lobottomee

If I could only pick Lotto numbers as well as I predicted this year's performance. Attached is a post I made last December. I'm not the brightest person in the world (uh lobottomee?), so if I can predict the Bills, how easy do you think the likes of Belichick can do it. Comments? From December 2008: Education and pedigree don't necessarily ensure success. Football is a game of tactics and emotion. The ability to sense when it's time to go in for the kill is intuitive, not cerebral, and is a snap judgment, not analytical. Knowing when to support the team and when to make one an example comes from the gut, not the mind. Jauron has the mind, but is completely missing the other part. Watch him talk after games and you can see he genuinely doesn't understand why he loses. He'll never ever figure it out because he's incapable of understanding the non-analytical part of football. Isn't it interesting when you consider Jauron only has half the tools to be successful, his teams have only once been better than 50/50. But as they say, even a blind squirrel gets an acorn once in a while. Having looked at next year's schedule it wouldn't surprise me to see only 2 or 3 wins. Bill's management has consistently missed the point on the core parts of the team; the o and d lines. I see nothing different in the future. Competing with playoff caliber teams (of which there will be plenty next season) requires winning the battles up front, and sticking it with long enough to wear down the opponent. The current Bill's players aren't capable of winning those battles, and the Bill's coaches don't have the fortitude or understanding to stick with it even if the players were capable. I have to admit, I got sucked in this year and thought the Bill's had finally gotten legit. But in the end, they didn't possess the fundamentals to win consistently, or compete against the better teams. Unfortunately we're in for more of the same next year.

Education and pedigree don't necessarily ensure success. Football is a game of tactics and emotion. The ability to sense when it's time to go in for the kill is intuitive, not cerebral, and is a snap judgment, not analytical. Knowing when to support the team and when to make one an example comes from the gut, not the mind. Jauron has the mind, but is completely missing the other part. Watch him talk after games and you can see he genuinely doesn't understand why he loses. He'll never ever figure it out because he's incapable of understanding the non-analytical part of football. Isn't it interesting when you consider Jauron only has half the tools to be successful, his teams have only once been better than 50/50. But as they say, even a blind squirrel gets an acorn once in a while. Having looked at next year's schedule it wouldn't surprise me to see only 2 or 3 wins. Bill's management has consistently missed the point on the core parts of the team; the o and d lines. I see nothing different in the future. Competing with playoff caliber teams (of which there will be plenty next season) requires winning the battles up front, and sticking it with long enough to wear down the opponent. The current Bill's players aren't capable of winning those battles, and the Bill's coaches don't have the fortitude or understanding to stick with it even if the players were capable. I have to admit, I got sucked in this year and thought the Bill's had finally gotten legit. But in the end, they didn't possess the fundamentals to win consistently, or compete against the better teams. Unfortunately we're in for more of the same next year.

The OL is the root cause of the Bill's problems. Consider this... Good OL makes a mediocre back look great. Mcgahee isn't mediocre Good OL gives rookie QB's time to look over the field Good OL allows sieve-like DL time to contemplate the bench heaters Good OL demoralizes opponents Good OL lets slow receivers get open. Evans and Roscoe aren't slow. Good OL keeps allows opposing offense time to contemplate the bench heaters Does it get any simpler than this? Basice football 101. Why doesn't TD get it? Stop thinking fancy TD!! The OL is the equivalent of tires on a car. No matter how good the engine and the driver, the race is lost unless the tires are good. Doh!!!

Although you make a very valid point about pushing the price of "your" oil as high as you can (after all, that's the same thing corporate boards do) your point about controlling prices is unfounded. Want to drive prices down? Stop buying. If enough people stop, prices will drop. The problem is, as stated very well by Fan in Chicago, gasoline prices are inelastic. People who are addicted to cigarettes find it difficult to stop buying, so downward pressure on prices is light. We're addicted to gasoline, so until we have to make the choice between food and gas, we'll just yell and holler while the nozzle is stuck in the side of the car. I love how every time oil prices go up the comparison is made to "inflation adjusted prices of 1980". That's meant to make us feel better about the upward spiral of prices. To me it shows how little our press really understands the underlying core problem. They're all little more than parrots; repeating what they hear without ever understanding what they say. At the end of the day, it's up to us to change things, but I have my doubts that we as a society have the fortitude to actually follow through. I'm reminded of the time I worked for a company that was going through financial difficulties. For a year and a half, management warned that tough times were coming and we had to change the way we do things. Everyone agreed, but no one actually did very much. And then on one particular Monday we went to our lockers and half of them had been cleaned out because the workers had been laid off. The light bulb went on and we decided we'd better get busy and change things. Trouble was, it was too late. This time around, though, being too late will be a disaster.

