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Horn of Gabriel

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Everything posted by Horn of Gabriel

  1. The 12-team setup creates a situation where there's no enticement for ND to join a conference, ever. UNTIL the B1G and SEC start to become AFC/NFC and schedule each other nearly exclusively, then ND will find it hard to get enough top level games. That might do it, or a revenue difference compelling enough that they need to join to stay competitive for coaches or paying players from TV money, which make no mistake will happen in the next 20 years.
  2. I had to do this for a project car recently. There's no penalty fees, you do have to sign an affidavit that you didn't drive it, and that you haven't received any tickets for lack of registration. The major PITA is that you can't do it online (or at least couldn't do it online when I did it for WilCo), you had to go into the Tax Assessor/Collector office and do it in person, which means burning a few hours sitting on your ass. At least now mine does online appointments to cut down on the wait. You'll want to bring your title. They may not need it but good to have it.
  3. OK but even assuming that's true and yes as noted above there is plenty of "creative" accounting in many AD's to show breakeven or a loss every year...promotion/relegation only works if everyone agrees to do it. It's pretty obvious why SMU, UTSA, or UH would sign up for that. What motivation does Georgia, Texas, Ohio State or Bama have to sign up for a system where they could get relegated? I can't think of any.
  4. It's fun to think about but also completely unworkable for college football. Most athletic departments outside the top 20 are breakeven at best and many actually require subsidy from the university to be solvent. Texas is far outside the norm here with the revenue we throw out of the AD. Since football is the #1 revenue generator, if a more marginal school was relegated, their revenues would tank even further. Imagine being an Iowa State or an Arizona St., or Purdue or Ole Miss and you string together a few bad years and relegate down one or two levels. All of the sudden your conference schedule is what we know today as MAC, Sunbelt, and AAC teams at best. Your TV revenues tank, your gate tanks, and now your whole AD is insolvent. You have to cut a ton of headcount out of the AD and, probably, cut a bunch of other sports too. Especially women's sports, and now you have a Title IX issue. It's a death spiral. In european soccer a rich owner plugs that gap and invests to move up. In CFB, the "owens" are the donors, much more fickle. Also worth pointing out: in this system how far down would Texas have relegated from 2010-now? 2 levels? 3? Interesting to think about
  5. WSJ: Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a?mod=hp_lead_pos1
  6. Purple alternative Texas uniforms confirmed!!!!!
  7. We'll see if UW and UO sign any meaningful GOR. Doubtful.
  8. Now imagine Deion was a white coach saying that
  9. Not really, as more and more good teams get pulled into the major 2 conferences, there's fewer reasons for non-conf games. Go to 10 noncon, 3-4 permanent and 6-7 rotating. Blah blah NFL-lite, etc
  10. This is interesting; source on the Amazon 15-year GOR request?
  11. That would be the ultimate FU, would love to see Yomark hand us the trophy as we put a foot out the door.
  12. Couple of possibilities, in my ranked order of likelihood: They thought this would be like their prior balloon overflights and not be regarded as a big deal, but the media picked up on it and it blew up in their face The left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing because China is so big and bureaucratic, and while they underestimated the shitstorm, they weren't intentionally trying to fuck up the summit it was just a side-effect ... ... There's a shadowy cabal within the Chinese government that wants to sabotage any sort of bilateral relationship with the US and planned a balloon overflight of our airspace timed to Blinken's visit to disrupt it
  13. I'll admit I've been pleasantly surprised with the EU, especially Germany over the past year. However, let's also be realistic - we've been lucky. First, they've had a mild winter which reduced their gas consumption. Second, because LNG is a commodity we've been able to backfill Russian supplies to some extent and that ability is growing as the EU builds new LNG import facilities for US gas. Third, the Ukraine war is in the EU's backyard. None of those conditions exist for a faraway war between China and Taiwan/US. I think it's much more likely that Germany and the EU spearheads a strongly worded letter to China saying "No, really, stop!" and maybe some weak sanctions that they later back off on when they feel the pinch. Especially if they're already feeling a pinch from rising energy costs due to the Russian sanctions.
  14. Maybe in the long term. In the short term they are precariously close to being able to take the island and then figure they're too big to fail and will deal w/ the repercussions down the road. The world depends on Chinese manufacturing and supply chains way more than Russia; it was realatively easy to remove Russia from the global economy but it will do as major damage to the US if we shut down all trade with China also. Go through your house and see how much shit is made in China. It's everywhere and changing those supply chains to India or reshoring them to the US is a decade-long thing, not a flip the switch. In the meantime, voters are going to punish the party in power when they see a 40%+ price increase on daily goods to account for that re-shoring, as well as shortages. Also don't count on the EU for shit. They'll buckle. Agree, again, long term. China has a window for about 7-10 years now before they hit the rough patch there, and they have some homeport military advantages, AND the US population isn't bought into the need for the war. That could be enough to nudge Xi into action.
