From his concurring opinion in today’s historic Supreme Court decision (NCAA v. Alston) smacking down the NCAA: “The bottom line is that the NCAA and its member colleges are suppressing the pay of student athletes who collectively generate billions of dollars in revenues for colleges every year. Those enormous sums of money flow to seemingly everyone except the student athletes. College presidents, athletic directors, coaches, conference commissioners, and NCAA executives take in six- and seven-figure salaries. Colleges build lavish new facilities. But the student athletes who generate the revenues, many of whom are African American and from lower-income backgrounds, end up with little or nothing.” Nailed it!
I tested positive for the “Wuhan virus” on Wednesday. Among other symptoms, I suffered a throbbing headache, a perpetual and painful cough, and a bad lower-back ache. Thankfully, however, I did not develop a fever and did not lose my sense of taste or smell, but even this “mild” case of COVID was the worst ailment I have ever suffered, keeping me in bed for over 20 hours per day during the past three days …
“Half of the pandemic’s unemployment money may have been stolen.” That is the title of this recent report by Felix Salmon for Axios, but the only evidence in support of this increduble claim is a statement by Blake Hall, the CEO of ID.me, who says that “America has lost more than $400 billion to fraudulent claims” and that “as much as 50% of all unemployment monies might have been stolen.” I would not be surprised if unemployment fraud were rampant, but this is pretty weak evidence.
You cannot make this shit up! I found the following message waiting for me in surprise (see screenshot below) when I recently re-activated my Facebook page in order to get into my Expedia account:
So, Facebook’s algorithms are censoring legal history papers now? My paper “Domestic Constitutional Violence,” available here via SSRN and which I presented in 2018 at a special symposium at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, surveys a series of laws enacted by Congress, beginning with the Militia Acts of the mid 1790s, authorizing the president to use military force inside the United States. Suffice it to say I not only closed my Facebook account for good; I went ahead and deleted it!
One week ago, Tyler Cowen, the prolific co-author of the popular “Marginal Revolution” blog, published this odd post on “The IRS tax data leak.” Instead of engaging the merits of these damning allegations — the fact that many of the most wealthiest Americans are self-righteous hypocrites who game the tax system in order to avoid paying their fair share of federal taxes — Cowen decided to dwell on the “ethics” of the data leak. Among other things, Cowen concluded that “ProPublica acted unethically, and in fact nothing fundamentally new or interesting or surprising was learned from their act as accessory.”
Let us assume for the sake of argument that Cowen is right, that ProPublica somehow acted unethically by publishing private tax data and that nothing new was learned from these sordid revelations. (Put aside the fact that Cowen, like most commentators calling for greater ethics, never bothers to share with his readers what theory of ethics was in play here. Virtue ethics? Duty Ethics? Consequentialism?) Even so, Cowen is committing a version of the genetic fallacy. Instead of questioning the ethics of our perverse tax system itself, Cowen chooses to focus on the illegal provenance of ProPublica’s data. Sorry, but no dice …
On the contrary, a strong case can be made that ProPublica’s exposé, by revealing how little U.S. billionaires pay in taxes and by exposing their rank hypocrisy, was highly ethical–under whatever theory of ethics you prefer. After all, what ProPublica did was to reveal the truth, and how can transparency and truth ever be inconsistent with ethics? Furthermore, although I already knew that companies like Amazon pay little in taxes, I did not know, contra Cowen, that Jeff Bezos–the richest man in the world–pays little in taxes. Also, thanks to the N.Y. Times, I knew Donald Trump paid only $750.00 in federal income taxes in 2016; I did not know that Elon Musk paid $0 in 2018! So, don’t lecture me about “ethics”!
On this day (June 14) in 1959, the Disneyland Monorail System, the first daily operating monorail system in the Western Hemisphere, opened to the public in Anaheim, California. Via Wikipedia, here are some facts and figures about Disneyland’s original monorail system:
Grand opening: June 14, 1959
Designer: WED Enterprises
Three trains: Mark VII Red, Mark VII Blue, and Mark VII Orange
Max train cars on beam: 3
Track length: 2.5 miles (4 kilometers)
Ride duration: 10 minutes, 30 seconds
Coupon required (originally): “E”
Ride system: Each train was propelled by six DC electric motors mounted in articulated powered trucks shared between cars, not just the lead car.
1959 construction costs of the entire system averaged over $1 million per mile (>$620,000/kilometer)
Oversized ceremonial scissors failed to cut the ribbon during the televised opening ceremony, so Walt simply tore it
![NCAA v. Alston] Oral Argument | C-SPAN.org](https://priorprobability.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/img_2708.jpg?w=1024)
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