A Year That Did Truly Suck

2014 sucked. That's pretty much the consensus. Here's an (incomplete) list why, in no particular order:

> Russia attempted to host the Winter Olympics in Sochi and dark comedy ensued... 

> ...Including Russia's re-drawing Europe's borders for the first time since World War II (HA! HA! Who's laughing now, decadent West!)

> Commercial airplanes were shot down (with no repercussions), or just disappeared without a trace. 

> Global warming is definitely happening and it's probably unrealistic to do anything about it now.

> Foreign tax inversions to avoid U.S taxes officially became a cool "thing" in the corporate world.

> Old wars became young and bloody again in Syria and Iraq.

> Ebola scared the shit out of us -- no deaths though -- and killed from 5 to 15 thousand of them, over there, where they tend to be scared less and die more.

> ISIS / ISIL / Islamic State / Daesh / Those Crazy Murderers In Two Countries Where Lots of People Get Murdered.

> It became news to us (but not to them, or the people they've been shooting) that U.S. police can shoot just about anybody and get away with it.

> Although the U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 5.8 percent of the labor force in November 2014, the lowest since July 2008, the labor force participation rate (i.e. excluding those too young, old, sick or beaten down by failure to work) is still below 63 percent; and wages were up only 2 percent for the year.

> Congress did not raise the minimum wage, again.

> Voter ID laws are still in effect (mainly in the South) and still doing what they're intended to do: suppress youth and minority votes.

> Red Lobster (a fav of ur's truly) became an economic bellwether instead of that place with the cheesy biscuits.

> We found out (but weren't really surprised) that up to 18 percent of NCAA revenue sports athletes read like children.

> We discovered that sandwich makers earning minimum wage are being asked to sign non-compete agreements.

> We found out the CIA is filled with sadistic, sicko torturers (and their defenders) who are nonetheless incompetent.

> The GOP held onto the House and took over the Senate.

> The GOP put taxpayers on the hook in the amount of $300 trillion in bailouts for Wall Street's derivatives bets.

> U.S. corporations are even more, uh, endowed with personhood than ever.

> Likewise, robots (AI) continued their exponential Moore's-rate progress toward enslaving humanity... or just taking all humanity's jobs.

> Still no federal prosecutions of Wall Street banks that committed securities fraud, wire fraud, perjury during Congressional testimony.... (Thanks, Obama and Eric Holder)

> Stephen Colbert put to rest The Colbert Report -- and worse -- his genius farcical Bill O'Reilly persona.

> Dick Cheney managed to stay alive -- and stay on FOX -- for another year.

Did I miss anything?

2014 sucked for conservatives as well. I hear their whining so I know. Yet few of these will sound like victories to liberals (and notice that most involve Obama):

> Obamacare remains the law of the land (because the federal government remains funded).

> 44 states have adopted Common Core standards.

> Obama escaped an impeachment vote on (take your pick).

> The Keystone XL pipeline is still not approved.

> Obama remains extremely popular abroad.

> Uppity blacks (no, they don't use that adjective anymore!) protested and rioted about police all over the country and didn't seem to be punished for it.

> The Tea Parties' power in the GOP diminished and the Establishment came back.

> The gay marriage steamroller is unstoppable.

> Obama's Ebola "czar" wasn't qualified to thwart an Ebola epidemic that wasn't coming anyway.

> Obama granted "amnesty" to approx. 11 million illegals.

> Unlike the last guy, this Pope is a flaming lib.

> Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder got to leave his job at the time and manner of his own choosing.

> Obama tightened rules for US coal power plants and made a deal with China on greenhouse gas emissions.

> And all of Obama's other "tyrannical" executive orders (yeah, you know the ones, don't get me started).

> White conservatives lost their best black spokesman for personal responsibility among African-American males when it was revealed he was a serial rapist. (On the other side, liberals lost a great stand-up comedian).

> The latest (the 10th?) GOP Congressional report on Benghazi! did not conclude that Hillary Clinton murdered those four Americans with her bare hands.

> And Hillary seems like an unbeatable juggernaut in 2016 when compared to (insert RINO or TP wacko's name here).

