lostfan

Depending on how that goes in court, if the union loses it will f*** over public union pensioners elsewhere jn the country really bad, they'll be up the creek without a paddle.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jul 18, 2013 -> 04:05 PM) Ah. Well that might be worth it. But I dunno, it's pretty dirt cheap now isn't it? Yeah... I guess part of the problem is there's a lot of stuff that is kind of in the way that still belongs there and you can't build around it and can't provide services for the 2 people left on a city block, so you'd need some help from eminent domain or something like that, some kind of major revitalization plan that does a lot all at once.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jul 18, 2013 -> 03:56 PM) (The sad thing is Thome would have been the perfect part time DH to pair with Andruw Jones that season since Jones did nothing other than murder lefties). Yeah, and I saw absolutely no indication whatsoever that this would've even been considered, even though that would've been the perfect platoon for the rotating DH idea, and very well could've won the division. Thome wasn't grindy enough... or, well, he actually wasn't s***ty enough at baseball for that.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jul 18, 2013 -> 03:53 PM) It's used to wipe the slate clean, yes, but often times the businesses that file are failing so badly they just end up back in debt and close shop anyway. Or even more often, they clean their books of debt and then find a bigger buyer to take the business. That's why I'm wondering if tons of investment is really worth it here. You're basically asking Detroit to take out a loan the first day of being debt free. Their pension system, which I think is constitutionally protected from becoming an "unsecured" debt (i.e., they won't take pennies on the dollar), is underfunded by like 10 billion. Oh, I wasn't talking about investing like with municipal bonds, I meant like if I was looking to start a business or expand. I could get a bunch of property in Detroit for dirt cheap (cheaper than now) and do whatever I wanted with it.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Jul 18, 2013 -> 03:50 PM) It kind of runs into itself a little, but it's possible that Thome could have gotten hurt or been mediocre or whoever/whatever and the Twins could have ended up signing or trading for someone else. That much is impossible to know. Because he signed with the Twins, the Sox stuck with Kotsay and the Twins won by 4 games. Many of the games between the two of them saw Jim Thome as the main difference between them, especially his walk-off homer against Thornton which sucked big time. I'm almost positive Ozzie would've played him 140 games if he was still with the team, so he'd have played full-time and gotten tired and put up one of the typical .245 average, mid 800s OPS type seasons and not that 1.039 he put up in Minnesota when they only used him like 2/3 of the time.

Isn't it pretty much the whole point of filing for bankruptcy to answer a question like that?

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jul 18, 2013 -> 03:35 PM) There's a novel idea in there somewhere. Allow small investors to buy into the rebuild in some fashion, providing small returns on investment. Instead of just interest on loans, they could offer a similar interest rate, plus some part of growth in tax revenue over time. Like a bond-plus instrument of a sort. I would bet they could get lots of people to buy in, enough that as a block, that could be a useful chunk of money for the city. You could even give the instrument voting rights on certain key decisions, to guide certain aspects of policy. It's worth investing in. Obviously, bankruptcy is a bad thing and obviously it is going to cause real pain for some people, but it's not necessarily the end. It gives an opportunity to start over and start really putting the city back together. I know people have been trying to do that but of course it's a lot more complicated.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jul 18, 2013 -> 02:56 PM) [/b] If they could figure out a way to fund the renewal, it would be an unprecedented opportunity. What was the last planned large city in the US? DC? I'd love to get in on something like that if I had a lot of money.

Does the picture of Tsarnaev look like what you'd expect a picture of a terrorist to look like? If not, then that's the point. A kid who looks like one of your high school classmates committed a terrorist attack. Now we ask "how."

QUOTE (greg775 @ Jul 18, 2013 -> 12:53 AM) See, we'll never know. I was told by a respected poster that last year's collapse was cause the Sox ran out of gas and were injured. How the heck do we know that? We blame running out of gas because Robin is liked. How do we know Oz's antics affected the team in any way? You still have to hit the ball and pitch the ball and field it. Why does Oz get blamed and not Robin? Ozzie was the manager in 2006. That team legitimately ran out of gas and there was also an unexpectedly hot Detroit team to compete with, it wasn't Ozzie's fault. In 2007 they were legitimately bad, there were injuries, a laughably bad bullpen, so Ozzie wasn't blamed for it. By 2011 we'd seen a few consecutive years of Ozzie's antics where he was sandbagging it or otherwise undermining the team, to the point where he outright quit on the team. That's the difference. I don't even think anyone's under the illusion that Robin is a great manager (how could he be?) but he doesn't have much to work with either.

