Balta1701

QUOTE (The Ginger Kid @ Jun 23, 2011 -> 07:03 PM) On second thought, you're right. Furthermore, Riggleman signed a contract and just walked away from it. That's bulls***. Walked away from his team over money midseason. Not exactly the kind of selling point I'd admire.

QUOTE (knightni @ Jun 23, 2011 -> 06:37 PM) Cops should use tasers more anyway. I bet the average cop fires his weapon only a couple of times in his entire career. Cops use radars way way way too much. They are sold as you say as a replacement for lethal weapons, but they're regularly used to subdue people for minor offenses.

QUOTE (Cknolls @ Jun 23, 2011 -> 07:17 PM) OBAMA. REelection. This does nothing long term. Those will do a great job of turning out the vote in the August 2011 presidential race.

Ok, this is pretty darn cool, and not just because somewhere on the way back on this technique you run into my name.

QUOTE (SoxFan1 @ Jun 23, 2011 -> 05:40 PM) It was one of the first names to come to my mind. He's going to be a good defender (which Anthony is), period. Draft Express has his basement as Taj Gibson and ceiling as 6'9 Dwight Howard. So there's that... I assume that means my ceiling is a 5'10" Dwight Howard?

Jabroni (I didn't answer earlier either to taunt you or to avoid bringing his name up).

QUOTE (SoxFan1 @ Jun 23, 2011 -> 05:01 PM) Whoa, they might swap the 10th/Salmons to SA for Parker and Jefferson. That might be the biggest instant downgrade for a #1 seed in history. (The 98 Bulls werent' a 1 seed were they?)

Well, still no reason to expect the Bobcats to leave the lottery, sot hat's good.

QUOTE (SoxFan1 @ Jun 23, 2011 -> 03:49 PM) Not sure about the Noah/Ellis thing. I like Ellis, but he isn't a perfect fit on the Bulls whatsoever, and losing Noah would hurt a lot. My problem is...we already lost Noah for about 2/3 of the season. He was absolutely dominant that first month. We'd have been screwed on the circus trip without him. After that hand injury, his dominant games were at best few and far between. I mean, we benched him down the stretch against the Heat repeatedly...and he deserved to be benched. The Noah post-injury is moderately effective, sometimes. The Noah pre injury was constantly a beast. The post injury Noah I'd happily trade. The pre injury Noah, I'd give up if I were getting Howard back.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 23, 2011 -> 03:34 PM) That was never meant to be the idea. The idea was to be an emergency safety net against supply shocks. Doesnt mean that it wouldn't be a possible benefit.

QUOTE (Milkman delivers @ Jun 23, 2011 -> 03:28 PM) I can hardly speak to game threads, as I usually avoid them like the plague. So I can't hope to refute anything you've said. A couple of things I noticed that seem out of place, though. Balta seems to typically be an optimistic guy, and he's there more for the bad games. Joe is the opposite of that, and J4L comes off as pretty even. If I'm there more for the bad games it's because there are more bad games than good. I'm on when I get the chance.

On a similar topic, talks aimed at raising the debt ceiling and a long-term budget framework appeared to end this morning when Eric Cantor walked out over the principle that there should be no increases from the current tax level in any form as part of the deal. Here's probably the best commentary I've read

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Jun 23, 2011 -> 01:46 PM) They're weaseling out of it now. They say "well it's not predictive, just taking the 'temperature' right now!" but there's no plausible deniability that they didn't realize how some would try to take advantage of the results politically. I expect that when it was taken, the people doing it didn't expect it to be taken advantage of politically, they were probably legitimately trying to position themselves to profitably advise companies on the new law and see which messages had the most impact. It just wasn't designed to be a predictive, public study, and someone in the company released it that way. Whoever it was that released the original info publicly probably ought to be fired. They embarrassed the firm and dragged it into a political debate that it had no business being a party to.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Jun 23, 2011 -> 01:45 PM) Where the hell are all these rumors? I googled it and found jack s***. In about a month, A&J's Sports Pub will be adding "As featured in sports illustrated" because of this thread.

Researchers who actually do work on polling are comparing that McKinsey study that 2k5 cited to a Push Poll. Some of the setup questions are now available at this link.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Jun 23, 2011 -> 01:30 PM) You are certainly in the minority. X-Men: First Class is the 2nd best comic book movie I've ever seen. In hindsight I can see why NSS has the complaints he does, but while watching it, none of those issues bothered me. I think the key thing in making that happen was that the major guys were very good at their parts.

QUOTE (chw42 @ Jun 23, 2011 -> 11:37 AM) Bogdanovic is a very good shooter. Although he might want to jump onto an NBA team right away. I've heard that he's a pretty clutch offensive player, but is pretty poor defensively. If he's smart, he's expecting that an immediate NBA jump will be difficult because of the lack of NBA.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Jun 23, 2011 -> 12:46 PM) I'm still so glad Kahn jumped all over Beasley to help Miami snag an extra stud. Wouldn't you have done so if you were a non-contending team's GM?

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jun 23, 2011 -> 01:19 PM) I like his "coin" system. At first it was cute then it started getting annoying.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 23, 2011 -> 12:09 PM) The other factor would be if you did it regularly the market would just price in the expected release. The fact that it was a complete surprise is what destroyed the commodities prices this morning. There are a couple possible benefits of that though...in particular, if you had some mechanism where a rapid oil price increase or decrease triggered an SPR response, you might well kill off any speculation-only driven price spikes.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 23, 2011 -> 11:40 AM) Looking at the totals on-line, if we released the entire reserve, we could replaces OPEC product for about 25 days. "All of OPEC production" or "OPEC imports to the U.S."?

QUOTE (maggsmaggs @ Jun 23, 2011 -> 10:52 AM) I thought of that, too. It may exist and be subtle eye contact things. It clearly doesn't exist for the Sox, despite AJ and Ozzie being in the dugout together for 6 years.

QUOTE (Milkman delivers @ Jun 23, 2011 -> 10:47 AM) We're in too big of a hole to take any chances at this point. At least AJ seems to understand that, although he went about it in his usual classless way. Should a catcher and a manager have a signal worked out between them for "Come and take this pitcher out" that no one else, even the pitcher, recognizes? That's not the worst idea I've ever heard.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Jun 23, 2011 -> 10:43 AM) Or the Yankees game where back-to-back circus catches by Lilli prevented walk-off hits? Wins driven by the Stealth Elf have nothing to do with luck.