Balta1701

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Oct 29, 2008 -> 03:42 PM) Limit the window where they can run political ads and form 'exploratory committees' to raise money. I don't want to see another 2+ year campaign. Ever. The Palin/Huckabee/Romney matchup starts next Wednesday.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 29, 2008 -> 01:41 PM) Are you saying that Romney is the poster child for fiscal conservatives but social moderates? Because he isn't anywhere near that - or at least he wasn't during the GOP primaries. I wouldn't say "Fiscal conservatives" there. I'd say "The big business wing of the Republican party". That one is a lot closer to true.

QUOTE (Texsox @ Oct 29, 2008 -> 01:33 PM) Care to elaborate? I'd say that the only reason that the ethanol industry exists in this country is that there are huge government mandates and subsidies that pay portions of the cost. It just so happens that an awful lot of the money created by that subsidy flows to the first state in the Presidential Election contests.

Iowa's Ethanol Industry says hi.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 29, 2008 -> 01:21 PM) Math is hard, let's go shopping! I always knew you were President Bush in hiding!

QUOTE (PlaySumFnJurny @ Oct 29, 2008 -> 01:05 PM) The only thing I see that's really silly there is the red in Indiana, given the grey everywhere else. By the standards he's using to put places like IA, MI, PA, and OR in grey, then you'd have to put places like MT, AZ, NC, the Dakotas, and GA in grey also if you're just going by the margins in polling data. Unless of course a 10 point lead for 1 candidate was considered less valid than a 5 point lead for the other candidate.

To start us off here, I'll give you a primer on the kind of problems this area will be facing when the San Andreas goes by picking a particular problem and running through what will happen. I'll save some of the truly scary ones for later, but for starters...transportation. It's possible that there may be some severe damage to local transportation that will prevent people from getting around. In the 89 San Francisco Earthquake we saw 1 highway totally collapse. Given these sorts of ground motions, it's likely that there will be a few bridges that will go down and block major transportation routes for days that way. There is also a lot of topography out here, and that is going to mean landslides. You can probably expect a few thousand of them large enough to block roads, especially up in the mountains in areas where there's only 1 road in and out. Getting to these people or getting help to those people is going to be especially difficult. The real fun though is the San Andreas itself. Typically, we're talking about something like 5-10 meters, or 15-30 feet of movement on that fault if it snaps. A lot of the major highways around here go across that fault; the only one that really doesn't at any point is Highway 1 along the coast. The 10, the 14, the 15, and the 5, the routes connecting L.A. to Arizona, Vegas, and Northern California, and the associated rail lines, they are completely severed. The road is instantly impassible and every one of them will be blocked until they are completely rebuilt in the destroyed sections, which can take weeks. On a given day in L.A., there are a couple hundred thousand people who commute from one side of the fault to the other, who work on one side of the fault and live on the other. If this fault snaps while they are at work, then a few hundred thousand people can't get home, and with communications down, they literally don't even know if their families are alive or not. Even beyond that, the counties in L.A. aren't drawn with the San Andreas in mind, so at various places, the Fault cuts right through the middle of San Bernadino, Los Angeles, Riverside, and Kern counties. The big ones are the first 2; the fault splits them almost in half. Any county level emergency response system therefore...if it is run from one side of the fault, it will have no ability to communicate to the other side of the fault. Imagine sending a group of fire trucks to fight a new fire, the trucks head out, and suddenly they realize they can't get across the fault. Or the call never comes in because there's only 1 side of the county in touch with the county seat. Any service run at the county level therefore needs to have 2 command centers, one on each side of the fault, because otherwise, the fault will render it impossible for emergency services to reach anyone. Going one step further, for everyone else out there...a huge fraction of the merchandise you buy at your local Walmart, all those things imported from China, Taiwan, Korea, etc., flows through the ports of L.A. and Long beach. The goods are unloaded there, loaded on trains or trucks, and shipped out across the country. The Earthquake will destroy those transportation routes. It will be weeks to months before a normal flow of goods can resume out of the city, maybe more. The rest of the country will suddenly see goods they thought were plenty vanish from storeshelves, because some of the biggest port complexes in the world can no longer reach them, and there's not enough spare capacity on the west coast to make up for those areas being cut off. So, to summarize, everything goes to hell. You can't drive, you can't ship stuff, you need a lot of bulldozers, your roads are destroyed, and help can't get to you.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 29, 2008 -> 12:12 PM) I read that it wasn't the San Andreas fault that was expected to drop the "big one" but another fault a little further inland ( I forgot the name of it of course) Does that make sense? There are quite a few other faults inland of the San Andreas, the Mojave desert is made up of dozens of 10-20 kilometer long faults that have moved around for the last 10 million years. In the past 20 years we've had 2 earthquakes on them, the Hector Mine earthquake in 99 and the Landers earthquake in 91. Both were magnitude 7 events. But the rub of these type of faults is...the rupture magnitude and intensity scales with the fault length. The San Andreas runs for hundreds of kilometers, and past ruptures along it have run for hundreds of kilometers. If you look at this map I stole...the section of the fault they're rupturing, which again is not the worst case scenario, basically runs from the Salton Sea up through Palmdale. We're talking about a fault breaking along a couple hundred kilometers of its length. The San Andreas is the only fault in this area capable of producing magnitude 8+ events, and for this simulation, they're shooting for "Average", not "Worst case scenario". There are also some smaller faults that run within the L.A. basin that can do a lot of damage locally if they go (Northridge in 94 happened on one of those) but for raw power, there's nothing around here that can match the San Andreas.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Oct 29, 2008 -> 12:10 PM) Um, November 13th, not October 13th? (opening sentance) Oh Bloody Hell. And it's spelled sentence

