Brock Beauchamp

All I can do is hope the Twins scouts were so enamored with the guy that they told Ryan "you need to make room for this guy on the roster". I hope to god winning the bid wasn't an accident.

No, of course not... But that only works in the abstract. Given the option of "starve" or "be underemployed", most people will choose whatever option isn't "starve". In reality, a single person cannot fairly negotiate against a monolithic organization. It's why unions were created in the first place. A group of people can negotiate, yes... But we've spent decades vigorously union-busting the point unionization is almost an afterthought in this country. And consumers don't give a ****, either through apathy or because they can't afford anything better. The cheapest product wins. It's a race to the bottom. Lower wages beget lower prices beget more competition to force lower wages and fewer hours. If we want to deregulate business, so be it... but then we must bring back the unions and aggressively punish any business that evens hints at union-busting. Pick your poison. We can't have it both ways. Businesses can't be deregulated without worker protection being put in place somewhere in the chain. Someone has to balance power and the individual cannot do it by him or herself. Anti-unionization is one of the GOP platforms that most pisses me off. Okay, so you want to ease regulations on businesses. Sure, whatever. But then you must allow the other side a fair chance to fight for their own rights and the free market solution to business deregulation is unions.

Yep, which is why I'm not up in arms about this offseason (excepting the bullpen), just a bit baffled by it.

To be clear, I don't hate the Park signing, I simply don't understand it in the context of the current roster. But as I've said previously, this "problem" probably sorts itself by midseason. Park stumbles, Plouffe gets injured, Plouffe gets traded, etc.

Indeed it is.

My opinion is that minimum income is just that, minimum. Some supplement that income with "gig jobs" while others take on more meaningful (and well-paying) jobs that require more eduction and/or training. People still need things to do with their time and if the pay is good enough, they'll take on some unenviable tasks to supplement their income. Dunno. All of this requires such a drastic rethinking of how we live our lives - much less how society itself operates - that it may be too big to ever be implemented.

That's not really my point. Plouffe, Sano, and Arcia make sense for two positions. Sano, Park, and Arcia make sense for two positions. Plouffe, Sano, Arcia, and Park don't make a lot of sense. I'm not all hot and bothered about the people manning the positions, I only take issue with the quantity of people taking the positions.

An interesting blend of capitalism and forward-thinking socialism. It may be the best path forward.

It's an interesting solution and not *entirely* unlike a minimum income policy. Institution of some variety of minimum income is inevitable. I don't think now is the time to implement some form of that policy but I expect to see it gain traction in my lifetime and certainly your kids' lifetimes. Technology is going to continue snowballing, swallowing up jobs along the way. For every two middle class jobs consumed, we'll be lucky if one of those jobs is replaced in another sector (eg. designing and fixing the machines). Those replacement jobs will be high paying for the select few that acquire them but much of society will be left in the cold. This is Foxconn's iPhone 6 assembly line in 2014: http://www.3g.co.uk/g_phones/large/iphone-6-entering-mass-production-1.jpg This is Xiaomi's Mi 4i assembly line in 2016:

While simultaneously not offering us work. I don't have the answers - far from it - but there are troubling trends arising that capitalism (probably) can't fix because capitalism has no interest in fixing it (namely, there will be more humans and fewer jobs going forward). What do we do when there are huge numbers of unemployed and underemployed? Again, I don't have the answers but refusing to acknowledge this is the path society is going down is going to lead to potentially catastrophic results. It may not yet be time to start blazing a path toward this societal structure but it needs to be on our radar. Capitalism worked for a long time. It will probably continue to work for awhile longer, particularly in a restricted state. But ultimately, it will cease to serve society's needs and new options need to be explored.

You could be right, I'm legitimately curious about it.

That's not what he said.

