OldSchoolSnapper

I'm sorry, but you haven't really argued anything you claim without hyperbole. It's always this same "I thought people were smart" and "how you can say this is just crazy" type stuff. My point was that you're making a causation/correlation error and claiming that because cases went up when the lockdown ended that means the lockdown worked. The problem is that a bunch of other stuff coincided with the lockdown ending and you can't just toss that factors aside. Further, my point is that there was no massive increase/decrease in interactions that you're suggesting. We just shifted most of our interactions from one place to another and IMO you're really exaggerating the number of people who did even that. I don't know why you bolded what you did either. It's referring to Wisconsin and the same thing I've been saying all along. So some people didn't go out to dinner anymore and instead filled the Home Depot parking lot to the brim every Saturday. I don't know how to whittle it down anymore. A hypothetical stoppage of people interacting with each other would slow a virus down. The problem is, that never happened in this state. I'm telling you, you would have been mortified by the scene almost nightly in the Dells the entire summer. A virus doesn't spread to everybody in the vicinity if no measures are taken at all. Some people just won't get it. It's not like without the measures, the entire state of WI would have been having one big orgy under the same roof. It's hard for me to envision a scenario with modern standards of hygiene and sanitation and personal space, in a state with WI's population density, that we'd be doing worse than 441,000 confirmed (likely way more) cases. What we do know now vs. February is: It's not as lethal as we thought It's not as contagious as we thought (ex. surface transmission) Despite that, TONS of people have still had it. That tells me a whole lot of people were exposed. So my skepticism that our version of a lockdown "worked", stems from a belief that with those numbers and what we know about Covid...we didn't really do a whole lot of inorganic "slowing it down." I can't say this as it just based on experience, but I feel like (outside of the first 2 weeks when people seemed genuinely spooked) there's actually more adherence to rules now than there has been the last few months, with the election over with. It's no longer a political play now and I see more people just accepting things. A lot of people who have been pretty stuck in the mud about doing whatever actually sat out Thanksgiving which shocked me.

Eli was a "big game" QB and one that played in New York which goes far with HOF voters. His statistical resume is completely meh but he's tied to some of the most iconic games of the last 20 years. Random stuff like "he got it done in the clutch!!" always has more pull than it should with this sort of thing. I'll be very surprised if Eli isn't voted in and fairly quickly.

No, I did not. I argued that they did nothing in Wisconsin. Because they never really took place at the level necessary to be effective. I don't know how many times I have to say this. I've never once argued here that lockdowns don't work. Highly debatable. There just isn't strong evidence to say this one way or another since the measures coincided with seasonal changes that drove people in or outdoors for other reasons. It's kind of hard to say how much of that was a lockdown vs. summer break or any of the things that increase in the summer. That Orlando's massive entertainment district hasn't been able to pinpoint a large outbreak despite lots of people trying to find one doesn't mean you're wrong, but it's not helping your argument and it would seem like it easily would do so. As far as lives being saved, as I've already said, I believe that anecdotally lives were saved by a small number of very high-risk people not going anywhere at all. But I don't think that the overall numbers would look much different than they do because I think that group is incredibly small. Despite a lot of dead people, we're still talking about something that's killed 4k people in a state of nearly 6 million. I don't say that to downplay what it's done, but to point out that tons and tons of people have been exposed to this by now. I don't think it could be spreading much worse than it has been.

We go against that line of thinking every single day with many things, so yes it's stupid, but this is actually not the point I'm making here specifically (though it is a valid one). I'm actually not talking about the economic of it at all. My inclination is that a lockdown as lame as our attempt at one doesn't actually achieve the "slow the spread" goal at any significant level, for a bunch of reasons. Most obvious is tons of people just ignored it, but also that even those that do make a bunch of exceptions they don't grant others. All those little exceptions add up to millions. Then there's also just the sheer amount of trips to places and errands to run that are assumed to be of zero risk if masked, etc. Then there are those who do get sick, but are never sick enough to think they are spreaders and engage in things they otherwise would not. If I knew I had Covid, I wouldn't go anywhere. If all I had is a sore throat, I'd probably just keep trucking. Add all of this stuff up together and I'm skeptical that the end result is any different due to the explosive nature of exponential spread. I am not stating any of this as fact. But my guess is that eventually general health of the population, population density and weather are far larger factors than half-hearted lockdowns and masks.

