southsider2k5

Good post Jim. Of all the things you should be worried about keeping out of kids hands, the Harry Potter series might be the stupidest.

I'll get the pic up eventually, but for some reason I am getting timed out when I try to do it...

rafacosta(24), TLAK(54), Wanne(46), TheBlackSox8(22), luvforbseball(22), Soxrock200(25), diegotony06(36) Holy crap, I am glad I am not going out to dinner tonight so I would have to hear all of the different happy birthday songs every 2 minutes Anyways Happy Birthday all!

QUOTE(AssHatSoxFan @ Oct 10, 2006 -> 09:47 AM) hope your last name doesnt start with a D then she will have the great initials of BAD just like my sister also congrats! She'll be a BAN, kinda like her daddy if he keeps it up

Congratulations guys She is a beaut.

Broadcast.com is a great comparision for youtube. It will be interesting to see how the product holds up when the lawsuits for using copyrighted materials start flying around.

QUOTE(RibbieRubarb @ Oct 10, 2006 -> 08:31 AM) Didn't you know? It's right here: Derek Jeter doesn't like A-Rod And if its on the internet, you know its true!

At work I have the same pic as Rex, at home it is a pic from AJ's walkoff on halfway to St Pattys Day.

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Oct 9, 2006 -> 05:51 PM) But all of the evidence, and I mean ALL of it, shows that this was not a political hit, it was in fact known by a growing group of people before ABC finally published on it. 1. The Republicans leadership began to know about the problem as early as 2000. At the very least they knew about them early in 2005. Nothing was done. 2. The Saint Petersberg Times and the Miami Herald received copies of emails from Mr. Foley to pages in late November 2005. At least the St. Pete times tried to follow up, but couldn't get the page in question to go on record or allow his name to be released. 3. CREW and lefty Blogger John Avarosis received the emails by July of 06. They forwarded the emails to the FBI and took no further action - they did not publish, because they didn't know what they had, and they only had the tip of the iceberg. 4. ABC learns about the emails in August of 06, but did not publish until late September, mainly because they were spending their resources covering the 9/11 anniversary. They decided to publish the tip of the iceberg on Friday, and when confronted with the emails, Foley resigned before ABC could even publish them. When ABC published them, the really nasty ones were sent to them quite rapidly. This was not a hit. This was being handed to the press, to the Republican leadership, and to the FBI at the end of 2005 at the very latest. Nothing was done. Had something been done earlier, then the Republicans could have avoided this pre-election mess. Gerry Studds saids "hi"

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Oct 9, 2006 -> 02:51 PM) I don't think anyone, even strong supporters of the "Paygo" rule, would argue that having the government totally unable to issue debt is a good thing. The key point though is the current fiscal mess we've gotten ourselves in, which makes instituting that rule, at least on a temporary basis, a good idea. We're deeply in the red right now, but we're not deeply in the red at a time of national crisis. The economy is strong, and has supposedly been strong for years. Yet we're still printing money like it's going out of style at the federal level in order to finance such emergency measures as the Medicare Insurance Company Bailout act and so on. In other words, we're spending a ton of money on credit cards basically because we can. Given the fact that there can only be so far any nation can push its creditors, and the large bills coming in the future to provide health care for the retired baby-boomers, something needs to be done to get this deficit spending under control now. Presumably, in the event of a national crisis of some sort, that legislation could be overturned. Wow. You are assuming that the US government is going to acting correcting and quickly, even without have a crisis event to trigger intelligent action? That's a leap of faith I could never make. Like I said, there is a reason we have things like the Federal Reserve bank, and that is because politicians make horrible bankers. Go back through your 19th century history, and read about all of the panics/recessions/depressions, and the great majority of them had a root cause of having politicians trying to act like central bankers and screwing it all up. It is important, no vital, that the central bank has the ability to change money supply on a moments notice, because in a fluid economy, you probably don't have time to wait for Congress to reconviene before actually doing something. Now if you go in and say that we can't issue any debt, you have fixed money supply, and you have essentially cut out the central bank. You might as well shutdown the whole federal reserve system, because the economy as we know it will collapse the next time we have a recession or panic. I know everyone looks at the deficit numbers and just because they are big, assumes that they are horribly dangerous. The thing is if we had done something rash and fixed money supply when things were booming in the 90's, the recession of 2001 would have been not a temporary thing, but it would have still been on-going today. It was the ability of the federal reserve bank to manipulate rates to add more money to the economy, and the government infusing hard currency into people's pockets that saved that from being the worst drawback since the great depression. The fact that we didn't have to trust our congressmen to do the right thing instead of playing politics insured that it got done quickly and promptly.

