bplewis24

I do wonder about this myself. I mostly ignore distances unless they are discussing carry. Sometimes I see these drives on tour that are admittedly magnificent, but I can see the ball rolling down this beautiful looking fairway for what seems like 75 more yards, and then they mention he just drove it 360. And I wonder how much roll my drive would have gotten there vs some of the courses I end up playing?

LOL, I was watching that video last night. At least, while some of the audience was going along with it, one person got up to the mic to say that as a libertarian he found that displays like that just reinforce the perception that his party is a joke.

No, not refuting the facts as you presented them. I'm saying that the conclusion you're drawing from it and the parallels you're making don't correlate. It may be real and tangible, but I think you're also presenting it in a vacuum, without context. Without even knowing the statistics, I would fully accept your numbers in terms of how many men were affected by the downturn. However, that type of figure doesn't account for how much better they may have already been doing compared to women in the workplace before the downturn. Or that there might be more men in the workplace who have higher salaries. So your assertion that it "doesn't fit the narrative" might be true, but it may not fit the narrative for a valid reason. I mean, if your narrative is that men have it harder than women (in either some broad sense or some specific sense in the workplace), then I'm going to have to strongly disagree. The stuff with the judge is providing a counterpoint to many of the arguments people are making in defense of Trump lately. Regarding a third party, it's just not going to happen anytime soon, unless one of the traditional parties has some sort of a split. There is simply too much money in politics to allow for a third party to gain traction in mainstream politics. And even if they could at the presidential level, the problem is that statehouses are still largely dominated by the two parties, and the funding in those races tends to come from the party establishment. The parties are institutions at this point.

And what are you basing that on?

No, this is just flat out wrong. It absolutely does matter if it was done by her predecessor, as it relates to criminal intent or mens rea. What happens on your job is another matter entirely. And the analogy of sending work emails to your personal email is another analogy that ignores the details and facts of this issue.

That's still a flawed analogy. DUI is against the law and had well established precedent as such. In this case, she (HRC) did something that former Secretaries of State did, that wasn't considered against the law because it didn't come up. Unless proven otherwise, there was no reason for her to think this practice--employed by her predecessors--was a crime. A lot of people here are attempting to assign a criminal intent to HRC here without any justification for it. The vast majority of people know that a DUI is a crime, and expressly. There are a number of reasons to dislike Hillary and not want her to be president. However, this isn't one of them, even though it's a relevant story/topic in the presidential campaign. That's an oversimplification, and not true.

As already cited, we know that that correlation does not hold true. Businesses tend to base growth/expansion/hiring decisions on market trends. Labor costs are nowhere near out of control (gains in productivity have exponentially gone towards the executive/ownership level, and wages have not kept up with those gains, let alone inflation), and greedy unions didn't even come close to causing the rife market for cheaper overseas labor. Yes, in a sense the government did allow it to happen (and actively facilitated it), but not as a result of union labor law, that has a lot more to do with globalization and trade agreements. (I'm really struggling with formatting of these replies, so I'm typing a response to the rest of the post here for the comments below it) 1) EPA regulations, yes, are an attempt to create a healthier planet. And yes, there are costs to them, but those costs are fully known, and not nearly having the impact on job losses in the oil/coal fields as you are implying. That has much more to do with the boom in natural gas and other more lucrative energy sources right now. And this ignores the absolutely important issues relating to reducing our oil/coal dependency. 2) You're glossing over the reasons why the economy went into a huge recession in the first place when bringing up the taxpayer expense from printing tons of cash. Significant among those reasons are deregulation and lowering taxes, which is exactly what I'm seeing preached in this thread right now. 3) Obama Care is hardly an example of why government shouldn't mess with the private sector. It's actually an example of the opposite, and suggesting that the government shouldn't mess with the private sector is pretty incredible. That's an entire other topic if you truly believe that. Can you elaborate? 4) Thankfully nobody views businesses as the enemy, especially since most of us work for them.

