gehringer_2

If you want to watch the Tigers your options seem to be shrinking. We are with DirectTV_Stream/Nee ATT mostly because they will still carry the local sports networks, though there is now a surcharge for them.

As I have watched politics over a few decades, the money in elections bothers me more day by day, but legislative horse trading, which can be labeled 'pork', is actually not so bad a thing to me - it's how get things done - somebody in my district needs this, someone in your district wants that. I think it's something that sounds worse in rhetoric than it really is in operation. I really have no problem with 'earmarking' for example and I think the Congressional leadership made a mistake eliminating the process. The question is not so much whether something got into a bill by individual earmark or for what might be a narrow constituency - as long as it is a public one. It don't mind if an interest is narrow as long as it's public. A post office for Podunk or a road that may be little used but still connects some real people I can live with as the cost of getting enough legislators on board for more important stuff even if some would call that pork. Even a useless weapons system isn't the worst thing since most of that money goes to salaries in the end. It's the tax and regulatory giveaways to the donor class, both private and corporate, that bother me most anymore.

LOL - One of the things Pelosi was trying to do would have been a favor to the remaining sane people in the GOP by removing Trump from future electoral politics, but they weren't having any.

always a good call.

LOL! On seeing this bit of blasphemy, any Christian that has read his NT should think of this: Have a nice day.

We've seen it before in MI. The same kind of 'stick in your eye voting' is probably also what helped keep Coleman Young in office so long. Consequences are just broader when it happens on a national scale.

Just grazing google there have been a couple of Al Qaeda plots caught inside Canada since 9/11, so their screening procedures aren't all that perfect.

not quite true. There was Ahmed Ressam in 1999. Ferried to Washington State from Vancouver with 100lbs of explosives. Planned to set off a bomb at LAX. I thought there was one other group apprehended in BC a number of years ago as well but I can't find anything that matches. Maybe it was this same story and I had it muddled. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/trail/inside/cron.html

I can see there are some interesting aspects. We have been told that more women in power is supposed to create a 'better' environment than the testosterone dominated one, so if women in business are just as bad as men, there's a counter narrative story on that front. But then even more than that, she has turned around and based her defense on blaming everything on the men, trying to play poor abused woman, so there is a story in whether she is believed (aren't we always supposed to believe the woman?) or does she get her comeuppance (yes she did) for trying to have it both ways? So I think the case does reflect a lot of current cultural tensions.

The language Progs apparently don't see that telling Spanish speakers how to speak Spanish is pretty much a form of English language cultural imperialism.

true. English nouns do not have gendered forms, we only have only gendered pronouns. In Latin and languages more closely derived from it, the nouns themselves have gender which makes the fixations of our English language police on pronouns pointless in those languages. You'd have to rewrite the entire dictionary.

the fixation on gender in and of itself seems to be somewhat unique to American progressives. I wonder if that is just the natural reflection/reaction to the overly strict gender role assignments of historical American Puritanism.

As a matter of fact ewsieg, after 9/11 the US complained bitterly to the Canadians that their asylum processes were much too liberal and did not sufficiently protect the US, and in view of that fact stopped allowing low security passage back into the US from Canada. This of course was damaging to Canadian cross boarder commerce and in retaliation (one of many) the Canadians closed Canada to easy entry by American workers who previously had been able to cross the border freely on a short term basis for their trans-national employers. I was such a traveling consultant and as a result of this little tit-for-tat actually had to apply for a Canadian alien work permit, which was, after much bureaucratic exercise and legal fees paid, duly stapled inside my passport, both of which I was now required to present to enter Canada to do a day or two of technical consulting when previously I could simply cross the border with nothing more than my ID and a "howdy" to the Canadian customs officer. It took a number of years of wrangling to improve the situation somewhat, though still well short of where it was in 2000.

a Driveline guy? Kewl.

this may be true but it's a bit apples and oranges. What is the comparison between '17 and '21?

that is actually pretty much in line with the total estimated dead from all the atomic attacks (2 by the US) in world history, and that has been 75 yrs. By 75 yrs we will have killed >600,000 with guns. Well, that is less than Covid, and since Covid's apparently not a problem, I guess guns aren't either. #culturegoneinsane

sounds like a natural for the broadcast booth, he could tell inside stories about half the teams in the league!