  15. You're correct, however China is rapidly closing this gap. They've recently been actively training for beach landings and deployment using roll-on/roll-off (RO-RO) ships. To your point, 100 miles is a lot and those waters will be contested. But China knows that, and they're dealing with that too. Specifically they've massively expanded their land based offensive ballistic and cruise missile capabilities for both anti-ship and land attack. From the link: Now you might say our anti-satellite, EW, jamming, and cyber capabilities make that issue moot and break the kill chain. You willing to bet 10,000+ sailors' lives on that? I don't think Biden or the Navy will be, and for that reason the SCS and Taiwan straight will be relegated to subs only and our carrier strike groups will be held at standoff range beyond the first island chain. We'll need 3-4 of them minimum and all the associated logistics that go along with that. At the same time, Guam and Okinawa will also be saturated by those missiles. We don't have enough anti-cruise and anti-ballistic missile defense to make up for the sheer numbers that China can throw out today, let alone tomorrow. If China gets serious, Guam and our other major Pacific bases will get cratered. This is why our recent news with the Philippines to open new and reopen old bases there is critically important to spread our assets. We can't keep all our planes hot seated, fueled and ready to take off on a moment's notice 24/7, so the AF is going to lose a shit ton on the ground. A recent wargame found that ~90% of the AF's ~300 planes lost were destroyed on the ground. We also tended to lose around 2 aircraft carriers and about a dozen ships in total. That sounds unfathomable, unthinkable. Our USAF and USN are too good right? I'm sure the French had similar thoughts about the Maginot line. OTOH, China has issues too. First they lack experience in amphibious landings, and that's really hard. We paid for our learnings up to Normandy in blood. The PLAN, PLAF, PLARF, and PLA haven't demonstrated combined warfare (yet). Their top-down culture is risk averse. Pros for China: Homecourt advantage Nationalistic fervor Easier supply chains Asymmetric advantages in missiles, potentially cyber Quiet diesel subs good for cross-straight and near costal fights AA/AD in SCS Enough nukes to hold us to MAD Cons for China: Technology disadvantage vs. US/allies Economic considerations of fighting one of their top 2 trading partners (this goes both ways) Lack of experience in amphibious landings Taiwan's geography works against them once they land (few viable beaches/ports to land at, lots of mountains and choke points make it defensible inland) Time - the longer it takes the worse for China once things go hot Pros for US: Overall much stronger military, better training and more professional Technology advantage in stealth, standoff weapons, anti-missile defense (although #'s limited), anti-sub warfare, space, and others Blue water Navy Cons for US: Military is currently spread around the world US population isn't bought into the need to defend Taiwan or spend our lives on another war in Asia Could go nuclear Long supply chains make sustainment really hard Relatively low supplies of anti-ship standoff range missiles like LRASM, which forces the USN to either put subs or carrier groups at risk Unlike Ukraine, Taiwan cannot realistically be resupplied once the conflict starts because we cannot guarantee air superiority due to mainland China's missile reach and proximity Limited basing options in AsiaPac make juicy targets for Chinese missiles + our antimissile defense is nowhere near enough to deal with their #'s If you really want to geek on this stuff, read the output of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) unclassified wargame "The First Battle of the Next War - Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan" released in January 2023. It's a sobering look at what we face. The bottom line: in most scenarios Taiwan is able to sustain as an independent democracy. The bad news: we lose a lot of lives and materials and our military is severely degraded for years to come (as is China's).
  16. Everything you write here would be relevant if China were not a dictatorship, which they are. This is the same country that during the Great Leap Forward allowed some 50M+ people to starve to death, and tortured and killed another 2-3M people to keep the population in line. And that was on a population base much smaller than now. Will things be different now? Maybe? Their government is not afraid of their people, the other way around. Xi is gonna do what Xi wants. His bigger fear is trying for Taiwan and losing, because that's how dictators get deposed or killed. He'll go if he feels like he can get it, and doesn't give 2 fucks about the losses.