While this conservative orthodoxy sounds good on paper, the correlation is dubious and we know that this strategy doesn't work in such a simple fashion. If it did, Kansas would be a business mecca right now, flourishing in entrepreneurship and new business startups. But it isn't, even though the things you suggest are the tent-poles of the platform that Governor Brownback implemented. The reality is that--while this can be a very complex issue on many fronts--the reasons why simply lowering taxes on businesses and deregulating (hello, GWB) don't create economic prosperity are somewhat basic. 1) Businesses often don't pay anywhere near their marginal tax rates. 2) Lowering their tax rates (which they already don't pay) doesn't show a correlation with investing in more business or relocating business. 3) There are consequences to lowering taxes and deregulation. I don't want to write an essay about these topics, but there are a few links below that do a decent job explaining some of these items. But fundamentally a lot of this is just logic: If companies don't pay the marginal rate, what incentive will lower tax rates offer? If there is no correlation with business investment, what is happening with the untaxed profit? What about considering which taxes we're going to lower? Payroll taxes fund things like medicare and social security. Cutting those obviously means cutting those services. Is that going to create economic prosperity? What other services get cut when the tax revenue begins drying up...infrastructure? Education? Does that create a more skilled labor force? What if we eliminate the minimum wage (another popular doctrine in some conservative/libertarian circles), and we assume it actually does bring jobs back? Are these low-paying jobs going to create and sustain a middle-class economy necessary for capitalism to be effective/successful? The GOP has effectively and very successfully gotten their base to buy this con for decades now, even as it continually bears no fruit. What I find ironic about it is that one of the primary perpetrators of this, Ronald Reagan, actually sold it while doing the opposite: raising taxes on business (he raised the corporate tax rates and capital gains rates. He also did a lot on tax shelters through passive loss rules, but that's only tangentially related). Bottom line is that Trump doesn't know a damn thing about how to turn the economy around, and if your faith is largely in his repetition of conservative policy, you may want to reexamine it. http://business.time.com/2012/02/23/will-a-lower-corporate-tax-rate-lure-jobs-back-to-america/ http://fortune.com/2011/04/08/lower-corporate-taxes-wont-create-more-jobs/ http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/07/10/Why-State-Tax-Cuts-Aren-t-Driving-Job-Growth

No. And it's false equivalencies like this that allow people to rationalize their poor voting decisions and party affiliations.

That's actually a pretty informative study. They have graphs with overlays showing the different technological advancement eras, and you can see the corresponding trend improvement that goes along with it. Without having taken the time to go through the study completely, it seems like the takeaway is supposed to be that regulation on equipment and resulted in more consistent performance in terms of distance.

I think I'll only go there if I end up meeting up with some golfing friends. Otherwise I'm probably gonna end up going solo somewhere. And, you're right on the weather. I was thinking about doing a Yosemite/golf trip out towards Phoenix, but then remembered how hot it will be there in August. I wonder if it cools off by October?

Well, mine was for 9 holes: a guy I was playing with was 5 under through 8 holes, and bogeyed the 9th hole to fall back to -4 through the front 9. For me, what was memorable about it was how casual it seemed. We were talking about his business and what I did for work, and he was hitting fairways and greens pretty easily, and making seemingly every putt. He didn't hit it much further than me, but his swing seemed pretty effortless. We only played 9 holes because It was a 9-hole outing at a country club I was considering joining, and they wanted me to play with other (relatively) young members at the club. This guy happened to be a former collegiate tennis player, who was something like a +1 or +2 handicap. These are the stats on the front 9 (we played from the Granite tees):

You guys are making me want to watch The Descendants again.

I still want to get out and play Dark Horse someday. I played The Ridge golf course around 5 years ago, which is also near Auburn, I think, and it was one of the toughest courses I've played. After the round, people mentioned that Dark Horse was the same way. Forced carries, undulating greens that can be very fast, etc. I think I four-putted twice that day. Other than the difficulty, what did you think of the course?

I have some Southwest travel credits that expire tomorrow, and I need to book a flight somewhere. It's a nice problem to have . So, in the absence of any other ideas, I'm going to book a golf trip at the 11th hour. Southwest is also currently running a sale to these cities from Sacramento which ends midnight tonight: Boise, ID Burbank, CA Denver, CO Los Angeles, CA Ontario/LA, CA Phoenix, AZ Portland, OR San Diego, CA Seattle/Tacoma, WA Any ideas on which of those places might be the best for a summer golfing destination (the sale requires purchase from Aug-Oct)? I was thinking about Bandon Dunes in Oregon, although from what I can tell that is quite a drive from Portland. But if you have any other West Coast suggestions that aren't close to any of the cities above, feel free to throw them out there.

