southsider2k5

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Jan 31, 2009 -> 11:25 PM) Brian Anderson is still around, and so is Dewayne Wise. Anderson has obvious ability and has culled a cult-like following among Sox fans despite getting limited play the past two seasons. In 2006, Anderson played in 134 games and batted a subpar .225. Last year, he started only 39 games but appeared in 109, often as a late-inning defensive replacement. "I think he grew up a little bit as a player last year, and I think he grew up a little bit as a man," Guillen said. "He will get a legit shot to win the job." Guillen said the same about Wise. The battle at second base is even more crowded, with Getz, Lillibridge and Jayson Nix set to compete. General manager Kenny Williams said top prospect Gordon Beckham needs a full season in the minor leagues. Lillibridge is a product of the Atlanta Braves' system, and Nix comes over from the Colorado Rockies. Much like Williams, Guillen is eager to see Lillibridge when camp opens in Glendale, Ariz. "I think this kid is going to bring a lot, because I talked to (Braves scout) Jim Fregosi and he's really high on him," Guillen said. "He's a player; he shows up every day trying to beat you. That's what I hear." from dailyherald.com This kid is my sleeper for the CF job. He would be a perfect fit if he could approach his pre 2008 numbers.

QUOTE (scenario @ Jan 30, 2009 -> 09:39 AM) I'm a financial advisor... And I can assure you that rich people pay taxes. In fact, most of them pay ALOT in taxes. In retirement, income tax is far and away the single greatest expense most wealthy people have. And when they die, most wealthy people end up leaving 30-50% of all of their assets to Uncle Sam due to estate taxes. So... there seems to be this belief that wealthy people don't pay taxes, but it simply is NOT true. If it were true, most accounting firms and financial planners would go out of business. There are a ton of numbers that back this up by the way...

QUOTE (Cknolls @ Jan 30, 2009 -> 08:54 AM) Well, new admin. still fudging numbers. Good to see, consistency is good. GDP, a joke. Not good even though "they" say it beat expectations. GDP = consumption + gross investment + (exports-imports). Durable goods were down 22.4%, non-durables down 7.1%. Exports down 19.7%(Global Depression?) Why the upside surprise?.......Federal Spending rose 5.8% Another positive "surprise" was that inventories rose. Just what we need, right, more stuff on the shelves going unsold in a Recssion/Depression. Exports are down because of the large dollar rally in the last quarter.

Judging by his skill set, I could love to see how Lill reacted to CF.

Have fun everyone!

On the bright side at least we can have a Barry Bonds thread now without hearing how he has never actually been busted cheating.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Jan 29, 2009 -> 07:14 PM) I'm going to go run up a couple billion dollars of debt actually, are you on board? As long as there are stock options and a big buyout clause, I will be your CEO.

QUOTE (Jordan4life @ Jan 28, 2009 -> 02:00 PM) I'm certainly not sitting here thinking "Yippie! Josh is a better defensive player now because Joey Cora says will be shocked." But it is encouraging that Josh appears to be extremely dedicated and is working his ass off to be the best player he can be. You probably say all pro athletes should have that attitude. Unfortunately, many don't. Reading through this thread and thinking about this point a little more, it wouldn't shock me if Fields really did improve his fielding by leaps and bounds with a bunch of dedicated attention from the coaching staff. Let's not kid ourselves, we all know how bad the coaching for fundimentals was in our minor league system before Buddy Bell got here. I don't know that it is better now, because we haven't had time to see the results, but we know it can't be worse. The more I think about it, there could be some very simple mechanical changes made to Fields techniques defensively that he was never taught before. Will it really bear fruit? We won't know until we see him grind it out in games. Could it be possible that Josh has improved that much? It wouldn't surprise me if he really is getting all of this attention and he really is healthy in that knee.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Jan 29, 2009 -> 07:06 PM) It was administered horribly. That's partially Congress's fault for not attaching more strings, and the Paulson crew for not knowing what the hell they were doing. Then again maybe Wall Street should just start calling it a stimulus plan. You seem to be able to get away with anything if you do it in that vein. How about the Dow Jones Industrial Stimulus plan! With all of the retirement money out there, we should be able to get a couple of trillion dollars for that right, because it is definitely too big to fail!