QUOTE (pittshoganerkoff @ Jul 18, 2013 -> 11:24 AM) I like it for keeping in touch with family and friends and the ability to quickly share and view photos. But, the political stuff drives me nuts. I have "friends" on both ends of the political spectrum, and some of them post (usually share) the stupidest stuff. One "friend", who happends to be a relative in-law, constantly shares every anti-Obama/anti-Democrat thing out there. The worst part about all of this is that this person is not even registered to vote. I've seriously considered un-friending them, but their ignorance is almost comical. I laughed out loud the other day when they shared a post from some group called Occupy NRA. The post essentially said that stricter gun laws are needed and compared the amount of gun violence in the US with other countries, stating that the countries with the lowest gun crime rates had the strictest gun laws. But, since the post seemed at first to be bashing the current government, this person shared it, thinking they were once again bashing the current administration. I can get pretty fed up with the crap I read on Facebook. I know I was very close to unfriending a bunch of people around the time of the election. But, as I said, it is nice to keep in touch with friends and family. People who post excess political stuff I don't wanna see but I'm friends with IRL, I don't delete them I just unsubscribe, or uncheck "Show in news feed" or whatever they describe it as these days.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jul 17, 2013 -> 03:40 PM) Sometimes it's really not. Sometimes it's just people hate other types of people and are willing to act on it. Articles like this make these douchebags victims, not terrorists. It's disgusting that this asshole has little teeny bopper followers that SUPPORT him. And this type of article just furthers that nonsense. It's not really like that. I'll sound like a professor or something describing it but a whoooooooooooooole lot of them hate us but only a percentage actually support any kind of violence and only a relative handful actually are willing to be the ones to act. Like a big social matrix, and there's a series of catalysts to put a person on that path. It's not always obvious. In fact it almost never is.

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Jul 17, 2013 -> 03:35 PM) With Manson they didn't go out of their way to make him look cool. The cover with the bomber asswipe looks like it could be TigerBeat. A difference between reporting and trying to find the 'softer sife of bombing'. Poor guy was failed by his family and lured into blowing up people for Islam. Almost as if they are trying to do PR for the guy. That is where your outrage, faux or otherwise, is coming from He was basically your average teenager until that, though. I haven't read the article but I have to imagine that's part of it, how did this ordinary weed-smoking teenager become a notorious terrorist? When people think of terrorists they think of a certain image or type of person, probably Arab or Pakistani, devout Muslim who prays 5 times a day, talks about and how they hate America, wants to kill soldiers, probably picture traditional dress too (even though none of them do that). That's not always true, there's different paths to radicalization and different degrees of it. Hence, "complexities" if I said more w/o reading the actual article I would be talking out of my ass.

QUOTE (kitekrazy @ Jul 17, 2013 -> 01:43 PM) Some would argue that the Thome/Rowand trade set them back even more. I liked Ozzie's philosophy on that but they had the wrong people for it. The DH has always been a money pit for the Sox. Really? I don't see how because while trading Rowand left a gaping hole in CF for us until a couple of years ago, Thome was a pretty big deal. Whereas the Kotsay rotating DH idea was just a thorough unmitigated disaster. There was the ugly breakup with Frank Thomas at the same time, though.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jul 17, 2013 -> 03:31 PM) Response from Rolling Stone: WTF is complex about this tragedy? Are they going to say he was a victim of American commercialism or something? Terrorism isn't a complex issue? Not sure you can get more complex than that

Rolling Stone is a pop culture magazine, but they do have a lot of actual journalism in there. Matt Taibbi for example is awesome. (He puts his political views up front, for you to see)

I guess count me in the "uh, I don't get why this is a big deal" crowd

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jul 17, 2013 -> 01:55 PM) Your bother had $300 to spend on an item of clothing in high school? Holy crap. I probably spent that on my entire wardrobe for high school. Hence, the "dumbass" at the end. He was really insistent on buying it (he did have a job at the time, granted)

QUOTE (mike65 @ Jul 17, 2013 -> 11:22 AM) As a Cardinal fan, I hope you are correct. I would love for the Cardinals to get Ramirez but I don't even get the sense that it is being discussed. I have seen some rumors about Asdrubal Cabrera but none connecting Ramirez and the Cardinals. As to your second point, any trade this time of year will be somewhat costly. If the Cardinals and White Sox do ever trade, the cost will be partially determined by how much of the Ramirez salary the Cardinals are willing to assume. You would love him, especially if he hits better in the NL

