Balta1701

QUOTE(EvilMonkey @ Jan 18, 2006 -> 07:22 PM) Last I heard, Target was not union either, and while they don't have the scandals that Walmart does, they also don't pay a 'living wage'. And to take your question one step further, why should Walmart help to shoulder the burden of healthcare? Seriously, how many companies do in todays world? I don't offer it for my employees, I couldn't afford to do it. The one plan I did offer was a catastrophic plan for my salesguy, and even that one cost me almost $200 per month. See, again, that's the problem...if employers are going to stop offering healthcare, as they have for the past many decades, due to the increasing price of health care, the only people left offering it will be private insurers or the government. The problem with private insurers remains the spiral one...when employers don't offer health care...the only people who really need to find health insurance are the people who really need health care...i.e. the expensive ones. Lots of people could make use of it, but with me for example, even with 2 bad knee injuries in 2 years, the insurance companies are making a lot of money because my employer provides good health coverage which I use very sparingly. We end up with the problem I've described before...because employers aren't providing coverage, the only people seeking out coverage are those who cost the insurers the most. By reducing the pool of people paying into the insurance pool, costs have to go up. This drives more and more people away from insurance because eventually the insurance becomes too expensive, and people basically are left hoping they don't get sick or die. Eventually, at this rate, insurance could very well become too expensive for a large majority of the American people. If the employer-provided health care system is collapsing because of rising health care costs, there are 3 options...1. "You're on your own" - we just let the system collapse, let the people who can't afford treatment sit on their couches and suffer, and hope it doesn't kill too many peoploe. 2. Forceably lower health care costs so that employer provided insurance again becomes practical, or 3. Let the government take over.

Why the Hell is this guy still alive and able to run free?

QUOTE(IlliniKrush @ Jan 18, 2006 -> 04:56 PM) Yeah i'm watching it as well...could tonight be the night?

Fresh on the heels of Google Earth and whatever Microsoft's satellite viewing software was called...I present A9...this one is fairly interesting in that you don't get satellite photos to go with maps, instead, if you're looking along a major route, you can get pictures of the fronts of buildings and actually see what things look like. And see people walking in front of them. Etc. Here's Pasadena.

QUOTE(RME JICO @ Jan 18, 2006 -> 03:53 PM) The good thing is that as long as each player can at least do what they did last year and at the same time have a few of these guys improve, the Sox will be improved offensively next year. That is not even taking the addition of Thome into consideration, which in itself should be a huge boost. So regardless of how many second-order wins the Sox had last year, I cannot see how they will be worse than last year unless several players regress unexpectedly or get injured for an extended period. The other side of that token is this one...we did what we did last year with only 3 people in our lineup really putting up numbers that weren't below their career numbers, maybe 4 if you count Iguchi (since half of what he did was move Pods over anyway). Therefore, we won the world freaking series with Crede, Pierzynski, Rowand, Uribe, and DH all having significant room for improvement offensively, and very little room to get worse offensively. If any of those guys (BA instead of ARow), and Iguchi and Konerko, step it up next year...we could wind up going from winning a world series on entirely pitching to having one of the best combinations of pitching, offense, and defense seen in years. If you just look at our lineup, and try to project "What is the best reasonable numbers we could expect from this guy", then there's enough there for people to really be afraid of our lineup, up and down the list.

QUOTE(Cknolls @ Jan 18, 2006 -> 10:24 AM) Did Kerry ever release all his medical records? John Kerry signed standard form 180 early in 2005. The Boston Globe reviewed all of his documents and found them to be as expected. Nothing hidden in them, nothing out of the ordinary or missing, etc. Basically all duplicates of stuff already released. Of course, one could ask why the Hell he didn't do that during the election campaign so that we could have shoved it back at the swift boat folks and asked why Bush couldn't match that level of disclosure of his national guard era documents...but then again, he wasn't a very good candidate anyway. Globe link.

You know, I always love watching the rounds of 64 and 32 in the years when the Big Ten is actually good...the Big Ten teams are always so good that they beat the living hell out of each other and all wind up ranked lower than they should be, and then they come out and start stomping people. I just hope IU doesn't wind up as a 5 seed this year.

The Fiance just got a raise! Woo-Hoo!

QUOTE(Gene Honda Civic @ Jan 18, 2006 -> 03:15 PM) Best.Thread.Evar. You are writing in the correct color.

QUOTE(sayitaintso @ Jan 18, 2006 -> 02:00 PM) Agreed. But i do feel that uribe will do better this year than in 05. I think that Gooch, Uribe, Crede, Pierzynski, and (God willing) Konerko all have good shots to do better next year than in 05, I just think AJ has the best shot at improving the most.

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Jan 18, 2006 -> 01:18 PM) Well instantly MD made two of those just more expensive for WMT. That's assuming that they'd employ the workers at a distribution center for the same minimum-wage no-health-care numbers that they do for the workers at their stores. In fact, it's probably a lot more likely that if anyone in Wal-Mart is being paid well, it's the folks who run those facilities, since they would likely be higher skilled positions (manning machines, physical labor) and would probably involve more injuries as well, possibly justifying the expenses on health care. Edit: That all said, I think it's highly probable that they won't build it there. If their history with shutting down stores to punish workers who unionize is any history, Wal-Mart has been more than willing to sacrifice immediate profits in order to work towards long-term political challenges. They're willing to shut down profitable stores to fight unions, there's no reason to expect that they wouldn't move that thing in order to fight a political battle in MD, even if it does cost more elsewhere.

