gehringer_2

and to finish the thought. I would posit that this almost certainly driven by increasing social isolation. People who must work hard to get by but do it in a socially cohesive and supportive environment could take a lot of emotional reinforcement from their experience. most of which is missing for most of them today.

approve/disapprove has become pretty useless because as you note, it's meaning to someone being surveyed has shifted from being a euphemism for "would you vote for this person" used to soften/evade the direct question, to "are you happy with things". Those are two significantly different questions. The malleability/transformation of language is a problem for pollsters. The very much want to be able to keep asking the exact same question over time in order to provide anchor points for use in adjusting samples, but whether the pollsters like it or not, language use does change. And worse than that, the whole emotional state of the population changes. Americans are more discontent for less reason than they used to be. That's not to say a lot of people don't still have it hard, but the degree to which people are willing to accept/expect life being hard has fallen - a lot.

29 years since Ozzy got one for the Wings. Ozzy had a goal and two assists in '95-'96, but not in the same game!

and if a knit cap is a toque, what is one of these?

Of course you know who has a vested interest in tax law being complex? The Lawyers. And of course we know who writes the tax laws - The LAWYERS! It's the perfect circle impenetrable circle. A system incapable of self correction.

I'm sure this system is going to work out well.

isn't that the new thing, that the schools can start paying athletes out of their income instead of outside money? (i.e. the $20M) Isn't the whole idea being to get off the unsustainable NIL rat race? If it's the schools money it seems title IX was bound to apply. But as I recall the deal with the judge did include funds to women's sports. Heck - Title IX has been in place for years and they still put a ton more resource into FB than anything else. 🤷‍♀️

System in the US seems to be trending to a different model. You won't get in to see your doctor, but the 'system' that your doctor/hospital are part of probably has an affiliated 'urgent care' facility you can get into to see someone in your plan on short notice. But a different weakness in the US system is getting in to see a specialist once you've done the urgent care or ER walk-in and preliminary diagnosis was made that you need to see the specialist. Unless you are already so sick you were admitted, that specialist referral can easily be months.

LOL - if the Tigers really have put an offer on the table and Boras is forced to come back to them because he wasn't able to beat it, I don't think he will be have much success convincing the Tigers to start negotiating against themselves - though I'm sure he will try.

I don't think that part is particularly out of line. I've worked at places in the past where they reserved to right to require doctor's verification for more than 3 sick days. Seemed pretty typical.

I saw that too, but TBF that was poor choice of words - they didn't extrapolate unknown data, the applied rates determined from the known data to the places that didn't have data. It all sounds terrible but it's still meaningless to see those numbers without comparison. I know a *LOT* of Americans who can't get in to see their doctors for months at a time. I'm sure that leads to a lot of late and 'too late' diagnoses as well. So what does the US morbidity/mortality look like on the same comparisons? Do we count the number of American's whose medical debt contributed to their suicides? It has been true in the past the Canada has been really bad about elective orthopedic surgery like hips and knees, which is were some of the most egregious wait list times are generated. But just because it's not life threatening doesn't mean it's not a bad situation. You see reports of Canadians coming the US for those kinds of treatments.

I don't mind them so much in general, but there was one point last night when the image on the side board "exploded" at exactly the moment a check was made. I hope that was just random coincidence because it would be truly horrible if they start doing that on purpose.

Yup. Game they were outplayed for better than half. Two takeaways for me: Johansson made some very good plays standing guys up on Panther rushes. He needs to stay. The other is that the secondary effect of the red hot power play is that teams are not going to want to take penalties against the Wings, and that helps inoculate them some from getting muscled out of some games, which is still always a risk for them. Maybe third was - pretty weak game by Rasmussen. Too many time guys just flew by him on his attempts at the forecheck.

If Holland could eventually channel a little Tayshaun Prince in his game.....

