MattPie

Good post, and I think your assumptions are pretty reasonable. It'd be fun to come back in April and see how close these numbers turn out.

They're just getting back to their roots by showing ridiculous stuff late at night. :) Speaking of which, how does World's Strongest Man fit into this? Magnus Ver Magnusson is the man!

Given the course of this conversation, I feel the need to post something.

Heh, that's a Southern Maryland trick. There's no beer, wine, or liquor sales in grocery stores, but some stores will have a store next door as it's own business, sometimes with an interior door between the two. There's one that has the liquor store inside the grocery store just roped off with a separate register.

I think the extreme crime and poverty has an effect in those two places. If the model works for everywhere there isn't massive poverty you shouldn't dismiss it just understand the limits.

It becomes a ton more prevalent once you cross the Mason-Dixon line. Down there people are taught "right lane for local, left lane for travelling". There are far too many miles of interstate to do in Autobahn-quality construction. :( CREDIT UNION!

Once March rolls around and he fires Babcock and becomes head coach (again) he'll be rolling in funny-colored Canadian cash.

Is that a Bill and Ted reference?

If only there wasn't a baby in the equation; I'd so be there. My wife likes beer a lot too, she'd probably suffer the drive (and drunk me).

Engineering Research: "the physicists gave us a bunch of math that kind of makes sense, but assumes everything is a sphere in a vacuum; we have to do research on how make any of this useful in the real world."

True dat, it's one of the few careers left you can make a go of with a bachelors.

You have a point, until the moment he shuffled off his mortal coil, a lot of people would have been happy to see him sell the team and never be spoken of again. As it turns out, he did well by the city with the way he structured everything so no harm no foul.

I'm not sure I'd hire someone with a doctorate fresh out of school, unless they had a lot of real-world experience to go with those fancy letters.

Surely if we're talking about traffic and gun deaths, you have to include accidental deaths by guns in those numbers, right? But even with your numbers, you've proven my point: you're 2.5 times as likely to be killed with a gun than by a texting driver.

That's cool.

That's actually false. There are roughly the same number of gun deaths in the US per year as there are total automobile deaths. I doubt every automobile death is the result of texting. I'll agree that text should be put on a higher level of infraction, but you don't need hyperbole to get there.

Ick, especially if the lines are clear letting the light get to them. I like my local place, they have around 12 taps and seemingly only get a keg or two of each beer before they change to something else. Even when I went there a couple times a week it was rare that they'd have the same set of beers on the list as the last time.

The Pizza Plant up in Amhearst NY likes to argue that if you have that many taps, you're probably going to be serving some "dusty" beer since you won't be able to turn over enough volume to keep things fresh. Maybe they're using sixtels instead of full kegs for the oddball stuff or something.

I know a few people who have gone through the "proper" immigration channels, so I tend to agree that illegal immigration should be curbed. I'm not sure how much a fence will do, since there's lots of ways to immigrate illegally that don't involve trekking through the desert. It might be one of those situations like drug testing welfare recipients where the cost for the testing is way more than the number of positive hits are saving. Is it worth spending $1B to build a fence and several $M per year to staff it if it only stops 10% of illegal immigration? (I'm just throwing numbers out, I have no idea what the real ones are)

Fixed! :)

Right? No deal and they just keep going with no one watching over their shoulder. This deal seems to but some serious brakes on nuclear development for the next 10-15 years, which by then the west can negotiate a new deal or (hopefully) there will be a less cantankerous government in place. It's not even a one-line spectrum for many things, especially politics. There are at least two major axes in US politics, fiscal and social, and people fall somewhere on that grid. The current Republican platform tends to be socially conservative and somewhat fiscally conservative (the tea party libertarians are pushing the Republicans further towards fiscal conservative, but they love to spend money as much as the democrats, just on slightly different things). Bernie Sanders (on the surface, I haven't looked real hard) appears to be fiscally liberal (taxes spent on social programs) but with a strong libertarian slant. Those things aren't mutually exclusive as some would have you think, it's possible to believe the government can be a force for economic good while still being strongly for personal freedom. This is why the two-party system sucks, you can't have a candidate with "diverse" viewpoints on things; a pro-corporate tax, pro-gun, pro-environment, and strong military candidate crosses too many lines and can't be nominated by either party.

Top 4 from each and the best 4 after than, no east/west seeding. 1-16, 2-15, etc.. I suppose top 5 from each and 1 wildcard too. :)

Several years ago, apparently the judge in either Broome (Binghamton) or Tioga (next to Broome) county just flat refused to sign CC petitions even if everything was in order. That's just stupid.

Indeed. Detroit wanted to be in the East for a long time and has way more clout.

Thanks. Maybe my statement is a little over the top, but the primary reason many people give carry a gun in public is to protect themselves. I'll admit that there are places in this country where that's a valid concern, like the inner city. However, it seems like a lot more of the people that "need" to carry a gun everywhere are going places where the chances of needing a gun to protect oneself is exceedingly low.