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It’s a huge deal for an entity with actionable power to officially link the word “criminal” with the words “Donald Trump”. This is the first time that’s happened, so that’s a definite step forward. But I’m also with you: I’ll believe it when I see it. They thrown their own gauntlet in front of themselves. The whole country is watching now.

It’s true that most teams won’t come close to sniffing the CBT payroll limits. The CBT isn’t there to constrain them. They’re already in the fold. The point is to constrain everyone so that the big billionaires do not end up dragging the whole market for players upward, even for the little billionaires. It’s the old “stop me before I spend again” gambit. Baseball will move on literally every other point before they cave on the lux tax. It’s the Players’ white whale, and for good reason. It sets the entire market up and down the scale, and it is the biggest reason overall player comp immediately became suppressed with the last CBA. I’d like to think a salary cap coupled with a floor would be a good solution, but the Pittsburghs and Clevelands and Baltimores of the Game will never go for it because that might force them to double or triple their current payroll, depending on what number they might land on. They want nothing to do with that, and their vote counts just as much as the Yankees and Dodgers and Mets.

Smilin’ Rob is having a good time with all this. Aren’t you?

I think they’re throwing stuff out to see what sticks. Who knows what outlandish claim will grow legs?

Well, they better fucking make it stick, or god help us all.

OK, now we’re getting somewhere.

LSAT score, huh?

Deadening the ball to 1980s levels would speed up the game. I'm starting to think Baseball will never seriously speed up the game. Manfred gave away the whole game when he relayed the comment Adam Silver made to him, about gamblers using down time to place their bets. More downtime, more bets, more revenue for Baseball, and especially sweet because the players can't touch it.

Because it's a de facto salary cap, CBT is the key to future player earnings for the whole sport.

We'll see how locked down Putin has that circle of his. There has to be dissension. If you're one of them, how do you suss out the other guys for support?

Maybe some disgruntled oligarch in Putin’s inner circle can get his hands on a rogue batch of Novichok.

Maybe they could tell that that particular president was neither strong nor respected.

If a person is naturally conservative and came to vote for Trump in 2016 because of that, not really knowing much else about the guy outside his TV show, I can understand that. If they observed everything Trump did during his four years and they still vote for him because they really like the cut of his jib, that's something else again.

I understand that. What I don't remember seeing is anyone here expressing contempt for someone because they are or once were military, irrespective of what color hat they wear.

Most people here despise soldiers? I haven't heard anything along those lines here.

I didn't come up with the 90% red hat number. That was someone else. I was agreeing on the assumption of an exaggeration for effect. I wouldn't bet money that the actual number is nine-zero. I was talking about economics in any event, that most ground force militaries derive their members from those communities of economically modest means. The same kind of guys who are on the ground for Russia right now. It turns out those guys may have even less to come home to after all this.

Yes, I do know that.

I don't think this characterization is at all accurate. The union is trying to win numerous gains for the youngest and least paid of their membership: they've asked for a substantial raise in minimum salary to levels commensurate with the three other major sports; they tried to get two-year players paid by having arbitration encompass all of them instead of 22% of them; they've been trying to get a substantial pre-arb bonus pool in place so young players working on minimum can earn extra dough through performance incentive, whereas before they had nothing like that; they tried to move free agency eligibility from six years to five. I also didn't see any asks that tried to get the "1%" class paid even more at all, let alone at the expense of the 99% of the membership. It's the current system that has created the situation resulting in the "1%" class, while players at the bottom of that ladder get relatively very little.

Not for nothing, Trump's sons' nicknames in school were "Stank" and "Choad". Apple-tree proverb applies here.

Soldiers tend to come from the same social class that gets rolled over the hardest when things go upside down as much as Putin has caused Russia to in just the last week. I don't know whether that means mass defections among the rank and file from the Russian armed forces in protest, but that's got to be in play at least somewhat now. We were worried about Russian Army saboteurs stealing Ukrainian civilian clothes and blending in so they could commit murderous mayhem, but it's starting to feel more likely that Russian Army defectors may steal Ukrainian civilian clothes and blend in so they can flee to Poland.

Again, you are not answering the question. You're merely whining about Biden and fluffing Putin. I'm a give you one more chance: what specific actions do you think any American President, no matter who it is, could have taken to effectively prevent Putin from invading Ukraine and avoiding war?

Please answer the question. What could have been to effectively stop Putin and avoid war entirely?

I find it interesting that all of the former Soviet republics either voted no, abstained, or are non-voting members. Looks like none of those guys want to poke the Bear, either.

Here’s the $64 question: what could we have done to effectively stop it, put Putin in his place, and entirely avoid war?

The masking in the car could be because they are picking up an immunocompromised person to take them someplace, maybe to a medical appointment, and they want to keep the air in the car clean before the person gets in.