Funkerstation » oad. The cockpit has been designed to accommodate

Once upon a time in baseball, it wouldnt have ended like this. And that, of course, is because, for close to 25 years, labor negotiations in baseball never ended like this.With peace. With stability. With a sport that has now gone so long without a work stoppage that the three other major professional sports in this land have combined for six of them since the last time a labor war erupted in baseball. How surreal is that?So even though the labor agreement of 2016 went down almost a week after Thanksgiving, this, my friends, was something to be thankful for. Peace is good. But more than that, peace is essential.As someone who has covered a few of those messy baseball work stoppages of yesteryear, Id be happy to hop up on the stand and testify. Whatever was gained on the inside from those strikes or those lockouts, it wasnt enough to undo the damage it caused on the outside.Baseball will never, ever be the same after the strike that wiped out the 1994 World Series. It will never regain the place it held in the American soul because of that strike. So no matter how vehemently people inside the game might want to defend the stands that they took back then, the truth is that in the big picture, only one good thing ever came of that strike.The people who run this sport got the memo: Peace is good. And they learned that they should never go down that ugly, self-destructive road again. And they havent.Theyve now made it through 21 consecutive years of labor peace since the strike of 1994-95. And thanks to the deal they made Wednesday night, we know theyre about to make it through five more. Hallelujah.As you look over the details of that deal today, could it possibly be more obvious that there was never an issue in the 2016 labor talks that was worth blowing up a $10 billion industry over? Never.Over the qualifying offer for a select group of free agents? Over containing spending on 18-year-old amateur players who happened to be born outside the United States? Over luxury-tax thresholds or tax rates? How did this sport ever drive itself to the brink of a lockout over issues like that? Incredible.We still have a lot to learn about the specifics of this new labor deal. So we cant fully judge the complete scope of everything that was agreed to yet. But the highlights that did leak out were fascinating, all right. Here are some quick reactions:? Wed been led to believe that owners were willing to shred the entire system that required teams to forfeit a draft pick if they signed an elite free agent (i.e., one who received and rejected a qualifying offer). Turned out we were dead wrong. Those teams no longer have to lose their first-round pick. And thats a significant achievement for the players union. But teams will still forfeit at least one pick for signing one of those players. And if theyre a team with a payroll that rises above the luxury-tax threshold, it will cost two picks -- second- and fifth-round picks. And thats still a big deal.Are a second- and fifth-round pick more valuable than a No. 1 pick? Of course not, one agent said Wednesday evening. But are they comparable? Certainly.? We also knew that as the two sides headed toward the wire, the luxury tax -- or competitive balance tax, if youre a fan of legalese -- was a major issue. Well, now we know why. Under previous versions of the luxury tax, the highest tax rate a team could pay was 50 percent, no matter how many times its payroll went beyond the tax threshold. But not anymore.If the Dodgers dont get their 2017 payroll under $235 million, it appears as if their tax rate would rise to an astounding 92 (yes, ninety-two) percent as a third-time offender subject to a 50 percent tax plus a 42 percent surtax for being $40 million over the threshold. Wow. Two different agents used the term soft cap on Wednesday night to describe the effect of a rate that high. But no matter what you call it, its the strongest deterrent to spending to ever appear in a baseball labor agreement. Theres no debate about that.? The union fought for months against the owners push to institute an international draft -- and ultimately won that fight. Instead, the two sides agreed to a hard cap on total annual spending for foreign-born amateur players, of about $5 million for every team. With no exceptions. And no flexibility to go above that amount.So the days of a Yoan Moncada raking in $31.5 million are over. As are the days of teams like the Dodgers blowing through their international bonus pool and then spending whatever they chose because they didnt mind the penalties. So it will take a while before we completely grasp the effect of this change on teams and players alike. But one thing to file away is this: Its the first time the union has ever agreed to any sort of hard cap in any area. Interesting.? The players did come away with a couple of scheduling concessions that theyd made a major priority in these negotiations. Starting in 2018, the season will start four days earlier, so that four extra off days can be included in the schedule. And there are new provisions requiring more teams to play day games when one or both teams face long flights after the game.In a sport that is now paying more than a half-billion dollars a year to players on the disabled list, these are more important elements of this agreement than you might think. If the primary cause of injury is fatigue, it makes sense for everyone to do what they can to combat as much fatigue as possible.There is so much more to sift through when