Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Let’s see where this goes. I’m not happy about how this shitty guy is our President, but I also think this is all very interesting. Either way we’ll find out, no choices here.

If we think of removing the 3.5mm jack on iPhones and rumored next Sammy’s Galaxy phone as how Apple removed less-used IO devices like optical drives and Ethernet ports, then it makes sense.

Is it anti-consumer? I don’t know, they do include a dongle in the device so not really to me. Could it have been done better? Yeah sure.

The problem I have isn’t the whining–the whining is the solution to the problem that I have–the problem is that Bluetooth is this wild child growing up on the sidewalks and street corners of today’s gadgets metropolis. Someone needs to take him/her in and give Bluetooth the grooming and upbringing it deserves. If the wireless future is to continue, and based on what I understand about Bluetooth there’s nothing technically inferior about it, companies need to drive this technology.

The problem with audio technology in general is that consumers are far from discerning. As much as I look down on Beats phones, the commercial success of those fashionable cans does drive people to new habits–namely buying better quality headsets. That in turn should drive more people to better Bluetooth devices. Historically BT was used for crappy conference speakers and headsets that sound like a 3200baud modem. And that has been the way China and all them product chains are working. (Side note: same thing is happening with cables for USB-C). This means the marketplace is flooded with terrible BT implementations. And nobody knows any better.

So in order to take dongle life to the next stage, we need better BT implementation. Which is why Apple did just that. This is why Android OEMs need to take note and play along. I think by ditching the 3.5mm that will mobilize public attention on this issue. If we want real progress we can’t just let fools keep fooling around with their cables, as suitable as it might be. Life is better when wirelessly portable is literally wireless.

I’ve been reading the Fivethirtyeight a lot this election cycle. It’s a handy site that aggregates at least all the poll results. As we just move past the first Presidential debate it is definitely a daily stop if to just see how the numbers move every day.

So they wrote this article. And I feel it’s time to rant a bit. As divisive as Trump was during the Republican primary, a lot of Christians (Evangelicals or not) have rallied back under the party banner. This just boggles the mind though. How can one possibly continue to support the same monster they despised merely 4 months ago?

They may cite the Supreme Court thing, but I guess my take on it is different than the typical full-ticket Republican. I think it’s hubris and a continuation of the failure of the Republican party to not take the Obama nominee, who is by all means going to be way more centrist than a HRC nominee. What kind of sane person would put it off, knowing Trump is likely going to win the Republican ticket? I mean, underneath the Supreme Court debate is that dereliction of Congressional Republican’s constitutional duty to keep the Court full is karmic retribution when the likely Democrat winner takes office next year? If I was God, this seems like the perfect conclusion to an election season where the Republican party, the party which the mainstream American Christians vote for, got stuck with its best representative.

It’s party politics and perhaps the year-in, year-out, public display of dysfunction is what’s driving the Democratic party forward this year, possibly electing one of the least popular Presidential candidate ever. I guess when they go low, the Republicans go even lower. We can only elect Baby Boomers for so much longer, guys. When Millennials get into their 30s there will be a reckoning, and I feel Evangelicals are at least labeled as people who can take a stand against the continuing crumbling of the Republican Party, as that does nobody, even Democrats, any good.

And while I don’t ask this from my Christian friends, but how can anyone who actually believes in this stuff, and not your casual Easter/Christmas Churchgoer, support your Republican Congress? The GOP has huge problems, and maybe some time as a minority party is the opportunity for it to recover.

MLB first baseman Mark Teixeira today announced that he will retire from pro baseball at the end of the season. This is his last year on the Yankee’s contract, which will run for 8 years and $180 million dollars after all is said and done. The local state rag ran a poll and it seems most people valued the contract favorably in hindsight.

Statistically, Mark was a quality defensive player throughout the years he played. The past 4 years he was plagued by injuries, especially in 2014 and 2016. The freakish thing was he played maybe 2/3 of the games in 2015 with an OPS+ of 146, which is freakish given he was clearly on a declining state athletically speaking, as he last cracked OPS+ 140 in the 2009 world-series-winning year at 141 OPS+.

But 180M/8 years is a lot of cash. Granted it would be tough to sign a top free agent in their prime without committing to a long contract that covered their declining years as well, but in Mark’s case he could have had his best post-Yankee years in 2015, if not for a foul ball that fractured his tibia. I mean, this is not the kind of injury that you can truly prevent while performing at an All-Star level.

The prudent and sensible way to evaluate the contract is to compare this 8-year contract with other similar-length contracts of position players who signed at around their late 20s. But I think I’m more interested to see how hindsight bias overwrites the factor of luck that plays into these long-term contract evaluations.

Injury is a part of MLB. People get hurt, especially the more they play and the older they got–two factors that are also correlated. The fact is you can guess how much a player is likely to get hurt only based on fairly poorly-explored medical knowledge. Injury due to hit-by-pitch or hit-by-foul-balls are as freakish as anything.

How did luck play a role in how we evaluate Tex’s contract? In hindsight, Tex was just good, not great, during his healthy years, outside of 2015 and 2009. He was great in 2015 and 2009. He was effectively out of commission for 2 seasons (but you take that over the situation he’s in today, as a Yankee fan). So not counting the injuries, the Tex contract was just OK. It definitely worked out in a way that you could have foresaw back in 2008 (minus, again, 2015).

It’s similar to that you can’t really expect David Ortiz to be the best hitter in the Majors at age 40, I suppose. Luck is a skill in these things.