gehringer_2

48 minutes ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

Rivian almost went under but now have a 5 Billion loan/investment from VW. If they don't turn a profit in 26 they might be done. 

From an engineering POV, the practical question is whether the cost of the minimal ICE plus a battery with a 30 mile range for a plug-in hybrid is going to settle out at more or less than the cost differential to a 300mi battery that can fast charge regularly without being killed. From an environmental standpoint, plug-in hybrids can take ~90% of the CO2 burden out of the automotive transportation sector because ~90% of your trips are short. The small ICE probably also weighs less than the step up to a 80-100KWhr battery so could make for an overall more efficient vehicle. Bottom line - it all depends on battery tech, and where the endpoint for that will turn out to be is still anybody's guess.

34 minutes ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

The R2 is what they are banking on. 300 mile range 5 seater.

https://rivian.com/r2

Nephew had a Rivian pickup. Loved it. Totalled it.

Too bad they are butt ugly.

1 hour ago, Screwball said:

Target isn't the same as what the numbers tell us, but I get your point. This is the deal with interest rates.

What is the price of debt/credit? Some think interest rates should be punitive as a throttle of credit creation. Others think they should create all they want. Why not, the more money, the more there is to go around, right? What's not to like?

Again, library's full of this debate.

and its always a matter of a good deal for me, but not for thee. Your friends at the bank can draw funds from the Fed's overnight window to put into the carry trade at rates that you and I couldn't get within 10% of.

38 minutes ago, Screwball said:

What 1% rates would those be?

Fed Funds rate from 2010 to 2017 ran pretty much at zero

2 minutes ago, Sports_Freak said:

Not only that, but it can't be said that players are making $60 million a year. Its a couple of guys making that big of a contract, other players have to live on $20 million a year or so ..🤣🤣

The interwebs just informed my that in any given year up to 60% of MLB rosters are at the MLB minimum salary of ~$825K

4 minutes ago, RedTeamGo! said:

Honestly, I think baseball certainly takes a lot of skill and practice but all the great hitters have one thing in common - extremely freakish perfect eyesight. One could be just as flippant about baseball and say "I mean, Ty Cobb had freakish eyesight, whoopdy do"

I'd add you have to have the reflex speed to go with it, but I agree that hitting is a genetic gift. You can do things to augment it if you have it, but if you don't it's been proven that you can be Michael Jordan and it still won't get you to the majors.

7 minutes ago, romad1 said:

Ideology is a luxury. 

Ideology is a luxury, in fact i'd say ideology is always stumbling block; but good ideas are a necessity.

25 minutes ago, RedRamage said:

And also, of course, this only works in a cap/floor situation where teams have at least similar resources to spend enough towards the caps.

A lot more things become possible if you get past this hurdle.

18 minutes ago, chasfh said:

“Soccer’s not a sport because you can’t use your arms. Anything you can’t use your arms can’t be a sport. Tap-dancing isn’t a sport … I rest my case.”

Use of hands allowed:

there is a more fundamental aspect to this though which to me is under-recognized, and that is honest, rational, constructive conservatism is by nature a stabilizing reaction to an active and potentially over ambitious or mis-directioned reform/liberal movement, and the truth is that liberalism as an active social re-organizing force was spent after the civil rights and great society pushes of the post WWII era. Liberalism has not had any kind of interesting or novel ideas or approaches for things like the stagnation of the middle class that are the things people are most deeply concerned about. It's been largely stuck in the social welfare theories of the 30's for 90 yrs now and the useful parts of those things are already in place. Or worse, it's been naval gazing over identity politics. You can hardly expect anything other than stagnation from Conservatism when there are no serious reform movements to be the counterbalance against. Are there even any decently serious thinkers in the democratic party on economic restructuring beyond Elizabeth Warren? AOC and Mamdani have welcome energy, but the DSA doesn't have the right answers to the future any more than the 50's British labor party they appear to want to emulate did.  

The country is desperate for ideas relevant to this century to reform corporate governance, education, politics, media; where are they?

1 hour ago, Deleterious said:

 

only thing I question in his remarks would be the assumption the inflation is on a downward trend.

Also notable that he called current rates or 3.5-3.75 as 'close to neutral'. I get the impression many people assume that the 1% rates that came out of the prior couple of decades is the 'normal' that policy was heading back to. But over the long-long term, those were anhistorically low rates driven probably mostly by the drop in monetary velocity as the huge block of boomers moved into retirement and lower spending - so people should probably stop assuming interest rates are going back to sub 2% or even sub 3%.

1 hour ago, Tigerbomb13 said:

It’s wild times we live in now that conservatives are now anti 2A and “state’s rights”. 

repetitive to say it of course but that is because they are not and never have been conservatives. Bob Dole was a conservative, Barry Goldwater was a conservative. Actual US conservatism died out with that generation. These people are more like what the scholastics were to the renaissance - primitive and irrational - fundamentally barbarians.

