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A lot to unpack here…. You really feel that these athletes don’t deserve a scholarship? They’re generating millions of dollars for their schools. $100k or so over four years (to do hard work in the classroom and on the field) is comparative pennies. And that’s coming from someone who doesn’t think they should be strictly paid (at least not directly by the school). Hutch has a National Championship to play for, Thib has nothing left to prove. I agree that the MSU bowl game (and honestly all non-playoff bowl games) will be a farce. That’s the fault of those who designed the bowl/playoff system. That’s not the fault of the student athletes who elect not to help rich people get richer without being paid. Jake Butt retired from the NFL this past July. Remember when he suffered a torn ACL in the meaningless Orange Bowl in 2016? He went from having 1st Round potential to being picked in the 5th round, he struggled with injuries throughout his NFL career, and started in only four games, failing to record a single NFL touchdown. It’s impossible to truly play the “what if” game out to too many degrees, but what can be certain is that if he had sat out the Orange Bowl in 2016, he would have collected much more money over his rookie contract, without any real harm coming to his team. No one would remember today that he sat out that bowl game. Now, admittedly without any knowledge of his personal finances, he stands at 26 years old having only made the money off his 5th round rookie contract. Is that enough for him to even actually retire comfortably? That was likely a huge loss for him.

He then took it back to the store and got money back for it. Told the guy he borrowed it from “something happened to it. Don’t know”.

Evangelicals believe Israel is going to be the HQ for the rapture events. That’s why they are so concerned with Israel. It’s not the people. The place. Much like they don’t consider Catholics real Christian’s they think US Jews are not real Jews.

Still has the tag on it.

I should add too that guys like Hutchinson DO make that million dollar gamble on playoff games that matter, and I’m sure Pickett and Walker would too if the playoff were expanded. The allure of the magnitude of an NCAA championship in football outweighs a lot of logical decision making. If you want to see good and exciting football games between good football teams, make the games meaningful. Don’t get mad at the players for making an astute financial decision regarding a meaningless game.

What we cannot do is reward Putin for electing Trump, Brexit and his general malign activity. He must be punished in the extreme for any transgression.

agreed. The USSR fell, but being a 'bad winner' in the cold war won't get the West any better an outcome than it got the allies in Germany after WWI. "In your face" triumphalism may be fun when it's Larry Bird on a basketball court, but it's generally not helpful in international relations. The objective should be a path to calm Putin down and give him his domestic policy fig leafs (what he probably really wants) without abandoning self-determination for the people of Ukraine. NATO is an irrelevancy to those objectives. NATO is a means to an end, not an end itself. If it's actions generate conflict that is contradictory to its charter. Of course I would note from the article that it was that most triumphalist and lest deep thinking of president's, 'Dubya' who pushed hardest on NATO for the offer of membership to Ukraine in the first place.

Idk seems reasonable to me to not want to vote for this.

The story on Jacob Barnes in the Freep was also intriguing. Another guy coming back from injuries - but he was apparently hitting 98. Interesting part was he liked the Tigers because he knew he had more changes to make and he felt the Tigers pitching analytics people knew what they were talking about.

so the 6th circuit appeals court ruled in favor of the OSHA vaccine mandate, contradicting the 5th circuit and more or less forcing SCOTUS to take up the issue. However, I want to know how such morons get on the court as the Trump appointee (OK nevermind, just answered the question...) who dissented from the majority with the following logic: “The virus that causes COVID-19 is not, of course, uniquely a workplace condition. Its potency lies in the fact that it exists everywhere an infected person may be — home, school, or grocery store, to name a few,” wrote Larsen, a nominee of President Donald Trump. “So how can OSHA regulate an employee’s exposure to it?” OK - lets parse this out. Are ladders ubiquitous in peoples' non-workplace exposure to them? Power tools? Dust in the air? Electricity? Is there a single thing you can think of that OSHA regulates by virtue of workers only experiencing it in the workplace? His argument falls apart within 30 seconds of consideration of what OSHA actually does. OSHA's legal mandate is not to insure people's safety everywhere, it is to insure it in the workplace. It's one thing to argue disingenuously to reach a desired political end, but one could at least have the competence to do it with with some skill. It is both laughable and tragic that such a moron could achieve a seat on an appeals bench.

