Jack Easterby Blames Kraft Family for Texans Turmoil [Update: Texans Have Fired Him]

[DarrylS]

There was no seduction. Rhode Island welcomed 38 Studios, and some power players in Rhode Island made a fortune exploiting the deal. Schilling went down there believing it would save the company. They also put untenable requirements and restrictions on 38 n exchange for the funds. A true clusterf***.

Some of the RI people behind the scenes were licking their lips (or vulture beaks, I guess), circling overhead to feast on the easy and naive businessman who thought he knew what he didn't know.

I blame Curt for what happened internally to the employees - he has to take responsibility for that. He kept believing he could pitch his way out of the bottom of the 9th, but business doesn't work like that. Rhode Island was a s***show - I'd go so far as to call it a trap - for 38 from the beginning.

Depends who you listen to and who you believe. Carcieri was surely influenced by Schilings star power and believed it would be an easy way to jump start the economy, Schilling had no experience in the video game business never mind a venture this ambitious. He spent a load of money on "38 Studios" infrastructure and then paid for the relocation of video game "experts"...

It was all for naught as he failed miserably, he did it his way... then of course he blamed RI Politicians which seems to be trend these days.. there is a lot of responsibility for this cluster f... spread amongst Schilling, Carcieri and the RI Legislature.. they never should have funded this project, particularly based on what they thought was a "good idea"...

 

[1960Pats]

top 10 best pitchers of all time?!?!?!?!

When compared with a list of what anyone would call the best 16 pitchers of all time, in multiple categories, he was tied for 7th. It came up here when I tried to show that Pedro is the best ever. Here's the list;

	Player		ERA	WL%	H/9	SO/9	BB/9	HR	Total
1	Pedro	Martinez	6	1	3	2	7	5	24
2	Sandy	Koufax	2	4	2	4	14	4	30
3	Walter	Johnson	1	8	6	13	4	1	33
4	Tom	Seaver	4	7	5	8	9	12	45
5	Roger	Clemens	8	3	8	6	11	11	47
6	Bob	Gibson	5	11	7	7	13	6	49
7	Curt	Schilling	14	10	9	5	3	9	50
7	Randy	Johnson	11	5	4	1	15	14	50
9	Lefty	Grove	7	2	16	14	10	3	52
10	Nolan	Ryan	10	16	1	3	16	8	54
11	Cy	Young	16	6	14	16	1	2	55
11	Gaylord	Perry	3	12	11	11	5	13	55
13	Greg	Maddux	9	15	13	10	2	10	59
14	Bert	Blyleven	12	14	12	9	6	15	68
15	Phil	Niekro	13	13	15	12	12	7	72
16	Warren	Spahn	15	9	10	15	8	16	73

 

[PP2]

But Communism is a pretty close second. No lie. For such a young philosophy its death count is insane. Between the big two alone you have maybe 200 million deaths, and then there's the absolute travesty that Maoism and its offshoots wreaked in Southeast Asia where multiple countries lost double digit percentages of their population to cultural purges.

Oh and it's still killing. Just ask the Uyghurs.

Yeah, but no one does worse things in power than a zealot, and there is no corrupt leader worse than a corrupt zealot because they WILL remove anything that looks like a potential obstacle, and do it with extreme prejudice. Stalin's purges, Maoist Cultural Revolution, and the massacres in Southeast Asia are all along that line.

and frankly, all of the Trotsky/Mao/Lenin style of revolutionary government gravitates VERY harshly towards zealotry. Communism works very hard to become a religion in its own right in order to supplant the local religion, since they see the Church as counterrevolutionary (not without reason, although the ends do not justify the means)

Communist hardliners are as severe as any Islamist or Christian fundie and just as prone as religious zealots to kill you for your own good.

Pure communism, as Lenin intended it was nothing like the communism maligned and abused by Stalin, Mao, Castro, and the like. You might be surprised to learn that communism was not invented by Lenin, but actually thought up by an English writer, Thomas More way back in 1516.

And as you say, it's not really the "ism" that defines politics, but how extremist an "ism" has become, whether Communism or Capitalism. To me, personally, hardcore communism and hardcore capitalism are both gigantic failures.

