owbc

As a scientist who writes academic papers, I would never, ever believe anyone who cites a single academic paper as evidence for an argument that goes against common knowledge in the field. I do think provocative and creative ideas are a good thing and often a ton of good science comes out of people debunking bad science. Ultimately people just need to listen to the top experts. If I see a controversial paper in my field my immediate reaction is to ask several top experts in that area what they think about it. Which is exactly what good journalists do. And the best experts will acknowledge where the gaps are in the science and be open about where their personal opinion differs from established ideas.

One thing I liked about Southwest is that I got a ton of free credit from their tendency to overbook...once I got $1,100 ($550/person) and got to my destination only about 5 hours late--and you could still get a good seat when you took the bump thanks to the open seating policy. A definite advantage to the "no change fees" policy if you have the patience to exploit it. Haven't flown them since I got status on Alaska...there isn't really a benefit anymore since I can get free checked bags and exit row seats now. Plus Alaska successfully took over the MKE-SEA nonstop from SWA and has a stronger presence on the west coast than SWA in general. Anyway, still waiting on the first airline to report that they are in significant financial distress. Already have seen it happen with Hertz and Norwegian Cruise Lines. It would be a huge win for the planet if this virus wipes out the cruise ship industry, or at least significantly reduces it.

I remember when the AA CEO said that and I thought it was complete BS at the time for a number of reasons (it's a shareholder meeting after all...). If it wasn't COVID or the 737 MAX it would have eventually been something else. Airfare is one of the easiest things to chop from a personal or corporate budget. And the absurd growth projections are dependent on an infinite supply of oil, no climate change, and a massive increase in travel demand in increasingly cramped airplanes. I didn't mean to derail the thread with my Southwest analogy but I disagree with many of the responses. Southwest still owns a bunch of 717s from the AirTran acquisition that they lease to Delta. Alaska was "proudly all Boeing" until they acquired Virgin America and subsequently ordered a bunch of new A321s. If one of the big airlines when bankrupt the other airlines would be tripping over each other to acquire the assets and grow their market share. Especially the gate space which they are constantly fighting over--hence why Southwest succeeded in carving out a niche at cheaper airports.

Yep. Although I will say that the "final year" thing was not necessarily bad strategy. It motivated everyone to go out and win another championship when decline was imminent. In some ways it reminds me of "Major League"...players/coaches motivated to prove the aloof executive wrong. Although it does seem pretty clear that Krause felt that he needed to get rid of Jackson/MJ and build another winner to give himself credit. Another comparison I think of is Bud Selig, who in my opinion liked to intentionally play the role of the bad guy in order to advance the broader agenda of the organization. Selig was one step ahead of Krause though. Krause clearly wanted attention and credit while Selig was fine with just pointing at the numbers and letting people say whatever they wanted about him. Krause just needed to step back and wait for the credit, which would have come eventually.

The 1994 Expos is not a bad position to end up in. They are way more famous than they would have been if they had lost in the playoffs.

If you have a good social safety net then you can allow poorly-managed corporations to fail. If executives fear their stock options becoming worthless they will run the company differently than they will with the knowledge that the government will bail them out. So even government loans can encourage reckless behavior. Look at the airlines. Southwest Airlines has been well-managed for decades and has a huge stockpile of reserve cash on hand for a crisis like this. They will be fine. Is it fair to them that the government is going to prop up their competition? If American or United went bankrupt, Southwest could buy up their assets for cheap and expand. Of course the United or American employees would be screwed in that process because it would take time for them to be rehired by Southwest. And travelers would be hurt in the short-term. But with good unemployment benefits and health care, the average employee gets a vacation while Southwest gets rewarded for running their company well. But instead, the poorly-run companies are being rewarded because they are able to keep the extra profits they made during the time that they should have been saving.

Only for season seat holders...single game holders can credit it forward or request a refund. The Cardinals are giving SSHs nothing. It is automatically credited to their account unless they request a refund. If that's the case then I'm definitely taking the cash on my single-game ticket purchases.

