Well, by “record”...it was a long time ago when we lived in the same house. We are older than dirt. 

If only this was something I had to search out and something not branded into my brain by a sibling with the Greatest Hits record on permanent repeat...

It’s fun to twist my conservative Trumpy relatives up in knots about CA...they hate this vast hippie liberal wasteland that’s all for high taxes, but they love tech bros, military towns and farmers...and they can’t make space in their personal worldview that CA is a pretty big and diverse place.

When my elderly relatives were growing up, their southern Euro immigrant parents had a hard time finding jobs or owning homes outside their ethnically-segregated area of town. Then they outbred the locals, got integrated into the community by sheer volume, reworked the existing place into a series of Italian festivals…

The lead in to it and use of that GIF deserves some sort of internet award. 

We only had one for a couple years, but even in that stretch the quality decreased. I don’t know if it was the struggling franchisee or the corporate ingredients. 

Ours closed, so I’ve been able to avoid that quagmire of discounts and my innate cheapness. I do feel bad for the workers, because there aren’t enough unskilled-level jobs around, but a good portion of ours are now in prison on drug charges anyway...

Seriously. Papa John’s closed in my town because they couldn’t compete with the price point of the other subpar franchises or the local places. 

In a lot of ways, it’s no different than a conversation I had with a coworker today about our Depression-era parents/grandparents. People that went through the shit will have a different view than people born in times of plenty. Problem comes when you abandon all accountability in the name of just having a job. Which…

Alex Sahlen still can’t figure out why other players had such a hard time making ends meet. And ends meat. 

USSF pays the salary of 23 women. Some are currently on the national team, some are still in the player pool, and some are contractual. https://www.starsandstripesfc.com/2018/2/15/17016674/nwsl-releases-uswnt-allocation-list

I really liked Foudy as a player when I was growing up. On pay equality, whatever she was saying to players not making minimum wage sounded like “I never whined about money, with my Stanford degree, marriage to a surgeon and ongoing demand for broadcasting jobs so you shouldn’t either.”

They pay the salaries of several of the better-known players, but even in this non-WWC year, only 3 of the ten top scorers are allocated USWNT players. 

In the lower level of minor leagues, it’s not unusual, although I couldn’t pull a stat or an IRS/budget reason why it works there. I’ve just seen it a fair amount in hockey and basketball marginal leagues. 

Rapinoe is guaranteed to get hurt, anyway, so they might as well keep her on retainer for the times she’s not playing.

Agreed.

I dislike that she had to put “four star hotel” in there. Yes, safe and clean conditions are a must. Fields and facilities should be four star. But when she says that about accommodations, it’s too easy to criticize a sense of entitlement in a cash-strapped league as the issue and not the subpar offerings. 

I spent my formative years looking up EPL scores in the paper and eventually on the internet. I’ve enjoyed this ability to watch, but it’s been a brief window and I’ll get over it.

If there was ever a case for a league stepping in and running a team, in any sport, I think Boston would be my textbook example. As a result of the fold, we have players on too-large rosters who aren’t getting time or development, an unbalanced schedule, and only Sky Blue (see whole story above) representing the…

I’m sure some people share the city stories with that sort of goal in mind. It fits their narrative to have jobless young people hanging around, unable to get a 1955esque factory job.