Quotulatiousness

September 19, 2013

Easterbrook – The NFL should be called the “Nonprofit Football League”

Filed under: Business, Football, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:40

In The Atlantic, an excerpt from Gregg Easterbrook’s new book The King of Sports: Football’s Impact on America, talks about the fantastic legal and financial advantages enjoyed by the National Football League:

In his office at 345 Park Avenue in Manhattan, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell must smile when Texas exempts the Cowboys’ stadium from taxes, or the governor of Minnesota bows low to kiss the feet of the NFL. The National Football League is about two things: producing high-quality sports entertainment, which it does very well, and exploiting taxpayers, which it also does very well. Goodell should know — his pay, about $30 million in 2011, flows from an organization that does not pay corporate taxes.

That’s right — extremely profitable and one of the most subsidized organizations in American history, the NFL also enjoys tax-exempt status. On paper, it is the Nonprofit Football League.

This situation came into being in the 1960s, when Congress granted antitrust waivers to what were then the National Football League and the American Football League, allowing them to merge, conduct a common draft, and jointly auction television rights. The merger was good for the sport, stabilizing pro football while ensuring quality of competition. But Congress gave away the store to the NFL while getting almost nothing for the public in return.

The 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act was the first piece of gift-wrapped legislation, granting the leagues legal permission to conduct television-broadcast negotiations in a way that otherwise would have been price collusion. Then, in 1966, Congress enacted Public Law 89‑800, which broadened the limited antitrust exemptions of the 1961 law. Essentially, the 1966 statute said that if the two pro-football leagues of that era merged — they would complete such a merger four years later, forming the current NFL — the new entity could act as a monopoly regarding television rights. Apple or ExxonMobil can only dream of legal permission to function as a monopoly: the 1966 law was effectively a license for NFL owners to print money. Yet this sweetheart deal was offered to the NFL in exchange only for its promise not to schedule games on Friday nights or Saturdays in autumn, when many high schools and colleges play football.

Public Law 89-800 had no name — unlike, say, the catchy USA Patriot Act or the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Congress presumably wanted the bill to be low-profile, given that its effect was to increase NFL owners’ wealth at the expense of average people.

While Public Law 89-800 was being negotiated with congressional leaders, NFL lobbyists tossed in the sort of obscure provision that is the essence of the lobbyist’s art. The phrase or professional football leagues was added to Section 501(c)6 of 26 U.S.C., the Internal Revenue Code. Previously, a sentence in Section 501(c)6 had granted not-for-profit status to “business leagues, chambers of commerce, real-estate boards, or boards of trade.” Since 1966, the code has read: “business leagues, chambers of commerce, real-estate boards, boards of trade, or professional football leagues.”

The insertion of professional football leagues into the definition of not-for-profit organizations was a transparent sellout of public interest. This decision has saved the NFL uncounted millions in tax obligations, which means that ordinary people must pay higher taxes, public spending must decline, or the national debt must increase to make up for the shortfall. Nonprofit status applies to the NFL’s headquarters, which administers the league and its all-important television contracts. Individual teams are for-profit and presumably pay income taxes — though because all except the Green Bay Packers are privately held and do not disclose their finances, it’s impossible to be sure.

The LCBO’s new “Ontario Boutique” outlets – doing a Wal-Mart to Ontario wineries

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

In the latest Ontario Wine Review, Michael Pinkus talks about the opening of three new “Ontario Boutique” LCBO stores. These stores are the LCBO’s response to rising demand for quality Ontario wines … opening stores to directly compete with the wineries.

Well it happened; the LCBO opened their Ontario Boutiques to great fanfare on September 12, in three cities: Niagara Falls, St. Catharines and Windsor … three places that have wineries nearby. Three places where the local populace could hop in their cars and within 15 minutes be at any of a dozen wineries in the area. The way we should all view this is the LCBO utilized the Wal-Mart approach to competition: get in there and fight it out with already established businesses. According to reports, they are beautiful, well-stocked and something to see. Now, I’m not questioning whether or not the LCBO was going to do a nice job on these in-store boutiques, heck they have the money to sink into them (yours and mine), I question their location and I question why the Wal-Mart tactics?

[…]

Someone who did get it (Bob) emailed me directly, putting it very succinctly: “The Wine Council’s information shows that the majority of VQA wines are still sold at the wineries. I asked one of their staff why they were putting a new VQA [boutique] in the Glendale store in St. Catharines rather than Toronto, and was told that it was because they sold more VQA wine in that store than any other in their system. Obviously, they are intent on trying to steal as much business away from the local wineries as possible, and therefore to deny the wineries (for the most part Canadian small businesses) as much profit as possible.”

While another reader, Gaye, admitted she has finally seen the light: “I always took your rants re: the LC mildly, as I like being able to shop in the “biggest” importer of wines in the world (sic). But I love Ontario wines, and living in Toronto always bemoan the difficulty of going to Niagara wineries and driving back … for obvious reasons. So I thought these boutiques were inevitable and of course would be in the place most Ontario wine was drunk, Toronto. As your excellent wife said, “a no-brainer”. This is incredible, opening in Niagara Falls? As if our wine was just something to be sold to tourists. Now I’m totally on side.”

