The 2026 Chicago Cubs are wasting a good lineup by having the worst pitching in the MLB. For me the root cause is Jed Hoyer treating the bullpen like a fantasy baseball manager, with turnovers every year and failure in real investment. The bullpen is foundational to pitching in the current era of pitching, and you see how teams like the Brewers who maintain consistency year over year and invest in the bullpen are competitive every year. In contrast, every year the Cubs try to build a new bullpen from the castoffs of other teams.
Now, while I put the blame for the pitching on Hoyer, I also have issues with Greg Counsells' decisions with pitching. For example, it has been obvious that Shota Imanaga is not giving his team a chance to win when he takes the mound, so either Assad or Rae should take his place in the starting rotation. Instead, Counsell keeps starting him, hoping for a different result.
The Cubs will earn a wildcard spot in the playoffs, but the most likely outcome is a first round loss and regression from last year. Injuries will be the excuse but the reality is that the team is severely mis-managed from the owner on down. Not making changes in leadership and expecting different results each year is insanity. If Ricketts doesn’t want the Cubs to have a real chance to be in the World Series he ought to sell the team.
Live Life Without Regret
From around the web….
A 450-Year History of Blogging
Brennan Kenneth Brown https://brennan.day/a-450-year-history-of-blogging/
“In his 1574 A Regiment for Sea, William Bourne describes how, with a line tied to it, a log was thrown over the side of the ship, and the length of line was measured “while someone turned a minute sand glass” or in some cases “spoke some number of woordes [sic]” in order to measure the ship’s speed.[2] (The length was eventually counted by literal knots tied in the line at regular intervals; thus, our equally iconic term “knots.”) Recordings of the log-derived information, eventually replaced by the “chip log,” a weighted wooden quadrant, were entered into what would come to be called the “log board.”
— Janet Sorenson, “Logging-In: The Ship’s Log as Medium””
My mornings are the time of the day that has changed the most in retirement. I am not woken by an alarm and I spend it slowly drinking coffee while I catch up on the world. I am able to spend the entire morning outside on the patio if I wish, which is now easier to do on a day like today when the temperature is cool even with no clouds in the sky. The cicadas are still singing their summer song while a chipmunk frantically gathers food and stores it in her nest. I am blessed.
Browsing social media this morning was emotional due to all the tributes to Dolly Parton. A question often asked is, how is there so much evil in the world? Perhaps the better question is, why is there so much good in the world? Fortunately there are those in the world, like Dolly, who are in communion with the Divine such that light shines enough to provide glimpses of the Kingdom as it ought to be on earth as heaven.
I think the hand wringing over non-mainstream politicians winning Democrat primaries is very telling in how it shows that a large number of people do not know or will not admit there has been a change in U.S. politics.
What most do not want to admit is that Trump and the “Make America Great” political movement correctly identify the sentiments of wanting change. The message is that the “same old, same old” is not working and less and less accepted. Trump successfully convinced a lot of people that he was truly different, and all the “crazy” things he says and does are just clear evidence. The problem for Republicans, however, is that it is becoming clear that in reality Trump and those looking to mimic him are not different.
In my opinion, Abdul E-Sayed is campaigning on the same problems MAGA is a reaction to. For example, why are U.S. tax dollars sent to foreign governments when there are so many U.S. citizens, including veterans, going without? Isn’t that a common sense question?
Further, if the U.S. government is going to collect taxes, shouldn’t those tax dollars be prioritized on U.S. citizens? Why not spend those billions on healthcare for U.S. citizens rather than on endless wars?
Hilary Clinton and Kamala Harris both lost to Trump because they were the “same old, same old.” In a time when many think the Democrat and Republican parties are pretty much the same, those people are looking for clear differences. And if the differences are between “crazy” ideas, which crazy idea is more harmful to the United States, starting a unnecessary war that results in prices going up or stop starting wars and instead spending that money on healthcare for citizens?
My installation of Feedland is one of the services I currently do not have access to due to the Proxmox host failure. Fortunately my installation of River5 is on another host, but this circumstance gives me the opportunity to try out FreshRSS. Learning a new RSS aggregator takes some time, but I am working my way through.