QUOTE (Texsox @ Oct 29, 2008 -> 11:59 AM) I love the theory of keeping the guys coming off crap seasons, aging, etc. because their value is low, and trading the guys who had good seasons because their value is high. Hmm, what does that leave us with? Quentin.

At 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, November 13th, the Southern California region is planning to undertake the largest earthquake preparedness drill in U.S. history. We're trying to simulate in extraordinary detail what would happen if there was a reasonable magnitude shock hitting the southern stretch of the San Andreas Fault. For you southern Californians out there, if your business or family hasn't registered to be a part of this event yet, please encourage your supervisors to do so, or if you are the supervisor...get in gear! To do a true earthquake practice drill, a number of things have to come together. Emergency services want to know where the worst areas are going to be, how many casualties they're going to be looking at, etc. Infrastructure organizations need to know what things are going to be out of commission. Governments need to know whether or not their communications will work. The everyday person probably wants to know whether or not their house will be standing and whether or not they can get home if it happens. What we're trying to do for this one is simulate as realistic of an event as we possibly can. A magnitude 7.8 earthquake nucleating near the southern end of the San Andreas Fault near the Salton Sea and running north up to roughly the point that the 14 crosses the fault on the northern side of the San Gabriel Mountains. Taking probably 25 years of work, they've simulated a reasonable set of motions along the fault, taken the energies released by this event, and propagated them throughout the L.A. basin to accurately simulate the damage the basin would take in particular areas. A noteworthy feature of this scenario is that it is a reasonable event...not a worst case scenario. This is an average scale event on the San Andreas, and on average, there is roughly a 2% chance per year of this level of event actually happening. At 10 a.m. on the 13th of November, a video will play on your local TV and radio stations and probably on a lot of websites for about 2 minutes saying "This is an earthquake drill. Please take cover. If this was a real earthquake, stop driving if you're in your car. Don't actually stop your car now!" and so on, showing recorded footage from other events, etc. After that, the businesses that have registered and all of the emergency services are going to spin up as though that event really happened, to try to see how they respond and to give them legitimate practice for an event that genuinely destroys everything and overwhelms every single response capacity. If your business hasn't registered yet, please do so. If nothing else, it's a good idea for everyone to spend a few moments thinking about how they'd respond to this event, because within about 50 years, one like this is probably going to happen, and it could well happen soon. I'll keep this thread running by giving some of the more interesting details of what will happen when the San Andreas goes, and if you'd like to learn more, please ask!

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Oct 29, 2008 -> 09:58 AM) Im hesitant to trade Kirk at this point. He is a perfect 2nd team PG and looked like he had more energy than recent seasons. I was hoping Kirk would blossom being on the second unit and get close to the Kirk of old that used to carry this team. We may be hesitant to trade Kirk because of the role he fills, the backup point guard...but I have a simple response to that...you're paying him $11 million a year to be a backup point guard. In a capped league, that just isn't practical over anything but the shortest terms.

QUOTE (illinilaw08 @ Oct 29, 2008 -> 07:13 AM) The Al Harrington news makes no sense at all. In my opinion, the Bulls need some dead eye spot up jump shooters (DRose is going to create a lot of open shots - we saw some of that last night) or a back to the basket scorer. Al Harrington fits neither of these roles. He's a career 45% shooter and shot 43% from the floor last year. Realistically Harrington plays the exact same role that Deng and Noc play. The Bulls have the luxury of having a glut of guards that they can trade, but this seems to me like it would be making a deal for the sake of making a deal. I hope Pax passes on this one. The logic here would be pretty simple. Al Harrington has a 2010 expiring contract worth just under $10 million a season. If you can move either Preferably Hinrich or alternatively Nocioni in a deal for him, suddenly we're holding 2 different big 2010 expiring contracts worth $25 million or so, in addition to Gooden's this season worth $7 mil. Nocioni and Hinrich have deals that run a couple years longer. Move one of them for an expiring contract, and suddenly there's the space under the luxury tax to sign Gordon if that's how you want to spend the money...or alternatively you're $20 million or so under the salary cap after 2010 and you have the money available to make a max run at D-Wade.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Oct 28, 2008 -> 08:43 PM) I think his production is much more valuable lower in the order. I have no problem with guys that get on at a .330 or .340 clip that hit for damn good power, ala Reyes or Rollins, but Alexei hasn't even shown that amount of patience at the plate. To me, he's a good #2 or #6 hitter, and I really don't think I'd put him anywhere else. I'd love to see Alexei in the #2 spot next year.