You're conflating things again though. You're arguing that lockdowns work, against nobody. NYC was among the first and worst places hit. It was taken very seriously and became a ghost town as the thing exploded. I have family there, it was NOT a comp to the measures taken in WI. Loads of people who work in NYC and are STILL working remote in their homes in Jersey and CT. Other countries that locked down actually locked down. It was enforced. These just aren't good comps. NYC is an incredibly densely populated area that was partially evacuated, almost completely locked down and a small land area that's far easier to control. That's not what happened in Wisconsin and it is not what happened in Florida. As such, I don't think WI really did a thing to slow this. I think it did what it was going to do with peaks and valleys caused by weather. There are anecdotal cases where I'm sure an elderly person who could have been infected hasn't left their home in 10 months, but the total numbers probably come close to balancing out in such a way that I don't really think anything we did significantly curbed it. The numbers look better than the very first ones because the virus was less deadly than thought, but I remain highly skeptical that the kinds of "BW3 must close but Lowe's is essential" measures stop anything at all. That just isn't how exponential spread works, where a person can do everything right and still get infected via 10 degrees of separation.

Sorry. You don't get to claim stuff like "100% factual" and "100% wrong" without a shred of reliable evidence to prove it. Tracking and measuring a "lockdown" as bad as ours was is so futile there is just no way to substantiate what you're saying. You can keep acting like it's ridiculous but it won't change the fact you're just speaking emotionally about it and not from any place of proof. I would be interested in the study Machu is mentioning because it seems to corroborate exactly the perspective I'm sharing. No that doesn't make me unquestionably right, but it would suggest that isn't something you can half commit to. There probably isn't a single person in this thread who didn't go at least one stupid place in 10 months, and lots of people make those kinds of trips semi-often but still otherwise follow all the rules. When a couple million people exempt themselves from the rules weekly, monthly, whatever, it's no longer one simple chore or task, it's millions of them. Covid doesn't care if you adhere 90% of the time if you happen to be positive the other 10% of the time you bend the rules. It doesn't take a great deal of lax behavior for exponential spread to explode. You seem to be really underestimating this aspect of things. And as aside, please stop with this "I can't believe smart people disagree with me!" stuff. It's so tired.

You can't compare military personnel to the general public when it comes to following orders. You can make all the quarantine, social distance, whatever rules you want but John Q Public (and apparently a whole lot of the same people that are making the rules) is still going to do whatever they want. This would make them the ideal sample. If intermediate quarantine measures didn't work with a group of people who don't have free will it would only strengthen the point I made above, that it's not the sort of thing you can cherry-pick isolation with. You either stay inside or you don't. Home Depot and Leon's aren't exempt. I would be extremely interested in this link if it can be found.

I'll do whatever they ask to get to one. I miss it badly. As an aside, SSH: the holiday gift this year is the Yelich bobble they're offering with 4 packs.

Lionel Taylor was the first with 100, but 100 was an achievement when Sharpe was playing and I think Sharpe still has the Packers record. Adams would decimate that if he'd stop getting hurt, but he might still get it this year anyway. Sharpe not in the HOF is something of a joke to me though I know the longevity isn't there. He is clearly better than lots of WRs they've allowed in. And short careers haven't stopped other players from getting in.

