Balta1701

Trading a guy who we drafted highly and who we have never once seen against minor league competition for an expensive player with 1 year of control? Love it, classic Rick Hahn special.

I don’t disagree with you but I also note the situation the White Sox have created. Right now, on the books for 2022, they have $105 million in committed contracts and that is before any arbitration cases, which includes Giolito. If you take on 3 multi year deals for bullpen, pitcher, and RF, then you have to be ready for a $160 or $170 million 2022 payroll.

How the f*** did we not have a thread here on that when it happened?

It’s not. An open tent is better than indoors, a closed tent is basically the same or worse. It’s another symptom of us not taking this seriously.

1. The things he does well often seem to be hard to notice. 2. The mistakes he makes wind up being very, very big ones. 3. There is a lot of talk on here by the insiders suggesting that the subset of people who don't like Grandal includes the pitching staff.

He was just hired and DUI charges the day beforehand wasn't enough to get him fired.

Released officially ≠ leaked to TMZ.

I mean, if they actually are talking about Cruz, that all but guarantees that their plan this offseason is to spend money to fill the RF hole and trade Vaughn + for pitching.

If assistant GM Hahn didn’t want everyone knowing what the white Sox are doing, he’s doing an abjectly awful job of controlling leaks, and has been for years.

The answer with wind is probably it has an effect but it’s within the error bars of a factor of 10. If you are within 1 meter, you’re exchanging a lot of air so wind might not make a big difference if you’re there for tens of minutes. If you are perfectly seated downwind and 2 meters away maybe wind increases air exchange, but wind is turbulent, it is going to mix the air you breathe out with fresh air, and the wind direction isn’t typically perfectly constant. So maybe you go from 0.4 to 0.6 liters in an hour exchanged, a 50% increase. Could that be enough to be the difference between getting sick and not? Yes, but now that depends on the amount of virus a person is giving off and what is actually required to make a person sick, which we don’t know to within factors of 100, so that factor of 2 is hard to plan for. You might not notice anything in a building built for this. Right now your school probably has rooms that do better and worse than each other based on vent positions, desk and person positions, airflow, etc. You might have to plan to not move desks or something like that to make sure airflow isn’t disrupted if you were in a room built to minimize transmission.

Here's the beauty of Mitch McConnell. He made you blame Nancy Pelosi for things he did. Observe timeline. 1. Democrats pass bill in the House in May, $3 trillion+ including aid to states, checks to everyone, aid to restaurants, schools, etc. Dead on arrival in Senate. https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2020-05-16/house-passes-3-trillion-coronavirus-stimulus-package 2. Democrats try to negotiate. McConnell allows 2 votes on $600 billion-scale bills that he know won't pass. Both bills fail in their votes. https://www.vox.com/2020/9/10/21429678/senate-stimulus-vote https://www.vox.com/2020/10/21/21525735/mitch-mcconnell-stimulus-senate-vote 3. Democrats keep trying other offers. Here's dropped to a $2.2 trillion bill. https://appropriations.house.gov/news/press-releases/house-democrats-release-updated-version-of-the-heroes-act 4. McConnell generally disapproves of the whole thing. Nothing gets passed whatsoever. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/10/20/business/us-economy-coronavirus 5. You blame the Democrats for being stubborn and not negotiating, when they did. You can literally look at the list of bills they passed and how they offered compromises in the middle, but that's not good enough unless it's 100% his bill. That's the amazing success of McConnell at destroying our system. He knows if he refuses everything, you blame both sides, because it can't possibly just be his fault right? He's played you like a fiddle.

I find it particularly interesting that the Portillo's account was unnoticed for months...and now that people noticed it, suddenly it is "give me credit must credit Portillo's". Anyway, I'm going to break the Springer stuff out into its own thread.

I never said Trump wasn't worse. That does not excuse him, nor will it excuse him when he continues this next spring. Mitch McConnel is doing something that will absolutely, by his own hands, hurt and kill Americans. He has taken zero penalty for it. He will continue doing this. Historically he knows that hurting the country under a Democratic President has rewarded him and provided him more power and key wins like the upper class tax increase/tax increase on everyone else. He will do this as long as he can gain political power from it. Tell me where I'm wrong. Tell me how a relief bill will pass and frankly I will apologize.

