gehringer_2

Still - it's one thing for Ivan not to have established 'air superiority', but another to assume the good guys control enough of the skies for A10s not to be sitting duck for superior air to air combat planes.

If you wanted the most impartial rule I could come up it would simply be to let a computer minimize the total perimeter of all districts, with the only over-ride factor being to avoid dividing existing governmental units as much as possible.

Under that interpretation Michigan's system could be thrown out then, as it was created by a citizen's initiative/constitutional amendment. So what if the constitutional amendment mandated that the legislature create the redistricting commissions? A fig leaf, but then the law is full of them....

well of course I drew out the arg to it's extreme conclusion - but you can't deny that the conservative agenda has been a long term play! But there is a federalist principle here as to what a state legislature fundamentally is. It is a creation of a state constitution, and thus subject to those state constitutional rules, or is is some kind of free floating unrestrained entity. To me that is a pretty easy answer and I have trouble seeing why a JOTSC would even be interested in visiting the question. But then I think "corporations are people" and "money is speech" are pretty asinine as well.

not the decision, the consensus expressed by some of the conservative members that they want to take up the issue of whether the language in the Constitution regarding state legislatures having power over elections trumps State Constitutional constraints on the exercise of that power. That seems like an obviously absurd position for SCOTUS to take and one can only be politically motivated in my book. For instance the US constitution may explicitly give the 'power of the purse' the the legislative branch, but that in no way means a court couldn't/wouldn't/shouldn't overturn a spending bill that violates the equal protection clause because it only allotted funds to white people. The mere assignment of a power in the Constitutions doesn't vitiate other limitations on that power They would basically be saying that no voting access rights case based on a state legislative decision could be heard except in a federal court. That seems pretty idiotic to me. Of course the next obvious step for the conservatives would then be to deny cert in the Federal courts saying they didn't have jurisdiction either.....The perfect slippery slope to eliminate right's protection.

I've always been a little sceptical of over-reliance on stealth as the physics tells you that transparency is always a matter of frequency. Now of course there are good reasons that tactical radar runs at the freqs it does, but that doesn't mean there are not engineering compromises available to increase the visibility of stealthy targets. Stealth advocates argue that these compromises cost so much in the ability to localize the target that stealthy still wins the day, but I'm not so sure someone won't get clever and figure a way to reduce it's value even if not defeat it completely. So I would keep making sure the birds we build are still good at all the non-stealthy stuff!

Fear and loathing of gay people is so deeply rooted into many cultures - esp judeo-christian. Probably the result of sexual insecurity in the males of the hierarchy over centuries driving the hidden undercurrents of cultural taboo/rule formation. I am actually surprised to see how much the US has changed toward normalizing homosexuality in the culture in my lifetime, but we clearly are not there yet. In the US today, the core issue remains that for the christian biblical literalists, the normality of homosexuality, like evolution, is one more scientific learning that they take as an attack on the cornerstone of their belief system, and one where the 'enemy' has a face, and one that has become easier to see as gays have been able to come out in the rest of society. Now that said said, I don't necessarily disagree with E that overloading young children with sexual messaging is largely inappropriate, but the joke is that rest of straight culture already does that 24/7/365 with all the sexualized advertising and media output to which they are exposed.

yeah - I think this part is easy to forget.

I could understand the idea that if the academies are getting a cut now that might go away in a draft system and that could reduce the funds available for the instructional system, but if that's the issue why are Abreu and Guillen on the other side? Not arguing here, just trying to understand the issues a bit.

LOL - most people would think their jobs just got easier if you cut their work hours by 20-30%.

interesting pic on that site of a Russian tank with sand bags piled on a platform over the turret. Appears to be makeshift attempt at Javelin defense.

so the argument is that it's the bonuses that drive participation in Latin American youth baseball? I could believe that might be true but I'd want more than one player's opinion in the way of analysis.

why are pitch clocks something that favor the owners, unless you just mean something that improves the sport overall should make the sport more profitable - in which case it should benefit the players as well? No?

