The Series is tied, the Mets GM search is a giant cluster, the Cleveland Guardians got sued by the Cleveland Guardians, and the rest of the world basically sucks.
I've said it b4, but when you lose *my* demographic from the TV audience ... last night I did some bills, then as usual poured a nightcap and watched BBC detective procedurals with the bride. Never turned it on. Still at 0 innings watched. Doesn't sound like I've missed much either.
Don’t sell them short! I’m sure they can figure out a way to have openers and closers for each batter, where one guy gets the first 2 strikes and they bring in someone else to finish the at-bat.
And then during the pitching change they can talk about how Chayyzen Holt is making the difficult transition from coming out of the bullpen as the "first strike getter to the second batter of the inning" to "third strike getter to the second batter of the inning" - it's a totally different pitching philosophy.
Yeah, but if you play it in a crisp 2.5 hours you’d lose that extra 90 minutes of Ad revenue. That would result in lower broadcast bids next time around then MLB would have to cut the luxury tax threshold (*cough*salary cap *cough*) and defund minor league teams…oh wait they’ve already done that…
That could work! Start a daily newsletter called "Glass of Water" and we can all debate how Price Pfister out-dripped American standard for the chance to meet Moen in the drip-offs.
I can't imagine there isn't someone who is willing to take the chance. I mean, if it doesn't work out, why should it kill any chance of landing another GM job since it's clearly not that person's fault. And surely the upside of "I fixed the Mets" matters to someone.
Also, I wonder why teams aren't letting people interview. Some of it is cover for someone not being interested, but is it possible that some teams just either are being really controlling of their employees and others are just being obnoxious? Have to say, I don't love needing permission to interview for a new job. Most people don't have to deal with that. Why should sports executives?
All that said...yeah, it's really amazing how Cohen and Alderson have made running the Mets so unattractive. For pity's sake, the Knicks have been run even more poorly, and have a really awful owner, and people still line up to be in charge there.
Sometimes people with nothing to lose do a good job. Though this being baseball...
Guess I should just think about deGrom shutouts and Alonso homers and the possibility of Brett Baty and Ronny Mauricio being stars someday and just not think about the front office follies.
I think Cohen is a step down from the Wilpons because they at least seemed able to hire decent front office people (decent in terms of baseball, not in terms of being good people). And because it wasn't till after Madoff that they became cheapskates.
For a long time, I think they did want to win. There was a nice stretch from the late 90s to 2008 when the Mets were good more often than not, if not actually contenders. That definitely took some spending (and this was one of the few eras the Mets were regular participants in the free agent market).
Sadly, ironically, the Wilpons were ahead of the curve on that whole "make money" thing since that seems to be the goal now for everyone.
As I posited a year ago: "Who'd have thought that an insider trading cheater who already was a part owner and ran a company with harassment problems wouldn't be a breath of fresh air?" I'm not gloating; I think it's awful! The vile hirings, the inane tweeting, the entire thing is just ... so much a part of Manfred's MLB. smdh
It's not as much LOLMets as Baseball Is Dying. But since it's happening to the Mets and not some other team with a rich asshole owner, it's still LOLMets.
yeah I guess that's my point. how does the league allow this to be an ongoing laugh fest?
meanwhile, one could easily argue that when it comes to sexual abuse and harassment (Angels, Bauer, etc. notwithstanding) the NHL & NFL have its own current issues and seem to care not at all as well.
Every last pro sports league has something wrong with it. The only one that comes close to decent is the WNBA, though the NBA isn't that awful. But Goddell's "we won't release that WFT report, and we haven't got enough information on Deshaun Watson" coming the same day of the Blackhawks report showed an astounding level of tone deafness even Manfred Man has to work to match.
I think the most distressing part of comments like these is the fact that a third of the country is basically in agreement with him. They're talking about slavery in the same terms as I talk about, "Man, when I was a kid none of us wore bike helmets, I guess that wasn't the best idea." It's disgusting.
My parents occasionally go into that kind of "What's the deal with seat belts..." talk, which I can shut down relatively quickly by pointing out that the people who would disagree aren't there to defend themselves because they DIDN'T survive.
My significantly older self muses on the problem we have in making sure that when the order is given, the missiles are launched - and NEVER when the order is NOT given. And unilateral disarmament really is off the table....
Last night's game made me miss the late Don Sutton.
