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Murfdogg21

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Everything posted by Murfdogg21

  1. The Astros had the #3 to #7 highest payroll last year depending which site you look at, and are sitting in the top 10 for 2025 before resigning Bregman or whatever they end up doing. It's not like we have the A's, Rays, or Pirates ownership. They shipped prospects to get Verlander back in 2023 and to get Kikuchi last season, and haven't restocked the shelves. Crane burned himself with the Abreu and Montero contracts, but all of us were thinking Abreu was going to be crushing a lot of dingers to the Crawford boxes when he signed. It would be nice if Crane admitted he made a mistake and spent an extra $30m more than he planned to in 2025 to offset the dead money of those two contracts. Mega contracts in baseball are never worth it. You'll get some good years and some bad years, but you'll be paying top dollar every year. By the end, it's just a money sink that really only NYY, NYM, and LAD seem to be able to afford.
  2. Hey man, I just file the TPS reports.
  3. and chooses to flee by riding a Greyhound to McDonalds...sounds like grounds for an insanity plea.
  4. Effectively yes, but the committee could lower them and they are only guaranteed a bye if they are in the committee’s top 4 conference champions. The committee dropped FSU to 5th last year based on the QB being out.
  5. Learning from FSU, Georgia will wait until after the rankings are announced to report Beck has a torn UCL and punter blew out his ACL.
  6. Quinn throws off his back foot 90+% of the time. His elite arm talent allowed him to thrive in spite of poor mechanics in high school and against poor college defenses. Sark and offensive staff probably should’ve worked on this the past 3 years to make him better for Texas and his draft stock. When he’s under pressure from a rush, dealing with an injury, and/or in a high pressure situation, it gets magnified and he floats balls.
  7. Arch at QB improves those rushing numbers through his runs as well as opening things up for Wisner due to threat of Arch run.
  8. If Sark is getting scared/conservative here because he can’t trust Ewers, then Ewers shouldn’t be playing.
  9. Can we start an NIL to fund Bert cutting his stupid ass ginger curls?
  10. As a semi-professional medical scientist, I'd speculate that the amount of shit ingredients and substitutes put into processed food and beverages has increased at a similar trend to obesity. Perhaps some people's genetics are minimally effected, while others store excess calories. Some of these ingredients have neurological effects, such as craving/addiction and behavioral disorders in children. Most European countries ban these ingredients or slap warning labels all over it, which could relate to Europeans not being as obese as Americans. Also, the poorer you are, the more cheap food you buy, which has more of the crap ingredients. Switching all Americans to fresh meat, produce, dairy, and baked goods and eliminating processed sweets, pasta, sauces, etc. would probably result in a significant decline in obesity without watching calories.
  11. The discussion of healthcare costs and sources of greed and inefficiency warrant its own thread, but I'll jump in here. The entire spectrum of "healthcare" is tainted and would require a complete reboot which would cause serious damage to stakeholders throughout even if it is the best long term solution. 1. Education costs - Why is it so damn expensive? The costs and debt are major justifications for physicians' salaries. If I ever ran for federal office, I'd campaign to treat "healthcare" education (med school, nursing, may stretch into associated med techs and admin, maybe even dentistry while we're at it) like ROTC type programs. Tuition subsidized or completely funded in return for minimum term of service at some lower salary. Encourage opening more medical and dental schools. Lower the barrier to entry for more professionals, lock them in for a few years at a reasonable (perhaps "below market") rate, and more competition among providers when they are free agents. Universities have been jacking up tuition because they have unlimited demand and know people can just go into 6 figure debt. 2. Physician costs - Should getting into med school justify a lifetime of top 1% or 0.1% status? I realize not all doctors make that kind of money (family, GP, etc.) and I am biased by my frequent interactions with ortho surgeons, spine surgeons, sports medicine, and interventional/PM&R docs. Although not universal, the overwhelming majority of those docs make great money and are always looking at how to make more, sometimes unethically. I'm not in sales and don't worry about offending them, so sometimes I engage in this debate and they will lean hard into they deserve it because so few can do what they do (get accepted and graduate from med school? Perform injections or surgery after years of training?). There are many talented people that could've pursued medicine, and most that did were driven (on some level) by earnings potential. Defensive doctors often point at the debt incurred during college, med school, and residency as a justification...so we could eliminate that via #1 above. 