Coyote Blog

Several years ago my knees started hurting a lot and eventually I was diagnosed with somewhat early but not bad osteoarthritis in both knees.  After years of running, I decided that my career was almost over, so I geared up with some cortisone injections and ran my first and last marathon.  The doctor may have said it was not severe yet but my knees hurt like hell for the months afterwards.

But I missed running.  Yes, many of you think running is stupid and boring.  Which is fine.  I think weight-lifting is a boring chore, but others love it.  Anyway, I love running not just for activity but to enjoy a nice day or explore new places.  I tried biking and an elliptical scooter and neither scratched the same itch.

But for almost a full year I never ran once.  I did a lot of hiking, and when that seemed to not be active enough I started adding my old textbooks to a day pack until I was walking and hiking with a 40+ pound pack and felt great.  So I was tempted to run again but knew I had to change something up to make it work.

At first I tried that old man marathon runners gate, which looks like a fast walk.  It worked OK but it was not that fun.  Then I read something about barefoot running, which I still think is dumb.  But the article talked about different sorts of strides and how they land differently -- some heel first, some toe first.  Apparently a benefit of barefoot running is it supports toe first landing, which some think is more beneficial.  Mostly I wrote all this off, as runners forums are jammed with people who have these pet theories that don't really stand up to study.

Anyway, the learning for me was that toe first landing even existed.  I started thinking about it and experimenting, and found that I had a strong heel first landing that was so forceful it was pile-driving my knees and spine.  What if I got off my heels?  I had already noticed that my knees seldom hurt running up a steep slope, and I realized I was on my toes doing so.  Couldn't hurt to try.

Well, changing your running gate after decades of running the same way is just as hard as you might expect.  The first few outings must have looked stupid.  Basically I was trying to run on my tip toes, as if I was doing the high-stepping tire exercise you see football players doing.

The breakthrough came with some practice and when I read somewhere that 1) toe first landing is about toe first, not toe only and 2) you have to sort of lean out a bit over your skis to run toe first.

Over time, it has gotten more natural and my knees feel great.  My progress was delayed a bit as I really was exhausting something in the back of my calves, but more practice and a more natural gate and some strengthening and I am back where I can run 3-4 miles at my old pace.  Actually a bit faster, as I think I was never leaning forward enough and wasting a lot of energy.

So we shall see.  This may all be temporary.  Heck, it may all be a placebo (readers who spend too much time in the comments trying to undo the placebo effect by convincing me it's a placebo will be blocked -- just kidding, in 15 years I have never blocked anyone).

By the way, I am not a doctor and PLEASE do not take any medical advice from me.

It is incredible to me that we still fetishize amateurism, which in a large sense is just a holdover from British and other European aristocracies.  Historically, the mark of the true aristocrat was one who was completely unproductive.  I am not exaggerating -- doing any paid work of any sort made one a tradesman, and at best lowered ones status (in England) or essentially caused your aristocratic credentials to be revoked (France).

The whole notion of amateurism was originally tied up in this aristocratic nonsense.  It's fine to play cricket or serve in Parliament unpaid, but take money for doing so and you are out.  This had the benefit of essentially clearing the pitch in both politics and sports (and even fields like science, for a time) for the aristocracy, since no one else could afford to dedicate time to these pursuits and not get paid.  These attitudes carried over into things like the Olympics and even early American baseball, though both eventually gave up on the concept as outdated.

But the one last bastion of support of these old British aristocratic privileges is the NCAA, which still dedicates enormous resources, with an assist from the FBI, to track down anyone who gets a dollar when they are a college athlete.  Jason Gay has a great column on this today in the WSJ:

This is where we are now, like it or not. College basketball—and college football—are not the sepia-toned postcards of nostalgia from generations past. They’re a multibillion dollar market economy in which almost everyone benefits, and only one valve—to the players—is shut off, because of some creaky, indefensible adherence to amateurism. Of course some money finds its way to the players. That’s what the details of this case show. Not a scandal. A market.

Don’t look for the NCAA to acknowledge this, however. “These allegations, if true, point to systematic failures that must be fixed and fixed now if we want college sports in America. Simply put, people who engage in this kind of behavior have no place in college sports,” NCAA president Mark Emmert said in a statement that deserved confetti and a laughing donkey noise at the end of it.

I am not necessarily advocating that schools should or should have to pay student athletes, though that may (as Gay predicts) be coming some day.  But as a minimum the ban on athletes accepting any outside money for any reason is just insane.   As I wrote before, athletes are the only  students at a University that are not allowed to earn money in what they are good at.  Ever hear of an amateurism requirement for student poets?  For engineers?

When I was a senior at Princeton, Brooke Shields was a freshman.  At the time of her matriculation, she was already a highly paid professional model and actress (Blue Lagoon).  No one ever suggested that she not be allowed to participate in the amateur Princeton Triangle Club shows because she was already a professional.

When I was a sophomore at Princeton, I used to sit in my small dining hall (the now-defunct Madison Society) and listen to a guy named Stanley Jordan play guitar in a really odd way.  Jordan was already a professional musician (a few years after he graduated he would release an album that was #1 on the jazz charts for nearly a year).  Despite the fact that Jordan was a professional and already earned a lot of money from his music, no one ever suggested that he not be allowed to participate in a number of amateur Princeton music groups and shows.

My daughter is an art major at a school called Art Center in Pasadena (where she upsets my preconceived notions of art school by working way harder than I did in college).  She and many, if not most of her fellow students have sold their art for money already, but no one as ever suggested that they not be allowed to participate in school art shows and competitions.

I actually first wrote about this in Forbes way back in 2011.  Jason Gay makes the exact same points in his editorial today.  Good.  Finally someone who actually has an audience is stating the obvious:

In the shorter term, I like the proposals out there to eliminate the amateurism requirement—allow a college athlete in any sport (not just football or basketball) to accept sponsor dollars, outside jobs, agents, any side income they can get. The Olympics did this long ago, and somehow survived. I also think we’ll see, in basketball, the NBA stepping up and widening its developmental league—junking the dreadful one-and-one policy, lowering its age minimum, but simultaneously creating a more attractive alternative to the college game. If a player still opts to go to college, they’ll need to stay on at least a couple of seasons.

If you still think the scholarship is sufficient payment for an athlete in a high-revenue sport, ask yourself this question. There are all kinds of scholarships—academic, artistic, etc. Why are athletic scholarship recipients the only ones held to an amateurism standard? A sophomore on a creative writing scholarship gets a short story accepted to the New Yorker. Is he or she prohibited from collecting on the money? Heck no! As the Hamilton Place Strategies founder and former U.S. treasury secretary Tony Fratto succinctly put it on Twitter: “No one cares about a music scholarship student getting paid to play gigs.”

