The Current Cubs Failure Starts At The Very Top
What Craig Counsell and David Ross have in common is that both are former players and I think that is the context in which one has to conclude that so far Counsell has not been better than the person he replaced. Former player managers appear to be more likely to continue to expect older players who once did very well to find their former selves any day now, when the probability of that happening is not likely.
The problem with the current Cubs is not Counsell just as Ross was not the problem when we was fired. The continued success of the Milwaukee Brewers after Counsell left them for the Cubs is for me strong evidence that it’s a system that leads to success not one person. What is important is the people at the top of a baseball team, the owner and next in command, to make good hires for people to put in place a good system.
The Chicago Cubs will continue fail to meet expectations and long as Jed Hoyer is running the Cubs. Hoyer wrongly over valued Counsell’s contributions at the Brewers and under valued the Brewer organization that clearly is superior to the Cubs. Counsell leaves and his bench coach is promoted to manager and the Brewers keep winning, what does that tell you?
I expect Counsell will be fired because that is the simplest action for Hoyer to take, and Jed isn’t going to fire himself. Rickett’s extended Hoyer last season before the trade deadline even after demonstrating poor decision making by trading the organization’s top prospect for a poor performing rental in Kyle Tucker.
Doing the same thing over and over is insanity. The Hoyer lead organization is convinced low cost, low budget aquisitions will get the Cubs back to the World Series but the current roster is just the latest evidence that will not work. We have the same team now as we had in every year since 2019.
I wonder, now that we have decided on a company to replace our windows, when will I stop seeing ads for window replacement companies in my Instagram feed?
I am reading through articles about announcements from Google I/O 2026, and I think this change Google is planning to make to Tiles in Wear OS 7 has to be one of the most idiotic design decisions I have seen. When you have a UI on a small screen like a watch, why would you not use the entire screen? What are they thinking?
Tiles are also getting a redesign. Google will roll out widgets with Wear OS 7 to replace full-screen tiles. A 2×1 or 2×2 block will display app information in a style that more closely resembles Android 16’s widgets. It doesn’t appear that the new design will allow users to stack widgets on top of each other in the same screen, like Samsung’s version of Wear OS allows Galaxy Watch users to do.
I put my Pixel 10 on a Belkin MagSafe wireless charger. Today it dawned on me that it would be cool if when the phone is on the charger that if a phone call comes in the phone would automatically operate in speaker phone mode so I could just tap a button to receive the call and talk.
Gadgeteer has an embed of a leaked walk thru of the forthcoming Android Desktop that Google officially announced as Googlebook this week. The demo is running in a VM on a Mac not on any native hardware. I don’t see anything in the demo that is really new or exciting. We have been using the “desktop” personal computer metaphor for so long and I wish that a company would have the guts to try something really new.
I think the only reason to consider Googlebook if it were built from the ground up as a AI-based user interface, but instead I think it will simply have AI stuff bolted on and that is not appealing. It’s early days, but hard to say what will be the reason to buy a Googlebook rather than a MacBook.
A significant amount of my childhood fears was driven by K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base located about 50 miles north of my childhood home. The base was part of the United States Strategic Air Command, housing B-52 bombers and nuclear weapons. When there was ever talk in the 1970s and 80s about nuclear war, that meant bombs dropping on K.I. Sawyer and close enough for either instant or near term death. The based paired with the Soo Locks that are vital to the transportation of iron ore to manufacture weapons, meant the U.P. in general was a strategic target for our enemies, meaning then the U.S.S.R.
Of course things changed in the early 90s with the fall of the Soviet Union and with it a decrease for the need of Air Force Bases, leading to the closure of K.I. Sawyer. The economic impact on the area was huge, and while today the site is partially in use including for the Marquette County airport, some of the buildings standing unused not too unlike the abandoned mining locations that dot the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Om Malik has written a very compelling post about what he calls the Internet of AI. Part of the post is an explanation about what AI actual means from an overall technology perspective. Here is a valuable summary:
The right historical analogy for what is happening with AI is not Web 2.0 or the cloud. It is the railroads of the nineteenth century. Railroad operators understood the freight cars were not where value lived. The value was in owning the rails and everything around them, including the land. Owning the rails meant controlling routes, latency, geography, redundancy, and the cost structure of every customer who depended on the network.
Home improvement is exhausting. We have spent the last two weeks seeking quotes to replace the windows in our condo. The condo was built in the 1970s and the windows are original and should have been replaced long ago. Ever since we bought this unit, windows has been the responsibility of the association, but the cost of replacing all the windows of all the units of the condominium would result in a huge assessment, so the topic has been avoided. Now the association is planning to update the bylaws to make window replacement the responsibility of co-owners.
The cost of replacing windows is made worse by the fact that our unit, like many in our condominium, has several large, non-standard windows. For example, multiple patio doors with four foot wide panels rather than a more standard three foot wide panels. By the end of the week we will have four quotes with a wide range in price between low and high. Part of me wants to pay the lowest amount, but the other part of me does not want to risk having to replace the windows again, given that we may be living here for ten more years. We are on the fence about which direction to take.
Just Because You Can Doesn't Mean You Should
I’ve written here a few times of my concerns with AI. Eric Markowitz expresses similar concerns.
We began to believe that because a capability exists, it must be deployed. That because a machine can replace a person, the person must go. This is an abdication of our moral duty as humans. It is surrendering our judgment to our instruments and calling it progress.
The reason this moment feels so acute, so existential, is not because AI is uniquely powerful — although it is. It’s because AI has arrived at precisely the moment when we have already hollowed out so much of what makes work meaningful.
We have already financialized everything. We have already reduced human beings to line items and disposed of them like inventory. We have already built an economy that treats people as costs to be minimized rather than as the very source of the value being created.
I also think the idea seeking meaning in their work is fools gold, intended to allow themselves to be used. Finding meaning in work confused vocation with occupation. Some times they do align, but I think only when starting with vocation.
Streaking Baseball Players
The Chicago Cubs have won ten games in a row, which is their second ten game winning streak of this season. Right now it is fun to be a fan of the Chicago Cubs given that their entire lineup is hitting and that puts a lot pressure on opposing pitchers. If the line up keeps this up, the Cubs could be a champion, but that is not likely. The key to winning divisions in baseball is stacking wins to put distance between you and other teams in the division so that you can get a large enough for when the team loses several games in a row you don’t lose your place.
I think it’s hard for me to get really excited about this year’s team because of the pitching staff. Teams that have success in the playoffs have Cy Young caliber pitchers and right now I can’t put any of Cubs starters in that category.
Going in to the season, Cade Horton had that potential, but he is injured and done for the year. Shota Imanga is pitching very well as is Edward Cabrera but the big question about both is whether they can sustain their current performance through the entire season, both have history of injuries.
Pitching wins championships and right now it’s hard to feel confident that the Cubs current pitching is good enough. The Cubs lineup and current pitching may be good enough to win their division, and perhaps even get to the National League championship series, but as teams advance in the playoffs chances of that opposing pitching will neutralize a lineup increases and that is when your pitching matters.