gehringer_2

bars and restaurants have been the Achilles heal for Covid for the developed countries the whole way. Eating and drinking around a table appears to be the best way there is short of direct injection to spread the virus -- but just closing them all and paying everyone involved off for an open ended time frame was just a political/social bridge too far.

Ordinarily, the hammer would come because if you depreciate and asset and then sell it for more than its depreciated value, you get the tax hammer then, but with a sports franchise, the escape valve is just hold it until you die, then put it into a trust with your kid(s) as managing trustees.

born of cruel experience!

I like that.

Well, apparently Steven Ross wanted to tank. The problem is not that no team has ever wanted to tank, it's how do you punish them without punishing the teams that are bad but honestly want to get better? It's the 'better a guilty man go free than an innocent man be wrongly convicted" argument.

like I said, if you are incapable of seeing that China is a complex enough place to be capable of repressing the Uyghur's while still attempting to excel the West in public health, that is your limitation of vision. How many millions did we kill in Vietnam on the heels of eradicating Polio? Just so that the "communist" government there could be more of an ally than enemy to us today? (and there is almost nothing that Karl Marx would recognize in today's China as 'communism' either.). There are no simple nations.

The Red Wings are really the very best counter-argument. No-one, and I mean absolutely no-one believes the Red Wings org has even tried to tank. If anything they tried way too hard to hang on the dying embers of their previous run for too long. The Wings never suffered any lack of intention, they simple suffered too much of a guy that once knew how to win but apparently forgot in the form of one Kenny Holland. So now ownership has corrected that mistake and the result is that the lottery has totally hammered a team that wants nothing more than to get better.

we'll agree to disagree.

you need to read more press reporting from China. Xi's whole approach to Covid is to try to portray the Chinese model as a more efficient/effective form of gov and he has decided a good way to do that is to try to prove China can do a better job agains COVID and that means yes - the Chinese are trying harder to get a lower death toll. Of course it makes a virtue of the tools of repression, but that's the point for Xi. When you look beyond the borders of the US you should always park your Manicheanism at the door. The real world is not a black and white place.

If you are from Detroit you have the example that despite the efforts of the league that has done more than any other in history to insure parity - the NFL, a team can still be consistently bad for a long time. There is no cure for incompetent ownership. In the end, it's not of much value to say an owner 'wants to win' if he/she is clueless about how to.

well that is good! My student lab has run in person right through this all also. We took reasonable precautions that were a pain to live with but we didn't have any documented cases of transmission and the U was tracking pretty closely. But that's the thing, we didn't need to be China to at least be Canada ( 1/3 the death rate of the US). My complaint was the refusal of so many Americans to be even a little bit reasonable for the sake of their neighbor's parents. Sure, the epidemiological issues have become more nuanced with Omicron - but the basic "kiss my asz" attitude remains, and that is what disappoints me the most.

Your're not arguing from one anecdote that 800K+ Americans haven't really died are you? (!)

you're reading a judgment into a set of statements that are simply statements. My *judgment* on the question would be that what the Chinese have done would have been too extreme in the other direction for us, though I'm not prepared to say it's been a mistake for the Chinese - different culture, different expectations, different everything. OTOH, I do think as a nation the US has been way too cavalier about accepting the death rates in pursuit of some mythical kind of cowboy freedom. Probably because so many of the deaths were of the old, and as a society we'd rather not see the old at all if we can help it. American's don't like being reminding of their mortality - we'd rather spend our time being vicarious super-heroes.

but not to anywhere near the same degree. Example - Mike Ilitch was much more desperate to win when he started writing blank checks than the Cards were when they let Pujols walk.

