I think what made 2018 feel so good was that aside from Jake, the team was primarily Gould recruits. It kind of proved that we had the talent all along and it was in fact a coaching issue that was now solved. We were quite likely one missed tackle away from going to Frisco, which stung even more when we played NDSU tough in 2019. But the rest of 2019 was so inconsistent. It might have been time for some fresh ideas on offense, so we shall see what Cody brings. As long as we break from the tradition of 32-second drives against teams with pass defense defined by 2 incomplete passes, a power run up the middle for 1 yard followed by a punt.

Perhaps the unanswered question is if the 2018 campaign was a flash-in-the-pan fluke or the new normal. 2019 was comparatively uninspired; was THAT a fluke or just regression to the mean? Turnover of key athletes and assistants is a routine test of an HC’s reinvention and pick ‘em skills. I’m not sure we will have a definitive verdict this year, because win, lose, or draw, 2020-21 will have an asterisk by it.

I’ve heard the national average rejection rate is around 30%, so if UCD health is inside 10%, that means some other hospitals must have a lot more refusals to pull that average up. I wonder if patients have the right to demand to only see providers who have been vaccinated or to know what percentage of staff have been vaccinated? I guess we don’t know for sure if the vaccines prevent transmission, but if we find out they do, I would certainly rather go to a well-vaccinated hospital than the alternative. Also, did anyone else find the nurse’s voice a little grating?

Is it most likely that a decision is made in the next few days and that's the guy, or we likely to see multiple guys get some reps this spring before settling on someone for the fall? Would we potentially see one person leading this spring and someone else for the fall if there is renewed competition over the summer? There is technical skill and then the intangible of personal leadership. I remember I think Biggs tried a co-quarterback thing at some point in the 90s and it didn't work very well.

I found a low resolution drawing and to me it looks like the hydrotherapy facility that has been mentioned. Looks like they dug a basement and are then building the pools into it so the deck is at ground level but they have an underground service corridor below the deck to get at the piping, which is likely extensive if these tubs are heavily jetted. I'm guessing the room with double doors is the mechanical room and the stairway highlighted actually goes down to the service basement. I circled what looks like stairs and possibly 2-story mechanical room in the photo.

Iron workers usually don't mess around. And at the hourly rate crane operators get, neither does the person paying them. This part always seems to go fast compared to the civil work or interior fit out. It usually feels like it takes longer to commission the fire alarm and HVAC systems than to build the building. Should be a nice facility.

I don't have strong feelings about either team. But I really don't care for Tom Brady or his egomaniac GOAT narrative, so I was half rooting for the Chiefs. KC had a bad night and I think the second string OL was a big part. They also got destroyed on holding calls at critical moments... some deserved, others maybe not so much. It was not a very fun game, because it was basically over at halftime. Nail-biters are more fun when you are at the pinnacle of the season. First Super Bowl with a female on the ref squad, really no reason more women shouldn't get involved with the NFL in ways that don't involve go-go boots.

The halftime show seemed to be pretty divisive this year, with a lot of love and hate online. I rate it middle of the road but definitely overhyped by the artist ahead of time. It wasn't my taste in music and I thought parts were too dark to really see the artist, but it was more entertaining than the bands that just stand there. Pregame, the ASL interpreter was the star of the show, but otherwise it was one of my least favorite renditions of the Star Spangled Banner. Ads were below average this year, but to be expected because some of the key advertisers took the year off, big budget ad productions were probably difficult this year, and advertisers seemed keen to avoid pushing the envelope into controversial waters.

Well, they wouldn't have been wrong! The part through the arboretum is more a dammed off retention pond than creek and the equestrian center used to wash their byproducts into the water, so it was pretty foul in the more stagnant spots. Over the past 5 years, they've been building a pump and filter system to clean up the water.

If DeLuca was a contender, should we be happy or not? I don’t know anything about him.

I spent a year living in a trendy 1905-era downtown apartment with no laundry hookups, so I had to use a laundromat. What a... cultural experience. But yeah, they were definitely washing more than clothes there.

