Balta1701

How many people have giant weather balloons inflated and sitting in their yard?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 16, 2009 -> 05:49 AM) Look no further than the automotive industry which at one point had just about everything that liberals were looking for from corporate America... great health insurance, pension, super high wages, etc. And giant gas-guzzling SUV's.

Really, Pedro in game 2 for the Phitins'? I figured they'd throw out Lee, he's on normal rest. I guess putting him in game 3 lines him up to pitch game 7 also.

Well, I've been busy most of the last day and this thread has barely progressed. That's disappointing and encouraging all at once.

Right now the ESPN.com headline on this series is "the Pen is Mightier". I couldn't help but think of this:

Quite a fun ride for the media though.

Not feeling like there'll be a happy ending on that one.

Even I have to say, ok, yeah, we got it. They screwed up, they suck at this. Let's move on.

Another way to look at it, paying $14 million to have a really good #3-#4 starter who does a number of things for you, like eat up 200+ innings and give you an ERA of 4ish or under and who helps make everyone else on your staff better is yes, a luxury. But it's a luxury you might be able to afford if you can meet a couple other criteria: 1. You have some young talent in your lineup and coming up through your minor leagues who are quality, and therefore are filling some of your positions cheaply for several years. 2. You have some young talent in your rotation, such that your rotation even with the expensive #4 starter isn't prohibitively expensive. 3. You're not holding an excess of ridiculously bad contracts that are preventing you from filling the other holes that show up. If we're not wasting money elsewhere and we're getting good success out of the talent we're developing in the minors (see; Gordon Beckham) then spending $14 mil a year on a #4 starter isn't going to cripple us, and in fact could serve to give us a ridiculously good starting rotation. Strangely, Buehrle's contract is probably affordable and ok if Rios actually hits like he's supposed to next year. If he busts, then wasting $10 mil a year on that CF slot without even filling it effectively is going to really hurt our ability to spend good money on a really good starting rotation.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Oct 15, 2009 -> 10:04 AM) Yeah people were saying this in like May. How the hell is the economy supposed to turn around in 3 months? Simple. Have the federal reserve dump in so much money that it has to find a place to go, and bang, 4000 points in the DJIA.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 15, 2009 -> 10:09 AM) I believe there is legislation pending that would force banks to clear charges in time order, instead of by amount or something arbitrary. That would be part of that overdraft reform bill that we discussed a couple pages ago. I'm pretty sure we were told how bad of an idea reforming that process to make it less like outright theft would be at the time.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 12, 2009 -> 11:01 AM) The most interesting part is in bold, IMO. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/w...obref=obnetwork Why is that the most interesting part? Are those guys totally irreplaceable for some reason? The closer's spot and an adequate 2b/ss who don't give you a ton on offense isn't going to cost an arm and a leg.

LOL, changing banks won't do anything, they all do that.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 15, 2009 -> 08:47 AM) That is incredibly vague, and I hope the language in the bill is more explicit in defining that usage, what constitutes viable liquid non-cash collateral, and who are pure hedgers. Don't you realize that's exactly the point? You want to introduce new regulation so that it looks like you're doing something and you can say "It's not my fault!" when the current investment bubble bursts and we find ourselves in an even deeper hole, but at the same time you can't piss off any of the banks because they flat out own the government and even long-serving Reps can't afford to be on their bad side.

QUOTE (knightni @ Oct 14, 2009 -> 09:52 PM) Joba's that bad, huh? Wouldn't you want captain cheeseburger to get 3 starts if it went 7?

QUOTE (lostfan @ Oct 15, 2009 -> 07:30 AM) I'm not going to attempt to say Fox is objective because that would be stupid, but you could probably make a case that the first half of TARP (where the Bush admin propped up the banks) had a lot more to do with the eventual recovery than the second half of TARP Obama's risky investments that haven't paid off yet and we won't find out if they will for a while. Did BHO really ever spend the 2nd half of TARP? I sorta got the impression that they wound up not really needing to. Once the banks understood that the government wasn't going to let them lose money after the citigroup and BofA bailouts in Nov/Dec., Geithner kept trying to unveil plans to use the 2nd half of TARP, but then the banks suddenly found out they could raise private funds essentially backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government.

A more astute author than Stossel might also note how the U.S. regulatory environment, and in particular the private health care market in the U.S., dramatically weakens the ability of people to actually start their own businesses.

Great! I'm so trying that today.

Collisions of particles in the LHC that might produce a Higgs boson could actually cause the universe to reset and make it so that the collision never happened. That just sounds so cool I had to post it.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 14, 2009 -> 08:16 PM) The funny part of that is that the same people who are saying the corporate tax rate doesn't do much are the same people running around for Barack giving the "jobs saved" number. Yeah. Because he didn't cut the corporate tax rate. Otherwise he wouldn't have been saving jobs.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Oct 14, 2009 -> 07:01 PM) source? We went over this a lot during the stimulus discussion and I've got too much work to do to really rehash it, here's a source citing work by a couple of people including the Congressional budget office and the congressional research service. Kap will say it's more complicated and those people are wrong, I will say Kap is flat out wrong, Kap will say that we have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, I'll respond "Yeah, if you assume that all of the deductions don't exist", I have to go worry about water-partitioning.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Oct 14, 2009 -> 06:16 PM) Check your link. And, the receipts would have crashed even harder if there weren't tax cuts in the system. The quickest "stimulus" that never gets the attention it should is the corporate tax rate. Cutting the corporate tax rate remains one of the weakest stimulative measures out there.

Unless they wind up being swatted. That's god's decision that he doesn't like them coming through

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Oct 14, 2009 -> 04:45 PM) Supply side economics works in the private sector a whole lot more BUT (huge but) you have to have corresponding spending cuts on the government side. I know you think that supply side doesn't work, but it provides a lot more revenue over a relatively short period of time (i.e. 5-7 years) then what we're seeing now on just pure printing press money. The issue becomes there's always cycles in the economy, and when a recession hits, the first thing Democrats want to say is that it's the tax cuts that's killing revenue. The bigger issue is you can't spend yourselves into oblivion like these nitwits (both parties) are doing. You know what one of the only good things about the last 8 years is? You just gave us a testable hypothesis. You proposed that you'd get a lot more revenue over a 5-7 year period after major tax cuts. I can actually respond with the federal tax receipts graph. The key thing to note is that even in the last expansion, if you extended the curve from where it was in 2001 (by far the largest dip before this year) you'd have to bend it dramatically downwards to get to where we were at the peak of the expansion. Either the tax cuts weren't as effective as you hoped in dramatically increasing revenue over the 5-7 year period (even before the crash) or the economy under Bush never recovered from 2001's recession, which argues that the tax cuts were ineffective as stimulus.

QUOTE (Rex Kicka** @ Oct 14, 2009 -> 03:25 PM) Absolutely wrong, just because you aren't a chair, doesn't mean you aren't part of the process. I didn't say kick him out of the committees. I said take his gavel away. If he wants to play "grand independent" whenever it gets him more attention - especially when in the process he ends up backtracking on his own commitments made to his own constituents, he should be given the leadership role he deserves, the back bench. Olympia Snow, Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad, Bill Nelson don't have gavels but they've gotten plenty of influence/huge checks from the insurance industry in the health care debate.