As if Penn State athletics won’t make a net profit. COVID was the only reason they recently went negative and the media rights deals recently made will come with a massive increase in money.

Could you provide a source on the coaching money coming from academics?

The funding for those facilities at PSU is separate from the academic side of the school. Money from athletics supports the school, not the other way around. Money donated for athletic facilities has to go to those facilities. It’s a condition of the donation usually.

Should more donors donate to the academic programs? Definitely. But I don’t like the impression that money that would otherwise go to academics goes to sports because it’s not true. At least not for PSU.

You took a bad take and made it so much worse. Seemed like you were about to make a point about the correlations between crime and poverty, something with nuance that you could use to then talk about how these communities aren’t being served well with the current way programs, resources, and transport options reach them or how crime may fill a role an individual could have addressed better with more assistance from the city, community, whatever. But then you just asked how anyone can expect lower income citizens to not kill people, like it’s something in poor peoples nature that can’t be overcome. They are people too.

Absolutely packed line right now. Been monitoring throughout the day, had plans to go later but will likely skip.

Thrice vaccinated, those three were based on the first variants. Omicron gains traction. Get omicron. Four months later get vaccine made for omicron. Four months since many exposures, no infection, over 8 months after omicron infection.

That’s the fun thing about viruses. They mutate. I also got omicron despite having 3 vaccines at the time. 2 Moderna plus a booster. The current round that’s out, number 4 for those that got them as they rolled out, was specifically made for omicron and it’s derivatives. I got that this fall after I got sick at the end of spring and have been exposed multiple times since with no infection. It’s like wearing a long sleeve shirt in September. It’ll keep you warm enough, but when December comes that protection isn’t enough and you need something stronger. The virus mutates and experts can’t really predict how the major mutations will occur. They try to react as fast as possible, which is why the newest vaccines are so effective against omicron derived variants despite the first doses released being pretty useless to them.

Sorry, I don’t want to put words in your mouth. You contrasted no rules with a literal authoritarian lockdown. The US was never enforcing anything like China has. Sure, some of the rules were ridiculous, but my whole point is there is gray area between the two extremes. I think mask mandates made complete sense earlier when there was little immunity, vaccine or natural, for the public. I haven’t seen any proposals yet for businesses, only BPS, and studies showed the effectiveness of the mandates in the schools. That’s the government setting the rules for a government-run system. I just reflexively have to respond when it seems people try to equate any restrictions at all with police barricading you in like China.

Is this the part where we pretend there’s literally no middle ground between being welded into your own home and not being allowed to tell customers in your own business to wear a mask?

I think we should encourage vaccination as much as possible, allow businesses to enforce their mask rules if they see fit, not whine at people taking measures to protect themselves, and proudly call out people that think they are freedom fighters but actually just don’t want to be inconvenienced in any way by limiting their public presence when they have COVID or another contagious illness. Those people aren’t noble patriots fighting tyranny, they are jerks that think their desire not to be inconvenienced matters more than the health of otters.

Let’s be honest. Masks aren’t hard to wear. I played D1 volleyball with an n95. Don’t try to tell me it’s impossible to survive a trip to the stop and shop with a mask on. If your or anyone else’s lungs are that frail, a COVID infection will destroy you.

It runs all over Norfolk Sourhern’s network. It’s one of their locomotives painted to represent the PRR. They have a bunch in different schemes for all the lines they bought or took over one way or another.