No, not his pitching. Although anyone who cheated his way to 300 victories AND punched out Steve Garvey gets a gold star on his report card.
But instead, his announcing.
After retiring, he spent a couple decades at a TV and radio guy, mostly for Atlanta, a couple hours up the road from where he grew up in the Alabama wire grass region. He was a solid B as an announcer. Occasionally cranky and 'get off my lawn' about pitch counts, but largely enjoyed the game in front of him and was informative without getting into an over-the-top lecturing mode. But in listening to him, you could be assured that at some point in 98.6% of all games you'd hear him say "not all outs are on good pitches and not all hits are on mistakes." (Yeah, he was a FIP / BABIP advocate without knowing it.)
Last night's Fried outing would have been perfect for Sutton's cliche. In the first, Fried wasn't locating the ball, getting too much of the plate and having the batters smash it. That it "only" resulted in a double and two long flys was fortuitous for the good guys, not the result of good pitching. But then in the second when the Astros really put the game away early, Fried's pitches were on the black and resulted in soft grounders that beat the shift or got through the holes and lead to four runs. Fried and Atlanta didn't deserve better results overall, but it would have been more appropriate if the scoring had been flipped in the two innings.
In the second, John Smoltz essentially predicted Yuli Gurriel would punch it through the gaping second base hole, which he did. Presumably the spray charts show playing a shift against Gurriel will result in fewer hits. But do they have situational spray charts? I wonder what his spray chart looks like when he has 2 strikes on him and the shift is on? My uninformed guess is that spray chart would show a high percentage of balls going toward the second base hole.
Smoltz then proceeded to say (and this is nearly an exact quote) "I know what the data says, but ..." That suggests that the data is pretty darned conclusive. And I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the teams use sufficiently granular data to reflect the difference between a random count and a two strike pitch. The idea that batters and pitchers take a different approach with two strikes is not exactly cutting edge knowledge. (That comes across as insulting; it is not intended that way at all ... I just can't figure out how to reword to be less snarky. Sorry!) I'll go further out on the limb and guess that Brian Snitker is not one to blindly defer to front office about the play on the field.
The shift doesn't always work. It just improves the odds by a small amount. You can hit on 18 playing blackjack and draw a three. A batter can beat the shift. That isn't proof that the shift wasn't the right play.
You're countering my weak, old-time baseball takes rather effectively this morning I see. ;-) You even felt guilty enough about it to like my above post even though you clearly disagree with it.
I'm sure you're right. It just seems when you're giving a thinking. accomplished hitter like Gurriel a hole like that, he's going to take it. A guy that is always trying to pull the ball and hit it out of the ballpark regardless of the situation? Yeah, then it clearly makes sense. But what it seems like to me and John Smoltz is probably not reality at all.
I'm not exactly sure about the proper cultural use of the like button around here. You are right in all regards and I am blessed to be able to read your words of wisdom? Good take that I disagree with? A precursor to an insult akin to 'respectfully, you are a ninny and your momma dresses you funny'? Handsome and charming poster regardless of the take?
A little data on the softly hit balls in the second inning courtesy of Dave O'Brien's (paywalled) game story at The Athletic: "The website Codify Baseball reported that no pitcher had given up more than four hits in any previous game during this postseason with exit velocities of less than 95 mph, and then Fried gave up four such hits consecutively in the second inning." https://theathletic.com/2918245/2021/10/28/braves-max-fried-has-a-rough-outing-at-houston-world-series-is-tied-after-two/
(I'm not sure of Craig's policy about quoting from paywalled articles. It is a short snippet so I feel okay about it, but would be happy to delete if appropriate.)
Craig links & quotes from paywalled sites all the time. As long as you keep it brief and properly cite your sources, I don’t see any issue. If anything, you might be sending people to the Athletic to read that as one of the free articles you get each month, leading to a potentially new subscriber.
But kudos to thinking that any rules of civility and decorum actually exist in the crazy world of a newsletter comment section.
I think a sentence is fair. It's the same kind of thing someone would see as a preview to attempt to entice a reader to click the "subscribe for full article" button. Similar to reading an abstract to decide if the entire paper would be relevant enough to be worth diving into.