2014 sucked for me as well. Maybe the worst year ever. For instance, being unemployed for most of it. Of course there are always silver linings, silver linings...

Begone and good riddance, 2014!  2015, you'll have to try really hard to suck worse. Talk to you next year, folks!

News digest / Catching up on news (08.08.2014)

Lately I can't keep up with my re-posting duties. Quickly, here are several stories you might have missed:

Federal Judge Rules Some College Players Are Entitled To Payment:  http://n.pr/V95KJ7 -- SOME JUSTICE!

How Big Is a $16 Billion Bank Fraud Settlement, Really?:  http://huff.to/1A036VM  -- NOT VERY.

FEAR: 11 TOP BANKS STILL TOO BIG TO FAIL:  http://huff.to/1zS8ZnU  -- TBTF HERE TO STAY, BY DESIGN.

Nine myths about the social safety net, annotated:  http://wapo.st/1pF1Cvr  -- OLD PEOPLE ARE THE BIGGEST WELFARE QUEENS?

Unwealthy in America: New study finds that Top 1 percent hold 37 percent of nation’s wealth. A quarter of US families feel they are under economic stress caused by the Great Recession:  http://www.mybudget360.com/unwealthy-in-america-wealth-in-united-states/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mybudget360%2FQePx+%28My+Budget+360%29  

The Conflict In Gaza Explained In One Map:  http://huff.to/1ASuhTK  -- UNLESS IT'S A MAP DERIVED FROM THE OLD TESTAMENT, I'M NOT INTERESTED.

Your chicken is about to get more full of feces:  http://gu.com/p/4v9ex  -- YUM!

CNN exposé: NCAA athletes read like children

This expose by CNN goes to show that sports socialism starts before the collegiate level. We subsidize, through our tax dollars, a sham system of "education" that promotes star athletes from elementary to high school to college who barely read at the level of children:

Based on data from those requests and dozens of interviews, a CNN investigation revealed that most schools have between 7% and 18% of revenue sport athletes who are reading at an elementary school level. Some had even higher percentages of below-threshold athletes.

According to those academic experts, the threshold for being college-literate is a score of 400 on the SAT critical reading or writing test. On the ACT, that threshold is 16.

Many student-athletes scored in the 200s and 300s on the SAT critical reading test -- a threshold that experts told us was an elementary reading level and too low for college classes. The lowest score possible on that part of the SAT is 200, and the national average is 500.

On the ACT, we found some students scoring in the single digits, when the highest possible score is 36 and the national average is 20. In most cases, the team average ACT reading score was in the high teens.

"It is in many ways immoral for the university to even admit that student," said Dr. Richard M. Southall, director of the College Sport Research Institute and a professor at the University of South Carolina.

Immoral, he says. Gee, ya think?

Yeah, but they get the best tutors to help them! said one of my sports-crazy friends. Even so:

Former and current academic advisers, tutors and professors say it's nearly impossible to jump from an elementary to a college reading level while juggling a hectic schedule as an NCAA athlete. They say the NCAA graduation rates are flawed because they don't reflect when a student is being helped too much by academic support.

"They're pushing them through," said Billy Hawkins, an associate professor and athlete mentor at the University of Georgia.

"They're graduating them. UGA is graduating No. 2 in the SEC, so they're able to graduate athletes, but have they learned anything? Are they productive citizens now? That's a thing I worry about. To get a degree is one thing, to be functional with that degree is totally different."

This immoral betrayal of student-athletes (most of whom won't play professional sports) and the ideals of higher education is all so that we have something to do on a Sunday, can enjoy the bowl games and hoopla, listen to the never-ending arguments on talk radio, and catch the highlights on ESPN before bedtime.

As I said before, the NCAA is a kabuki dance of amateur athletics. Everybody knows it's a lie, yet we still love it; we pretend it has something to do with the quality of a college or university, and by extension -- with the quality of the fans, I mean, us.  (Even queerer are the millions of college sports fans who never attended their favorite college, or any college at all for that matter.)

Even more galling, every halfway honest sports fan knows there is an inverse relationship at work here: the better the college's team, the dumber the student-athletes.  