I agree it's inhumane to put those with mental or other issues on the street (not that 1930s insane asylums worked either). I don't agree with the antifa theories. To some degree, homeless probably do follow resources, which I think makes the case to standardize services across communities to avoid pushing the problem around. I agree we have a housing problem due to a supply/demand mismatch, but I'm not sure I blame it specifically on illegal immigration. I blame it on a proliferation of stagnant low-wage jobs (which, in agriculture are often below legal pay and functionally can only be filled by undocumented workers), coupled with a refusal to build more housing stock. Some locales are out of finite land and water resources, but in others, people who bought high do not want the market to equalize because they will lose money if their property adjusts to its real value. If telework turns out to be here to stay, it may fundamentally change property values by allowing supply and demand forces to work more freely - though there will be a new set of winners and losers in that scenario.

yeah, you’re right in the current climate, I think because banks and corporations that play by federal rules can’t play. So it’s a cash-only industry of small businesses, which is attractive to organized crime the same way laundromats and bingo halls are. If this was just another product on the shelf at Walgreens, industrial agriculture conglomerates (a cartel in their own right) would exert a lot of pressure on the illegal model.

homelessness is an interesting paradox because is it the disease or the symptom of a different disease? Do you go for a curative or palliative treatment? The easy route is to push the problem around by having the police move people along. I grew up in a small county with an annual homeless budget of a few hundred dollars used to dole out one-way bus tickets to Fresno. I saw a story about Salt Lake City, that they took an approach 20 years ago to provide unconditional real housing (apartment beds not shelter beds). Most of the homeless at that time were mentally/physically disabled or addicts, so unemployable. They realized they couldn’t treat those root problems if those people didn’t have a reliable address and they dramatically cut homelessness. But then it came back 5 years ago, though a different group of people. These were working people who had never been homeless before. And they found that these people didn’t need services other than cheaper rent 6 months ago. But if these people stayed homeless more than a few months, they started to develop physical and mental problems that impacted employability. Growing income inequality with the people on the upside spiking real estate prices and then not wanting affordable housing in their neighborhood seems to be a big problem. UBI seems like a good tool for the kit.

You make some fair points on drugs, but maybe the best way to squeeze cartels is to legalize pot and let Phillip Morris grow it. As far as subsidizing people, I’d rather not have to, but it costs like $15k a year to get them in housing, $50-80k to put them in jail. It’s cheaper to let them hotbox an apartment.

From what I gather, we might see J&J vaccine hit pharmacies by March. While maybe not as effective as Pfizer and Moderna, perhaps the single dose and simpler handling will speed distribution. It uses an adenovirus (a common cold virus as carrier?) instead of mRNA. I believe it is similar to the Russian Sputnik V vaccine. I'm not sure I fully understand the mechanism, but maybe I don't need to.

I read the writer's bio... looks like she was previously with LA Times and until recently, the Sac Bee. It says NYT "correspondent", which I think is code for a freelance journalist paid per article rather than a staff reporter paid a salary. I think the business model for online news and increasingly print news is just that... the reporters are gig workers and the news organizations are little more than editors/curators that buy articles. I would imagine in the Bee's case that they do not pay journalism students much if anything. I think new entrants to the career do a lot of pro bono work up front to build their portfolio and resume. Bully for the UCD press office for getting a connected journalist to this story. I think it shows that UCD can attract national attention when it shares something widely applicable. Far too many of the stories that Davis pushes are niche vanity projects that interest narrow corners of academia and the social justice movement. Normally I see these kinds of headlines in the UCD news feed - "A multicultural exploration of the intersectionality of paint and canvas in relation to implied sexism of paintbrushes" - the kind of stuff that ain't going to make the NYT.

Several models of Fitbits are able to measure SpO2 levels. Fitbit has been moving more and more towards monitoring health metrics along with tracking activity levels — BlueGoldAg

Fitbit is now owned by Google, so they are into tracking any potentially saleable piece of information they can about you. They must have an advertising customer wanting to know your O2 levels :chin:

The campus has a no visitors policy for dorm areas and requires any visitor to campus to fill out a COVID questionnaire. Students and employees are mandated to participate in testing, visitors are encourage to test. I don't know how well they are enforcing the questionnaire on casual walkers or bikers through campus. What I get though from it though is that visitors without a compelling reason are just not wanted right now. Partly to prevent spread of disease, but also partly to enforce order around their public health efforts. The University has tools to discipline students and employees for breaking COVID policies. It's harder to discipline unaffiliated visitors for unwanted behavior that does not rise to the level of being illegal and warranting trespass from public property. I wouldn't bank on spectators, though if that becomes an option later in the season, maybe students and staff get first crack since they are already in the testing/surveillance bubble.

I hope there is a good online audio/video feed. I live far outside KHTK's terrestrial range. For streaming, regardless of provider, Aggie Stadium has far more technical problems than the other schools in Big Sky. Somebody should be checking the upload bandwidth of their modem.

