Jake

Let's be real, the Samardzija/Russell trade was absolutely fabulous for the Cubs. Only thing that rivals it in terms of A's stupidity is trading away Donaldson that offseason.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Nov 17, 2015 -> 01:03 PM) I would argue players completely underuse the backboard. That shot is easier using the glass and he was extremely effective with it. I hope he uses it more. Especially when he shoots line drives like that.

Hard to believe TheoHoyer would part with a first rounder for Alex Gordon

QUOTE (Eminor3rd @ Oct 29, 2015 -> 12:05 PM) I thought Dan Jennings was like 34 Nah, just a name that sounds like it belongs to a 34 year old

Re: Reinsdorf and the spending limits, let's be clear that the way the Cubs and some others are doing it is not cheating. Breaking the rules implies that they have acted against them. The Cubs and their ilk are acting within the rules, which specify various consequences when you spend beyond the limit. They think it is better to do it this way and the rules allow them to. Jerry can do this as well and I would imagine the reason he doesn't do that is because it is very expensive and very risky, two things he really has never supported in terms of amateur players.

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Oct 6, 2015 -> 12:35 PM) From what I read if the people responded 'Christian', he shot them in the head, others he shot more to wound. if that is the case, they yeah, he singled out Christians. I thought it was impossible to shoot to wound, that's why police officers always kill people who they are moderately afraid of

IIRC, Carson got the first question at the first Republican debate. It was from Megyn Kelly and it was devastating in terms of the way it questioned his raw competence to be POTUS. I thought he looked uncomfortable when he answered it and assumed he'd fade away shortly thereafter.

Last I looked, BA had him outside of the top 15 players from Cuba, so it isn't as if the hype is unanimous

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Oct 7, 2015 -> 01:15 PM) If all you're doing is "reporting" rumor, you're not better than any regular joe who reads/listens to random people talk about basketball. "I'm hearing Rose is going to return early!" ESPN has a problem with this reporting stuff. Broussard and SAS are notorious for throwing stuff against the wall, hoping it will stick. I guess if you're right 1 out of 10 times, you can always point to that one time you're right, but at some point you lose credibility and people will tune out. Sadly, there's a decent size chunk of this country that finds SAS and Bayless entertaining enough to watch on a daily basis. I don't know who these people are or what sort of IQ they have, but they clearly need help/need to get a life. Well there is a thing called hate-watching, which is almost certainly a big driver of that show's ratings. People just wanting to get pissed off about the stupid things those two say

It is probably far easier to hire a part-time guy if he doesn't have to travel. From the Sox perspective, this is probably a lot better deal than Scully's arrangement with LA

QUOTE (bmags @ Oct 2, 2015 -> 04:06 PM) Untouchable? It's a penalty if you touch him

Let's all remember that the second amendment was written to simultaneously allow governments to form militias while still giving them the privilege to restrict civilian ownership of guns. http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/th...ntrol-amendment I especially like that thought experiment—if the words "well-regulated" weren't in the amendment now and someone proposed adding them, what would the reaction be? What would the right say the consequences of that phrase's presence would be?

As long as it is technically possible to meet some standard of accessibility to the IDs, we won't care about how much it changes from one year to the next or how likely it is that people know what they're supposed to do

I'm happy enough with my AT&T cell phone plan, partially because I'm on a business plan which seems to get you a far better level of customer service. I signed up for AT&T U-verse a year or so ago and it was a freaking catastrophe. They show up and say that I don't have the connections necessary in my neighborhood for the level of speed for internet that I chose (their systems were wrong about what was available at my address). I say okay, just give me whatever I can get. The tech isn't allowed to hook me up with anything but what I've signed up for. He leaves. I call them, wait for an hour, then talk to someone. I say please lower my speed and send another tech. They say okay, your new plan will be [whatever my old plan price plus $40/month was]. I say wait a minute, I'm asking for less service. Well, we can't help you. Let me send you to another CS person. Okay, wait another 30 minutes, go through the entire explanation and they offer the same high price. Nope, that's not what I want. They send me to another person who may have the ability to make this change. Wait an hour. This person is helpful, has to get permission from manager who is out to lunch. They will call back. No call back, ever. I call back, they can't find any record of any of these conversations, so I redo that entire process. They finally manually change my plan and allow me to schedule the installation for 5 days later (I was in a new apartment with no TV, no internet). 5 days later, nobody shows up. I look at my online account and there's an alert that says my appointment was cancelled because I signed up for an internet speed that is not available in my location. I at this point just called and cancelled, which took a while of course as they tried to sell me a mobile hotspot plan. They were still generally courteous, no Comcast horror story in that sense. As soon as I hung up with AT&T for the last time, I signed up for TWC online, drove to their local retail location, and picked up the equipment and hooked it up. No problemo.

QUOTE (Brian @ Oct 2, 2015 -> 04:59 AM) MSNBC interviews someone who was concealed carrying, or whatever the term was. He said he was afraid to pull out his gun in fear of getting shot. Wrong! It's easy to tell who the good people with guns are

Allowing some simple things like using government funds to study gun violence and punishing FFL/gun dealers who sell large amounts of guns that are later used in crimes. Back when the government was allowed to look into these things, they found that nearly every metro area had just a few gun shops where the vast, vast majority of guns used in crimes were sold. Then too much talk about gun control and registries and the right made sure nobody was allowed to look into these things anymore.

