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I think it was this, and I think it was that.

I think twenty seconds max between pitches will be plenty enough time to maintain tension and emotion in close and late games with runners on.

Also, no way Trump was ever going to let any [deleted] tell him what to do.

Oh, doink! Totally misread that!

Their ultimate goal is to share ruling power with a single-party fascist Christian Congress at the behest of an iron-handed autocrat. Not Trump, but someone equally Trumpy but with brains. if they get far enough, at some point they will want to drive out the Court's remaining liberals, preferably in shame and ignominy by their definition, and get 9-0 unanimity. I don't know if they'll get it, but that's what at least five of them would like to see.

Quick, find any one Democrat who has ever lied about any one of their credentials so we can both sides this and move on to the important Congressional business of gaming out secession options.

Everything I wrote that you snipped out of the quote pretty much lays out what the limits are in a case like this. This is definitely not a case of thought-policing, and you do acknowledge as much. It is a case of a newspaper protecting itself from being associated from someone specifically trading on that association to blowtorch society at large with his inflammatory views. The Plain Dealer had a right to shit-can him, and I believe they were right to. And the next person who does this same thing and gets shit-canned will deserve it, too. I don't think this is the right example to clutch our pearls about how far will newspapers go to quash whatever, since by bringing that up now in relation to this incident, you are (inadvertently, I hope) casting aspersions on the Plain Dealer's decision.

Ask your parents. I'm sure they remember. Hey, weren't you born in the 60s? 😁

Scott Adams has been a star for a couple of decades now, so of course he believes be deserves preferential treatment and that normal workplace rules don’t apply to him. Stars have always believed that, and extreme cases like this aside, they’ve always gotten away with it, too. The flip side about stars, though, is that they are never truly on their own time. So when they lip off in public, the consequences also accrue to the people and organizations they are closely associated with, which in this case is the newspapers in which Adams runs. The Plain Dealer was the only place the folks in Cleveland could see his work. When they think of Dilbert, they think of the Plain Dealer, so when Adams goes off like this, his actions are associated with the Plain Dealer as well. In such a case, they are practically obliged to let Adams go. It’s the same thing if a player lips off in public, even during the offseason—he is associated with the team he’s on, so they’re going to bear the brunt of criticism, too, so they have every right to sanction him within bounds as they see fit. That’s something most of us don’t have to worry about when we ourselves lip off in places like this. Yup, it’s totally not fair. The last thing here is that Scott Adams also wasn’t really on his own time, anyway. He was trading on the fame he gained through his association with the newspapers to host a live stream in which he could spout off his noxious views in the first place. He wasn’t doing this on his free time—he was still working, making income due to his associated fame, which he couldn’t have done so prominently had he not acquired that fame through the newspapers he was still being featured in. Even if the papers don’t share in the revenue he generates from it, they still bear the brunt of the externalities his bad behavior generates, anyway. Any newspaper dumping him because of this is totally in the right.

The other thing that occurs to me is that the 25-year-old professor herself went to school in an environment that accepted active shooter drills, school lockdowns, and armed security personnel on campus. She grew up living in a police state.

I’m not surprised. Even formally-educated 25-year-olds in general haven’t learned to think things all the way through.

I think many people are behaving rationally on an evolutionary basis, since people have been wired since evolution to respond to immediate danger, rather than still-hypothetical danger. And as long as summer days are still within a recognizable temperature range, the water is still flowing out of the tap, the utilities are still humming, and we can still get stuff in the stores or online, global warming is still hypothetical to millions of people, especially those who generally never want to change anything about how they’re living.

Umm … win?

Didn’t the Tigers have 6:40 game times last year when average games were coming in over three hours? I know the Cubs and a lot of other clubs have had that for a few years. I selfishly love that game-time start and kind of wish they’d extend that throughout the summer. I think it’s as much about getting parents to bring the kids to games on schoolnights as it is getting the parents themselves home early. Even absent that, I would bet that most people are not going to be disappointed to be leaving the ballpark around 9:15 instead of around 9:45.