It's so, so pathetic.  Sports socialism and sports craziness have spoiled America -- and sports. There is nothing else that unites us anymore.

Some college athletes play like adults, read like 5th-graders

By Sara Ganim

January 7, 2014 | CNN

URL: http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/07/us/ncaa-athletes-reading-scores/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

Deford: Separate college from sports -- AMEN!

I'm glad that Grandpa Munster, er, I mean the great Frank Deford, who has spent a lifetime writinge about U.S. sports, agrees with me: NCAA sports are a money-losing scam.

It's always nice when the pros like Deford can take a cue from the amateurs like moi.

You know me, being so laissez-faire and all, I want to privatize everything and let the good ole' free market rule the world the way Jesus Christ and Adam Smith intended. That's why I want to privatize sports and take them out of U.S. public education altogether.  

Let's Separate The Schoolin' From The Sports

By Frank Deford

June 26, 2013 | NPR

We usually think of college sports in terms of classic big-time schools, polls and bowls.

But, in fact, our athletics are intertwined with — and complicate — all higher education.

The University of North Carolina, Wilmington provides a typical recent case. The Seahawks field teams in 19 Division One sports, but unfortunately, like many colleges, UNCW athletics are in the red, so the chancellor, Gary L. Miller, assembled a committee, which recommended the elimination of five sports: men's and women's swimming, men's cross country and indoor track and softball.

Well, that produced a firestorm, especially with swimming, which has won the conference 12 years in a row and, which, financially, is about on budget. Now, by contrast, the basketball team has a deficit of a million dollars; the coach himself earns almost a half million a season, notwithstanding that the team lost two-thirds of its games and is academically on probation. Hmmm.

So why not just get rid of big basketball? Well, fans don't show up to see cross country or swimming, do they? Isn't part of the power and charm of college sports that it brings town and gown together, cheering our school on? Isn't that the American way from high school right on up?

Like a lot of his colleagues, Chancellor Miller also has to factor in the reality that his school is tilting female. Sixty percent of UNCW students are women, and the majority grows. And Title IX requires athletic percentage to reflect gender proportion.

Chancellor Miller is also being whipsawed to upgrade facilities so the Seahawks can be competitive with their rivals. UNCW is in the Colonial Athletic Association. No, it's not the Big 10, but the CAA stretches about 1,100 miles. Every college is desperate to get into a better conference and maybe even get on ESPN.

So what did Chancellor Miller, a biologist by discipline, do? Well, obviously influenced by the thousands who signed petitions, he decreed that he was keeping all sports.

But, he offered a provocative afterthought. He suggested that those folks so blithe about signing sports petitions might "leverage their passion" –– which is apparently what a polite biologist says when he means "put your money where your mouth is."

We in the U.S. think, nostalgically, of athletics as integral to higher education, but perhaps they're so unusual that they should be entirely separated from the academic and simply turned into an honest commercial adjunct.

Leverage, indeed. Let alumni and local businesses pay for sports. It certainly would make a lot of college presidents happier. And passionate alumni could then sign petitions to keep courses, like medieval history and Western philosophy. Yeah, sure.

Report: NCAA sports socialism is a net financial LOSS

Read the scoreboard and weep, sports socialists:

“The belief that college sports are a financial boon to colleges and universities is generally misguided," the [Delta Cost Project] report states. "Although some big-time college sports athletic departments are self-supporting – and some sports may be profitable enough to help support other campus sports programs – more often than not, the colleges and universities are subsidizing athletics, not the other way around.”

Think about that. If you are an American man, quite likely your free-time enjoyment, pride in your home city, maybe even your own self-esteem, all come from government-subsidized sporting events featuring immature teens and young adults doing a kabuki dance of "amateur" athletics.

Dontcha think that's kinda weird?

Now, if only we could get the Tea Parties mobilized against all this waste and fraud in higher education, as the cost of college skyrockets and the quality of our higher education plummets, then maybe something would change!....