I wonder how long Euro's memory about China's encouragement of Putin will be?

of course this aspect has has been rotten since forever. I don't know if there are some owners using their teams to launder dirty money or what, but that the MLB owners have never agreed to put their team finances on a transparent enough basis to share with the players so that fundamental things like a global revenue split could be negotiated is beyond absurd and maybe the single core issue that could facilitate all others.

LOL - Thumb war at High Noon!

right - but when this happens you have a team of 25 players operating at low salary for 2 guys in NY making 40 million. If that is what the union wants, fine - *some* guys are getting a bigger % share of total revenue, but not the average player. The base thing is that I don't agree with the contention that top salaries drag up any other salaries. I haven't seen it. Guys are the bottom make the minimum, which is not tied anything at the top, and it seems like the cost of mid level players - say like our example Schoop, do not seem to have gone up in proportion the top contracts being given to stars, though I could be persuaded I'm wrong if someone had the figures to make the showing.

Shrub was strong and healthy - probably more so than any US Pres in my lifetime - and also a disaster as POTUS. And I was dumb enough to vote for him once.... Reagan was in excellent condition for a man of his age until the dementia hit. OTOH, FDR managed WWII with one foot in the grave...

they could have done worse.

that's one way to put it....

I know you reject it. () but if in all these years the the CBT being what it is hasn't caused teams 100 million away from it to approach it, what mechanism changes that now? Things like the streaming deal are certainly part of the answer if the revenue is more evenly distributed than overall revenue now - it's moving things in the right direction. Not speaking of you or anyone in particular here, but there seems to be a view that small market owners are just sitting on some big pot of money and it's their fault they don't spend more, but that just doesn't seem to square with the facts. 1st, if it were true small market teams should be fetching the highest purchase prices because they are so profitable - that certainly isn't the case. The second arg is it seems odd cheap owners only buy mid-market teams. If it's just random greed I would have thought that by now some cheapskate would have bought the Yankees or Dodgers and run them like the Pirates so he could pocket even more money, but it's never happened.

absolutely, But to analyze conventional wisdom, look for available data. Compare football or basketball to baseball. In those sports, almost all teams have payrolls at or within striking distance of their caps, but not in baseball. Doesn't that argue that there must be some other situation that constrains many baseball teams other than the existence of the cap (de facto or otherwise) that is not constraining basketball and football teams -- like that the revenue situation is so different in baseball than in other sports? Are we to believe that baseball owners are some different kind of breed than other sports owners? Why would they be? I don't see how you fix the overall revenue split to the players without working toward a more equitable revenue split. All the cap increase does is allow a few teams to pay more, while leaving competition even more screwed. That's good for a few players, I don't see how it's good for players as whole. I think the fair counter question is why doesn't the union see this if it's so obvious, and personally I think it's because the union is well captured by the richest players who do benefit - as a sub group - from a higher cap. You also have the 'aspirational fallacy' at work. In the same way many lower economic group people defend the rights of the rich in politics because they think they might be rich some day, many more players than ever will probably beleive they will be stars.

the really dangerous one that the conservative on the court are pushing is that state legislatures are not bound by their own state constitutions. I seriously doubt that is anything the founders had in mind.

when COVID crashed the world economy, the drop in the price of oil drove frackers off their fields. As the economy came back, supply was low so prices rose. Prices have to increase to the point where producers back start up again. Price elasticity of supply and demand - Econ 101. The US federal government has had little to do with this - it's called market economics, and this market has done exactly what any market would do under the circumstances. On top of that war uncertainty has added some additional premium of course. And it wasn't the US gov that invaded Ukraine either.

That sounds like one of those -- "people are saying" args . Just because wisdom is conventional does mean it can't be wrong. The first may be right but the numbers argue that the 2nd simply does not follow. The evidence appears overwhelming that more teams spend to their revenue than to the CBT number.