gehringer_2

I see the likely end game as once everyone has had it or been immunized it will fade from significance as a public health crisis. As it morphs it will be dealt with using updated boosters and probably some kind of ongoing booster schedule will be developed. There will be some low background of uniquely sensitive individuals or those for whom vaccination doesn't work and it will always remain a risk for them, but as a mass public health issue those numbers will be low enough not to impact normalcy. Until we get there, those that continue to resist vaccination will get it and develop their resistance the hard way, or they will die.

yeah - he's still being a PITA, but at least he's not so much a particular risk to the rest of the team. Maybe Blash should just put him on the 3rd line so Larkin and Raymond can settle in with someone.

meh - now that he's been infected he is no worse than someone who has been vaccinated once. He took a foolish risk to get there but got away with it.

So everyone assumes Putin's Russian conscripts will just swamp the Ukraine army, and maybe with good reason, but what examples do we to have of the recent fighting trim of Russian ground troops?

interesting point

can you keep natural grass alive over the winter in a retractable roof park this far north? I've read re-sodding a baseball field costs something like about half a million, so it's not so costly it couldn't be done every year, but I guess the normal replacement is more like 7-10yrs. And actually the bigger problem is probably that you are at the mercy of the weather as to whether it grows in with any hold before the season starts.

agreed. I think what Pickett said goes more to the point of whether he should be credited with cleverly trying to exploit the rules or just running to daylight.

what would you do differently if you did? I have a couple of peeves. The first is that if they were going to put the ballpark facing south for the skyline view, then it needed more roof overhang to protect the fans from the Sun. Too much of the ballpark is pretty terrible for Summer day games. I'd also build a little more vertical with a smaller lower deck but the upper deck(s) closer to the field.

FWIW, I saw Pickett was on a panel the other day and said there was nothing planned about the fake - he was ready to go down, looked up and saw enough daylight that he honestly changed his mind mid motion.

I think in some cases the designers make things worse. Driving is a visually driven skill and circles should be the ultimate in seeing just where you want to go. But some are designed with terrible visual clueing. In particular I'm talking about ones like at Lee Road at US 23. The designers have tried to 'help' drivers by putting entry 'slots' to the turns, but all they really do is visually uncouple the drivers ability to see where he wants to go. I know I want Whitmore lake road, but I have to pick one several ramps and visually I can't really see which one goes to Witmore lake road. I find that bad conceptual design.

No doubt there has been an inversion of sorts. I would say it's because we have reached a point where COVID outcomes have shifted from being a matter of how well communities organized (and were pushed) to take control measures (distancing, closing schools etc) to the simpler issue of people getting vaccinated - and in MI - since it is a highly polarized state, vaccine resistance has been high. Through this latest surge, low vax areas have consistently led in case rates. The availability of the vaccine has naturally reduced the level of other control measures in place, and that had created a situation where the incidence in the unvaxxed population only goes up - all compounded by Delta being more infectious. Then it becomes almost self sustaining as the high incident rates among the unvaxxed continually create 'reseeding' pressure for breakthrough cases back into areas with higher vax rates. I do fault the State gov for not trying harder with more pro vax propaganda. I understand that they believe the anti-vax crown is unreachable, but I find that to be a bit of circular reasoning. Why are they unreachable? Because they have been propagandized! So it seems to me a case where you should be fighting fire with fire. It's already established that anti-vaxxers are reachable via media inputs. I would have liked to see the State do more to pull out all the stops with its inner Joseph Goebbels. It would have been worth a shot. And the fact is, at least some of those people were reachable because vax rates in MI have finally started to increase again with this latest surge.

Cowher? I think I can picture him holding a playlist in front of him. Bill Walsh also maybe.

actually, not so much. The big increases in cases in Wash county have been in 48197 and 48198. https://www.washtenaw.org/3108/Cases Those are Ypsi addresses and not areas with a lot of UM alums. There was some effect in the student population (see below) and some in 48103, which would more likely have been the game, but mostly the blowup is in low vax areas. If there is a football effect, it should also show up strongly in Oakland county - that is where all the alums are driving in from. When a student brought B117 to A^2 it went right from Washtenaw to Oakland with the students that go back and forth.

