It's a BS analogy. The NFL as a whole is a business. The owners voted to share revenue. The NFL wasn’t being forced by the government to "level" anything. Players and coaches get rich when they succeed and get cut and fired when they fail (well maybe except for those with the Texans, but they have improved since they have better embraced capitalist ideas). The closest his analogy comes is the crony capitalism that funds the stadiums etc. That worked out real well for the Cavs and the city of Cleveland. They sure have a nice, empty basketball stadium funded by the taxpayers. But we should blame the NBA and the Cavs for that, and not the city. They might have a black mayor.
NBA needs to be socialized. other than that, Government, education, healthcare, housing, transport, mines, banking.
It is a very relevant analogy. I hear conservatives constantly braying for government to be run as a business. The owners (voters) have voted people in office who have shared revenue (SS, Medicare, etc.) and when polled, consistently say that they want MORE things like this, not less. The biggest reason that the NFL and, to a lesser degree the NBA, have a viable business model (for the leagues as a whole, not just for the rich, as in the MLB example) is because they engage in revenue sharing to assure that EVERYONE gets a share of the profits for which they work. That is the point, EVERYONE who works and is a productive member of American society should be sharing in the gains made in the economy, but over the past 10-15 years, the ONLY people receiving pay raises of any kind are the wealthy.
Since the thread is nominally about socialism, I'll hijack it to post a couple of interesting articles from NPR (the pinko commie radio station): http://www.npr.org/2011/11/03/141949820/how-technology-is-eliminating-higher-skill-jobs [rquoter]How Technology Is Eliminating Higher-Skill Jobs by Chris Arnold November 3, 2011 The U.S. economy hit an important milestone last week: Gross domestic product, the sum of all goods and services produced in the country, returned to pre-recession levels. But the gains were made with millions fewer workers. Part of the reason is technology, as computers and machines continue to replace humans. We used to think about machines taking over mundane jobs, like twisting a screw into a toaster on an assembly line over and over again. But more recently, technology is eliminating higher-skill jobs. To talk about this, some of the nation's top technologists and economists came to Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this week for a jobs conference called Race Against the Machine. There was a very impressive machine on hand: Watson, the powerful Jeopardy-playing computer built by IBM that recently beat the all-time human Jeopardy game show champion. This week Watson took on two teams from MIT and Harvard. The auditorium was packed with students. Although Harvard managed to do well, its team was no match for the powerful computer. Only tepid applause greeted Watson after it correctly answered questions about things like a truncated icosahedron (soccer ball-shaped). Maybe the reason human beings don't tend to clap for Watson is that we can instinctively sense that it might steal our jobs. "We see already that the work of legal discovery — in other words, sitting around and reading huge volumes of documents at the early stage of a lawsuit ... is being very quickly and very heavily automated," says Andrew McAfee, an MIT researcher who helped organize the conference and is co-author of Race Against the Machine. "And by one estimate, it lets one lawyer do the work of 500." The world will still need brilliant human courtroom litigators, but not as many junior lawyers and paralegals. McAfee also says we won't need as many tax preparers. More complex manufacturing is being done by machines, which means even fewer auto workers. So where is all this headed? "There's been a long-running debate about does technology eliminate jobs," says David Autor, an MIT economist who spoke at the conference. He says it's not like every job a machine takes over leaves one person permanently out of work. "Back at the turn of the 20th century, about 38 percent of all American workers were working on farms. At present, it's 2 percent," Autor says. Machines took over a lot of farm work, but new industries and new jobs were created. Overall, Autor says technology improved people's quality of life, including advantages like better health care and rising incomes over the past 100 years. But Autor also has his worries. He says machines used to take over work that was physically hard or dangerous or just monotonous. But now, he says, we're losing higher-skill, better-paying jobs to machines — like bank tellers, airline check-in agents, accountants and whole floors of actuaries in insurance companies. Meanwhile, computers still aren't very good at many menial labor jobs like cleaning bathrooms and other janitorial work; we still need humans for that. So it turns out that for many very low-skill jobs, there's still demand. For high-skill and high-touch jobs like being a good manager at a company, a doctor or a nurse, we need humans. But many middle-skill, middle-class jobs are where we're seeing the squeeze. "That's the irony, right?" Autor says. "That basically the things that proved easier to automate are not the lowest-skill activities. It's easier to have a computer play chess than it is to have a computer wash dishes." So going forward, the worry is there's going to be a greater need for people to do minimum-wage restaurant busboy-type work and less need for $30-an-hour office workers. Other economists say innovation will save the day: New industries and new technologies will spring up with new kinds of jobs for people that we can't yet anticipate.[/rquoter] Automation is the driver I always come back to to justify a welfare state (which I mean as something a little different from socialism). We are getting more and more productive over time as we can produce more and more with less effort. You would think automating your job would be a good thing that should allow you more ease in life, not simply obsolescence, impooverishment and marginalization. I don't want to socialize the means of production because I still want people to innovate and get rich. I just don't see why the obsolete worker should have to be so poor when we produce so much wealth, and it is only because we got better at producing wealth that they should be obsolete in the first place. Consider paying for the social impact as part of the cost of doing business. Preserve the obsolete worker in a comfortable lifestyle, and train him and find a new place to use him. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2011/11/02/141771712/how-fear-drove-world-rice-markets-insane [rquoter]How Fear Drove World Rice Markets Insane by Dan Charles Nothing is more basic and simple than food. Yet it comes to us courtesy of a long, complicated supply chain that spans the globe. That chain delivers food cheaply — but it can break. Four years ago, it blew up in most spectacular fashion, affecting hundreds of millions of people who rely on rice for sustenance. That crash — the great rice crisis of 2008 — was a true disaster for some of the poorest people in Asia and West Africa. And the most frightening thing about it is that no one can guarantee that it won't happen again — because the decisions that created it were all, somehow, perfectly reasonable. This crisis started with a simple cost-saving decision in India. The Indian government decided to buy more rice for its food distribution programs, instead of wheat. (Wheat was really expensive at the time.) To make sure there was plenty of cheap rice on hand, Indian officials made it illegal for most Indian rice to leave the country. In October 2007, they blocked exports of all non-Basmati rice. "This was the trigger, and we saw it the very next day," says Peter Timmer, an emeritus professor of economics at Harvard who is one of the world's leading experts on the rice trade. Even though there was plenty of rice available around the world because farmers in many places were harvesting record crops, the Indian ban on exports meant that there was less for other countries to buy. Immediately, the price of rice on world markets started to increase. Then came the next reaction. People started hoarding. Even Timmer went to Trader Joe's and picked up six boxes of rice. "I knew it was going to be really expensive in another couple of weeks," he says. Governments, in their own way, did exactly the same thing. Early in 2008, Egypt, Pakistan and Vietnam all started limiting the amount of rice that they would export. Government officials in Thailand, the world's leading rice exporter, started talking about setting up a cartel of rice exporters, similar to OPEC. That, in turn, put the squeeze on countries like the Philippines, which don't grow enough rice for their own consumption. They need to buy rice from abroad. Panicked government officials in the Philippines went on TV to tell people to eat less rice. That, of course, convinced people to go out and buy even more. Prices surged again. On top of incompetence came corruption. Government officials in the Philippines spent taxpayer money on a series of sweetheart deals with a state-run company in Vietnam called Vinafood. They bought huge quantities of rice at ever-higher prices. Timmer says they didn't mind paying high prices, because the higher the price, the bigger the kickbacks from their Vietnamese trading partner. Those deals drove up the price by hundreds of dollars a ton. At this point, panic in the Philippines had spread to countries across Asia. "People panicked everywhere," says Timmer. "In Ho Chi Minh City, for heaven's sake, the center of the second-largest rice exporting surplus in the world, supermarkets and rice markets got cleaned out in two days." During the first four months of 2008, the price of a ton of rice on the world market went from $300 to $1,200. In countries that relied on imported rice, from West Africa to the Philippines, people got squeezed hard. Ben Flores, a janitor in the Philippines, says he just had to eat less. "Before that, I used to eat rice every morning," he says. "I really lost weight because of that." And remember: All of this was completely artificial. There still was plenty of rice in the world! Fear and self-interest was keeping it off the market. Two Americans — the economist Peter Timmer and Tom Slayton, who follows rice markets for a living from his home in Alexandria, Va. — hatched a plot to pop the rice bubble. "Tom called me up and said, 'Peter, there's a million and a half tons of high-quality rice sitting in Japan,' " recalls Timmer. These stockpiles of rice exist because the World Trade Organization has forced Japan to import it from the U.S. But Japan doesn't want that rice, and most of it just sits in warehouses. Japan is not allowed to re-export it — unless the U.S. says it can. Timmer and Slayton started a lobbying campaign, pushing a deal between the U.S. and Japan that would allow Japan to export that rice to the Philippines. In mid-May 2008, both sides agreed. And that announcement was enough; the price started to drop. But a lot of damage remains, and so does some of the fear that produced the crisis in the first place. Neither ordinary consumers nor governments can be confident that the global food system won't go crazy again.[/rquoter] I'm not exactly sure how this relates, because I don't want to socialize commodity markets or anything. But this seems like a neatly-contained example of a capitalist vulnerability of commodity markets to irrational pricing that has caused crisis after crisis.
Since there's so much clamoring for a substantive argument to this quote (even though every one of you freaks has a hard time getting around to an answer to the man's original question until the 2nd or 3rd page of the thread, and instead choose to attack the arguer instead), I will provide one. Although, I'm not sure why...you won't address the substance of this either. This is a laughable argument, most notably the above quote. In baseball, teams with middle-of-the-pack or lower payroll certainly CAN be and ARE competitive. Just as an example... St. Louis Cardinals - 12th in payroll - won the World Series Texas Rangers - 13th in payroll - lost in the World Series Tampa Bay Rays - 29th in payroll - AL wild card winners Arizona Diamondbacks - 25th in payroll - NL West division winners, 3rd best record in the NL Milwaukee Brewers - 16th in payroll - NL Central division winners, 2nd best record in the NL Compare the payroll... http://espn.go.com/mlb/team/salaries/_/name/stl/st-louis-cardinals vs. the results... http://espn.go.com/mlb/standings ...and it sure is hard to make this argument and get away with it.
The default retort of you freaks is always 1 of 4 things: 1. Ignore the post and hope it disappears from the current page 2. Change the subject 2. Claim something was interpreted wrongly, point was missed, etc. 3. Bash the person
Don't forget #4. Point out irony in the post (see my fixes above) And don't forget #4 also. Pointing out that you can't count.
I don't think anybody argues that it's IMPOSSIBLE for a small market team to win in baseball. But the odds are stacked against them. The problem with your argument is that it looks at one season only. One season allows for statistical deviations that might otherwise go completely against the norm. You need to look at success over time - if the same teams are playoff teams over and over again (even with significant turnover in the rosters), then it's safe to say that baseball's lack of parity in money means those big-money teams have an unfair advantage.
Yep. I will say though, it used to work like a charm. Too bad everybody knows your tricks now though since they've become so obvious. It really is pretty tired. But I guess that's all you have in your playbook.
"My" tricks? Don't lump me in with anyone, and in return, I won't lump you in with anyone. Read my posts in this thread -- I responded to the OP with earnest, relevant detail. I didn't call him names or anything like that. TIA