From the Fascinating graph department...

I could survive for 35 seconds chained to a bunk bed with a velociraptor Created by Bunk Beds.net

QUOTE (Texsox @ Oct 28, 2008 -> 07:25 PM) The theory goes, you cannot live, for example, in a brothel, without being affected. Desensitization is a well studied part of the human experience and if we keep surrounding ourselves with immoral acts we all become immoral. Good decent people, for example, supported the Nazis because the Nazis were woven into the fabric of the society. We accept sixteen year-olds pregnant and then we have more sixteen year-old pregnancies. So, did you just compare tolerating homosexuals to tolerating the mass murder of Jews?

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Oct 28, 2008 -> 05:30 PM) I've thought for a while that too many important laws are passed without "approval" from the public. Yes we elect people to represent us, but in many ways they are using their own judgment. I tend to think the most important issues... like gay marriage... should get an up or down vote from every voting citizen. But you know what? When you leave everything open to the public, you just make a mess. Unfortunately, that's what this state is in right now and a big reason for it is the ballot initiative system. When the legislature writes a law, yes it's open to lobbyists, malarkey, earmarks, whatever, but at some level at least it winds up being a law that is put together and negotiated and can even be changed if necessary. The initiative system out here has, for example, written things like mandatory spending on education and totally obscure property tax codes in to the state's constitution, and it has helped build in a budget deficit and gridlock that the legislature pretty much can't overcome.

QUOTE (Kalapse @ Oct 28, 2008 -> 12:53 PM) If the Sox offer Griff arbitration and he accepts (the risk is always there) he will make, at a minimum, 10 million dollars next season. That's why they wouldn't offer. And no, I don't think Jon Heyman knows whether or not the Sox will offer him arbitration, them not being interested in resigning him isn't really an indicator one way or the other. It's entirely possible that the Sox had some sort of arrangement with Griffey's people that they might offer him arbitration if he agrees not to resign. If the Dodgers can do that with Manny there's no reason the Sox can't also. Depends on what Griffey's looking for. If he wanted a 1 year deal with anyone, he'd probably take that. If he was looking to start somewhere...he'd probably decline.

QUOTE (Heads22 @ Oct 28, 2008 -> 01:54 PM) I really think McCain lost his grip when the Republicans decided to spend more time talking about Obama than about McCain's policies. I think McCain would be in equal amounts of trouble if they'd focused on their policies. Hell, today one of their top spokespeople accidentally pointed out that their health care reform plan was garbage. Their health care plan is based on giving people a tax credit to go in to the (Much more expensive) individual market while putting a tax on the benefits people receive through work. Thus, it drives people out of the employer based health care plan and in to the individual market. Today, one of their guys said that they wanted people to stay in the employer based market because it's a better deal than the individual one. Then why are you trying to force people out!

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Oct 28, 2008 -> 10:18 AM) I agree 100%, and that's why I agree with a slightly progressive tax system. I think what we currently have now, where some people get a bigger refund than they pay in, is wrong. I think that Obama is wrong for hitting the wealthy as hard as he plans to. I also think McCain is wrong for giving them as big of a break as he plans to. I disagree with some of what Obama was saying in that interview, but I don't know how you can deny that what he said was taken out of context and heavily distorted to make it appear that he's left of Lenin. His tax policies are more-socialistic than McCain's, but he's not a socialist. Progressive taxation =/= socialism. The biggest problem with this is that it's way overstated how often that actually happens, because it is assuming that income tax is the only tax that's being paid.

As always, thanks for the hard work folks!

QUOTE (Hawkfan @ Oct 27, 2008 -> 08:26 PM) terrible idea to get baldelli of course, but I love that damn guy. I've been hopin for three years we would get him, but I'm glad we didn't. Find a Cure for Mitochondria! Um, you might want to rephrase that. Basically you just said the equivalent of "Find a cure for arms" or "Find a cure for blood".

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Oct 27, 2008 -> 06:21 PM) Ant the station would have b****ed endlessly about how unaccessable the Bush admin was being, how childish they were acting, 'why can't they answer tough questions', and on and on. What the TV station SHOULD fear is that an Obama admin would try to have the FCC revoke thier license. And the Obama people should fear the response they'd get if they actually tried to do that for the reason that they don't like a station.