If you can't see the deaths being caused by restaurants and bars right now, I don't know what to tell you. They are perhaps the single greatest transmission point based on available data. We have a choice nationwide - either support them while their facilities are extremely limited or closed, or let this virus go wild. Aid to restaurants right now is literally life. We have doubled cases in the USA in 2.5 weeks and they are one of the key transmission points for this. This is a direct chain, and Mitch McConnell could not care less. Aid to restaurants would have saved tens of thousands of lives. No Hyperbole.

Mitch McConnell could have passed a bill desperately needed for additional aid any time since May. I know time seems wrong this year, but that is 6 f***ing months of disaster he has personally engineered. Schools have endured billions in costs for tests and protective equipment with no support from the government. Restaurants and bars have been nightmares - city governments need them open for tax dollars and for businesses to survive, but they have been instrumental in the expansion of the virus, because there is no option for them other than to open even though it clearly isn't safe. Just on this year alone, he has personally caused tens of thousands of deaths. I am not exaggerating here, that is what this virus is doing, and he doesn't care. One bit. This country is in a crisis right now, and he has personally engineered that crisis. There is zero exaggeration in this post, whatsoever. If you're uncomfortable with that, please look at what this nightmare has been doing to consolidate his own power. If you don't like the racial aspect of it, explain the delay of the DREAM act, which has bipartisan support but which he has personally blocked for a decade. I will wait.

If McConnell keeps the Senate, I expect zero cooperation. McConnell will believe correctly that if he provides no relief he will trigger a depression with rapidly increasing unemployment. 4 years of that drop later the job loss will expand throughout the economy, and even if Biden wanted to do more McConnell will expect Biden to be blamed as Americans don’t pay enough attention to policy. McConnell will believe the best thing for the Republicans is 12%, 14%, or higher unemployment - the deeper the crisis, the more the Democrats will be blamed, so he will be rewarded if he can trigger a true great depression with 30% unemployment. Similarly, he will oppose anything that gives more votes to non whites, because as a true white supremacist he does not want to dilute the white vote that supports him. Therefore, Biden can undo Trumps executive orders, but not fix the laws.

Tony LaRussa stays. The team struggles this year because he’s a terrible fit and because they are being asked about his legal issues constantly. Hell maybe he does it again and Lance Briggs style they are making excuses for his behavior midseason. How many jobs are lost if revenue disappoints next year or if InBev realizes they have people they care about organizations like MADD protesting them specifically midseason? This team is well built. Literally no one of decent quality thought this was a good idea, and that was before they all had to deal with their coach’s alcohol problem. Do the wrong thing and that could well cost jobs, but hey, who cared about the job losses from the terrible moves from Rick Hahn’s tenure other than me? I’m trying to stop the bleeding. I could put enough pressure on JR through his advertisers to save jobs if everyone got on board. Join in and email InBev to save jobs. The earlier the better.

More opted out for the Pats than for any other team. That and Brady’s cap holds would have made this tough for NE even if they had no outbreaks. That said, they need to reload.

If the White Sox are doing that where they don’t yet know they have the money to add their needed pitching, well they better be ready to take several seasons of losses because of that contract as they’re all but guaranteeing it. Especially with how it looks right now. They better have lots of liquid cash available to cover it. They might, this could just be payback for 3 cheap seasons.

