Old guy

Welcome to the Bills Jax Kerr.

All the best to JG, he deserves it.

@MusicCityBilliken The secret factor underlying the kind of morphing you describe is money, not money to be distributed to the member schools but money which in one way or the other go to those running the conference. Look at A10 and how it has gone from a multi bid conference to a single or occasionally two bid league.

@White Pelican I fully agree with you. I do not expect to see a merger of A10 and Big East in my lifetime. I also could not care less about McGlade or Ackerman's jobs.

Do you think it is likely that A10's Bernadette Mc Glade will accept a secondary position to Big East's Val Ackerman or vice versa in a new merged conference? This is not likely to happen in my opinion. @slu72 & @MusicCityBilliken, hope you enjoy the dreams.

Shows you how close I follow.

Dayton, in my opinion, has a problem. They have a tough OOC schedule and if they win repeatedly they will do just fine. The problem is that Holmes will not be playing this season because of his injury and I assume they were counting on Holmes to play the good OOC teams. We will see how well they do without Holmes playing.

Believe me, going down one spot or more than one spot in the rankings of any sport has no significance in the IVY league. They look at athletes not as athletes but as students first and athletes second. They can get good players because there are good players out there that really want an IVY education. As long as they get new kids in the schools that are satisfactory to them in terms of academics, they will be perfectly satisfied with their sport teams. They really do not care if Duke or anyone else's teams are better in terms of sports performance than theirs. This way of thinking about sport teams and their recruitment was published in the Harvard magazine some time ago. The academics come first athletic prowess comes second. Other academic focused schools like Wash U use the simpler method of choosing Division 3 for their teams. As long as the school is satisfied with its focus on sports teams, they have no problems with sports teams rankings.

A large amount of debt after graduation from college increased by grad school debt is a very large burden upon anyone. If you can obtain grants, scholarships or signing bonuses to lower the level of debt you should do it. For example, MDs joining the active military services used to get a $100,000 signing bonus (I have no idea what the bonus is now). Most of these MDs went to line units, not military hospitals. If you are choking on your debt level, maybe you should consider the military services as an option. Remember that there are very limited spots for MDs in Navy ships, but lots of spots are generally available in the Marine line units. If you choose the Air Force they will drag you through a lengthy security clearance investigation since MDs in the AF have access to highly secure locations and need a high level security clearance. I have no idea what the deal is with the Coast Guard, but during Nam they manned the boats patrolling the Mekong River. The Uniformed Public Health Services (UPHS)provides medical services, among other things, to icebreakers and weather ships (not sure the weather ships are still in operation). If you have any desire to visit Thule in Greenland or the adventurous spirit to desire a tour of duty to the South Pole, also covered by this service, this may well be the service for you. Please remember, in the South Pole you have no place to spend your salary and are probably paid extra for hazardous duty. The UPHS provides many other opportunities for MDs. By the way, I served in the Army, as an MD in an infantry division, not a hospital or MASH unit.

Willie the kids coming from St. Louis may wind up going to school far away and kids from far away may come to St. Louis, it is not only a matter of academic reputation and standards. Some kids going to small high schools may choose very large schools and vice versa choosing a place to go to college is a complicated issue and kids may have strong ideas about what kind of school they want to go to. It is not a matter of money either, not as far as the kids are concerned. Young kids are largely ignorant about the burdens of debt.

The money to pay for all these outflows has to come from somewhere. Is it possible that excess tuition money coming primarily from those paying the full amount is redistributed to those determined to be unable to pay the full amount? Something that could be viewed as an institutionalized Robin Hood redistribution system? I have never heard anything like it, not that it cannot be done. Wow!

What I see here are a lot of generalizations about sticker prices and who pays for what regarding a child's college education. I think every single family sending a kid to college somewhere has to make a decision about payments and sticker prices. Once more, money does not grow in trees, and the loss of purchase value affecting the dollar is significant. Students may decide to take debt to pay whatever the family is not willing or capable of paying for. However that means these students will reach graduation date with a high level of debt. Generalities are not accurate to describe individual / family conditions and ability to pay, and the students do not realize the burden that a high level of educational debt will be after graduation. Each separate family has unique factors that have to be taken inlto account reaching a decision about how much financing will be provided for each one of their children's eudcation. By the way, when the student has divorced parents, which is not a rare situation, the discussion as to who pays for what among biological parents gets a lot more complex. Sometimes (my case with my ex) you have one parent that does not follow his/her agreed obligations to provide funding to to help finance the education of a child. Financing a child's college education is a lot more complex for at least some families than can be described in generalizations. This is particularly applicable to the education of a child with divorced parents.

