igor67

I'm also enjoying the games, but a .500 team and a losing team in the playoffs in the same year is a good argument against this format. I'd imagine that most years with this current format will end up with a .500 or worse team in the playoffs. Between having 8 chances every year to have a mediocre division and the chance variation in conference strength getting a really sad wildcard team in more often. Even in normal years mediocre teams aren't eliminated from playoffs until mid to late December so there isn't that much gain in terms of removing dead game with the expansion.

Some updated data https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/cdc-chance-anaphylaxis-covid-19-vaccine-11-in-1-million-exceedingly-rare-225522117.html Given that out of almost 2 million people hundreds of thousands are still going to have a history of allergies, only 17 reactions is a pretty small risk. Worth being informed about and certainly monitoring for but mercifully quite low.

Normal inflation would account for most of that price shift, without resorting to a formula car prices in the Depression were 1-2000 dollars and my grandfather purchased his house for $1000, in a small town of no particular economic value that sold for $40K years ago. That gives a range of 20-40 times an increase due to inflation. Those are crude comparisons of course, but inflation clearly explains most of that price change. I can sort of see where some of those historical details support a notion of something lost, I do not know the precise amount of gold back currency my grandfather had in 1933, but I do know that because of the WPA he had a job and was able to keep making the payments on that house and turn that into a solid blue collar life, so I'd have a hard time claiming he came out behind. Somewhat more generally I think it is worth asking in general how far back in time one is willing to hold onto that type of grievance. I said generally because there are other types of calls for settling old disputes that I don't think we (collective) do ourselves any favors in demanding direct compensation for. In this case my grandfather has been dead for 29+ years, which means a pretty good portion of this board wasn't even alive to have any kind of connection to that. So while understanding the history is always super relevant, any policy needs to be firmly grounded in the needs of the present and future.

Gold has a few other uses, but it's real world value is it's incredibly high electrical conductivity and great resistance to corrosion. So I find it very unfortunate that this rare substance is mostly wasted on a medium for trade because our ancestors thought it looked pretty and gave it value based purely on the power of belief, especially since we have found other items to use purely as convenient methods of trade.

While I am not a Bitcoin fan (or gold) for somewhat distinct reasons I would be far more worried about a return to the gold standard for general economic reasons, not investing reasons. If you are talking about just creating a permanently fixed asset for trade that is a very different discussion, it is basically the same as investing in something like ultra rare cars.

That also means if you are say a ditch digger paid in Bitcoin you would need to be paid less wage in the future than you are now. Which maybe in theory sound workable, but what happens when someone invents something like say a vaccine that most people desperately want, but actually costs very little to produce? Since we'd have to pay some amount of Bitcoin for this new thing, everyone else has less Bitcoin to spend and the car dealer has to immediately lower his price to compensate (or sell fewer cars), but the cost of car was already set by the higher prices he paid for wages and materials! You need the amount of currency to be changeable since people generate so many less than tangible products and are also both resources (more labor) and costs (more food and cars). Hyper inflation and deflation are both signs that whatever currency you are using is completely out of touch with with people need for survival and prosperity.

Thank you I was unaware of that particular detail. That does leave me wondering why you would want to make it so as we have more people (about 2 billion more by 2050) you would guarantee there to be exactly the same amount of money available as that just makes everyone poorer (on average)

I'm sorry nate but I don't follow your reasoning at all. Bitcoin is practically the embodiment of innovation making something that never existed before and turning it into a commodity. You literally just run computers to mine more. Whereas gold is completely limited, at best you can create more wealth by digging more out of the ground but it is still highly limited.

That positivity rate is still very high for WI, MN is down into single digits, but still over 5%

homer the link Chorizo included does contain the data. I won't blame anyone for not slogging through the 60+ pages though. Critically though there was no significant increase in the category 4 events, it was only the category 3 events and as Machu had explained those are all symptoms consistent with a vigorous immune response, and certainly things I saw being reported on both ABC and CBS national news as possible side effects. I don't know if they are particularly higher or lower than other common vaccinations at that level of severity.