QUOTE (mr_genius @ Jan 29, 2009 -> 03:49 PM) i heard something about lowering the 10% tax bracket to 5% and the 15% to 10%. that could push the bill into bipartisan landslide territory. as far as cloture, i still think it would be a mistake to drag this out to a neccesary 60 vote. give the dems this bill if they want it IMO. That's a joke because no one in those two tax brackets actually pays any taxes. They get it all back with the deductions and the credits that fall into those brackets.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Jan 29, 2009 -> 05:12 PM) Obama is on CNN talking about the 20 billion in Wall Street bonuses sounding all pissed off (well as close to pissed off as he ever sounds). Why should he care? He just handed out 820 billion in bonuses.

The Critic on the Governor's reputation....

QUOTE (fathom @ Jan 26, 2009 -> 04:52 PM) It's like how people b**** about Miguel Cabrera getting so heavy. Who the f*** cares, as long as they hit, they can be as fast as they want. These players will get their ass in shape when they have the chance to sign a 8 yr contract. I seem to remember one Albert Pujols slipping to the later rounds of the draft because of his weight as well. If a guy is a hitter, he is a hitter.

When the started advertising "Better off Ted" I thought they were making the spinoff with Ted the lawyer.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jan 29, 2009 -> 11:11 AM) I still say you are wrong there because you're defining your baseline improperly. A job saved due to a change in a particular tax is a change in the GDP relative to where GDP would have been had the tax cut not happened. You're trying to insist that it's relative to current GDP and that's just not what any of the numbers say. The multiplier effect is defined as the impact on the GDP of a specific government action relative to if that action had not occurred. In other words, if it saves a job, it would still be counted. A more technical way of putting it is: The multiplier effect is a derivative, it doesn't matter where you start from, the only thing that matters is the rate and direction of the change due to the spending. Let me explain in another way why corporate tax cuts have such a ridiculously low multiplier. Simple question to start off...how much in taxes is Bank of America going to pay on their earnings this year? Answer? Essentially zero. Ditto the next few years, and probably the last few years too. Why? Because we've structured our tax system such that it is loaded with exemptions for businesses. One of those exemptions is that you are allowed to deduct losses and spread those deductions out over a number of years. Now, which businesses are going to be actually paying taxes this year? The few that will are going to be the ones that are actually still profitable. Now, which businesses are going to be the ones cutting the most jobs? The ones that are still profitable or the ones that are hemorrhaging money? If you're giving money out in the form of a business tax cut, you're not giving it to the ones that are cutting the most jobs. You're giving it to the ones that are by and large still profitable. It's going to the wrong place. The Obama team actually realized this, and a few weeks ago when they were setting up this package they floated the idea of having their business tax cut be done in the form of "money given out for jobs saved or jobs created" but they rapidly realized there was just no way to actually figure out which jobs would have been saved without the plan, so they junked it. Some fraction of jobs will be saved by a business tax cut, yes. But with the multiplier effect, the question is basically what fraction of the money you send out actually winds up spent? That's why the multiplication for actual projects is so much higher than for tax cuts. If you give someone who doesn't need a tax cut some portion of your money, they're not likely to spend all of it. The same goes for businesses. If they're hemorrhaging money as it is, then a tax credit would make their balance sheet look better, but it wouldn't change the fact that their business model has moved in to unprofitable territory, and hence it wouldn't directly translate to 100% job savings. Some may well save jobs, but it isn't nearly all going that way. Alternatively, if you hire a person for a project, you are guaranteed to create a job relative to the baseline of the government doing nothing, and therefore you're taking a person out of unemployment and giving them the ability to resume as a consumer. They will therefore actually spend the money. As far as I can tell, you are both simply wrong on the definition of a multiplier effect. Hell, you saw last year how weak of a multiplier a tax credit produced; everyone in the country got a $600 rebate last year, but only a fraction of that moved its way in to the economy because a lot of it was saved. How exactly would you quantify a "not lost" job? You can't. Its counterintuitive. I'm telling you from dealing with the multiplier effect quite extensively it only deals with actual change, and not implied change. I had a full calculus of economics graduate level class and dealt an entire semester of how these numbers are calculated and what they mean. You are reading into this too far to make it into something that it is not.