I think that's exactly what Bernie argues, that his stuff isn't extreme whatsoever

If you get the chance, read this Intelligencer article.

I remember ppl here saying "the left" loves Biden

He borrowed a clean shirt for that photo.

Strictly speaking just for covid on an individual level, there's no reason to be that worried about you or your family. But collectively it looks like it's going to crash things in our hospitals which are already at a breaking point. The people that work there have been at this for 2 years. They really cannot take much more. I wish there was a way to make that point known to everyone. They can't have cameras in there to show what it looks like to see a lot of people on ventilators and ECMO machines. This is where we are now prior to Omicron. Yes the data suggests it might not be as bad as previous waves but it's not a sure thing as we don't know enough about who it has hit. The speed of Omicron is the dangerous part. Given where our systems are now an exponential growth of cases, even at a lower severity, could put us back to field hospitals and parking garages, etc. The next 3-4 weeks could be disruptive. I'm anticipating some virtual things as more people test positive and have to quarantine, or just simply have a cold(covid) but are not tested but staying away. I'm not saying I know what the answer is because I don't see how it's avoided at this point. If you've had your booster then you'll pretty much be fine. But a lot of people didn't and even a small % impact of severity will put a big stress on our hospitals. I'd avoid things that can lead to injury more than I would crowds. You might not have any place to go. Prior infection as a defense against Omicron is looking to be useless, as could be the J&J vaccine.

Let's go Lesko!

Right? It bugs me when discussing someone’s unforeseen death and whether it was warranted or not and people being up something else… as if it matters a single bit. It doesn’t.

I really think Correa is going to land back with the Astros, and really, they'd be nuts to let him go. With apologies to Shorty, Correa's is the best homegrown player on that team, and he's on a clear Hall of Fame trajectory. In a way, he's kind of like their Barry Bonds: everyone in his baseball hometown adores him, and everyone outside that town hates him. And I don't see the Yankees signing him anyway because half the guys on that roster were there when the Astros cheated past them into the Series in 2017, and since Correa is the public apologist for that whole shameful incident, they'll never forget that. Besides, I'll bet that in far less than ten years, we'll be wiping our brow for having dodged a bullet by not signing him, and maybe that's why the now-analytics-savvy Tigers lowballed him.

I'm not holding my breath expecting any great hitting breakthroughs from a 29yr old. But if he makes even marginal improvements it's all icing on the cake. He's the SS after all. Catch the ball and give me 800 OPS and I'm a happy camper.

Hah!!! Now with Kingpin? Now I gotta remember which Vigilante series he was in, and which season... And I know he made it into more than one series/ season so... Wait... wasn't Vera Farmiga his love interest in his main vigilante series? Funny, at the start of this episode, just as Jack Duquesne was getting arrested I thought "OH, her mom is going to go bad...". I blazed through the different vigilante series and was ok with some of it but... it didn't sink in like the rest of the MCU...

This is a really good and undervalued point in this discussion... the baby boomers were already on the precipice of retirement age and the pandemic merely hastened the impact of their departure from the workforce. This is especially true in my industry... I'd been hearing back to when I was in college about the amount of opportunities on the horizon by pursuing this career path because of looming retirements. And it hasn't disappointed. Also a good point... one that we have learned since becoming single income parents. Raising kids are not cheap, but the income sacrifice between a caregiver remaining in the workforce versus staying at home with kids maybe aren't incentive enough to stay in the workforce anymore when you factor in the price of child care, not to mention the availability of it.

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.

this is from Dana Milbank in WaPo Merry Christmas