the details get announced. So there will be more surprises and more changes, many of them subtle, some of them not so subtle. And only then will we know how all the pieces of this puzzle fit together.But Ive covered enough labor talks in my day to know that most of you dont care about any of that. You only care about one thing:Did they get this frigging deal done or not?Well, ladies and gentlemen, the deal got done. Woo-hoo. The hot stove can keep on burning. The trade rumors can keep on flowing. The game can keep on growing. And that, in the end, is what had to happen. Any other outcome would have been an embarrassment. Not to mention a disaster.Once upon a time in baseball, it wouldnt have ended this way. So thank heaven we dont live in that time anymore. Thank heaven we live in this time -- because no matter who emerges from this agreement unhappy about how this deal affects them -- peace always beats the alternative. And never more than right now. 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The injury bothered Bledsoe in the Suns victory over the Clippers on Monday and he sat out the teams home loss to Memphis on Thursday night. Not content with beating Ferrari and McLaren on the track, Red Bull designer Adrian Newey has gone into competition with them on the road. The result is the stunning Aston Martin AM-RB 001 -- a hypercar of jaw-dropping beauty that is designed to lap the Silverstone grand prix circuit faster than an F1 car.Those in the supercar market have been spoilt for choice in recent years, with La Ferrari, the McLaren P1 and the Porsche 918 all raising the bar to a new level. But where most people saw automotive perfection in those three models, Newey saw room for improvement.The ideas behind the car are almost in the opposite direction to some of the cars youve just mentioned, in that its much smaller and lighter, he explained at the launch on Tuesday. Its about trying to keep it pure and simple and light, with a tightly packaged, aerodynamic body.Although the exact details of the car and its engine have not been released, the defining rules of the AM-RB 001s design have been mapped out. The car will weigh less than 1,000kg (La Ferrari weighs 1255kg, the P1 weighs 1,345kg and the 918 weighs 1,704kg) and have a 1:1 power-to-weight ratio -- meaning close to 1,000bhp.It will benefit from underfloor aerodynamics, producing unprecedented levels of downforce for a road car and the potential to pull serious G-force in corners. Some of the ideas are based on Neweys F1 experience, but other concepts were developed in virtual reality when designing a race car for PlayStation game Grand Turismo.Its been an evolution of ideas that Ive thrown in the box over the years. In some ways it is an evolution of an F1 car, morphing into the PlayStation X1 car and then this. There is a similarity and in some ways it is a covered X1 PlayStation car and its trying to get those principals together to get the aerodynamics form underneath, and get a canopy to fit two people inside.In that way its a bit of a Tardis, because weve tried to keep this small, many cars have become big and clumsy, but weve tried to keep this small and compact. Initially when a lot of people look at it from the outside they think its a single seater, but its not, its a two-seater. Its using the packaging experience that we have developed in Formula One to get a lot of the components -- the driver, the enginne, the radiators and everything else into the form that you see here.dddddddddddd And that has been a challenge.The engine will not be turbocharged but instead a bespoke, normally-aspirated, high-revving V12. Aston Martin have promised the compact V12 will break ground with new technology and a hybrid element has not been ruled out.We studied V6 twin turbos, V8s, single turbos and all the rest of it, Newey explained. Weight and packaging are large factors, the car is tightly packaged, and while turbochargers initially look attractive because the engine is so small, you have to put the turbos and intercoolers somewhere, so there are lots of extra bits and pieces that come associated with turbos.So in the end the engine that offered the most performance in terms of the overall package, was a normally-aspirated engine and to get a normally aspirated engine with the sort of power we wanted, it had to be a V12.Although 25 track-focused cars will be added to the end of the production run, both Aston Martin and Newey have stressed that the road-going model is not simply a race car for the road. The cockpit has been designed to accommodate Marek Reichman, Aston Martins six-foot-four-inch Chief Creative Officer, in comfort and it will have all the mod cons expected of a supercar, including air conditioning.First of all its a road car and that means it really has to be a car of two characters, one that is capable of extreme performance when you want it -- probably by taking it to the track -- but equally it has to comfortable driving down the Kings Road, Newey said. So if it comes across as an LMP1 car on the road with all its discomforts and compromises then we would have failed.But take it to the race track in its road going guise as you see here, then its performance would be very high. Going to the next level, there will be a small production run of track-only cars that we will put on the end and they will be in the LMP1-type areas of performance.The bad news? We will have to wait until late 2017 to see the first working prototypes before the car finally reaches customers in early 2019.Over to you Ferrari and McLaren ... ' ' '