantly reduced cases, hospitalizations, and deaths?

Back bacon.

I prefer the way it is with nine batters. Maybe it's because baseball has a sort of symmetry of threes: three outs, nine batters, nine innings, everyone is 0-for-3 in a perfect game. That kind of thing.

The DH is no longer an experiment. It is the state of the game. Every league above high school uses it. Only two leagues in the world do not. Pitchers will never get any better at hitting for a simple reason: they never work on it. Why should they? They never hit in college, they never hit in wood bat leagues, they never hit in foreign rookie leagues, and they never hit in the minor leagues. Most pitchers hardly step to the plate even in the major leagues. Of the 901 current active pitchers who have played in the majors, 242 of them haven't logged even a single plate appearance, and exactly have of them have three or fewer career plate appearances. Why bother working on your hitting if you're basically never going to hit? Every moment a pitcher works on his hitting is a moment spent not working on his pitcher. It would be a waste of his time. The only pitchers who have the luxury of working on their hitting are those who receive guaranteed multi-year contracts with National League teams. Sure, it was fun to watch Jon Lester work hard so he could get his first big league hit and home run, but he still ended up hitting .115 for his career. And that's what a good-hitting pitcher hits. Too often, too many pitchers try to make outs, on purpose and sometimes under manager's orders, to preserve his health for his pitching. They'll swing half-heartedly at pitches not intending to hit them (which would be a disaster because they might accidentally get a hit and have to risk injury on base), or more likely, just watch three strikes go right down the pipe. Some people might find that charming, but I think trying to make out makes for a dishonest at-bat, and I don't find it charming to watch the guy at the plate try to make out on purpose. Bring on the universal DH.

Did Capone run a confidence game? I thought he was a racketeer.

I guess it’s time to put away the dog whistle.

Talk about false equivalencies, it seems like some people would like to put Maddow and Tucker in the same box. That is asinine. Even though Maddow clearly has an agenda to advance the Democratic Party, she is also a first-rate journalist. She has both the deep background and the news chops to deliver the goods. The best Tucker can aspire to is mean-spirited hack.

The filibuster, which allows even a single Senator to essentially kill any Senate bill regardless of either its level of support among US citizens or votes to pass among Senate, is literally the most anti-democratic feature of the inherently undemocratic body that is the Senate. #MAGAMathFail Which is why the MAGA fascist elite are trying to take it down from the inside, using their red hat base as the cannon fodder to do their bidding. And why not? No skin off the elite's asses. Yet. You do know, don't you, that we realize that everything you and the red hats say the Democrats are going to do, the Republicans have already done or are in the process of doing right now? The projection reeks. This is as valid as me saying to you, "If things were reversed and Republicans were pushing for Senate rule changes, you would be having a party."

Lol at the idea that chasfh is effectively restricting free speech in America. I can’t even get a bunch of Internet forum randos to care about what I have to say. Like I’m going to get DirecTV to pay attention to what I would like them to do? Come on.

Apropos of nothing, I notice that one of the two expansion teams in the eternal baseball universe is in Birmingham, Alabama (along with Montreal). Birmingham could never support a big league team, but I have wondered how they have never gotten an NBA franchise. They are the #45 market in the country, right behind Jacksonville and OKC, and bigger than New Orleans, Memphis, and Buffalo, all of whom have at least one major franchise (and two of which have two teams). And Birmingham is far enough from Atlanta so that the Hawks probably won't bleed enough supporters to make a difference, but could also generate a pretty good rivalry if they can manage to compete for a division against one another.

I'm betting one or more top investors in AT&T have threatened to pull back some of their money of they didn't drop OANN, since T has been the target of protests from major rights organizations, some of which have ties to top corporations.

lol equivocating the violent storming of the capitol to prevent Congress from doing its constitutionally-mandated duty, versus supporting a legislative change that would restore the balance of one person-one vote in the Senate, as equally threatening to American democracy.