Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/169554786?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Monday, December 5, 2011
The Self-Righteousness of Sports Fans
Why does everyone get so mad about unsportsmanlike conduct?
AP Images
Every week, our panel of sports fans discusses a topic of the moment. For today's conversation, Patrick Hruby (writer, ESPN and The Atlantic), Emma Carmichael (writer, Deadspin),Jake Simpson (writer, The Atlantic), and Hampton Stevens (writer, ESPN and The Atlantic) try to understand fan reaction to athletes' antics.
Hey guys,
It happens every fall: Some professional football player (in this case,? Buffalo Bills receiver Stevie Johnson ) struts, preens, dances, or taunts his way into America's collective living room. In response, some paid sports bloviator (in this case,?Bob Costas) immediately castigates said player for:
(a) A classless lack of sportsmanship;
(b) An unsportsmanlike lack of class;
(c) Acting like a naughty five-year-old;
(d) Inching our fair republic one step closer to Visigothian anarchy;
(e) All of the above.
Debate erupts, always the same, always numbing, forever rousing a pair of eternally warring camps: the Armies of Doing the Right Thing in Sports versus the Forces of It's Just a Game Out There. Yet rather than take a side?for what it's worth, I'm with the latter group?I'd like to ask the rest of you a related question.
Namely, why do sports fans get off on this stuff?
Fact: we?definitely?get off on this stuff. If there's one thing the hoi polloi love nearly as much as wins and losses?well, besides gambling, beer and cheerleaders?it's tinpot crime-and-punishment scenarios. Breakin' the rules and payin' the price. Discipline and drawing the line. Good and bad in the sense of right and wrong, and not in the sense of points on the scoreboard. Sports as morality play.
I have a theory: deep down, sports fans basically view athletes as children. We love children. They do the darndest things. But we also loathe them.? Because they do the darndest things.?If we can't see them pull off something spectacular, then we'll settle for seeing them put in their places by some sort of authority figures, even if those figures often the same people who charge nine bucks for a warm cup of beer, then screw us on parking.
Actually, we might like seeing that even more. And that's why end-zone celebrations are never just end zone celebrations.
Emma, you've weighed in on the Costas-Johnson matter before. Am I way off-base? Or am I on to something?
?Patrick
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Sunday, December 4, 2011
Europe Accuses Google of Monopoly Abuse
They're using their huge market share to unfairly promote their other products left and right.
You mean, like every business on earth, they use their existing mind share to promote their other products. Unless you actually want to fine Boeing for advertising their regional jets when they're selling their intercontinental jets, you're full of hot air.
They have the most dominant position to do this too - the largest search engine on planet.
Only if you define the planet by Europe and US. Russia isn't so enamored with Google, and China... well, we know about China. You can, of course, always weasel out by arguing that they are still the largest engine on the planet by total users, but now you're just mixing arguments. I'm pretty sure that's not an accident, too.
For years they have scraped smaller websites and then returning their own sites higher in search engine results.
They push Google+ to every that comes to Google.
Yes? Should they hide the fact that they have another product available?
How is Diaspore or other smaller social networks ever going to challenge that?
By being better? Or, to turn the argument around - the same way that Google ate Altavista's lunch.
They push Chrome to every IE user in a very spammy way, and they always do it in YouTube too.
Another outright fucking lie. Unless you think that telling people that they should upgrade from IE 6 is a terrible sin. In which case, you're just delusional.
Recently all the flight ticket search engines started fearing as Google introduced their own one and embedded the results directly in search results.
Yes. God forbid there's some competition in the flight search engine market.
Because of their market share that is blatant monopoly abuse and I'm good to see that EU is finally doing something about it.
Newsflash: having a large market share is not a monopoly. Furthermore, having a monopoly is not in and of itself illegal. What is illegal is to turn a non-government sanctioned monopoly into a rent-seeking enterprise by limiting external competition.