QUOTE (ZoomSlowik @ Jul 17, 2013 -> 11:49 AM) Not really, because most teams will have some combination of low-value picks and bad drafting. A lot of teams would have 2 or 3 useful players and then D-League filler. Here's the Charlotte Bobcats just for comedy purposes. They were new in 2004 and didn't have any picks in 2010, but they had 10 lottery picks, several of them in the top-5. PG- Raymond Felton/Kemba Walker/D.J. Augustin SG- Gerald Henderson/Bernard Robinson SF- Michael Kidd-Gilchrist/Jared Dudley/Adam Morrison PF- Sean May/Cody Zeller/Alexis Anjica C- Emeka Okafor/Bismack Biyombo/Ryan Hollins Now THAT is terrible drafting. Touche. Probably makes the point I was making more, actually (that the Bulls list isn't as bad as it looks).

I don't see any reason why Ozzie wouldn't be cool with Robin, they always have been as far as I can tell

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Jul 16, 2013 -> 10:09 PM) In high school I had long hair, tinted glasses and used to wear an Army jacket. I would get stopped by our school security at least twice a week and frisked for drugs, based on how I looked. By junior year I was wearing different clothes and no Army jacket, stopped getting searched. It happens. My brother thought the leather trenchcoats were the coolest thing ever after he saw the Matrix so he spent $300 on one only for the security guards at his high school to tell him he couldn't wear it, because Columbine was so recent at the time. lol, dumbass

QUOTE (Jake @ Jul 16, 2013 -> 05:40 PM) I've always found there to be an interesting balance when thinking about "proper" race relations. While it would be out of line to deal with black friends or whomever else in a particular way because they are black, there is an extent to which it is inappropriate to act colorblind. There are parts of the human experience in the world today that are fundamentally different for (for instance) black people and I can't just treat my black friends like they are seeing and experiencing the world the same way I am. I remember when I was younger, saying the word "black" around a teammate and then I started acting embarrassed like I had just dropped an n-bomb. He just goes, "you know, it's no secret that I'm black. I have mirrors at my house. We don't have to pretend." This is when I first realized that I was being a pretty useless "non-racist" as I was trying to do my best "non-racist" impression around my black friends and, in effect, treating them with kid gloves because they were black. That doesn't mean I should instead pretend that I know what it's like to be black, but I also can't pretend that being black isn't an important part of someone's identity, for better or for worse. This is a fairly recent tension in critical theory, a sort of sub-specialty of mine in academia. There was a huge movement to try to abolish all labels, so to speak. All very well-intended, of course, but some prominent black and feminist scholars noticed something--all the people behind this movement were old white guys (a result of the old segregated hiring schemes in tandem with tenure). Black and feminist scholars, in particular, were thinking "hey, it's easy to renounce all sense of identity when you haven't had other people defining it for you for your entire existence." So, we have this tension between a desire for colorblindness when we simply don't live in a colorblind world. And the core assumption behind colorblindness seems to be that this just lets other people be assimilated in the club of white males rather than an acceptance of cultural variety and history. I personally find this hilarious. My boss did this once when he was telling a story about one of his employees earlier in his career, he said something along the lines of "and he was b-... he was an African-American gentleman..." I started laughing out loud, I was like "he's black, it's ok to say that, I'm black too." QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jul 16, 2013 -> 05:59 PM) So again, using that definition everyone is racist, every opinion about race is racist, and now racism has no meaning. That is absurd. Well I mean, you don't have to wear a white hood screaming the n-word with a noose in your hand while setting a cross on fire in a black family's front yard to actually be considered racist. Most of the time in 2013 people like to hide behind a layer of plausible deniability anyway, something about the Martin case in particular has a lot of people dropping that and being overtly racist (not that I'm saying that's happening in this thread, or that you're doing it, besides one or two people and they know who they are).

On that list of Bulls players drafted if you made one like that for every team, probably the majority of them would look like that.

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Jul 16, 2013 -> 04:54 PM) Which is exactly why Zimmerman has the right to call the police, but not to pursue the kid. He clearly wasn't trained on how to deal with the situation once confronted. If he stays in his car, the police probably don't end up killing the kid. Yes, some people might get pissed off that a black kid got stopped and questioned when he wasn't doing anything wrong, but at least the larger tragedy is avoided. +1