As an eight-year-old in the theater my assumption was that once DEFCON 1 was declared, it 'unlocked' WOPR's access to launch the missiles (no matter what subsequent actions were taken), and any shutdown of any link in that command chain would be interpreted as a destruction of NORAD, and the individual missile silos would follow their last instruction and launch anyway. The declaration of DEFCON 1 also allowed General Beringer to issue the commands necessary to respond to a real perceived threat; staying at DEFCON 2 wouldn't give him the authority necessary to deploy forces in a meaningful way. Decisions, however, are made by humans and any systems analyst worth anything would tell you that such a centralized system would be the worst design paradigm to follow, but eight-year-old me didn't know that...also Matthew Broderick got to kiss Ally Sheedy and his Bio teacher set him up for a great in-classroom wise-ass response.
The democratic republic: these left and right wing nut jobs make me wonder if we made a mistake 245 years ago in not duplicating Britain's parliamentary system instead trying to reinvent it.
I agree with you. America's winner-take-all elections systems promote extremism and lead to the two parties forming a duopoly to make sure no other parties get any real chance of election.
Although let me be clear: over the last 5-40 years, this isn't a "both sides" thing. I find the Republicans far more loathsome in their tactics and policies. Democrats are (mostly) incompetent or have no backbone.
Or they don't actually give a shit. I'd actually prefer that explanation, because otherwise they're the most inept group of people in the history of civilization.
Both parties are owned by rich people, it's just the rich Democrats aren't as lothesome as the rich Republicans. But they still don't actually give a shit about the rest of us.
Agreed. A leftist extremist in this country (as defined by the mainstream media) is someone who advocates for single payer healthcare and paid family leave. You know, what's considered normal in most of the rest of the developed world.
This is...a take. There is some truth to the "no backbone" part, which I primarily attribute to residual fear from the 1980's and the absolute disaster of the '84 and '88 presidential elections. However, I often see people complaining about why the Democrats don't do X, Y, and Z without acknowledging two key facts:
Since 1995, when the Democrats lost control of the House for the first time since 1955, they've controlled the House for 8 years and the Senate for 12. They've held both houses for 6 years and the trifecta (House, Senate, and Presidency) twice: the first two years of Obama's first term, and now. Our system limits what you can do while in the minority, especially in the House.
The other issue is that while the Republicans, starting with Gingrich in 1995, vote in lockstep, the Democrats are the big tent party. That's the huge problem right now: we've got Manchin and Sinema blocking anything remotely resembling progress, with a silent assist from the senior senator from my state (Feinstein), and then Sanders and Warren pushing from the left. The structure of the Senate gives outsized power to individual senators, so even though Senate Democrats lean left, they're stymied by Manchin and his love of fossil fuels and Sinema's love for herself. The only hope for change is to ditch the filibuster, and that's not going to happen as long as M & S can get attention and donor $$$ for blocking any attempts at reform.
TL;DR: The Senate is a completely undemocratic institution designed to maximize the power of the rural slaveowning states at the expense of the urban areas. Wyoming has 578,000 people and gets two senators. California has 39 million people and gets two senators. (Washington DC has 693,000 people and gets zero senators.) As long as this holds, it's going to be next to impossible to push progressive legislation.
One of my hobby horses is the need to expand the House of Representatives and adjust the numbers. As you note, Wyoming has a population of 578K, let's call it 600K for the purpose of making math easy. They have 1 Rep. California with a population of 39 million has 53 reps. If you do 1 rep for every 600K people, California should have 65 Reps.
Not that it helps solve the problem of the Senate being an inherently undemocratic institution.
That's a great point about the House needing to be expanded. It's been capped at 435 since 1913, when the US population was 97 million. With a population of 333 million, that's utterly ridiculous.
Given the state of the UK's parliamentary system currently, with Boris Johnson and the Conservatives having an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons, I'm not sure there's all that much difference. Aside from LibDem/Conservative coalition from 2010-2015, third parties have been largely irrelevant in Westminster, especially with the Fixed Term Parliaments Act and the use of first-past-the-post. The UK doesn't have the nonsense of the Electoral College, but the results of their electoral process currently looks a lot like the US.
ObDisclaimer: I am neither British nor a political scientist, and I didn't stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night, but I got interested in UK politics while distracting myself from the shitshow of the Trump years by reading about Brexit.
The thing that makes all these bullpen games and taking a still effective starter out of the game early in the post-season viable is all the off days. In the regular season teams play 7 game in 7 or 8 days. In the post-season traveling between Houston and Altanta and playing the next day becomes unimaginable. (A day off after traveling between LA and Atlanta? Sure.)
