Archive for the ‘Anarchy Journal Constitutional’ Category

#Northwestern Winning Right to Unionize is a Game Changer

Posted: March 28, 2014 in Excess and Algorithms
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sportsroll

by @anarchyroll
3/28/2014

Whether you know it or not, college athletics changed forever this week.

Northwestern University’s football players were found to be employees of the school, not merely student athletes, by the National Labor Relations Board in Chicago. This means the players now have collective bargaining rights with the school. That means the players now have a say in terms of monetary compensation for their time and effort on the football field beyond an athletic scholarship. Why is this a big deal?

The student athlete paradigm has been crumbling over the past decade. EA Sports no longer puts out it’s NCAA Football or Basketball video game franchises. Why? Because former student athletes filed multiple class action lawsuits and won (one) because they were not being royalties (residual checks) for the use of their likenesses. EA settled but the NCAA is vowing to take the case(s) to the Supreme Court. The NCAA is also saying they will take the NU case to the highest possible court/governing body. Why? Money.

The NCAA is exposing itself for what it is, a money laundering operation. They exist solely to make money off the time, energy, effort, blood, sweat, and tears of 18-21 year old men and women at Division I universities in the United States of America. They care nothing about graduation rates of the players. They care nothing about their health and medical costs. They only care about how much money they can make off of television contracts for the Bowl Championship Series and March Madness.

By exposing themselves as money hungry pigs, the NCAA is losing it’s battle in the court of public opinion. Rather than evolving and paying the students who are making NCAA and the universities billions of dollars (with a B) each year, they are trying to keep them as scholarship slaves. Scholarships are fine for athletes and universities that aren’t on national television on a daily and/or weekly basis. Scholarships are fine for academics. But NCAA Division I athletics is about money, nothing more, nothing less. If it wasn’t then ESPN and CBS wouldn’t be allowed to make anything more than enough money to cover operational costs to broadcast the sporting events.

But that’s not the way it is. It’s not 1960 anymore. Sports equals business in America. So pay the employees what they earn by destroying their bodies in the primes of their lives for the glory and admiration of their parents and peers. The times they are a changin’. You don’t want to pay students who are on national TV every week? Then;

  • Take the games off national TV.
  • Revoke all contracts outside of local public access.
  • Force all coaches to make the same as the professors.
  • Don’t allow schools to travel out of state to play away games.
  • Disperse all funding equally between all sports played at each school.

Don’t want to do any of those? That list is unrealistic and naive? Yeah, no shit. So pay the players. Don’t give them straight cash homey. Pay them in gift cards so they can buy;

  • food
  • clothes
  • tutors
  • laptops
  • plane tickets to go back home during breaks

If the students can afford these things themselves they won’t be dependent on their parents, boosters, or shady gamblers who get them into point shaving schemes. No one is saying pay the quarterback of Notre Dame $1 million a year. But how about you give the kids some money to have fun on the weekends so you can stop putting schools on probation, stripping wins, taking down banners, and expunging winning records?

Why is NU winning union rights important? It changes the face of college athletics forever. How? Because students will be looked as employees. The tide has turned on this issue. Much like gay rights and marijuana legalization, there is no going back, only forward. It is only a matter of time before all major universities are affected by this. That will affect scheduling, coaches contracts, television contracts, merchandise rights, and tuition costs. The college experience as a whole can and will be changed by this going forward. We have just witnessed the tip of the iceberg.

#MinimumWage Debate Shows Disdain for Humanity

Posted: March 26, 2014 in Excess and Algorithms
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eanda logoajclogo2