3. Hospitals, ASCs, private practices - Nobody still sees these entities as anything but for-profit businesses, right? Hospitals and ASCs collect the lion's share of procedure reimbursements, and try to cut their costs by pushing (or forcing) the lowest cost supplies (medical devices, implants, third party services), reduced support staff (nurses, techs, admins), and ways of reducing physicians' fees and options. For private practices, doctors/owners go to as many business conferences as they do medical conferences to learn how to maximize profit, cut costs, minimize liability, etc. We could dedicate part of the great enshittening thread to this topic. Now we're in an era of private equity buying out hospitals, ASCs, and private practices (and dental and veterinary clinics too, for that matter), making the doctors salaried (more or less) employees, and reorganizing everything to maximize income and minimize costs. 4. Self-insured employers - Many (most?) mid to large size companies and municipalities have employee insurance administered through Aetna, UHC, BCBS, etc. but are actually self-funded. They collaborate with the brokers to set premiums, deductibles, fees, and coverage. Some employers look out for their employees more than others and take a big hit on these costs to offer cheaper healthcare, others absorb little to nothing of the costs and pass it right through via a crappy insurance plan at high premiums and deductibles. 5. Insurance companies - Not much need to add to what has already been discussed in this thread. They set premiums and reimbursements to maximize profit as much as the market will tolerate, while trying to minimize services covered. All of the entities above are for profit (some will argue universities aren't, but come on). If they didn't make a profit, why would they be doing it? If they were out of the space, there would be less competition and theoretically higher costs and/or lesser quality and variety of service. How much profit is "too much"? As with all debates on capitalism, which of these should have prices capped by the government? How much lower should the cap be than "free market" rates? How will such caps reduce the number of players and long term state of the healthcare industry? Would fixed, lower education costs cause some universities to drop medical and nursing programs? Caps on physician fees would push some out of the business (it already has a bit) and push other college graduate into alternative fields. Hospitals, ASCs, private practices, and similar facilities would not respond to lowered reimbursements by accepting lower profit, but through further cutting their costs in head count of support staff and quality of supplies. Forcing self-insured employers into coverage minimums and premium maximums could be possible, but they would offset it by reducing other forms of compensation to employees. Capping the profits of insurance companies could make healthcare more affordable in the short run, benefiting consumers. However, there are risks associated with reduced innovation, possible market consolidation, exploiting loopholes, and a potential decline in the quality of care. The overall impact would depend heavily on the specifics of the policy, including how the cap is structured, the level at which it is set, and how insurers adjust their business practices.
  12. I think the concern was/is that we can’t beat Georgia or Oregon with mediocre QB play, and Arch provides a threat in zone reads, RPO, and deep passes that defenses don’t have to plan for with Quinn. It’s possible that Quinn can be better than Arch at somethings (like reading defense, pinpoint accuracy in short to medium passes), but Arch’s strengths give us a better chance of beating elite teams.
  13. Usually salary caps include salary floors, so the players collectively make more money. It just gets spread around to more mid tier guys than just being too heavy. NFLPA usually goes with it because the rank and file guys are the majority of votes and they get more money.
  14. We wore white jerseys when we won the 2005, 2009, and 2023 Big 12 championship games.
  15. Available. Ball game.
  16. They can change the song lyrics to “Saw junior varsity’s horns off”
  17. It’s a Ritchie Valens remix.
  18. Time to get you back to aggy misery rehab before you die again.
  19. Yeah and about 100 of those yards came from a Jaxon Shipley double pass and the derp derp derp run. Ewers made some great throws in the first half and Wisner was a fucking man tonight.
  20. Case McCoy also beat OU and aggy.
  21. At least they won’t have to ask the SEC commissioner to dodge us in bowl games anymore, and we won’t be seeing them in a playoff game for the foreseeable future. Advantage aggy?
  22. Being unsatisfied with a QB who throws off his back foot and quasi side arm 90+% of the time and turns the ball over regularly while we have a team with legitimate title aspirations makes one a pussy who should suck penis? If we keep winning while consciously accepting poor mechanics and inaccuracy under pressure that lead to turnovers and overthrows, all Longhorns should be happy but eventually it will catch up to us against a good team. Maybe Arch doesn’t know the playbook and read sequence as well as Ewers, but he sure as hell is more of a running threat on RPO and designed runs and can throw the ball down the field. If the season ends short of championship and Ewers didn’t have any ball out games (300+ with 80% of it is yards after catch isn’t as impressive as 300+ mostly through the air, which is what Ewers fanboys imply when touting 300 yard games), most fans will ask what if Arch had got more snaps post-Miss State. Could it have made the offense more dynamic and helped win it all? If we end up losing a playoff game either way, is it not better for 2025 to play Arch more in 2024? We are lucky that our defense is fucking awesome and Wisner is a stud running hard through small gaps and racking up yards after contact.
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