Ok. So, the first answer is that before this, no one really did anything like air exchange calculations from person to person over time, so the models are rough and being adapted from other things, like atmospheric pollutant transport. Hence, geoscience. If you assume fairly quiet conditions and 2 people standing 3 feet apart outside then the amount of air exchanged between 2 people directly over an hour is about half a liter. For comparison, same 2 people in a moderate sized room for an hour exchange about 10x as much air directly. ~4 liters. Smaller room, more air exchange. More rapid breathing = more air exchange. Distance only matters if you’re about a foot or two apart where the dose rises rapidly, because otherwise the whole room becomes well mixed and homogenized. Now for all the qualifiers. The more things you plug into the model the more complex it gets. Wind. Air conditioning. Filtration. Yada yada yada. Basically, we have models that can handle this, but you have to do room by room, condition by condition. Windows open. What happens if people stand up and disrupt air flow. Now that we’ve seen this as a trillion dollar worry, this sort of modeling can actually be done before you open a building for the first time. Where do you put airflow, how much air needs to move, how do you balance that against cost. A single big room could be modeled several dozen times for different conditions. That is the long term basis for government standards for building development that can reduce pathogen transmission. Now, what is required for transmission? Well unfortunately they don’t know that, because the biologists don’t know yet either. They know there is a required dose, but they are thinking in terms of log units of virus particles and it’s hard to know right now within 3 log units. They know that virus particles are spat and breathed out of people in various sizes, but they don’t know what size particle is the most important for transmission or how much of each would do it. But there are some things we do know. Most particles that are 100 micrometers (μm) in diameter (human hair is 3-50 μm) do settle out towards the ground within a couple feet. This is the size social distancing works for. But we know this virus can travel farther than that, meaning that large particles are likely capable of transmission, but social distancing beats it. Masks also dramatically stop particles at this size. Particles that are less than 1 μm are effectively aerosolized. These basically never settle out of air. They will stay in air for hours, maybe days. Masks other than gas masks effectively do nothing against particles of this size. Ventilation, high grade filters, and staying far apart are the only defense against particles this size. Inbetween we have a problem. 10 μm particles are notoriously difficult to work with. Air pollution of this size is hard to sample. You can’t do it with normal filters or sampling devices. Filters do catch them, masks will limit them, but a substantial fraction gets through both, and they can travel long distances and not settle out. If these particles are suspended in a closed room they can stay there for hours. Air pollution this size can cross the Atlantic. If aerosols were the only thing that mattered, then masks would do nothing. If large particles were all that mattered then distancing and masks would stop it perfectly. We know masks help but they aren’t perfect. We know distancing helps but it isn’t perfect. So all sizes are probably involved, and you need to worry about concentration of each. Stay outside of 1m and you avoid the big particles, especially with masks as they settle out. Outdoors helps then because you dilute the dose over time, but it isn’t perfect, especially if you talk about an hour or several. Indoors, masks are strong over a few minutes and decline pretty quick over tens of minutes in small rooms (normal restaurant sizes) Ventilation helps but is an extremely complicated calculation depending on the details of every single bit of the room. If you are indoors for tens of minutes, masks help, but the longer you are in the room the more air you exchange directly and small particles that aren’t stopped by masks don’t settle out. The worries are: with more time indoors, exchange of air goes up logarithmically. In 1 hour you exchange 4 liters of air, in 2 hours it becomes dozens. The examples of businesses and bars and restaurants becoming infected, that’s how it happens. 2 hours and you’ve breathed in 20 liters of air from a person 20 feet from you. Although no one has measured this, it also implies a very strong delayed effect - if someone infected was in the room an hour before you get there, you come in, they’re gone, but the room is still contagious if it hasn’t been strongly filtered. Outdoors, ten to tens of minutes is a risk. Lack of masks accelerate this, but not beyond ten minutes or so. If you are closer than 1 meter, exchange rises dramatically and transmission in minutes could be possible. Over an hour, exchange over 2 meters may be possible, but depends on conditions like masks, wind, and turbulence. It will be possible to dramatically improve these numbers with computer models designed for this and better numbers foe virus dose, but neither of those will be available for years. Forgive any font changes as my phone had to copy and paste μm. Unit changes happened during her talk.

I am so f***ing tired of reading Ed Yong can we please stop this. I want to read something else.

by the way I actually got a talk this week from an aerosol particle dispersion expert if you’d be interested in how much air is being exchanged from one person to another.

Please evaluate the type of people who own the Cubs and get back to me.

Nothing the White Sox do would shock me, but I'd be more than a little surprised if they feel confident they can afford that right now.