 

Our two largest Arizona public colleges are spending over $18 million in public funds just to get rid of their football coaches.

I use the words "public funds" knowing exactly what I am saying.  The schools dispute this, saying:

...no tuition dollars nor public money will fund the buyouts. Both universities have self-sustaining athletic departments

But this is total cr*p.  Money is fungible.  They can pretend that this money comes from athletic program revenues, just as certain electricity customers pay extra to say that their undifferentiated kilowatts from the grid came from a particular solar plan or windmill, but its not true in either case.  Marginal spending is paid for in the end by the marginal source of funds, and the marginal source of funds for universities is tax money.  That is $18 million that could have been spent for about anything in these public education institutions but was prioritized towards trying to upgrade the football coach.

A lot of people on Twitter get freaked out when they see football players kneeling for the national anthem, or detect obscure micro-agressions in some online statement.  When I venture onto Twitter, which I am still not sure is good for my mental health, I get freaked out by this:

Electric motors are the unsung hero of clean energy - the latest are 97% efficient, vs. 45% for internal combustion. https://t.co/p1DjeMf6bL

— Eric Schmidt (@ericschmidt) September 21, 2017

My initial response on Twitter was "Of course they are if you leave out the efficiency of converting fuel to electricity".  I will explain this response more in this post.

It would be impossible to say that Eric Schmidt is not a smart guy or lacks technical training.  I'd like to think that he would quickly understand his error and say that he would have said it better when he has 280 characters.  But soooo many people make this mistake, including the folks who write the electric vehicle MPGe standards for the government, that it is worth explaining why Mr. Schmidt's statement, as written, is silly.

Let's first look at what the terms here mean.

• When we say that electric motors are 97% efficient, we mean that the actual physical work produced per unit of time is 97% of the electrical power used by the motor, which equals the current flowing to the motor times its voltage.
• When we say that the internal combustion engine is 45% efficient, we mean that the physical work we get out of the engine is 45% of the heat liberated from burning its fuel.

By the way, both these efficiency numbers are the top end of current technology running at an ideal speed and percentage load.  In real life, efficiencies of both are going to be much lower.  Of the two numbers, the efficiency number for internal combustion is probably the most generous -- for non-diesel engines in most cars I would be surprised if the actual efficiency was much higher than half this figure.  Even average electric motors will still be in the 80's.

Here is the problem with what he tweeted

The problem with Schmidt's statement on its face is that he is comparing apples and oranges -- he has left out the efficiency in actually producing the electricity.  And for the vast, vast majority of the country, the marginal fuel -- the fuel providing the electricity for the next increment of load -- is going to be natural gas or coal.  His numbers leave out that conversion step, so let's add it in.

Actual power plants, depending on their age and use, have a wide range of efficiency numbers.  For example, a big combined cycle plan is more efficient that a gas turbine, but a gas turbine is useful because it can be started and stopped really quickly to react to changes in load.  Schmidt used leading-edge efficiency numbers so I will do the same.  For a coal plant the best numbers are in the high forties.  For a gas plant, this can reach into the 50's (this site says 60% but that is the highest I have ever seen).  We will take 50% as a reasonable number for a very very efficient power plant.  Power plants, by the way, since they tend to run constantly at ideal speeds and loads can get much closer to their ideal efficiency in real life than can, say, internal combustion engines.

After the electricity is produced, we have to take into account line and transformer losses (and in the case of electric cars the battery charging losses).  This obviously varies a lot but I have always used a figure of 10% losses so a 90% efficiency number.

Taking these numbers, let's convert the 97% efficiency number for electric motors to an efficiency number all the way back to the fuel so it is apples to apples with internal combustion.  We take 97% times 90% transmission efficiency times 50% electricity production efficiency equals 43.6%.  This is actually less than his 45% figure.  By his own numbers, the electric motor is worse, though I think in reality with realistic efficiency numbers rather than best-possible numbers the electric motor would look better.   The hard step where one is really fighting the laws of thermodynamics is the conversion of heat to work or electricity.  So it is amazing that a tiny power plant in your car can even be in the ballpark of giant optimized multi-stage power plants.

Here is why electric motor efficiency is almost irrelevant to getting rid of fossil fuels

Very efficient electric motors are necessary to moving to a non-fossil fuel economy, but not because of small increments in efficiency.  The reason is that large parts of our energy-using technology, mostly vehicles, run on a liquid fuel directly and this distribution for the fuel is already in place.  To replace this liquid fuel distribution system with something else is really expensive.  But there does exist one other energy distribution system that has already been built out -- for electricity.  So having efficient electric motors allows use of non-gasoline energy sources if those sources can be turned into electricity.  For example, there are real advantages to running vehicles on CNG, but there is no distribution system for that and so its use has been limited to large fleets (like city busses) where they can build their own fueling station.  But electric cars can use electricity from natural gas, as well as solar and wind of course that have no other distribution method other than by electricity.

The problem with all this is that most of the barriers to using electricity in more applications are not related to motor efficiency.  For vehicles, the problem is in energy storage density.  Many different approaches to powering automobiles were tried in the early days, including electric and steam powered cars.  The main reason, I think, that gasoline won out was due to energy storage density.  15 gallons of gasoline weighs 90 pounds and takes up 2 cubic feet.  This will carry a 40 mpg car 600 miles.   The Tesla Model S  85kwh battery pack weighs 1200 pounds and will carry the car 265 miles (from this article the cells themselves occupy about 4 cubic feet if packed perfectly but in this video the whole pack looks much larger).  We can see that even with what Musk claims is twice the energy density of other batteries, the Tesla gets  0.22 miles per pound of fuel/battery while the regular car can get 6.7.  More than an order of magnitude, that is simply an enormous difference, and explains the continued existence of internal combustion engines much better than electric motor inefficiencies.

And here is why electric vehicle equivalent MPG standards are still screwed up

I don't really have the energy to write about this again, but because these issues are so closely related I will quote myself from the past.  Suffice it to say that after years of development, the EPA made nearly the exact same mistake as did Mr. Schmidt's tweet.  This Despite the fact that the agency had already developed an accurate methodology and then abandoned it for a flawed methodology that produced inflated numbers for electric vehicles.  There is more than one way for the government to subsidize electric vehicles!