by @anarchyroll
3/25/2014

Very few issues in the last thirty years have been debated as much as the federal minimum wage. The debate is of course, a farce. The debate is bullshit. The debate is the economic equivalent of the debate over climate change/global warming. It is not a debate, it is an argument over power and control over resources and the monetary consequences thereof.
Somehow the minimum wage debate has been lumped in with the social safety net/ entitlements debate, as if recipients want something for nothing. Literally the opposite is true. We are talking about adult men and women who are not only willing to work, but show up for work 40, 50, 60, 70 hours a week or more. All they want in return for the more often than not, physical labor that they are give is for in return, the ability to pay all of their bills and have enough left over to have some fun AND save for the future.
Employees with more income are more productive. Employees who have higher wages are able to spend more money. Those are the reasons Henry Ford doubled the pay of his assembly line workers in 1914. The results were more productive grunts, but more importantly to Ford and to the country as a whole, more cars purchase, more money pumped into the economy. Ford’s workers were now able to buy the cars they put together on the assembly line in Detroit. This resulted not only in a boom in auto sales, but a boom to the economy in general, serving as a precursor to the Roaring Twenties.
Cost equals wage divided by productivity. Never forget that equation. Economists don’t, people with MBA’s don’t. Just like the dirty secret of fitness is you never need to do anything other than push-ups, sit ups, squats, pull ups, and jog the dirty secret of economic policy debate in regard to wages versus costs is that the effect of increased wages offsets the rise in costs due to an increase in productivity.
The minimum wage has remained essentially stagnant for almost twenty years while the consumer price index (the cost of the stuff we need to buy to survive) has gone up steadily over that time. Wages have not risen at all when adjusted for inflation, in fact, they have decreased.
Why are slave wages acceptable in our society? It’s 2014, not 1914. If people are willing to work, why should they not be paid enough to live off of their paycheck? Cause of the market? The people struggling the most are often working the hardest. How and why is the free market leaving them behind? These are people willing to work more than eight hours each day, more than forty hours each week. Do they not deserve to be able to have money for all their essential costs and still have some money for a little bit of fun here and there?
They perform the essential tasks. Hedge fund management is not essential, garbage pickup is. Bank vice presidents are not essential, food preparation is. Day traders are not essential, janitors are. Just because a group of workers doesn’t have an army of lobbyists doesn’t mean they don’t deserve their piece of the pie. Their piece of the pie they work for with their hands, feet, blood, sweat…and tears when they match their paychecks with their bills at the end of the month.
Remember these are human beings, not numbers on a spreadsheet. Lives, with families, not expenses on a report. Slavery has been abolished for quite some time. One of the consequences of that is if people are willing to do work, or hard labor, we pay them fairly for their time and effort. Fairly means a living wage. Living wage is $15 an hour. If we can’t afford to pay that, then we as a society must adjust before these hard-working people get a fourth job and learn to live on less than three hours of sleep per night with no vacation or retirement forever eva, forever eva, forever eva, until they are put six feet under in a pine wood box.

 

 

#QE Continues to Taper

Posted: March 23, 2014 in Excess and Algorithms
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eanda logoajclogo2

by @anarchyroll
3/22/2014

Janet Yellen chaired her first Fed meeting this past week. Afterwards she announced Fed policy going forward regarding her baby, quantitative easing. She helped construct QE at the height of the economic downturn several years ago, a topic written about repeatedly on this website. Yellen announced that QE will continue to taper down at a rate of $10 billion per month until the end of the year.

That is good, QE needs to end, the sooner the better. The problem is the economy has become somewhat dependant on it. The markets took a small but sudden dive at just the announcement about anything QE related. Yellen also said that QE coming to a total end will depend partially on unemployment numbers.

If you haven’t noticed the unemployment problem is a deeper wound in the economy and in the country not seen since the Great Depression. Not only are a huge number of people out of work, but even more are underemployed and wages have been stagnant for over a decade. When the  markets react negatively to even the mention of QE ending, which it does every time there is an official announcement on the subject, employment numbers are likely to take a hit.

Why? Because the 1% who employ the other 99 have their assets all up in the casino stock market. So if/when those numbers go down unemployment goes up, underemployment goes up, wages stay stagnant or go down. So tying QE to the employment numbers is an out to keep QE going indefinitely since the unemployment crisis could be indefinite. What will the effect of a possible government mandated rise of the minimum wage? All these moving parts will affect whether QE ultimately comes to an end.

The minimum wage debate will be the subject of the next Excess and Algorithms article.

Does #BitRot Make Digital Archiving Mission Impossible?

Posted: March 23, 2014 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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bit rot

 

by @anarchyroll
3/19/2014

The concept of Bit Rot grabbed my attention and peaked my curiosity. The fact that it has already had negative and serious affects on NASA’s ability to recall and study past missions/operations kept my focus on the topic.