Quick update. We celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary last week, first with one night of camping and then a planned night in Frankenmuth, Michigan. We survived the campout ok, but on our anniversary night I accidentally shaved off a chunk of my right index finger so we spent a few hours at urgent care. Not a big wound but enough to make typing difficult. To top it off, when we got home I found my primary Proxmox server was down due to a worn out SSD.
Winning The Trade Deadline Doesn't Matter
Trades at the Major League Baseball deadline do not make champions, championship teams are built during the off season and through development of young players. Good teams that need one or two players at the deadline and get them can make themselves a great team.
By most measures, the Chicago Cubs became a better team at this year’s deadline by getting the players they needed. The problem is, the Cubs needed too many players at the deadline, and didn’t make their lineup more reliable.
A Fool With A Tool Is Still A Fool
AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
Nikhil Suresh https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking
“Unfortunately, we live in a dark timeline. All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, not only amongst projects we have been asked to participate in22 We have rejected all AI implementation work. It is absolutely a gigantic bubble and we have minimized our exposure to it – every single one of our current contracts would be totally unaffected by OpenAI collapsing, save for perhaps some second-order effects such a recession causing a client to become unable to pay us. And there’s nothing we can do to insulate ourselves from that anyway., but even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work. Even if you grant that AI tooling accelerates specific workloads, the method and scale of the current investments is senseless. Frequently the failure is not related to AI itself, but rather that companies are terminally bad at running software projects effectively, and as I have remarked previously, AI projects are subject to all the failure modes of normal projects plus you can get everything right and then still fail because of the method’s novelty. Very few companies are so good at shipping software that they can afford the extra risk profile.”
Only You Can Change You
Roadtripping In A Hyundai Tuscon
Looking In The Mirror
Finally back home to mornings on the patio being sernaded by the cicadas. We saw a lot of the following during our road trip.
Taking in all the sights
Manton has added a new feature that displays books that I have read by month. You will find a like to the page from the Reading page, it is called Finished Reading By Month.
A year ago I was working in the basement for my job of 37 years, today I am in a coffee shop in Loveland, Colorado casually drinking a latte and reading. Nothing more than realizing how my life has changed.
Road tripping, any guess where?
Sounds to me like at least for the moment RSS chat is like old school Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) before things like Fido net. I imagine people will quickly want some form of federation because most people aren’t old enough to have been experienced BBSes and the idea of small, sandboxed, online communities.
Can you correctly answer the questions on the civics test that people who wish to be U.S. citizens must be able to correctly answer?
A Method For Quoteblogs
Among the many RSS feeds that I subscribe to there are a few that contain posts that share other people’s writing. I find the posts valuable because they provide me links to articles to read that I may not otherwise find and tend to be thoughtfully curated.
I want to provide my own “quoteblog” posts and landed on a method for creating them using the knowledge management app I’ve been developing for myself with Claude.
My reading flow starts by reviewing articles collected and presented by Feedland and River5 using RSS. I click articles with interesting titles and then send them to Readwise Reader using an extension, later I read them and highlight portions of the article that I like. Copies of the article highlights are downloaded to Obsidian and accessible to Readwise, which sends me random highlights of articles I read in daily emails.
The dashboard of my PKM app has a widget that is a list of the recent articles with highlights. Claude wrote the code to use the Readwise API to access the recent articles and display them in the widget. The article titles in the widget are links to the article highlights in Readwise. The articles roll off the widget over time but I can pin them to access them later via a Pinned Highlights page.
My quoteblog posts originate from the highlights I store in Readwise. Readwise provides the ability to tag articles, or what it calls documents, and tag individual highlights. I give the source article of the quotes a “blog-post” tag and the highlights to share a “quote” tag in Readwise. Claude then wrote the code that reviews the articles that I pinned looking for ones with a “blog-post” document tag and when it finds one, it puts thee article title, author, and source URL in a markdown file. Highlights that have a “quote” tag are then added to the markdown file.
For now I am not automating the publishing of the quoteblog post to this site. For now I am going to manually create my blog post in Obsidian, copy and paste the source of the quoteblog created from my highlights, and then do some light editing before publishing. The first of my quoteblog posts is Independent Food For Thought.