dkolo

I'm not sure I understand what you meant. I was just using Scotty Cameron as a representative example of a putter that tends to go with a strictly milled face and no insert.

That's... odd. They usually figure that percentage out by the percentage of precincts reporting. Unless Iowa Republican precincts send vote updates in live throughout the night, that'd be really weird. On the Dem side with the nature of the caucusing, doing it on anything but precincts would be meaningless.

They're not flaws; they're just character! The grooves are Nike's Polymetal thing, which they argue is a balance between a milled face (think Scotty Putters) and an insert (think Odyssey White Hots) in terms of feel. Like boogie said, just wash it with soapy water when you find it's not to your liking. Make sure you don't make a stroke with any dirt caught on the face; that's when the abrasions happen. A little grass residue from a putt from the fringe is mostly harmless though.

I don't think the trash button was ever enabled after the switchover; I was thinking back to the Huddler days. It helped make the "Stop typing, this doesn't need to be posted" decision easier, haha. Thanks for the heads up on the cross symbol, that's at least a better way of doing it than messing around in the source.

I've resorted to going into the source code menu and doing it that way. Is there any way to bring back the old trash can button for deleting a draft altogether?

Wait, you can recover from a bad round? Well, there's hope yet! Good thing he's not on the LPGA, or he might've gotten the 88 Rule hammer dropped on him in the stupidest way possible

I air dry my clubs when I wash them after every round, I don't know why that's so odd to you.

Yeah, I like how all of a sudden the circles turned into the orbit of Halley's Comet once it came to the NPR, haha.

Yeah, the X-Series and N14 or whatever they call them are the same basic idea, just more clearly labeled for consumers. Callaway Preowned's site, EBay store, and Amazon store have very little in the way of internal price consistency. I've seen price differences of over 30% before any sales even were taken into account. Amazon prices can shift daily or stay the same for months on end, but they're usually a few bucks at a time. Their main site will have sales all the time and the prices jump massively so you have to time it more.

I also bought my set from Callaway Preowned after having seen it in Costco (was 375 on Black Friday 2012 vs. 550 in store). It's just unsold units returned to Callaway. Costco was selling a rebranded X-Hot all last year and they're probably going to release this year's rebranded Callaway set within a month, following the schedule of the past few years. So that set might be gettable at a discount, though harder to identify because, if I could get on my soapbox, Callaway and Costco did a bit of shady business last year by not identifying in any way that set as a reissue. They were just labeled "X-Hot," which is the first time they called it the same name as the model it was based on, versus some clearly changed name (X-24 Hot became X-24, Diablo Edge became RAZR Edge, RAZR became X-Treme, but X-Hot became X-Hot even though the clubs changed). In any event, Callaway Preowned is great, I've done a lot of business with them. Good luck!

I have their model from 2 years prior, the Costco X-24 line which was a rebrand of the X-24 Hot. These clubs, like your X-treme, are good clubs. They're rebranded Razr X irons from 2012 with a bunch of woods and hybrids that have no fancy tech in them. But know a few things: they have basically no resale value, they're made with tremendous offset in the irons (which might be a good thing!), and they're made a bit cheaply, with various cosmetic effects done less cleanly than in a regular release. Edges aren't beveled, paint isn't as clean, etc. The shafts are very generic. That said, the woods are very forgiving. I hit that driver better than the Big Bertha that sold for more than the whole set cost. I think in retrospect it's good value but you can do a lot better for a bit more money. But it's a good set for a high handicap player who doesn't want to stress too much about what they're buying.

I haven't hit a single shot well in over a month. The changes I've been making to my swing paid off spectacularly for a week or so, culminating in one great round but I've been chasing that feeling since then. I'm just in the place where swinging a golf club doesn't make sense when I'm standing over the ball and its shank city. I'm just going to keep working on my pivot from what was told to me in my swing thread and practice chipping / pitching until the snow goes. Hopefully some time off will do my mind good.

It's the same idea as the Callaway PM grind with its high toe. Since the lob wedge is so frequently opened up, moving the CG closer to where contact will be makes sense.

The actual head volume doesn't really mean much anymore, and the manufacturers outside of Taylormade aren't using it as a distinguishing metric as much as in the past. The manufacturers can play around with head shapes much more than they could in the past due to the lighter materials and better manufacturing techniques. They can make a 460 head look compact and a 445 head look massive and forgiving all by making the head taller, flatter, pear shaped, etc.

