owbc

Should have been a stranded lead off double.

348 ft porch shot…whatever.

Win it for Ueck.

I really screwed up withholding this year due to my wife’s RSUs and ended up with a $20K tax bill. It’s hard to project. The W2 withholding on the RSUs was way way too low. I consider it a good problem to have but it wasn’t ideal. Thankfully we bought an investment properly last year and I was able to figure out how to write off most of it, but it will increase my tax burden down the road.

I thought this was a pretty smart mutual move by the Mariners and Raleigh — the Mariners lock in a fan favorite for a relatively good price and Raleigh, who surely is aware of the prospects for older catchers hitting FA, gets a nice payday. Having watched Raleigh here in Seattle it’s clear that his preparation and game management is second to none so the Mariners will be fine with below-average offense in his 30s as long as he hits for power and continues to be an asset defensively. From the Brewers side, I think you’re hoping for more offensive value from Contreras than the Mariners expect from Raleigh. If I’m the Brewers I would absolutely come to the table if Contreras wants to talk, but I would have a similar dollar/year number in mind as the Raleigh contract and be thinking more about a 1B conversion. Mediocre 1B play is costing us $18 million this year…

87 I’m less optimistic than last year, the divisional rivals will be tougher to beat this year and we let some top talent go that won’t be easy to replace. On the plus side, Chourio alone makes this team worth the price of admission, they seem to have enough starting pitching to get by, and we know they will find diamonds in the rough to plug pitching gaps. But getting to 90 with this roster feels tough. I think they do enough to get a wild card spot though and find a way to win a series or two before losing to LA with some “win it for Ueck” magic. Cardinals finish in last place and we can laugh at all the empty seats from the “best fans in baseball”.

Looks like the SEC was overrated in football and basketball. I’m sure the pundits will write this off because they “beat each other up” in the regular season or something.

I agree but I’m sure it will create some new problem as teams try to optimize to please the computer. The bubble controversy is just something to fill three days between selection Sunday and the tourney start. In a week everyone will have forgotten who the snubs were anyway. This isn’t like the college football playoff where a snub can entirely destroy a program. Sorry FSU…

How could the economic playing field for US goods possibly improve on the other side of all of these tariffs? I'm genuinely curious what that might look like. The best case scenario that I can think of is that things to like the Russia economic restrictions and we manage to find new trading partners.

I think any previous "soft landing" monetary policy can be thrown out the window at this point. The Fed will need a new strategy to deal with the current situation. Rate increases are more likely than decreases in my opinion. But I think everything is complicated by the uncertainty. If the tariffs happened and were set in stone, you might see more domestic hiring and higher wages. But with the uncertainty I think we might see higher prices without a corresponding uptick in investment in domestic production. I think stagflation is a real risk. The bottom line is that the economic policy decisions are being made to gain political leverage over various groups. The actual impacts to the economy are not really being considered, the goal is control.

The stock market would crash if the Fed lowered rates because it would indicate that the executive branch coerced them to do it. It would set off a panic for sure. The uncertainty is what’s killing the economy right now more than anything. If they set 25% tariffs and stuck with them the market would probably adapt and move on after a period of disruption. But instead it’s a new policy every day!

Is this real life? You actually believe that? The Fed better quit with the tariffs!

Yeah they wouldn’t want to do that. Need an independent source of funds. Someone deep pocketed who wants to resurrect women’s bball.

Increase their NIL fund?

Yeah I kinda wish it would drop hard to force policy changes but instead they are just punting tariffs out and delaying federal job cuts, so we will just sit in a period of uncertainty where the market stagnates or slowly slides.

I moved about half of my retirement savings to cash positions at the end of January and I’m riding it out now. I know it goes against common investing wisdom but I think this is an exception where it is very easy to time a market pullback. Figuring out the bottom may be more difficult but I’m not worried about that yet, it might be a while since it seems like it’s going to be a slow slide but the general policy goals of the current admin and their consequences couldn’t be more obvious.

The crazy thing is that it doesn’t feel like they are playing fast. They are just efficient. They get into their half court set and 5-10 seconds later they have found a high percentage shot.

Haven't watched much this year…wow this team can put up points. Crowl is having a heck of a game.

Really sad. It’s amazing how little fanfare this has gotten given it is the largest mass layoff in American history by far. Most of what I’ve seen has been personal stories like this. Lots more to come as government contracting companies go under. I have a family member at one at a 5,000 person company which is prepping to file for bankruptcy.

C+ Despite the grade I’m fine with the offseason, the reality of our finances is what it is. I’m glad we hung onto Hoskins and the Williams trade is a “wait and see”. I would have liked to see us make at least one more move with some high upside but it seems like the trade market has been pretty quiet and when 93 wins is your baseline you don’t necessarily have to shake things up too much with a fairly young team that should see some individuals have career years in 2025.

Switched to Hulu after November price increase. It’s been fine, all these services are basically the same. MLB season will be interesting, I’m currently boycotting paying for my local team (Seattle) until they make it easier to watch so might be sailing the high seas this year or watching more Brewers, which is free with MLB.tv through my season ticket membership.

Right, your company is screwed, but the markets won’t feel that for a while. Honestly good for Canada — they can’t win this fight on economic might but if they unite and boycott US made goods it will give them real leverage.

The markets mostly see this stuff as negotiating tactics for now. The real damage being done is going to take some time to filter through.

More the latter I think -- specifically the common assumption about where AI is going to go in the next 5-10 years. It's also about the dynamic between the buyers and sellers of AI models and chips as well as between open source and proprietary models. The assumption prior to this week is that the only way that these giant LLMs are going to get better is with more data and more compute -- basically building giant data centers with Nvidia chips that are so energy intensive that they need their own nuclear power plant. Microsoft has been throwing their weight and dollars in that direction, not to mention their stake in ChatGPT 4o. On the other side are the users of AI who clearly stand to benefit from this development. That's Meta and Apple. Meta's AI model is open source -- they were actively trying to encourage a startup like DeepSeek to make an innovation like this, which will eventually lead to cost savings. Apple hasn't invested much in AI relative to the other big players so the common assumption here is that they made the right call in not throwing hundreds of billions at an AI model that isn't any better than what a startup can do at a fraction of the cost. --- Personal take is that overall it isn't that big of a deal and I don't think anyone is all that surprised that somebody figured this out (possibly by stealing OpenAI data, but that doesn't really matter because OpenAI stole most of that data first). With hundreds of billions at stake it's a guarantee that people are going to figure this stuff out. None of it gets us any closer to AI replacing knowledge workers -- so maybe 5 years from now we just end up with cheaper AI that isn't much better than the current LLMs.

I think that’s an outdated line of thinking for the most part when it comes to China. In the case of DeepSeek, we’ll know in a week since the model is out there for anyone to verify. American CEOs also run their mouths with outlandish claims…