I find the delusion it takes to believe the bolded portion pretty startling. Is that a joke? Or are you as delusional as the opposition members who wanted the incident "investigated" in Parliament? Trump isn't a better option than a ham sandwich for President, let alone Hillary or Bernie. He's honestly a much worse option than several of the folks he was running against for the GOP nomination, including Kasich, Rubio, Bush, and a few others. Trump represents the Frankenstein's monster that the party has been creating (through basic echo-chamber fear-mongering) for years now. There is not a single objective measure by which Trump is a better candidate than Hillary or Bernie that translates into actual political capital. He doesn't understand policy, he has an incredibly immature and volatile temperament, he is clueless on foreign policy, and he is a classic narcissist who is either deluded by it or is willing to lie, pathologically, to convince others. And to the extent he has taken on conservative positions, he has done so at the expense of conflicting positions he took years--and sometimes months--earlier*. He is a disaster waiting to happen, and yet fully represents the current GOP base. *Incidentally, this is part of the problem with Hillary also: she has co-opted Bernie's platform on a number of issues to be more progressive, conflicting with positions she took (or equivocated on) in prior administrations or political eras.

Two of my best "hot streaks" I would consider flukes: Two years ago I had three straight birdies. I didn't even play particularly well that day nor did I have a good swing. But I somehow put three great tee shots and one approach shot (two par threes and one par four), and made the putts. I haven't done it since, even though I'm swinging better now. Three years ago I had 6 straight pars, which I've matched a few times since (including this past weekend). But the flukey part of it was, I only hit one green during that stretch. When I did it this weekend, I hit 5 out of 6 greens. Which leads me to my most current "hot streak": This weekend I played Saturday and Sunday. In the Saturday round I hit 11 straight fairways. In the Sunday round I hit 7 out of 8 greens. Both translated into the best rounds I've had in those respective statistical categories: fairways hit (86% for the round) and GIR (78% for 9 holes, only 50% for the round).

I can typically golf 10 months or so out of the year. I'm in Sacramento in the northern california valley, and up here it's mostly about heat. Today it will be 100 degrees and I'm going to the driving range to practice. Heat doesn't bother me, typically I only avoid bad weather in the form of thunderstorms with strong (15+ MPH) prevailing wind.

Any corporations Trump is affiliated with (either as a stakeholder/shareholder, board member, or both), would still retain their "secrets" if he released his personal financials. And how is being transparently ignorant and unqualified better than somebody who isn't transparent but may or may not be qualified? Polling and recent history says otherwise. There was a poll recently (I cannot find it, but I believe it was on Vox.com) that showed that around 80% of Bernie supporters were going to vote for Hillary, which wasn't too materially different from the amount of Hillary supporters who were willing to vote for Bernie. And while this contradicts some polling from earlier in the campaign cycle, people tend to forget that this happens every election cycle: during the heat of the campaign, voters stubbornly reject the alternative choice in the primary. Does anybody here remember PUMA? Those were the Clinton supporters from '08 who claimed they would "never" vote for Obama. Guess what? The vast majority of them fell in line too. This is an odd statement. What rulings do "smart Evangelicals" want? I would think "smart" evangelicals would recognize how much damage the GOP is doing to their cause right now by trying to fuse religiosity in matters of the state. Our country was founded specifically to avoid this, and for good reason. Of course, I'd be wrong . Evangelical voters vastly prefer the GOP, even if it's misguided. Exactly, on both counts. Still, the SCOTUS issue is huge, because it is going to cause a political shift. And, especially if Garland isn't confirmed before the next term, it's very possible that what used to be 5-4 for conservatives could now end up being 6-3 for liberals (while Merick Garland is indeed more moderate, the right has shifted so far right over the past decade that being "moderate" is effectively far left of the Republican base). And as far as the congressional map goes, the Dems were already in a good position to take back the senate (the same way Republicans were in a good position to take it in 2014) before Trump was the presumptive nominee. There's no telling yet, but it's possible the math may be even better for Dems if Trump has as big a negative impact down-ticket as some folks think. This (senate) issue is the real reason why some GOP insiders are exploring a third party independent run. Everybody knows that won't win a presidency. But they desperately want to hold onto the Senate and seek to limit the negative down-ticket impact of this party fragmentation.