Now, how exactly is Google limiting competition? People are a click away from Bing. A click away from Facebook. None of the data that Google holds is sticky. There is exactly zero cost to switching to a competitor like Bing. Why aren't people doing it? Tell me, why? Because.... they're Google? That's a circular argument.
Tell you what, I'll make you a deal. You start posting the same crap in Facebook and Microsoft stories, and I'll pretend that you actually believe what you're posting.
Source: http://c.moreover.com/click/here.pl?r5560150517
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Saturday, December 3, 2011
House Republicans step up anti-regulation effort (AP)
WASHINGTON ? House Republicans have launched their most ambitious, pro-business effort yet to rein in Obama administration regulators, triggering a furious debate over the value of new rules for clean air, workplace safety, children's toys and many other categories.
The House was set to vote Friday on the second of two anti-regulation bills, legislation that would impose potentially stifling procedures on federal regulators. Republicans argue that avoiding expensive new regulations would aid businesses in hiring workers, while Democrats counter that Americans' health and safety would be jeopardized.
The White House budget office didn't wait for the vote to announce that if the bill passed Congress, senior administration advisers would recommend a veto.
At this point, the Republican effort is mainly a 2012 campaign issue because the Democratic-run Senate has not passed any of the anti-regulation bills the House has approved this year.
Until now, Republicans have focused on derailing specific proposed rules, many of them from the Environmental Protection Agency. The latest effort, however, would curtail regulators ? and their proposed rules ? across the entire federal government.
The bill considered Friday, the Regulatory Accountability Act, would require numerous steps before new rules could be issued. Regulators would have to consider the legal authority for the rule, the nature and significance of the problem, any reasonable alternatives, and potential costs and benefits of the alternatives.
Federal courts would have an expanded role and the government would have a tougher legal standard to meet for a proposed rule to be affirmed.
OMB Watch, an advocacy organization that tracks federal regulations, said if the bill already had been law, the government would not have been able to issue a finding that greenhouse gases endangered public health. The group said it would have been more difficult to withstand court challenges to findings that a popular weed killer was dangerous. It would have been tougher to defend statements about the health impact of too much salt. And the government would have had to weaken a strong rule on lead in gasoline.
Still to come, probably next week, is a bill that would make it far easier for Congress to kill regulations.
The House on Thursday passed the first of the three bills in this latest anti-regulation effort. It would give more weight to the impact of federal regulations on small businesses, whose owners can be a powerful political force and are being courted by both parties.
The bill went to the Senate on a 263-159 vote.
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Report: Police went undercover to watch Occupy LA
LOS ANGELES (AP) ? Los Angeles police used nearly a dozen undercover detectives to infiltrate the Occupy LA encampment before this week's raid to gather information on protesters' intentions, according to media reports Friday.
None of the officers slept at the camp, but tried to blend in during the weeks leading up to the raid to learn about plans to resist or use weapons against police, a police source told the Los Angeles Times. The source spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing.
The undercover work yielded information that some protesters were preparing bamboo spears and other potentially dangerous weapons in advance of an expected eviction by the LAPD, none of which were used, according to City News Service which first reported the story.
Police downplayed the significance of the undercover work since Occupy meetings were public and easily tracked.
LAPD Officer Cleon Joseph declined an Associated Press request for comment on the reports.
Occupy L.A. protester Mario Brito told City News Service he was not surprised by the revelation, but said it was "tantamount to 1950s McCarthyism."
Meanwhile, the city attorney's office filed criminal misdemeanor charges Friday against 27 more of the people who were arrested following the police sweep of the camp.
In all, 46 of the 291 people arrested during the raid have been charged with misdemeanor crimes of failure to disperse from an unlawful assembly. Some also were charged with resisting arrest.
The arrests came Wednesday during a pre-dawn raid on City Hall Park, where nearly 500 tents had been erected at the peak of an anti-Wall Street protest, City Attorney Carmen Trutanich said.
Fifty-eight posted bail or were released by police, Criminal Division Chief Earl Thomas told City News Service.
