gehringer_2

I bet you never would have bought a tulip in 1635 either. Party pooper.

Miller trying to make lemonade from his lemons.

I think this was edited down from a longer program so it seems to jump topics a bit at some points, but an interesting 23 miin semi-lecture with Peter Ziehan. It's a youtube but it's mostly a podcast - the video is just a few slides. Educational, economic and political background/trends on the current state of Russia and some explanations about their current desperation level and poor future prospects. https://youtu.be/UwPMtmuuVNw Ziehan was a Stratfor guy.

and to be honest, Jefferson (and the rest) cribbed pretty liberally from John Locke (and without attribution - he'd have his tenure revoked today!) As an English intellectual it was pretty natural to be soured on sectarian religion based on the the previous 500 yrs of religious warfare they had been through - but espousing atheism was probably a bridge too far for any public figure then (let alone now). If I remember my readings, Jefferson admitted to being what was referred to at the time (to some degree still is) as a "Deist", one who accepted the existence of divinity but remains relatively agnostic about any particular theological claims about it.

They've gotten pretty innovative with the retractable designs - I suppose that has lowered the cost. But there may not even be room at the Target site for a roof that moves mostly to the side. It's a very constrained site. So the motivation to stay downtown have also have been a factor. The old Metrodome site is a good deal bigger, but unlike the Vikes, who could play at U Minn during construction, the Twins would have had nowhere to play if they had wanted to rebuild at the same site. To have come up with a bigger site in DT Minny probably would have ended up your typical big political fight. Target is a pretty nice venue though. We were only there a couple of seasons after it opened but to that point at least there didn't seem to be any feeling of buyers remorse about it.

and I should have added the converse - a tendency to denigrate the social utility of the action based on a moral judgment about the actor.

As a rule, people in MN are not extravagant for sure, but also: It's hotter and rains less often in Minny in the Summer than in Det or Chicago. Plus if you live in Minneapolis the last thing you want to do after surviving another winter is go inside for your entertainment in the Summer.

Yeah - I can't help seeing a John Salley with a better shot. Good but not dominant player.

so I'm old enough that safety razors were still the most common article when I started shaving. The better ones had adjustable blade guides. The cheaper ones without that were pretty brutal. The other big problem with the old style safety razor is you have to be really careful with it, which most people used to disposable plastics aren't conditioned to. Bang it around or let the blades get a little nicked - easy because they were heavy and so much blade was exposed - and your face is toast. It was a big 'breakthough' improvement when the 'Techmatic' came out because it had a blade guard that snapped in place to shield the edge when the razor wasn't in use.

GOP, WWE? Can you tell the difference?

really? Fundamentalist? You know Jefferson made a translation of the NT where he edited out all the miracles.🤔 The point that Buddha and I are pushing is not that no-one in the history of the world had ever been anti-slavery - you could probably find examples going back to Greece. The issue was that not much had come of it in 3000 yrs so would any practical person (and these were practical men, which is why their revolution took and France's didn't) really envision what the world was going to end up looking like in another 100 yrs when slavery - an institution that dated back to the pharaohs, suddenly did collapse almost world wide? You may be right - they may have been total mercenaries - I guess I don't really care. As I said, I just don't feel any need to pass judgment 250 yrs later on who they were as people. What they did stands on its own for what it was - which was a revolution in national governance systems for its time. One of the things things we consider a core of the Western system of justice is that we separate the person from the act. We don't let you get away with murder just because you love your dog, and we don't convict you of a crime you didn't commit (at least in theory!) even if you are a gang banger. The problem is pop culture (and historians) don't seem to have ever gotten the message. There is a natural human tendency to want to ascribe personal moral worth (whatever that even means) to a person who does a socially useful act when there is never any necessary causal connection between the two. If we would recognize that, we would be less prone to getting into these weeds.

Yup. He probably feels his reach shortening/narrowing - so there is more symmetry between how much he needs to associate with 'popular' people and how much they need to associate with them.

it's what makes drafting players interesting - there's no right answer. You can draft based on what a guy has done and be right or wrong - a guy with tons of NCAA accomplishment might end up as Peyton Manning, or Andre Ware. OTOH, you draft a guy based on great physical attributes and a projected high ceiling, you might get Tom Brady, or you might get Darko!