I would like to see Democrats counter the talking point that Republicans have used for several years about the federal budget. They go crazy about budget deficits, etc. and how it should be treated like a household budget. But if the budget being balanced was really your top priority, you would never decrease your income. The truth is that most of both parties are comfortable running a deficit, but they disagree over what makes a deficit productive. Democrats feel that government spending is morally important and stimulates the economy in such a way that leads to longterm solvency since more people will earn a living and pay taxes. Republicans feel that lowering the tax burden will stimulate the economy and ultimately lead to more people making more money who will make up for the lower rates. What's really going on is the Republicans both want to cut taxes out of some economic concern—and, to be sure, to please donors and be consistent with their worship of successful businesspeople—but also want to cut spending because they have moral or other disagreements with what the spending is for. Regardless of the purposes, though, you can't with a straight face say that you care about the budget being balanced while you decrease your income. Any business owner would know that too, since they like to compare it to real world budgets; you would never cut your business's earnings on purpose, but you might increase spending (investment) even if it cost you debt.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 30, 2015 -> 10:55 AM) NBC Chicago Pope Francis supposedly had an important message for Kim Davis, so important that attorneys for the Kentucky county clerk say he delivered it in person ----> http://nbcchi.com/i9QRKP7 It's not implausible, but I'd wait till I hear it from someone other than her

Looks like PFF did a write-up about Rodgers's grade. https://www.profootballfocus.com/blog/2015/...negative-grade/ Basically, 1. They say not to automatically take any number that begins with a minus to mean "bad." They say it's really more like average when it's that near to zero. 2. His fumble cost him. 3. He threw multiple TDs to Randall Cobb that were basic out routes that Cobb turned into touchdowns. 4. He threw what should have been an interception for TD if not for a bad non-catch by the DB. Because Rodgers did his job badly on that play, he gets downgraded. So does the DB for dropping it.

QUOTE (bmags @ Sep 29, 2015 -> 09:45 AM) PFF seems to mainly function to confirm your biases when it shows it and ignoring everything else. PFF routinely rates Matt Forte as like, the worst Bears offensive player. Bill James said something to the effect that a given statistic isn't worthwhile if it doesn't surprise you sometimes. That doesn't mean every stat that is counterintuitive is automatically good, but the whole point of PFF is to give you information that isn't in the box score. You can't refute it with the box score. Their system could also be bad or wrong under certain circumstances or it's totally right and we aren't appreciating that Rodgers was carried by his teammates. I don't know.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/09/ge...n-martin-corpse A fan of George Zimmerman's mentioned him in a tweet that contained a picture of Trayvon Martin's dead body, Zimmerman retweeted it. Also, I guess his Twitter account has just become a general outpost for him to make it clear what sort of person he is

Looks like we preferred giving somebody else consistent reps over whatever possible better production we'd get from Allen (if any)

I think one of the biggest big picture limitations the Sox have is the location of their ballpark. It doesn't make success impossible by any stretch, but I think it is a big part of the reason that the baseline for attendance is so low.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Sep 25, 2015 -> 01:18 PM) So Obama had better experience then a CEO of a Fortune 500 company? Yeah, I don't think so. They both might be massive failures but I think you very much underappreciate how much it takes to be a CEO of a large organization. I've met a lot of politicians and I've met a lot of executives...very rarely have I met a politician who was smarter than the executives I've met. Often times, the politicans I've met at various fundraisers / charity events, blow me away their lack of savvy and overall acumen. To be President of the United States, Barack Obama had way better experience than any CEO who has been running for POTUS. It has nothing to do with whether it's hard to be a CEO or how smart CEOs are. Governing requires a specific set of learned skills and experiences. This is why lots of smart people are against term limits, for example. It takes a long time in government before you know how to write laws well, read laws well, manage your staff and the media, broker deals with opposing legislators, etc. CEOs may very well have some of the raw aptitudes that make for good government executives, but they get none of the expertise from running a company. Obama had been an elected state representative for nearly 8 years and a US senator for nearly 4. You don't get that experience trying to deal with executive boards and managing mergers. There is one area of policy where CEOs may have a better or at least unique insight, which is of course those things that affect large corporations. I'd hesitate to say better, since it will be almost necessarily biased towards their experience of policy as a CEO, but it would at least be a unique point of view to counter the others who won't be familiar with that side of things. Of course, it will all go down the s***ter when they learn how difficult it is to craft a law that doesn't cost too much, doesn't have unintended consequences, and will actually be accepted by peers. For a relevant example of a non-politician going straight to a top executive political position, look at Arnold Schwarzenegger. He straight up admits how wildly unprepared he was and rude of an awakening it was to have to actually run a state. Some might recall during one of the budget fights when Joe Biden got together with Lindsey Graham and some other top Republicans to hammer out a workable deal. And they did. That's because those guys have been in the game for a long time and know how to talk to each other in these situations, how to swallow their pride, and to the extent possible manage more unruly peers. You won't see someone like Carly Fiorina ever come close to grasping that kind of working knowledge of governance.

Tough thing about shutting down the government is that there isn't a 100%, indisputable offending party. Technically speaking, both sides have the option to vote for what the other side wants