The Reds announced their policy--cash refund or roll over to 2021 with a 10% concession credit. Seems like a fair offer.

I don't know about that. They make up 70% of all businesses. What is "much smaller," 65%? That's the million dollar question. One would hope that the permanent loss is not a double-digit percent loss.

I agree for the most part, but I can't stand how many 3 point shots are attempted in today's game. Getting rid of the 3 pt line entirely would be nice. I miss the mid-range jump shot and there are simply too many games decided on the randomness of hot shooting. And too many blowouts when one team is hot and the other is cold.

Those are touchless - how are they an issue? With paper towel rolls, they always get jammed up or the sensors don't work and you have to manually turn the knob to get them to dispense the next towel. There was a Mythbusters episode on this. It turns out the blowers send germs flying everywhere. Paper towel is more sanitary.

Most of the changes are an acceleration of things that were already happening... 1. The gig economy is going to be even bigger than before, there are hundreds of thousands of people delivering food/groceries who used to drive for Uber/Lyft. People are going to continue to expect delivery so there will be plenty more jobs in that sector. One class of minimum-wage workers supporting a much wealthier class of white collar workers. 2. Remote work will continue to expand. People will be less inclined to have long work commutes. Companies will permanently reduce business travel. 3. Research will continue to move ever more to private sector and away from universities/government labs. This is a personal one as a university researcher myself. The starting pay gap is already massive for PhD scientists (~$60K at a university vs. ~$150K in the private sector). Related--the university bubble is definitely going to burst as students move to cheaper online learning. 4. Small businesses are going to be a much smaller chunk of the economy. 5. People will keep many of the hobbies that they picked up during COVID. Gardening, DIY projects, cooking, etc. 6. I don't know about crowds...I bet they will return once COVID is completely gone. Although people will certainly be more hygienic in general. 7. Lots of political instability thanks to the oil crash. There is a good chance that oil demand never returns to previous levels and there will (hopefully) be additional political pressure to accelerate green energy as people demand that government is better prepared for other crises that may or may not be on the horizon...

I think it's completely backwards. Not in terms of Jordan's impact on ISO ball, but the defense. The adjustments and added emphasis to the hand check rules have allowed for wings to score much more easily since...what, 2004 than prior to that. Before that, the game was dominated by big men and Jordan's scoring was an outlier. Since then the scoring has been dominated almost primarily by wing players because the rules made it easier, not harder to score. As for the touch fouls...I think you're being more than a little harsh with Jordan on that one. He was on the recieving end of SOO many fouls that would not be called flagrant and to infer that it's not only NOT different today or that it's not even worse today I'd refer you to one Harden, James. Also...you could double team whenever you wanted when Jordan played. You just couldn't guard space. But the Dunks? I really don't see how it would have been easier for Giannis back than OTHER than more bigs played more regularly then and he'd have had an easier time getting around them. And he'd have paid a price far more often for going up. After seeing those highlights from the '89 playoffs I strongly agree. Jordan was getting absolutely hammered by the Pistons. Some of those highlights looked more like a hockey game, refs intentionally looking the other way, etc. Not sure how you can watch that and not come out with more respect for MJ. --- Some might read the banter as backstabbing, I see it as storytelling. And I'm loving it.

My spouse's company (a medium-sized tech company) just announced that voluntary work-from-home will be permitted "at least through the end of 2020".

Exactly. Not a problem anymore though, nobody is going to be flying a full airplane for a long time!

I agree, but I can't help think that this was a problem limited to the Before Times. I assume I'll be paying at least double what I did previously to fly in the future and doing it far less often than before.

It was fun to hear the Pacers talk about how hard it was to defend him. Although the circumstances that lead to the Bulls even making the playoffs was the real crazy part.