LOL - Ethereum all hyped about finally getting off the environmental bad list and dumping 'proof of work' for 'proof of stake'. Just what the world needs, going from a system that outgrew what was envisioned as being a truly open distributed control, to one controlled only by the guys who could bring the biggest HW to the table, and now right on to direct control by the biggest existing holders. Crytpo, which early fans saw as some kind of decentralization of banking has taken less than 20 yrs to descend into ordinary top down control capitalism. It has turned into a cute little microcosm lesson in the natural wealth/power consolidating properties of capitalism. Build the boat, float the boat, pull up the boarding ladders. https://www.reuters.com/business/cryptoverse-ether-prepares-epic-merge-quest-eclipse-bitcoin-2022-04-26/

Peaking too early.

Good reason for Manning/Mize to be in FLA.

so I did a little more detailed visual survey of the 'refinery' site and environs via google earth. It does not appear to be what we would call a 'refinery' in the US. It appears to be a fuel blending facility or pipeline terminus for rail loading. It's primarily tankage and a couple of rail loading sidings to handle a couple of dozen rail tankcars at least. There are buildings that could conceivably hold processing facilities (refining process equipment would normally be outdoors, but Russia....), but I see no process furnace stacks or cooling facilities anywhere on the site, which says the only way it can be a processing facility is if all the cooling is done with water from the nearby river - certainly possible - and they only run extremely clean power units - and how likely is that in Russia? The building are more likely for drum or truck packaging/ blending etc or other non-energy intensive operations.

computers do go really fast. No technology limitation on the computer picking the top of the zone based on a guy's load just like the umpire is supposed to. Am curious about what MiLB system actually does though.

It's easy to get deluded into being a home town slappy, but you look at how Ford is going about their entry to the E-vehicle market it seems to be well thought out and thorough-going. And Ford is not even the best of the established operators - the Germans will be heard from, GM etc. The advantage they have all had it that the Japanese have mostly been reluctant, they are still hedging to hold the hybrid market that they think will still emerge as the vehicle of choice - If Toyota had jumped in full EV 5-7 yrs ago with both feet, Tesla would probably already be history.

I think it's definitely a danger sign when a management/manager takes a left turn into an area where they have no expertise. Whether you are impressed by the products or not, the heart of the operation at both Tesla and Space-X was mechanically engineered HW product. What ever mastery Musk has demonstrated as a corporate leader has been finding and managing expertise in HW design and manufacture. I question whether he has a clue how to run Twitter successfully.

There is where I would part company and pretty much what I mean by complexity and nuance. Every human being is the product of their time, of the culture they were born into and the expectations of that culture. I would guess that most of these men, if born today, would be the progressives of today because they would start from *this* cultural ground zero rather than the one they actually started from. From that reference point, what are norms and understandings today were not even visible over the horizon, let alone within reach of practical effort. That's why to me it's pretty much a fool's errand to get embroiled in that discussion. Not one of us has any real concept of the details of the moral universe they viewed. For me it's enough to say that a man made a positive contribution to the movement of society toward a new concept of democratic government. Those were significant and important events in human history, and whether he was a sinner or a saint is really quite immaterial to the fact of the history that was generated by his actions. I think this is a case were maybe we could look to the art world for a little clarity. In general we realize that judging art by the character of the artist is silly. Yes - there are some people who won't play Richard Wagner, but for most people who listen to music, his political views are simply immaterial the music he produced. Picasso was hardly anybody's role model, etc., etc. Let the deeds - the products of action, stand on their own. If Thomas Jefferson abused his slaves, sure repudiate him for that as a man, it simply doesn't change the value of what he brought to world history as a leader a of new movement. They are in the end, unrelated issues. But that said, I do agree that we make a mistake when we lionize the person in place of just celebrating the historical outcome.

That's Cold. Very cold....

"you must be lost young fella...."

because soon every single tweet world wide will come with an ad for one embedded!

I like it.