The NCAA and the $$$

The NCAA's actions are becoming more and more ridiculous and inconsistent, and they only make sense if you assume the NCAA only cares about the $$$. Three recent and high-profile NCAA disciplinary actions have brought this fact into sharp clarity. The three players in question are Reggie Bush, Cam Newton, and Terrelle Pryor et al.

The NCAA threw the book at USC, and in so doing punished everyone but those who broke the rules. They cut scholarships, stripped the team of wins, and allowed players to transfer without penalties because years ago Reggie Bush (and moreso his parents) were hooked up financially in defiance of NCAA rules. Cam Newton's father shopped his son around for hundreds of thousands of dollars, which should be THE cardinal sin of amateurism if there is one, and Cam Newton was let more or less off the hook. Why? The NCAA thought there wasn't enough evidence (at the time) that Cam Newton knew or was involved. This not only stretches credibility, but it seems to be in flagrant contradiction of the NCAA's own written rules, which say in so many words that the parent and the student-athlete are one and the same.

Why are these two cases treated differently? The only reason I can think of is that Cam Newton is in the process of generating lots of buzz and making other people lots of money, while USC is a dynasty seemingly in decline. Notably, the NCAA did not declare the Cam Newton case closed and the investigation is ostensibly ongoing. Why punish Newton now when he's making the NCAA money? Why punish Newton now when you can whip your indentured servants into line later, punishing whatever innocent third parties are hanging around after Newton bolts for the NFL? The Newton decision only makes sense as a decision to protect post-season revenue, not as a decision to protect fairness, sportsmanship, or the principle of amateurism.

The recent Terrelle Pryor decision (surprise surprise) has the same stink all over it. Pryor and some of his teammates are in trouble for selling some of their Ohio State paraphernalia. The NCAA is suspending them for 5 games at the beginning of next season, but not for the upcoming Sugar Bowl. The NCAA's stated rationale is that the players were not adequately informed about the rules, but what does this have to do with the Sugar Bowl? Isn't this a reason for non- or minimal punishment? The decision makes sense only as a decision to protect post-season revenue.

I could be wrong about the $$$ and the role it plays, but its undeniable that the NCAA's decisions are increasingly inconsistent and difficult to justify.

Oddball Full-Time Jobs

I have been musing recently about a few unusual things one might be able to do for a living. I have a prepared a short list, along with some comments about feasibility, etc. Many of these are odd-jobs that people typically do in small doses for extra money, but that could conceivably be taken on in sufficient quantity to provide decent full-time work.

Given in no particular order...

Psych. Department Guinea Pig:

Psychology departments need lots of human subjects for experiments of various sorts. To bring in these subjects they typically pay around $20 per hour (this number is based on Wash. U and University of Michigan). If one were able to find these opportunities for 40 hours of the week, this would translate into an income of about $40k per year. Being a full-time psych. guinea pig would have some perks. There definitely wouldn't be any stress or pressure while at work, as your employer would record your successes and failure with equal scientific detachment. Being depressed, insomniac, addicted to drugs, neurotic, etc. would all become career boons, as they would qualify you for more studies.

The real difficulty of this career would be finding enough work. I think working one university aggressively, it might be possible to get 10+ hours a week consistently. In an area with many universities close together (Boston, New York, SF Bay Area, etc.) working full-time might be possible. These areas typically have high costs of living that might or might not be compensated by better psych study payouts than the ones I have personally seen.

Sports Ticket Arbitrage:

On a few of occasions I have bought and sold college football tickets secondhand, usually via Facebook or Craigslist. My impression is that the ticket resale market is a long long way from anything one could call efficient. There is almost always a huge spread in listed prices for tickets of very similar qualities, and many buyers and sellers seem oblivious to opportunities for a better deal. I have the impression that one could consistently make money buy purchasing tickets priced too cheaply and then reselling them at a markup.

This plan differs from scalping in that it would not require any on the street sales job. Tickets can be advertised online, most deals would go down long before the game, and buyers are generally willing to meet you wherever. Assuming the right buyers and sellers can be found on the internet, this job boils down to hanging in a coffee shop downtown and collecting money from strangers a couple of hours per day.

Doing this well would require knowing at what prices to buy and sell, and I am not sure how difficult or easy this may be. Listed prices for tickets are so widely spread as to suggest that it is easy, but I do not know for sure what the relationship between list and eventual sale prices is. I dabbled once in the past and it was pretty easy to turn a $20 profit on a ticket. However, once is not a very large sample. The difficulty is compounded by the caprices of sports: if the team does well, ticket prices go up, if the team does poorly, ticket prices go down, etc. If one could predict these things perfectly, one could simply make the money gambling, so ticket arbitrage may not always be a reliable way to make money.

The biggest difficulty would be to buy and sell tickets in sufficiently large volume. Doing a few profitable deals a week seems doable, but I don't know if its possible to find more than this. Everything would be easier if you attempted this scheme in an area with a dense interest in the sport(s) in question.

StubHub is really already executing this plan, even though they present themselves as an intermediary rather than a middle man.

Math/Science Tutoring:

I know from personal experience that calculus tutors can make $30-60 per hour in Ann Arbor, and I have heard and believed stories that rates are substantially higher elsewhere (most notably in New York City). If one were to tutor full-time, this translates into an income of $60-120k per year.