That is a very good question.

Another point about the IVYs: They really don't care much about sports. There are exceptions as any games between Harvard and Yale, or the rowing contests down the Charles river. Otherwise a team might win a major tournament and have almost no one waiting to greet the players at the airport when they come back.

I am very aware that there is are a lot of issues other than inflation that affect lots of people. Inflation affects everybody, everything else boosting prices affects some people more than others, and anything at all in this day and age can become a political football at any time. The government money will or will not be used to pay your debt after hundreds of photo / video op events with different politicians beating their chest vowing to help their constituents in whatever way they say will be best for all. Until this series of photo / video op events of all kinds of politicians is done and over, and until the decision is made to pay or not to pay your student debt, the debt is most certainly your own personal debt that you have to pay. However, paying student debt is not a major issue any way you look at it, unless you are a student or ex student with unpaid debt. The most terrible problem that is currently affecting lots of people is losing their jobs. John Deere just fired lots of people and transferred manufacturing to Mexico, Stellantis will eliminate the Chrysler Headquarters, the workers will be terminated in October. You may not feel the pain of the people affected, but a lot of people are jumping from a middle class level into a vacuum. And if you look at it from a political point of view this is an issue that does provide ample material to become another major political football with politicians of all kinds having their photo / video ops where they claim to be the great defenders of their supporters. Do you honestly think that the pool at the rec center is a major concern for anyone? It may indeed be an issue given the fact that SLU is charging too much in tuition and then giving money to students. Where does the money come from? Donors do not have money trees in their backyards and sooner or later their seemingly eternal sources of income may well become less bountiful. If and when this happens, and it may well happen, where does their money go to? The answer is simple, the donor's money goes where the Donor wants it to go. What donor wants to give money for a pool, do you know? What really concerns me most of all is the talk of war going on in the media. I hope and pray a real war does not happen. If it does they will draft lots of doctors. During my induction physical, during my internship, early 1972, I saw the Sargeant in charge of doing chest XRAYs stamping my papers with a Normal X Ray stamp. I asked him how can you do that?, the film has not been processed yet. The Sargeant answered: Doc, if you can breathe and you can walk, you are in.. Keep this in mind for your induction physical, if and when it comes. Again, I pray it does not happen.

When I went to college 1963 - 1967 a full semester, with room, board and books was about $1000. Med School tuition at Georgetown was $2000 per year when I was a student there 1967 - 1971. I ended college and Med School with an $8000 (plus a few extra hundreds) in debt. This was a total steal in current terms but everything cost less and salaries were a lot lower at that time. My first salary as an intern at the Georgetown University Hospital was $8000 per year and they would launder white coats for free. Food and rent were much cheaper, and I was paying below $30 for a full moth of gasoline for the car. Note that I was driving all over DC because I had rotations in different hospitals. What we are seeing with the differences in price means that the dollar has lost a huge amount of purchase value since I ended Med School in 1971, and there is no evidence indicating that the dollar's value will increase in the foreseeable future. Prices have increased because the dollar has lost a lot of purchase value. To give you an example, my first new car, which I bought during my 1971 - 1972 internship was a VW beetle with such advantages as a fuel gage and a blower for the heater. If I remember correctly I paid $1,800 for it. I loved that car. The absolutely cheapest 2024 car for sale in the US is the Nissan Versa with a base price of just $15,980 (MSRP). At the time I graduated from med school the cost of the cheapest 2024 car would have covered the full 4 year tuition, room and board. Nowadays kids graduate from med school with over $250,000.00 loan debt. Give it another 20 years or so and you will see a much higher average debt at the time of graduation from Med school. So, when you finally retire and depend on savings, pensions, asset gains, and social security payments, remember that the factor that will affect you the most is not what you spend but the rate of inflation. Remember, inflation is just another way to talk about the loss of purchase value of the dollar.

If I recall correctly SLU went to a Bahamas basketball tour during the Crews era. This was the trip during which Wellmer's freshman year (not sure of the spelling) broke his foot for the first time. This fracture never quite healed properly and the kid spent all 4 years mostly on the bench. He had multiple surgeries and finally had to give up.