A couple more points to consider... As a general rule, oil companies don't get "tax breaks". They do get depletion allowances and other deductions because the nature of thier business is risky. To get a sense of the risk, try this experiment. Go to your boss and request about 200 million dollars. Tell him your going to drill a hole in the ground 18,000 feet deep, but first you need to spend another 150 million to build the platform that floats in the Gulf of Mexico. Remind him you are the best at your business, and that on average you only miss drilling commercial wells 40% of the time. Tell him he's making record profits and can afford to piss away 40 million on your hunch. While this is facetious, it's illustrates my point. Drilling oil and gas wells is the industrial version of Las Vegas Blackjack. Yes you can win, but you have to be damn good at the game, and sometimes the cards are just stacked against you. I have to disagree with you that politicians are greedy and don't give a crap. I think most of them are well intentioned, but don't have the backbone to make good intelligent decisions. Take Hillary; her decisions have nothing to do with the country and everything to do with her ambitions and ego. She lives for today, and worries about tomorrow some other time. But she believes that the things she's doing are in the best interest of the country. Trouble is, she can't tell the difference between long term beneficial policy and short term political expediency, so she defaults to acquiescing to the loudest voice she hears. If it's the Sierra Club, she's an environmentalist, if Exxon is screaming loudest that day, she's for drilling in ANWR. It's a rare politician that has the crust to make difficult decisions that are in the country's best interest, especially since the liklihood is that decision will mean an unsuccessful re-election. All that being said, the government is for the most part impotent when it comes to fostering meaningful changes. That's why Social Security is still being debated, 28 years after it first started getting into trouble. Tax incentives can help initiate changes, but they can't sustain them. Only market forces will sustain meaningful changes. There's all kinds of tax incentives available if I want to buy a tenament and rehab it. But until the crack heads get cleaned up and there's a profit in it for me the buildings will continue to rot. It's the same for energy policy. No matter how many incentives there are, energy change will not happen until individuals like you and me start making decisions that go down those roads. Waiting lists for Toyota's Prius will push GM towards fuel efficiency overnight whereas governement pressure to do the same thing will be little more than martini discussions at the next board meeting. And guess what's driving those changes? Yup, me wanting to buy one of those cars cuz' the damn thing gets 60 mpg and I can save 25 bucks a week! Okay, enough pontificating on my part. Just one more thing... Go Bills!

High oil / gasoline prices are a good thing for this country. And having spent 15 years drilling oil wells I have some idea what I'm talking about. Here's the deal; there's only so much of the stuff, and sooner or later it'll run out. For years we've had relatively low prices for oil and gas. No one gave a thought to it. Drive to the store for a candy bar? No problem, hop in the car and go. Drive by yourself to work even when you can share with your neighbor? Yup, I'd rather be by myself. Gas mileage? What's that? You get the point. But now that gasoline is $2.50 a gallon, people are thinking about. Look around on the freeway, you see people carpooling. Want to make $2.50 a gallon gas $1.25 again? Drive half as much; share a ride to work. Alternative energy is now becoming competitive. Guess what? We're a bunch of greedy bastards in this country. If there's a buck to made, someone will make it, and when a buck can be made in alternative energy the market will take off. And money begets money, so someone else will come along and cut the price because they figured out how to do it cheaper. Bush may be a bumbling dolt when it comes to public speaking, but he's no fool. The strategic oil reserve is full, and Chuck and Hillary's bellyaching about opening it up to lower gasoline prices 10 cents a gallon isn't going to change Bush's mind. It isn't called "strategic" for giggles, it's there to keep this country from being brought to it's knees by some nut case in the middle east. High oil prices will do more to slow global warming than any treaty ever will. High prices get me off my ass and make me do a damn grocery list so I only have to make 1 trip. They make windmills attractive, solar heaters affordable, and steer the finest technical people we have in this country to do what should have been done a long time ago; make energy supplies match energy use! Our lives won't end because oil prices are high. But they will be different. Ultimately our lives will be better. For years, we've been eating our seed corn, and now that the pantry is getting bare we're getting scared. Great! That makes us pay attention. But there's lots of alternatives out there, we just need to go after them. Yeah, it's gonna take some work and some time. So what doesn't that's worthwhile? Lastly, think about this. If every person in this country cut their usage of gasoline by 2 gallons per week oil imports to this country would drop by 1/3. Piss on Iraq. Bring back our boys and let the camel jockeys kill each other. We won't need them anymore!

Wow! Just goes to prove that functioning brain cells are optional to be a public official. Or put another way, juz go da proov dat funkshunin brane sells iz opshunal ta bee da pubic ofishal!

There's more than one way to improve a OL. Trades, drafts, free agency... and strategy. Even a mediocre OL can look good when they don't have to worry about zone blitzes and every linebacker headed toward the quarterback. A mobile quarterback, a strong running back who can break it at any time, and now 3 blazing fast receivers forces a defense to stay home instead of crashing the OL. I like this pick. Perhaps TD is making lemonade in this draft when most offensive linemen are lemons.