gehringer_2

best of all possible worlds for the US now would be for Trump to lose energy to where he no longer initiated much but keeps holding to power so close none of the crazies around him can take any initiatives either.

one of the deeper issues in the US is that an effective democracy has already broken down. Minorities are able to control the US government both because of the initial construction mistake in this union which has resulted in too many small populations having outsized voting power, then added to that has been the ability of that minority to cement its protected status via control the Supreme Court and its protection of Gerrymandering and campaign funding abuse. This leads to at least 2 results. The real majority of sane people tune out because they've already had too much experience seeing their votes not get results that they know 80% of the actual population favor (e.g. rational gun control), but also on the other side, it fosters a sense of desperation in the minority who should have lost power long ago, because they know their political power is tenuous and unjustified, so they constantly have to up the stakes to keep their people motivated and lie about the threats to the system. Yes -reform would threaten their control, it wouldn't threaten democracy. It's the status quo, which has not been functional democracy for a long time.

I won't be surprised if mortgages respond sluggishly - the spread between the 10yr and longer rates is unusually large right now. It will help if that also closes some.

can't help but make me think of this: what a different world.

I still wonder - so much of the discussion around the House settlement and all the changes is from the perspective of the top teams in the power conferences. Can a MAC team like Todedo or EMU play in that game at all without massive support from their school's general fund? I just haven't heard much about what kind of options exist for teams that can't blythely pony up $20M for player salaries.

this.

The bottom is falling out for young workers, even those with degrees, while the profits keep rolling in for the deal makers. It reflects a lot of what is wrong with the American economy and goes to the point about how we use numbers to judge our condition. GDP growth becomes especially meaningless as a socio/political useful objective when it's coming at the expense of half the population actually getting poorer.

Over/under on how many outlets report "Inflation last month rose at a 4.8% annual rate"?

300K is normally the level you don't want to see. Getting a bit close.

Apparently for Ford, even hindsight isn't 20/20....

Seems reasonable, but it's going to be confusing to sort out because you are still going to have all the schools left out of whatever becomes the new power league that are likely still going to play football. Does it all go Ivy league form with true amateurs again? Is that even possible? Can you imagine football as a club sport? Well, maybe flag. I guess I would need to read more than I am interested to but what does become of the teams/leagues like the Ivy league that have already opted out of the current system? Are they exempt from the House settlement terms?

Not a lot to go on here to judge the pension but I'll comment on ESSP. I had one for a number of years. Sounds like it was a similar deal, 15% discount on the stock price. That part is free money and means almost certainly worth taking. The down side of an ESPP is that it *can* be a lot of work on your taxes. It depends on how much of the accounting work your employer provides you with. In my case, it was zero and without that it will be a pain to track your gains for your tax returns. Plan on using a higher level version of TurboTax! When I was in the plan most of the time I spent on my taxes (including a full schedule A in those years) was spent on the ESPP. In the ESPP I was in, the actual internal stock purchase date was always the 1st day of the year but the award date was whenever the company decided - usually it was in the fall, so my taxable income from the plan was based 15% off on prices I had to go look up and track myself. The paper work they provided was the barest minimum. It was all stuff they could have provided but didn't. Once I set up a spreadsheet that tracked it all it wasn't too bad. My plan had no hold requirement, so I could sell the shares the day I got them if I didn't like where I thought their price was going and often as not I did. And if prices were rising, i could hold the shares till they converted to long term gains and get taxed at a lower rate. The 15% discount is always regular income though - so that's one way the accounting gets complicated. In any case, at least the 15% on the $$ I put in the pool was guaranteed if I didn't want to hold the stock so why turn that down?

Something about sowing the wind you say?

I'm not sure we have been a serious country since people voted for Kennedy instead of Nixon because his make-up was better.

that's exactly what I thought of.

That is too bizarre. You couldn't make it up.

I suppose it had to happen sooner or later to someone who has said this.

It might not be as rosy as all that - at least after the 1st year or two when the novelty wears off, because if they break away and only have each other to play, then half of those teams are going to have losing records. The fact that now the good teams pump up their records playing cupcakes is what allows there to be so many marquee teams. Put them in a league all by themselves, and you'll have a lot fewer match-ups between teams with winning records. Twenty teams can be the elite of 120+, only a smaller number can be the elite of 30. I have a feeling that is one of the reasons it hasn't happened yet.

LOL - I just got home and went to the box score first and was trying to figure out how so many guys had RBI with no hits!

I'm surprised Skubal's is that good, I would have guessed lower.

If industrial productivity goes up 2%, and production is up 1%, then 1% of your work force is now unemployed.

considering that the real GDP increased around 45% from 2010 to 2024, the total increase in industrial production is paltry. Even the ~1.1% increase so far this year would be a loss of ground vs the estimated 2% GDP increase.

Even before Trump was elected, Paul Krugman wrote a piece about the maximum likely effects of Tariffs and the proportions of the economy dependent on import/export and he basically said the same thing - a tariff regime would be counter-productive but not likely the end of the world. Of course what nobody anticipated was that it would not only be tariffs but pure chaos, and the chaos is probably having at least as much deleterious effect on the economy as the tariffs themselves. Plus the thing this all misses is that tariffs do have an outsize effect on consumer's sense of inflation because other than food, a ton of consumer shopping is for imported goods. And as the Biden admin found out, it doesn't matter what the inflation number really is, all that matters is how it feels to voters. And that not only has the obvious political fallout but also, to the degree it reduces consumer confidence, a slowdown can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

absolutely. In historical terms, 6.5% is a little high, but not any worse than rates often were in the 70s-80s-90's in periods when housing boomed. But people then were buying houses at maybe 2-5X annual income. Now 10x is as likely.

The Hyundai raid may be have been the dumbest one yet. But more generally, have they yet fined or even brought a single employer to court? This is exactly analogous to drugs and pushers. You can bust all the pushers you want, but as long as there are users, new ones will arise in their place because the profit is worth the risk from enforcement. You can bust and deport all the workers you want, as long as there is no effective penalty for hiring them, the profit from low wage workers is higher than any cost they bear from enforcement - (which only seems to fall on the workers). So the jobs for undocumented workers remain, and If the jobs stay, they will keep drawing illegal workers, who in the end will fail to be dissuaded from coming by all the depravity ICE throws at them for that purpose, because humans will just put up with whatever they have to put up with to support themselves and their families.