Great post. In essence, we're moving toward a post-capitalistic age. Barring an apocalypse, it's almost inevitable. At some point in the relatively near future, we will have far more citizens than are needed to sustain the workforce because the workforce will be sustained by machines and small numbers of incredibly efficient humans (your idea of "plenty" over a former "scarcity"). We're already seeing the first signs of it with crude automation of basic tasks... That is only going to snowball in the coming decades and there's no stopping it. It doesn't matter if the minimum wage is $1/hour or $50/hour, the machines are coming. All one has to do is look at the (relatively good-natured) pissing contest between Google and Facebook over A.I. to see how quickly this is coming to a head. Whether it will take 50 years to get there or 200, I do not know... But I do know that clinging on to ideas borne from the 19th century industrial age aren't going to fly. We need to look forward, not back. That doesn't mean we throw everything out the window but it does mean we need to start closely examining which ideas will hold up in time and which ideas are no longer applicable to modern society. Think about it this way: 40 years ago, the personal computer - for all intents and purposes - did not exist. Today, we can do most of our work from a 5" phone we carry in our pockets, right down to ordering damned near anything our hearts desire, paying for goods and services, and staying in touch with the world 24/7/365. Cars don't only drive themselves, they drive better than human beings. And these are basic consumer goods, not cutting-edge radical ideas just emerging out of skunk works around the world. What will the world look like 40 years from now? The rate of technological advance is not slowing... If anything, we're only getting started. To continue down this rabbit hole, think about the potential impact of automated semi trucks. According to a quick Google search, there are roughly 3.5m professional semi drivers in the US... That's one percent of the population. Not one percent of the workforce but one percent of the population of the country. Alphabet/Google could probably build an automated truck tomorrow with the tech they have in-house. It wouldn't be the best driver in the world but it'd probably get by well enough. How far are we from putting those 3.5m people out of work? A decade? I'd argue two decades, tops. And then what happens? Old capitalism ideas aren't going to solve the coming problems. Some of them will surely help but others will hinder our progress as a society. We shouldn't be so naive as to expect old practices to continue working as society continues to evolve at a rate never seen in the history of man. Left to its own devices, pure capitalism would cause a worldwide revolution (the violent, ugly kind) in a matter of decades as 1% controls the money and power while the world is ravaged with an astronomically high unemployment rate followed by starvation, fall of governments, etc. because half the population is "simply no longer needed, thanks for your service".

Is that what happened, though? I thought he left to focus on getting in shape.

I've said multiple times I thought the Park acquisition was questionable. It didn't make sense given the make-up of the current 40 man. I hope the guy tears the cover off the ball and the Twins' scouts nailed it but man, it doesn't make much sense.

No arguments here. Even if this situation was unexpectedly dropped on the front office, why'd they pull Sano out of winter ball?

I might agree with this IF we knew whether Sano can play third. We really need to stop assuming that is fact. What happens if you give away Plouffe for pennies on the dollar and Sano is a complete disaster at third? That'd be the type of move people get fired over. It's bad policy to sell low on any player. It's one of Ryan's traits I really appreciate.

It'd be great if this was the case but there's no reason for the Twins not to say so. The way they've handled it from the start is strange.

i don't think it'll really start until NH is out of the way as well. NH isn't as silly and irrelevant as Iowa but it's still a bit wacky.

Yeah, exactly... Kind of what HBO does with Amazon. Anything 2+ years old is on Amazon and if you want the new stuff, you buy into HBO Go/Now.

This is Netflix's biggest issue in the short term. Cable channels think they can stream themselves - which is what BBC America is doing - and pulling out of Netflix. By and large, I think this is short-sighted. BBC A doesn't have enough pull with audiences to stream their own service without offering older episodes elsewhere to draw in additional people, bolstering their new content. The smart play is to put the old content as many places as possible and try to lure people they hook into the BBC A streaming service with new exclusive content.

I don't even understand why we're having this discussion on the minimum wage. It's too low. Period. The debate should be whether it's going to be raised to $10/hour or $15/hour, not whether it should be raised at all (I'd probably settle in somewhere around the $11/hour mark myself). Then fix the ****ing wage to cost of living and never think about it again. If a normal person is working minimum wage and qualifies for government assistance, that's corporate self-subsidization and it needs to stop. It's that bloody simple. Hell, even my 75 year old conservative, curmudgeonly father thinks the minimum wage should be raised for the simple fact "when I worked minimum wage, I was paid nearly twice as much in real dollars".

But Pseudo has a point. While we can't tax the rich into oblivion - nor should we - we can't let them dictate policy out of fear they'll take their ball and go... Where, exactly? Most of the western world has higher tax rates than the US. It's not as if these people are going to flee to Kazakhstan.

The Tax Foundation is a conservative think tank with a pretty obvious bias.

For right or wrong, the American public is not going to give a damn about the emails unless something big breaks between now and November. Personally, the fact she did it pisses me off because damn it all, it's her job to know better. And we should just stop saying the word "Benghazi" because seriously. Whitewater was a billion years ago.