  17. We can detect them. We just never regarded it as a threat because of a combination of: We assumed they could get equal to better intelligence out of satellite surveillance so why care The public wasn't awake to the threat so nbd We lack a symmetrical response...we just spent around $2M shooting down a $100K ballon. We can afford it so whatever but before the public cared I'm sure that no general wants to get dragged in front of the HASC to answer questions about "herp derp ballon" We lacked imagination about the threat...these are a serious problem, they could be a delivery vehicle for an EMP. This isn't Clancy-novel level shit, it would be an easy, non-attributable way to fuck the US in the ass if you put a ballon with a EMP-tuned low yield nuke device at 150K ft over the Eastern seaboard. We'd lose multiple millions of lives in the ensuing chaos and power outages. Now imagine 5000 of these balloons launched in the span of a few days and you have to shoot them all down...while China is making their crossing to Taiwan. Now that we're awake to this we'll plan for it better...and China will find another vector we're unconscious about. Hopefully we have some smart people in the intel community sitting around gaming all this out to protect us, because the current news doesn't exactly make me brim with confidence.
  18. What do you think we're doing by leaving the Big12? I'd say that has some bite for those remaining. Texas doesn't have the power here with regard to the schedule. Until we're out of the conference, we play by the conference's rules. Or I guess just forfeit because we're sad and stuff, which is a great look to our new conference mates in the SEC.
  19. Sounds good and is fun to think about but this is on the same level of thinking of people who say "let's just nuke Iran and turn the middle east to GLASS!!!!!1!" The repetitional and media hit we'd take for forfeiting a game b/c Houston was incompetent in setting up their stadium 20 years ago would be massive and lasting. It would give yet another excuse for the national media who already want to shit on Texas to do so, and the ensuing pile on from other fanbases about "cowardly" Texas, regardless of the real reasons. Thankfully our admin are adults. "The best revenge is living well." Go play at Houston, beat them by 4 TDs at their place. Stomp the rest of the Big12 and win the title on our way out with middle fingers held high. That's the plan.
  20. Fuck Fox. Get us out of this goddamn conference already!
  21. Set aside COVID for a sec, as hard as that is. Also set aside the origin discussion of lab leak vs. wet market vs. natural. Why do GoF? This is literally creating killer viruses in the lab that don't exist in nature. Some of these are relatively benign flu-like stuff, and some of them would make COVID look like a sniffle. We are basically trusting the future of humanity (not an exaggeration at this point) to the security of largely unregulated labs and disinterested governments around the world. It's like nuclear weapons, only worse, because there are only a few countries that could create nuclear devastation. There are at least dozens of countries capable of GoF now. We're one finger prick, one broken slide, or one mis-configured BSL lab from an extinction-level event. It came out that the Wuhan lab was supposed to be doing research at BSL-4 but was actually at BSL-3 or -2. This is scary, scary stuff and we're getting by on luck and voluntary regulation. It's beyond playing with fire, it's incredibly irresponsible because we're basically putting the nuclear football and big red button in every lab doing this research around the world. As pointed out above, our virological research and understanding has progressed independently of GoF research. We don't need it, it doesn't provide demonstrable value commensurate with the risks it poses and it should be banned WW. We've managed it with with human cloning - even China is onboard, and jailed the mad scientist that was going that direction. Any country that makes supportive moves of scientists trying human cloning would turn into a world pariah. We need to treat GoF the same.
  22. GMO carrots don't kill millions of people. Engineered viruses can.
  23. Fauci/not Fauci, China lab/not China lab IDGAF. The better question is EVEN IF the China lab didn't accidentally/intentionally release this, and EVEN IF Fauci/CDC/Whoever didn't realize what they were financing, why in the FUCK would we or anyone do gain-of-function research? That research is literally trying to create killer viruses that don't exist today, specifically the kind that can infect humans! Like, WTF! WHY?!?!?! I've seen Fauci and that British fucktard spinning bullshit about how GAF "helps us understand how viruses evolve in the wild so that we can better respond to them when they occur." Sorry, but that's bullshit. I have yet to see how 30 years of GOF research Pfizer and Moderna create their vaccine. Or any other evidence that the bullshit benefit outweighs the absolutely 100% certain and currently demonstrable risks of an outbreak like COVID. Or worse! COVID is actually mild compared some of the other shit they've cooked up that hasn't escaped. What if they created an airborne transmissible version of something like Ebola...imagination runs wild. The arrogance of the Fauci's and the Peter Daszak's of the world playing word games with "gain of function" to try to say the research Wuhan was doing wasn't actually GOF in his political fight w/ Rand Paul is astounding. Then basically saying "Well you normal people just aren't smart enough to understand what we're doing here" smacks of narcissists playing God in a lab. Yeah, we're not PhD virologists but we don't have to be to understand that gain of function "...aim to increase the ability of infectious agents to cause disease by enhancing its pathogenicity or by increasing its transmissibility." If someone can make the argument that GOF benefits outweigh the risks, I'd love to hear it.
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