@The Wiz Looking at the prior year's very poor SLU record, it would be natural to assume that the NCAA might not be inclined to be very favorable to us. Therefore, I think our primary goal this year should be to win at the A10 tournament and get the automatic entry to the NCAA tournament. I think we have a reasonable chance this season to do just that. Once we are in the Dance we will find out how good we really are. One of the glaring flaws of our teams under Ford was that we never really tried to win games by as large a margin as possible. I think that under Schertz we are more likely to go for the high margins of victory. If we have to play teams that are really not very good, we should try to get high margin wins, and we should never let a 15 pt. lead evaporate in the last 10 minutes of a game and become a 2 point win or a loss. Let us not just win a game, let us win by really high margins every single game we play this season against a lower opponent. The Colgate story you mentioned should be our model this season.

This does not mean that I dislike our current team roster in any way, I think we have an excellent team that will do very well next season. However I also wish we had been able to retain Curcic and Van B,

I did AI for trading for about 8 to 10 years before I stopped. It is neither a time saver nor accurate on its own. What the AI does provide is an approximate solution to a question asked to it (usually entry and exit points). The accuracy or proximity to an accurate answer depends upon the number of iterations the AI runs. The more runs it does the more accurate it becomes but also the more fixed it becomes. If you let it run for as long as it goes it will provide a correct solution, but only for the exact variables of the data you feed it. This solution is useless for trading stocks because it is rather fixed and the market constantly changes. To make it adaptable to changes the number of iterations the AI is allowed to run must be limited to a relatively low number. You also must feed it data that contains a wide variation of market conditions and a wide range up and down values for the stock you want to trade. My preferred daily time interval series feed for the AI went from July 2008 to February 2010. From before the market crash 2008 to well into its recovery in 2010. Still with a short number of runs the accuracy of the AI left much to be desired. The way I fixed this issue was by accepting the fact that each run was nothing but an approximation to the desired solution (entry and exit points). The way to solve this issue was to produce a family of close to identical approximations. This was by done leaving all AI parameters used with the initial run as they were and changing the base number used by the AI's random number generator. I would produce 10 or so different runs all with small alterations to the random number generator clock. The 10 approximate results were then fed into a cloud analysis program to find an overall solution to the 10 separate runs. This was a vast improvement in the AI's accuracy but it took a lot of time to do. I finally decided to stop using AI for trading. You must understand that the market has only 5 variables for each stock every day (open, close, high, low, and volume). You can probably use a similar approach in sports but the number of variables that must be used is much much larger that those for a single stock in the market. An AI is NOT the automatic process that people believe produces excellent results. It all depends upon what you want the AI to do. If you want the AI to make money for you, you need to learn how to use it, and be able to alter its rules and parameters in order to achieve whatever results you want. Just for fun, what answer do you get if you feed a general AI a collection of radiuses and circumferences? You get an approximation of Pi, of course.

Steve, I do not deal with servers directly but I have read a lot of reports about the CrowdStrike outage. The issues appear to go a lot deeper and are a lot more complex that it looked when it happened. It is possible that the vast majority of Windows servers were affected in some way or the other by this. I also understand that clients using specific provider server services for their own purposes may not be able to fully fix their issues, the server services provider may be the only one that can get things fully functional for them and it may take time.

I know you did this upgrade 23 hrs ago, but I had no problems at all today

Thank you very much for posting this video

No one deserves anything, everyone is out to see how much they can get. Lawyers profit from this. @papal I know you are trying to be cute, don't. Subpar surgeons exist but they tend to go bankrupt when their unhappy customers find medical injury lawyers. Anyone doing surgery regularly does at the very least a standard level job. And when a Dr. tells you "you can do what you do normally" they are CATEGORICALLY NOT saying you are clear to play professional level basketball, they mean you can walk, go up and down stairs and run a bit.

Sports injuries have two separate sides, the obvious one is the actual physical damage that is repaired and in time achieves or comes close to full recovery. The second side of the injury is the psychological side. People that experience severe physical injury during sports become more cautious and do not achieve the full performance level they had before the injury. They do not follow Commodore Perry's famous saying "full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes." They cannot forget the way they were injured all and play at full capacity, regardless what it cost them. I am afraid Holmes at Dayton may never fully recover like Perkins did.