Playing Different Games

By Kevin Kiley

January 16, 2013 | Insider Higher Ed

URL: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/01/16/universities-spend-more-athletics-athlete-academics-student-report-finds

Bold black college drops NCAA athletics

Kudos to Spelman College in Atlanta for acknowledging the NCAA for the expensive, anti-educational scam its is, and instead investing its resources in health and fitness programs for all its students.

"We have to ask ourselves: What is the cost of the program and who is benefiting? How many people are benefiting? Is the benefit worth the cost?" asked the college's perspicacious President Beverly Tatum. Exactly. Schools have limited resources and have to make tough, cost-benefit-based decisions about how to use them.

It's no surprise, however, that the school's basketball coach isn't happy about the change:

"It teaches you a level of sacrifice that is so hard to explain," she said. "Unless you are an athlete or a former athlete, you don't understand what tools and gifts and things that you learn that carry you throughout your entire life."

But as I've argued before, all the lessons learned in sports -- like teamwork, commitment, determination, competitiveness, etc. -- can be learned in an academic or work-study setting, where they better conform to the mission and context of an educational institution.

Now, if we could only do the same at the high school level, and get rid of school-sponsored sports and get all our high schoolers moving, every day!....

To Trim Down, Spelman Trades Sports For Fitness

By Kathy Lohr

December 6, 2012 | NPR

URL: http://n.pr/THqEM7

March Madness 'amateurs' should get $265 K a year

Yes, it's that time of year: March Madness. Time to reflect on the hoopla and glam of men's Division I amateur athletics.

And time to reflect on how badly those amateur athletes -- mostly blacks, who will not go on to play professional sports -- get screwed by the NCAA:

The average fair market value of top-tier college football and men's basketball players is over $100,000 each.... [I]f college sports shared their revenues the way pro sports do, the average Football Bowl Subdivision player would be worth $121,000 per year, while the average basketball player at that level would be worth $265,000.

The NCAA could put some of that money in a trust for players. After all, students on full athletic scholarships live below the poverty line at about 85 percent of colleges.

And the NCAA could contribute some money to defray rising tuition costs for students. (Let's recall that over the past decade, tuition and fees for in-state students at public colleges increased an average of 5.6 percent a year above inflation.)

The NCAA men's basketball tourney is a shameful farce of "amateur" athletics, as networks pay almost $780 million a year for the rights to televise the games; fans bet $2.5 billion; and basketball coaches take home as much as $4 million.

Should college athletes be paid? As much as $1M says new report

By Frederic J. Frommer

September 13, 2011 | AP

URL: http://www.suntimes.com/sports/colleges/7635972-419/should-college-athletes-be-paid-as-much-as-1m-says-new-report.html

Ticket bubble: More evidence pro sports is a scam

It looks like even more socialistic redistribution of wealth from rich upper-tier teams to the vast lower tier of pro sports teams is the only hope for saving America's ailing pro sports teams.

Meanwhile, attending a game has become a privilege of the rich and corporate staff.

I'm not a big sports fan, but if I were, I guess I'd be pissed off that my tax dollars went to pay for expensive local arenas that I couldn't afford to visit. But go figure: Americans hate socialism unless it benefits the employers of grown men dressed in costumes tossing their balls.

The two-tiered pro sports system is a mirror of the two-tiered NCAA Division I (men's) sports system, and, for that matter, a mirror of America's two-tiered economy of the super rich and everybody else. 

...Maybe that's why schizo, self-loathing Americans love their pro sports?

Plenty of Good Seats Still Available

By Neil deMause

August 4, 2011 | Slate

A few months ago, it seemed like Major League Baseball was in the throes of a ticket apocalypse. Through the first two weeks of the season, six teams had set all-time single-game lows at their current homes. The surprising Cleveland Indians led the American League Central in the standings, but remained in the cellar at the turnstiles. The New York Yankees, whose ultrapricey new stadium has been beset by empty seats since it opened in 2009, hosted record-low crowds for four games in a row. It was as if fans, having quietly absorbed more than a decade of price hikes and the advent of $9 beers, had spontaneously decided to go on strike.