I want to highlight how conservative the safety standards are for vaccines. When you look at the range of things included under the term Severe reaction, my experience with Midwestern folks is most of us would still show-up for work under those types of symptoms. That conservative nature is built in to the system because they realize that when you start talking about population wide treatments the millions of people getting the treatment means it has to be way safer than say a random standard surgery. It does lead into some very challenging statistical territory, as you push your real risk territory down into the 1- in a - million territory (literally) it becomes very difficult to actually say what the actual cause was for that particular 1-in a million event. For whatever its worth I've had anaphylactic reactions [something legitimately serious] due to other medical procedures (not a vaccine) and I plan on getting my shot as soon as I can barring some dramatically new information coming to light.

I don't know what can really be done at this stage with the coverage. I would be very happy to settle for fair catching every punt, and taking a chance on a touch back on anything inside the 10 yard line that's for sure. I would definitely thinking about punting out of bounds against any good returner for sure though.

He did start telegraphing the Farve-esque performance with all of those over throws in the 2nd quarter. The announce team was pretty terrible. It really was like they were handed the roster at 8AM this morning. The bias in terms of talking about the other team would have at least been understandable (sort of) if we were playing a top 10 SEC team or other big name program, but Wake Forest at 4-4 on the season? It really seemed like the lack of D-line depth hurt the defense, they stonewalled well on the running game but there was no pass rush.

At least last night the biggest difference I saw was that Jones had better speed on the outside. That said I think this system I think helps to make effective backs, and I wouldn't mind saving the cap money and planning on spending a mid round pick next year to just keep cycling through guys.

Back when I would go fishing growing up, I could fish, listen to Ueck on the radio and read a book. Multitasking and doing nothing all at the same time it was great.

There are any number of examples for the link between numbers of investors and risk and efficiency (which are 2 somewhat distinct things). One of the more defining monopoly behaviors is to suppress competition by buying out the competitors and just letting their idea die. The entire math behind free markets assumes infinite individuals (large numbers generally behave similar enough to infinite for this to work). What's true for supply and demand is also true for investing the wisdom of the crowd works better in the long run than any individual. So the smaller number of people you have making the decisions the more the individuals deviations from the best choice will accumulate as inefficiencies. Scientists have expressed concern about analogous behavior with grant agencies for years with them often favoring funding safer experiments and not risky ones. DARPA is rather famous for running counter to this trend. On the private side the tendency for various investment firms or management styles to favor sales departments (and the shiny immediate returns) vs. long term R&D is another one.

I certainly understand how an individual level investing makes sense, but when one looks at wealth accumulation as a pure Darwinian steel cage match the game seems rather less impressive. Let's take my current yearly pension contribution of $4200. Now let's assume for the moment that I'm a crazy active investor who researches everything and manages to get a 10% return and no fees. I've made for the year an impressive $420 dollars. On the other hand I could make more than that with a 1% raise on my actual salary. When the question comes what is the best thing to do with that extra income specifically of course the answer is to invest it (hence the individual benefit), but when you start applying that same analysis on the high side of the equation you also realize that the working class, I saved my way to 1-2 million net worth, individual is still losing ground over time to someone sitting on a few billion. This also leads to significant inefficiency over time in the usefulness of investment capital. Instead of lots of investors placing bets on which ideas are good ones it becomes more and more concentrated with fewer people making meaningful decisions on which business ideas to invest in, which to anyone familiar with the math understands leads to more missed opportunities, aka less innovation.