Agreed--overall the models have been pretty good. All models have a ton of assumptions built into them, the key is figuring out which assumptions matter and which don't. At the end of the day, exponential growth is exponential growth no matter what coefficients you throw in there, and with very limited information the models correctly predicted the rapid spread of infections. The tricker part was to model deaths and hospitalizations because the percentage of cases leading to hospitalization/death is an important parameter and nobody really knew what that was given the lack of data. At the end of the day you would rather prepare for an overestimation. And things were certainly helped by people being good about social distancing which should be celebrated. At some point I hope as a society we can congratulate ourselves for successfully fending off the worst case scenario. The local and state responses have been great, especially given the complete lack of organization at the federal level and the general lack of a plan for what to do. To me it's quite scary how poor the national response was,if the states hadn't acted to get this under control it could have gotten pretty ugly quickly. The governors are just following the advice of infectious disease experts which is really all they can do. You're now the 2nd moderator today with not so subtle political jabs. Not poster...moderator. Funny thing is, the governors have generally praised the federal government for their response and organization. If criticizing the federal government is inherently political then we're in bigger trouble than I thought. The federal government response has been and continues to be terrible and the case counts are higher than they should be because of it. Has nothing to do with preferring one political party to another.

Agreed--overall the models have been pretty good. All models have a ton of assumptions built into them, the key is figuring out which assumptions matter and which don't. At the end of the day, exponential growth is exponential growth no matter what coefficients you throw in there, and with very limited information the models correctly predicted the rapid spread of infections. The tricker part was to model deaths and hospitalizations because the percentage of cases leading to hospitalization/death is an important parameter and nobody really knew what that was given the lack of data. At the end of the day you would rather prepare for an overestimation. And things were certainly helped by people being good about social distancing which should be celebrated. At some point I hope as a society we can congratulate ourselves for successfully fending off the worst case scenario. The local and state responses have been great, especially given the complete lack of organization at the federal level and the general lack of a plan for what to do. To me it's quite scary how poor the national response was, if the states hadn't acted to get this under control it could have gotten pretty ugly quickly. The governors are just following the advice of infectious disease experts which is really all they can do.

Who else is watching? We finally have some new sports-related entertainment so we may as well discuss it!

I've already seen some examples of prohibition-style services popping up. Businesses are starting to get desperate for revenue. My medical provider offered services that are supposed to be emergencies only and my spouse was able to get an off-the-record acupuncture procedure. Hard to argue against the rules though. This thing has spread like wildfire when it has gotten an opportunity, such as in Sioux Falls.

Isn't SS essentially insurance against living too long?

I would have been 100% sure that the awful flu I had from Jan 1-3 was Coronavirus except that patient zero in my area was confirmed to have come back from Wuhan on Jan 15. It was just a nasty flu this year. After the crap China has done regarding this why should we believe that it began January 15th either? They’ve lied and distorted from the get go. Restricting travel from Wuhan to the rest of China while letting worldwide travel from Wuhan is at best a very suspect action, at worst an act of war. It was confirmed via genetic sequencing. Patient zero in Washington State came back from Wuhan on Jan 15. All subsequent cases in Washington that were sequenced (before it started spreading everywhere) can be traced back to that person.

I would have been 100% sure that the awful flu I had from Jan 1-3 was Coronavirus except that patient zero in my area was confirmed to have come back from Wuhan on Jan 15. It was just a nasty flu this year.

I don't wish to escalate my previous comment any further, the fundamental debate is about what percentage of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck? Googling that question gives all sorts of numbers, from a third to even 75-80%. Most likely it's somewhere around a half. So even with people cutting their expenses, it is completely reasonable that a third can't afford rent. And yes, that means that landlords will not get all of their rent or their airBNB income, ever. And yes, that means there will eventually be a big increase in auto repossessions, foreclosures, etc. Especially since a decent chunk of people with 6-figure incomes are also living paycheck-to-paycheck (irresponsible, but if there are whole industries that depend on upper-middle class people blowing money on clothes, furniture, vacations, etc). For now everyone is going to be patient, extend payment deadlines, etc while the quarantine is still going on. After the quarantine is when the real feedbacks will start to be felt across the economy. When it becomes apparent that the lost money isn't going to reappear.