The Fisker Karma electric car, developed mainly with your tax money so that a bunch of rich VC's wouldn't have to risk any real money, has rolled out with an nominal EPA MPGe of 52 in all electric mode (we will ignore the gasoline engine for this analysis).

Not bad?  Unfortunately, it's a sham.  This figure is calculated using the grossly flawed EPA process that substantially underestimates the amount of fossil fuels required to power the electric car, as I showed in great depth in an earlier Forbes.com article.  In short, the EPA methodology leaves out, among other things, the conversion efficiency in generating the electricity from fossil fuels in the first place [by assuming perfect conversion of the potential energy in the fuel to electricity, the EPA is actually breaking the 2nd law of thermodynamics].

In the Clinton administration, the Department of Energy (DOE) created a far superior well to wheels MPGe metric that honestly compares the typical fossil fuel use of an electric vs. gasoline car, using real-world power plant efficiencies and fuel mixes to figure out how much fuel is used to produce the electricity that goes into the electric car.

As I calculated in my earlier Forbes article, one needs to multiply the EPA MPGe by .365 to get a number that truly compares fossil fuel use of an electric car with a traditional gasoline engine car on an apples to apples basis.  In the case of the Fisker Karma, we get a true MPGe of 19.  This makes it worse than even the city rating of a Ford Explorer SUV.

I was at a function the other day when I was challenged to take a position on the stupid 'black lives matter vs. all lives matter' false dichotomy.    I was fortunate to be in a group that actually let me answer with more nuance.  Here is essentially what I said:

1. There is a real problem with police accountability and police violence in this country, one I have been writing about since long before the BLM movement was even created.
2. The harm of these police accountability issues falls disproportionately, but not solely, on blacks and other minority ethnic groups
3. For any number of reasons, fixing racism is not the immediate answer.  Most obviously, because racism is super-hard to eradicate and has persisted (though improved, IMO) despite a lot of attention over many decades.   It is hard to point to any time and place in human history when some folks have not been seduced by in-group-out-group thinking.  The other reason is that the primary issue is accountability, not racism.  We give police special powers to use force that the rest of us do not have, but impose less accountability on them for the use of force than the rest of us face.  No matter how good most police officers are, this accountability problem is going to allow bad eggs to repeatedly abuse their power.
4. There are real, identifiable steps that can actually increase police accountability and transparency and reduce the types of police violence incidents BLM was formed to oppose.  Early on, BLM actually identified a pretty good list.
5. BLM did a fabulous job of raising awareness and putting these issues near the center of political discussion.
6. Having done so, BLM now has gone completely off the rails.  It appears to be entirely focused on virtue-signalling and disruption and support of progressive issues completely tangential to its initial focus.  It has no coherent action plan.  Colin Kapernick torpedoed his own football career to bring attention to BLM, but once he did so and had microphones thrust in his face from every direction, neither he nor any of his supporters had anything specific to advocate for, other than outrage and telegraphing their victim status.
7. Progress can be made on these issues, but what it will take is a hard city by city slog to change the rules that govern police discipline and transparency.   As I wrote before, BLM "could learn a lot from Conservative and libertarian groups like ALEC, that focus on creating model legislation and local success stories that can be copied in other places."
8. Republicans often oppose police accountability steps -- they don't just support the police, they fetishize them.  But the cities that most cry out for new accountability rules -- New York, Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, Los Angeles -- are have Democratic super-majorities and governments whose officials almost to a one have come out publicly in support of BLM.  So why no progress?  One big barrier is the Democratic Party's unwavering support for public employee unions, and it is police unions that are the biggest barrier to implementing the steps BLM should be demanding.  This is another side of this issue discussed earlier in the week.

I have disputed the meme in the post's title on many occasions.  For example:

• No person running any government agency has access to the same information that millions of individuals might have in making decisions for themselves
• No person running any government agency can create an optimal solution, because millions of citizens all have different values and make different tradeoffs, so an optimum for one is not going to be an optimum for many others
• No person running any government agency has the right incentives to make good decisions.  They will always optimize for increasing the size and scope of their organization and signaling virtue over actually being virtuous.

But researchers have found yet another reason:  power causes brain damage

A spate of recent articles corroborate what I already suspected, that holding elected office is the neurological equivalent of getting kicked in the head by a donkey.

"Subjects under the influence of power," Dacher Keltner, a professor atUniversity of California, Berkeleyfound, "acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people's point of view."

In other words, power turns people into sociopaths.

This isn't a huge surprise to the vast majority of us who rant about power on election day and every day afterward. Republicans and Democrats want power and scramble for it, like a football. Classical liberals see power more like Frodo's ring—a corrupting influence better chucked into a volcano. In light of recent studies we ought to consider it a bit more like a concussion.

Keltner, brought into the public spotlight through a recent piece in The Atlantic, likens the accruing of power to actual brain trauma: "My own research has found that people with power tend to behave like patients who have damaged their brain's orbitofrontal lobes (the region of the frontal lobes right behind the eye sockets), a condition that seems to cause overly impulsive and insensitive behavior. Thus the experience of power might be thought of as having someone open up your skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy and socially-appropriate behavior."

I have written both here and here about my issues with my own University. Many folks are frustrated with the state of college campuses nowadays.  Your issues may be different, but mine include:

• Lukewarm support for, or even opposition to, free speech
• Substitution of posturing, virtue signaling, and even violence for dialog and rational discussion
• Unwillingness to teach students the need to engage opposing points of view
• Utter lack of intellectual diversity in faculties and administration
• Absurdly low standards for scholarship in many of the humanities and social sciences, where regurgitating the "right" politics is more important than doing good research
• Outright discrimination against Asian-Americans in admissions
• Diversity cultures that have gone beyond nurturing tolerance for all into promoting intolerance against new groups

Despite years of mounting criticism on these issues, the response of many universities to such criticism has not been reform but a doubling down on their illiberal policies.  Shaming is not working and not going to work, for the simple fact that the smug, elite culture that dominates Universities does not consider you and I to be woke enough to credibly criticize them.  The very failing of universities that we are trying to criticize -- that they are promoting a culture of ignoring, no-platforming, and even doing violence against anyone who disagrees with them -- makes them simultaneously immune to criticism.  Anyone who criticizes their actions is automatically someone not worth engaging.

So I am suggesting another approach.  Hit them in the pocketbook.  I know my University carefully monitors alumni giving - both dollars and percentage participation.  Even a five or ten percent drop in a year is going to get their attention.  So just take the pledge -- this year, I am not giving to my school.  Give the money to someone else.  I gave mine to Teach for America, but there are an almost unlimited number of good causes out there that could use your money, likely more productively that your University (which will probably just use your money to add a nicer television to the men's football locker room).