I dug into the technical notes and the short answer appears to be that they decreased the estimated death total expected so far to account for the known lag effect of reporting the true number of deaths (which ends up often taking a full 12 months to achieve in other years). I copied the most relevant description from the technical notes. Completeness Methods to address reporting lags (i.e. underreporting) were updated as of September 9, 2020. Generally, these updates resulted in estimates of the total number of excess deaths that were approximately 5% smaller than the previous method, as weights in some jurisdictions with improved timeliness were reduced. While these adjustments likely reduce potential overestimation for those jurisdictions with improved timeliness, estimates for the most recent weeks for the US overall are likely underestimated to a larger extent than in previous releases. Some jurisdictions have little to no provisional data available in the most recent week(s) (CT, NC, WV); together, these jurisdictions represent approximately 5% of US deaths. In previous releases, some of the underestimation or lack of provisional data from certain jurisdictions was offset by the overestimation in other jurisdictions with improved timeliness when considering trends for the US overall. Because the updated weighting methods mitigate the impact of the previous overestimation for some jurisdictions with improved timeliness but provide no additional adjustments for underestimation or a lack of recent provisional data in other jurisdictions, the excess death estimates for the US overall are expected to result in a larger degree of underestimation than in previous releases. To account for potential underreporting in the most recent weeks, counts were weighted by the inverse of completeness. Completeness was estimated as follows. Using provisional data from 2018-2019, weekly provisional counts were compared to final data (with final data for 2019 approximated by the data available as of April, 9, 2020), at various lag times (e.g., 1 week following the death, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, up to 26 weeks) by reporting jurisdiction. Completeness by week, lag, and jurisdiction was modeled using zero-inflated binomial hierarchical Bayesian models with state-level and temporal random effects.

I regrettably don't have direct data to share, but we have multiple MN schools of data in our family to compare against and from a learning standpoint most of the schools that have done hybrid (very few in MN could do true in person for very long this year) are claiming great learning outcomes, most have shared with us that they wished they had just done distance the entire time. This very much includes all K-12 grades. There is no question that older students can do distance somewhat better, but the circus of quarantining students and staff for weeks at a time to do in person responsibly has eroded the effectiveness substantially for in person whether hybrid or not. To the point I read Faucci's message on schools and I think he was only considering the issues from the perspective of transmission risk and disease risk. The logistics or trying to keep the low reported spread at schools low has a lot more to do with school decisions then beliefs that it is all fear driven. We also now that when a school switches from one model to another in MN that costs them about 10% of their staff. To be clear that applies to any switch, so jumping around is highly disruptive to any kind of continuity (which there is a large body of research on its one of the modest number of things that consistently makes a difference in education.

I'm trying something different in the new year, I'm pretty much giving up all paid services. Had been doing Sling for awhile, and its a solid value but I mostly watch network. I basically get Netflix for free via my phone, and For that extra bit of cable like indulgence I'm trying Pluto TV. Sure it means commercials again, but my TV watching has actually gone down this last year. With everybody doing their own little channel we plan to sign-up here and there for a month or two and binge things.

I think Indiana being 2020 football champions is perfect on so many levels.

I'll concur with AKcheesehead I have a hard time believing how seeing better by blinding everyone else reduces accidents.

I think a bigger issue with tying insurance rates to obesity is that unlike other risk categories a significant part of the causation is not individual choice. Certainly there is a significant genetic component to the obesity, and based on the systematic increase over the years there are likely environmental factors outside an individuals control as well. It's far from clear as a case (nutrition research is challenging), but I'd look to target some things like food ingredients, sugar and high fructose corn syrup are both potential items that for example could be made less desirable with a tax to shift behaviors.

Building on that given that to be blunt every public health level attempt to address the obesity epidemic has failed to bend that curve. Why would a public health official waste precious words and message time on highlighting that aspect? They can barely provide adequate time to telling people to consistently wash hands, social distance, and wear a mask. The communication/ education limits of public health should be a key part of every decision. Aside from those issues, to get people out of the somewhat obese to somewhat overweight groups is typically going to require ~20 lbs of weight loss. That's at least a 2-3 month endeavor. That is hardly an immediate thing to focus on in the early days of the pandemic. If nothing else its worth understanding that given the correlations in Wisconsin bars should probably be closed permanently to address obesity. Not that I think it would change enough behaviors to alter average weight.

Mostly on the other side of a big fraction of my close family (but not household) finishing their recovery. Mostly mild cases despite significant risk factors, on the other hand the sickest people out of that group were some of the lowest risk. Good example of the high degree of variability in the illness.