Ripken

I chatted with his wife briefly last year at a baseball tournament Nick's son and my son were playing in. Let's just say, I know where some of Nick's money went...

I said months ago they'd start in July and finish the season. Still think that's right.

Some real nice arms still available. We're gonna take one right?!

At this point maybe we should just pass.

Brutal. Tank the season to get premium draft position, then tank the draft to get, uhh, fired? This set the franchise back again. I've been hugely pro-Elias but that's gone. He shit himself.

Horrid draft so far. Just awful. Thanks, Mike.

Horrid draft.

Ugh. Elias and crew sure know more than I do. Like the kid, really don't like him @ 2.

The players are killing this, as much as I don't like the owners. An incredible level of tone deaf from the Union.

Never understood the "Reyes as a prospect" thing. Kid couldn't hit water if he fell out of a boat, and that was in A ball. Still, sad for these guys. Rough times.

Absolutely. I agree and alluded to that elsewhere in here. One way or the other, people are heading back to normal life and I believe that should happen now (carefully), as that is the only real solution to this.

May restriction rollbacks are doing a lot of good in many places. That's the sort of opening up and return to normal we need. How things worked prior to that, and are still working in select places, is problematic. The ramifications of this will be life altering, for the overall good, I believe. What we learned about pandemics, good and bad, will be studied endlessly. Many places of business may never be the same. Tele-everything has been hugely tested and did very well overall. From that, figure business travel will decline, office visits should be less necessary, highway congestion hopefully goes down a bit, and so forth. Extrapolate those and maybe we get a small pollution decline. And so it goes. Everything is in play. A huge moment in history.

It's a global consideration. Life becomes a numbers game. This awful mess is killing people and it will for a while. Deaths from car accidents are way down. I'm sure suicides, domestic violence, and addiction related incidents are [way] up. Seemingly endless data points on those topics. What I don't believe we're giving enough consideration to are things like outpatient care for those with cancer. We've told them to stay home, miss treatment, and likely shortened life expectancy for them. Another idea being overlooked is that of stopping elective surgeries. People hear that and think about cosmetic surgeries but there are many "elective" surgeries that are critical to people, such as knee/hip replacements, tonsillectomies, scoliosis surgeries, cataract extraction, ligament repairs, and many others. The folks being denied this medical care are likely in many states of miserable. Further, after investigating all of the differences in countries, from population age, population density, climate, residential qualifying characteristics, global connectivity, and everything else, especially with widespread testing and causality issues... it becomes clear this virus hit everywhere in a fairly consistent manner. People will disagree with that. Sweden! New York! Italy! Idaho! The numbers globally, figuring in reporting errors and randomness, are fairly similar. When considering the variety of reactions, mitigations, and approaches, there is an enormous lesson there. We are more than 100 years from the Spanish flu. Beyond historical interest and nuance, these pandemics are not comparable in any sense that matters to our actions now. Technology, communication, and science have made this a vastly different world. Most businesses can survive a couple of months off but six months will wipe them out, the Federal government can not keep printing trillions of dollars, food supply chains will break, and many other ugly truths will be revealed, which bring with them an exponentially larger cost of life. A global depression will wipe out millions. We need to get back to our lives. There is no bigger truth in this.

Some disclaimers here. No one, including and especially the CDC and WHO, have been right about much. I'm not in the health care field or a related science. I value any opinion on this. We're all throwing darts at some level hoping to get lucky. Appreciate the discussion. Ready? I absolutely disagree with 6%. I don't believe it is anywhere near that. I imagine once we realize how many walking carriers are out there we'll see mortality is under 1%, even well under for "healthy people". I also believe the number of reported deaths is higher than what is true. The majority of deaths are elderly and most of the rest are health-compromised people. And I'm not making light of death, just discussing where we are. It really wiped out some nursing homes and the like. The most vulnerable need to stay home for now but, thankfully, elderly people are not a measurable part of the economy. Beyond that, I think everyone waiting for testing and vaccine(s) are going to be disappointed. Vaccines take time. The reports of progress and expediting the process are great but I really doubt it's coming soon and even then it's not 100% effective. It's a weapon in our arsenal against this but not the answer. Testing has been wildly inconsistent with times and accuracy. Further, what good is a test if, 10 minutes after you take one, you go near another human, or go to a public place, or in any way expose yourself in some manner? We're passing this thing while being asymptomatic too. Unless we really come up with, I dunno, heat cameras or something that are highly capable of spotting this in real time, tests are helpful but not the answer either. We need the healthy people to go out there, live normal lives, precautions being used, but they need to get this thing and prevail until the virus runs into corners where it can't spread anymore and it just dies off. That's herd immunity and it's the only real solution. Yes, people will die. People have already died. People will die no matter what path we take. Beyond all of that, two-thirds of new cases in NY were from people staying at home and social distancing. Think about that. We're already doing herd immunity. After a few months of being trapped inside, and once warm weather gets here, people will get on with living and that's what we need. Calling it a war is accurate. You send a million young people to battle, knowing 100,000 will die, to prevent an invasion that could kill 10 million. All the previous pandemics (yes, not as severe) followed the same path and took up to 18 months or so to go away. Summer helps, some treatments have some good results, but in the end, the virus just stops hurting us, outside of some mutated strains here and there. Epidemiologists and Virologists have admitted as much. Then there's this and I mean it sincerely (not being a dick): Walk me through how staying home 6-18 more months and completely trashing the economy isn't a far more devastating outcome. Flattening the curve was just that: slow the initial infections so we can load up on supplies, learn about the virus, and get going on every possible level of prevention and cure, while not overloading the health care facilities. We've done that. It's time to get going.

A tough situation for sure. There will need to be creative answers, many of which are happening now but we'll need other approaches, too. Smaller, isolated daycare setups, in a home possibly, with a preschool teacher that isn't working at their preschool. Maybe some summer camp solutions for splitting kids into smaller subgroups. There are people who have been out of their home working the last two months. What have they done during this time with their children? In some cases, it's possible one adult was home while another worked and now both will be out working, but many have found solutions to their kid's distance learning already. More varied hours, maybe. One thing that's very clear, while 20% unemployment is terrible, a bright side is that many of the 80% working are doing so from home and that does not need to change until schools are open. I've been teleworking this entire time and I know I won't be back on my Federal campus any time soon, for several reasons, but the top of that list is having children at home.