This pledge is carefully crafted both to have impact and not to ask folks for more than they are willing to give.  For example, it stops short of asking folks to stop giving forever.  For a really long time, I loved my alma mater and would like to love it again, and so I couldn't pledge never to support it.  The pledge also stops short of asking folks not to send their kids to such and such school.  College admissions tend to be a one-time shot at age 18, and deferring that chance for a year might close off opportunities forever.  Besides, if your son gets into Yale and can keep his head down for four years (maybe stay celibate?) and avoid the worst of the social justice craziness, the Yale diploma is still really valuable even if he does not learn a thing.

...Is that Julio Jones's catch may be forgotten.  Best reception I have ever seen in a lot of years of watching football.  Video here at NFL site

PS-  Run the ball three times after that catch, kick a field goal, and the Falcons would be your Superbowl champions.

5 minutes ago the title of this post would have been "F*cking Cardinals" for giving up that hail mary pass to Green Bay -- didn't anyone watch the tape on the Detriot game, with the receiver backing into the end zone to make the catch?  This play was almost an exact duplicate.  I will, though, give credit to the Cardinals for blitzing the QB on that play -- I think that was smart and would have worked against most teams.  Only Aaron Rodgers could have gotten that throw off.

Anyway, Fitz was already beloved in Phoenix, not only as a great football player but as an awesome human being.  Now just more so.

For years college presidents cut a Faustian bargain with their football programs.  The University would shield athletes from having to take any actual classes and shower the program with money meant for academics in return for the football program raising the visibility and prestige of the university and at least nominally pretending that academics come first.  For years Presidents consoled themselves that they still held the whip hand in the relationship, even when it was increasingly clear they did not (e.g. at Penn State).  This week, it was proved for all the world  who is in charge.  University Presidents can keep their jobs only so long as the football players are kept happy.

Update 2/1/2016:  I will not comment further at the moment on Applied Underwriters as they are currently suing me to have this article below removed.  So you will need to look elsewhere for news on AU, of which there appears to be plenty.  For example, here and here.  The State of California Insurance Commission, via an Administrative Law Judge's decision, has ruled on the legality of the AU product discussed below.  That ruling (pdf) can be downloaded here.  I would love to comment on it but I will have to leave the evaluation to you.  If you can't read the whole thing pages 33 and 34 are worth your time, as well as the conclusions that begin on page 59.

After you read this, there are more updates on 4/18

Well, I have managed to get myself into a scam.  It is not your normal scam, like the ones that are run by some mafia boiler room with guys working under aliases.  This scam comes via a major insurance company called Applied Underwriters (working under the names California Insurance Company and Continental Indemnity Company) which is owned by Berkshire Hathaway and none other than Warren Buffett.  If you feel sorry for Warren Buffett and want to give him a large interest-free loan for an indeterminate number of years, this is your program.

Update 4/16:  Let me insert here that Applied Underwriters has sent me a letter threatening a libel suit if I do not take down this post and a parallel review at Yelp.  AU Takedown demand here (pdf).   The gist of the matter seems to be the word "scam".  By the text of their letter, they seem to believe that "scam" is libelous because their company is well-rated financially and that they provide reasonable claims service.  I concede both these facts.  However, I called it a "scam" because there is a big undisclosed cost to their product that was never mentioned in the sales process, and that could only be recognized by its omission in the contract I signed -- that there is nothing in the contract committing them to any time-frame under which to return deposits and excess premiums I have paid, which may well amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars.  This fact about the contract is confirmed by their customer service staff, who have said further that the typical time-frame to return such over-collections and deposits is 3-7 years after the contract ends, or at least 6-10 years after the first of the deposits was made.

So is this a "scam"?  I believe that this issue is costly enough, and hard enough to detect, and far enough outside of expected business practices to be called such.  You may have your own opinion, but ask yourself -- When you enter into, say, a lease and have to put down a security deposit, is it your reasonable expectation that the landlord has the right in your lease to keep your deposit for 3-7 years (or more) after you move out?  /Update

Anyway, let's take a step back and look at this in detail.

First, I need to give a bit of background on how workers comp works.  When you are a new company, they assign you an experience rating -- that is a multiplier of your premium based on past loss experience.  There is some default starting number that if I remember right, in most states, is a bit over 1.0x.  Each year, the workers comp world looks back at your past history and computes a new loss rating -- higher if you have had more payouts, lower if not.  Generally it is based on three years experience not counting the last year (so 2-4 years in the past).  Your future premiums get multiplied by this loss rating.

Several years ago we had a couple bad injuries that drove our loss number into the 1.7-1.9x area.   Neither were really due to a bad safety issue, but both involved workers in their seventies where a minor initial injury led to all sorts of complications.  Anyway, my agent at the time calls me one day a couple of weeks before renewal and says that none of the major companies will renew me.  This seemed odd to me -- I understood that my recent claims history was not good, but isn't that what the premium multiplier was for?  In fact, if my loss history returned to normal, they would make a fortune as I paid high rates based on old losses but had fewer new ones.

Apparently, though, insurance companies have fixed rules that keep them from underwriting higher loss ratings.  Probably for the same reason Vegas won't take action on Ivy League football games any more -- just too much variability.  I found out later with my new broker we could probably have overcome this, but I learned that too late.

My broker at the time put me into a 3-year program from Applied Underwriters, in part because they were taking everybody.  This program was set up differently from most workers comp programs.  You had a basic policy, but there was a second (almost indecipherable to laymen) reinsurance agreement that adjusted the rates of the basic policy based on you actual claims.   Here is the agreement (pdf)  In other words, based on your claims, they would figure up at the end how much you owed and what your premium multiplier would be.

I saw two red flags that I ignored in signing up.  1)  The reinsurance agreement was impossible to understand, violating one of my foundational rules that I shouldn't sign things I don't understand.  And 2) The rate structure was very suspicious.  They touted a rate structure that could go as low as, say, $100,000 a year and was capped around $400,000 a year.  But when you pulled out a calculator, the $100,000 was virtually unobtainable.  It would require about zero claims.  If there were any claims at all, even for a few bandaids, the price would march up to $400,000 really fast.  It was the equivalent of a credit card teaser rate, and it should have made me suspicious.

