Coyote Blog

How is this a scandal?

While fans can also purchase pink [NFL Branded] clothing and accessories to support the cause, a shockingly small amount of the fans' money is actually going towards cancer research.

According to data obtained from the NFL by Darren Rovell of ESPN, the NFL "takes a 25% royalty from the wholesale price (1/2 retail), donates 90% of royalty to American Cancer Society."

In other words, for every $100 in pink merchandise sold, $12.50 goes to the NFL. Of that, $11.25 goes to the American Cancer Society (ACS) and the NFL keeps the rest. The remaining money is then divided up by the company that makes the merchandise (37.5%) and the company that sells the merchandise (50.0%), which is often the NFL and the individual teams.

How is this "shockingly small"?  A donation of 11.25% of the retail price, and 22.5% of the wholesale price,  of a piece of clothing is a pretty hefty.  What do they expect?  All the author is doing is demonstrating his (her?)  ignorance of retail and clothing net profit margins.  In particular, how can you try to make the NFL the bad guy for donating 90% of the money they actually get?  It's their program, they can't donate the clothing manufacturer's money.

And besides, the NFL should be congratulated for being open about the numbers -- there is often zero transparency in such charitable promotional programs.  How much of the money in the last charity gala you attended do you think actually made it to the charity rather than just help fund the self-aggrandizement of their socialite sponsors?

I will admit, I can get angry, especially when I believe someone has done me wrong.  But over time, I have learned to distrust this anger.  About twenty of twenty of the actions that I have most regretted in life or that have backfired on me have been undertaken during such periods of anger -- from yelling at innocent airline employees to writing scathing business letters that only make a situation worse.  I have learned to impose on myself a sort of count-to-ten rule, where if I am really ticked off about something, I force myself to wait 24 hours before I respond.  It works for me.

Attorney Charles Carreon needs to figure out a parallel strategy, or else he needs a business partner or family member who can perform an intervention for him.  Because last week, he totally lost it.

As you might remember from our last episode, Carreon was representing a web site called Funnyjunk where people post content strip-mined from other sites.  One of those sites, the Oatmeal, got mad about their cartoons ending up on this site without compensation, and called them out online.  No lawsuit, nothing unnatural, just good old American criticism.

I don't know enough about copyright law to know if Funnyjunk was in the right or wrong.  The Oatmeal could have tied it up anyway in copyright suits, but chose not to.  So of course Funnyjunk responded in asymmetric fashi0n by hiring Carreon to threaten the Oatmeal with a $20,000 lawsuit.  Apparently they were really sad and hurt by the Oatmeal's criticism, and argued that the Oatmeal abused their copyrighted name by using it online in the criticism (a hilarious charge given how the whole thing started).  By the way, in case anyone is confused about this, though this approach is tried constantly, courts have routinely held that there is no such copyright that bars someone from criticism or comment using one's name.

At this point, this all constituted irritating but fairly normal (unfortunately) behavior of people and lawyers online who don't really understand the First Amendment.

Then Charles Carreon drove over the cliff.

On Friday, he apparently sued not only the Oatmeal  (for criticizing him online, causing other people to hate him, and for violating his copyright in his own name) but also, get ready for this, the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society.  Why?  Because when the Oatmeal first got Carreon's demand letter, its proprietor said he would raise $20,000 for charity instead, and send Funnyjunk a picture of the money.  To date, nearly $200,000 has been raised for the two charities by Oatmeal fans who wanted to show their support.

Apparently, according to Carreon's suit  (I still can't believe he actually filed this), the money that was raised for these charities was tainted because it was raised in the name of making him look like a doofus.  Which, by the way, is exactly right.  I am not a huge fan of either charity (they use too much money in both cases for political activism rather than solving problems), but I gave $100 just to help hammer home the point that Charles Carreon is an idiot.

Perhaps this guy has no friends.  But if he does, one of them needs to be grabbing his collar and shoving him up against the wall and explaining in one syllable words how suing two prominent charities is NOT a path to success in the war to reclaim his reputation.  The guy basically kneecapped himself with his opening shot.   He will soon learn that while it may be increasingly against the law on college campuses to hurt someone's feelings with your speech, it is not illegal in the rest of America.  And he will also soon learn all about California's tough anti-SLAPP law, as he finds himself headed to Bank of America to take out a second mortgage on his home so he can pay the legal bills of those he has sued with the intent to suppress their speech.

