gehringer_2

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.

And Trump is so economically illiterate - he probably thinks this is great since now he might even get a 50 basis point interest cut. And inflation will wipe out his party by the end of the next cycle.

Bert you have me one-upped. I'll up on the west shore the Keewenah this weekend. I'll get the trees and sky, but no mountains . Lake Superior is cool (literally - it's already snowed up there once), but hard to say anything new in a water under sky picture (at least at my level of graphics skill!)

this reminds me of a the column Brooks wrote this week. He defended that he 'can't' be a liberal even now because he doesn't agree with liberal welfare policy. What total naivete in a grown-ass man. If you don't get on the lib side now you aren't going to have the option to debate welfare policy in the future. Idiot.

It was murder on the high seas. I would be nice if every American could take off their Jingo glasses long enough to see a little reality.

and have to say Newsom isn't helping in that regard. Started out clever but the quality of the gibes is fading.

Other things being constant, BaBIP will correlate to EV and LD%, but since other things aren't constant and since it's really LD% (or launch angle distribution if you want to be modern) and EV that are the 1st order inputs that tell you something. and since they are now more available, you can look at those things directly.

One game isn't enough to mean much - yet. But it's just to highlight that there are so many wildcards now that didn't exist in the past.

No sacks today.

All bankers hate inflation, it transfers wealth from the banks to the borrowers. If that's the pool of people most of the candidates start from, the result isn't surprising.

They need to rebuild pitching depth. Too many guys either hurt - Brieske, Gunether, Olson, Jobe, Foley, Lange , Madden, or pitching like the DL is their likely next stop - Hurter, Flaherty. The extra starting depth we thought we had at the end of 23/24 (Manning, Wentz, Faedo) has evaporated to thin air. The pitching staff is last year's Lion defense.

read the docs. The Athletic department had to get $16M from the general fund to close their deficit. You can believe what you want, that's the budget that was actually approved at the Regent's meeting. Sure they make money, and they burn through it like Beasley with his rent money. With more money now due to the players, they have been thrown out of balance in a way they haven't been in my memory. The Athletic department almost always returns at least some money to the GF or else funds some kind of project for the general student body like IM facilties. That buys them goodwill North of Hill Street. It's pretty much the same deal at most BiG's. As long as the Athletic dept turns a profit, everyone is happy. When they can't do that, nobody is happy.