QUOTE(kyyle23 @ Jan 18, 2006 -> 12:56 PM) Well, that is determined by MLB scorekeepers, isnt it? If they determine the catcher could have done something about it, it is then termed a passed ball and charged to the catcher. As far as I know, the rule is that if it's in the dirt, it's going to be a wild pitch. Or at least that's how they get called. But that doesn't mean a good defensive catcher can't get his body in front of a bunch of those and keep the ball in front of him, thus preventing the wild pitch.

QUOTE(Cknolls @ Jan 18, 2006 -> 12:58 PM) They could decide not to build the distribution wharehouse under consideration. That assumes there's an alternate spot that would work as effectively for distribution where WalMart could just easily move it around in order to punish Maryland. There are lots of other issues that decide where you're going to put one of those other than revenge: Labor costs of workers at the facility, availability of workers there, education of workers in the area, land value, access to transportation, quality of transportation, tax rates in that state, distance from stores which will be supplied by that facility, distance between that facility and other distribution centers, etc. It's not that easy to just decide not to build a facility in Maryland to punish MD...it's in fact quite likely that if they did that, they'd wind up spending a lot more on the facility itself.

QUOTE(Soxbadger @ Jan 18, 2006 -> 12:22 PM) If Lendale runs a sub 4.5 you could see him easily top 10, arguably the best back in the nation really. In a chat today, Kiper suggested he could see him falling all the way to the Patriots.

Still before we even talk about AJ and gold gloves, I think it would behoove us all to go look at which pitchers had the most wild pitches in the league. Even though a WP isn't credited to the catcher, that doesn't mean there's nothing the catcher can do to stop it...that only means it was in the dirt.

Personally, I gotta go with A.J., for a bunch of reasons. First, last year was simply his worst year with the bat. His power numbers masked that some, but he hit 30 points below his career average, and 50 points below what he was usually hitting in Minnesota. He still has all the advantages of hitting in the Cell next year to help push his power numbers back up, but all he really needs to do is get that average back up and his numbers should go through the roof. Furthermore, just watching him last year, I can't think of anyone else on our team who hit more lined shots directly at defensive players on the other team. Every week it'd seem like he'd hit 3-4 rockets right at people that just always seemed to turn into outs. I kept thinking he was going to catch fire all year, but he just never did. I'd love to say Crede here...but my head tells me AJ will go up the most.

Roberts before his confirmation hearings:

Will check the DVD tonight if no one else does first.

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Jan 18, 2006 -> 11:39 AM) Because it is unconsititutional? If the Terry Schaivo bill didn't cross that line, this certainly won't either.

November Santorum: "The K Street project is purely to make sure we have qualified applicants for positions that are in town. From my perspective, it's a good government thing." January Santorum: "Well, I don't know what you mean by Senate liaison to the, quote, 'K Street Project.' I'm not aware of any Senate liaison job that I do for the K Street Project."

I don't see it up yet, but last year whitesox.com offered a download which, when run, automatically placed the Sox Schedule into Outlook. I just looked and did not see the same option yet up. My advice is to wait a little while and it will probably show up...and it's a lot easier than creating your own Excel/Word sheets and then adding things to Outlook manually.

QUOTE(SSH2005 @ Jan 18, 2006 -> 10:13 AM) Because Neyer is a stathead and he argued all last season that the White Sox weren't good enough to win the World Series. Now he looks like an idiot because his stats failed him. The thing I think Neyer is failing to realize right now is that he still doesn't have a large enough package of stats to evaluate teams. For example, we all know that there still aren't real good, perfect metrics through which defensive performance can be evaluated, nor can we tell how defensive performance impacts total game results yet. The White Sox looked like they should be a worse team based on older stats, like OPS. But the places where we excelled last year (pitching and defense) were places where there aren't always good stats to allow for evaluation of every single point.

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Jan 18, 2006 -> 10:04 AM) #4 It isn't that any one WMT makes a lot of money, it is the fact that their business model has a ton of stores making a steady solid small profit, which adds up to huge profits at the end of the day. I really don't think adding 8% to their single biggest expense (payroll) is going to be good for many individual stores bottoms lines, and I think WMT with their history of playing tough will resort to store closings in many cases sooner than letting their profits get ate up by this law. I think they will recognize that they can invest their capital into more corporate friendly areas and shutdown stores that aren't profiting as much as other areas could be. Well here's the question though...can Wal-Mart stand up to a serious challenge of this sort? Let's say WM decided that in response they were going to close any store in MD which fell below a certain level of profitability. What happens when another state enacts this law? Then another? What happens when California does? Wal Mart is able to function in large part because of their size. They can go to their manufacturers and tell them that they have to give WalMart a discount because they're so big that manufacturers desperately want their products sold in WM (thus forcing the manufacturers to employ cheap Chinese labor). But if this becomes more than a 1-state phenomenon...Walmart can't exactly just pull out of California, for example, if they hope to be able to maintain that strength over their manufacturers.

QUOTE(Cknolls @ Jan 18, 2006 -> 10:08 AM) The courts have been explicit on this point, most recently in In Re: Sealed Case, the 2002 opinion by the special panel of appellate judges established to hear FISA appeals. In its per curiam opinion, the court noted that in a previous FISA case (U.S. v. Truong), a federal "court, as did all the other courts to have decided the issue [our emphasis], held that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information." And further that, "We take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President's constitutional power." I don't think United States v. Truong Dinh Hung really applies here since he wasn't a US citizen or permanent resident alien (and, therefore, not a US person). Under existing law, his communications could be monitored without needing to request permission from a FISA court. What we're talking about here is monitoring of US citizens, not foreign citizens who just happen to be inside the US at the time they're being monitored.