Ticket sales have improved since—overall attendance is now roughly flat year over year. Even so, there's a good chance this will mark the fourth straight year that Major League Baseball has seen ticket sales slide after a record year in 2007. You can't blame it on steroids, either. NFL, NBA, and NHL attendance have likewise dipped over the last three years.

The obvious culprit is the sinking economy: Lose $4 trillion in spending power, and at least a few consumers are going to save by watching games at home in hi-def. Yet as the economy lurches back to its feet, there are signs that the sports ticket bubble will continue to deflate. That could have far-reaching effects on ticket prices, competitive balance, and the very existence of the major pro sports leagues that aren't the NFL.

Sports leagues' ticket woes aren't always visible to the naked eye. According to Team Marketing Report's Fan Cost Index, three of the four major leagues saw average ticket prices rise last year. (The NBA, which cut prices by 2.3 percent, was the exception.) These figures, though, only take into account the face value of tickets. Teams are understandably hesitant to cut prices outright, since it's a tough move to undo should the economy (or the team) suddenly rebound. Instead, we've seen a frenzy of discount offers, attempts to goose the turnstile count without tipping off season-ticket buyers that they're paying more per game than their seats are worth.

Perhaps the first sign of the ticket bubble came in September 2009, when the Baltimore Orioles offered an unprecedented deal: tickets for $1 (plus the ubiquitous "handling fees") for the entire month, except for games against the Yankees and Red Sox. Attendance barely budged. That fall, several NBA teams began quietly offering two-for-one deals to fill suddenly half-empty houses. The previous season the New Jersey Nets, lame ducks at their home arena after announcing a move to Brooklyn, actually gave away tickets to one game for nothing more than Ticketmaster fees.

At the same time, the high end of the ticket market showed signs of softening. Last fall, the New York Giants demanded that fans pony up as much as $20,000 for "personal seat licenses" before being allowed to buy season tickets at the New Meadowlands Stadium. That may have been a workable price point when ground was first broken for the stadium three years prior, but fans balked at the hefty fees in 2010. What was once a lengthy ticket wait list quickly evaporated, leaving the team with thousands of empty seats on its new building's opening day.

It's a remarkable turnabout for an industry that remade its business model over the past two decades around selling expensive tickets to corporations and rich people. It's no coincidence that the biggest surge in ticket prices came not during the 1970s and early 1980s, when free agency drove up player salaries, but during the 1990s, when the rich got dramatically richer thanks to the Reagan tax cuts and the Clinton economic boom. At the same time, a wave of new stadiums and arenas—mostly built with taxpayer dollars—flooded the market with pricey new luxury boxes and club seats to cater to fans' newly bulging wallets.

The result was a dramatic shift in the nature of sports business, and in the type of fans that clubs tried to attract. After an exhaustive search through consumer-price-index surveys, economists John Siegfried and Tim Peterson determined that the only demographic segment that attended more baseball games in the 1990s than the '80s was households earning more than $50,000 a year (which back then was still real money). As the rich poured into new stadiums and arenas, the less-wealthy folks who'd traditionally been the core of the sports market were largely priced out, or at least limited to splurging on tickets once or twice a year.

The rise of the online secondary ticket market could end up changing that dynamic. Ironically, resellers like StubHub initially looked like they would help drive prices still higher, as fans used them to unload sought-after tickets for more than face value. Teams also watched the sites to determine the market price for seats, and then raised their face values accordingly. MLB even anointed StubHub (now owned by eBay) as its official reseller in 2007, earning teams a cut of every ticket resold.

In recent years, though, StubHub et al. have been a boon for bargain hunters. A glance at FanSnap, which aggregates tickets posted on various resale sites, shows thousands of tickets available for virtually any game you'd care to see, often at well below face value. If you want to take in next week's Indians-Tigers AL Central showdown in Cleveland, for example, you can snag lower box seats in the infield—normally $44—for as low as $25. As a bonus, reseller fees are typically lower than teams' own ticket fees. Given those options, it would be stupid to pay full price at the ticket window.