Eliminating some off days would make play at least somewhat more similar to regular season play, and making what it takes to be successful in the post-season more similar to what it takes to be successful in the regular season would be a positive in my view.
What does the regular season record of Tampa Bay over the past several seasons say about the assumption that the short outing is not viable absent the more frequent off days?
If the Cleveland baseball team makes $290 million revenue per year, and offered to pay the roller derby team 15 minutes of annual revenue for the Guardians name, then the offer was $8,276.26. I wouldn't have taken it either.
That revenue figure has almost got to be off. Atlanta, as part of the publicly traded Liberty Media, releases its data and, other than the pandemic year with no ticket sales and a 60 game season, was showing almost twice that.
That Cleveland Guardians story is really something. The fact that the baseball team cannot currently use the website name clevelandguardians.com is hilarious.
In the early days of the internet explosion, the website mlb.com was owned by a law firm, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. The latter is a mega firm that among other things, represented (represents?) baseball in labor matters. (Frank Coonley, who eventually ran the Pirates was an attorney there into the 1990s.) The firm was convinced to give the website to baseball and, for a couple years afterwards, there was a small button on top of the baseball site that said something akin to 'if you are looking for Morgan Lewis click here.'
No, I totally and absolutely do not have any memory of that, and you do not need to worry about checking my browser history to confirm if I'm telling the truth.
You'd think large corporations would understand stuff like this, just like with politicians and sports analogies and failing at terminology.
I work for an unnamed large org and I am in the middle of trying to convince them to change the price of something because they--a notoriously customer-focused pricing group--set the original price based upon the competition. In a survey I put out, I've found that the price consumers are willing to pay is, at most, less than half of the list price.
Seems like something we should have done upon launch and not when the product is failing miserably. Large companies are weird.
I agree about Manchin, but I am also really annoyed that we can't have the infrastructure bill till we have the other bill. Unless the Squad is actually opposed to that bill, they should just let it pass because we need that bill. And their tactic of holding it hostage isn't working. (I want to be sympathetic to the left end of the party. I agree with them on like 80 percent of things. But their unwillingness to compromise is no better than Manchin's.)
And while the war in Iraq was bad and the Taliban taking back Afghanistan the second we left was bad, we didn't lose those wars. We brought the regimes in both down, we drove out Al Qaeda in the latter, we accomplished our goals. What we lost was the peace. We were incredibly short sighted in not planning for what happened after we won, but you can't blame the military for that.
I would disagree about the left side of the party being no better than Manchin in their willingness to compromise. Manchin keeps moving the goalposts. This is Biden's agenda, it's what he ran on, and the left are the ones actually supporting it. The bill polls favorably everywhere, including with Manchin's own constituents. He has no reason to keep demanding cuts to it other than being a goalpost-moving contrarian.
I think I am obligated to tell you that last night I dreamed you had a companion podcast to the substack that I listened to regularly and that I discovered you were doing a live podcast and was driving around town so I could listen to it without being distracted by things at home. I realized from what you were describing that I was only about a mile from where you were and so I drove over to the church that you were podcasting from and convinced you to hang out with me and get drinks. Then I told you about the time you cited me in one of your NBC Sports articles and It was a pleasant evening.
“Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV?”
You left off “Enjoy this little ditty.”
Scratch that. Guess Craig didn’t give us any music today….
But enough about college football...
Or the last 5 minutes of a basketball game, that somehow take up to half an hour.
I've said it b4, but when you lose *my* demographic from the TV audience ... last night I did some bills, then as usual poured a nightcap and watched BBC detective procedurals with the bride. Never turned it on. Still at 0 innings watched. Doesn't sound like I've missed much either.
Yep. Started in on reading the LOTR trilogy again in front of the fireplace.
Watched the first two episodes of Succession season three.
Who is more feckless (has less feck? I don't know the proper term, really): Rob Manfred or Kendell Roy?
Wow - just how big did they expand rosters this postseason?
Don’t sell them short! I’m sure they can figure out a way to have openers and closers for each batter, where one guy gets the first 2 strikes and they bring in someone else to finish the at-bat.
And then during the pitching change they can talk about how Chayyzen Holt is making the difficult transition from coming out of the bullpen as the "first strike getter to the second batter of the inning" to "third strike getter to the second batter of the inning" - it's a totally different pitching philosophy.
