iamshack

QUOTE(hitlesswonder @ Jan 11, 2008 -> 10:40 AM) I'm not thrilled, but I'd rather have Swisher in CF than GMJr because: 1) Swisher is a better offensive player (the Swisher/Konerko pair should outproduce GMJr/Swisher at the plate). 2) Swisher may not be much worse than GMJr in CF. He's above average other than arm in the corners. 3) Even if the Angels paid a third of GMJr's contract (how likely is that?), that's still 4 years and almost $30M for ages 33-37. I really don't like #3. It locks up a roster spot for a player that probably won't be very good those years. Well, I don't like it either, but if it nets you one of their top young players, I think it's certainly something you've got to consider. Given the fact that Konerko has 3/$36 million left on his contract, you're basically stuck with one extra year at $10 million or whatever, which could be accounted for if you take the difference between Konerko's and Matthews' contracts and add Crede's money in there. The way I'm looking at it, we don't have a whole lot of pieces left to acquire all-star caliber young players with. So if you can move Paulie for one without adding any $ from the projected payroll for the next 3 years, it's the kind of avenue you look into.

QUOTE(YASNY @ Jan 10, 2008 -> 09:44 PM) No, he didn't know he would acquire Cabrera at that point. In fact, after signing Uribe, the Angels told KW that they were planning on offering Cabrera to him until he signed Uribe, thinking that KW wouldn't be interested after the signing. Of course, KW still had ears to hear, so to speak. That's interesting....I had not read that yet. Makes me wonder what took them so long considering the date we had to make a decision on Uribe was pretty well known, as well as the fact that Kenny stated he was exploring all kinds of solutions to the ss problem prior to him resigning Juan. One other thing to remember is that if Kenny did not resign Juan, it takes a bit of leverage from his position. It'd be tougher to trade for a ss if every other GM knew full-well you had no internal options...

QUOTE(hitlesswonder @ Jan 11, 2008 -> 10:13 AM) GMJr's defense is a controversial subject. Dewan's fielding bible had him as the worst CF in baseball last season: LINK I don't know if he's that bad, but I do believe his range is limited and it's not going get better given that he's 33 years old. Given that the LAA targeted Hunter, I think you have consider that they at least partly agree with Dewan's assessment. I wouldn't like to see GMJr and Dye together in an OF. Yeah, I have read the same. However, how excited are you really about Swisher and Dye together out there?

QUOTE(TLAK @ Jan 10, 2008 -> 07:43 PM) Just for conversation. What team in the Central is gonna get the most good starts over a 162 game season? The names below are orderd by Indians, Tigers, Twins, White Sox, Royals #1 Sabathia, Verlander, Santana, Buehrle, Meche #2 Carmona, Rogers, Bonser, Vazquez, Bannister #3 Byrd, Bonderman, Baker, Contreras, Greinke #4 Westbrook, Willis, Slowey, Danks, Davies #5 Laffey, Robertson, TBD, Floyd, De La Rosa Well looking at it that way, that makes me feel a bit better about our rotation...my chief concern was having Contreras as a rather undependable #3 (even though personally, I think he bounces back well this year), but compared to the likes of Byrd, Bonderman, Baker and Greinke, I think he matches up alright....from #3-5, there's no one in our division that is head and shoulders above what we have, unless of course, Dtrain experiences a Rennaisance...

From what I've read, the M's are willing to offer Jones/Sherrill/Tillman, but the Orioles want Clement back and the M's are unwilling. I think if Bedard is traded, he will ultimately end up in Seattle though, so we should probably forget about any monster three-way deals happening. I also can't see Angels moving all that young talent and the White Sox getting the best player in the deal. Seems to me like a simple Konerko to the Angels deal would be much more reasonable. That being said, in talking with some Angels fans with connections to the team, it seems a bit odd that the Angels would really press for Konerko given they already have Kotchman at first and Morales waiting in the wings as well. The only scenario that would seem logical to me would be Konerko to the Angels in exchange for one very good young player, and taking Matthews Jr back and eating his contract. Because if we're not eating the contract, what is really the impetus for the Angels to make such a deal?

