Michael D retweeted
Still don’t understand how people can support a cap.
Let’s go ahead and give unlimited profit to owners where the game is growing exponentially, but cap the potential benefit for the players who are directly responsible for the game’s growth.
Mind boggling.
Michael D retweeted
In the last few months:
The Orioles owner said he bought the team because all of his friends who had sports teams made more than he ever could in private equity
The Padres sold for $3.9B, 63% more than the previous record
The Angels then sold for $4.0B, beating the Padres record
So why then are billionaires lighting money on fire by bailing out other billionaires from the apparent financial ruin of owning a baseball team?
It's because they're all making billions in appreciation and teams like the Yankees can sell just 16% for $2.6 BILLION (MLB of course waived the 15% cap lol) with an additional $1B in tax-exempt revenue bonds to refinance debt in their other business ventures
Seriously, who would pass up on an infinite money glitch like that?
I'm begging you all to realize owners just want a cap to make accounting easier. They're lying about competitive balance to create a narrative that is only in place to win them cost certainty
A salary cap is about predictable costs and the owners want that because it makes franchise values explode. Has absolutely nothing to do with competitive balance
Michael D retweeted
George Harrison stands at the gates of Friar Park,staring at what most people would call a disaster.
The Victorian mansion is decaying. Grass grows through the floors. The once-famous gardens are wild and overrun. Greenhouses have collapsed. Grottoes are buried. Paths have vanished under decades of neglect.
He’s 27. The Beatles have just broken up. He could go anywhere. Do anything. The world is waiting for his next move.
Instead, he buys the ruin and starts digging.
Not as a hobby. As a way of life.
He hires ten gardeners and works beside them from dawn until midnight, hands in the soil. His sister-in-law sees the place and asks what he’s thinking. George doesn’t explain. He just keeps working.
His son Dhani grows up watching his father gardening by moonlight, squinting in the dark because the shadows hide the imperfections that bothered him during the day. The music industry keeps calling — albums, tours, interviews. More George Harrison, the Beatle.
George wants to plant trees.
Friar Park isn’t just a garden. It’s a strange Victorian dream: caves, tunnels, a four-acre Alpine rock garden topped with a miniature Matterhorn, and gnomes everywhere. He even photographs himself among them for All Things Must Pass — then goes back to pruning.
When a nursery owner mentions slow sales, George buys one of everything. When someone offers 800 types of maple trees, he takes them all. His wife Olivia remembers him saying, “It’s not my garden, Liv.” He saw himself as a caretaker. The garden didn’t belong to him — he belonged to it.
By 1980, he publishes his autobiography and dedicates it “to gardeners everywhere.” He writes that he’s simple. He doesn’t want the business full-time. He’s a gardener. He plants flowers and watches them grow.
Journalists visit and call it un-rock-star-like. George doesn’t mind. He’s lived Beatlemania, stadium screams, cultural revolutions. Compared to restoring hedges, it felt empty.
After John Lennon’s murder, the gates close for good. George and Olivia keep working — not for visitors, but for the work itself.
He dies in 2001. Today, the gardens are considered masterpieces of Victorian landscaping. Olivia still tends them. The estate remains private.
George Harrison chose dirt under his fingernails over applause.
And in that choice, he found something stadiums never gave him.
Freedom.
Michael D retweeted
The monarch butterflies that cross North America every autumn spend the winter in twelve small patches of mountain fir forest in Mexico. Avocado orchards are being planted inside them.
The migration is one of the wonders of the natural world. Each autumn tens of millions of monarchs leave Canada and the northern United States and fly up to 3,000 miles to a few cold, high valleys in Michoacán, where they cluster on the fir trees in such numbers that the branches bend. They have never seen the place. Their great-grandparents left it in the spring.
Those valleys are a national reserve. They are also at exactly the height where the avocado grows best, and the price of an avocado has made that land worth more as an orchard than as a forest.
So the forest is going. Across Michoacán, trees have been cleared for avocados at a rate of more than ten football pitches a day for a decade. Growers set fires, blame lightning, and plant in the ashes. Some plant young avocado trees among the pines and quietly take the pines out when the orchard can stand on its own. Inside the reserve itself, nearly 2,400 acres have gone.
A study in 2025 found that as the climate warms, avocado land is moving uphill, towards the last groves where the butterflies cluster.
Scientists who count the monarchs each winter by the area of forest they cover have watched the figure fall by about 90% in a generation.
Those butterflies are the pollinators of the American prairie. They are not pests, and they have never been farmed. They are dying for a fruit marketed to people who put a bee emoji in their bio.
Michael D retweeted
The “MLB has no parity” take is one of the laziest in sports.
Last 20 years of champions:
• MLB: 12 different World Series winners
• NFL: 13
• NBA: 12
• NHL: 13
And MLB went *24 straight years* without a repeat champion (until the Dodgers finally did it in 2025). No other major league has come close to that streak.
Cubs ended 108 years. White Sox 88. Rangers first title. Royals, Nationals, etc. all got theirs.
Salary caps in the other sports didn’t magically create more different champs. Baseball’s October chaos did. The “buy a title” narrative keeps dying in the playoffs.
Parity exists. You just have to look past the payroll spreadsheets.
Facts over feelings
Michael D retweeted
This is the ideal marmot body. You may not understand it. But this is what peak performance looks like.
ALT A large, rotund marmot standing upright on its hind legs.
Michael D retweeted
There is a mountain of unworn clothes in the driest desert on earth, large enough to be photographed from space. It grows by 39,000 tons a year and almost none of it will ever rot.
