gehringer_2

It's also the the larger demographic trend. The very center of the baby boom is exactly at retirement age so you have an unprecedented number of people leaving the labor force. On the other end the cost of child care drives more parents with small children out of the low wage workforce because the income trade off is not good enough. Higher wages won't do much to stem retirements, but they could pull more parents who are at home back into the workforce.

population is still getting older, demand will still be weak once supply chain issues taper off so the long term trend will remain deflationary. On the inflation side the labor market is finally tight enough to produce some wage inflation, and the the stimulus on the fiscal side is large. But the monetary stimulus on the fed side has also been large and as the Fed tapers that the extra effect of the fiscal stimulus will be blunted. I can see the problem being that as the Fed tapers, it will depress the market and the Wall Street people will start screaming about it. One of the problems ever since 2008 is that too much of the stimulus in the economy has been monetary, and that money tends to flow too much to investors, compared to fiscal stimulus which flows into the economy on more of a bottom up basis. But we have a pretty spoiled investor class in the US now. The Fed should be able to control this inflation if politics allow it to.

well, they lost by less than they were out rebounded by.

Should they make the playoffs they should be a better team with Vrana and Bertuzzi ( and maybe Berggren) than what we see right now. So maybe a 4 or 5 game series where they lose close twice.

well, that didn't take long: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/sports/college/2021/12/10/fake-slides-now-against-rules-after-pitt-qb-picketts-trick-vs-wake/6462187001/?itm_medium=recirc&itm_source=taboola&itm_campaign=internal&itm_content=RightRailArticleThumbnails-Redesign

you know you could just gargle a 1/2 ounce of Tanqueray and get the best of both worlds.....

All, true. Long story short: I didn't say there weren't reasons for a tournament, only that a larger tournament would do less to determine which of the consensus elite teams was the best. That was supposedly the original motivation for instituting the current championship playoff. It was just too terrible to have to contemplate the possibility of two different schools finishing at the top of the two polls. Mich/Neb must never happen again! Now of course that is only one reason for a playoff. Whether it's best one or the only one is in the eye of the beholder.... A 12 team tournament may have any number of virtues, but resolving the old split poll situation to pick "the best" team from the one or two that rose to the top during the season isn't one of them.

be nice if they show up for this one since it's Friday night and I don't have any homework.

And the difference between Tx and Ca is more than just wages. For example, real estate costs for the franchise in CA are probably something like double on average.

But what does that mean? We know that the outcome of single game between two teams does not really resolve which team is 'better' in any general sense. If UM played OSU each week for 10 weeks I would not put a nickel on Michigan winning 5 or more. So of course if 12 teams play the outcome is going to have a high degree of randomness overlaying what ever 'real' difference there is in the quality of the teams. The initial idea of the tournament was to resolve the argument between which of the *small* number of teams that might all have some level of support for deserving the overall championship, i.e., those that got 1st place votes in a split poll. There is no way there are any number of people are contending the #12 team may really be the best in the country. There are reasons for having tournaments ($$$) but widening the tournament in football will just dilute the degree to which its winner is going to be the team most people believe is the best team - so that is not the reason this one will expand. The expanded playoff just moves you closer to the situation like the baseball playoff, where the winner is no-more than the team on the best short term run. The Braves may have won the WS, but would any sane baseball person exchange take the 2021 Braves in for the 2021 Dodgers or Giants?

the wings keep playing in their own end on 5 on 5 like they are short handed. They keep sagging off the puck carrier even when there is no odd man to worry about. You never get the puck back playing so passive.

terrible period. Seider caught flat footed on the 2nd goal. Leddy can't make an outlet to save his life tonight but the holding call on him was a joke

Kulfan went through the injury list for tonight in his daily column in the News and didn't mention anything about Seider being out.

Kulfans daily Wings update in DetNews now reports Hronek "playing through an injury" https://www.detroitnews.com/story/sports/nhl/red-wings/2021/12/09/red-wings-namestnikov-enjoying-increase-offensive-production/6446217001/

This is true, but I think it's only part of the equation. It doesn't matter if a coach is loved, but it does matter if he knows how to get inside the heads of his players to get them to perform. Case in point would be Scotty Bowman. But I think there that if you cross the point where most of a team really thinks the coach is an A-hole, where they have 'dismissed' him so to speak, his chances of being able to manage, let alone motivate, that team probably do get a lot worse (e.g, Patricia or Mike Babcock at the end of his Det tenure).

Al Borges on a recent Michigan insider talked about how as a coordinator you look out at a defense and think "This is available and that is available", but then you look at what your personnel can execute and you realize, "No, it's not....."

