Balta1701

QUOTE (DBAHO @ Feb 12, 2009 -> 11:42 AM) So wait, does Thomas's deal end in 2010 or 2011 then? He'd a pretty decent backup center who gives you hustle and defense, but he also has heart issues. Would be an upgrade on Aaron Gray though. Thomas signed a 6 year deal in 2004. His deal ends in 2010, he has 1.5 years left on it (2 years via the NBA trade machine rules). I have no problem with him as a backup C/PF. Assuming Gooden walks this offseason, which he darn well better, that gives us more depth in the front court and clears out Larry Hughes. And if the Suns happen to be really going after expiring deals, then we go from having $8 million in Gooden to $14 million in Gooden + James, which gives us the ability to offer up more cap space to the Suns and perhaps fewer players (keep Thabo so that we have a shooting guard next year?)

QUOTE (DBAHO @ Feb 12, 2009 -> 11:25 AM) Thomas and James have at least 1 if not 2 years left on their deals IIRC. James has 1 year left on his deal while Thomas has 2. That would take $6 million from Hughes's contract off the books for next year and would cost us zero cap space in summer 2010. We'd add an additional $200k this year, and be holding a $7 million expiring deal next year along with more depth in our front court for next year. Somehow I'm sure this would wind up costing Tyrus and Noah minutes, but I'd do it.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 12, 2009 -> 09:41 AM) The Cubs could put "We have sucked for 100 years, and you idiots will still over pay to come see us at Wrigley" on a billboard, and they would still have 40,000 people there everyday.

QUOTE (nitetrain8601 @ Feb 12, 2009 -> 09:13 AM) Deng disappears in clutch time. Hell, I can't remember him ever having more than a few good games in the 4th quarter. I rather have Tyrus Thomas as that guy in the 4th. Down the stretch...IMO you run your normal offense. Forget this isolation crap we always get in to, put the ball in your PG's hands, run your offense, move the ball around, have someone push in to the lane and try to create an open shot.

Frankly, I feel like we have a lot better backup plans than we've had in the last 2 years at most of our spots.

QUOTE (ZoomSlowik @ Feb 12, 2009 -> 09:03 AM) That's really not the case if you believe the reports that came out right when it happened (I'm too lazy to check the old TalkBulls thread, pretty sure Sam Smith wrote about it). The Bulls supposedly had the opportunity to get Gasol for Noah, Thabo and PJ Brown's contract, but JR nixed it because he'd have had to re-sign Brown to a sizeable deal before the trade for cap purposes and pay a sizeable amount on the luxury tax. We'd have also had to take Brian Cardinal, but then again his deal is smaller than that of Larry Hughes. Noah, Thabo, and PJ Brown's contract is still quite a bit more than what the Lakers gave up for him IMO.

QUOTE (Texsox @ Feb 12, 2009 -> 07:15 AM) I think your idea would be better than shuffling from one to another. Interestingly, NOAA does a lot for farmers as well. When people think of consumer protection they also think about UL (which is not a government agency). None of this would have stopped the peanut issue, unless we provide every factory an inspector on a daily basis. It seems like the FDA focuses on what is in the market and the USDA focuses on how it got there. Perhaps that would be a better alignment. Well, without touching on this exact issue, I would like to point out that every time there's one of these outbreaks, the country is hurt by a number of things. First and foremost, there is no centralized or computerized tracking system for food. Remember the salsa related outbreak a year ago or so? How it started with tomatoes, then they thought it was cilantro, then they eventually found a contaminated pepper somewhere? A big reason why these things stay under the radar for so long is that there are very limited documentation requirements for food shipping and storage, even stuff coming from overseas. So you get people being sickened by Salsa, you start looking at the ingredients, then you realize that all of the ingredients have been thrown basically in to giant piles in warehouses without any record of what was put where other than a few sheets of paper that you spend a week tracking down, and by the time you actually figure out where things have come from 15 more people are dead. I'd say that increasing the penalties on these sorts of mistakes might also provide a market-based reason for the quality of service to improve. A lot of times, when a contaminated product is traced to one factory, they shut down for a couple days, change their name, re-register themselves, and they're putting their product back on the market a week later with very little punishment. That may well have been related to the decisions of the people in charge of the regulatory agencies under, let's say, their previous leadership, but I think it seems like we're barking up the wrong tree here. There are methods that could be significantly more useful and effective ways of improving the quality of the U.S. Food distribution system than reorganizing the agencies who run it.

QUOTE (BigSqwert @ Feb 12, 2009 -> 06:50 AM) Indeed. They are all looking out for each other. Which is of course, a huge ingredient in the recipe for how we got in to this mess in the first place.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Feb 11, 2009 -> 09:58 PM) Let's face it, if that was the atmosphere at the Cell, we would all think it was brilliant! And very few of us would be going to games.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Feb 12, 2009 -> 08:26 AM) Gordon has proven consistently that he's not that guy. I'd go to Deng personally, with a mid-ranger. There's actually been some reasonable discussion on this topic at a number of basketblogs over the last week. If you had to pick one guy in the league to take the shot in the last 24 seconds, who'd you pick. No brainer, Kobe right? Guess what Kobe's FG %age on those shots is over the last couple years? 25%. League wide, the average on last second shots is only 30%. Gordon hits about 35%, which is actually a fair amount above average. So to respond to your claim that Gordon isn't the guy for those shots, if he isn't, then very few people around the league are. The interesting reality of this is that the whole league sucks in those situations. 30% is terrible, and that can't just be from people taking 3's or because of defense, that suggests that the offenses people are trying to run are vastly less effective than the offenses teams run during the normal part of the game. In other words, the question shouldn't be "Who do you want taking the last shot", the question ought to be how are you going to create the last shot and make it a good one. Defense doesn't just get that much better at the last second. More reading 1 More reading 2