I have been to a hardcore communist country like Cuba, and the poverty and class division there is unbelievable, and the US is as close to a hardcore capitalist country as any on the Earth, and we have a huge class division problem, and I have driven through the giant industrial wasteland that is the Midwest, and through the impoverished South. I have been to other "soft communist" countries like Vietnam, which is a mixture of communism and capitalism and it's a robust and pretty stable country. To me the best functioning countries have been the democratic socialist ones, like Sweden, et al.

 

[upstater1]

When compared with a list of what anyone would call the best 16 pitchers of all time, in multiple categories, he was tied for 7th. It came up here when I tried to show that Pedro is the best ever. Here's the list;

	Player		ERA	WL%	H/9	SO/9	BB/9	HR	Total
1	Pedro	Martinez	6	1	3	2	7	5	24
2	Sandy	Koufax	2	4	2	4	14	4	30
3	Walter	Johnson	1	8	6	13	4	1	33
4	Tom	Seaver	4	7	5	8	9	12	45
5	Roger	Clemens	8	3	8	6	11	11	47
6	Bob	Gibson	5	11	7	7	13	6	49
7	Curt	Schilling	14	10	9	5	3	9	50
7	Randy	Johnson	11	5	4	1	15	14	50
9	Lefty	Grove	7	2	16	14	10	3	52
10	Nolan	Ryan	10	16	1	3	16	8	54
11	Cy	Young	16	6	14	16	1	2	55
11	Gaylord	Perry	3	12	11	11	5	13	55
13	Greg	Maddux	9	15	13	10	2	10	59
14	Bert	Blyleven	12	14	12	9	6	15	68
15	Phil	Niekro	13	13	15	12	12	7	72
16	Warren	Spahn	15	9	10	15	8	16	73

There are so many great pitchers left out here. This is the kind of stat crunching that would leave Jim Brown, Earl Campbell and Gayle Sayers out of the discussion of great RBs simply because of stat padding. Seaver, Gibson, Clemens, Ryan, Spahn are great pitchers. Then there's the old guys who I can't judge. But the others are just very good or excellent HOF types. But this list leaves out people like Carlton, Wilhelm, Sutter, Palmer, Marichal, Koufax, Page and many others. I would compare Schilling to people on that list like Blyleven and Gaylord Perry who also not top 10.

 

[Simpelton]

Pure communism

Let me stop you right there. When it comes to political and economic theories, there is no "pure" anything. Everything is a mix of this and that and a blending of various ideas. You will never have pure communism in practice because that's simply not how theories are applied in the real world. The only question is, what do you blend it with.

In the case of Russia and China, what you blend it with is quite simply, the ideas that existed beforehand. There was no other option. You can't take over a country and completely replace the ideas of the former regime in a day. It's virtually impossible to muster up enough hardliners to staff the bureaucracy that makes a country run overnight, you have to work with the apparatus that exists and that lets the old thinking endure.

And in both cases, as well as Southeast Asia, what was there before were authoritarian regimes that were not afraid to kill people. That's why the most lethal Communist regimes replaced autocratic states. The Soviets basically took over the apparatus the Czar had been using to crush revolutions in his country for decades prior. This is ultimately the fate of any successful revolution as you have to make deals with remnants of the old regime just to keep the trains running on time. It's why no Communist regime in a previously authoritarian state will ever successfully maintain its control without a body count. because that's how the middle management knows how to do things

 

[TheRainMaker]

Why haven’t the Texans got rid of this guy yet?

 

[50-yard-line]

Depends who you listen to and who you believe. Carcieri was surely influenced by Schilings star power and believed it would be an easy way to jump start the economy, Schilling had no experience in the video game business never mind a venture this ambitious. He spent a load of money on "38 Studios" infrastructure and then paid for the relocation of video game "experts"...

It was all for naught as he failed miserably, he did it his way... then of course he blamed RI Politicians which seems to be trend these days.. there is a lot of responsibility for this cluster f... spread amongst Schilling, Carcieri and the RI Legislature.. they never should have funded this project, particularly based on what they thought was a "good idea"...