Update:  Mr. Carreon, welcome to the Streisand effect.  Last Thursday, none of his first page Google results mentioned this incident.  Today, there are five.

Update #2:  Mr. Carreon claims his web site has been hacked.  Maybe.  But I will observe that for the web NOOB, "buying the cheapest Godaddy hosting account that is fine for my normal 12 visitors but crashes when I get 50,000 hits in an hour from Reddit" and "hacking" often look the same.

Update #3 and irony alert:  If you want to see something odd, check out the web site he and his wife run.  The site is full of very raw critiques that would easily land a desk full of lawsuits in the Carreon mailbox if the legal system routinely accepted the type of censorious lawsuits he himself is attempting to initiate.  If he takes the linked site down, the screenshot is here.  As an aside, I am constantly amazed at how liberals, including those who claim to be feminists, seem so obsessed with the sexuality of Conservative women and couch so much of their criticism in terms up to and including rape images (particularly oral sex).

If I had to name the one single biggest problem in US healthcare, it would be this:

"Twenty years ago, when I was in training, nobody really dealt with
economics," says Stephen Hufford, an oncologist in San Francisco. The
prevailing thinking, he says, was: "Cost should never be an issue in
someone's care."

In a survey of 167 cancer doctors reported last year in the Journal of
Clinical Oncology, 42% said they regularly raised the issue of costs
when discussing treatment options with patients.

Which means that even today, 58% of oncologists did not raise cost or price issues with various treatment options, despite practicing in perhaps the most costly of medical fields.  What planet are we living on, here?  Can you imagine a survey in which 58% of car dealers refused to raise the issue of cost in a new car sale?   Or 58% of real estate brokers saying they never mentioned the prices of houses when discussing them with clients? 

This represents a process failure in the health care system on two levels.  First, not having any single person in the decision-making process making cost-benefit trade-offs is a recipe for disaster.   Insured customers will consume as much as they can when price is off the table.  Many folks in the health care debate recognize this.

But there is a second problem.  Even when there is a single entity making these trade-offs, it is almost never the patient.  Most "reformers" on both the left and the right want to place this decision-making authority in government bureaucrats, in insurance companies, in Congress, in doctors -- any place but in the individual patient herself.   This particular article discusses the role of doctors in this process:

Many health-policy experts say it's high time for American doctors to
start considering costs when assessing treatment options. In 2007, the
cost of cancer care alone reached an estimated $89 billion in the U.S.,
up from $72 billion in 2004, according to the American Cancer Society
using data from the National Institutes of Health....

The study, conducted
by Deborah Schrag, an oncologist at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in
Boston, found that 23% of oncologists said costs influence their
treatment decisions, and 16% said they omit discussion of very
expensive treatments when they know the cost will place great strain on
patients' resources.

This misses the mark.  Doctors should be ready to inform patients of their options, but at the end of the day we need a system where the patient is making these tradeoffs.  Note the absolute, nearly criminal arrogance of doctors who don't suggest the best treatment regime because the cost might stress out the patients.  How does the doctor know what financial resources the person might be able to bring to bear?

Postscript:  In an adjoining article, the WSJ has an article on the wacky way the French government makes these cost-benefit trade offs in health care:

Since 1860, when Napoleon III appropriated this
ancient Roman spa at the foot of the Alps for his empire, the National
Baths of Aix-les-Bains have been a symbol of France's cushy health-care
system.

On a recent morning, Jacqueline Surmont and her
husband, Guy, a 77-year-old retired construction worker, headed for
their daily mud wrap. The spa's rheumatism cures, thermal baths and
13-minute deep-tissue massage all are covered by France's national
health-insurance system. Transportation and lodging are, too....

"For many people, it's like a free holiday," says Ms. Surmont, who says
all her mud wraps and massages were properly prescribed by a doctor to
soothe her ailing back. "Some patients go shopping in the afternoon.
They're hardly in pain."

Wonderful.  This kind of BS is virtually inevitable in state-run systems.  I think one can already imagine a US health care system where taxpayers foot the fill for groovy treatments loved by the dippy left, from acupuncture to aromatherapy to homeopathy, while cancer patients are denied drugs and people have to wait months or years for elective surgery.

By the way, we get this in the "goes without saying" file from a state-run spa employee facing cutbacks:

"Of course we went on strike," said Martine Claret, a 52-year-old
physiotherapist who has worked at the spa since 1979 and doubles as a
union representative.