I don't think decentralization is unique to California or health. I think it is rooted in the 18th century where people wanted to be within a day's horse ride of their decision makers and wanted to make sure that their local tax dollars didn't leak out to help poorer areas. On one hand, the needs in Modoc County are very different than LA County, but at the same time, county lines are kind of arbitrary because Lancaster is very different than Long Beach. Our system relies on having qualified elected officials who are invested in the public good both hiring and listening to topical expert civil servants. In general, I think civil servants can do a better job when the politicians provide responsible funding and framework and then butt out of daily affairs, which I think other than habitually underfunding, the politicians do get out of the way of the VA's daily affairs. Historically not the case over at places like USDA and Department of Education because nothing brings politicians out of the sewer faster than perceived sleights to small business and organized religion, and those departments are a mess because of it. Interestingly in this case, thousands of health civil servants across the country have basically all said the same things, which has some perceived conflicts with small business and organized religion, so out come the politicians. And rather than a national approach with just one set of politicians interfering, this is a fragmented approach involving 50 governors and about 3000 boards of supervisors and sheriffs micromanaging. And what we've seen is that a lot of civil servants are actually better than we give them credit for, while a lot of politicians of any stripe are morons more concerned with personal reelection prospects and ego wars over jurisdiction than the public good. We have public and private sector experts in this country that could pull off this heavy lift, if only we would have liquored up the politicians and dropped them off at the Dixon corn maze while the adults figured things out. If anything, a couple of blind spots that the vaccine distribution has highlighted - we have a lack of domestic emergency access to raw materials and manufacturing and we have a lot of residents for whom we don't have a good means of contact to identify them and let them know their place in line.

, @DrMike Some off-topic insider knowledge on hotel bookings... scroll by if this isn't of interest to you --

All of the hundreds of "discount sites" you are aware of are ultimately part of Expedia or Booking.com, so there is limited benefit in cross-comparing. TripAdvisor is deeply in bed with both. They use tracking cookies across sites to determine if you are a feature-conscious or price-conscious shopper, and if you start price comparing sites, it generates false scarcity ("one room left!") and the best deal you saw might even "sell out" while you shop (clear your cookies and it's back). On the hotel end, the hotel pays 10-20% commission to the site, so it's great for the hotel to use it on lower demand nights to fill rooms (occupancy rate and annual revenue per room are important metrics for investors and GM bonuses, so anything above 0 helps). But on a high demand night, they don't want to pay the Expedia tax if they could fill the room with a direct booking. As for how the hotel receives your booking - at some properties Expedia has a backdoor to their property management system, but for many others the front desk gets a fax or an email that staff manually enter. There is an element of human error here... fax machine out of ink, or they actually sell out before inputting the Expedia reservations. Because a lot of Expedia reservations cancel at the last minute, some hotel operators will short it and overbook, which could leave you stuck if they hedge incorrectly. If something goes wrong, remember Expedia Corp is the hotel's "guest". They pay the hotel with a one-time use virtual credit card and basically sublet the room to you. So if your potential bad review doesn't intimidate them, the front desk may not do much problem solving for you, instead telling you to sort it out with Expedia. Because you've basically bought the room at auction, some hotels will put you in blacklist rooms, next to the ice machine, pool pump, etc. You don't have the same lifetime value to them as someone brand loyal. Hotels prefer you to book direct and it does give you better insurance that your room exists and they will handle problems directly. Some hotel brands like Hilton will match Expedia offers right on their own site, others you have to call and they should match. In fact, franchise hotels typically have to pay the franchisor a 5% commission for web or call center reservations, so sometimes if you pretend it's 1990 and call the front desk local number direct, they can hook you up because they save all the commission costs. At a Best Western type joint, during they day you may well be talking to the owner. I've done this with the Best Western in Dixon, booked Picnic Day and football season all at once and the GM gave us an unpublished deal. All hotels subscribe to an industry report that shares occupancy information and then their own revenue algorithms adjust rates in real time based on a live look at bookings at every hotel in town. Some owners are strictly committed to data, but others are willing to override the algorithm with human finesse if the deal feels right. Moral of the story, discount sites are good for market surveillance to see your options, but there are reasons to consider making the reservation with hotel directly.

Things going well at the VA? I don’t understand. How could a nationalized single payer health system outperform a network of 3000 county health departments entangled with a variety of for-profit hospitals and pharmacies in competition with each other?

I’m writing from the assumption that assistants are UC employees, in which case I think policy prevents family members from directly supervising each other, at least on paper with the HR department. I would agree that assistant coaches typically do not get a national search committee, but when you are presumably handling taxpayer or student fee money, you want to both be and appear above board. While cooking the stat books may not be on the table, questions about fairness on performance reviews, raises, or HR complaints become more complicated when it’s all in the family at a government entity.