If it so happens that Baseball decides games are too fast, they can always adjust the timing up from 15-20 to, I don’t know, 15-22? Sixteen-twenty-two? Sixteen-twenty-three? They have options at their disposal if it comes down to it. I can’t imagine Baseball going on record that 2:35 is too fast for an average game time, but I suppose it’s possible. I just keep in mind that baseball became the dominant America sport back when the average game came in under two hours, and it maintained its dominance throughout the short-game-time period into our own childhoods. I can hardly wait to see my first snappy game in ages on April 5.

I don’t think the Tigers spent even one second thinking about trying to trade Baez this past offseason. He had a really good final month of the season, and they may think they have a chance to fix him in a way the prior regime or the Cubs could not. Plus, when things are going right, there are not many better guys to have in the clubhouse than Javy. He may be unfixable—after all, he is 30—but if he can be fixed to any decent degree, he’s a keeper.

I’m with you on this. I don’t think 20 seconds with runners on base close and late will be too short a time to move on to the next pitch. I’m actually looking forward to getting used to that quite nicely. I don’t know whether batters will have a clear view of the clock while in the box and looking toward the pitcher, but if so, one thing that would help him is the certainty that the pitcher must deliver the ball by the deadline when he notices that there are only three, two, whatever, seconds left. That would make it a lot easier for the batter to time the delivery of the pitch, especially coming out of the set. The only real tool the pitcher would have as far as timing anymore would be to deliver the pitch in a hurry, early in the pitch clock count which, if he doesn’t do it exactly right, might end up being an illegal pitch. So to keep things better balanced, I would think only the pitcher will have a clear view of the clock so he can deliver the ball before it runs out, and all the batter will know is that he got into the box before the eight-seconds-left point.

Looks like there's a good chance it all ends up with MLB. I hate watching games on their Network, for a couple old reasons and a new one. The old ones are, they have a constant crawl along the bottom, plus a box in the RH bottom corner than rises above the crawl—I hate detritus on my screen, especially along the bottom where play tends to take place—plus, the crawl now features in-game constantly-updated gambling odds along with URLs and app names where people can go make bets. I absolutely despise that one. Too bad everybody for whom the Black Sox scandal was a living memory is long dead. The new one, I just saw on a spring training game: they cut away from the game to a double screen, mute the game announcers, and show a full 15-second TV spot in the larger of the two screens. The announcer will be cut mid-sentence, this one time in the middle of a replay description I was actively interested in. It all adds up to a substandard viewing experience. I will be very sad when Baseball takes over the local broadcasting and implements these "innovations" to all 162 Tigers games.

That's what I'm hoping for: upside surprise this season. I think there's a good chance we get that, too. I am not at all a gambling man, but I thought I saw in the past few days the over-under for Tigers wins this season is something in the range of 66.5 to 69.5. I would take the over on any of those for something in three figures.

There is ample evidence that industries routinely know about the harm their products do for decades and do nothing about them because it jeopardizes sales, profits, bonuses, stock price, options, all that. Tobacco was one; oil companies re: global warming is another. Granting some situations are shrouded in ignorance, others exist in the bright light of day.

Industries don’t care about externalities until it comes back to bite them, people die, and then they are pressured to change. Then they finally invest in change using government subsidies, the changes are made, and then everyone moves on and forgets.

It’s an aggressive sign of disrespect, and in many cultures, that simply cannot go unanswered.

While It’s hard to feel sympathetic for people who pay the price for egging on and daring others to snap, this is one of the problems with moving about certain segments of society that are highly armed and socially reward tough guy standoff behavior.

The kind of kids who are wired to pursue white-collar and professional higher education at colleges and universities are generally not the kind of kids to walk around campus brandishing weapons.

I thought I was lucky to have seen Pat Venditte pitch, thinking I would never get to see anything like that again. I hope I get to see this kid at some point.