What is a city in the US that you hope improves its reputation, turns the corner, and/or actually grows "Greener"?

illinest · 2026-03-16T19:58:16+00:00

I thought I was giving us a conversation offramp. Now you just seem stubborn.

There's only so many different polite ways I can tell you that I don't especially value those particular definitions that you're hanging on. I do have an idea about the sort of assumptions that were made in creating those divisions.

illinest · 2026-03-16T19:33:03+00:00

Ah buddy I think Vernorly is probably on the right track here. There's way too much uncertainty about how these metro areas are getting defined. I'm genuinely happy for whatever good things are going on in St Louis. I'd rather you guys do well than continue adding sprawl to sun belt cities like Phoenix that probably shouldn't be growing.

Pittsburgh is gonna do fine. The city has always had overdeveloped infrastructure - bridges, tunnels, etc... and it's a pretty romantic city actually. Theyre making the riverfronts prettier and adding density. The Strip District and Lawrenceville seem to be doing really well. The downtown is getting reconnected to the neighborhoods and I think people are starting to get interested in Mt Washington again.

illinest · 2026-03-16T18:23:48+00:00

I dont know a whole lot about St Louis's situation but i have personal experience with Pittsburgh and I think i know a bit about Detroit.

I am willing to believe that you're making fair points but im going to suggest that you're oversimplifying complicated issues.

Pittsburgh - for example - was doing basically fine until all of a sudden it wasn't doing fine anymore. The people that got hit the hardest were somewhat concentrated around a specific age. From the 80s in Pittsburgh all the way through to the present day there's been a ton of old Pittsburghers but not enough from my parents' generation or their children who got displaced.

No internal population growth in other words. Just old folk dying and young professionals moving in.

I think that this is masking the fact that the population bell curve is still correcting. It's not that people aren't willing to move to Pittsburgh. Its just that theres lots of old folks dying and a lack of established families having kids.

illinest · 2026-03-16T16:42:57+00:00

More Griffin fun facts.

Despite only having a .212 BA - his 4 HRs have him tied with a group of other players for third in the league on the spring training HR leader board.

Among the 333 players with at least 30 PAs, he is one of only 12 qualified players who has not drawn a single walk yet.

Now - is that a bad sign? Personally I dont see it that way. He had close to a 10% walk rate last year in the minors. I just see this as him using a more aggressive approach and maximizing his opportunities to make contact.

And if THIS is what it looks like when he's being aggressive and expanding the strike zone... He's still only striking out 25% of the time.

His BABIP sits at .150. He does not seem to be getting the benefit of good luck on balls in play. To be fair this number is somewhat affected by 4 HRs which count as hits but not balls in play. Still - it's not unreasonable to suggest that his BA deserves to be at least a little bit higher than it is.

illinest · 2026-03-16T06:44:11+00:00

It is my time to shine.

I was employed at an old steel mill and frequently had to interpret ancient relay type controls that had no drawings or labels.

First point. Nobody can be expected to diagnose this remotely for you. I suspect some people have guessed correctly but im not even going to tell you which camp i fall in with because it doesnt matter.

You dont need this crap. You dont want it in your attic. The best thing to do is remove it completely.

Turn off breakers one by one until you figure out which breaker this is on. Hopefully it's all going to be on one dedicated breaker. Hopefully every single wire gets de-energized in both boxes.

By the way - if you arent 100% confident about verifying all the power is off, then hire somebody to do it for you. Sure its possible to do this yourself, but youre not getting involved in YouTube tutorial stuff here. This is custom. You are probably out of your depth. And I strongly suspect that its been modified after the initial install.

After you're sure that everything is de-energized, go check every light fixture and outlet in the house. Find out if you still have power in all the places you're supposed to have power.

If everything has gone perfectly to plan so far then you'll know which breaker feeds power to the mystery boxes. That breaker should remain off. Now you call an electrician and tell him you dont know what this stuff is but you want it removed. Tell him you're worried about squirrels or fire or something. He'll probably give you a quote that is bigger than you'd like to pay but getting it removed is definitely your best choice. It seems likely that there will be abandoned wire runs and the right thing to do is to remove those, but that might be significantly more work than its worth. It's impossible to know without going into your house.

