Interesting Links for 07-03-2012

[andrewducker]

• Ken Clarke defends secret courts. I, of course, think they're an awful idea.
  (tags: law secrecy security_theatre uk )
• 6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying
  (tags: money income society )
• Jews in Scotland may be disenfranchised by a Saturday vote.
  Is there a reason why voting has to happen on one day? Give people a week to vote, with daily updates on the ongoing count!
  (tags: voting uk scotland independence jews )
• Kids born later in the year more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD
  (tags: adhd diagnosis children )
• Govt. agencies, colleges demand applicants' Facebook passwords. (And they can, frankly, fuck off)
  (tags: facebook privacy employment usa )
• Dammit, I find myself largely in agreement with esr on Hollywood, piracy and the internet
  (tags: censorship politics freedom )
• A man who informed police when he found child abuse images on his computer has not been allowed to be alone with his daughter for four months.
  (tags: uk Child_abuse )
• How I became Amazon’s pitchman for a 55-gallon drum of personal lubricant on Facebook
  (tags: lubricant facebook amazon advertising )
• On Writers Block
  (tags: neilgaiman writing )
• I hadn't realised that Gillian Anderson stood on a box for The X-Files
  (tags: GillianAnderson x-files tv )
• Either be offensive, or don't be offensive. Being offensive and then pretending you weren't is just dumb.
  (tags: humour offensive )
• Rather than a mansion tax we should be sorting out council tax
  (tags: tax uk housing )
• Romney vs Mr Burns - can you tell which quote belongs to which one?
  (tags: simpsons politics usa )

Comments

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Everyone pretends that college football is still an amateur competition, like any other varsity match, when actually it's an incredibly popular, lucrative and pervasive professional sport. As part of this charade, "student" atheletes are obliged to accept compensation and bribes only in a small subset of officially sanctioned ways, and anything else is A Moral Outrage (TM).

A side effect is that there's an incredible pressure on schools to conceal it if the atheletes show up sub-par academically. Remember in Buffy, where the school principle bullies Willow into "helping" an athlete? I think it's like that, but an awful lot more so, not because the schools are stupid, but because they make lots of money from the games, so can only fund themselves by perpetuating the situation.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

It's a truly awful system and I can't fault the universities who want to do everything they can to crack down on the rampant bribes.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I don't know it first hand, I just know sensible people (like you) have described how ridiculous it is sometimes! :)

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

It's really amazing too the clever ways the alumni and gamblers try to get around the system. A few years ago when they realized that giving gifts/cash directly to the student was too obvious, they started buying houses and shit for the student's parents, or paying off their entire family's mortgage and credit card debt.

The UK is lucky that their student athletes are actually student athletes and not simply fund raising machines.

The real fault of this is the NFL. When they decided that all professional football players had to have university degrees that encouraged universities to build stadiums so they could have the players the NFL wouldn't accept yet, make money off the games and then give the football players meaningless degrees four years later.

Eventually they realized that it was a waste to simply make money off of this during football season and just expanded the practice to their other sporting programs.

[akicif.livejournal.com]

I can't help but think that the alumni must be almost as thick as the players if they risk having their team barred from competition by bribing their own players.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

They think they are smart enough to get away with it - which is the downfall of most criminals.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, it's widely believed that Moe Dalitz was the first guy to come up with the idea of bribing players to go to certain schools.

He was smart enough to get away with it. But most of the alumni assholes didn't have years of experience as criminal masterminds behind them before they decided to try to bribe people.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

I have a vague memory that back in the 80s, one college's football programme was suspended because the coach paid for the flights to enable one of his students to attend his mother's funeral. Which seems a little harsh.

I also find it amusing that while it is possible to be "academically ineligible" as a college athlete, former Washington Redskins defensive end Dexter Manley managed to play four seasons at Oklahoma State despite being (in his own words) "illiterate".

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

I remember that 80s thing too. I think it was just the NCAA trying to make it as clear as possible what their "no tolerance" rule meant - since so many, many people seemed to think they could get away with almost anything.

Do you remember when three UNLV players were photographed sitting in the hot tub of Ritchie "The Fixer" Perry?

http://www.reviewjournal.com/images/business/perryhottub.jpg

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

I also remember in the early 90s I think it was a Michigan player who got caught accepting a suitcase with $280,000 in cash inside it and tried to explain it away as a "private student loan" - even though he had a full scholarship already.