gehringer_2

1 hour ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

 

 

it's a logical fallacy to believe what is wrong or right in the specific must also be wrong or right in the general, or vice versa. That it is a good idea not to go to work on a day you happen to be sick does not mean you should stop going to work period. The fact that apples are good to eat does not mean every apple is edible. 

Happily, the human brain has the wiring to learn to make such logical distinctions, if the brain in question is willing to make the effort.

the corollary is that platitudes are no substitute for judgement.

5 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

No they aren't robots, but the vast majority of fans don't know enough from a small sample in order to detect whether it's real or just noise.  It's fun to guess though.  

And noise reduction is one of the things that the search for advanced metrics is all about. Launch angle and exit velo are much better indicators of a hitter's hitting health than whether the fly ball was caught!

6 hours ago, Longgone said:

It has nothing to do with "riding the hot hand", it's the exact same sweet swinging Kevin McGonigle, but facing different pitchers and circumstances and randomness that produces very different results in small samples. Baseball is a frustrating game where you can do everything right and still get negative results over the short term.

In the same way you can never step into the same river twice, no human being is the same person two days in a row. In the 24 hrs billions of cells have died and been replaced. In some people's genome that generates little overall change, in other DNA sets the outcome of that turn over is constant change in the overall organism, sometimes better, sometimes worse. In general, only people who are lucky enough to maintain a pretty consistent phenotype ever get to high levels of sports performance, but even then, the genetic timing and injury and repair factors all remain variable and that's before psycological factors are considered in the mix at all.

I'm deliberately over drawing the argument here, but the idea that athletes are robotic automatons is just wrong. Athletic competition exactly selects for the most consistent performers in the population, but that consistency is always on the edge of being lost from both internal and external forces.

All this goes on at the same time that the game injects massive random uncertainty into outcomes. Both are true.

1 hour ago, 1984Echoes said:

FYI: It's strait, not straight.

Straight = straight line.

Strait = thin body of water (as in larger than a river) between two larger bodies of water.

Unless this is just a joke I am missing out on...

LOL - yes. And anyone who lives in De'Troit should know better!

1 hour ago, chasfh said:

You misspelled number five.

When they signed him it seemed the intention was for Anderson to make the rotation. I guess bringing in JV changed that calculus somewhat, but the team had to know going in that JV might end up not being one of the 5 best pitchers, and for that matter that could be true of Flaherty and/or Mize as well. I don't think Harris lacks the stomach to make the tough call if it has to be made, but that that call might be tougher than usual if it had to be JV was always a risk going in.

3 minutes ago, buddha said:

petty tom izzo is the best tom izzo.

I guess maybe because the season is over, but he wasn't half as PO'd tonight as he was after losing to M in the 1st game.

15 minutes ago, Deleterious said:

I'm not a military tactician, but I don't see how you secure the straight without boots on the ground.

Google says Iran has anti ship missiles with 180 mile range and the straight is only 21 miles wide. So they can launch those from 150 miles inland.

they don't even have to use anti-ship missiles, all they need to do if float a bunch of mines out into the gulf that will self-deploy out in the straight.

Quote

As of early 2026, the U.S. Navy's dedicated minesweeping fleet is critically reduced, with reports indicating only about four to eight Avenger-class mine countermeasures ships (MCMs) remain in service, down from a total of 14. These remaining vessels are primarily forward-deployed in Sasebo, Japan, and Bahrain. 

• Fleet Status: The Navy is in the process of decommissioning the aging Avenger-class ships, with plans to replace them with more modern, modular systems and Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) equipped with mine-hunting packages.

I would note that due to litany of procurement problems, the LCS program has been dramatically reduced.

12 minutes ago, Deleterious said:

I'm not a military tactician, but I don't see how you secure the straight without boots on the ground.

Google says Iran has anti ship missiles with 180 mile range and the straight is only 21 miles wide. So they can launch those from 150 miles inland.

and you have to put boots on the ground on the Houthi side as well....

Also - the terrain in SE Iran is very similar to Afghanistan, where we had so much success with ground operations in the past.

On 3/6/2026 at 4:54 PM, Mr.TaterSalad said:

There will be many "Sure Jan" moments during this unjust, unconstitutional war with Iran. Saying the war will last a few days or weeks will be one of them. This is turning into Iraq 2.0 right before our very eyes.