And of course he used the lack of direct evidence and the lack of actual criminal activity on the tapes as his defense... Ugh. Luckily there is no way that they don't impeach him.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Jan 29, 2009 -> 10:02 AM) I think you're blowing this slightly out of proportion, Israel has security problems, but it's not like it has missiles raining down on it every day for months at a time and hundreds of civilians dying. I'm saying, if they really want to not have to do this every 2 years, they need to figure out another solution other than "kill more people." That didn't work for us in Vietnam, didn't work in Iraq, probably won't work for us in Afghanistan if we do that either. So it won't work for them. I never said there was a big death toll. But much like the V2s of WWII, it is the mental toll of living under the constant attacks is almost as bad as anything. There were 1750 attacks in 2008, when there was no conflicts until the very end of the year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qassam_rocket

QUOTE (lostfan @ Jan 29, 2009 -> 09:58 AM) My semi-educated guess is that the GOP was willing to compromise and put a stimulus through, but they were unwilling to compromise that much on the amount and stood firm against the Democrats who wanted to spend the entire package. If the package was, say, 500 billion with a few tax cuts instead of the bloated 800 billion, I imagine it would've gotten some R's to cross over. If this is the case then I don't know why the Dems were insisting so much on doing it their way (the president can push this, but he can't write the legislation). That sounds about right to me. I would even have been willing to bet that they would have been more likely to vote for $800 billion worth of spending if it had been piecemealed into different bills.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Jan 29, 2009 -> 07:42 AM) To break it down to its most basic level, Israel's overwhelming (and I use that word loosely, because they don't work outside of the short term) responses aren't helping them any more than Hamas's rocket attacks are helping them. The solution to every problem from Israeli conservatives is "drop a few bombs, kill some more, that'll show em." That works when you're fighting the military of another country, but who's the opposing country, and who's the opposing military here? I agree that the responses don't help, but at the sametime, the peace treaties and ceasefires haven't stopped bombs from reigning down on their country either. How is a nation supposed to react when it is literally under perpetual missile attack?

QUOTE (lostfan @ Jan 29, 2009 -> 09:39 AM) Y'all should know that zero house Republicans voted for this, for the record. [applause] We could do with a much smaller stimulus bill. If you want to start talking about passing a highway bill, a contrespectives bill, an NEA bill, a mass transit bill, etc, that is fine. Over half of this bill does not belong in the sentance with the word "stimulus". At best it is an omnibus spending bill.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 29, 2009 -> 07:51 AM) My point is, you asserted that the idea of tax cuts not being good is a "liberal myth". That is the same as saying that GOP'ers see all tax cuts as good as part of their "conservative myth". Neither are myths - tax cuts have effect on the economy, but there are a lot of arguments one can make for or against them in various circumstances. They aren't myths. It is a myth when something that isn't true is taken to make the arguement that something is true. I guess I could have called it a "lie" instead.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 29, 2009 -> 07:36 AM) First sentence, agree. Second sentence, you made a huge leap there. There are many good reasons to argue against certain tax cuts being useful, depending on their implementation. Its not all just some myth. When you take numbers out of context to make an arguement, it bothers me. I don't call it a leap of faith at all.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Jan 28, 2009 -> 07:02 PM) I'm not denying that the Israelis have legit concerns over terrorist activity within their borders or that they have the right to defend themselves or use military force when they need to. Of course they do. But it's not so cut and dry, if they could've solved the problem purely with military force, this would've been over years ago. These operations don't really help, they only make things worse. And if they could do it with a peace movement, it would have happened by now as well. Everytime things get settled down for some amount of time, a missile or an attack ends that, and Israel responds in spades. We have seen these cycle just keep repeating itself. At what point is Israel allowed to respond?

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jan 28, 2009 -> 07:00 PM) Is there actually data that shows what you claim? It's been my impression that for years, the hard-liners have been gradually losing support while support for a 2-state solution has continued to climb. You want data to support the fact that there is a peace movement inside Israel? Where the heck would you find data on that?

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jan 28, 2009 -> 07:08 PM) That makes very little sense to me. The multiplier effect as defined in the linked document is "One-year $ change in real GDP per $ reduction in federal tax revenue or increase in spending". In other words, it is defined as what happens relative to no federal action being taken; aka in this case, no tax cuts. It does not matter if it is considered a new outlay by the business or not, all that matters is the impact on GDP. In other words, keeping people employed who's jobs otherwise would have been lost without a tax cut must be included, because their economic activity counts as part of the GDP. If in some fashion it didn't count that, as you claim, then the multiplier for a corporate tax cut would be even lower. The baseline is relative to no government action taken, not relative to where things currently stand. Because they don't count a job saved as a change in GDP, because technically it isn't a "change". It keeps the status quo. The change actually occurs when there is no change, and they have to layoff employees to keep the company afloat. You don't count no change, as a change, that's why these numbers are so low. Its a statistical anomaly that is fairly clear and understood. People take these numbers out of context and have no idea what the actually mean. That's why the whole liberal myth of taxcuts not working keeps getting proliferated.