Well, this won't be popular, I don't agree. I know this is the thing everyone likes to say because it makes us feel good about what we've done but I genuinely question the impact that it had, if any significant one at all. If Milwaukee were to green light everything this instant, the people who are scared to walk outside wouldn't be lining up at Sanford. They would continue to proceed with caution. Reckless people have continued to behave recklessly throughout the 10 months. Enormous parts of Florida have all but ignored Covid completely and there is no discernible difference between FL and WI. They have just over 2x the documented cases and 4x the people. They've had (daily festivals) Disney World and Universal open since June. Call me crazy, I just don't think our half-hearted distancing measures did anything at all. Most of the times I was out and about I found them being ignored all over the place. I remember trying to arrange curbside pickup at a restaurant in April and the guy just told me to come inside when I got there. I walk in and there are 10 people inside, half without masks, just getting their food. The thing is moving its way through WI at will and I don't actually believe it would be worse if the public messaging were any different. People are doing what they're comfortable with and for a lot of them that means whatever they want. I don't think most of the US mitigated anything. We just did the worst of both methods. Closed a bunch of stuff, made it impossible for lots of service-oriented businesses to survive, and locked down so ineptly that we didn't stop the sickness at all either. OK. So way more human interactions wouldn't have led to less human to human spread. Gotcha. You're not getting my point but just opting to be sassy and dismissive instead. Gotcha. We didn't decrease interactions on any significant scale. Schools were open for most of the time and the people who would frequent a dine-in restaurant in Milwaukee right now, aren't curtailing their interactions, they just find new ones. Did you see Lake Geneva, or the Dells ALL summer? My point is that we did the worst of both things. We took away any chance for these places to be profitable while being laughably bad at limiting contact simultaneously. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that locking stuff down means the virus has nowhere to go. The problem is we didn't actually do that. We had ice cream stands with lines around the block on day one and arbitrary rules about what's "essential." You're conflating my point "lockdowns don't work." My point is that joke lockdowns don't work and that's exactly what we had. Although, since you brought up human to human contact, it should be reiterated that Disney/Universal are seeing 100k people a day and have been for 6 months there's been no conclusive link to an outbreak at either place, while the state is overall doing a lot better with infection rate than WI. Even if their numbers are fudged, they would have to be drastically fudged to be where WI is.

Well, this won't be popular, I don't agree. I know this is the thing everyone likes to say because it makes us feel good about what we've done but I genuinely question the impact that it had, if any significant one at all. If Milwaukee were to green light everything this instant, the people who are scared to walk outside wouldn't be lining up at Sanford. They would continue to proceed with caution. Reckless people have continued to behave recklessly throughout the 10 months. Enormous parts of Florida have all but ignored Covid completely and there is no discernible difference between FL and WI. They have just over 2x the documented cases and 4x the people. They've had (daily festivals) Disney World and Universal open since June. Call me crazy, I just don't think our half-hearted distancing measures did anything at all. Most of the times I was out and about I found them being ignored all over the place. I remember trying to arrange curbside pickup at a restaurant in April and the guy just told me to come inside when I got there. I walk in and there are 10 people inside, half without masks, just getting their food. The thing is moving its way through WI at will and I don't actually believe it would be worse if the public messaging were any different. People are doing what they're comfortable with and for a lot of them that means whatever they want. I don't think most of the US mitigated anything. We just did the worst of both methods. Closed a bunch of stuff, made it impossible for lots of service-oriented businesses to survive, and locked down so ineptly that we didn't stop the sickness at all either.

You don't think that his off-the-field issues will cause him problems in this regard? I don't, no. I'm with you personally in that I never have felt he strikes fear into defenses. I've always thought of him as a modern day Aikman. Someone that is not all that impressive but is serviceable and played on very good teams. I don't believe he's ever been a serious MVP candidate, but he's been very steady. He's also a unique player in that he's sort of a link between two eras of the game/Steelers history as he's still around now but won a title with Jerome Bettis.

Stats matter a lot less than notoriety if your stats aren't mind-blowing. Eli Manning is 5 points below Stafford in career passer rating. But he won the Super Bowl twice and beat the Patriots both times. He's at the center of two iconic Super Bowls. Guys like Roethlisberger, who are IMO nowhere near the talent of someone like Rodgers, but better than Stafford/Manning AND have the titles, are locks. Stafford, to me, is one of those guys who gets talked about as underrated so much that I think he's overrated. If he were that great of a QB, that team would have made the playoffs more than it has. I think he's an above average QB and that's about it.