This is way worse than Iraq. The impacts of Iraq were fundamentally local. The impacts here are global.

A huge  mistake Trump has made (among hundreds) is backing Iran so far into the corner that they have nothing to lose. At this point they are perfectly happy to see the whole Western energy economy in the toilet. What's it to them? Trump isn't offering them any off ramp worth taking. Iran knows all they have to do is hold out somehow for a little while 30 days, 60 at the most, and Trump will have to fold. $150+ $/bbl oil with every country at each other's throat trying to insure their own supply, employment down, inflation  up, every multinational will be pouring millions into political efforts to end this. He thought he held all the cards, but he should have read Dune "He who willing and able to destroy a thing is the one who controls it" That's Iran, the Straight of Hormuz and the world's energy economy.

45 minutes ago, Screwball said:

No chart porn, but this is wild. Crude futures over $118 at 10:30ish.

This called having no elastic in the 'Elasticity of Demand'

12 minutes ago, Longgone said:

Hypothetical for you. You clone Kevin McGonicle. Exact same player in every way, and alternate them through the first ten games of spring training. One goes 1 for twenty and makes several errors in the field, and the other goes 10 for 20 and is flawless at short. Which one goes north and which one to AAA?

Hinch is not above riding a hot hand even if he knows the player will be gone by the ASB. Once the season starts, short term results are still results, you take 'em if you can get 'em. The great baseball debate has always been: are players streaky or is it just stochastic noise? The answer is 'Yes'.  The performance of the human machine is the combination of hundreds of factors that just might all align once in a guy's life for a week or month or 3 or even one season and then maybe never be seen again. Other guys will turn in year after year of consistency. OTOH, BaBIP buries a tremendous amount of true performance in its noise generation. But both things are true, always have been. And good teams take advantage of understanding it all.

were they resting Gibson in the 3rd or was he hurt again?

1 hour ago, Mr.TaterSalad said:

I expect to see gas up around the $4 mark here in Metro Detroit within the next week or two. I think it's feasible that by April, if Trump's war drags on, that we hit $5/gallon.

an oil barrel is 42 gallons. assume yield to valuable product from the barrel is 90%. Normal refinery mark-up is about $10/bbl processed. For $110 crude barrel that's a base cost of $3.20 before retail markup and taxes. MI gas tax is $0.52 - so make it $3.75 before retail markup of about 10% which gets you to $4.10. Add the reality is if supplies get tight, refineries will jack up margins by another $10 barrel or so, and you are near $4.50.

1 hour ago, Deleterious said:

The summer of inflation

and quite possibly recession. If the market goes into a funk - even if it only flattens out for an extended term, 1%er spending will slow, and that's been driving a lot of economic activity.

US Admin has an insurance scheme for tankers, I don't think any of the operators are going to be too wild about sending anything through the straight without a full escort. The USN probably doesn't have enough ships left in the fleet to do that, and Iran would probably love nothing more than a bunch of US Navy hulls in the narrows of the straight to take pot shots at hoping one gets through.

Quote

Markers tied closely to the region have already soared through that level. Futures tied to Abu Dhabi’s flagship Murban crude closed at $103 a barrel on Friday, while Oman crude futures were at $107. Chinese crude oil futures on the Shanghai International Energy Exchange ended, in US dollar terms, at $109.

“Every additional day of disruption adds pressure, and in that scenario there is effectively no ceiling to prices in the short term,” said Stefano Grasso, a one-time physical energy trader who’s now senior portfolio manager at Singapore-based fund 8VantEdge Pte.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oil-market-chaos-deepen-more-163727122.html

2 minutes ago, Tigerbomb13 said:

Sounds good to me!

exactly. Perfect in fact.

Sadly the dems are themselves so foolishly weak kneed they will probably cave just when they have a success in their grasp.

Iran claims US attacked a water desalination plant, Iran returned the favor targeting one in Bahrain. Desalination is the only thing that allows the nations around the Persian gulf to support their populations in the desert.  If desalinaiton plants are knocked out entire populations will have to flee, fast.

Quote

Political analysts and diplomats have long warned about the vulnerability of desalination plants in the region should they become military targets.

In 2008, a diplomatic cable sent from the U.S. embassy in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, and later released by WikiLeaks warned that a single desalination plant provided Riyadh with more than 90 percent of its drinking water at the time.