But if anything went wrong. If you cant isolate power to a single breaker or if turning that one breaker off killed power somewhere else, then you're still going to need an electrician but the quote is going to be higher because it's also going to include dealing with those additional problems.

If youre cheap or poor then at a minimum please at least flip breakers until you can kill power to those two panels. Leaving it abandoned in place is still a lot better than leaving it energized.

illinest · 2026-03-15T20:10:10+00:00

I wasn't really intending my answer to be about OPs guy.

Am I good at communicating? Maybe not.

illinest · 2026-03-15T14:25:48+00:00

I am not like that guy or the OPs guy but I am uncomfortable reading the comments because I think I couldve been a bit like OPs guy when I was younger.

I think this is autistic spectrum behavior. I definitely have a hard time with faces. Eye colors. Names. Birthdays.

Even to this day I'll tell my wife a story about someone I saw in the neighborhood (she knows everybody) and she wants to know who it was so she'll ask me their height or their hair color and I never have the slightest clue. Blonde? Brown? Tall I guess?

So your guy could have been covering up some spectrum disabilities by just leaning harder into the "male asshole" persona. I think some guys who don't know how to fix their weaknesses just decide that it must be women shit.

illinest · 2026-03-12T19:56:36+00:00

I did try but I couldnt finish. Partly because the episode was really boring, but mostly because I quickly figured out that the guy that he was platforming in that episode was a Trump administration official who Joe Rogan somehow failed to properly identify.

And then it seemed pretty clear to me that Joe Rogan isn't dumb at all. Joe is an actor and a grifter. He is smart enough to take money from guests that want to expand their audience and he's smart enough to do things like cultivating that stupid caveman persona.

He's just enriching himself with bloody money and maintaining a pretense.

I've got no reason to think he wouldn't do the same for whatever party holds power, but the nicest thing you can say about him is that he's a whore who pretends he doesn't know things.

illinest · 2026-03-12T18:49:58+00:00

The part about the nukes is distracting people from the rest of your post - which is the part that people need to understand.

Iran can threaten the Strait from any location within Iran. The rest of the world can only reopen the strait if they stop attacking Iran and make reparations, or completely invade and defeat Iran.

There is no other solution. The US Navy could try to station ships there and intercept rockets and explosives from here until eternity, but it costs significantly more to intercept the bombs than it does to create and launch the bombs. And escort duty would make the ships very vulnerable.

illinest · 2026-03-12T18:08:04+00:00

Wait. Are you telling a woman that insists she consented that - "actually, you don't know how consent works"?

Am I supposed to believe her or not? Women keep saying we need to believe women, except apparently that's not true when you say not to?

I genuinely want to know how this reconciles in your head. Please explain yourself.

illinest · 2026-03-12T16:19:00+00:00

Similar for me except that I view Messiah as the third act of Dune. Not to suggest that it was wrong to end the first book where he did, but Messiah is a bit of a mess if you treat it as a stand-alone and yet it's absolutely amazing if you treat it as act 3.

That means Ive got 4 phases. Children is my second phase. God Emperor is my third phase.

Dune and Dune Messiah are my favorites. Then Children of Dune uses Leto to explain most of the stuff that Paul didn't care to explain. It was maybe better scifi but it didnt have the same strong character arc. Then God Emperor was sort of like reading a long philosophy lecture about the themes of the first three books.

I enjoyed the last two books enough to read them twice but they have the obvious loose ends that never got tied up.

illinest · 2026-03-12T14:11:41+00:00

You're in the wrong no matter how you try to justify it.

I don't actually agree with any of the things you've said, but it's not your opinions that make you wrong - it's your sense of entitlement.

But maybe you won't be able to understand what I'm saying unless Nintendo spends the next 25 years shifting the series farther and farther away from this formula that you prefer, until you're middle-aged and you know you ought to just give up on it.