Yeah, but if you play it in a crisp 2.5 hours you’d lose that extra 90 minutes of Ad revenue. That would result in lower broadcast bids next time around then MLB would have to cut the luxury tax threshold (*cough*salary cap *cough*) and defund minor league teams…oh wait they’ve already done that…
That could work! Start a daily newsletter called "Glass of Water" and we can all debate how Price Pfister out-dripped American standard for the chance to meet Moen in the drip-offs.
*ahem*
https://smp.uq.edu.au/pitch-drop-experiment
I can't imagine there isn't someone who is willing to take the chance. I mean, if it doesn't work out, why should it kill any chance of landing another GM job since it's clearly not that person's fault. And surely the upside of "I fixed the Mets" matters to someone.
Also, I wonder why teams aren't letting people interview. Some of it is cover for someone not being interested, but is it possible that some teams just either are being really controlling of their employees and others are just being obnoxious? Have to say, I don't love needing permission to interview for a new job. Most people don't have to deal with that. Why should sports executives?
All that said...yeah, it's really amazing how Cohen and Alderson have made running the Mets so unattractive. For pity's sake, the Knicks have been run even more poorly, and have a really awful owner, and people still line up to be in charge there.
Sometimes people with nothing to lose do a good job. Though this being baseball...
Guess I should just think about deGrom shutouts and Alonso homers and the possibility of Brett Baty and Ronny Mauricio being stars someday and just not think about the front office follies.
I think Cohen is a step down from the Wilpons because they at least seemed able to hire decent front office people (decent in terms of baseball, not in terms of being good people). And because it wasn't till after Madoff that they became cheapskates.
But I never wanted Cohen in the first place.
For a long time, I think they did want to win. There was a nice stretch from the late 90s to 2008 when the Mets were good more often than not, if not actually contenders. That definitely took some spending (and this was one of the few eras the Mets were regular participants in the free agent market).
Sadly, ironically, the Wilpons were ahead of the curve on that whole "make money" thing since that seems to be the goal now for everyone.
soooo ... welcome to my "club"?
As I posited a year ago: "Who'd have thought that an insider trading cheater who already was a part owner and ran a company with harassment problems wouldn't be a breath of fresh air?" I'm not gloating; I think it's awful! The vile hirings, the inane tweeting, the entire thing is just ... so much a part of Manfred's MLB. smdh
It's not as much LOLMets as Baseball Is Dying. But since it's happening to the Mets and not some other team with a rich asshole owner, it's still LOLMets.
yeah I guess that's my point. how does the league allow this to be an ongoing laugh fest?
meanwhile, one could easily argue that when it comes to sexual abuse and harassment (Angels, Bauer, etc. notwithstanding) the NHL & NFL have its own current issues and seem to care not at all as well.
Every last pro sports league has something wrong with it. The only one that comes close to decent is the WNBA, though the NBA isn't that awful. But Goddell's "we won't release that WFT report, and we haven't got enough information on Deshaun Watson" coming the same day of the Blackhawks report showed an astounding level of tone deafness even Manfred Man has to work to match.
EXACTLY!!
I mean, we could give them a simulation, depending on what some of the congressional investigations currently ongoing dig up.
I think the most distressing part of comments like these is the fact that a third of the country is basically in agreement with him. They're talking about slavery in the same terms as I talk about, "Man, when I was a kid none of us wore bike helmets, I guess that wasn't the best idea." It's disgusting.
My parents occasionally go into that kind of "What's the deal with seat belts..." talk, which I can shut down relatively quickly by pointing out that the people who would disagree aren't there to defend themselves because they DIDN'T survive.
Referring to Tom Cotton as (R-Antebellum) was a great way to start my morning. Just *chefs kiss.
My 10 year old self loved WarGames so no ruining a classic please! I'm gonna go stroll thru Falken's Maze now.
My 16 year old self got a warm and tingly feeling from Ally Sheedy. She liked the nerd!
My significantly older self muses on the problem we have in making sure that when the order is given, the missiles are launched - and NEVER when the order is NOT given. And unilateral disarmament really is off the table....
Joshua called me!
Last night's game made me miss the late Don Sutton.
No, not his pitching. Although anyone who cheated his way to 300 victories AND punched out Steve Garvey gets a gold star on his report card.
But instead, his announcing.