Anyway, I was desperate.  For a business like mine, being told I had no workers comp insurance just a few weeks before the old policy ran out was a death sentence.  No one would write me or even quote me a policy that fast.  So I took the Applied Underwriters offer.  Shame on me, I should have worked on this much harder.

I won't bore you further with my voyage of discovery in trying to figure out how this thing works.  I will just tell you the results that I have found.  There are apparently other companies with similar issues, one of which is documented here: Applied Underwriter Suit (pdf)Newsletter publisher objected to scan of article, so I have taken it down at their request.  Here is a link to roughly the same article.

I spent hours and hours trying to figure out AU's statements.  There is a whole set of terminology to learn that is actually not used in most of the rest of the workers comp world.  The key page of the statement is page 7, which I will show below because it highlights several of the issues with Applied.  Page 7 is the page where the monthly premium is "calculated".  I have added the red numbers and arrows for the discussion below.

Here are some of the Applied Underwriter problems:

1. Large deposits that must be made each year and may never be returned.    You can see that I am making deposits over $40,000 a year.  And that is each year.  The first year deposit is not returned.  The second year and third year are just added to it.  And I have found out since I joined this program that they are not contractually obligated to return them in any time frame.  Maybe some guy who was hurt in his thirties has a relapse and claims more money when he is 75.  Gotta keep your deposit just in case, don't we?  The timing of the return of your deposits (and overpaid premiums below) is entirely at their discretion, and that has been confirmed by their customer service staff.  In fact, their standard answer is that on average, such monies are not returned to customers for 3-7 years after the contract ends, or at least 6-10 years after the first deposits were made.
2. Premiums based on the worst of your experience and their estimate of your losses, and they keep the difference for years and years.   For those in the same trap as me, I will try to explain the numbers above.  The estimated loss pick containment at the top is basically their estimate of your losses.  Note that it drives every number on the page and is basically their arbitrary number -- they could have set it anywhere.  The loss pick containment to date is just pro rated for the amount of the year that has gone by.  The 65% is an arbitrary number.    The $25,278 is my actual losses to date.  You can see where I point with #2 above, though, that my losses are irrelevant to my premiums.  They take the higher of my losses and what is essentially their estimate of my losses and I pay based on that.   Note that their higher number is not based on the reserved amounts on actual claims -- the $25,278 includes their reserves.  It is just the number they established at the beginning of my policy they think my claims are going to be and gosh darnit they are going to stick to that (and my claims even in my worst year in history were never even half of their estimate).  Yes, at the end of the policy if my losses stay low, they owe me money back for all the premium they overcharged me based on their arbitrarily high estimates.  But see #1 above -- there is no time horizon under which they have to return the money.  They can keep it for years and years.
3. The final premium is, after all these calculations, entirely arbitrary.  So after this loss calculation (which essentially just defaults to their arbitrarily high estimate and not my actual loss history) they do some premium calculations.  These actually sort of make sense if you stare at the agreements for a really long time.  But then we get to the line I point to in red labelled 3.  It is the actual amount I owe.  But it does not foot to any other number on the page.  How do they come up with this?  They won't say.  To anyone.  It might as well be arbitrary.  I actually had some dead time and took all my reports and tried to regress to a formula they use for this, but I couldn't figure it out.   So all the calculation on this page is just a sham, it's the mechanical wizard in the Wizard of Oz.  It looks good, but does not actually directly lead to what you are billed.

So I thought I understood my problems.  I put in large deposits and overpaid premiums based on arbitrarily high loss estimates they make -- all of which will take me years and years of effort to maybe get back.  It turns out that I likely will have a third problem.  In the lawsuit linked above, the plaintiff complains that when they left the program after three years, Applied arbitrarily wrote up all their estimated losses on open claims to stratospheric levels and then demanded a large final premium payment at the end.  Folks on Yelp complain of the same thing.  You should know how this works by now -- the plaintiff will theoretically get all this back someday, maybe, when the claims prove to be less costly, but in the mean time Warren Buffet gets to invest the money for years and years (cost of capital = 0) until it is returned.

This is why I think Applied Underwriters actually likes companies with high lost histories.  Rather than costs, losses for them are excuses to over-collect on deposits and premiums -- money that can then be invested and held for years free of charge.

As an aside, I want to thank my new agents at Interwest Insurance for helping decipher all of this.  They actually flew a guy in to help me understand this policy.  They didn't get me into it, but they are helping me pick up the pieces as best we can.

I generally have refused to even participate in the debate over Indiana's RFRA because most of the discourse is so incredibly ill-informed that it is impossible to have a serious discussion.  But I would like to make one observation:

Here is Ruth Marcus with as good a proxy for the anti-RFRA position as I can find:

Hold whatever religious views you want: about whether women should drive, or the morality of having children out of wedlock, or whatever. Your church gets to choose (and enforce its rules). You can practice whatever your church may preach. But if you operate a business, you shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate against people based on who they are, or whom they love.

OK, that is clear enough -- if you have a business that serves the public, you must accommodate all the public equally.  You can't decide not to do business with some group of people.  But this leaves me with a question -- many of the opponents of Indiana's RFRA, from Apple Computer to the NY Times editorial page to the governor of Connecticut (which has its own RFRA, lol) called for businesses to boycott the citizens of Indiana.  Why isn't such a boycott, essentially a refusal to do business with anyone from the state of Indiana irrespective of his or her position on the RFRA, illegal/immoral under exactly Marcus's logic?  Most folks see boycotts as an important first amendment right, a way to express displeasure with a group using the power of markets, without government coersion.  But it seems to be proscribed by Marcus's definition.   Am I missing something here?

I suppose supporters of the boycott would argue that it is OK to refuse business based on political opinions but not on race or gender or sexual orientation.  But supporting the legality of gay marriage is a political opinion.  Now what?

Try as I might, I can only think of two internally consistent positions on this issue:  1.  Businesses have the freedom to accommodate whomever they want; or 2.  All businesses, perhaps as a part of the state business license requirements, must accommodate all comers no matter what.  Number one leads to some ugly, but probably rare, incidents.  Number two causes a lot of friction with other first amendment rights such as speech and religion.

Any other position must take the form of "it is legal to refuse accommodation based on some things but illegal to refuse accommodation based on other things."  There is no way to derive a dividing line between the two based on first principles, so the line becomes a political football, with no viewpoint neutrality.   Basically, accommodation law is whatever the politician of the moment says it is.  Unfortunately, this seems to be what most folks are advocating.

...Probably Nick Saban, coach of the University of Alabama football team at around $7 million a year.  But Jim Harbaugh, recently hired by the University of Michigan for a $5 million base salary, apparently has incentives that can take that up to $9 million a year.