I grabbed this from a labor law site regarding the new law: That doesn't sound like you can skip out without calling in. The 3day thing refers to how much sick time an employee can take without providing medical evidence of sickness to the employer if the employer demands it. https://www.seyfarth.com/news-insights/if-pain-yes-gain---part-125-michigan-dol-publishes-updated-paid-sick-leave-materials-as-amended-laws-february-2025-effective-date-looms.html

if long term rates are increasing in the market, it means the bond buyers think inflation is not being controlled on the Fed's current path. So make a showing you are willing to change the path, maybe you change the psych. And 25 basis point has little enough effect on the real economy that the psych effect may be worth it. In the long run you don't get longer term rates back down until you get the expectation of inflation down. If pushing short term rates up gets people to believe the Fed is going to maintain a hard line on inflation (and assuming they actually take one!), then all rates can eventually come back down - in theory.... If I could sit in a Fed meeting maybe I hear a hundred reasons it's the wrong answer, but sitting here blowing smoke, it seems like as good an idea as any. Immaterial though - as in the real world I think there is zero chance they bump rates up. To many pressures not to.

It's so common for hitters to drop off rapidly, irreversibly after 30 that you have to be really sceptical when any player has a down year after that age. It's possible that it doesn't mean anything or there was some other reason than that he's started his decline, but you have to approach it from the standpoint of finding evidence he is still going to be good instead of assuming he just had a down year. When you sign a guy at 30 you hope he's an Ian Kinsler - who performed pretty well to about age 36, but you have to understand that the odds are he is not. So if I'm the Tigers and there isn't some body of evidence explaining to me why his OBP was down and why whatever it was isn't going to happen again, I'm passing. And of course we don't know their conclusions from the deep dive into his performance that they have undoubtedly already done. If they pass, maybe he does fine somewhere else -- but they decided they were OK letting some other team wager on that particular risk-reward.

I understand all the reasons the FED always wants to move slowly and deliberately, but I think now is a time where 'sending a message' with a 25 point *increase* would have a lot more psychological effect on long terms rates than any actual slowing effect 25 pts would have on short term economy. If markets lose confidence that inflation is coming back down the rest of the way, it will make it much harder to actually make it come down. But of course the individual Fed governors also know that to bump rates would be to incur major wrath from 1600 Pennsylvania.

He's lucky Charles Koch probably won't live much longer, because the Koch's have played a long and strong game with their political money and I wouldn't have bet against them getting their kind of people back into control of the GOP again over the longer run, other than that there may be no 'longer run' for Charles at this point.

could get worse if the PCE comes in at 2.8% (or more) again at the end of the month.

the dems would have been too worried about ticking of part of their base to have done that. It's an interesting asymmetry. Both parties contain sane people and crazy people. But in the GOP, the public believes the sane people control the party when it's the crazy people that do, while on the Dem side, the people believe the crazy people control the party, but the sane people do.

Agree. As I would read this, FLSA is clear, but there *could* be a question of whether it covers stadium employees. If they are non-ICC employees they are only covered by MI law. My understanding is that MI law incorporates some/most/all(?) of the FLSA but I don't profess to know any details of what MI may exempt. Obviously if the suit was brought in Federal court, the employees are arguing they are Federally covered ICC employees, and maybe their standing is the core of the case. The team is certainly an interstate operation, but it's possible they've tried to carve out the stadium operation in such a way that that it isn't, or at least claim it isn't.

I don't know if what they are charging is a legal requirement or not, but I do know that my ex-employers did include shift premium when calculating time-and-a-half rate. FLSA, CFR 29 part 778 says this;

Yeah - I'm not sure every guy has to be a totally finished product when they come up, talent can still be an improvement over the status quo even if it's still growing. That said, in the game he started for the Wings it looked like he hadn't quite developed an NHL level sense of positioning - he found himself wandering too far from the net a couple of times - pretty much the kind of thing that experience should fix.

So of course the irony for Trump and the car market is that the more EV's get sold the more it depresses the price of gasoline!