After retiring, he spent a couple decades at a TV and radio guy, mostly for Atlanta, a couple hours up the road from where he grew up in the Alabama wire grass region. He was a solid B as an announcer. Occasionally cranky and 'get off my lawn' about pitch counts, but largely enjoyed the game in front of him and was informative without getting into an over-the-top lecturing mode. But in listening to him, you could be assured that at some point in 98.6% of all games you'd hear him say "not all outs are on good pitches and not all hits are on mistakes." (Yeah, he was a FIP / BABIP advocate without knowing it.)
Last night's Fried outing would have been perfect for Sutton's cliche. In the first, Fried wasn't locating the ball, getting too much of the plate and having the batters smash it. That it "only" resulted in a double and two long flys was fortuitous for the good guys, not the result of good pitching. But then in the second when the Astros really put the game away early, Fried's pitches were on the black and resulted in soft grounders that beat the shift or got through the holes and lead to four runs. Fried and Atlanta didn't deserve better results overall, but it would have been more appropriate if the scoring had been flipped in the two innings.
In the second, John Smoltz essentially predicted Yuli Gurriel would punch it through the gaping second base hole, which he did. Presumably the spray charts show playing a shift against Gurriel will result in fewer hits. But do they have situational spray charts? I wonder what his spray chart looks like when he has 2 strikes on him and the shift is on? My uninformed guess is that spray chart would show a high percentage of balls going toward the second base hole.
Smoltz then proceeded to say (and this is nearly an exact quote) "I know what the data says, but ..." That suggests that the data is pretty darned conclusive. And I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the teams use sufficiently granular data to reflect the difference between a random count and a two strike pitch. The idea that batters and pitchers take a different approach with two strikes is not exactly cutting edge knowledge. (That comes across as insulting; it is not intended that way at all ... I just can't figure out how to reword to be less snarky. Sorry!) I'll go further out on the limb and guess that Brian Snitker is not one to blindly defer to front office about the play on the field.
The shift doesn't always work. It just improves the odds by a small amount. You can hit on 18 playing blackjack and draw a three. A batter can beat the shift. That isn't proof that the shift wasn't the right play.
You're countering my weak, old-time baseball takes rather effectively this morning I see. ;-) You even felt guilty enough about it to like my above post even though you clearly disagree with it.
I'm sure you're right. It just seems when you're giving a thinking. accomplished hitter like Gurriel a hole like that, he's going to take it. A guy that is always trying to pull the ball and hit it out of the ballpark regardless of the situation? Yeah, then it clearly makes sense. But what it seems like to me and John Smoltz is probably not reality at all.
I'm not exactly sure about the proper cultural use of the like button around here. You are right in all regards and I am blessed to be able to read your words of wisdom? Good take that I disagree with? A precursor to an insult akin to 'respectfully, you are a ninny and your momma dresses you funny'? Handsome and charming poster regardless of the take?
A little data on the softly hit balls in the second inning courtesy of Dave O'Brien's (paywalled) game story at The Athletic: "The website Codify Baseball reported that no pitcher had given up more than four hits in any previous game during this postseason with exit velocities of less than 95 mph, and then Fried gave up four such hits consecutively in the second inning." https://theathletic.com/2918245/2021/10/28/braves-max-fried-has-a-rough-outing-at-houston-world-series-is-tied-after-two/
(I'm not sure of Craig's policy about quoting from paywalled articles. It is a short snippet so I feel okay about it, but would be happy to delete if appropriate.)
Craig links & quotes from paywalled sites all the time. As long as you keep it brief and properly cite your sources, I don’t see any issue. If anything, you might be sending people to the Athletic to read that as one of the free articles you get each month, leading to a potentially new subscriber.
But kudos to thinking that any rules of civility and decorum actually exist in the crazy world of a newsletter comment section.
I'm noting if not naïve. :)
I think a sentence is fair. It's the same kind of thing someone would see as a preview to attempt to entice a reader to click the "subscribe for full article" button. Similar to reading an abstract to decide if the entire paper would be relevant enough to be worth diving into.
