I’d like to share a sample of recent text messages from my mom:

“What is going on?!”

“Am I insane?”

“How can they be so bad at their jobs??”

The target of her ire? The MLB umpires calling balls and strikes during Washington Nationals games.

While I don’t see quite as many games as her, I still catch a bunch on MLB.TV, and completely share her sense that the rate of “bad calls” by umpires was up a ton in the first half of the 2023 season. To add insult to injury, it also has felt that these calls often came during pivotal moments of games, where it’s most critical for umpires to spot balls and strikes accurately.

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One of my most strongly held hypotheses about the world is that the US housing market is in the early stages of a slowdown that is going to last for quite a while.

This concept, of course, is not news - I don’t claim to have invented it! But I recently found some interesting data which helps support my thoughts, and as such I thought it might be interesting to walk through my thesis, talk through the drivers, and see what supporting data we can find to support the argument.

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Ugh, Juan Soto. It almost broke my heart when the Nationals traded him last fall. Looking back on the deal, I’m happy with the package of prospects we got back from the Padres, with CJ Abrams and MacKenzie Gore as immediate starters with All-Star upside, and James Wood and Robert Hassell hopefully both future every-day contributors. But still - it’s terribly bittersweet to see my favorite player hitting for a different club.

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About a month ago, I wrote a post highlighting the new MLB pitch clock. In it, we were able to see that the implementation of the timer seems to have driven a half-hour decrease in game runtimes - for most fans, a huge improvement.

Game runtimes weren’t the only perceived issue that the MLB tried to address in the offseason - they also sought to create more action on the basepaths. This was done through a few different mechanisms:

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If you tuned into Opening Day last season, you might have been curious where the baseball was! Between the endless batting glove adjustments by hitters and the incredibly slow working pace of many pitchers, games sometimes felt interminable - especially if Pedro Baez was on the mound:

Baseball’s 2023 Reforms

The pace-of-play problem had gotten so bad that the Major League Baseball, a legendarily change-resistant and slow-moving organization, implemented significant reforms for the 2023 season. While I might be forgetting a minor tweak or two, the key changes to the game are as follows:

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Growing up on the East Coast, I never thought much about water. And why would anyone? With abundant rivers, lakes, and reservoirs, water is cheap and easy to access.

Since moving out West, it’s been interesting to see a world in which the baseline is almost fully opposite: water is increasingly rare, expensive, and difficult to acquire.

While this winter’s parade of rain and snow storms should provide a brief respite from the drought conditions plaguing the region, I have no doubt that the overarching trend of aridification in the West will resume and potentially even intensify over the coming decades.

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Last week, the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) dropped a bombshell set of data: reviews by thirteen hundred active NFL players, of their own teams. Players graded their teams from A+ to F- on the following dimensions of player experience:

• Treatment of Families
• Nutrition
• Weight Room
• Strength Staff
• Training Room
• Training Staff
• Locker Room
• Travel

The NFLPA’s website is interactive and offers some entertaining anecdotes - such as the fact that the Arizona Cardinals charge their players for meals at the team facility!

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This Christmas, I received a Tidbyt smart display as a gift. The Tidbyt, for those who were not successfully targeted with Instagram adds like me, is a 64x32 pixel display, housed inside a sleek walnut case, with a suite of simple apps immediately available for use. If you’re looking for an attractive small display to passively flash information like weather, word clocks, surf forecasts, etc. - I can’t recommend it enough.

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Last year, I wrote a post quantifying the cost of home EV charging across the US. Given the low prices of home electricity, it’s no surprise that EV owners choose to slowly top up their batteries each night at home, and avoid more expensive public chargers.

However, it’s a safe bet that nearly all EV owners will eventually find themselves in need of a public fast-charger! And when that happens, they’ll almost certainly be looking to charge their vehicles as quickly as possible, and get back on the road.

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Years ago, I set up a Pi-hole at my house to serve as a network-level adblocker for all my devices. It’s been a terrific setup - the Pi-hole is quietly super effective at removing advertisements from different services, to the point where it can be surprising to load a website away from home and see how many ads are layered on the page!

A few days ago, I got curious to see if I could get any quantitative metrics on the performance of the Pi-hole, to augment my qualitative judgement.

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