The Atacama, in northern Chile, is a place where it may not rain for a decade. On its edge is a duty-free port called Iquique. Every year about 59,000 tons of clothing arrives there from Europe, America and Asia. It is last season's stock that never sold, and the bags people leave at charity shops.
Dealers pick through it for anything they can resell across South America. Two thirds of it is worthless. Nobody will pay to ship it back out, so lorries drive it into the desert at night and tip it.
The local landfill refuses to take it. The reason given is that the clothing does not biodegrade and is full of chemicals. Most of it is polyester, which is plastic, and in a place with no rain and no soil life it will lie there for centuries. Some of it is set alight, and the smoke drifts over a town of 100,000 people.
In 2025 a Chilean court ruled that the dumps had done serious damage to the land.
For most of history this could not have happened. Clothes were wool, linen and leather. They were worn out, handed down and patched, and at the very end a rag merchant paid for the scraps. In Yorkshire, from 1813, old woollens were shredded and spun into new cloth. Anything left went on the fields, where wool breaks down in months and feeds the grass.
Nobody ever had to find a desert for worn-out wool. We invented a fabric that cannot die, and then we started making it to be thrown away.
Michael D retweeted
New York, October 26, 1974. KISS in full makeup and mostly borrowed suits at West 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue, while the people walking past barely look up. Bob Gruen was shooting a photo comic for Creem about the band in their secret identities, heading to work like everyone else. "People kind of glanced at them," Gruen said. "They may have thought it was a little early for Halloween. It takes a lot to shock a New Yorker." A shot from that same corner became the cover of Dressed to Kill in March 1975.
🎸 Dressed to Kill came out in March 1975 with "Rock and Roll All Nite" on it. What's your favorite track on the album? 🎸 👇️
ALT Color photo of the four members of KISS in full face makeup and business suits standing on a New York City sidewalk. From left: Peter Criss and Ace Frehley in dark suits, Paul Stanley with big curly hair and a hand at his chin, and Gene Simmons in a tight tan suit with his hair tied up and white clogs. To the right, a young boy in a tan jacket and several men in coats and hats stand nearby, with traffic, storefronts and tall buildings behind.
Michael D retweeted
Fan frustration over the #Mariners disappointing 2026 season is “palpable and understandable.” But…
Sticking with Jerry Dipoto was the right decision by ownership. My rationale…
mariners-consigliere.com/p/d…
Michael D retweeted
Survey fans on cheaper tickets, $5 beers, free parking, no blackouts, every game on one affordable streaming service, no jersey ads and fewer commercials.
Funny how fan opinion suddenly matters when it aligns with the owners’ financial interests.
These guys aren’t prepared to sacrifice billions in revenue and risk a work stoppage out of concern for competitive balance. They do not give a shit about competitive balance.
Owners want a cap because they believe it benefits them financially. Full stop. The fan surveys are just a convenient way to sell it.
Trying to convince fans that billionaire owners suddenly care about them is insulting.
“Owners do not intend to pivot from their contentions. Their insistence on a cap and floor -- backed, the league says, by surveys that show fans want one”, per @JeffPassan
Michael D retweeted
Sadly, this quote never goes out of style.
However, we are grateful for everything our members and supporters do to help us Keep Wilderness Wild!
Michael D retweeted
"The global collapse of migratory shorebird populations is much more than a calamity facing a group of exquisitely evolved birds. It also tells us that our global network of aquatic systems is fraying."
nytimes.com/interactive/2018…
Michael D retweeted
Montana FWP reported one female wolf was shot and killed in the Region 1 on 10/11/26. Total of 10 wolves were killed just because they were wolves. Wolf pack is family, each of them is loved by the rest of family.
Michael D retweeted
I’m in Connecticut covering basketball so my Mariners thoughts are a little more muted today - but I’m not a huge fan of the Joe Espada news. If your rival doesn’t mind you taking him, what does that say?
Just my initial thought
Michael D retweeted
Three high-profile wolf hearings take place in federal court in Missoula, MT on October 13, starting at 9:30am MDT.
Wilderness Watch and our allies are part of the second hearing about our Northern Rocky Mountains wolf-listing petition.
Details >>> wildernesswatch.substack.com…
Michael D retweeted
Current scene at REI's flagship store. That's the Pinnacle in the background of the first photo. I've been watching this camp grow for a while and felt it was time to do a post on it.
I remember back when this store was built in 1996 and how excited I was. It quickly became my go to store for most of my skiing and backpacking and climbing gear. The old store had been in a run down building in the heart of Capitol Hill. I'd been in there a few times but this was a whole different experience. It even has a short mountain bike testing trail, and a big man-made waterfall. The Pinnacle itself was such a draw, and at the time, one of the tallest indoor climbing structures in the world. Do a search on it and it might tell you about the view from up top, since it's all glassed in.
And now look at the view today.
Hey, at least it's tents. That ought to give shoppers some inspiration. Not to mention it's an easy resupply for the vagrants across the street.
And so once again, we have another Seattle landmark marred by homeless drug addicts. Because god forbid we actually have any civic pride anymore.
You might recall the situation across the street from MOPOP I posted about last year. That was also in a vacant lot, which used to house the old Polly Esther's nightclub. After being vacant for a while, it was burned to the ground by squatters in 2021. And to this day, they still camp on its grave. Same thing goes for the vacant lot by REI, which had a building that was also... burned to the ground by squatters.
REI customers aren't the only folks who get to enjoy the view of the encampment. On the other side of the encampment sits Marriott's AC hotel. Imagine returning home to your spouse:
"How was Seattle, dear?"
"Oh, it's a beautiful city, except for the huge homeless encampment right by my hotel."