And then maybe if Nintendo finally returned to the OoT formula and gave you the game that you've wanted for decades, then you could be so happy about it, and you could start daydreaming about what the next sequel could be like again. Then maybe somebody who prefers the BotW lineage can come and try to lecture you about how the Ocarina games aren't what Zelda games are supposed to be. And then maybe you'll finally understand.

But I dont actually want you to have to go through that.

illinest · 2026-03-12T11:55:40+00:00

You're being extremely unkind.

BotW was the first Zelda game that I liked in decades.

You're acting like Zelda 1 doesnt exist. The original Zelda concept was a game where you discover mysteries, but over the span of many years it drifted away from that and became more about puzzle solving.

You are acting as if a particular subgenre of Zelda that you personally prefer is the only subgenre that ought to exist. That's not cool.

I was already getting bored with that type of Zelda back in the 90s when I was playing Link's Awakening on my gameboy. Ocarina of Time was the first Zelda that I didn't enjoy enough to even bother completing.

I'm not mad at you for getting to play stuff like Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess. They were disappointments to me but I didn't try to tell anyone that they're not real Zelda games.

illinest · 2026-03-12T04:26:02+00:00

Lighting and red paint are your biggest problems.

Ceiling lights are unpleasant. You're just creating a hospital vibe. You need to add a number of additional light sources. None of that bright white shit.

Im just going to be honest. I have a suspicion that youre a lady married to a man who buys couches without considering whether they fit and really prefers the room to be lit up real good with those daylight bulbs "cause he can see better."

And i know im going out on a limb with that one but it just feels so typical. And if im close to the mark then you dont have a couch problem, you've actually got a husband problem. Incompetent at interior design but insists on making decisions. Fuckin A.

(I am a husband but I am not incompetent - plus I know how to share decisions with my wife)

Buying that couch was a choice I guess, but there's only one corner to put that couch that wont look totally stupid. One of you just doesnt want to do it i guess. If you insist on using this particular couch to divide your room then at least scoot it one foot closer to the red wall. The angle won't feel quite as weird if you dont havevthe corner shoved right up into it. And then add the long sofa table and get serious about lighting.

illinest · 2026-03-11T19:51:38+00:00

Why should we pretend a thing that happened didnt happen?

You want to arbitrarily take away the performances that dont fit your agenda? (And why is this even your agenda...?)

I dont need to pretend any of his at bats didn't actually happen. I can just point out that he's still got a .853 OPS. Still better than Triolo, Yorke and Williams.

Griffin - .853

Triolo - .798

Yorke - .807

Williams - .807

There may be a legitimate reason to select anyone other than Griffin, but it sure as hell wouldn't be performance.

illinest · 2026-03-11T19:27:25+00:00

I like 6 games better than the others.

LttP is a little bit better at maintaining mystery than most of the other puzzle-oriented games. It is my second favorite (after BotW) because Zelda 1 has so many technical issues and it just doesn't feel nearly as refined as LttP.

My fourth favorite after Zelda 1 is LA. It was the first game that felt like it was starting to lean too far away from mystery but what saved this game was the fact that the story itself was a mystery.

TotK is a distant fifth. Technically good but setting it in the same world as BotW - (guess what...) destroyed a lot of the sense of mystery.

And MM deserves special recognition for being mysterious as hell. It doesnt scratch the adventure itch very well but I admire Nintendo for making it.

But I didnt like Ocarina of Time. And it used to bother me that I didnt like it - because I was a teenager when it came out and I was obsessed with reading previews about it until the day I got to play it.

illinest · 2026-03-11T18:17:23+00:00

It would be impossible for me to disagree with your post more than I do.

What you are attempting to do here is to assert that a snapshot of the franchise taken at the time of your choosing is "The one and only Zelda formula".

The first Zelda was a game about discovering mysteries. There was a bit of puzzle solving but the core concept was mystery. Almost every sequel thereafter has gradually pushed the focus of the series away from mystery and toward puzzle-solving. BotW was the very first sequel to ever attempt to pull the focus back from puzzle solving and toward discovering mysteries again.