Apologists will argue that this is all OK and shouldn't worry taxpayers at all because these guys are paid out of the college athletic budget which is generated from sports revenue rather than taxes.  Hmm.  Any state parks agency probably generates millions or tens of millions each year in user fees.  Should we be OK with the state employee who runs those agencies making $5 million because it comes out of user fees rather than taxes?  Money is fungible.  $5 million more spent on a football coach is $5 million less that can fund other University services.

(PS - in the US Today ranking of college football coach salaries, 19 of 20 are at public institutions).

In my review of my Droid Turbo, I mentioned in passing that I was frustrated by how slippery a lot of cell phones were.  I was in the Verizon store the other day killing time while they fixed something on my kids' phone, so I tried holding a bunch.

The slipperiest by far were the HTC One M8 and the LG G3.  Both, probably not coincidentally, get high marks for being attractive due to their metal or faux metal backs, but the same backs make them like a wet bar of soap to hold.  You can put a no slip case on them of course, but then if you are going to put them in a case, why buy a phone that is promoted in large part on its looks?

My Droid Turbo is OK, with no slip surface around the edges but a very slick back, at least the nylon back one I have.

The Galaxy S5 is better than average.  Its back gets a lot of grief for being ugly, but it will not slide around in the hand and is comfortable to hold.

Until this week, the no-slip champion for me was the Moto X with the bamboo case (it is real wood veneer, not some plastic fake thing).  It looks good to my eye and it is very grippy in the hand.

But there is a new champion.  I tried the Moto X with the new football leather backing (again, real football leather).  This thing is not going to slide out of your hand (unless maybe if you are Jay Cutler).  The looks are ... different, but I could get used to it.  Phones for me are a convenience item, not a fashion item.  The Moto X's only problems are a small battery and a camera that is a bit weak.  Which is why I bought the Droid Turbo, which is a very similar phone but with a bigger battery.  Just wish they had all the cool Moto Maker options the Moto X has.

Grade inflation is back in the news, as the Harvard Crimson reports that the median grade at Harvard is an A-.  This is clearly absurd.  It reminds me of some of the old Olympics judging where they had a 10 point scale but everyone scored between 9.7 and 9.9.  The problem is not necessarily that the mean is skewed, but that there is almost no room left to discriminate between high and low performance.

There is one potential way to combat this, and it was invented by colleges themselves.  Consider grading in high school.  My kids go to a very tough-grading private school where A's are actually hard to get.  The school sends (for Arizona) a fairly high percentage of its students to Ivy and Ivy-level schools, but the school produces someone with a perfect 4.0 only once every four or five years.  Compare that to our local public school, that seems to produce dozens of perfect 4.0's every year -- in fact since it adds a point for honors classes, it produces a bunch of 5.0's.

Colleges understand that a 3.7 from Tough-grading High may be better than a 5.0 from We-have-a-great-football-team High.  They solve this by demanding that when high schools provide them with a transcript, it also provide them with data on things like the distribution of grades.

Employers should demand something similar from colleges.  This is a little harder for employers, since colleges seem to be allowed to legally collude on such issues while employers can get sued over it.  But it seems perfectly reasonable that an employer should demand, say, not only the student's grade for each class but also the median and 90th percentile grades given in that same class.  This will allow an employer to see how the school performed relative to the rest of the class, which is really what the employer cares about.  And schools that have too many situations where the student got an A, the median was an A, and the 90th percentile was an A may get punished over time with less interest from the hiring community.

One way to get this going is for an influential institution to start printing transcripts this way.  The right place to start would be a great institution that feels it has held the line more on grade inflation.  My alma mater Princeton claims to be in this camp, and I would love to see them take leadership on this (the campus joke at Princeton during the Hepatitis C outbreak there was that at Harvard it would have been Hepatitis A).

Postcript - An alternate grading system from Harvard Business School:  When I was at HBS, they did not give A's and B's.  We had three grades called category I, II, and III.   By rule, the professor gave the top 15% of the class category I, the bottom 10% category III, and everyone else got a category II.  I actually thought this was a hell of a system.  It discriminated at the top, and provided just enough fear of failure to keep people from slacking.

This week, the NLRB agreed to allow the players on the Northwestern University football team to unionize.   This is one of those issues that is simple and straightforward in a free society and a total mess in our less-than-free society.  Here are a few thoughts:

