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It's ... OK. It's not as bad as Adam McKay, but there is definitely some influence there. I hate that they feel they have to invent characters and situations to make it easier on them to write the story, but hey, that's a thing now, I guess.

Reads to me as though the jobs were coming from California, and now they're going to stay in California: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/18/business/disney-ron-desantis-florida.html In March, Disney called Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida “anti-business” for his scorched-earth attempt to tighten oversight of the company’s theme park resort near Orlando. Last month, when Disney sued the governor and his allies for what it called “a targeted campaign of government retaliation,” the company made clear that $17 billion in planned investment in Walt Disney World was on the line. “Does the state want us to invest more, employ more people, and pay more taxes, or not?” Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, said on an earnings-related conference call with analysts last week. On Thursday, Mr. Iger and Josh D’Amaro, Disney’s theme park and consumer products chairman, showed that they were not bluffing, pulling the plug on an office complex that was scheduled for construction in Orlando at a cost of roughly $1 billion. It would have brought more than 2,000 Disney jobs to the region, with $120,000 as the average salary, according to an estimate from the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity. The project, near Lake Nona Town Center, was supposed to cost $864 million, but recent price estimates have been closer to $1.3 billion. Disney had planned to relocate as many as 2,000 employees from Southern California, including most of a department known as Imagineering, which works with Disney’s movie studios to develop theme park attractions. Most of the affected employees complained bitterly about having to move — some quit — but Disney held firm, partly because of a Florida tax credit that would have allowed the company to recoup as much as $570 million over 20 years for building and occupying the complex. When he announced the project in 2021, Mr. D’Amaro cited “Florida’s business-friendly climate” as justification. Mr. D’Amaro’s tone in an email to employees on Thursday was notably chillier. He cited “changing business conditions” as a reason for canceling the Lake Nona project. “I remain optimistic about the direction of our Walt Disney World business,” Mr. D’Amaro said in the memo. He noted that $17 billion was still earmarked for construction at Disney World over the next decade — growth that would create an estimated 13,000 jobs. “I hope we’re able to,” he said.

I agree.

You mean like Jeimer Candelario?

These are guys who are on the roster, sub-par or not, so they're going to play and even start at some point. That's baseball in 2023. I don't think we are in a position to run the same nine guys out there 162 times a year while the other four guys play only when it's garbage time and no time else. I don't even know who those nine guys would be. I don't like it any more than you do, but there we are.

Tapia is a nobody. Kiermaier and Myers are not impact bats. Haniger was 32 and Conforto was an injured 30 year and they both signed with a team in a super cool west coast city that has a puncher's chance of making the playoffs. Are these guys you'd want to overpay in years and money to get them to come here to agree to come to a losing situation in Detroit instead? Nimmo is the only guy listed I believe could be reasonably hoped to lead a team into the playoffs. Would you really wanted to have signed him for nine or more years?

Grooming

Not a few posters here thought TORK! was already done and could never improve.

Who should they have signed and what amount could we have signed them for, in your opinion?

Baseball!

We couldn’t have signed an impact bat this offseason if they wanted to, at least without dramatically overpaying.

The overarching goal of any team is to win, but that goal is also tempered by the reality of roster abilities and likely outcomes. A team constructed in such a way that everyone knows they’re not going to make the playoffs, such as the Tigers, don’t have the same urgency to win this game here 162 times a year, as playoff bubble teams do. So they can manage to other goals, such as keeping players fresh to nurse owies or to last the whole season, or marketing legends way beyond their sell-by dates, while hoping that everyone still puts it together more often than not and wins enough to keep fans happy, all the while not affecting their expected season outcome.

When it comes to fascists, it’s not about your freedom to choose how to live your life. It’s about their freedom to tell you how you’re gonna live your life.

They’d be arrested, at minimum. Stupid ****ing Heller.

Who’s the high-value target here that would be worth the comp?

down, boy

There might be a case of the ignorant leading the ignorant, too. If there is a big science story that takes technical background to report on and understand, mainstreamers are still not going to have a technical writer report on it. It’s going to be staff journalists trying to get just enough of their arms around it so they can topline it for an audience that probably won’t get it anyway.

As long as phrases like "free market" and "market economy" and "market competition" and "capitalism" are deployed, the voting useful idiots will be satisfied and none among them will be motivated to look too closely under the hood.

A key currency of fame is relevance.

Greedflation—not just a conspiracy theory anymore ... 1 big thing: "Greedflation" goes mainstream Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios Once dismissed as a fringe theory, the idea that corporate thirst for profits drives up inflation, aka "greedflation," is now being taken more seriously by economists, policymakers and the business press, Emily writes. Why it matters: Though inflation is starting to come down, it still remains well above the Fed's target level of 2%, and understanding what's causing inflation is key to combatting it — now and the next time. The idea that profits drove our current bout of inflation surfaced in the last few years among progressive economists and lawmakers but was waved away by more mainstream types as a "conspiracy theory." That changed earlier this year. In a speech in January, then-Fed vice chair Lael Brainard said wages weren't the main driver of inflation and pointed to a "price-price spiral," where companies mark up prices far higher than the increases in their input costs. In March, the chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, Paul Donovan, published a note on "profit margin-led inflation," describing how in late 2022 and into this year, companies — particularly retailers and consumer goods makers — convinced consumers that they needed to raise prices. (They didn't really.) Most of the time, these companies have "weak pricing power," meaning they depend on repeat customers and can't just wildly increase prices because consumers will abandon them, he says. But businesses both large and small had a convincing story to tell: They really didn’t want to raise prices, but there was "this terrible war or the pandemic or labor shortages or whatever," Donovan tells Axios. "That's what's basically been going on." With so much in flux, people were more accepting of higher costs for everything, and more convinced companies HAD to raise prices. In earnings conference calls last year especially, executives spoke in corporate lingo about consumers accepting such price increases. A few weeks after Donovan's paper came out, European Central Bank executive board member Fabio Panetta expressed worries that inflation growth was "due to increasing profits." The following month, a column in Bloomberg Opinion drew attention to increasing profit margins and urged consumers to push back. "The idea that corporate profit expansion has been a big driver of inflation was once mostly confined to trade unions and left-wing academics, but it’s now taken seriously by central bankers," the authors wrote. By May, the Wall Street Journal published a story on how corporate profits were keeping inflation high, citing the work of Isabella Weber, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was derided for her work on the topic back in late 2021. In a stunning comeback this month, The Times of London profiled Weber's rise from a lone voice to a star economist who's drawn attention to the notion that companies and certain sectors can drive inflation. What she's saying: "Suddenly everybody wants to know how to think about inflation differently," Weber tells Axios. She's been inundated with calls recently, she says, from central bankers, Parliamentarians, think tanks and academics — and reporters, of course.

I've always had strong doubts about that, too. It sounds so much like an urban legend. I took a hack at trying to replicate what the least severe angle would have to be in order for this to happen, and ... gee, I don't know. I'm not as sure now that it couldn't happen, especially if somehow there was a swirling wind pushing a moon shot back.

He sounds like one of the good ones.

The criticism of transgender people from a transgender woman makes Caitlyn one of the good ones. Same as a black person who criticizes the blacks.

Sure it’s free. It’s the freedom for the people in charge to control other people’s personal and private lives. There’s a long and storied history of that in that part of the country.