gehringer_2

Yeah - starting with listening to him..

Nailed it - exactly.

That's beyond silly. Nobody who approaches investing on such a dogmatic basis should have a platform to be giving advice to anyone. Debt is financial tool, it has no more intrinsic moral nature than a hammer - only particular debts or purchases can have any moral value and the moral value doesn't even relate in any consistent way to whether a particular use is profitable or not. All separate issues.

Anyone who says there is such a rule is just straight up wrong. It's *always* a matter of comparative returns. If the interest rate on you mortgage is higher than your likely return, pay it first, if not, don't. In general over the last couple of decades it has not been hard to find investments that pay substantially more than the interest on most mortgages. That may not be true for small investors right now, but the point is that it's a situation that has to be constantly evaluated.

Of course, obesity is so epidemic in the US now that even a 150lb 'fireman's carry' req still leaves more than half of citizens in line to be toasted. The ship has sailed on that concept. (average body wt for both men and women >170lb! - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/body-measurements.htm)

Is that a Judge or a parole board recommendation? TBH, I don't know what the complaint is, PizzaGate ended up as a property crime and 1st time offenders for property crimes are generally not hammered that hard. My question is what parole was he violating now? Was he still on parole from 2017 or something since? - Story didn't say. Pretty stupid thing to pull a gun on a Cop over a parole violation unless you're looking at some kind of heavy time.

seems to be some debate - NBC and NYT articles say he got 4 yrs. Suspended later maybe? https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/09/us/pizzagate-shooter-killed-police.html

It was interesting to hear him talk about trying to get guys who were having success in the minors to fix things before they were exposed at the next level, holding back Madden because he hadn't, and then thinking about the contrast to Torkelson, who the previous regime kept promoting on the basis of his ability to hit the long ball without ever forcing him to become a better hitter. I also wonder if Torkelson is or is not in the group of guys who he referenced as 'coming back' from their private coaches to more reliance on the team's people.

yeah - Alito flaunts his privileged immunities in a more unseemly way than any member of the SCOTUS in my lifetime. He's worse than Thomas in a lot of ways.

FWIW, I also saw Skubal projected at $11M last week.

Ignorant easterners have no idea what happens when it doesn't rain for 10 months and then you get 60mph desert winds coming at you through a bunch of rugged terrian. It's like saying "people aren't prepared for a volcano." The planet usually gets the last word on human efforts to 'be prepared'

Bread and circuses. Need something to keep the masses riled up or they might actually notice what is going on around them.

And I would just wager that there will probably be a disproportionate number or black and brown people trying to put out the fires that are threatening the houses of a disproportionate number of white people.

A neat non displaced Fibula fracture could have been less but apparently Ivy wasn't that lucky. Just for comparison, and granted Hutchenson broke his Tibia also, but he were to make it back by the SB that would be 4 months and that's still considered unlikely by most people.

One man's viable internal candidate is another man's sub-replacement bum

I have a theory () that building red tape is another misdirected recognition that there are too many people already. But the human species doesn't really have any accepted, established social mechanisms for expressing it's desire for population control, other than a short experiment in China, and the topic remains controversial in so many places, so the psychic pressure that builds up in a crowded society manifests itself indirectly in all kinds of rules to make it harder add more people to the neighborhood (If you have no-where to live hopefully you will go away! - etc).

interesting enough, building red tape is something Newsome (a dem!?) has been pushing his state hard about. But funny you should mention it because I'm peripherally involved with some renovation work that a non-profit is doing on one room of their building ~1500 ft sq. This morning I just leafed through a 236 page codes and specifications document from the architect to the general contractor. Now to be fair, everything I took the time to look at in any detail seemed perfectly reasonable, but a 236 page doc of specs for one room? (note this isn't even any of the actual plans). You'd think there has to be a better way. Let me know if you come up with it. As an engineer by trade, I tried as best I could to stay in the process and operations end because I know this kind of stuff would have turned my brain to mush if I had ever gotten cornered into doing project work.

I've been surprised the Chinese have been, for lack of a better term, so brain-dead about the whole 'belt-and-road' thing. They've watched the West intently for a long time yet made pretty much all the same mistakes in loaning money to poor governments that were never going to pay it back and then leaning on them to do so anyway - thus they will see their clients' fealty turn into resentment just like we always did.

By representing such a large portion of players, Boras is actually at least in a little bit of a conflict of interest in his representation of any individual player because his overall revenues depend far more on the whole market rising than that individual getting the best outcome for his particular situation.

sea level is not much an issue in CA, it's not a low coastline. Ironically it's quite possible that climate change may end up benefiting CA in the form of a long term increase in rainfall, but nobody really knows, which is the risk. Increasing atmospheric energy will probably equate to more total rainfall globally but with possibly major changes in where rain falls. If you want to take a purely probabilistic view, if you live somewhere that is more desert like now, the odds of change increasing your rainfall are probably better than of it decreasing it further.

The gov has been too lax about getting people out of flood plains since just about forever. People don't like it when it's finally acted on. OTOH - I don't see any connection to 'natural coastline' in any issue in CA. Drought alternating with atmospheric rivers, windstorms and the resulting fires and landslides are not confined to the coastline at all.

Now to be honest, Carter probably had the funds to write a check and create more housing for the poor than the efforts of his own labor ever could so working on habitat houses was hardly the most altruistic thing he could have been doing, per se. And maybe he wrote some of those checks. But the value in his service to Habitat was never in his individual labor, it was that he was great recruiter and ambassador for the org, and that's fine - I don't knock the value in that at all. For most Americans the time they can donate to community service is more valuable than the amount of money they have available to donate so that recruitment matters. But as a general rule I wouldn't consider it all that redeeming for a rich person to donate some of his time if he isn't also donating some of his money!

If they have't extended Skubal by now I think the odds are he's gone when his deal is up. It's just cooked into the current system. To me that's just a base assumption you have to accept Riley is a tough call, between his style of play, the injuries he's already had and the brutal way he torques his back on his swing I'm guessing they they still have a measure of 'wait and see' in any plans to extend him.

If I understand it correctly - and I may not, in China the provincial governments have also been allowed to take on debt and I've read there are now tremendous levels of this sub-national level government debt as the regional govs have been spending wildly on xs infrastructure, real-estate devel, etc for a generation as well.

I don't know much about Tarasenko, but at least based on his career success if he is healthy he should still have more upside at 33 than he is showing. I've seen Johansson make a few mistakes, but I've also seen him play way harder than Petry can any more. I wish Jeff a *long* and comfortable recovery from whatever is ailing him. I agree this line-up just doesn't look like it can be a high pressure over 60 minutes kind of 5 on 5 offense, but they do have the players to score more 5 on 5 transition goals with at least two lines, and hopefully the big improvements in zone exits and faster transitions are going to show up as more transition scoring.