Nobody's children are in harm's way anymore so than they were last year or last decade. Stop deluding yourself for the sake of your party. He gets what done? And what does that have to do with being President? You think real estate development deals and investment decisions prepare him for that office? If you do, you'll have to do better than using logical fallacies to explain why. Because virtually every aspect of his personality, his history and his campaigning (policy proposals and knowledge of political issues) has tended to show otherwise. He's a political neophyte with no discernible ability to handle both the influence and prominent stature of the office nor the delicate relationships with both domestic and foreign leaders that comes with it. They have been strange bedfellows with the conservative right for decades, so there's no reason to think otherwise. And it's pretty easy for the religious right to hypocritically rationalize that decision because there is plenty of recent and long-standing precedent for it. This isn't new. Trump is just the unharnessed culmination of all of the rhetoric the party has employed to keep their coalition together. Trump lacks the discipline and temperament of a politician, but that has only helped him as he has tapped into the same fear and nationalist/authoritarian angst while appearing to not appease party leaders and media outlets. For the base, that is refreshing. The big problem the party has, though, is a messaging problem. Their policies are objectively bad, sure, but the base believes in them and continues to vote for them. However, Trump is a manifestation of the rallying cries of republican party leaders of the past several campaigns and even decades. Yet they're now trying to disavow him without disowning their contribution to it. That's a pretty difficult task to accomplish without alienating the base built around it. She's also completely unqualified, delusional and unhinged. So there's that.

Not that I disagree with your pick, but your description of Rory sounds a lot more like Phil than a comparison to Tiger. Tiger, from what I can gather, was a strong Sunday player in that he could hold on to virtually any lead, and avoid making huge mistakes in a sport where having a Sunday lead in a major is about as much pressure as there is in all of sports. That sounds a lot more like Spieth to me (Masters notwithstanding).

Golf is hard for me. Hope that helps.

But, we do have to go back to the past (and the current) for examples, because it illustrates why the blanket statement (all citizens have equal rights) is a theoretical and abstract concept that is still untrue in many ways in application or practicality. Our recent and distant past is littered with examples of people who were supposedly protected by the constitution but disenfranchised by their state, local government or authorities. I, too, don't think bathrooms are a huge issue. I think it's a silly issue. But apparently it's serious enough for some states to start legislating about it, so it's going to be a political discussion topic. No, nothing realistic. Hillary has all but locked it up. He has pushed her a pretty good deal to the left as she has effectively co-oped his platform of the past several decades, so there's that. Not only all of those things you mentioned, but laws about bathroom usage are antithetical to the platform of limited government an individual freedoms from the party supposedly representing those ideals. Of course, they're couching the legislation in the "safety" and "protecting our children" issue, but obviously that's just another use of their wedge issues. And it's wasteful, from the party of fiscal responsibility. How do you enforce these types of laws without throwing a lot of money at it, for no benefit? I'm struggling to reply below Ernest's quote below, so I'll add it in here: The DOJ asked them to stop enforcing the law, and NC sued the Feds to ask them to butt out of it (said they are misinterpreting the law), and the DOJ has counter-sued.

I think it makes perfect sense. This is a manifestation of years/decades of an ideological clash of the party leaders/politicians and their base, and was/is inevitable. When your platform is based on spurious conservative principles that rely on ensuring your base votes against their best interests in matters of fiscal/economic policy as a tradeoff for social and cultural wedge issues, eventually they get sick of voting on those issues as they are presented. This goes back to the Goldwater Coalition, the Moral/Silent Majority with Reagan, etc. All that has happened is Trump has dispensed with the dog whistle rhetoric of his predecessors and spoke very plainly about the same issues. And, surprise! The base cares less about the dog whistle and more about the underlying policy. Even though it's bad policy, they believe in it. But, what doesn't make sense, is their ability to basically block out anything he has said or stood for for the years/decades prior, that conflict directly what some of the things he's saying now. That is a pretty absurd generalization, that only takes a few simple examples to illustrate (demonstrated in posts in between ours). We tried that. Then we wrote a Constitution because it wasn't working. And even after the Constitution, it has required decades upon decades of federal legislation to ensure that individual states aren't skirting the ideals within that document. This is pretty naive. How many people do you think have the means, resources and luxury of being able to wait for the Supreme Court to take up their case of their Constitutional rights being violated? There are many statehouses in this country that have shown an express willingness to subvert the Constitution and constitutional case law in many different ways (not the least of which is the current effort to make sure abortions are as hard to get as possible). To put the burden of fighting against that on a particular citizen in a particular state is pretty ridiculous.

That's why I probably wouldn't lay up on that hole inside of 230 yards or so. I don't like any of the layup options. Not the distances nor the locations/angles. And I'm not a good wedge player. If I'm 215 yards out, I want to lay up to a full shot distance (my favorite distance is 130 yards). I'm definitely not hitting an 85 yard layup. And I'm just as likely to skull a wedge into the water as I am to hit a controlled, 65 yard shot. So...no thanks on the layup.