An additional 187 protesters were released without bail and without being charged, because they had no prior criminal records.
Bail amounts ranged from $5,000 for most of the defendants to as high as $20,000.
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Friday, December 2, 2011
US envoy criticizes China's controls on economy (AP)
BEIJING ? A U.S. trade envoy has accused China's government of increasing its role in the economy in violation of its free-trade pledges and he appealed to Beijing to reconsider its embrace of "state capitalism."
The comments reflect a harder U.S. tone toward Beijing amid disputes over market access for banking and other services and complaints China is supporting its producers of solar power and other technology despite promising to allow free competition.
In a speech this week, the U.S. ambassador to the World Trade Organization cited a "troubling trend" of increased Chinese government intervention in the economy over the past five years despite its WTO commitments to open its markets.
The ambassador, Michael Punke, made the comments Wednesday in Geneva, according to a transcript on the website of the U.S. Trade Representative's office. He was speaking at a WTO meeting for the tenth and final annual review of China's compliance with its WTO obligations since it joined the body in 2001.
"China seems to be embracing state capitalism more strongly each year, rather than continuing to move toward the economic reform goals that originally drove its pursuit of WTO membership," he said. "This is a troubling development, and the United States urges the Chinese government to reconsider the path it is on."
During a trip through Asia last month, President Barack Obama called on Beijing to show more maturity in its economic relations with other nations.
"Increasingly, trade frictions with China can be traced to China's pursuit of industrial policies that rely on trade-distorting government actions to promote or protect China's state-owned enterprises and domestic industries," Punke said.
China's trade and economy have grown rapidly since 2001, propelling it past Japan as the world's second-largest economy behind the United States and financing a military buildup that has alarmed its neighbors.
On Wednesday, China's Defense Ministry criticized Washington's strengthened military pact with Australia as a throwback to "Cold War thinking."
Beijing has alarmed foreign companies by unveiling initiatives to build up state-owned corporate champions in an array of fields from telecommunications to wind energy.
Business groups complain Beijing appears to be trying to squeeze foreign companies out of its clean energy and other promising industries. They have questioned whether the communist government wants to live up to pledges to allow foreign companies to compete on an equal footing with Chinese rivals.
Punke said that in its first five years of WTO membership, Beijing took "impressive steps" to reduce tariffs, eliminate trade barriers and improve protection for intellectual property rights.
But he noted complaints that Beijing tries to intimidate foreign companies, threatening to retaliate if they speak up about problematic policies or cooperate with their governments in challenging them.
Punke complained that Beijing appears to resort to trade actions in response to legitimate steps by the United States and other trading partners under their trade laws.
Last month, China launched a probe of U.S. government support for its solar, wind and other renewable energy industries after American authorities agreed to investigate a complaint by a group of companies that Beijing improperly subsidizes exports of solar panels and hurts foreign competitors.
"This type of conduct is at odds with fundamental principles of the WTO's rules-based system," Punke said.
___
U.S. Trade Representative: http://www.ustr.gov
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Vincent DiPaolo sentenced in North Providence insurance fraud ...
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) - A former Rhode Island insurance adjuster has been sentenced to six months in a halfway house and six months of home confinement for his role in a $40,000 home insurance fraud.
A judge imposed the punishment on Vincent DiPaolo of Johnston on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Providence. He is the last of four defendants to be sentenced in the case.
DiPaolo pleaded guilty in August to conspiracy and four counts of mail fraud. He could have faced up to 85 years in prison.
Authorities say the 62-year-old helped former radio personality Lori Sergiacomi , a.k.a. Tanya Cruise, file a bogus home insurance claim last year. Sergiacomi was sentenced in August to four months in a Massachusetts halfway house and four months of home confinement.
Federal investigators uncovered the scheme while investigating another corruption case in North Providence involving several town council members.
Source: http://www.wpri.com/dpp/target_12/north-providence-insurance-fraud-vincent-dipaolo-sentenced
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