RE: DEFCON 1:
As an eight-year-old in the theater my assumption was that once DEFCON 1 was declared, it 'unlocked' WOPR's access to launch the missiles (no matter what subsequent actions were taken), and any shutdown of any link in that command chain would be interpreted as a destruction of NORAD, and the individual missile silos would follow their last instruction and launch anyway. The declaration of DEFCON 1 also allowed General Beringer to issue the commands necessary to respond to a real perceived threat; staying at DEFCON 2 wouldn't give him the authority necessary to deploy forces in a meaningful way. Decisions, however, are made by humans and any systems analyst worth anything would tell you that such a centralized system would be the worst design paradigm to follow, but eight-year-old me didn't know that...also Matthew Broderick got to kiss Ally Sheedy and his Bio teacher set him up for a great in-classroom wise-ass response.
7/10
The democratic republic: these left and right wing nut jobs make me wonder if we made a mistake 245 years ago in not duplicating Britain's parliamentary system instead trying to reinvent it.
I agree with you. America's winner-take-all elections systems promote extremism and lead to the two parties forming a duopoly to make sure no other parties get any real chance of election.
Although let me be clear: over the last 5-40 years, this isn't a "both sides" thing. I find the Republicans far more loathsome in their tactics and policies. Democrats are (mostly) incompetent or have no backbone.
Or they don't actually give a shit. I'd actually prefer that explanation, because otherwise they're the most inept group of people in the history of civilization.
Both parties are owned by rich people, it's just the rich Democrats aren't as lothesome as the rich Republicans. But they still don't actually give a shit about the rest of us.
*Extremely NSFW* analysis of the situation:
https://twitter.com/elivalley/status/1453480618600374274
Agreed. A leftist extremist in this country (as defined by the mainstream media) is someone who advocates for single payer healthcare and paid family leave. You know, what's considered normal in most of the rest of the developed world.
This is...a take. There is some truth to the "no backbone" part, which I primarily attribute to residual fear from the 1980's and the absolute disaster of the '84 and '88 presidential elections. However, I often see people complaining about why the Democrats don't do X, Y, and Z without acknowledging two key facts:
Since 1995, when the Democrats lost control of the House for the first time since 1955, they've controlled the House for 8 years and the Senate for 12. They've held both houses for 6 years and the trifecta (House, Senate, and Presidency) twice: the first two years of Obama's first term, and now. Our system limits what you can do while in the minority, especially in the House.
The other issue is that while the Republicans, starting with Gingrich in 1995, vote in lockstep, the Democrats are the big tent party. That's the huge problem right now: we've got Manchin and Sinema blocking anything remotely resembling progress, with a silent assist from the senior senator from my state (Feinstein), and then Sanders and Warren pushing from the left. The structure of the Senate gives outsized power to individual senators, so even though Senate Democrats lean left, they're stymied by Manchin and his love of fossil fuels and Sinema's love for herself. The only hope for change is to ditch the filibuster, and that's not going to happen as long as M & S can get attention and donor $$$ for blocking any attempts at reform.
TL;DR: The Senate is a completely undemocratic institution designed to maximize the power of the rural slaveowning states at the expense of the urban areas. Wyoming has 578,000 people and gets two senators. California has 39 million people and gets two senators. (Washington DC has 693,000 people and gets zero senators.) As long as this holds, it's going to be next to impossible to push progressive legislation.
One of my hobby horses is the need to expand the House of Representatives and adjust the numbers. As you note, Wyoming has a population of 578K, let's call it 600K for the purpose of making math easy. They have 1 Rep. California with a population of 39 million has 53 reps. If you do 1 rep for every 600K people, California should have 65 Reps.
Not that it helps solve the problem of the Senate being an inherently undemocratic institution.
That's a great point about the House needing to be expanded. It's been capped at 435 since 1913, when the US population was 97 million. With a population of 333 million, that's utterly ridiculous.
Given the state of the UK's parliamentary system currently, with Boris Johnson and the Conservatives having an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons, I'm not sure there's all that much difference. Aside from LibDem/Conservative coalition from 2010-2015, third parties have been largely irrelevant in Westminster, especially with the Fixed Term Parliaments Act and the use of first-past-the-post. The UK doesn't have the nonsense of the Electoral College, but the results of their electoral process currently looks a lot like the US.
ObDisclaimer: I am neither British nor a political scientist, and I didn't stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night, but I got interested in UK politics while distracting myself from the shitshow of the Trump years by reading about Brexit.
The thing that makes all these bullpen games and taking a still effective starter out of the game early in the post-season viable is all the off days. In the regular season teams play 7 game in 7 or 8 days. In the post-season traveling between Houston and Altanta and playing the next day becomes unimaginable. (A day off after traveling between LA and Atlanta? Sure.)
