Horn of Gabriel

1st timer here with LHF, we went baller style Section 4 row 57, close to the 50YL and under the overhang. My wife (no pics) is a fair skinned ginger and wants to be able to duck into the A/C sometimes, but you can't buy touchdown club access unless you sit down there. LHF told me that the club on the west side *starts* at $15K donation (!!!). Are there any other options or is it just cross the street to the alumni center?

If you're into Allbirds, they're very comfortable https://www.allbirds.com/products/mens-tree-dashers-diablo

Wait, wut? We're going to have a SEC-only playoff before the CFP playoff? That seems...unwise and unlikely. Top 2 seeds go to SEC CCG. Fewer losses in the SEC top tier = more CFP eligible entrants. Why would SEC shoot itself in the foot by adding losses to the top 4 teams w/ semifinals? The SEC champ will not need "additional data points" to get into the CFP, all that does it hurt SEC's #2-4 chances. Money isn't it either, as the money made from extra CFP participants would dwarf the money made from add'l SEC-only games.

We should all take the move to the SEC as the opportunity to ask ourselves as fans: "How can we be more arrogant?"

Agree, they blew it on the final episode of Loki. And I love the series, but they mostly ignored the personal stakes they setup for Loki and Sylvie and we got 30 minutes of He Who Remains talking at us to give us exposition to setup Phase 4. Also agree w/ the confusing terminology re: multiverse and timeline. Does each universe have its own timeline? Or are the branches on the off the old sacred timeline now the different 'verses?

@cactusflinthead once I murder the nutsedge with Certainty and it goes to brown, is it safe to pull at that point? Or will that still re-seed it?

You know the drill, quote and say "buy" or "sell." Then add your own. Buy/Sell - Texas wins 10 games this year.

Sure but that extreme due process is the point of why shit is so expensive to build here. Compare to China where some CCP flack decides a train line is going thru your house, they just build it. And they LOL at environmental impact studies. I’m kinda OK with the tradeoff.

Self-quote alert! @cactusflinthead any ideas?

No one tells the truth when it comes time to raise prices. Because if you're pricing correctly, you're pricing based on what people are willing-to-pay for the product. You blame your costs when raising prices because that is what the market accepts. It's why the airlines always point to fuel costs when raising prices even though they've hedged their fuel cost 20 years out. Prices aren't raised to pay CEO bonuses and shareholder dividends. Those things are the effects of higher profitability not the causes of pricing increases. Companies who over-shoot pricing increases are either beat by competitors who undercut them or the market who refuses to pay for their products and they aren't paying big money to shareholders for failure.

Next time try watching with your wife, she'll explain the rules to you.

This Spurs fan is going Suns all the way!

Really? Are ND fans worked up about not getting top 4? Because, there's...a pretty clear path for ND to get a top 4 AQ...just not the one they want. I'd argue ND has more, not less, access to CFP in the 12-team playoff. Before you had to go undefeated or have things break just right with a loss. Now you can go 10-2 and probably still get in. Oh and it completely takes away any pressure to join a conference, cementing ND's independent status b/c you get that without joining the ACC and not having to compete in a CCG. Seems like a pretty fair trade, in fact I'm not sure Texas couldn't do the same, hmmm.

Betting the fucking PAC and Rose Bowl find a way to sink this. I have such a love/hate relationship w/ the Rose Bowl. On one had, they should be the all-time host of the CFP Championship. The venue is just too perfect. On the other hand fuck the Rose Bowl and their B1G/PAC hangup.

For SEC to get 5 in, they need their conf champ, plus 4 of the 6 at-large spots. Possible? Sure. Likely? Hmm, we'll see I guess. I can easily buy 3 and maybe 4 but 5? I haven't looked into the past several years, would the top-12 rankings support that? Regardless, the following is true: SEC has gotten and will get in the short/medium term more teams into the CFP than the other conferences That won't change until SEC starts losing on the field You can't beat them on the field w/o getting teams into the playoff, which means... You need to do everything you can as a conference to get more teams eligible for the playoff, not kowtow to some idea that RR is "best," or "more pure," "most real" way of getting to 1 true champion, b/c the people who matter with regard to CFP access have demonstrated that they don't care about that Which is the reason why people upthread are advocating for BIG12 conference wide shift in scheduling to take out the RR and replicate part of the SEC model for scheduling. Less in-conf, more OOC, more wins, fewer losses, which... Starts the process of breaking the self-fulfilling prophecy the SEC has set up. Right now we're fighting w/ one hand tied behind our back. I don't like fighting on an unlevel playing field.

We may not like it for fan service, but it's pretty clear we need to 1) keep the CCG, and 2) stop the round-robin by reducing the in-conf games, which creates more intra-Big12 losses and the perception of a weaker league, especially @ the bottom. Split by divisions, play a protected rival and add an OOC. The strength of that OOC can be higher OR lower than the in-conf game we'd be losing depending on how that team wants to schedule. It's pretty apparent that scheduling cupcakes hasn't damaged the SEC, pretty much the opposite. So we have lots of data on that. Or we could add a marquee name if we prefer; I'd go for mid-tier P5 with compelling road trips personally vs. going to Ames (no offense to ISU).

Uhh, so dumb question amnesty...how do you get those big ass cranes out after they build themselves in?