The city “would have to evacuate within a week if the plant, its pipelines or associated power infrastructure were seriously damaged or destroyed,” the author wrote. “The current structure of the Saudi government could not exist” without the plant, the cable added.

 

Since then, the Saudi government has invested significantly in expanding water storage, reducing its vulnerability.

At the same time, the region’s cities have grown rapidly, drawing in large populations of foreign workers and straining the fragile ecosystems that underpin them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/08/world/middleeast/desalination-plants-iran-bahrain.html

4 hours ago, Tiger337 said:

I don't give a crap about spring stats, but there are certainly valid questions to be asked about several of their position players.  

OTOH, guys don't have a magic switch they can push to suddenly start seeing and hitting the ball better or getting more guys on the 26th either. Stats don't matter because the numbers from what happened the first couple weeks don'tmatter, but if by the last week or 10 days of ST they are still looking flat, odds are they are still going to be flat come opening day. 

I don't know exactly why but I don't have a good feeling about this team at all this season. Feels like it's going to be Tarik and the 24 dwarfs.

5 minutes ago, Screwball said:

We are not going to engineer or bull**** our way out of energy deficiencies. 

 

nobody is saying that (well maybe Jimmy Carter did once - Drive 55!).

Stupid thing about destroying Iran's infrastructure is that when the shooting is all over, the loss of that production capacity from the world market just makes it easier for the other producers to get a higher price....

Tiger O seems to be picking up pretty much where it left off.

I heard Harris say he didn't want them to so over emphasize contact to where it was counterproductive to overall offense, but I hope 26th in team OBP (where they are in ST currently) is at least a little worse than he wanted to see.

35 minutes ago, Screwball said:

You can't have growth without energy

yup, standards of living correlate pretty closely  to how much energy an individual can afford to command.

But efficiency also play a role. We can get more output with a lot less input in a lot of what we do. Look at what is happening with cars. IC engines have a peak thermodynamic efficiency somewhere maybe in the 30% range, and the way we use them they are operating at maybe 15% of that most of the time, so as an energy consumer, you are only getting a few percent of the energy you put in as gasoline in useful transportation distance out. Compare that to the 'new thing', the EV, where you are running an electric motor at 80-90% efficiency, charging it at probably 90% efficiency. The overall yield to you getting moved around is much better than 50%, something like an order of magnitude better than a gasoline engine car in terms of motion out vs total energy in. And even after you add in the losses to make the electricity you are still way ahead. 

So even as economies apply more net energy as living standards go up, their rate of gross energy input can/should go up more slowly than GDP as tech improves.

23 minutes ago, IdahoBert said:

I just watched Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy starring a load of famous actors from 2011. My life was so full of four children and travel and an exhausting work schedule I didn’t watch many movies back then so I hadn’t seen it until now.

It’s pretty tense and the plot is fairly complex and to fully understand what had happened I had to read a recap on Wikipedia after I finished it, but if I decide to watch it a second time I think I’ll enjoy it more but it’s still pretty good on its own. 

They brought LeCarre in as consultant with the British TV serialized TTSS - he'd had an on-again/off-again relationship with previous movies of his work - going back to not really liking the Richard Burton version of "the Spy Who Came in form the Cold" which first catapulted him to fame. But he was so taken with Alec Guiness' portrayal that he wrote "Smiley's People" expressly for Guiness. Gary Oldham is no slouch either, but having to do it 127 min instead of 350 made it a lot harder to get the complexity of the plot without it getting confusing.

27 minutes ago, Deleterious said:

Long construction equipment.  I can't imagine we have the unused capacity to even come close to meeting that number.

 

50% in 15 yrs is only 3%/yr, so it's not that big a lift - I'd guess the regulatory hurdles are worse than the construction constraints - especially on the transmission line end.  EVs are going to be a big draw on the up side. On the down side, the number of data centers that get built is likely to be less than forecast and the evolution of electronics tech in place by the time they are built will mean they consume less power than currently forecast.

33 minutes ago, Deleterious said:

Will BYD ever be allowed to sell their EVs in the states? I just read an article talking about their new battery that has a 600 mile range on a 5 minute charge time. That is basically on par with an ICE engine.

when you start getting to very short charge times heat management becomes a constraint. It looks like they have made a very system with a very high surface/volume ratio so it can dump heat very fast. That also a minimum of ~1000 amps going through the charging cable!