1. In a free society, this is a no-brainer.  The Northwestern players are welcome to create an association among themselves and call it anything they like, including "union".  That association is free to try to negotiate with the university for better terms  (they are also free to fail at this and make no progress).
2. However, it is clear that we are not a free society because the players had to go to the government and ask permission to form this particular type of association.  The reason is that associations called "unions" have been granted special powers and privileges under the law not available to other associations.  There are also a large body of very particular rules for how such associations may conduct business and how other groups (in this case the University) can or cannot interact with it.  It is a very tricky legal and philosophical question whether this package of benefits and privileges should be accorded to a group of college football players
3. In a free society, the fact that the players don't get paid cash and that their universities make millions off the football program would be irrelevant.  The players freely agreed to the deal (in most cases, playing in exchange for free tuition and perhaps a chance to land an NFL job) so there is nothing inherently unfair about it.
4. However, in our society, we have all sorts of government interventions.  I consider many of these interventions to be counter-productive, even occasionally insane.  But if one is to navigate such a society (rather than, say, go off and live in Galt's Gulch), I think the principle of equal protection is critical.  Arbitrary government interventions in free exchange are FAR worse when applied unevenly.  From an equal protection standpoint, I think the players may have a good case.
   • The law generally does not allow profit-making businesses (and the NCAA and college footfall are certainly those) to accept unpaid labor.  Many folks who don't deal with the Fair Labor Standards Act every day will say: "players are paid, they get free tuition."  But this is not how the FLSA works.  It counts non-cash wages only in very specific circumstances that are enumerated in the law (e.g. lodging).  Think of it this way -- McDonald's could not legally just pay all its employees in french fries and claim to be compliant with the law.  Also, large numbers of Division 1 football and basketball players never graduate, which shows a fair amount of contempt by players for this supposedly valuable "free tuition" compensation.
   • On the other hand, most college athletics are not profit-making.  My son plays baseball at Amherst College -- it would be laughable to call this a profit center.  I am not sure there are but a handful of women's teams in any sport that generate profits for their school, and even on the men's side money-making is limited to a few score men's football and basketball teams.   But the few that do make money make a LOT.  University of Texas has its own TV network, as do most major conferences.
   • The law generally does not allow any group of enterprises to enter into agreements that restrict employment options.  Google et. al. are getting flamed right now, and likely face criminal anti-trust charges and lawsuits, for agreements to restrict hiring employees from each other's firms.  The NCAA cuts such deals all the time, both severely restricting moves between schools (transfer provisions in Division I are quite onerous) and preventing poaching at least of younger players by professional leagues like the NBA and NFL.   The notion that top players in the NCAA are playing for their education is a joke -- they are playing in college because that is what they have to do in order to eventually be allowed in a league where they can get paid for their skills.
   • Actually trying to pay players would be a real mess.  In a free society, one might just pay the ones who play the most profitable sports and contribute the most value.   But with Title IX, for example, that is impossible.  Paying only the most financially valuable players and teams would lead to 99% of the pay going to men, which would lead to Title IX gender discrimination suits before the first paycheck was even delivered.  And 99% of college athletes probably don't even want to be paid
   • Part of the pay problem is that the NCAA is so moronic in its rules.  Even if the university does not pay players, many outsider would if allowed.  Boosters love to pay football and basketball players under the table in cash and cars and such, and top athletes could easily get endorsement money or paid for autographs by third parties.  But NCAA rules are so strict that athletes can be in violation of the rules for accepting a free plane ticket from a friend to go to his mother's funeral.  When I interview students for Princeton admissions, I never buy them even a coffee in case they are a recruited athlete, because doing so would violate the rules.
   • Much of this is based on an outdated fetish for amateurism, that somehow money taints athletic achievement.  It is hilarious to see good progressive college presidents spout this kind of thing, because in fact this notion of amateurism was actually an aristocratic invention to keep the commoners out of sports (since commoners would not have the means to dedicate much of their life to training without a source of income).  The amateur ideal is actually an exclusionist aristocratic tool that has for some reason now been adopted as a progressive ideal.   Note that nowhere else in college do we require that students not earn money with their skills -- business majors can make money in business over the summer, artists can sell their art, musicians can be paid to perform.  When Brooke Shields was at Princeton, she appeared in the school amateur play despite making millions simultaneously as a professional actress.  Only athletes can't trade their skill for money in their free time.

I am not sure where this is all going, but as a minimum I think the NCAA is going to be forced to allow athletes to earn outside income and accept outside benefits without losing their eligibility.

Back in 2011 I wrote an article in Forbes on this topic

For several days now I have been highlighting article after article (here and here) where the only service downside of the government shutdown anyone can come up with is the closure of parks.  Here is another example, from the AP entitled "Lawmakers feeling heat from Government Shutdown".  Its all parks:

Some 800,000 federal workers deemed nonessential were staying home again Wednesday in the first partial shutdown since the winter of 1995-96.

Across the nation, America roped off its most hallowed symbols: the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, the Statue of Liberty in New York, Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, the Washington Monument.

Its natural wonders — the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, the Smoky Mountains and more — put up “Closed” signs and shooed campers away.

Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia said he was getting pleas from businesses that rely on tourists. “The restaurants, the hotels, the grocery stores, the gasoline stations, they’re all very devastated with the closing of the parks,” he said.

The far-flung effects reached France, where tourists were barred from the U.S. cemetery overlooking the D-Day beaches at Normandy. Twenty-four military cemeteries abroad have been closed.

Only 22,000 of those 800,000 run parks.  Apparently none of the others do anything we will miss.  Oh, they come up with one new one:

Even fall football is in jeopardy. The Defense Department said it wasn’t clear that service academies would be able to participate in sports, putting Saturday’s Army vs. Boston College and Air Force vs. Navy football games on hold, with a decision to be made Thursday.

Eek!  I joke about this but I fear that today this is going to bite me right in the butt.  Our company operates campgrounds on land we lease from the US Forest Service.  Since we pay all expenses of the operation, take no government money, and employ no government workers, we have never closed in a shutdown and the US Forest Service confirmed at noon yesterday we would not have to close this time.  But apparently someone above the US Forest Service somewhere in the Administration is proposing to reverse this, and illegally close us.  My guess is that they realize parks are the only thing the public misses, and so the Administration trying to see if it can close more of them, even ones that are operated privately and off the government budget.

Update:  This is very similar to what is happening in DC.  By trying to close us, the USFS is actually costing themselves more money (since we pay rent to them based on our revenues) with the only goal being to make the closure worse.  The Administration has ordered the same thing to occur in DC parks, where they are spending far more money "closing" monuments than they do just having them open all the time

Yesterday, the sight of a group of World War II veterans storming the barricaded monument built in their honor in Washington, D.C., became the buzzworthy moment from the first day of our federal shutdown.  The open-air, unmanned outdoor memorial had been barricaded to keep people from "visiting" due to the government shutdown, though there was no real (as in “non-political”) reason to have done so. Barricades certainly wouldn’t prevent vandals from busting in there at night if they wanted to. It was an absurd, petty move.

This morning, Charlie Spiering of the Washington Examiner returned to the memorial to find a gaggle of “essential” government workers there to barricade it once again. He tweeted that the employees fled after cameras started filming them working, but then came back to attach “closed” signs. A couple of them appear to be talking to the media. The barricades are apparently there, but have not been tied together and are therefore easily removed.

The Red Zone channel from DirecTV.  Basically the show's producers channel surf for you, flipping obsessively between as many as 8 simultaneous pro football games (sometimes with two split-screened at a time).  My wife says she gets a headache from watching it even for a few minutes.  But I think its awesome.  I actually flip back and forth between the RZC and whatever game I have chosen to watch that day for extra hyperactive bonus points.

Arizona State has climbed back into the top 10 party school rankings.

This is the same institution that is opposing Grand Canyon University's entry into Division I athletics because, as a for-profit university, they are apparently not academically serious enough.  For some reasons GCU's accountability to shareholders isn't as pure and wonderful as ASU's accountability to former customers who will never use their product again except perhaps to attend a football game (e.g. alumni).

Arizona State University (ASU) has always had a certain niche in the college world, a niche best evidenced by their making both the top 10 party school and top 10 hottest women lists in the same year.  President Michael Crow has done a fair amount to, if not reverse this image, at least add some academic cred to the university.  ASU has been creeping up the USN&WR rankings, has a very serious and respected honors college (Barrett) and hosts the Origins conference each year, one of the most fun public education events I have attended.