I see a lot of justification that seems suspiciously like hand-waving from elite virologists like Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance regard GoF and its benefits to mankind and preventing or mitigating exactly this type of pandemic. When I look for specifics I get some variation of "well you have to be an elite virologist to really understand any of this..." That is bull. Lots of complex topics are made simple and clear in terms of their benefits and risks to laypeople, many of whom in the U.S. are apparently funding this research via the Government. I'd love to see this broken down as "we prevented X pandemic" or "our GoF research accelerated vaccine discovery and production for a virus we first created artificially in the lab and later actually emerged in the wild." And for good measure I'd like to hear that from someone other than the scientists directly benefitting from the research grant. Maybe those benefits actually exist; I'd love to see them! Right now the risks seem pretty clear, the benefits murky. OK? Thank you for illustrating a real benefit to tradeoff against the risk. Dealing with horrifying pathogens involves risks and should be regulated tighter than it is today. It still doesn't address the question of what benefit we're getting from literally creating new, more horrifying, more transmissive pathogens.

Regardless of lab-leak or natural, can we agree that gain-of-function research is fucking stupid? I see Dazak and virologists who want funding talking about all these wonderful supposed benefits of GoF: we need to "get ahead" of nature, etc. Have any of these benefits actually come true? Where was getting ahead of nature w/ COVID? Do we have demonstrable benefits from GoF to weigh against the real, documented lab-leaks that happen anywhere there is a BSL lab?

Dropping into this thread for the first time in a long time...I'm still fighting my (lifelong) battle here in Cedar Park with nutsedge. Fuckin' A I hate this stuff. I have an ornamental garden and it's a total PITA. I've tried super-concentrated glyphosphate w/ surfactant and it laughed at me, plus that shit kills the nice plants I want to keep. On the recommendation of this group I went to sedgehammer and then finally to Certainty (applied w/ surfactant w/ handheld sprayer) and that works...sort of. Takes awhile to see results and no sooner do I have it knocked down than I have to do it all over again and damn if it doesn't come back on my quick. If I get lazy or miss it then it's all over the place FAST. Is there any newer or better recommendations here or is it just a fact of life that this stuff sucks and "deal with it?" Second question is new, I use Emerald Lawns for helping me manage the routine with the turf grass (St. Aug in the front of the house, zoysia in the rear), and every other year I had been getting core aeration done. They've shifted to "liquid aeration" which they claim is better, here: https://emeraldlawnsaustin.com/services/lawn-aeration/...is that true or B.S.? It's certainly less expensive per application than core, but they want to do it more often. What's the truth? Oh one other question...I have a really nice thornless "Maverick Mesquite" tree at the edge of the turf and garden. It hasn't done anything since the freeze...I'm really hoping it's just still dormant and not dead. I've read that mesqites sometimes take a long time to come back or can even skip...anyone with direct experience here?

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is a slogan popularized by Karl Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. Nope, not Marxist at all.

LOL right back atcha. I told you like I see it also. And because this is an online political thread: get fucked you Nazi cuck bitch

I'd characterize it as are we looking forward or backward. At the risk of cloaking this further, if you have nail everything looks like a hammer. Let's say that this...lacks imagination and there may be lots of reasons beyond government policies to account for differences between groups. LOL are you suggesting that, assuming an achievement gap exists for Nigerian-Americans vs. AA as a whole, that Nigerian-Americans is too fine-grained a slice to statistically represent? That's...interesting. This is too CR already and everyone's entrenched into familiar positions. I'll close my participation by stating my opinion, which is that closing the wealth gap programmatically is not feasible, and will not have enough political support in my lifetime to perform once we move from generalities that everyone gets behind ("let's raise up AA to redress past wrongs!") to specifics ("The gov't is going to spend $12 trillion to cut direct payment cheques to AA and those who identify as AA [for at least 12 years], raising taxes significantly for you and your kids to pay off"). To tie this back to the OP, I and apparently others believe that CRT and it's execution vehicle DEI are a stalking horse for reparations - if you convince the world that if you're white, you're racist, then you must "feel bad," "check your privilege," and assign any difference between groups as a result of your (in)action and lack of antiracism, so reparations are the logical end step to the journey. Except I'm not convinced if we cut $12 trillion in direct payments as Sandy Darity suggests in the video above that it would be the end of anything. It would be the beginning. I'll hang up and await being called racist...

Now we are getting somewhere! Kendi hasn't to my knowledge expanded more on this amendment, but it sounds pretty horrific to me, an unelected department with veto power over laws at every level and the ability to somehow punish those who talk wrongly. Yikes. You want to affirmatively lift up those who have been pushed down by policy; a laudable goal. How far back do you want to go? Are we lifting those up pushed down by policy today (I'd argue for fixing the bad policy itself first if it hasn't been addressed) or are we redressing old policies? If old, does the person pushed down still need to be alive and suffering or do we extend that grace to their children? Their children's children's children? Is the goal to create equality of opportunity or equity of result? If equity, do you, like Kendi, put 100% of the differences in outcomes between races on racist policies? If so, how do we account for certain subgroups of BIPOC achieving at much higher rates than the mean of the group, such as the Nigerian-Americans and Cuban-Americans cited upthread?

Just a friendly reminder that however biased or not Fareed Zakaria is, he is still a plagiarist.