No doubt about that first sentence - they wanted to start a video game hub (as in Montreal, Austin) in Providence.

The team Schilling assembled in Maynard weren't "experts" in quotes - they were top-shelf, proven talent, coming from Verant (Everquest), Blizzard (Warcraft), SOE, etc. They were some of the best available and proven designers and engineers in the industry. The art team was out of this world good. The sound team are all working on the top games out there. That assembly of talent certainly was NOT the problem with 38.

Yes, I blame Curt for 38 failing (long, long before the Hail Mary to Rhode Island), for a whole bunch of reasons that aren't widely known. I also blame him for HOW the company ended - i.e. at the expense of the employees. Schilling's blame of the politicians was over-the-top, but a few certainly deserved some of it, and more than that, the people working beside both 38 and the actual politicians involved deserved even more of the blame.

 

[PP2]

Let me stop you right there. When it comes to political and economic theories, there is no "pure" anything. Everything is a mix of this and that and a blending of various ideas. You will never have pure communism in practice because that's simply not how theories are applied in the real world. The only question is, what do you blend it with.

In the case of Russia and China, what you blend it with is quite simply, the ideas that existed beforehand. There was no other option. You can't take over a country and completely replace the ideas of the former regime in a day. It's virtually impossible to muster up enough hardliners to staff the bureaucracy that makes a country run overnight, you have to work with the apparatus that exists and that lets the old thinking endure.

And in both cases, as well as Southeast Asia, what was there before were authoritarian regimes that were not afraid to kill people. That's why the most lethal Communist regimes replaced autocratic states. The Soviets basically took over the apparatus the Czar had been using to crush revolutions in his country for decades prior. This is ultimately the fate of any successful revolution as you have to make deals with remnants of the old regime just to keep the trains running on time. It's why no Communist regime in a previously authoritarian state will ever successfully maintain its control without a body count. because that's how the middle management knows how to do things

I think you meant that in practice, nothing is ever pure and I do agree with that. But I speak of pure communism, in theory, as in abstract, and this is what I meant when I said pure communism, as envisioned in Marxist thought and theory, and what Lenin subsequently was trying to intend. The actual application of it, post-Bolshevik revolution is, as you say, an entirely different story. And you make a very good point that a new system almost never completely replaces an existing one. Especially considering how many Nazis we had to leave in charge, in postwar Germany.

 

[TinhWoodhead]

Easterby story on Easter Sunday?

 

[1960Pats]

There are so many great pitchers left out here. This is the kind of stat crunching that would leave Jim Brown, Earl Campbell and Gayle Sayers out of the discussion of great RBs simply because of stat padding. Seaver, Gibson, Clemens, Ryan, Spahn are great pitchers. Then there's the old guys who I can't judge. But the others are just very good or excellent HOF types. But this list leaves out people like Carlton, Wilhelm, Sutter, Palmer, Marichal, Koufax, Page and many others. I would compare Schilling to people on that list like Blyleven and Gaylord Perry who also not top 10.

Baseball is much more of an individual game than football and stats are much more relevant. Nobody is stopping the hitters from getting in their swings.

What I did was check the overall ranking for each player in each category and see where they stand vs the others on the list. When I have some time I'll add those other names and see where they stand, though I do have Kofax there (#2) and don't have stats for Page.

 

[upstater1]

Baseball is much more of an individual game than football and stats are much more relevant. Nobody is stopping the hitters from getting in their swings.

What I did was check the overall ranking for each player in each category and see where they stand vs the others on the list. When I have some time I'll add those other names and see where they stand, though I do have Kofax there (#2) and don't have stats for Page.

My point was that players like Perry, Niekro, and even Schilling, to an extent, built their reps on stats from longevity, whereas some of the greatest pitchers had shorter careers due to the kind of ball they threw or the times.

 

[wjcook68]

 

[Spiral]

Caserio should have known better.

 

[borg]

I have been to other "soft communist" countries like Vietnam, which is a mixture of communism and capitalism and it's a robust and pretty stable country.