But Michael Crow is now upset that another Phoenix area school has been given Division I status in sports, a for-profit college named Grand Canyon University.  This could really hurt both ASU's athletic recruiting in the area as well as dilute its revenues.  But in the supremely hypocritical world college athletics, he can't say that.  Instead, he says (Via Tyler Cowen)

The conference's 12 presidents signed and delivered a letter dated July 10 urging the NCAA's Executive Committee to "engage in further, careful consideration" about allowing for-profit universities to become Division I members at the committee's August meeting. In the meantime, Pac-12 presidents decided at a league meeting last month not to schedule future contests against Grand Canyon while the issue is under consideration.

"A university using intercollegiate athletics to drive up its stock value -- that's not what we're about," Arizona State president Michael Crow said in a phone interview over the weekend. "... If someone asked me, should we play the Pepsi-Cola Company in basketball? The answer is no. We shouldn't be playing for-profit corporations."...

"Our presidents have a pretty clear view that athletics works for the broader benefit of the university," said Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott. "There's a discomfort with the idea that the sole accountability around athletics would be to a company that might use athletics as a marketing tool to drive stock price. There's a sense that changes the dynamics and accountability around athletics."

It is freaking hilarious to get lectured on accountability around athletics by the NCAA.  This is an organization that has been making billions off unpaid workers for years, workers who think so much of the value of the compensation they do receive (a free education) that most of the best of them never complete it.  I wrote more about the NCAA and athletes here.  In short, though, all these schools use the athletic program to raise capital (in the form of donations), likely far more so than a private school's sports team would raise its stock value.  Unless you grew up near the school, what do you know about well-known schools like Penn State, Ohio State, University of Miami, LSU, Alabama and even Notre Dame other than their athletics program?

Michael Crow reveals himself as just another incumbent that does not want competition.

In regards to Grand Canyon specifically, though, it would certainly appear that Crow, who's been spearheading the effort, is driven in part by protecting his own turf. Arizona State has long been the only Division I university in the Phoenix market. And in the bigger picture, it seems a bit self-righteous that the same group of presidents that in 2011 signed a $3 billion contract with ESPN and FOX -- and which last year launched a profitable television network of their own -- would play the "non-profit" card in calling out someone else's motives.

"It's different in the following sense," Crow said of the comparison. "Whatever income we generate from a television network goes to support the swimming team, the rowing team at Cal. We support thousands of athletes and their scholarships, their room-and-board, as part of the intercollegiate spirit of athletics. ... In the case of a for-profit corporation, those profits go to the shareholders."

His last point is a distinction without a difference.  First, I am not sure it is true -- Grand Canyon also has other athletic programs that cost money but don't bring in revenue. They also have a women's swim team, for example.  But who cares anyway?  Why is a student interested in swimming more worthy of receiving football largess than an investor?  Maybe Crow is worried that the people of Arizona that fund so much of his operations (and bloated overpaid administrative staff) might suddenly start wondering why they don't get a return for their investment as do GCU shareholders.

Postscript:  Phil Knight at Oregon and Boone Pickens at Oklahoma State (to name just 2 examples) get an incredible amount of influence in the university due to the money they give to their football programs and the importance of the football programs to those schools.  Boone Pickens says he has given half a billion dollars to OSU, half of which went to the football program.  But it is clear he would not have given a dime if he had not been concerned with the football team's fortunes and the problem of his university's football team losing to other rich guy's teams.  Is this really somehow better and cleaner than being beholden to equity markets?

The link in the original article is broken, so here is a better link to an article and video of how "non-profits" are spending their athletic money, on things like this palatial locker room for the Alabama football team that would make Nero's gladiators blush.

Several companies announced a new sensor product to keep track of the number and severity of blows to the head during sporting events like football.  For a while now, I have been predicting such equipment (once invented) would become required in most sports, with at least younger kids' leagues setting maximum numbers above which a player might have to sit out for one or more games, sort of like mandatory pitch limits in little league.

You would have to be a Coyote Blog old-timer to remember back in January of 2007 when I asked

Is there any state where a college men's football or basketball coach is not the highest paid state official?

Robert Fischer-Baum, via Ilya Somin, has the answer.  In forty states, the highest paid state employee is a university football or basketball coach.  In all fifty states, the highest paid public employee works for a state university.   Which brings us back to my post earlier today.   Government student loans are to university payrolls as quantitative easing is to stock prices.

Death by tort lawyer in 3...2...1

A Colorado jury has awarded $11.5 million in a lawsuit originally brought against helmet maker Riddell and several high school administrators and football coaches over brain injuries suffered by a teenager in 2008.” While the jury rejected the plaintiff’s claim of design defect, it accepted the theory that the helmet maker should have done more to warn of concussions.

If the helmet makers are getting nailed, wait until every high school and college in the country is sued, not to mention the massive suit looming against the NFL.  Expect to see a debate soon, beginning in state legislatures, over tort protection for football.  Texas, for example, has several of the country's tort hellholes but if Friday night high school football is threatened, you can bet that the legislature will be moved to action.

I think Megan McArdle is being naive about the tort system in this country when she writes

So Junior Seau's family is suing the NFL over head injuries, which lead to chronic brain damage, and possibly his suicide.

...

I couldn't resist clicking through to this article supposedly laying out a "trend" that increasing numbers of women were finding "sugar daddies" to pay for college.  I was considering an article calling BS on the whole trend when my attention was diverted.  I found the best single-statement illustration of the attitude that is bankrupting this nation.   First, the basic story:

Nearly 300 NYU co-eds joined the site’s service last year seeking a “mutually beneficial” arrangement with rich older men — a 154 percent jump over 2011.

It was the second-highest number of new members for any college in the country.

Hundreds more young women from Columbia, Cornell and Syracuse universities also have recently signed up for the service, the site said.

“I’ll admit that I’ve thought about doing something like that,” said a Columbia junior who gave only her first name, Karen.

“It would be easier in some ways than working, taking classes and then spending years paying back loans.”

The writer is obviously trying to get me to be outraged, but all I can do is shrug.  There are a lot of worse things in the world to worry about than people entering into "mutually beneficial relationships."   But this is the line that stopped me short:

“Clearly, we need more financial aid if those are the lengths people are going to pay for school,” sniffed Ashley Thaxton, 20, an NYU theater major.

God, is there ever going to be  a non-problem that doesn't require more government spending.  How about lowering tuition?  Cutting back on bloated administrative staffs?  Eliminating useless academic departments?  Channeling less money to the football team?  Or how about we just accept that some people make personal choices that might be distasteful to us, but are really their own god damned business.