5 cases/100,000 population per day. We were almost there in the dip after the initial surge but began to relax too soon before getting far enough to really keep it down. At that point we were facing the Chinese decision - clamp down the rest of the way and kill it or live (and die) with it. Political and ethical considerations completely to the side, any country could have tried to do what China did and I don't doubt they keep a better lid on it than we have. But whether to have pursued a Chinese style strategy is not in the end an epidemiological question, it's a political one about how much a life is worth vs how much you have to do to save it. We make that decision all the time in many different areas and for Covid the US has come down in an almost uniquely extreme position wrt not caring much about lost life compared to the 'cost' of saving it. So we get to keep our red hats and have one of the highest death rates in the 1st world. That's just been the way the cookie crumbled. The Chinese OTOH, have decided to value life extremely highly, not least in a politcal gambit to show that their system can produce a kind of favorable result the West can't. To each his own I guess.

right. 1st, you probably have some teams whose management does want to win but are just incompetent. The Tigers under Randy Smith probably fit that bill. Then you have the teams you cite for whom profits are more important than wins, and there is no question that doing the most you can to win is probably not the most profitable strategy, or worse, you have a team in the situation where losing a lot is actually the most predictable and financially lowest risk strategy. Clearly those teams should be moved or their ownership replaced, but there is no easy mechanism to get to those decisions.

Correct, incidence numbers are pretty useless at this point. Hospitalizations and fatalities are more meaningful comparisons now. Even vax rates have to be tempered by accounting for how much 'natural' immunity is in a community from prior infection, and then that is complicated by the fact that the different strains apparently produce varying levels of resistance to other strains. The reports are that having had Omicron provides better natural immunity than Delta, despite being the less serious disease. But I wouldn't consider the knowledge base there cast in stone either.

5/100k. The standard from the Epids has been out there from the beginning. If Covid should become an 'ordinary' circulating 'common cold' that might be too low, but it's not like the people in the field haven't thought about this stuff, you just don't hear it reported.

Yeah - if any one in history benefitted from 'pretty girl' syndrome, it was Diana. She seemed to start out pretty well but by the end of her life it looked like she was getting just as bad as the rest of them. If she had lived longer I wouldn't have been surprised if she would have managed to finally take the shine off her image.

Or you organize a league as a single big corporation or trust with each team’s management group subject to fan retention vote every so many years. that would also let you put all players on the same performance based pay scale. And if all funds went first to a single league org, market size advantages would also be eliminated.

Reminds me of when GM was using ‘Eminence Front’ in an ad campaign. The lyric, of course, is that you are being ‘put on’. Perfect accidental truth moment in American advertising!

Other than most kids seeming to have higher resistance to Covid, another piece is that you’d have to guess that kids wear masks even more poorly than adults, but again, that kind of thing is very hard to determine with any accuracy

speaking of retrospective studies on masking - from the CDC today. This study was pre-omicron and based on self reporting - so again, FWIW: reduction in chance of contracting Covid: Cloth mask = 56% surgical mask = 66% N95 mask = 83% https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7106e1.htm?s_cid=mm7106e1_w [cdc.gov]https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7106e1.htm?s_cid=mm7106e1_w [cdc.gov]

yeah - the misinformation and misunderstanding on the mask issue is deep. Cloth masks have *never* stopped virus from passing through them, their major property is to break up your exhalation patterns to reduce the range to which you spread virus around yourself so that other people who are trying to stay a reasonable distance from you have their risk reduced. They protect other people from you - so when worn by all produce and aggregate risk reduction to a population, but still not directly to individuals. OTOH - even with N95s - which can reduce your risk of inhaling someone else's shed virus and can protect you directly, few people who have them wear them properly (i.e. tight!) enough for them to actually do what they are theoretically able to do better than cloth. The fluid mechanics of air flow, particle distribution and filtration are really all outside the expertise of most of the medical establishment - even they have trouble figuring it all out, and good data is very hard to come by because good experimental work is really hard to do or reproduce - you are immediately faced with too many variables to track. The epidemiologists are mostly reduced to waiting for retrospective public studies on mask use, which are also fraught with difficulties. There is a reason that in industrial health science, for all hazardous atmospheres, only true respirators have ever been considered acceptable protection

if this is true, I think it could be definitive. Money trumps emotion even in Putin's world.