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Oct 9, 2006 -> 03:32 PM) So, one of the lesser known methods Wal-Mart has used to maximize its profits is to take advantage of the fact that most people don't actually know how much a lot of products cost. The classic example is given in this story from 2005...a simple pocket comb can be purchased by most people for about a quarter if you go to a barber (the barber in this example gets them for $.08 a piece). But at Wal-Mart, a cheaper comb goes for $.99. People don't know well how much they should actually spend on such a product, so they buy it from Wal-Mart anyway. Wal-Mart gets around this by identifying roughly 1-2% of their products that people actually do know the price of. These goods are then always placed at the lowest prices, advertised, and given key spaces within the stores. So, people see the goods whose prices they know at lower prices at Walmart, and simply assume all goods are well priced there. It is for this reason that Wal-Mart's slogan had to change from "Always the lowest price" to "Always Low Prices" several years ago. I spell this out of course in the Wal-mart prescription drugs post...because...guess what...they're doing exactly the same thing with prescription drugs. Creating a level price for about 100 drugs, some of which should be less expensive than the $4 talked about here, repeating the same drug on their list several times, and so on. The funny thing is that there is an industry term that predates even Wal-Mart... Its called "loss leaders". Every smart chain has been doing this forever.

Most of that I can at least respect, but an artificial fixing of money supply by refusing to deficit spend anymore pretty much went out of conventional thinking with Thomas Jefferson's fear of a central bank. The ability to deficit spend is a need of the American government in order to periodically rescue the economy with injections of liquidity.

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Oct 9, 2006 -> 01:36 PM) So, it usually does take a while for the USGS to give final intensity numbers on seismic events, but at least based on the preliminary numbers, some people are starting to conclude that this test was actuallya dud. (It is really, really hard to build a 1 kiloton nuclear device. A plutonium bomb should produce about a 20 kiloton blast at minimum...because you need to have enough plutonium there to achieve critical mass and a fission chain.) Well I hope they are right.

Bah, see if I root for the Twins ever again...

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Oct 9, 2006 -> 12:52 PM) I would have said the exact same thing before we saw Haeger succeed quite well out of the bullpen in September. And top that off with the rest of the guys out of the back of the pen being hardthrowers, and it makes for a real good contrast, which will make it hard to adjust to Haeger. Think about it, the possibility exsists of seeing MacDougal, Haeger, and then Jenks in a game. What a difference of speed, tempo, and movement! I think if you throw in Thornton you see the back three guys all as hardthrowers, and a change of tempo guy in there could make them almost unhittable.

QUOTE(Jeckle2000 @ Oct 9, 2006 -> 12:46 PM) Why do you have Thome hitting cleanup... HE'S NOT A CLEANUP HITTER! Or did his pathetic 2nd half not drill that home enough... Jim Thome is about as classic of #4 hitter as exists in MLB today.

QUOTE(farmteam @ Oct 9, 2006 -> 12:06 PM) Just a quick comment on the site: This may be small, but perhaps you should make your name more pronounced on the homepage. I only see it there twice (once on the button for the biography section on the left and once at the bottom of the page) and I had to search for several seconds for both of those. Admittedly, people who view that page likely already know your name, but I still think you should make it more visible. After all, if they don't know who you are, they can't vote for you. Just my thoughts. That is one of the things on the "to-do" list. Actually I am hoping to soon have a video link up for my appearence on a local politics talk show, plus I need to get a picture of me without a baseball cap on for the site. Thanks for the tip though, I appreciate it.

QUOTE(sox4lifeinPA @ Oct 9, 2006 -> 12:44 PM) I laughed simply because of the unintended pun. boo banning books! Hooray puns!! God is it good to see you again...

Screw Detroit

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Oct 9, 2006 -> 10:47 AM) Remember the Type-o-Dong 2? The missle that could hit the U.S. mainland but fizzled out over the summer? Now we know that those things work. And so does everyone else, including potential buyers. With the complete lack of hard currency they have, and the lack of a dependable delivery system, it wa sa big deal for them to SHOW they could do it. We have known for a long time they have the materials and ability, now its a done deal.

I do think Chuck Haeger will be our swingman out of the pen next year, filling in with a Scot Shields/Tim Wakefield kind of a role.

QUOTE(Dick Allen @ Oct 9, 2006 -> 10:16 AM) A columnist in the NY Daily News mentioned the Angels first, but then mentioned the White Sox with "power arms" that I'm not aware of and Josh Fields, not Crede. If we could get Alex Rodriguez WITHOUT giving up Crede, there aren't many scenarios I would say no to.

QUOTE(Soxy @ Oct 9, 2006 -> 09:35 AM) Isn't North Korea wrong enough hands? I can think of about 200 other nations I would rather see have the bomb, but I don't think in their present state, NK's biggest threat is actually using the bomb, but more of selling the bomb to people who will actually use it. Truth be told I think the biggest thrust of this is to try to blackmail the world into rescuing their failed economy/system without actually releasing any grip on controlling every aspect of everything that goes on in NK. I think if they fail to win huge concessions from the rest of the world, they will be on the black market selling all of this to the highest bidder, who hopefully isn't a group like Al Qaeda who had the guts to use it.

So how long until this technology and/or weaponry ends up in the wrong hands?

That whole conspiracy about republicians somehow exerting their control over speculation trades and forcing gas/oil prices to plummet is pretty much ready to be flushed down the toilet with the rest of the crap. It turns out there is a conspiracy to control prices, but it is OPEC, conspiring to keep them high. It wasn't too long ago that they wanted to keep oil in the $22-28 per barrel range, now they are pissed prices went under $60 a barrel, and are cutting output because of that. Don't forget to send a thank you card to your local emir. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/49296ee0-56f6-11db...00779e2340.html