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(And on a train you could probably find a brake somewhere, if it was important enough.)

Indeed, you can.

*You don't argue balls and strikes.*

It's part of the game. Let it be. Half the charm of baseball is the old-timey aspect.

And that's because, until PitchF/X came along a few years ago, umpires sucked at calling balls and strikes - that rule was put in place because they sucked at it. And MLB didn't really care - no one could really see but the players, so MLB just banned arguing about it.

There's no charm as shitty officiating that the sports league doesn't care enough about to fix.

But then TV came along - with more and more cameras capturing the games as the years passed. The crappy umpiring began to be exposed. I'm looking at YOU, Don Denkinger!.

I strongly remember TV cameras being placed high above home plate showing balls WAAAAY outside being called as strikes during the 1992 or 1993 World Series involving Toronto. Of course, that was only for the first game or so - MLB got pissed that the entire world could see how shitty the umpires actually were at calling balls and strikes.

Hell, PitchF/X is the reason why HRs in baseball have gone down over the last decade or so. Nope - all the homeruns weren't the result of steroid use - if they were, the homerun rate wouldn't have spiked in one year - 1994 (all too coincidentally back to 1987's "rabbit ball" levels...) Gee, HRs spike in one year, right around a major strike. And right afterwards, MLB runs TV ads glorifying HRs ("chicks dig the long ball...").

After 1994, HRs remained constant for a decade or so, until PitchF/X shows MLB just how shitty umpires really are about calling balls and strikes. The strike zone starts growing, causing strikeouts to go up. More strikeouts means less balls hit means less HRs. But the rate of HRs per batted ball remains just about constant.

"Steroids are linked to homeruns" is BULLSHIT. If steroid use were linked to more HRs, HRs would have gone up slowly as more and more players used them. But they didn't - HR rate spiked high in 1987, went back to normal, then spiked back up in 1994 and stayed there. So increased steroid use isn't linked to increasing HR rates. Do you really think steroid use in MLB jumped in 1987, went back down, then jumped back in 1994?

And the opposite is true, too. When MLB banned steroid use, HR rates didn't suddenly drop - they remained pretty constant, and only began dropping as the larger strike zone (from PitchF/X feedback on shitty umpiring...) led to less batted balls and less HRs - but the ratio of HRs to batted balls remained constant. Again - no link to steroid use.

In a traditional permission system where you tell your OS what you will and won't allow, you could still run the Facebook app and notice when it fails to work normally—or when the OS terminates it outright.

But that's not what we have. Imagine a town where everyone feels socially obligated to leave a house key under the door matt for the town priest, who basically just sleeps wherever he wants.

Why Zuckerberg's 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn't Fixed Facebook — 6 April 2018

Concert dates: 2006, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2018.

This is a priest with a known history.

He is also a priest with a known drinking problem, and anyone slipping him a ten spot in a dark alley will be quickly rewarded with choice gossip. To put it bluntly, sharing gossip is really the only thing that gets him out of bed in the morning.

So what's he doing with all those house keys left conveniently under the door matt?

Nobody knows, not for sure. I guess you just kind of close your eyes and pray that your children don't have any closer-to-God than God intended loose pyjama experiences.

———

Me, I'm heading for the atheist exit. My phone is down to three apps: Firefox, Signal, and a password store (and some legacy cruft that won't survive my next phone purchase). Oh yeah, and a Google thing that plays podcasts (but mostly I still use my old iPod as a dedicated podcast device).

I consider my phone the worst technology I've ever owned, and this list includes several different computers purchased before anyone not in the 1% could afford an actual hard drive.

The "killer app" meme isn't what it once was, but here we have it: geographic and social ubiquity. And it was good. It was so good that two high priests strolled into town, wearing different hats, but both basically saying the same thing: "hey, everybody, start leaving your house keys under your front door matt" and don't worry, be happy if we share your close personal affairs with political operatives.

And now we have an entire generation raising under a regime of not just tolerating, but pocketing quasi-consensual corporo-totalitarian spyware.

———

Merely becoming a real atheist isn't good enough anymore. Now the motivated atheist needs to also live on the outskirts of town, and subsist on a routine diet of social media juniper berries.