IMHO, the biggest issue for baseball fandom is too much player mobility. Whatever they come up with needs to allow players to get paid without having to move to do it so teams can build their identities long term around their stars. Perez has identified the issue but his proposal does nothing for teams not paying the tax, and they are ones losing their players.

2 hours ago, Tiger337 said:

which means it was almost cetainly not random.  I wonder if putting Brinkman clean-up was really directed towards Cash?

I vaguely remember being a bit disappointed that the line-up had not changed that much.  I was only 9, so I didn't understand random samples, but when I heard he picked the line-up out of a had, I was expecting something more bizzare.

Mid Summer Sunday day game, Billy was probably too hung over to care what he was doing.

9 minutes ago, Deleterious said:

$10,500 profit sharing checks for GM hourly workers this year.

GM has been kind of flying under the radar under Barra. That's probably good.

5 minutes ago, buddha said:

the years are long, but the number is good in an expanding cap for a guy like chiarot.

the wings - and the league - value physical defenseman more than the analytics crowd does.

chiarot on your third pair next year is not bad.  in 3 years i suspect he'll be in grand rapids a lot.  at least i hope so.  

A good number of Dmen who learn to pace them selves play OK to their late 30s, and even if the third year is a bust, it will be less than 3% of the cap. In general I do worry about Yzerman not leaving himself enough room to make a big signing when a Hughes or McDavid hits the market, but not enough to worry about this deal.

3 minutes ago, buddha said:

if you think that tells you everything i would question your curiosity.

i also question just how much you actually know about soccer

My objection to soccer is purely philosophical. It's the fact that we have our arms available instead of tied to our locomotion with hands with opposable thumbs at their ends that makes us what we are. Any activity that denies the use of the arms strikes me as being somewhat sub-human.....😉

1 hour ago, Tiger337 said:

Remember the Superstars competition back in the 1970s?  Kyle Rote Jr dominated and the baseball players usually embarrassed themselves.  That tells me everything I need to know.  

LOL - it's nice for baseball players to be athletic - it means they will run and field much better, but athleticism is only marginally connected to whether a guy can figure out where a baseball coming at him at 98mph is going so he can put his bat there.

16 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

 The only way to make it "reasonable" is for fans to stop going to games and purchasing tv packages. 

the latter has already happened to the degree we see the RSN's failing.

9 minutes ago, mtutiger said:

You have any comment on the top advisor to the President of the United States called Alex Pretti a domestic terrorist three days ago, but now says mistakes may have been made?

Or are we gonna talk about Chuck's religious views?

40 minutes ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

You hate religon we know....

religion? do you think they asked if they were practicing or not in the roundups in Germany or Armenia or Rwanda? The fascists don't care about what your religion is or whether you practice it, and the American Christian right wingers don't care what you are either if you are anything outside their own cult (theirs being one of the most excluding theologies out there). Religion is never more than a convenient construct to define what groups will be the targets for redirecting the anger of the masses in a failing society. It's all about picking a target that is easy to identify, the 'why'  of that identification is purely incidental. All that matters is that there is an elite who needs to deflect from their own corruption and greed, an intellectually lazy or economically exhausted mass who'd rather not be reminded about their own failures, and a set of identifiable targets the elites can persuade the masses are the cause of their problems. Religion never matters in and of itself. It's nothing more than the sieve.

9 minutes ago, buddha said:

.....is becoming more popular than baseball nowadays

one could write a book on all the likely reasons for this, most of which are bad, but it would have to start in a different forum.....😉

Short version would be that I don't think the state of organized youth baseball is enough to keep MLB from becoming more niche as well.

1 hour ago, buddha said:

bad loss.

hopefully missing edvinsson doesnt do them in for this tough stretch before the break.

Playing Colorado twice without him is not a happy prospect.

1 hour ago, buddha said:

(even if hockey is a much more exciting sport than baseball by a wide margin...)  🙂

apples to oranges though. It's like comparing Bach to Led Zeppelin, they function in different spaces.

The entertainment value in baseball doesn't follow as much from raw excitement like hockey, as from the slow tension builds the you get at times like a critical 10 pitch AB or as a pitcher starts losing command and digging himself a hole in a one run game, or whether a relief pitcher can work his way out of a 2 on no-out jam. Individual plays can be exciting but are more the icing on the cake than the main events in a baseball game. Baseball is more 'interesting' than 'exciting' - or at least a very different kind of 'exciting.'

14 minutes ago, buddha said:

ok, need a big third period.  losing at home to the kings would not be great.

yeah - 10 shots through 40min, Wings had better have been banking their energy for the big finish.