Tag: Premium

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 Zoe Pollock

Steve Mann has created computerized eyewear for over 35 years:

I have found these systems to be enormously empowering. For example, when a car’s headlights shine directly into my eyes at night, I can still make out the driver’s face clearly. That’s because the computerized system combines multiple images taken with different exposures before displaying the results to me. I’ve built dozens of these systems, which improve my vision in multiple ways.

Some versions can even take in other spectral bands. If the equipment includes a camera that is sensitive to long-wavelength infrared, for example, I can detect subtle heat signatures, allowing me to see which seats in a lecture hall had just been vacated, or which cars in a parking lot most recently had their engines switched off. Other versions enhance text, making it easy to read signs that would otherwise be too far away to discern or that are printed in languages I don’t know.

Believe me, after you’ve used such eyewear for a while, you don’t want to give up all it offers.

Update from a reader:

I have fond memories of Steven Mann from my undergraduate days at MIT. You’d see him walking around campus occasionally with like 40 pounds of electronics strapped to his back and a massive camera/screen system on his glasses. At first it was quite jarring to see, because you don’t really see stuff like that every day. But after a while I stopped thinking of him as an oddity … one of the occupational hazards of getting educated at MIT that it no longer becomes weird to see a guy with a pentium lashed to his forehead. Just one of the many interesting visionary characters that I was privileged to spy on during my time at the ‘tute, kinda like the guy who ran my freshman physics lab that turned out to have a Nobel prize.. Anyways, thanks for the trip down memory lane.

(Image: “Self-portraits of Mann with ‘Digital Eye Glass’ (wearable computer and Augmediated Reality systems) from 1980s to 2000s” from Wikimedia Commons)

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 Chris Bodenner

A reader adds a first-hand perspective to a recent post:

I have no idea whether narcoanalysis will be useful as a psycho-diagnostic technique or as a law enforcement or intelligence gathering device, although it does seem less onerous than waterboarding. I do know that it can be very useful to the criminal defense attorney in certain limited instances. In the early part of my career I defended more than 50 homicide cases and found the technique to be very useful in three cases. I was fortunate to have the services of an experienced psychiatrist who had used it in treating what we now call PTSD in WW2 veterans suffering from repressed memories of traumatic events.

My first and most helpful experience was with a man who had undoubtedly shot and killed his wife but could not recall exactly how or why. When pressed to recall the event he could do so up to a point and then would start belching – a rather bizarre response. He was under indictment for second-degree murder under circumstances that suggested an execution-style killing. He had come back from a visit to the factory where he was employed while it was on strike.

The first indication that he was being truthful while undergoing the amytal interview came when he contradicted an earlier account of the reason for his visit to the strike scene. Before the medicated interview he said he had gone there to see how it was going. Under amytal he said he had gone there to try to get on television.

At the crucial point in the interview, for the first time he described how while he was pointing the gun at his wife to try to get her to admit a marital indiscretion, she grabbed the gun and jerked it downward, causing it to discharge. The 15-degree downward angulated entrance wound suggested she might have been on her knees begging for mercy without the revered memory he had suppressed.  I played the recording of the interview for the grand jury, who returned a superseding indictment for manslaughter, based on causing death while in the commission of the unlawful act of threatening her with a gun.

On another occasion I used the technique to gain some confirmation of my client’s claim that although he had gone along on a burglary, it was his partner who suddenly displayed a gun and killed two elderly people. His account of this was accompanied by the emotional response one would expect under these circumstances. He still went to prison for murder, but his partner was sentenced to death.

In another case the client admitted the complicity of another that he had refused to acknowledge even when confronted with evidence that only made sense if another was involved. More that admitting the involvement of another, he identified the person, which he confirmed when confronted with the tape recording.

All these people were of modest intellect. It is accepted that a thoroughgoing sociopath can lie even under  the influence of amytal. Ordinarily, an attorney would not bother to use the technique with that kind of defendant.

The above video is a scene from John Huston’s Let There Be Light, a 1946 documentary about the experimental treatment program for traumatized WWII veterans that employed hypnosis and sodium amytal. From the film’s Wiki page:

The film, commissioned by the United States Army Signal Corps, was the final entry in a John Huston trilogy of films produced at the request of the U.S. Government. This documentary film follows 75 U.S. soldiers who have sustained debilitating emotional trauma and depression. … The film was controversial in its portrayal of shell-shocked soldiers from the war. “Twenty percent of our army casualties”, the narrator says, “suffered psychoneurotic symptoms: a sense of impending disaster, hopelessness, fear, and isolation.” Apparently due to the potentially demoralizing effects the film might have on recruitment, it was subsequently banned by the Army after its production, although some pirated copies had been made.

by Brendan James

The UN is putting some teeth on its peacekeeping mission in the DRC, authorizing a 3,000-strong “intervention brigade” to put down militia violence in the eastern part of the country. David Bosco reminds us that the last attempt to do so turned ugly, fast:

In 2006, a group of Guatemalan special forces soldiers assigned to the peacekeeping mission attempted to hunt down units of the Lord’s Resistance Army operating in Congo’s Garamba National Park. The operation turned into a disaster. Several U.N. soldiers were killed (likely by friendly fire), and the LRA forces escaped. In early 2009, U.N. forces began actively supporting the offensive operations of the Congolese armed forces. But that collaboration was dialed back as criticism of Congolese army tactics mounted.