Obviously, one would want to attempt this scheme in an area with a high density of students. During peak periods (around the time when the local colleges have midterms or finals), if one advertised and marketed aggressively, one might be able to round up 60 hours of tutoring a week or more. I am not sure how much work would be available the rest of the year, and summers would be particularly lean. The 60-120k numbers are almost certainly not attainable, but it might be possible to get enough hours to make 30-60k.

Be Grateful, Dummy

It seems that almost everyday, there is a story in the news suggesting the national mood has deteriorated even further. People of every ideology have their unique paranoid fantasy culminating in the inevitable decline of the US as an economic / military / political power. For people on the left, China and India are popular fixations of anxiety. In the other day, I read a piece in the New York Times actually entitled Western Men Are Doomed, which was long on provacation and short on actual substance. It even tried to fit supposed Chinese cultural / intellectual superiority in seamlessly with the fact China spent the 1800s under the heel of various European colonial oppressors. Fareed Zakaria, who has the conspicuous qualification of looking sort of like a middle-eastern vampire, seems to be marketing himself deliberately (in his Washington Post column) as a focal point for this sort of anxiety.

On the right, we now have the tea party movement, whose constituents seem to think they are facing a crisis as urgent as Soviet troops, aliens, gay zombies, etc. running loose in middle America. In addition to more reasonable complaints, some tea partyist believe that a conspiracy of rich douchebags is secretly running the world. Duh! I thought everyone knew this sort of thing had been going on since the beginning of time.

Some people are so pissed off that at least one of them felt the need to light his house his on fire and fly his plane into an IRS building. This is the house where his WIFE and DAUGHTER live, and its his PRIVATE PLANE he's flying into a building. What a jackass. You'd think this guy had something to live for, but apparently if you can't declare your house as a church on your taxes, life isn't worth living. I have all possible sympathy for his wife and daughter, I hope they are able to move forward with their lives, and its a tragedy he did this to them over something as eternal and as boring as taxation.

People need to be grateful for the what they have. Life in the US today, put in perspective, is about as good as life has ever been anywhere. I am a graduate student, and I make a lot less than the average American, but I can still eat as much as I want, drive around in my car, surf the internet on my computer. I can go basically wherever I want whenever I want, I can express any kind of opinion I want, I can associate with anyone I want. I enjoy more material abundance and political / intellectual freedom than almost all humans that have lived, ever.

The world isn't perfect, and there is a lot we can work on, but the life isn't that bad either. I disagree with much of the of anxious hand-wringing I discussed above, but even if you don't, you should put your troubles in perspective.

Daybreakers

Daybreakers had a lot of interesting cultural commentary, and I wanted to point out a few things that I thought hung together.

1. The subsiders are clearly meant to represent the dehumanizing effects of poverty: the result of becoming too poor to afford the primary vampire commodity is an unavoidable degeneration into an ugly, violent monster. A few interesting scenes, recurring images:

a. A number of scenes ended with the camera panning downwards to show subsider-on-subsider violence in the sewers beneath the city.

b. There were a couple scenes which humanized the subsiders. In the scene showing the execution of subsider Alison Bromley, she clearly recognizes Frankie and attempts to communicate with him, showing that she has maintained her identity and concepts of her relationships with others. Also, Dalton's neighbor turned subsider wears his wedding ring, with its sentimental / romantic inscription, to the bitter end. A nice addition here would have been for his subsider wife to burst hysterically onto the scene following the fight.

c. A number of vampire characters refer to the subsiders as animals without referring to the processes that produced their state, notably the cop responding to Dalton's subsider home invasion and the vampire mom shown in a newscast near the end of the movie. This is reminiscent of the attitudes of the upper classes in industrial revolution era England, which often held that the poorer classes were intrinsically small / ugly / dumb and ignored the possibility that this was a product of their material deprivation.

2. The characters all clearly view the vampire society as exploitative, and show a variety of different attitudes to this fact.

a. On one end of the spectrum is Bromley. Bromley clearly is happy to profit from the system: "It's not about a cure, its about repeat business." He also seems to viscerally enjoy it, which is clear in the scene where he describes his appreciation for the flavor of fear in blood. Dalton's lab coworker, who is prepared to kill his friend to suppress a cure for vampirism, is another example. The blood substitute, a focus of the plot, is a means to continue exploitation in the eyes of these characters.

b. Dalton is the other end; he is squeamish about being a vampire and is uncomfortable about the way humans are exploited. Dalton views his efforts to find a substitute as a way to end this exploitation, and is repeatedly frustrated by Bromley's refusals to guarantee that a substitute will be used towards this end.

c. Frankie Dalton is an interesting middle ground. Late in the movie, he tells his brother that he turned him to vampirism out of fear for his safety and dependence on their fraternal relationship.

2. Just a few more things:

a. Dalton works for a company called (or at least pronounced) Bromley-Marx!

b. As vampire society is going to hell, there is a shot of vampires on a deserted subway wearing lots of clothes in order to conceal the early signs of subsider mutation.

c. Dalton's hair looks way better after he is cured of vampirism.