Like, this whole enterprise is supposed to be about giving worse teams a better chance to get better. But instead, the supposed smartest people in baseball were moving cash around, like the little army man tokens in Risk, and praying that the other 29 teams, plus a group of teenagers and their advisers, didn’t fuck them over before their names came up again.
They weren’t picking the best players, and it was infuriating to watch, as once again in professional sports, complex and entirely self-imposed financial restrictions prevented teams from doing what benefits them the most. Meanwhile, the players get screwed out of millions in bonuses that a true free market would generate.
Saturday, June 11, 2016
Last night's MLB draft was "infuriating to watch"
TR:
Sexual-misconduct scandal leads to firing of Oakland's police chief
EBE:
at least fourteen Oakland Police officers, three Richmond Police officers, and four Alameda County Sheriff's deputies had sex with the girl
...
at least three OPD officers leaked her confidential information about undercover prostitution stings. One Oakland cop obtained police reports and criminal histories and shared them with the victim
"LAPD can only enforce speed limits with radar on just 28 percent of the streets in Los Angeles that require traffic studies"
LAi:
In order for the LAPD to enforce speed limits on surface streets throughout the city using radar, those streets must have been subjected a traffic speed survey conducted by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) within the past seven (to ten) years.
The problem for the city and its police department, says a new report from LADOT, is that the lion's share of speed surveys in L.A. are obsolete.
...
LAPD issued 99,000 speeding tickets in 2010, according to Streetsblog Los Angeles. That number dropped to just 16,000 in 2015. While LAPD can still enforce speed limits, they can only do so on those roads by pacing cars from behind. Pacing can be dangerous, and the preferred method of speed enforcement is with radar or lasers.
Friday, June 10, 2016
"Revealed: vast medieval cities hidden beneath the Cambodian jungle"
TG:
cutting-edge airborne laser scanning technology has revealed multiple cities between 900 and 1,400 years old beneath the tropical forest floor, some of which rival the size of Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh.
...
the colossal, densely populated cities would have constituted the largest empire on earth by population at the time of its peak in the 12th century.
Gravity Falls: Dipper and Mabel and the Curse of the Time Pirates' Treasure!: A "Select Your Own Choose-Venture!"
Available at Amazon:
YOU choose from multiple paths that lead to different wacky adventures! You might end up finding the greatest treasure ever known, or you could send the twins and Blendin into an abyss from which they will never escape! This all-new Select Your Own Choose-Venture time-travel treasure hunt book features thrilling adventures, original artwork, and an exclusive double-sided poster! The book's author, Jeffrey Rowe, wrote episodes of Gravity Falls; Alex Hirsch, the creator of the show, provided additional story for the book; and the book's illustrator, Emmy Cicierega, was a storyboard artist for the show.
"Riot Games hypothesized employee behavior in-game could be correlated with in-workplace behavior" and set out to test that hypothesis
Re:
The Riot team hypothesized there’d be a correlation between highly toxic in-game play and workplace toxicity; if a Rioter received lots of in-game complaints, the team assumed they'd have more friction with workplace teammates too. This is not to say Riot had a problem with workplace toxicity. Ranking high on Fortune’s 100 Best Places to Work For list, it was quite the opposite. But as a quickly growing company they were concerned about strengthening and scaling their culture.
Riot looked at the preceding 12 months of gameplay of every employee and discovered there was a correlation between in-game and in-Riot toxicity. They determined that 25% of employees who had been let go in the previous year were players with unusually high in-game toxicity. The most common bad behaviors they found were passive aggression (snarky comments) and the use of authoritative language, sometimes using their authority as a Riot employee to intimidate or threaten others.
Riot also found that a player’s toxicity was a fluid thing and not immutable. Like moods, toxicity levels can fluctuate. Riot could measure and predict toxicity trajectories of players over time, and so they set about seeing if they could improve the player behavior of their employees.
Riot identified the 30 most toxic employees (all of whom were more junior Rioters, new to the working world) and classified them into two categories:
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