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Horn of Gabriel

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Everything posted by Horn of Gabriel

  1. If he can get it why not? How would it be different than OpenAI or Microsoft offering their employees stock options? Or the big Wall Street firms doling out bonuses based on profit sharing? It's all collectively bargained anyway so it's not like he's holding them hostage.
  2. The NY Liberty are owned by Joe Tsai, net worth of $11+ Billion. The new Cleveland Franchise owner is Dan Gilbert, $32 Billion. Ted Leonsis owns the Washington Mystics, $3.1 Billion. Herb Simon owns the Indiana Fever, $5.1 Billion. The WNBAs revenues just went up 6X in their most recent contract. The W will pull down north of $250MM in TV revenue this year - thanks Caitlin! I'm more with the players here. League interest is way up. Revenues are way up. Franchise valuations are way up. Player salaries are flat. That's why they opted out of the CBA. The "nobody watches" myth is busted, and the "WNBA runs a loss" is based on old revenue numbers while pumping up the cost side. Billionaire owners pay themselves as their franchises rent facilities owned by the owners. Moving money around, tax loss harvesting, etc. I have not seen any franchise P&L statement as of yet, just a lot of bluster. If I were a player I'd opt out too.
  3. My biggest concerns this year are that: Our WRs legs don't fall off after catching 80 yard bomb after 80 yard bomb Arch's doesn't get enough passes due to him going 7/7, 7TDs, 560 yards and getting pulled at halftime each game Simmons doesn't pull his hamstring celebrating his 50th sack somewhere around game 4 or 5 If we can avoid that, I think we're good.
  4. It would also be glorious to see FSU meltdown again after suing their own conference in the hope of getting into the SEC.
  5. Just got done with it. The Good: the retro feel, the musical score. Both were very well done. Pascal and Kirby were solid actors in their roles. Other two were just OK. The Bad: because they didn’t want to do the origin story for the Nth time, it required a 10 minute exposition dump off the top. That was tedious and not super effective. They chose Galactus as the big bad and he just doesn’t translate well to screen: a deity-level neigh invulnerable being the size of a skyscraper with power levels ranging from “can destroy star systems” on the low end to “kills Eternals and comp able to Infinity” on the high end. The Ugly: even for a Marvel movie this story had a usually high amount of “turn your brain off” level plot holes. To hit just a few: 9 month pregnant women goes to space, time dilation effect of FTL travel ignored while at the same time used to trap the Silver Surfer, weakass explanation for Johnny even being able to use his flame power inside a spacesuit full of oxygen, “let’s turn off and conserve power so we can use it later” …power doesn’t work that way. And it’s a minor bit but it stretches belief to have a reality where we have flying cars and teleportation but still use cassette tape drives and CRT tube displays. And we launch our space shuttle from downtown NYC. But, but, but the comics! Yeah, change the dumb shit.
  6. A forward-thinking, creative and smart players union might attempt to negotiate not just higher salaries but for % ownership in the W-franchises. It could even be structured smartly to not dilute the current owners by saying "If we take the value of the Indiana Fever as $75MM today, as part of the next CBA grant the players ownership pool will get 10% of the increase in value at the time of the sale of the franchise, to go into a pool for the players and then distributed to the players by a formula accounting for tenure, games played, etc." Now when an owner buys in for $20MM and sells for $400MM, the players would get 10% of $380MM or $38MM into their pool. Multiply this by all the franchises and you've now tightly aligned the goals of both players and owners: to grow the value of the WNBA. As the W gets to 16 teams with a roster of 12* (really 11) that makes about 192 players in the W. If one of those franchises sells every other year, and generates $40MM to the pool, that's about $100K average upside per player per year. Of course the owners would immediately reject this because they're not idiots and billionaires didn't get that way by giving away their upside to employees. They know that their payout comes from the value growth of the franchise not the year-to-year revenues. However, putting this offer out there in lieu of higher salaries would be smarter than printing t-shirts saying "Pay us what you owe us," because it would force the owners to reject the offer and then that would create leverage for the higher salaries conversation.