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 12, 2009 -> 08:02 AM) I always understood that Kobe killed the deal. Garnett was a matter of Boston not wanting what the Bulls had to offer. I never saw anything about the Bulls turning down MN. Gasol was the only deal I saw that the Bulls actually killed. And even then...the Bulls had clearly offered quite a bit more than the Lakers ever tried to offer for Gasol. The Bulls may have turned down a more expensive offer, but never had the chance to even evaluate a deal on the level of what the Lakers gave up for Gasol.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Feb 11, 2009 -> 07:11 PM) So we've been doing this for like 50 years and satellites have never collided before? Ever? Smaller stuff has hit lots of things, but usually we're pretty good about bringing the big stuff down over the South Pacific. From a different article: I think the answer to your statement is "Space is pretty big".

This is quite cool. Somewhat surprised it hasn't happened sooner with all the junk we've left floating up there.

Lillibridge in CF is a possible/probable 2nd option if Owens struggles anyway.

This could so get fun...

QUOTE (juddling @ Feb 11, 2009 -> 06:33 PM) That question would be "How you gonna eat 5 dollars??" Or, you could just ask them to eat a pile of s**t with a price tag on it.

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Feb 11, 2009 -> 03:45 PM) Make him eat his own product. That Q came from Congressman Greg Walden (R-OR). Can we also ask the banks if they'd be willing to eat their own products?

QUOTE (nitetrain8601 @ Feb 11, 2009 -> 03:51 PM) Add in Gooden as they want his expiring as well as Cedric Simmons. The more I think about it the less I like that deal. Blah.

The Republican party just needs to stop Twittering. Earlier this week, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-MI, blew the cover on a planned trip by some Congressmen to Baghdad by twittering that they were arriving in Baghdad. Yesterday, in the Virginia state Assembly, the GOP was making a move to take control of the state Senate by trying to convince one of the Dems in that body to flip parties. Problem was, before they had an agreement, one of their members twittered that it might happen. The Dems jumped in and kept the guy from switching with a better offer.

Think "Sammy Sosa's arms".

QUOTE (hawksfan61 @ Feb 11, 2009 -> 03:34 PM) The Senate version applied to all home buyers, but the catch was you had to live there for a certain amount of time (I believe 3 years but don't quote me on that) and if you sold before that period ended you would have to pay the $15,000 back. There was ample protection against speculators here and for some reason they got rid of it, which I think was a pretty stupid idea. Housing is a huge drag on the economy right now and anything to get that moving again would be a huge help IMO. I don't know if they have gone back to just the $7500 credit that expires June 30th or what, but as of this afternoon the $15,000 was out. I believe the burst balloon metaphor works pretty well here. If you keep trying to blow air into a balloon with a hole in it, you might slightly reinflate the balloon, but once you stop blowing on it, the air is going to leak right back out. Yes, housing is a huge drag on the economy, but there's simply no way around that. For the past decade, housing prices have been propped up at a level well above what people could afford based on their salaries by the fact that housing prices were going up. Once housing prices stopped going up, there was nothing left to prop up housing prices. Any temporary action designed to try to restore that market is going to wind up being pretty useless overall, because as soon as that tax break ends, housing prices would resume their drop towards an equilibrium level where people can afford homes based on their salaries. I'll give you an example. If I can pull off one of the Postdoc's I'm applying for, a logical move for me may be to purchase a condo. Especially if I start around Dec. 1 or early next year, because I think the market should be close to bottoming by then, or at the least it should have declined so much that the amount I'd pay in rent will be less than the amount it would decline, thus allowing me to build up some equity from the purchase. On the other hand though, if this tax break existed, but it was expected to expire in early Feb., if I wasn't in a position to complete the purchase by the expiration date, it would make no sense to me to make the purchase, because I'd expect another $15k or so of a drop in the housing pirce once the temporary tax break went away, thus eating up the tax break as wasted $ and potentially killing off my hope to build up additional equity by spreading out the decline longer. Housing isn't going to just "get moving again". Housing has to fall back to where housing should have been in the first place, and having the government pay a chunk just means that part of the drop would be eaten up by the government rather than the banks. Which of course, is pretty much what the Fed has been doing anyway.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Feb 10, 2009 -> 07:01 PM) What bias? Today Fox News issued an apology. Side note: they didn't apologize for lifting a story verbatim from a Republican operative press statement. They apologized for the typo. And blamed it on the Wall Street Journal.

QUOTE (Texsox @ Feb 11, 2009 -> 12:59 PM) Is adding a lab at the USDA going to save us anything? Remember, reportedly, the agribusiness industry is happy with the way things are now. I guess the FDA lab would, in theory, now be smaller. I'm sure they are. They've got a nice track record lately of poisoning people.

QUOTE (beautox @ Feb 11, 2009 -> 12:44 PM) So who here would do a milledge for poreda and link swap? No.

QUOTE (longshot7 @ Feb 11, 2009 -> 11:18 AM) Considering the 7% unemployment, I'd guess a bunch. The U.S. government actually tracks these data through its unemployment surveys. It's considered underemployment; when people take jobs below their pay grade because they're the only things available. As of the Feb. numbers, it appears that roughly 5% of the work force fits in to that category. Like everything else in the job market, those #'s are at something on the order of a 20 year high.