QUOTE(southsider2k5 @ Jan 10, 2008 -> 09:04 AM) As an economist this line of thinking really bothers me. Why would people hold the belief that we are going to get more and better healthcare by taking the incentive to conserve health care out of the system? Think about it. Our system is this overburdened and out of whack with it being very expensive to partake in health care today. Say we take the costs of the system for patients, it actually gives them MORE reason to go to a doctor everytime something is wrong, not less. Unless someone comes up with a way to produce way more doctors, hospitals, nurses, clinics, etc, wait and quality of service are not going to improve if you add WAY more people and visits to the system. In fact, I would bet the system collapses if they take the patient costs out of the system. Economically the cost of health care tells you exactly the demands being put on the system, even at the higher prices. Plus it is an economic fact that if the government goes in and forces a reduction in prices, it will result in a reduction, not an increase, in services being offered in the medical sector. If you remove the profit incentive, you remove people who are willing to offer their products and services. The law of unintended consequences is worth exploring in depth here. What about something that is currently happening in the private sector...a lot of corporations are now starting employee health care plans whereby the corporation's insurance will allow a cash incentive or return up to a certain amount of coverage on an employee- say $1,500. Any amount the employee does not use, he receives a certain percentage back in cash. The early returns on this system are showing that employees are less likely to abuse the health care system "because they have insurance," and also have become much more frugal shoppers of health care. No longer do they just go to any physician or hospital, but they look for value, much as we do when shopping for other goods or services. Perhaps a universal health care system could have a similar rebate or incentive program not to abuse the system built in. The threshold number could vary depending on age and gender, perhaps even other demographic factors, and even location. And any amount you do not use up to this threshold number could be applied to your tax return or something...

QUOTE(RME JICO @ Jan 9, 2008 -> 02:11 PM) If we list all the major deals, has there ever been even one that has been rumored before it happened, other than mild speculation? Trades? I can remember the Garcia trade (when we acquired him from Seattle) being talked about beforehand....other than that, they usually are rather unexpected...

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Jan 9, 2008 -> 11:59 AM) The ice core record is absolutely magnificent. There are actually annual color bands in the ice cores that allow you...or well, let's say, allow the Grad Student who gets stuck with that job, to literally tell you within an error of a couple years what year the gas they're analyzing comes from. And more remarkable still, we have ice cores from both sides of the planet, totally independent of one another, that produce nearly identical small scale (100 year or so) fluctuations. And that's on top of the large scale signals (The 20,000, 40,000, and 100,000 year cycles that show up). The record of the atmosphere we have over the last 800,000 years or so is simply amazing. And because of the various types of data you can get, gas compositions, isotopic values, trace gases...you can actually make highly accurate estimates of what the conditions on the earth were, because isotopic fractionations are strongly temperature dependent. If I give you a graph where the data form a good line, where one axis is something I can measure in one of those cores and the other axis is temperature, I can take a new measurement and turn it pretty easily into a temperature. And in the Ice cores, we actually have multiple systems which give us several independent temperature estimates. We can also use other isotopic systems to calculate other variables, such as the amount of ice on in the ice caps relative to the size of the oceans. The ice cores literally are powerful enough to give you temperature estimates to within a degree or less, and atmospheric compositions to within the annual variation we see in the Mauna Loa record. Would I be able to do better if I was there and had a bunch of thermometers? Yes, but that doesn't negate how incredibly useful and detailed that data is. Once again, I'm not stating that this information is not useful. I guess what I am saying is that, for me, personally, I don't believe that many of these scientists can predict, with the accuracy they claim they can, and come to the conclusions they claim to have come to, what is going on with climate change to any degree of reasonable certainty. They need more data. Tons and tons and tons of more data.