Latest online piracy study shows the problem is Hollywood

Filed under: Business, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:37

Techdirt‘s Mike Masnick shows that the data in the most recent study of online piracy (funded by NBC Universal) clearly shows that the real reason for piracy is Hollywood’s unwillingness or inability to learn:

While we already discussed the MPAA’s questionable new study trying to pin the blame for infringement on Google, MPAA member NBC Universal has released its “Digital Piracy Universe” study as well. This study was done by NetNames, the company formerly known as Envisional, which basically released a very similar study two and a half years ago. Matt Schruers, over at CCIA, does a nice job explaining some of the more questionable aspects of the methodology. However, we’d like to focus on something a bit more basic: the study’s own numbers don’t seem to support what NBC Universal seems to think it does. More specifically, as we noted with the last study, the results actually suggest piracy is Hollywood’s own damn fault. This isn’t just our interpretation either. The guy who wrote both studies, David Price, basically said the same thing right before SOPA died (he argued that the bills were a bad idea).

Once again, it’s not difficult to see why the problem is Hollywood’s with one simple chart:

Online piracy and Netflix

Basically, in the US, where Netflix has come up with a model that many people find to be reasonably priced and convenient enough, the rate of things like BitTorrent usage falls in comparison.

After smartphones, genius machines?

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:41

In the Daily Beast, Robert Herritt reviews the latest book by Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation.

Cowen’s main background assumption is that in the not-too-distant future various kinds of “genius machines” will be everywhere. In the workplace, business negotiations and client introductions “will be recorded, processed, and analyzed [and] … [e]ach party to the communications might receive a real-time report on when the other people are likely lying …” At the supermarket, “[y]our shopping cart will use GPS to track your moves through the store, including which aisles you visit most often.” As for our personal lives, “[a] woman might consult a pocket device in the ladies’ room during a date that tells her how much she really likes the guy. The machine could register her pulse, breathing, tone of voice … or whichever biological features prove to have predictive power.”

Even a few years ago, this forecast would have sounded silly, but that was before many of us trusted Match.com algorithms to suggest potential spouses and smartphones came with fingerprint scanners. Cowen’s not talking about flying cars (that futurist mainstay that always seems both just out of reach and comically unnecessary), but rather slightly more sophisticated versions of the technologies that many of us already use.

The bad news, he tells us, is that the rise of the machines will only worsen the wage polarization we are seeing today. Cowen predicts a situation where 10 percent to 15 percent of Americans are “extremely wealthy” with “fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives.” Most of the rest will see stagnant or falling wages but will benefit from plenty of “cheap fun and also cheap education.” For those wondering, this vanishing middle ground is where the book gets its catch-phrase title.

What will determine whether you end up a high earner or a low-wage left-behind will be, in large part, your answer to some variation on the following questions: “Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you?”

QotD: Guns and mental illness

Filed under: Health, Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

There isn’t much of a culture-war component of discussing mental illness, other than a few folks on the Right who blame the Left for deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill in the 1960s. I suspect that there is no real constituency in favor of the Second Amendment rights of the mentally ill — provided, of course, the definition of “mentally ill” is clear, explicit, and taken seriously. (If you think there’s a stigma to admitting you’re seeing a therapist, a psychologist, or getting mental health treatment now, just wait until some of your legal rights can be restricted because of it.)

Thankfully, I’ve never known anyone who has had violent episodes or threatening mental illness. My sense of reading coverage and the literature is that people rarely “snap” and become dangerous killers overnight. As you’ve probably found in your research, there are certain common threads: withdrawal from others and lack of a support network; hostile behavior and temper control, outbursts, etc. It is maddeningly infuriating to hear friends and acquaintances of past shooters describe behavior that seems, in retrospect, to be a warning sign or red flag.

After Columbine, many school administrators tried to institute a new “If you see something, say something” approach to individuals behaving in a threatening manner. Then we saw in Virginia Tech that many, many students reported the gunman for strange and threatening behavior, including stalking. School administrators ultimately couldn’t do enough to stop him — either from fear of lawsuits or from overall bureaucratic inertia.

[…]

It’s not clear how effective a program like this would be; one would hope that people would already know to report strange, troubling, or threatening behavior to authorities. In past writings, I’ve emphasized that the only authority that can put someone on the federal firearms restriction list is a judge, and so that these sorts of concerns are best sent directly to the cops, not to a school administrator or company HR department.

However, a country where more Americans are trained to spot signs of serious, untreated and potentially dangerous mental illness strikes me as a better path than yet another effort to restrict the rights of 40 million gun owners because of the actions of a handful.

Jim Geraghty, “Why Post-Shooting Gun-Control Debates Are So Insufferable”, National Review Online, 2013-09-18

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