When I was young, I remember still seeing still immigrants coming to the USA from Western Europe and Scandanavia. You don't see may resident Euros in the US any more other than people on transfer by multi-nationals.

LOL - From 1976: https://www.nytimes.com/1976/01/04/archives/ftc-disputes-validity-of-research-on-listerine.html

If you sue Congress, doesn't that give them a prima facie case for contempt? Just sayin'..

actually make sense though. Defending the parent's case is going to be of interest to gun advocacy groups. Those same groups don't care if the boy is found guilty because 'people kill people' is consistent with the narrative.

there is also the argument that the availability of so much load money has removed any market pressure for schools to keep costs down. I don't know how to evaluate that argument. It's plausible, it is true? Heck if I know. The U says it $1.2B in aid flows to students against that $1.7B total tuition bill, but the devil is in the ratio of loans to grants, which they conveniently do not report.

when it comes to the 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat", Putin is a solid 1 for 2.

it is a fact that Russia has real historic ties/claims - particularly in Crimea. In fact it is a more than a little ironic that that Ex-Soviet Russia is being hoist on the petard of their own false reality system. The Soviets created fig leaf 'independent' soviet 'states' within the CCCP as a misdirection over the reality of their status as a land empire. Ukraine was not independent under the Tsars and wasn't under the Soviets either. But the Russian are now being bitten by the fact that they initially made them a separate state on paper and the question is now is whether that has morphed into a different reality on the ground. The Ukrainians seem to think so! It's very easy for the west to dismiss Russian claims in the name of the claimed greater virtue of self-determination, but we should remember that the worst war we ever fought (and won) was pretty much to deny a portion of our countrymen self-determination. We would claim we fought their self-determination in the name of a higher virtue, while we will claim to support Ukraine's self-determination also in the name of a higher virtue of being anti-Russian. But virtue is in the eye of the beholder. You can't negotiate with Russia on the basis that you find them the source of vice. It may be true but it's still a non-starter at the negotiating table! So the first thing to accept is that even if it weren't Putin, any Russian leader is likely to put up a fight over Ukraine joining NATO. If what's important is doing right by the people of Ukraine, we won't be doing them any favors by turning their country into a worse war zone than it is. It's more important to persuade Putin to keep his hands to himself so Ukraine can develop on its own path, than to insure Ukraine has a path to NATO membership. If a deal can be made for a non-aligned but basically free Ukraine (the Finland model), the West would be both foolish and wrong not to take it. Finland is doing fine, BTW. They found a path where they get along with the West and they get along with Russia both quite nicely. NATO survives quite well without them and the Russians don't seem to feel threatened their fully Europeanized political and economic organization at all.

correct - tuition and fees cover 80% of costs today, they used to cover 25%. It's basically the same budget model as a private school. The proportionally larger endowments at someplace like an Ivy generates roughly the same percentage contribution at a Yale that the state does at Michigan. But higher Ed costs more everywhere. So here are the numbers: go all the way back to before inflation - say 1968- which is convenient yr as my sister started at UM that year. Total UM enrollment today is 50K. Tuition for a year in '68 was $350. UM claims that was 23% of the costs at that time, so total cost of educating her was $1460 of which the state was kicking in $1,110. There was not a lot of research money in those days so let's assume the general fund was essentially tuition plus state appropriation. The price deflator since then is 8.28. So in today's dollars, the state should be kicking in $9180 per student. For a total enrollment of 50K, that would be $459M. Actual state support is $322M. The difference is $2.7K per student. The $2.4B general fund works out to $48K being spent per student educated(!). The $1.8B in tuition comes out to $34K/student. If the state had kept up, reduce that to $31K. So the U's line that tuition increases are all about reductions in state funding is not exactly accurate though it is a big chunk-o-change. But the real increase in University spending per student since '68 adjusting for inflation is from $12K ($1460*8.28) to $48K, or almost a quadrupling! When I look around campus, the question is always - where is that money? Being a college professor has not really changed much in terms of economic class - still solidly upper middle, and a lot of the instructional staff is well below full professor pay grade. If you believe the charts, G&A is not all that terrible. At the engin school one huge change is the sq footage of architecture per student. The physical plant per student has exploded. But the Engin School is the outlier - it raises a lot of it's own money via research and and it employs a lot of non-student/non-faculty full time scientists who are largely self supporting. But the E-school just isn't that big a part of the budget total. So where is it?

what has changed is that states used to underwrite a big part of higher ed. The great 'success' of the GOP/Corporate led race to force states to compete to cut taxes, is that states don't have the money to do that anymore. College is more expensive *everywhere* because tuition carries a higher % of the cost load today. You can see the truth of this in the fact that the real cost difference (as actually paid by students and described above) between the costs of a private vs public university education has fallen substantially in 40 yrs.