  7. I'm going to advocate for both owners and players in this post. To the point above, no. Players don't get the benefits of "massive franchise valuation growth" because 1) they didn't put up the money/risk buy the franchise, and 2) those are paper, not realized gains and could disappear tomorrow. In the players favor however, it's a common talking point about how the WNBA "loses money," and as a result the players should be grateful to even have a job, it's subsidized by the NBA, etc etc. All of that is only a partial truth. I'm sure the WNBA does lose money, but it's not as much as people think. First, the NBA has not (until recently) broken out the TV rights so they've under optimized the revenue generation piece. Second, the cost side is warped and not in favor of the W. Aside from personnel costs, their biggest costs are facilities. Most of the facilities are owned by the same owner groups who own the franchises, who then get those franchises to pay their facilities. They're paying themselves, and moving money around. By suppressing revenue accounting and increasing cost accounting, there is definitely some tax loss harvesting going on. On top of all that, the owners don't get to decide what the players are worth, the market does. The owners just have to decide if they want to pay it. Don't the players make multiples of their WNBA salaries playing in Europe or some of the other leagues?
  8. This post isn't getting enough love because @Vegas64 nailed it. The W is a very queer and black league. The lily-white, straight, cis, Christian Caitlin Clark shows up and they are hearing the hype train coming in before she even enters the association and they are pissed, for all the reasons quoted above. Think about it, if you are in a white collar job, you've been doing your very best over the past several years, and all of the sudden your management recruits a Harvard MBA to join after they graduate, and all you hear about is "He's going to put us on the map," "We'd be nothing without him," etc, you'd be pissed too (even if all that were true). The reason the WNBA had a niche audience isn't that they were predominantly queer or black. It's because the games were not entertaining to watch for an audience expecting NBA basketball. Truth is women's basketball may be played on the same court but it's not the same game. Pre-CC fans knew that and maybe even liked it. If you're a men's basketball fan, you see the games in the W and say "WTF is this shit?" They brick open layups on the regular, there are about 5 airballs per game minimum, tons of midrange bricks, the style of play is ugly in that most teams pound it into a big in the middle to shoot a contested 3-footer with 2 people hanging on her, the officiating is terrible, and the few players who are explosive enough to beat the first defender and uncalled foul that comes with it don't have the power to finish in the lane regularly. Because they allow so much physicality, it's no surprise that players do what they're allowed to do and favor the defense. When I watched Dallas vs. Indiana they were quoting Paige B. as saying she had to learn how to foul because they don't call it and if she's not fouling, she's not playing hard enough defense. It feels very 90's NBA when the Spurs won their first championship against the Knicks and the average score was 82-76 or something. CC is too aggressive in her passes and she generates too many turnovers as a result. She attempts passes that the men could catch but the women on her team either aren't used to the speed, angle, or just don't have the reaction time or hands to handle. She also has her own share of passes she should have never made like any PG. I'm a fan and think she will adapt and improve. But over aggression in her passes is not her biggest issue. Her biggest issue is lack of a deadly mid-range/floater. Her instinct right now is to run the P&R looking for the roller, or to pop back out looking for the 3. She'll drive if she has to but her finishing is weak compared to her 3, and she gets knocked down a lot. She needs a soft floater to take 1 dribble off the P&R and punish the overpursit of her 3. That will open up everything: the 3, the roller, and the drive.
  9. It is ridiculous. Maybe someone smarter than me did the math, but at every casino I walked into that had higher limit craps tables like $25 or $50 I would see one table with 3-4 people on it, and 10-12 empty unmanned tables. Guess they prefer a handful of higher rollers than tables full of lower ones? Those empty tables are just sitting there costing money! I'm sure they'll be replace by more slot machines soon.