Last year my parents told me to pick out a new tv for my Christmas present. After a lot of research, I bought a 42' Samsung plasma, with the piano black finish. I read reviews, searched for the best prices, and ended up purchasing it from an online vender for about $1200 shipped to my house. At the time, Best Buy had it for about $1800 plus tax, so I felt like I got a pretty sweet deal. Sure enough, a few weeks later, Best Buy reduced their price to $1500, but I still saved several hundred dollars when you factor in the tax I saved. Anyways, I've been extremely happy with the tv, including the previously mentioned "game mode." Gaming is a big concern with plasma tv's (or at least it was until recently), and I didn't think I would ever buy another console system again, but figured the game mode Samsung provided would protect me in case I did choose to get one. Well sure enough, I bought a PS3 for myself for Christmas this year, and all I can say is that I cannot be happier. Between the television, the console, the games, and the Blu-Ray player, everything has been perfect. I would look at Samsung, Panasonic, Sharp and Sony for the best deals. The newest models are always rip offs, but if you go with the previous model, you can usually get a nice price. Check the internet also, because you can often find very good prices through running searches on Yahoo shopping and Pricemad.com. Obviously, check out the vendors before you buy anything, but many of them offer the stuff at prices Best Buy simply can't touch because of all their overhead and advertising costs.

QUOTE(Adam G @ Jan 9, 2008 -> 10:45 AM) The Roberts to the Cubs deal is allegedly done and to be announced today, as per my buddy in Baltimore. We'll see. Sean Gallagher, Sean Marshall, and Ronny Cedeno for Roberts.

QUOTE(StrangeSox @ Jan 9, 2008 -> 05:41 AM) That's the thing, though. Using ice core samples (and I'm sure there's other methods), we have data for hundreds of thousands of years. We have data, but that data is far more broad than the data we are able to keep by actually being alive on this planet. I'm not a scientist, and I'm not sure Balta is or not, but he obviously has a handle on this stuff...but would I be correct in saying that the data obtained from ice core samples gives us information to theorize ona much broader level? You can hypothesize what happened over a period of a hundred thousand years, or a million years, but that doesn't give you data on a year to year level? You can't look at ice core samples and definitively say in the years 17,500 BC to 17,300 BC the Earth was experiencing these kind of temperatures (as we are doing now). Would I be correct in saying that, Balta?

One possibility is that he was getting B-12 injections and was using the lidocaine to numb the soreness from the B-12 injection (or at least this is what the nurses at the hospital I am working at now told me)...

QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 8, 2008 -> 03:56 PM) History can be found without having been there, via numerous scientific methods. I was in agreement with you on research and caution, but I think you are wrong about not being able to draw some conclusions about our climate. WE know a LOT more than we did just a few decades ago, and the data being researched stretches back hundreds of thousands of years. How is that not big enough of a sample? Besides, the climate millions of years ago is irrelevant, given the planet was so completely different. Oh, I never said you cannot draw some conclusions. What I am arguing is that we cannot establish extremely accurate conclusions which show cause/effect relationships for climate change based upon a century of data keeping. It's quite clear that in the past, there have been periods of warming and cooling far more dramatic than what we've seen in the industrialized age. And this is not to advocate to ignore what information our data-keeping does provide us with. But to make claims and draw conclusions about the temperature climbing in the 90's compared to patterns in the 1880's really isn't telling us squat. It's like comparing how you felt this minute to how you felt 10 minutes ago, but not taking into account how you've felt for the rest of your life. It's simply not enough of a sample size to make accurate conclusions from.

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Jan 8, 2008 -> 03:30 PM) I'd just like to add...No. Care to elaborate? How can we understand climate change when we have only been keeping data for .0003 % of the Earth's history and draw accurate conclusions from that?

QUOTE(sircaffey @ Jan 8, 2008 -> 03:21 PM) I've been listening for 20 minutes, Boers and Bernstein haven't stopped talking about steroids so there hasn't been a sports update or anything. No breaks yet. It probably was never said then. Thank you though.