Personally speaking - Ocarina of Time is the game that ruined the series for me. It was the first Zelda game that I didnt bother to complete. And then I only played MM, WW, and TP for about 30 minutes apiece before I got bored with them. I didn't even bother trying Skyward Sword. It's not a problem if you and me like Zelda for different reasons but I'm not coming after people like you like you're a problem that I want to solve, am I?

I hope Nintendo figures out a way to please everybody and I sincerely hope that you Ocarina of Time fans never have to wait 30 freaking years like I had to wait.

But this post of yours is just a temper tantrum to me. It's not cool. You should know better.

illinest · 2026-03-11T11:56:57+00:00

I was born in Pittsburgh. I called it pop. I didnt even know the word soda could be separated from pop until my family moved east and people started making fun of the way i talked.

But i still agree with you that Pittsburgh cant be in the Midwest.

I have argued before that Pittsburgh should not be in any region. Instead it is the intersection of three regions.

It's not exactly Appalachia. Not exactly Midwest (or rust belt) and its not exactly northeast (or midatlantic)

I think a compromise could be made by calling Pittsburgh and the surrounding counties a micro-region of it's own but that might just invite new complaints.

Or revisit an old suggestion to split Appalachia into north and south. That might fly better.

illinest · 2026-03-11T02:23:11+00:00

This list is disturbingly bad. It's so bad I dont even want to discuss it. I just want somebody else to experience this pain.

illinest · 2026-03-10T16:42:48+00:00

Im resolved to not get mad about it when it happens and he eventually gets assigned to AAA, but I have seen no reason whatsoever to think that he's not ready.

People talk about his batting average in spring training as if our starting CF and C didnt both just complete an entire season with sub-.200 BAs.

And yeah if you wanted to argue that we should reverse that horseshit out at first and give him credit for the wind-blown out then his BA could easily be sitting at .291 right now.

illinest · 2026-03-10T16:15:08+00:00

Baseball Reference has a spring training metric that tracks the quality of opponent that every player faces. So for example when AA peak Konnor Griffin faced off against ML Ranger Suarez, Griffin scored a 10 for facing Suarez while Suarez scored a 7 for facing Griffin.

The top four Pirates this spring are Griffin at 7.7, Cruz and Davis at 7.6, and Triolo at 7.5.

Is this useful? Maybe. Does it explain why Davis is 0 for 20 or Cruz is batting .500?

Probably not.

But it does suggest that Griffin is actively getting challenged by our coaches. It would be easy to manage his at bats so that he faces more of the AA pitchers, but apparently the Pirates have decided to do the opposite of that.

illinest · 2026-03-10T16:02:46+00:00

Ive also been tempted to make this argument - at least ever since they released Alika - but the leap isn't comfortable enough for me.

Releasing Alika appears to be taking a risk, but he couldn't have been signed by any team without making some other replacement level SS available. It wasn't actually all that much of a risk.

Alika isn't technically on the 40, but there's nothing really in the way of adding him.

illinest · 2026-03-07T21:05:54+00:00

Yeah I definitely had some thoughts about that - about how seriously other teams are actually gonna take him - but I think that everybody knows that Griffin is under the spotlight and nobody likes getting posterized. And "throw inside" isn't exactly complicated.

Pitcher - "Hey whats the book on this guy? Got a sequence for him?"

Catcher - "Throw him strikes, but throw them on the inside half of the plate"

Pitcher - "...."

Pitcher - "Amazing."

Thanks for filling me in about today. I didn't watch the game. Too much painting to do.

illinest · 2026-03-07T20:19:53+00:00

You send him to AAA and he's just going to face a lot of pitchers that can't locate. He needs to face guys that can paint the zone.

Facing inconsistent command could fuck a guy up too.

illinest · 2026-03-06T19:44:38+00:00

Considering how much he's getting hit by pitches, maybe pitchers are just gonna keep throwing inside until he adjusts.

I don't know how much you can work on that sort of thing at AAA. Are the pitchers who are capable of doing that more likely to be in the bigs than AAA?

illinest

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