Well, it would be one way to the Russians 'inside' NATO as well.

mistyped that, I was thinking of Hawley, brain pulled up the wrong idiot.

if they regain the Congress they will be worse this time. The few GOP institutionalists left are seeing their numbers decrease almost daily - not to mention the likelihood that McConell keels over dead sometime soon - whoever takes over will be worse - a la a Cruz, Graham or Hawley

no doubt

yup. The old saw about the knife at the gun fight apply. But like every thing else, the filibuster has to go first. If the dems can't pull together the unity to do that, nothing else happens beyond spending money, which you can always get past either party. Not that that is nothing, but it has its limits. Then again, who knows, if the GOP takes Congress in 2022 we might all be thanking Manchin for his intransigence.

To penalize the many for the few argument as reason to forestall legal change doesn't actually hold though because that is exactly what is done every where in society. Some people drive safely enough that the marginal value of a seat belt is small. Society decided their being 'penalized' was a sufficient price to pay. You find a thousand similar cases - some people could keep opiates in their medicine cabinets and use them responsibly - no dice on that either. So as a general complaint - complain away should such laws be passed, but as a precedent to prevent the law from acting anyway (should the majority ever actually find it's political will) it's a losing arg.

IDK, there are two sets of voices in play here. First are the house conservatives like Bret Stephens who the Times generally allows to get by on a lower level of intellectual rigor in the name of 'balance.' Frankly I wouldn't bother. If your editors believe these people are wrong, provide balance by reporting on them, but not carrying them. OTOH, if the complaint is about their left side writers whose agenda is enlarging the anti-facist coalition then understanding that the left's tendency to eat itself from the inside out is its biggest challenge to successfully meeting the right side threat is worth the ink. You need to pull in the middle in America, and when you present intellectual constructs that the middle cannot make head or tail of you have lost/will lose. Like it or not that is the way it is. Even if the left continues to believe in its righteousness it needs to find paradigms and rhetorical systems in which to present its ideas that actually attract the majorities - in fact - supermajorities that are no required to accomplish anything. So I don't find anything wrong with NYT opinion writers sounding the alarm to segments of the left for whom purity to too much a virtue.

you aren't going to get constitutional reform until one or more of the large stats forces it. That is just the reality. Does anyone think there is a single sole in Wyoming who is going to say - "Oh my yes, our Senatorial representation really does need amending."? But it's two different questions: How it happens and whether it happens. FWIW, I wouldn't rate the odds of the US democracy just collapsing into some kind of Chinese style econo-autocracy as any worse than real Constitutional reform happening. We are already seeing that half of America seems perfectly willing to hold tighter to their myths than their survival. But if the Union is going to be saved long term, the large states will have to force it or it won't happen.

LOL - worrying about election security is what is known as 'rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic'. The problem in the US is not that election results are mis-counted, it's that correctly counted elections results do produce democratic outcomes. The Federal government is structurally undemocratic and getting more so all the time. That is what why the country is becoming ungovernable. If you want to continue to cling to an 18th century anachronism that it makes any sense for the Constitution for recognize states on an equal basis when half of them are completely incapable of independent existence today, be my guest, but don't turn around and ask why the country doesn't work. Until we stop feeding ourselves mythic nonsense about how great the US Constitution is (the Bill of Right maybe. Articles I&II not so much) and realize that the national contract is obsolete, things will continue to swirl down the tubes.

The different part is being a real functioning Human Being instead of privileged, self-absorbed jerk. ...just sayin'

Someday we get a constitutional convention when CA tells the rest of country to either rebalance representation or they are seceding. The US needs CA a lot more than CA need the US. There won't a civil war to hold the union together this time.

Looks like someone is going to tryu to grease the skids on the slippery slope....