Diego Ricardo

Alabama doesn't need Rylan Griffen. They need a point guard and one more big. Bristow can probably be a SF/PF combo tbh. Still need size and a point.

Wrightsell is coming off a major injury. No telling what he will be like out there.

Holloway is a major liability on defense. Holloway regularly seemed like he was just running around like elementary schoolers playing soccer: didn't know what he was doing and just chasing the ball around...

I have no clue what Bethea will be given he played on a miserable team and didn't have a great year himself.

Oats is a great coach...he'll figure out something to make this team functional at a minimum. It's just not a rosy situation and there is no reason to sugarcoat it.

Rylan is probably bench depth on this team even with it being a weaker roster than the last 3.

Isn’t Hurts newly married? He’s probably legitimately got a conflict of the honeymoon variety.

I feel like the Philon coming back discourse is just hopium at this juncture. Philon said he was all-in on going pro in his announcement. I read that to mean he's done with college and he's going to let the chips fall where they may.

We're going to be mid to low end major conference at-large team next season. 2025-26 is a reset after a great 3 year run.

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Isnt it essentially that anyone under 100,000 isnt paying any taxes anyway...

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A tax return does not mean you get all your taxes back, it means the government over taxed you relative to credits you were able to claim at the end of the tax year. I can guarantee you when I was starting my career, I noticed the taxes being deducted acutely and what I got back in the first few months of the following year wasn't making me whole again.

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I know we're trying but we need a lead guard and more in the frontcourt.

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We have unfortunate roster holes. Lead guards are expensive and this is a particularly inflationary NIL cycle. We don’t need a starter caliber PF/C but a rotational big. It is just hard to find people looking to move who also want to play rotational bench big type of minutes.

The problem with the United States is we've turned the judiciary into a shitty legislative branch and the executive branch into something closer to emperor.

The Cold War ended the effectiveness of our constitution. We allowed the legislature to sign over many of their key authorities to the executive with essentially laughable checks. Additionally a litany of extra-constitutional congressional procedures - that they set for themselves - assures the body is an ineffective morass that cannot allow for creativity or new ideas to reach the executive's desk. The legislature only exists to rubber stamp budgets or pass laws that probably help large corporation or wealthy individuals (cross party consensus broadly speaking). Since nothing significant can make it through the legislature, we mostly just have the courts act as an unelected legislature twisting their brains into pretzels to determine how this executive order is constitutional or that executive order is not.

We had a good republic but our global superpower position - and the need to maintain it - after WWII required neutering our legislature that represents the actual will of the people and turning our executive into an elected emperor. Hard to not call us an empire when we have military bases on every continent. You can't be an empire when the will of the people in the imperial core/metropol can do things that upset the balance of the global system. This is why the "antibodies" fight Trump so hard because he's essentially using the imperial power we grant the modern presidency to destroy the US empire (of course he and all his supporters think they're doing the opposite).

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Again. A fundamental difference in thinking. You think it’s the governments money and they just allow us to keep some. And what they allow us to keep is an entitlement. I see things the exact opposite. Doesn’t make either one of us bad…it’s just a completely different way of thinking.

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If different “classes” gets you different “entitlements” it is the exact opposite of equal application.

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We can agree to disagree. I broadly agree with school choice should be offered but I'm hesitant about universal availability for a litany of reasons. First, I don't think it will actually improve outcomes for most applicants. Second, I think universal voucher programs will be inflationary on private school tuition prices. A voucher essentially sets a new floor for cost of tuition. Third, I think it will disproportionately help people in urbanized areas and perhaps even hurt more rural areas.

Private schools are businesses. They've got to be financially solvent or they go out of business. I have my doubts that a rural private school subsidized by vouchers can provide as good of an education as a rural public school. There just aren't enough people nor high enough incomes to support tuition too far above the voucher floor. Speaking from hometown experience, we had a rural private school academy and it closed early in my school career. It was close to my home. Not quite walkable at my age but would've been by middle school. There just weren't enough middle or higher income families in my town to sustain it.

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It’s all the governments money, right? We will never see eye to eye. This is a fundamental difference in thought process.

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It is a representative democracy. We don’t get to make individualized decisions on spending and it is inefficient for governments to operate in such a way.

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So…no equal application of the law. Got it.

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It is equal application. If you’re upper class but live in a high poverty area that will inevitably have bad schools then you can get the voucher. I am saying that the system will have the most benefit to lower class because the limited, fiscally responsible funding will be open to places where they are more numerous. I am not saying it will only be available to the lower class.