There's a snowball effect here that can be dangerous for team finances. Just as rising prices on StubHub led teams to hike face values, so does a glut of online tickets lead to the deep, club-sanctioned discounts we've seen of late. (There are other signs of increasing desperation: No fewer than three New York sports teams have assigned "personal customer agents" to try to induce me to buy tickets from them directly; I'm sticking with StubHub, so long as it's cheaper.) There comes a point at which fans come to expect a deal on tickets, whether from the team or on the secondary market, and hold off on buying until they see a bargain. That pressures clubs to offer more discounts, leading to a downward spiral of ticket revenue.

We've seen this story before, incidentally. Last summer, the concert industry, which had been riding high after years of seemingly unstoppable price increases, completely tanked. Scads of tour dates and festivals were canceled after it became clear that no one was buying tickets. Humbled promoters promised lower ticket prices, while cutting way back on the number of shows offered.

The sports ticket bubble will ultimately stabilize, but as we've seen with the housing market, the landscape won't look quite the same afterward. For a handful of top teams, times are still flush. While 18 out of 30 MLB teams have seen attendance dip, the World Series champion San Francisco Giants are up nearly 5,000 fans per game, and their opponents in last year's Series, the Texas Rangers, have seen attendance jump by more than 8,000 per game. Likewise, premier events like the Super Bowl continue to set their own prices, as seen when the NFL managed to sell several thousand $200 tickets to watch the big game on video screens outside Cowboys Stadium—and after the "party plaza" sold out, tickets were scalped on StubHub for double face value.

Where we look to be headed, then, is a two-tiered system. A handful of top teams and events will be able to charge whatever they want, while most everyone else is forced to give away tickets. That's great if you're a budget-conscious fan of a cellar-dwelling team—or even a fan of the contending Indians, who remain 26^th in the league in attendance. (Thanks to the widely observed phenomenon that teams get their biggest bump in attendance the year after winning a pennant, fans generally end up paying the most to see teams that are just past their prime.) For leagues as a whole, however, it seems likely to exacerbate the spread between the haves and have-nots.

Unlike musicians, sports teams compete on the field for both wins and players. When the Eagles (not the Philadelphia ones) cancel tour dates, they don't have to worry about another band snapping up Joe Walsh as a free agent. In the sports realm—not counting the NFL, whose outrageously huge TV contracts, split evenly among its 32 teams, has effectively made it into a television show with a sideline in ticket sales—a more pronounced revenue split can be catastrophic for low-revenue teams, since somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 percent of revenue comes from ticket sales.

Unless team owners discover a new willingness to share, baseball in particular could be headed back into the small-market vs. big-market abyss. For the NBA and NHL, it could lead to more teams following the example of the Phoenix Coyotes and New Orleans Hornets and becoming wards of their leagues.

Declining ticket revenue could also be a major factor in the NBA losing some or all of its upcoming season to a lockout, as now appears likely—according to Forbes estimates, revenue from NBA ticket sales has dropped 6 percent over the last five years. For fans, that's the potential downside of the collapsing ticket bubble: Yes, it's a great time to find ticket bargains, but that only applies so long as the box office stays open.

The revenue scam that is NCAA Div. I sports

Some amazing takeaways from these two economic analyses, which I stumbled upon:

Texas which generates on average almost $50 million a year, has seen incredible sustained growth. In 2003, their profit margin was $34.6 million. In the year 2009? $68.8 million!

Amazingly the state of Alabama is at the top for college football revenue, though the state remains generally poor in GDP/GSP related measures.

Unfortunately, this is the sad truth:

In fact 40 teams averaged a loss in money through football over the 7-year period. It's no wonder that some schools are willing to travel into SEC country year in and year out for a hefty payday even though its [sic] another guaranteed loss. 

Women's sports lose money and only men's basketball/football are profitable.

So you could say that NCAA Division I sports are a microcosm of America: a lot of wealth distributed extremely inequitably, but nobody objects because they hope their winning lottery ticket is coming any day, too. Meanwhile, everybody is distracted by televised glam and spectacle and trying to rub elbows with the super rich.

NCAA Div I College Football Expenses and Revenue

By Vipul Lugade

March 24, 2011 | Matlab Geeks

NCAA expenses and revenue across gender and sport

By Vipul Lugade

March 30, 2011 | Matlab Geeks