What is Bit Rot? It is when an information file either digital or analog decays and/or becomes permanently unreadable/irretrievable.

Most people are familiar with Bit Rot and don’t even know it yet. When a floppy disk is damaged, a CD gets heavily scratched, a record melts, a virus wipes out your hard drive.

Why is this a concern? Because with more information being stored digitally, if Bit Rot becomes widespread and isn’t addressed we as a human race could literally lose access to our archives. Like information once written in Sanskrit with tea leaves on rocks, the information could be lost forever with no way to retrieve it and given enough time,  not know it ever existed.

Is there hope? Yes, there is always hope. There is a very good Ars Technica article on emerging technology that can help  minimize bit rot going forward and possibly eliminate it’s concern on a large scale with important information. Remember, we’re not talking IG selfies and Vines. We’re talking the stuff stored in the Library of Congress.

Keep an eye on this issue and address it in terms of your personal/professional files/archives.

I’m a Mark & FanBoy for #UFCFightNight: Shogun vs Henderson 2

Posted: March 23, 2014 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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potatoshooterlogosportsroll

by @anarchyroll
3/22/2014

If you have been a mixed martial arts and/or UFC fan for more than three years, then UFC Fight Night 39 on Sunday has been circled on your calendar for a while. Two of the greatest fighters in the history of the sport will meet in the octagon in a rematch of what can be argued as the greatest fight of all time from UFC 139 in 2011.

Mauricio “Shogun” Rua will be looking for revenge against Dan “Hendo” Henderson in the most professional, polite, and brutal way possible. Both of these icons have immense respect for each other dating back a decade when both ran rough shot over the PRIDE Fighting Championships in Japan. Both are in my personal top five fighter list of all time. Their first fight is my personal favorite fight of all time. The list for now is as follow:

  1. Shogun vs. Hendo I
  2. Wanderlei Silva vs. Chuck Liddell
  3. Frank Mir vs. Big Nog I
  4. Hendo vs. Big Nog II
  5. Cro Cop vs. Wanderlei Silva

Just my personal list, nothing I’ll get into a shouting match argument about. I could literally make a list of 25 fights off the top of my head that are so good that would make me rethink that top five list a few times over. But not the top one. Hendo vs. Shogun could have been a shitty fight and I still would have really liked it. The fact that it was five rounds of some of the most intense fighting in the history of the sport is just icing on the cake.

Just writing this article I have gotten goose bumps four times and counting thinking about their first fight and what may happen in their second fight. Why? It’s not just that I personally like both fighters, it’s the fact that their places in history as all time greats can’t be denied.

Both men will be hall of famers who will be remembered as pioneers and kings. Both dominated the 205 lb division at a time in the history of the sport where the 205 lb division was the deepest in all of mma regardless of promotion. Both did so in spectacular fashion. Both have fought in multiple open weight fights against opponents with distinct size advantages. Both men have held championships in Japan and America. Both men have won mma tournaments. They just don’t make ’em like these two anymore.

Both are the last of a dying breed, PRIDE alumni. If you have never seen PRIDE, do yourself a favor and look up some fights on YouTube and/or on the UFC website. It was the wild wild west of mixed martial arts and professional sports. Along with Fedor, Cro Cop, and Wanderlei Silva; Hendo and Shogun are on the PRIDE FC Mt. Rushmore.

I could write ten pages about these two guys, I hope my enthusiasm comes across in this writing. If you are a newer fan of the UFC look these two up. It’s not just that they are legends, they almost always have exciting fights. They are both two of the greatest closers, finishers, and knockout artists of all time. They both finish fights and didn’t just make good careers out of finishing fights, they became bonafide legends.

It is rare to have genuine living legends face off in a sporting event. UFC Fight Night 39 in Brazil will see just that. Knowing that both men are closer to the end of their careers than the beginning I encourage all of you to watch because fights and fighters of this caliber only come along a few times in each generation. I’m picking Shogun to win, only because that will ensure a trilogy, which gives me restless leg syndrome just thinking about.

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