He argues these missions are almost always hobbled by inadequate forces sent with ambitious goals:

Part of the problem with offensive U.N. operations is that the training and resources of the forces doing the fighting often doesn’t match the mandate. It’s one thing for the Security Council to authorize offensive operations from New York; it’s quite another thing for peacekeeping commanders to manage them successfully on the ground. During the U.N.’s Bosnia operation in the 1990s, that gap between the Council’s proclamations and the actual work of peacekeepers grew to tragic proportions.

By Zoe Pollock

Graeme Wood ventured out to the Iranian resort island of Kish to understand the effect of American sanctions on Iran’s economy:

The Iranian rial trades semi-openly, and as this magazine went to press, its value was hovering under 40,000 to one U.S. dollar, weaker by nearly half compared with six months earlier. Authorities tried to ban currency trading for a few weeks in October, when the inflation rate peaked, but they failed. Finally they just asked money changers not to advertise the depressing new rates in their windows.

Wood’s First Rule of Budget Travel applies here: where there is runaway inflation, there are great deals for travelers with hard cash. … The first sign of rising prices was the hotel rate card. I had agreed over the phone to pay 370 dirhams, or about $100, for a night at a five-star hotel, including breakfast and lunch. (I had originally been told that the hotel had no vacancies, but when I asked again in English, with the implication of payment in foreign currency, a room materialized.) The rates for Iranians were quoted in Iranian rials, and to me—I had not been in Iran in more than three years—they looked not high but simply wrong. A zero in Persian writing is represented by a dot, and here I saw dots leading far off to the right, as if someone had left an ellipsis on the rate card instead of the full price. The Iranian price was 1.8 million rials.

Max Fisher has mixed feelings about taking a hyperinflation vacation:

Imagine the money in your wallet suddenly increasing value by a factor of four and a half — your nightly hotel budget rising from $70 to the equivalent of $340 — and you can see the appeal of a hyperinflation vacation.

Still, it feels a little weird to profit off of someone else’s pain. In this case, that someone is the entire Iranian middle and lower class. (Something Wood is very aware of and discusses with great care in his article.) The Post’s Jason Rezaian has reported from Tehran on the pain that ordinary Iranians feel from inflation, with everything from food to medicine becoming tougher to afford. And Wood points out that wealthy Iranians — those more likely to be affiliated with the regime, and thus desired targets of the economic sanctions driving so much of the inflation — are actually able to profit off of the inflation, for example with well-timed imports or by taking out the fixed-interest loans available only to those with political connections.

(Chart of the official Iranian rial-U.S. dollar exchange rate and the black market rates diverging by Steve H. Hanke of CATO)

by Patrick Appel

Ezra examines them:

Elections really are zero-sum affairs. For one party to win, the other has to lose. … Immigration reform, however, sits at the center of an unusual convergence of forces that have made it positive-sum politics. Democrats believe in the policy, but they also believe that it’s good — even essential — politics to deliver on the number-one priority of the growing Hispanic electorate. Many Republicans also believe in the policy, and almost all Republicans believe that if their party is to prosper, they need to agree to immigration reform to show Hispanic voters that the GOP isn’t hostile to their interests.

Josh Marshall Brian Beutler argues that either Republicans or Democrats must be wrong:

A majority of new citizens will either be Democrats or Republicans. To the extent that the new GOP position on immigration reform changes existing voters’ minds about politics, only one of two parties will be on the winning side of that realignment. Some important Republican strategists and opinion makers recognize this, and worry the GOP has picked a loser.

Donald Trump, of all people, makes related points. How Brian Beutler sees the issue:

[T]he math looks very different in the near term than in the medium and long term. When President Obama won in November, immigration reform was destined to be on the national agenda this year. And though killing it might make sense for the GOP’s longer-term viability, for the immediate purposes of making gains in 2014 and securing the White House in 2016, it would be a grave error — particularly because Republicans haven’t responded to Democratic gains by offering up anything else that might appeal to Democratic voters. Supporting immigration reform isn’t exactly a sign of Republican panic, but that they think it’s their least bad course of action right now.