Eventually? Roethlisberger will be a 400+ TD pass, minimum 2-time SB Champion 3x AFC champ, on one of the most storied teams in the league. He will get in immediately. Canton isn't Cooperstown. There just aren't a lot of hot NFL debates about borderline guys. They let almost every conceivable player in. The handful that aren't are mystifying because they seem to be guys who CLEARLY should be. Eli Manning is a lock. Ryan and Stafford are Cecil Cooper guys in any other Hall of Fame, but the NFL has a precedent for letting those types in.

We were closed basically all of November and my kids went back 11/30. They are both home sick today.

I think Alaska and Hawaii are still requiring tests to get in and others have 14-day quarantines. But the bigger problem is that visiting a lot of areas just isn't all that great because you can't dine in or do any festival etc. The price of the airfare is moot when there is little to do once you get there, depending on the state. The Hawaii thing is kind of a joke. Free airfare to live there for 3 months? So you save $400 but have to pay their prices for everything else and find somewhere to live... Besides, the cost of flights to Hawaii was undergoing a steep drop pre-Covid. There are more carriers serving HI now than ever before. FWIW I don't fault you or anyone else traveling. This 50% participation thing where millions of people don't care and millions of others are living in constant fear isn't bringing an end to this any faster. All people can do at this point is minimize contact as much as possible and hope they can last until they get drugs. We've been moving from event to event for a year now warning people off it and it doesn't achieve anything. All we seem to have done is killed off a bunch of restaurants and not slowed the virus at all.

Chiefs win ugly but I still think they are the best team in the league by a decent margin. You can't be a bad 11-0 but has anyone really looked at Pittsburgh's schedule, or better yet, the schedule of the entire AFC North? They're playing the Bengals twice and the NFC East. Pittsburgh's interconference schedule includes powerhouses such as Houston and Jacksonville and a game against RGIII. I think that is a serious factor in Cleveland being 9-3 as well. Though they played their best game of the year today. Pitt is for sure a top 5 team. Just not sure if they are #2 or #5.

I dunno, if this were the Knebel coming off the 2018 season it would be pretty nice to have three relievers like that for an extra $5 million especially how the Brewers use them. But that isn't the situation.

I don't know how anyone can get on the Brewers for this. It's a position of strength on the team and we all realize the financials of the league and team are under scrutiny. It's either pay a guy that might be done at a position where you aren't exactly bad, or lose him for zero. This is the kind of thing they had to do.

It's been making the rounds for a year. I don't think 1/3 of people having it is insane, but it sounds high. 13.5 million is laughable. There are loooooot of people in the country living in very not dense areas, though. Covid is a boring non-factor to many of them. A number like 60-70 million would not surprise me at all though.

WI public schools do not even require vaccines. I think some people are dismissing just how many people will refuse, and the fact that anti-vacc has grown in popularity in the last few decades, it's not disappearing. I'd happily be the lab rat and get it this afternoon. I just have a feeling we are in for a long, drawn out hassle with getting people to get it. Maybe Covid has been annoying enough to get people to give in. I'm less hopeful. Fortunately as far as international travel is concerned, other countries can do what they want we're powerless to stop it.

Maybe, but I think they are planning to use him. A 6'4/6'5 350-365 lb cog sure sounds nice in the middle of that defense fight now for 15-20 snaps. I like the pickup a lot to be honest. He's an undrafted FA that got on the field a lot and played well. He just hasn't had the right opportunity. The lack of production we've had at the position might be a good fit for him.

Rush is by far the largest DL they will have. Maybe he makes no difference. But I wouldn't rule it out just because he's played for a bunch of teams. He plays a highly specialized role that will be redundant or not needed on lots of teams. There isn't huge demand for 360-lb DL. I think the Packers have a clearly identified role they want him to fill, not like someone they are crossing their fingers on. He was actually pretty darn productive in Philly, but depth at the position made him hard to keep.

I think vaccine requirements are a pipe dream. I just do not see that happening in this country. There will be so much vocal opposition to that sort of thing. Lawsuits up the wazoo.

Don't know if Rush is any good, but he is enormous. 6'4, 361