I completely understand that and I've defended Taylormade (and pretty much every GI manufacturer today, really) on that front and for that specific reason, but I think at a certain point it gets a tad much. For the high handicappers these are putatively aimed at, the low lofts are visually imposing and I do think the low spin will be an issue when they do struggle to get the long irons in the air, even though these seek to specifically help that. I have a Speedblade 6i from when they were giving them away. I bag it instead of my 5i because it goes as far but is a little easier to hit. But I feel the same as I would my 5i, which is that it's the limit of what I can handle in an iron. Even if the balancing of CG and loft works out on paper, in the hands of a higher handicapper, less loft isn't visually reassuring. And I can imagine it can create gapping issues as well. I'll demo them once they come out and reserve further judgment on them until then. I had reservations about the M1 driver in pictures but seeing the crown in person changed my opinion on it completely, and I think it looks spectacular.

The problem they run into with these strong lofts is lowering the spin too much and making it too hard to hold greens.

Taylormade's gone pretty much insane with their iron lofts. We've always joked about their strong lofts but they're cranked beyond belief. They're roughly 5.5° to 6° stronger than traditional lofts. Even against their Speedblades from a few years ago that were pretty nuts, the 6i is 1.5° stronger. I'm more bemused than apoplectic but from the early reviews, the common theme is that the spin model on these is crazy.

It's not strictly demand; it's because colleges don't compete on price but on quality of life and academics, both of which create an arms race effect that's fueled by the supply of money from lenders who supply it knowing they have zero risk on their loans.

I understand that, and it's something that'd have to be phased in over the course of probably a decade to allow the market to adjust. But ultimately the lenders would be looking at the investment itself to determining the ROI on a loan. So it's less about what assets the student and family have and more about the institution's track record versus its cost. I think a cap would create even more disparity because it would hurt the poor, soak the middle class, and leave wealthy families status quo. This is because I don't think a cap at the level described (or at any level that strikes a balance between repayability and being useful) would push tuition downwards sufficiently.

Maybe. On the one hand, a blind cutoff isn't the worst idea, but on the other I would like to put more responsibility on lenders to actually analyze where they're sending money to do a risk analysis. It would incentivize the lenders to lend more carefully and force schools to justify the soundness of the investment to the lenders. Capping the loans doesn't really force lenders to do that kind of analysis.

The underlying cause is relatively straightforward: student loans are non-dischargeable in bankruptcy (with extremely narrow and limited exceptions. This creates a huge problem in the education industry. When loan companies know the debt won't get eliminated in bankruptcy, it eliminates any incentive to scrutinize the worthiness behind the loans, so everyone gets access to a massive amount of money without any consideration on anyone's part of whether it's a sound investment. Now the schools see that students will get loans for their tuition, whatever it is, and since the loans are based on tuition as opposed to a fixed number (Stafford loans are capped, but private loans go up to the level of tuition and certain expenses), they have every incentive to raise prices. This is what leads to the extravagant student unions and myriad extracurricular activities. So they keep raising tuition and so does the entire industry because no one really competes on tuition on a large scale. The result is students end up saddled with massive debt on overpriced tuition that they can't get rid of and may not be in a position to repay. The solution is to turn off the money spigot. Making loans dischargeable in bankruptcy would force loan originators to run calculations on how much money they can reasonably loan someone at this particular college. It forces the colleges to keep their tuitions competitive and reasonable, as well as incentives them to be more proactive in working on getting their students placed into jobs after graduation. Does this mean some people would have a harder time getting loans? Absolutely. But the industry as a whole needs a massive market correction with respect to how it operates because the current situation is untenable and massively unfair for kids going into it relatively blind.

Well, you talked me into it. Really twisted my arm...

I'm debating going to the chipping area today. It's likely frozen solid and caked with some patchy snow but with the megastorm purportedly readying to unleash on the northeast, it might be my last chance before March.

Very cool! Absolutely mesmerizing to watch. Great work practicing well.

Texas is already pretty anti-gambling anyway, so this isn't a particularly big shock. In any event, the writing's on the wall with DFS. It's gambling by any objective definition. Whether it (and gambling generally) should be legal regardless for responsible adults is another question, but in a paradigm where sports betting and other gambling is illegal or regulated, it would be inconsistent to treat DFS differently. Frankly, until they can resolve their integrity issues (maintaining the secrecy of the data from anyone who could use it to play the game as well as the problem of high volume professionals raiding the pools), I'm not shedding any tears for this industry.