Average wage in Vietnam is a robust $150/month

 

[PP2]

Average wage in Vietnam is a robust $150/month

Actually minimum salary is around $200/mo but most people earn more than that, and the ceiling of average salary for the middle class can be several thousand dollars a month, but the point is that to me, most people there seemed to be living in comfortable proportion to their living costs as far as I could tell. Of course that doesn't excuse the masses of sweat shops there operating underground, but it wasn't like there were people sleeping out on the streets like they do here.

 

[BennyBledsoe]

Of course, knowing what the average wage is does little to provide proper context. You need to factor in cost of living, as well. That 150 to 200 could be enough to sustain a person. Without knowing the cost of living, you can't make a proper judgement.

 

[DarrylS]

There was no seduction. Rhode Island welcomed 38 Studios, and some power players in Rhode Island made a fortune exploiting the deal. Schilling went down there believing it would save the company. They also put untenable requirements and restrictions on 38 n exchange for the funds. A true clusterf***.

Some of the RI people behind the scenes were licking their lips (or vulture beaks, I guess), circling overhead to feast on the easy and naive businessman who thought he knew what he didn't know.

"Power players", "RI people behind the scenes" are not people who I associate with. I have never met one person in RI who thought that this was a good deal and the right way to proceed.. most thought the outcome was inevitable. No matter who he brought on board, he was not a business man and had no experience running an organization such as this..

 

[50-yard-line]

"Power players", "RI people behind the scenes" are not people who I associate with. I have never met one person in RI who thought that this was a good deal and the right way to proceed.. most thought the outcome was inevitable. No matter who he brought on board, he was not a business man and had no experience running an organization such as this..

All you have to do is look at the top creditors on the bankruptcy filing to see some of the people I'm talking about.

Curt's problem was, quite simply, his ego and his undying belief that he could pitch his way out of any jam. He wouldn't listen to the GREAT people - yes, even in management - that he coaxed to Maynard and Providence. If he had, the management team was plenty capable of getting some product out there to begin earning money. And the talent on the lower levels was more than capable of putting out superior product - Like KOA: Reckoning, which is again kicking ass with its re-release from THQ Nordic, who bought the rights from Rhode Island.

The people who left 38 are almost all back on their feet in the gaming industry 9although after that fall, many left the industry, refusing to look back), working on games like Warcraft, Diablo, League of Legends, and a host of others at very senior levels. The one thing Curt did very right was use his cache to bring in some of the best people you'd ever meet. 38 Studios should not have failed - just a few months into the company, with a fledgling staff and offices not even built out yet, its future could have been fully secured.

 

[DarrylS]

All you have to do is look at the top creditors on the bankruptcy filing to see some of the people I'm talking about.

Curt's problem was, quite simply, his ego and his undying belief that he could pitch his way out of any jam. He wouldn't listen to the GREAT people - yes, even in management - that he coaxed to Maynard and Providence. If he had, the management team was plenty capable of getting some product out there to begin earning money. And the talent on the lower levels was more than capable of putting out superior product - Like KOA: Reckoning, which is again kicking ass with its re-release from THQ Nordic, who bought the rights from Rhode Island.

The people who left 38 are almost all back on their feet in the gaming industry 9although after that fall, many left the industry, refusing to look back), working on games like Warcraft, Diablo, League of Legends, and a host of others at very senior levels. The one thing Curt did very right was use his cache to bring in some of the best people you'd ever meet. 38 Studios should not have failed - just a few months into the company, with a fledgling staff and offices not even built out yet, its future could have been fully secured.

I stick by what I have said, I have never met a person who is not a "power player" or a "RI people behind the scenes" who felt that this venture was a good idea.. Schilling was a big part of this, he had an idea, but no experience in managing something like this and understanding how to operationalize it... it came about due to with Schilling's star power and our easily influenced politicians who just followed along.

He could not pitch his way out of this jam..

 

[raduray]

Of course, knowing what the average wage is does little to provide proper context. You need to factor in cost of living, as well. That 150 to 200 could be enough to sustain a person. Without knowing the cost of living, you can't make a proper judgement.

Also essentials over there are not the same as over here.