  10. How can we possibly be expected to land recruits with that kerning?
  11. Corso was in on the joke and able to laugh at himself. McAfee is pussy narcissistic bitch who ruined a college girl's life by slut shaming her on national TV, and couldn't handle being showing whiffing against a softball pitcher and demanded that ESPN name names about who aired that clip. He desperately wants love and validation which is why he keeps his sycophants around, yet whines about his poor feelings getting hurt and tries to pretend like he doesn't care after he makes a stupid take and then gets called on it. He think's he's the coolest guy in the room at all times and if you don't believe him just ask. Someone made a point upthread about he's just giving the public what they want, which is douchiness and stupidity. Good on him for that, my visceral dislike of McAfee is more of a statement on hating where we are heading as a society than the man himself, he's just the embodiment of The Idiocracy. But, there's plenty of money to made as King Douche of the Idiot Clan.
  12. Somehow I think every shoe posted to this thread is worse than the last. Them clown 🤡 shoes.
  13. I had tears flowing reading that, thinking of my kids and what that family has and will go through. My God, have mercy on their souls.
  14. I agree by all accounts the owner was a good guy and died trying to save those girls. People have short attention spans and reach for the easiest answer so the blame will fall to him. The county, state, and definitely the federal people like Noem know this and will ride out the storm pointing fingers until the next tragedy hits and the public moves on. By then they'll have their stories straight on who to blame like Trump was already blaming Biden on this, like c'mon. The level of negligence/culpability with regard to Mystic vs. the RM pros who checked them off vs. the county vs. the state doesn't really matter; Mystic in its current form is done. Even if they did everything "right" they're going to get sued into the ground and there is no way they have the assets for a long fight over 30 wrongful death suits. They'll end up liquidating and selling the land. Kerr County will install a few sirens so they can say they did something, and that will probably be the extent of it. My take is cynical but warranted. Uvalde was just a few years ago and I'm still waiting on real consequences for our DPS heroes who stood outside in violation of their training and policy while that dude massacred a bunch of kids.
  15. Just got done with a fun Vegas trip with my wife and my buddy and his wife for his birthday. He and I play craps while the wives play slots usually. We stayed at Aria but craps was mostly $25 min. We walked to Park MGM and they had $15 tables so played there the first night. Down about $300. Next day we did more Park, then took a trip down to Fremont and started at El Cortez ($25 wtf?), then Grand which had $10 tables, now we are cooking. Made about $400. Last day we decided to walk a little and ended up at OYO (old Hooters), where they had one craps table at $5. Super cool dealers. We played there about 3-4 hours and I made $1000. Finally we crossed over to Excalibur and it was hella fun, good $10 table made me about $400 again. There was some other stuff in there too but I ended up +$1400 which was pretty good. My strat is a little different than HG, which I do want to try. I rarely press. I usually play the pass line minimum unless I trust the shooter. I always play max odds. If the point sets 5, 6, or 8, I’ll bet the other two. I will also play the field here, but setup my bets so if I lose the field it’s paid back on the 5, 6, or 8 with interest. For example on a $10 3x/4x/5x table I’ll put $10 on pass. If point sets at 8 I’ll put $50 on odds. I’ll lay $30 on 6 and $25 on 5 and $25 on field. If 5 or 6 hit you lose the field but pays $35 on your 5 or 6. Collect the $10 difference and $25 back up on field. Obviously I’m putting more at play, so you have to come in with a decent bankroll to take the waves. But when a shooter is going for a while you have a win condition on every single number other than 7. Point then 7 crushes but you can say that for everything. When the point hits after you’ve been collecting fields for awhile the payout is awesome. And collecting double on 2 and triple on 12 is a nice sweetener.
  16. I get the analogy but Manu is a HOF player. He’s in the top 75-100 all time players somewhere. Kobe is top 5-10, but I don’t think you’re saying Wisner is a HOF top 100 level all time back.
  17. Dan Patrick has such a punchable face. What a complete asshole. When he dies if he doesn't end up in hell, there's no point in having one.
