gehringer_2

The weird sense of transposition leaving an LAX that was so crowded you needed a shoe horn just pry your self enough room to stand in, and landing in Portland where a cannon shot down the terminal wouldn't have hit a soul.

Cheers!

remember, it took a while before any one matched ARod's contract. Not every new contract set a new baseline. Correa's hoping Lindor is not ARod. Maybe he'll be right, maybe not.

fair point. I think SF has the right narrative though. When Covid started the Reds weren't being affected and the evangelicals could just call it God's judgment on all them city sinners. Problem is once having picked sides it's not so easy to back out of the logic to which you committed.

Yeah - I don't see what why what a guy is asking for is any kind of hard determinant on what you might want to offer. Your FO may have a more realistic idea of what he is going to have to settle for than he admits to.

I should know better by now to never post anything from my phone!

No way to predict that. Mutation is fundamentally a random process. It’s true that a bug that kills its host too efficiently won’t be able to keep spreading very well, but the morality rates for all the Covid variants are low enough that probably doesn’t figure much into their survival probability. So far that has been mostly a matter of the other side of the coin— their infectivity.

there are certainly issues with the regulatory state, but the primary one is the loss of democratic control of the government that runs the regulatory state. The problem is not a government that regulates - any good government must - and the clear difference between requiring people to take reasonable measures to insure the public health of all, as opposed the rent seeking lobbies that have given you permitting requirements to fix your own head as the result of their political expenditures should be self-evident. You have gotten as far as identification of the problem, but the reflexive response that anarchy and unrestrained power for those that can buy it is the wrong solution. The problem with the regulatory state in the US is that today it is driven more by the money contributed by commercial interests than the public interest. I'll give you three guesses how best to solve that, and the 1st two need not even count.

Merry Christmas, Morans!

There is a very simple reason for this - at least in MI, which is that as the vaccine was sequentially approved for younger people the denominator in the percentage calculation increased and the % vaccinated dropped, then eventually got back to the previous level when enough new vaccinations had occurred to get the the same percentage of a now larger target population. This has all been explained on the Mich Covid (MDPH) site at each stage of the process - approval to 12 yrs and then approval to 5 yrs.

the other thing about the numbers in the US is that in places like MI, you have an average of 60 but half the places are at 80 and the other half are at 40, so for all intents and purposes you have half the counties in the state at such a low level that it's no different from zero for for the purposes of epidemic suppression.

Somewhere up thread I posted about the difference between a vaccine's clinical effectiveness and its epidemiological effectiveness. They are different things. Early evidence is that Omicron will still replicate in a vaccinated individual enough for that individual to pass the virus on, so that's much not help wrt epidemic spread. But OTOH, so far preliminary evidence is that the vaccines are effective for Omicron at reducing the severity of clinical outcomes (morbidity/mortality). Meaning that getting vaccinated now is even more a matter of self-interest rather than social responsibility than it was previously.

the opt out problem for Correa in that scenario is that even if he has two great years, in the eyes of most buyers, as a short stop he is probably still losing value faster with age than performance can overcome.

right. Not even in the same family.

Was give given a copy of 'the Dawn of Everything' which looks to be arguing Rousseau and Hobbes were all wrong. I'll let you know if they succeed in drowning the Leviathan.

the biggest problem with this view is the technological society. The needed for pooled action is easy to see in the case of crime/security. If the bad guy is young, 6'8" 275lbs and/or has a gun, you want society organized to bring the strength of the full society to your aid. But the idealization the individual can navigate the modern advanced technology market on his own scientific competence, or that the market can manage resource utilization decisions fairly or safely in the absence of accounting systems that actually capture true social costs, idealizations that underpin libertarianism, are fantasies. No individual in 10 life times can gain knowledge of enough sciences and technologies to make only informed market choices, so like we pool physical strength, we are forced to pool knowledge collectively in the form of the regulatory state. Likewise no economy has yet devised a accounting model that forces the external costs (health/safety/environmental) of their operations on corporate actors. Again, this demands the pooling of social judgement on the advisability of economic activities in the form of the regulatory state. It actually is exactly the same case as crime/violence with the same validity. So this is where/why libertarianism agitprop becomes the favorite charity of the robber baron class. The easiest way for the Koch's or Exxon or GM to clear the way for whatever irresponsibilities they are motivated to commit in the name of profit is to proselytize for the libertarian case across the country. When it comes to the libertarian argument just follow the money. When you see who is paying the bill, that should give you pause to understand you are being co-opted if nothing else does.

is it still the largest offer he has received to date? What he says he wants and what he gets might end up being quite different. If the Tigers looked around the league in their judgement no-one was going to give him what he wanted, they had nothing to lose by making an offer they were willing to pay. Call it due diligence, or just keeping some faith with the fan base. True, the internal contradiction is that over the years it's pretty obvious the Tigers always want to do their business early, but a "you know you aren't really going to get what you want offer" to a player is more likely to yield a deal if it comes near the end of the FA process than the beginning. Of course the other thing we don't know is how many teams had already made Correa other offers he had rejected.

LOL, $50K Xmas present

I don't even think you know what Marxism is if you think it has anything to do with anything in this thread. But be that as it may, expecting people to make some level of accommodations in their own lives for the benefit of their fellow travelers is not called tyranny, it is called civilization. Try parsing this sentence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Do you notice the 1st principle is "LIFE" and the the rights are meant to inhere in *all*. Read some John Locke (the guy the Founders cribbed all this stuff from). Government exists to take us of out of the natural state of warfare every individual would otherwise be in with every one else. It is the reasonable expectation that your liberty will be proscribed by necessity of helping other people also gain their lives and liberties. The US right seems to want nothing more than to return exactly to some kind of state of individualist state of warfare as though it were some kind of virtue. Nothing could actually be further from the motivating principles for the founding of this nation.

Trump only wanted to deny the virus required any actions that might affect the economy and reduce his chances of re-election. He was perfectly happy to talk up the virus in terms of him being the country's savior from it. So for Trump like *everything* else, his relation to facts about the virus were completely transactional: If they helped him they were true, if they impeded him, they were false.

isn't most of surveillance provided in downtown Detroit provided by Bedrock rather than the police? Not quite the same as having their people in the street but a case of a private org directly contributing to or supplementing police activity.

and he is probably still 3-4 yrs away from peak strength - if he can stay healthy.

the number that cross the border and the number that get caught are both pretty meaningless. There is a large flow of Mexican nationals in both directions all the time.

wow. Don't think it's common for a brain tumor to go un-diagnosed to so long and then kill you so quickly. Then again, having known at least one BT victim, the long drawn out case may be worse.

No scale to judge the size of the hole on top but at the right size I'd day candle holder?