Author: Doug Allen

by Doug Allen

Responding to David Sirota’s fear that Ware’s injury would cause him to lose his scholarship, a reader writes:

In the case of a career-ending injury, the NCAA allows the school to continue financial aid to the injured player “off the books” (i.e. without it counting against the limit the NCAA imposes in each sport). It is a remarkable bit of common sense on the part of an organization that doesn’t show it very often.

Additionally, Louisville has made it clear that Ware will pay no out-of-pocket expenses for his medical treatment. Meanwhile, the injury has renewed the debate over the relationship between universities and their “student-athletes.” Anna North calculates the worker’s compensation for which Ware would be eligible if he were a paid employee:

Workers’ compensation [PDF] in Kentucky is based on the employee’s average weekly wage. Ware doesn’t make a wage, per se — that’s another feature of being a student-athlete. But researchers at Drexel University estimated [PDF] the fair market value of college players, based on how much they could make professionally; they estimated a University of Louisville basketball player’s market value for 2011-2012 at $1,632,103. An employee making that much in Kentucky would run up against worker’s comp maximums, which are pegged to the state’s average weekly wage. If that employee were totally disabled for a year from an on-the-job injury, he or she would get $39,139.88.

Jon Green thinks the “student-athlete” is a myth:

[L]et’s not kid ourselves; especially on powerhouse teams, collegiate rosters are filled out by athlete-students, not the other way around. From one-and-done recruits to softball courses specifically for varsity athletes to outright grade-changes, the idea that players are really on campus for the sake of going to college, and only play sports on the side, is laughable. They are on campus to win games and make money for their respective universities, though ticket sales, ad revenue and licensing rights. It is time they were paid accordingly.

While this may be true for athletes in the higher-profile sports like basketball and football, which always garner a lot of attention, it’s not the case for all student-athletes, even at very competitive Division 1 schools. Some of my good friends from college were student-athletes, in the very best sense of the word: they managed to balance their athletic and academic responsibilities and move on to successful careers after graduation.

I think that this ongoing debate about compensation for student-athletes (see previous Dish coverage here, here, here, here and here) often ignores a key point: the experience of playing a game that you love at a high level.

While in college, I was an athlete on a club sports team that traveled all over the country to play in tournaments. I did not receive a scholarship, and nearly all of my expenses for equipment, travel, and medical care for the injuries I sustained were out-of-pocket. There was never any hope of making money as a professional athlete after school, yet I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything.

The relationship between schools and athletes could certainly be improved. Previous readers have pointed to the prohibition on endorsements as particularly problematic, and I agree. Maybe colleges should be encouraged to think more long-term about their student-athletes, setting up safety nets for students like Ware who are injured while representing their school, to ensure that such injuries don’t threaten their ability to complete their education should they choose to. But I think the image of the poor, burdened, college athlete who suffers endlessly to line the pockets of their athletic department is a bit overdone.

by Doug Allen

Jonathan Bernstein calls on Justice Ginsburg to retire:

There’s every possibility she could not only continue in office beyond the Barack Obama presidency but that she could survive even eight years of a Republican in office after that, if that’s what’s in the cards. And yet: “Every possibility” isn’t good enough. Ginsburg will turn 84 soon after Obama’s successor will be sworn in. Realistically, anyone planning for the future has to assume there’s a 50 percent chance of that successor being a Republican.

He follows up:

I don’t understand the objections that this line of thought is insulting to Ginsburg, or what I think is a related argument that SCOTUS should be above politics. I think that’s a real misunderstanding of the Court. It’s true that Supreme Court justices don’t, and shouldn’t, simply vote the way that Members of Congress vote on issues. But yes, absolutely, the Court is and is meant to be “political” and a part of the US democracy. And during an era in which the polity is highly partisan and polarized, it’s no surprise that the Court is, too. Not only no surprise, but it’s basically what we should want. The idea that the Court should be the same regardless of what voters want is anti-democratic — and, given the Constitution, unrealistic.

by Doug Allen

Jackson Diehl defends his interventionist stance on both Iraq and Syria:

Iraq was unquestionably costly and painful to the United States — in dollars, in political comity and, above all, in lives, both of Iraqis and Americans. It hasn’t turned out, so far, as we war supporters hoped. Yet in the absence of U.S. intervention, Syria is looking like it could produce a much worse humanitarian disaster and a far more serious strategic reverse for the United States. … The tragedy of the post-Iraq logic embraced by President Obama is that it has ruled out not just George W. Bush-style invasions but also the more modest intervention used by the Clinton administration to prevent humanitarian catastrophes and protect U.S. interests in the 1990s.

Larison scoffs:

One lesson from Iraq that many war opponents have learned is that the U.S. shouldn’t be waging unnecessary wars that serve no discernible U.S. interest. That isn’t the wrong lesson to learn. It’s one that Diehl simply ignores, which is probably why he never really addresses how it would serve U.S. interests to go to war in Syria.