Eliminating some off days would make play at least somewhat more similar to regular season play, and making what it takes to be successful in the post-season more similar to what it takes to be successful in the regular season would be a positive in my view.
What does the regular season record of Tampa Bay over the past several seasons say about the assumption that the short outing is not viable absent the more frequent off days?
If the Cleveland baseball team makes $290 million revenue per year, and offered to pay the roller derby team 15 minutes of annual revenue for the Guardians name, then the offer was $8,276.26. I wouldn't have taken it either.
That revenue figure has almost got to be off. Atlanta, as part of the publicly traded Liberty Media, releases its data and, other than the pandemic year with no ticket sales and a 60 game season, was showing almost twice that.
we go live to the phone call:
"does $8,276.26 get 'er done??"
"no"
"ok, how about we round it up to an even $9K?"
click
And that's one-time, not annually. Next year the baseball team is saying "thank God we don't have that $8,276.26 bill coming again!"
lmao.
THAT would break them, owner would wake up at 3 am and have to aggravation pace. lol
Is Bishop Sycamore also taken?
I'd piss on a spark plug if I thought it would make Tom Cotton human.
That Cleveland Guardians story is really something. The fact that the baseball team cannot currently use the website name clevelandguardians.com is hilarious.
In the early days of the internet explosion, the website mlb.com was owned by a law firm, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. The latter is a mega firm that among other things, represented (represents?) baseball in labor matters. (Frank Coonley, who eventually ran the Pirates was an attorney there into the 1990s.) The firm was convinced to give the website to baseball and, for a couple years afterwards, there was a small button on top of the baseball site that said something akin to 'if you are looking for Morgan Lewis click here.'
I remember that!
Early internet was weird. No one is going to believe the those stories in the near future.
Remember when whitehouse.com was once a porn site?
No, I totally and absolutely do not have any memory of that, and you do not need to worry about checking my browser history to confirm if I'm telling the truth.
You'd think large corporations would understand stuff like this, just like with politicians and sports analogies and failing at terminology.
I work for an unnamed large org and I am in the middle of trying to convince them to change the price of something because they--a notoriously customer-focused pricing group--set the original price based upon the competition. In a survey I put out, I've found that the price consumers are willing to pay is, at most, less than half of the list price.
Seems like something we should have done upon launch and not when the product is failing miserably. Large companies are weird.
I agree about Manchin, but I am also really annoyed that we can't have the infrastructure bill till we have the other bill. Unless the Squad is actually opposed to that bill, they should just let it pass because we need that bill. And their tactic of holding it hostage isn't working. (I want to be sympathetic to the left end of the party. I agree with them on like 80 percent of things. But their unwillingness to compromise is no better than Manchin's.)
And while the war in Iraq was bad and the Taliban taking back Afghanistan the second we left was bad, we didn't lose those wars. We brought the regimes in both down, we drove out Al Qaeda in the latter, we accomplished our goals. What we lost was the peace. We were incredibly short sighted in not planning for what happened after we won, but you can't blame the military for that.
why should they give up leverage? I want a bigger BBB. It is popular with voters everywhere.
I would disagree about the left side of the party being no better than Manchin in their willingness to compromise. Manchin keeps moving the goalposts. This is Biden's agenda, it's what he ran on, and the left are the ones actually supporting it. The bill polls favorably everywhere, including with Manchin's own constituents. He has no reason to keep demanding cuts to it other than being a goalpost-moving contrarian.
I think I am obligated to tell you that last night I dreamed you had a companion podcast to the substack that I listened to regularly and that I discovered you were doing a live podcast and was driving around town so I could listen to it without being distracted by things at home. I realized from what you were describing that I was only about a mile from where you were and so I drove over to the church that you were podcasting from and convinced you to hang out with me and get drinks. Then I told you about the time you cited me in one of your NBC Sports articles and It was a pleasant evening.
No more bourbon before bed for you.
"A strange game, Mr. Pentagon. The only way to win is not to play ... fair."
Imagine wanting Chris Christie involved in your business in any capacity.
YEEEEEE HAW!
https://i.imgur.com/JSWIk7m.jpg
How often do we hear "if government had to run it's finances like a business? (or household)?". Now take that and reverse it.