Fortunately, I've never much liked my illiterate fellow man. And this is a weird thing, because this is golden era like no other era before, where I can surround myself exclusively by the glitterati of every intellectual endeavour of life, whether print or YouTube on demand. I casually consume hours of books/lectures per day from the rock stars of the modern academy at basically no marginal cost (my computer is so weirdly configured, Google rarely delivers a single ad, and when an ad does come up on something that's not fungible in under 5 s, I slide the window to another desktop and mute my audio for 30 s, before returning for a quick rewind to content begin).

I'm basically the Dwight Freeney of commercial bullshit.

Athletes with Weird Eating Quirks

For example, in the week leading up to a game that season, âoe[Freeney] ate beef and pinto beans and nothing else, not even for breakfast. ⦠If he goes to a restaurant, he brings his own ingredients and instructs the chef on how he wants it prepared—no oil, no pepper, no garlic, no garnish, no powder and certainly no pan spray.â

———

Where are all the other mental athletes out there, with similar dietary rigidity? The body is your temple, but your mind is junk heap? I guess while the abusive jocks were preening, all the sad-sack geeks internalized lazy, don't give a shit. Vi

Is there to spell

Shawn
Sean Yeah, me too
Shaun

http://bleacherreport.com/arti...

I'm not saying that for-profit universities are bad because they seek a profit. But there is an undeniable trend: For-profit colleges are worse than non-profit colleges by almost every metric.

Motivations: Yes, some non-profit universities are spending enormous amounts of money on sports, but sports spending is an investment that returns profits that are used for education. For-profit schools, on the other hand, spend more than $400,000 a day on ads while downsizing their teaching staff.

Governance: Yes, another legitimate gripe with non-profit universities. But once again, for-profit universities do it worse. Read the consumerist link I posted earlier. Widepsread misrepresentation of graduation and placement rates. Falsification of grades to prevent students from failing out. Termination of faculty members that failed too many students.

Outcomes: Yep, there are lots of recent graduates of non-profit universities who are jobless. But how many of them went to universities that have campuses with 0% graduation rates? You have to wonder what they point of a university is when it fails to graduate any students. There's also the fact that many for-profit colleges are charging $20,000 - $30,000 for associate'sdegrees. You could get that for less than $2,000 at you local community college.

Private universities are a response to current realities: many low-risk jobs require a paper degree, but no actual skills. Many traditional universities are needlessly stupid and expensive if all you want is that paper. And there is plenty of free money to go around, irrespective of merit.

100% true. But I don't have anything against private universities. In fact, I went to a private university. That said, it was a non-profit, regionally accredited private university -- the complete opposite of the nationally accredited for-profit universities that were mentioned in the articles that I linked to. Private does not equal for-profit, and that is an important distinction to make. This image sums it up nicely.

Have you ever seen pictures of LeBron James's toes?

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1757693-everybody-look-at-lebron-james-toes

Too late. One third of MLB pitchers have now had surgery to allow them to continue pitching at a high level. But steroids will still get you banned. Seems sort of inconsistent to me.

http://bleacherreport.com/arti...

On that list Boston is the most racist.

Former Iowa State Cyclone basketball coach might still be married and working at Iowa State had he had this product. http://bleacherreport.com/articles/507716-the-biggest-party-animals-in-sports/page/5

Those NE schools you are citing are just doing it wrong. There's plenty of money to be made in college sports:

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/388387-texas-longhorns-how-the-athletic-department-keeps-the-money-flowing

Uhhhh...dude? You DO know that football jocks have been getting away with shit pretty much as long as their has been professional football, yes? Hell I didn't have to take a single class in HS because the coaches had me set up in my own room teaching jocks how to spell flower and stood, and cheat if necessary to pass the tests to remain eligible.

Just Google "college football crime" to find thousands of pages of athletes that get away with serious crime because they are future NFL draft picks. Here is one to get you started. look I like football, but lets not kid ourselves, okay? The sport has been full of spoiled jocks that can and do get by with anything ever since the advent of televised sports and the big money that comes with it. Why do they get away with everything in HS and college? Because having "the home of NFL hall of famer" looks good on recruiting and money drives.

As long as there is big $$$$$ to be made off of these kids they will be allowed to do pretty much anything they want as long as they can play the game. The only reason Vick got busted was because the moron videotaped himself and caused such a stink they couldn't let it drop. And how many years would he have gotten if he wasn't a football player?