  18. No. You see some version of this pining for a SWC redo on other sites and in comment sections as people wax nostalgic for "regionality" in college football. Let's all remember what regionality did for Texas: Rampant cheating in the SWC Baylor fucking us at the lege TTech trying to fuck us Bleachergate with UH TCU, Tech, Baylor turning the Texas game into their annual jihad game Those same teams restricting tickets for Texas fans into buying multi-game or season ticket packages just for the Texas game Drafting off of Texas' massive fanbase and TV ratings, while simultaneously complaining about big bad Texas Texas today is right where we should be, and where we need to be. We're in the top conference, where we get consistently pushed by other blue blood programs. We are still a massive brand but we are one of many peers with Bama, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, etc. All teams that care a lot about football, and invest a lot into football, and have large fanbases. Getting a lot more money is just a side effect of all that. Fuck TTech and Baylor in their ungrateful bitch asses. The only time we should play them again is in the playoffs, if they make it. And BTW we're still regional. We play OU, Arky, A&M, and LSU.
  19. Same and it was pretty dead in the morning. Didn't feel super crowded until after 10AM. Got into the stadium really early but hung out under the stands due to the heat. Wife has instructed me to get shade seats this year...Hmmm we shall see
  20. Anti-drone tech is getting better and better every day, but it's always going to be chasing. Directed microwave and laser are probably the best shots against this type of attack and I'm sure we're rolling that out at high risk facilities. Our B-2's are only based at, what like 2 bases? B-52's only a handful and the B-21 Raider is just coming online. Most of the China wargame stuff I've seen says that if China got serious, the majority of our USAF losses would be planes sitting on the ground in Guam, Kaneda, etc. We are not built for a long attritional war like Ukraine is in, we don't have the raw materials or resupply industrial base like we had in WWII. Right now we are as vulnerable as we have been in decades. Golden Dome isn't a bad idea, we should have it AND anti-drone tech as well. But if China rolls up to the port of SF or NY and pops open a container of 10,000 suicide drones to fly into highrises, nobody has a defense for that. And that would be a warcrime and very different than hitting a military target.
  21. Not sure how I have missed this one. 20 years after D-Day, Walter Cronkite interviews Ike at Normandy.
  22. Not sure where this would go, so I guess Daily Texan. A good/interesting article on the Texas Rangers participation in the U.S./Mexico war in the mid-1800's By the fall of 1847 Scott’s occupation challenges had dramatically increased with his inexorable march west and stunning capture of Mexico City. The strained American army of approximately 24,000 men now relied upon an embattled chain of fortified outposts to govern conquered territory, stretching 260 miles from capital to coast. As negotiations failed, Mexican aristocrats along the line of invasion enthusiastically embraced the call for “War without Pity” as the guerrilla resistance transitioned to a wide-spread insurgency. To remedy this untenable scenario, Scott called for the deployment of a specialized counterguerrilla force to compliment his pacification strategy. The general needed cavalry unlike any other, a cadre of irregulars forged in the crucible of frontier combat. For the hard task at hand, he needed Texas Rangers. This essay explores how federalized Texas Rangers, officially designated the First Regiment of Texas Mounted Volunteers, supported the U.S. Army in Mexico in 1847 and 1848 by providing critically needed counter-guerilla capacity. It investigates the Texans’ contributions to the American governance program, enabled by their singular mastery of repeating firearms and horsemanship, by pursuing two lines of inquiry: How did they achieve consistent tactical superiority over Mexican mounted forces, and how did their kinetic activities both support and undermine American pacification plans? The answers to these questions will reveal the Texan regiment as a controversial, yet overall beneficial, component of American victory in the decisive campaign of the Mexican-American War. https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/05/30/fighting-fire-with-fire-texas-rangers-tactical-innovation-and-counterinsurgency-operations-in-the-mexico-city-campaign-1847-1848/
  23. Putting Venables and Bielema in the same bracket is malpractice. That's a finals matchup, semis at worst.
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