I wouldn't tell anyone not to buy crypto if they want to, but just realize that investing in crypto is like being a 'technical' stock buyer in the sense that you're placing your bets on trend analysis and/or market psychology predictions, not the kind of 'fundamental' value analysis you might do for a company or product.

and luckily, common Russian nouns do not have patronymics - War and Peace would an inch thicker....

yeah - you wonder. There is enough uncertainly on both sides with the available testing that you're left with doubt. I had a 'cold' in early Dec - passed it to the SO. It hung around more than two weeks, though that is not particularly unusual for me. I tested twice - the 'U' does a saliva based PCR, neg both times. Symptoms didn't match Delta - no fever, no taste/smell effect, energy level fine. But still - maybe an early Omicron? But since then we have been through 3 crowded airports, 3 completely full plane flights, more restaurants than we have been in in 2 yrs, and an Xmas party where we know a grandnephew went positive the next day. If anyone should have caught it it since then it was us, but we're fine - so maybe we had it? Or what we both had in April '19 before there was any testing may have been it. One person can always be the outlier.

this is true. The more fundamental split in the US is urban/rural and it exists in pretty much every state. Aside from maybe the core of the old South, a state's relative blueness is pretty a measure of its internal urban/rural population dist. Even in Tx Houston is Democratic, and even in CA the Central valley is GOP.

SO found testing a time available at a CVS in A^2 tomorrow. Couldn't find anything when we looked before leaving town on the 20th. I have one scheduled tomorrow at the U's student/staff service. I'll be interested to see if they have moved back into the bigger room where they started in 2019. They had shifted to a smaller room this fall after they waived the weekly testing requirements for the vaxxed.

and the ultimate irony that has emerged is that we can only know what it should cost to buy some real object with BitCoin et al by first ascertaining their value against the standard of the US (fiat) dollar.

It's not a Ponzi - A Ponzi is a specific scam based on pyramiding which is not what crypto is. I don't think many people ever spend much time thinking about what money actually is and how it works. We assume that somewhere in prehistory, the very first commerce was barter, but it's obvious that barter becomes logistically inconvenient really fast, so the idea of an intermediate value storage medium - money that is, emerged pretty quickly. But what to use? Well you couldn't use anything too cheap and easy to come by because by definition those things can't hold more value than they are worth themselves, so things like rare metals, fine sea shells, and gems are all good candidates, and rare metals the best because you can actually 'mint' them and put convenient data on them to reflect their value. But there was still a problem, which is that the supply of even these rare metals was subject to wide fluctuations based on mining discoveries and bank hoarding or even jewelry styles, and supply didn't necessarily increase as economies tried to grow, which has a stifling effect. So national economies could be thrown into inflation or recession based on a mining find somewhere. Not a desirable situation. But finally in the 20th century the light went on. You don't need the actual medium to be worth anything in and of itself at all, as long as someone controls the supply carefully- the supply will establish the value, the thing in itself can be worthless paper (or computer entries now), as long as it's secure (hard to counterfeit) - and 'fiat' money was born. But the key to fiat money is that someone is managing the supply - and managing it well. That is the only way it works. The idea of crypto was its value was supposed to have some 'real' basis in the cost to mine it, but that obviously doesn't actually work to maintain stable value. The problem with crypto as currency is exactly that its value cannot be controlled as needed. No one can remove crypto from circulation when its value is falling and no one can inject it when the economy is expanding (at least any faster than the mining process, which to the degree it is controlled, is controlled by factors untethered to overall economic need. Things like the price of chips and GPUs and electrical power drive mining costs (and your ability to use malware to hijack other people's computer power!). So the way I would put is that the one thing Crypto is not is money. It much more akin to gold, and it suffers all the same failures, and in fact more, as money as gold ever did. Despite some governments doing it wrong sometimes, in the main fiat currency has been a huge improvement over gold/silver, just as I believe it will continue to be over crypto, at least until someone comes up with a crypto system different from any out there now. Though one thing which is does do is function as an untraceable transaction medium for black markets, which is probably what will keep it alive from now on.

Fusion is still a long way over the horizon - but I do think we will see safer more modularized fission reactions systems as part of the transition away from fossil. To me, Crypto is the purest of pure speculations. Crytpo is worth exactly what anyone wants to pay for it at the moment, which could be something or nothing. It's completely unmoored - which is precisely why it will never actually replace government issued money. The crypto creators held the concept that money detached from gov could be more stable and thus more desirable - that governments are evil manipulators of their currencies, but they had it exactly backwards. Despite what the Von Mises school adherents believe, the methods in systems like the US Federal Reserve are powerful stabilizers of the value of the dollar. Sure it's 'manipulated', but manipulated with the object of stability and predictability, which is why people like to use it. That is exactly what crypto lacks. Plus currenty the issue with the 'mined' cryptos is that the only profitable way to mine them is to steal the power and/or CPU cycles to mine them because the power and CPU to create one is worth more than the crypto is - so the whole process has become based on massive theft.