QUOTE(YASNY @ Jan 8, 2008 -> 03:20 PM) The water is full of flourine and the schools are crap. Not too damn sure about the food and we addressed the police when we talked about Swat teams and such. Free crap schools are probably better than no schools at all...

I think it's probably BS, but I am at work and cannot listen to the radio right now, so I figured I'd ask if they actually stated that on the Score.

I think the actual players involved are from a trade someone just made up on their own. All the original poster was claiming is that a three-way deal was brewing. I do not believe he is claiming they mentioned which players were going where.

Anyone interested in this topic should read the Author Bjorn Lomborg., He has written two books, The Skeptical Environmentalist, and Cool It, both which are counterpoints to much of the Environmental Movement. Another good book, for you fiction readers, is The State of Fear, by Michael Chrichton. It says a lot of the same things within a fictional story, much like Dan Brown's DaVinci Code. The bottom line is that it is extremely difficult for humans to get an accurate handle on what causes climactic change on Earth. Considering the dramatic climactic changes which have occured over the Earth's history (what, 4.5 billion years according to most estimates?), decades- even centuries of data are simply drops in the bucket in terms of causes and effects of climate change. Comparing what is happening in the 90's to ANY period in the past for which we have data is like measuring the ability of a baseball player for one at-bat to his other at-bats in that game, but ignoring his performance over the rest of his career in the past. It simply isn't a big enough sample size to ascertain accurate conclusions from.

Has anyone heard the Score reporting that a three-way deal between the Angels/Orioles/White Sox is brewing? I was alerted to a post on an Angels forum that the Score has reported such this afternoon.... http://www.angelswin.com/forum/forums/thre...=14&start=1

QUOTE(bigruss22 @ Jan 8, 2008 -> 02:26 PM) I completly agree with iamshack in the research portion. My brother is a junior at UMich working towards becoming an electrical engineer and hopes to work on alternative energy sources in his career. This has led to many family discussions about the environment and future sources of power and the whole corn ethanol strategy, and what has been found is that corn just doesnt have enough power in it to fuel the country. Even if we grow corn on every square inch of the US it wont match the requirement, so what do we do? Ive heard that there are researchers working on a new dense grass like crop which has much more energy than corn and hopefully that will come out soon. We definitely need to invest more in research. Even if the corn was more efficient, how absolutely irresponsible is it to use it for fuel when we could use it to feed people? The amount of corn it takes to fill an average SUV with gas could feed a person for a year.

QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 8, 2008 -> 01:44 PM) The information about the nickel is interesting, though I find this editorial somewhat questionable in its conclusions. I do agree with the overall point though, that many technologies have unintended consequences. But you see, that is yet another reason to get some of them moving - to vet them out and see what needs to be changed. As the hybrids example goes, the newer hybrids are using lithium ion batteries. Many of these technologies do not need to be put into mass consumption in order to discover they have very harmful consequences. What happens is pure capitalism takes over and blinds the manufacturers as to the actual environmental affect of the technology. What is required is more research, not reactionary responses. Look at what we have done with wildlife preservation. We've altered the ecosystem through our irresponsibility for centuries. However, the ecosystem adapts. And just as it adapts, we attempt to restore it to some half-assed natural state, and it not only does not fix what we have previously destroyed, but it then ruins the ecosystem that has adapted to that destruction. We need research, research, research, patience, small-scale pilot programs, common sense, and more research and patience. Meanwhile we are ignoring the problems we have as a society today, and trying to solve the problems our grandchildren may have in the future, ill-equipped and helpless as we are at this point....it's just so backwards in my opinion...

QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 8, 2008 -> 11:30 AM) Like corn-based ethanol, for example? There are some things that there simply is little to fear, and which we can undertake now with a very high probability of avoiding those pitfalls. Solar energy and improving its efficiency, for example. Hybrid cars. Higher efficiency appliances. More mass transit. Encouraging and incenting the creation and protection of green space. Plenty can be done right now. Oh I agree, there are certainly some technologies which have shown to be effective and we are fairly certain are beneficial in the near-term as well as the far-term. However, your example of hybrid cars. The technology is far from perfected. The nickel-based battery used in hybrid cars is NOT a good thing. Take a look at this excerpt from an article on the topic: "Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles. The plant is the source of all the nickel found in a Prius’ battery and Toyota purchases 1,000 tons annually. Dubbed the Superstack, the plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalist’s nightmare. “The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants and the soil slid down off the hillside,” said Canadian Greenpeace energy-coordinator David Martin during an interview with Mail, a British-based newspaper. All of this would be bad enough in and of itself; however, the journey to make a hybrid doesn’t end there. The nickel produced by this disastrous plant is shipped via massive container ship to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. From there, the nickel hops over to China to produce ‘nickel foam.’ From there, it goes to Japan. Finally, the completed batteries are shipped to the United States, finalizing the around-the-world trip required to produce a single Prius battery. Are these not sounding less and less like environmentally sound cars and more like a farce? Wait, I haven’t even got to the best part yet. When you pool together all the combined energy it takes to drive and build a Toyota Prius, the flagship car of energy fanatics, it takes almost 50 percent more energy than a Hummer - the Prius’s arch nemesis. Through a study by CNW Marketing called “Dust to Dust,” the total combined energy is taken from all the electrical, fuel, transportation, materials (metal, plastic, etc) and hundreds of other factors over the expected lifetime of a vehicle. The Prius costs an average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles - the expected lifespan of the Hybrid. The Hummer, on the other hand, costs a more fiscal $1.95 per mile to put on the road over an expected lifetime of 300,000 miles. That means the Hummer will last three times longer than a Prius and use less combined energy doing it. So, if you are really an environmentalist - ditch the Prius. Instead, buy one of the most economical cars available - a Toyota Scion xB. The Scion only costs a paltry $0.48 per mile to put on the road. If you are still obsessed over gas mileage - buy a Chevy Aveo and fix that lead foot. http://clubs.ccsu.edu/Recorder/editorial/e....asp?NewsID=188 So the point is that we may not even know enough about the technology to determine whether it is actually beneficial in the long-term. It's probably better, for the time being, to buy a conventional vehicle that gets good gas mileage and try to keep your driving to a minimum, and when you do drive, not to speed, etc. As for some of your other examples, most of them are solid. Solar technology is increasing rapidly. Efficiencies in both panels and films are still low, but new nanotechnology has made it possible to increase efficiencies exponentially (this technology was recently used to power NASA's Mars rovers). Higher efficiency appliances are good. Mass Transit is good, but who are we kidding, we are not going to stop driving cars until it becomes economically unfeasible or against the law. The point is that a lot of technologies which we think are good simply are not. And that is often the result of quick fixes, single-mindedness, and not enough research. We need to find the best solutions before we act. And that takes time.

Well, there is absolutely nothing to be gained by rushing any alternative energy solutions, that's for certain. The problem with the "Green" or Environmental Movement, in large part, is that so much of it is reactionary. We knew so little, and were so unaccustomed as a society to even caring, that often times we set in place solutions that on their face looked helpful, but actually made things worse. Both environmentally, and economically. Time is certainly running a bit short, but rushing to conclusions which are unsound and ill-informed only makes things worse, and there is absolutely no point in doing something simply to do something. We've done this countless times in our efforts to fix problems we have created, be it in our wildlife preservation strategies, or our attempts to use alternate cleaning solutions in industrial and commercial uses, etc., often times we simply make things worse. Spend the money, take the time, and get things right. Don't compound the problem by rushing into quick fixes.

QUOTE(ptatc @ Jan 8, 2008 -> 07:33 AM) Lidocaine does not work systemically. It only works locally. Did he say he actually had the lidocaine shot into his ass though? I thought when he was saying he took lidocaine and B-12 he was answering the question of "Did McNamee ever inject anything into your body"...