Another lesson is that forcibly collapsing a regime creates far more instability and chaos than leaving it in place would. There is no likely scenario in which hastening regime collapse would have limited the loss of life and displacement of civilians in Syria. …

Military interventions almost always take longer than expected, and that’s always true for interventions that are sold to the public by emphasizing how low-cost and easy they will be. Take an interventionist’s original estimate for how long a given military action will take, and then multiply it by ten or fifteen and you’ll be closer to the real figure. One of the reasons no one trusts the promises of Iraq war hawks is that they were promising a swift and easy war in 2003, too, and all that many of them can say after an eight-year debacle is that it “hasn’t turned out, so far, as we war supporters hoped.”

by Doug Allen

https://twitter.com/JessicaValenti/status/318197754792927232

Over the weekend, the NYT ran an obituary for Yvonne Brill, a pioneer in rocket science and recent recipient of the National Medal of Technology. The obituary originally started with this:

She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said. But Yvonne Brill, who died on Wednesday at 88 in Princeton, N.J., was also a brilliant rocket scientist, who in the early 1970s invented a propulsion system to help keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits.

Robert Gonzalez argues that this intro downplays her scholarly accomplishments:

Brill is a big deal in the world of rocket science. In the 1940s, she was quite possibly the only woman in the United States doing work in the field. In the 1970s, she developed and patented the electrothermal hydrazine thruster – a rocket propulsion system used by communication satellites to maintain a geosynchronous orbit around Earth. … All of this is, of course, mentioned in The New York Times‘ obit, which ran yesterday. Tragically, it is mentioned only after this spectacularly awful lede.

Melinda Hennenberger is more sympathetic:

Martin’s obituary for rocket scientist Yvonne Brill attempted to underscore her accomplishments by placing them in the context of other 88-year-old women who followed husbands around the country and stayed home to raise children for long stretches. … This perceived slight is irony gone awry, not a literal exaltation of stroganoff over science. But as the great Mary McGrory once warned me, “Nuance is overrated; clarity is the thing.”

by Doug Allen

Louisville sophomore Kevin Ware’s extreme compound fracture yesterday was probably the most disturbing injury I’ve ever seen in person or televised, and after seeing the replays I was unable to watch the rest of the game. Ian Crouch analyzes other reactions:

Ware’s injury quickly became about a variety of other things. It was a media story: When did CBS decide to stop airing replays? Did it do the right thing? And a tech story: How does social media capture and shape cultural responses to live events? It became an infrastructure story: Did the elevated court on which the game was played, installed largely for aesthetic purposes, contribute to the way in which Ware jumped and fell? And it has become a question about ethics: Ware’s immediate pain, and the long-term physical challenges he will face, make the mounting questions about the compensation (or lack of it) and exploitation of college players all the more significant.

Barry Petchesky provides a thorough rundown of how TV networks addressed airing the injury. Despite its gruesome nature, Will Leitch doesn’t blame sites like Buzzfeed and Deadspin for posting the footage:

Whether or not you think it’s right or wrong for Deadspin and The Big Lead and Buzzfeed and Yahoo to profit off the incident, it is undeniable that people desperately wanted to see it. You can hardly call those sites rogue or somehow sadistic, unless you are willing to call the vast majority of humanity that (and you might be). But those sites aren’t peddling drugs to children; they’re running footage of a nationally televised event that tons of people were watching. Don’t blame them for the video — blame the rest of us.

That’s to say: Blame human nature. Even now, knowing how horrific the video is, having been told by so many people to stay far away… I’m still curious to watch it.

David Sirota worries about Ware’s future:

[His injury] will likely be remembered alongside Joe Theismann’s career-ender as one of the most tragically gruesome in sports history. But that’s not the only tragic and gruesome part of this episode, because unlike Theismann, who was working under a guaranteed contract, Ware was an NCAA athlete helping to generate millions of dollars for the NCAA, but not automatically guaranteed a four-year education scholarship. As in so many other similar cases, that means his injury in service to the NCAA’s multimillion-dollar machine could spell the end of his financial aid and massive healthcare bills to boot.

(Photo: Russ Smith #2, Gorgui Dieng #10, Chane Behanan #21 and assistant coach Kevin Keatts of the Louisville Cardinals react after Kevin Ware #5 suffered a compound fracture to his leg in the first half against the Duke Blue Devils during the Midwest Regional Final round of the 2013 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana on March 31, 2013. By Andy Lyons/Getty Images)

by Doug Allen

Tim Maly calls attention to a non-profit called ColaLife that is leveraging the popularity of Coke to deliver much-needed medical supplies to remote African villages:

You can buy a Coke pretty much anywhere on Earth. Thanks to a vast network of local suppliers, Coca-Cola has almost completely solved distribution, getting its product into every nook and cranny where commerce reaches. There are places in the world where it’s easier to get a Coke than clean water. In the 1980s, [ColaLife founder Simon] Berry was an aid worker in Zambia, and when he looked at Coke’s success, he saw an opportunity. …

The result of [ColaLife’s] efforts so far is the AidPod, a wedge-shaped container that fits between the necks of bottles in a Coca-Cola crate. For the pilot program, they are using the AidPods to distribute an anti-diarrhea kit, called “Kit Yamoyo” (“Kit of Life”).

The effort is helping local businesses as well:

By working with [Coca-Cola wholesalers], ColaLife gains a connection to locally trusted businesses. “They know about inventory control, security, how to store products properly, and retailers in the district know where they are,” says Berry. “We’ve created a desirable anti-diarrhea kit. We’ve priced it and we’re marketing it at a level where these retailers who deal in other products can make money out of taking it to their villages and selling it.” For the ColaLife operational trial in Zambia, everybody on the ground (wholesalers, distributors and retailers) is making a profit. Recommended retail for the kit is 5,000 kwacha (about $1). Retailers make 35 percent profit, while wholesalers make 20 percent profit.