StrangeSox

"Air is the best insulator!" I keep meaning to get more insulation for my attic, and it's really biting me in the ass this year. I can't imagine how expensive having someone come and inject/blow it into all of my exterior walls would cost, though.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jan 30, 2014 -> 01:36 PM) Here are the profits of the top schools: http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/schools/finances/ You keep talking about revenue. Great, they make a s*** ton. But they also pay out a s*** ton. Same with the NCAA. It's not like schools are walking away with earnings of 100M which they just hand out to the President or other board members. They go back into the school to fund other athletics, building projects, etc. Some schools (Iowa for example) LOST money. They also go to bloated admin/coaches salaries in many cases, or spending money on new facilities just to spend money. Non-profits do this in every industry, which is why it's important to look at revenues and not just pure surplus. No, I'm not.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Jan 30, 2014 -> 10:13 AM) Windows are huge on that. Ours is that our house was retrofit with AC and Blown Heat (built in 1883) so the high velocity system kind of makes the heating uneven upstairs. Not to mention uneven insulation. SO f***ing frustrating. oh look at mr. moneybags over here with his fancy insulation.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Jan 30, 2014 -> 09:49 AM) The one thing its missing is the ability to have a remote module to detect temperature where a nest isnt located. I REALLY need that in my new house and havent found anything yet that I like. I think eventually with the google stuff maybe it will be able to use the phone to do this? Who knows. Supposedly you can have multiple Nests work together. I'm not sure if they actually integrate with each other or if they are just wired in parallel (you could do the same thing with an old mechanical thermostat). It'd be nice if it could work with just a cheaper temperature sensor versus another $250. Plus I think they're missing humidistat control, which seems silly for such an expensive HVAC module. Our schedule is predictable enough that a basic programmable thermostat works for us, but supposedly over 50% of people never bother programming theirs. I can't see what the hell the point of something like the "egg minder" is, though. I don't need a wi-fi enabled egg tray to send me messages that I need more eggs. If I'm at the store and not sure if I need some more or not, I'll just spend the extra $.99

"Non-profits" play all sorts of games with revenues and pretty typically act just like for-profits. I'm sure you're very familiar with the national trend of administrative bloat (in salary and numbers) at colleges and universities.

Think about the argument you're making. Collectively, the NCAA sports generate about $5,000,000,000 a year. New medical coverage for athletes will cost $X. Your argument is that any new costs imposed on the NCAA will not come out of that current $5B revenue stream, so they're voluntarily foregoing $X in revenue each year. Now, why would they be doing that? It would mean bigger, fancier sports facilities, bigger TV contracts, bigger endorsement deals, bigger executive/coaching salaries, etc. Why would NCAA sports be completely immune from the basic forces of capitalism that every other industry faces? They may not be publicly traded companies, but there definitely are people who would love to have additional revenue streams. Plus, this ignores that a lot of the revenue actually does come from publicly traded companies (NBC/ABC/ESPN, Adidas/Nike, Gatorade). The NCAA itself made that much in surplus (profit) revenue. When you add in the conferences and schools, it amounts to billions of dollars a year. Alabama generated over $100M alone last year. In the grand scheme of things, that really is a lot of money and more than enough to pay for athletes' ongoing medical issues. There are huge amounts of money thrown around to coaches and administrators throughout the NCAA, and there's nothing that says they're entitled to the entire revenue stream while locking the players out. There isn't some law of economics that says if suddenly the athletes got a bigger share of the revenues (via medical insurance, better scholarship guarantees, stipends, etc.) that existing expenses are fixed in stone and that the only possible source would be additional revenues. That doesn't happen anywhere else and there's no reason to expect it to happen here, even if they aren't publicly traded for-profit companies.

The ncaa is a cartel by any definition of the word.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Jan 30, 2014 -> 09:32 AM) To make it a finer point, my Nest is a product that does a very specific thing -- I want the Nest to know I'm home so it knows to turn my heat or air on -- NOT because I want Google to know I'm home, or how long I'm home, or how many times I enter my living room.

QUOTE (Chilihead90 @ Jan 30, 2014 -> 01:46 AM) Ill check again with one of our TVs downstairs that does not have a cable box, but last time I tried watching TV out there with the HD over-the-air channels, everything suddenly said "scrambled". The TV needs to have an HD tuner built-in (any TV made within the last six years or so probably does) or a separate HD tuner box.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Jan 29, 2014 -> 07:52 PM) That's it? Jeez, live a little. lol seriously what's the bankroll for a trip like that? We just had to re-arrange our trip to Bryce Canyon and Zion because of all the damn snow/cold days pushing back the end of my wife's school year.

QUOTE (Chilihead90 @ Jan 29, 2014 -> 04:15 PM) And IIRC, and HDTV antenna is not a thing anymore. They stop transmitting over-the-air tv signals last summer I think. I used to do that in my room at home, where I had like 60-70 digital channels, a handful of them in HD, just using over-the-air, but then at some point they decided not to do that anymore. Unless something has changed. This is wrong. Major networks are required by the FCC as part of their license to broadcast.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Jan 29, 2014 -> 05:41 PM) How is this different than say a truck driver. Many more of them die in crashes and become injured than football. I see many in the clinic that have lifelong injuries but I haven't heard too many people give a crap about them. The education and other benefits the players receive are more than many "regular' employees and the degree will set them up pretty well if they do it right. I think you'll generally find me strongly on the side of labor and unionization regardless of industry. Truckers routinely can barely make ends meet.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jan 29, 2014 -> 04:43 PM) Coaches are disposable. Coaches get fired all the time. Until coaches make it big, they live pretty awful lives as assistant coaches. You've got a warped view of the actual system. Not ever player is a star being denied millions in endorsement deals, and not every coach is making millions without doing any work. That's all wrong. It's the complete opposite. Very few players could make any money outside of football even if it were allowed, and very few coaches make millions without doing any work. I don't think and didn't say that any coaches make millions without doing any work. They don't put their personal health at risk, but that's not the same thing. You're arguing against free markets here and in favor of a cartel, fwiw. This assumption doesn't hold in any other area of economics. Businesses can't actually pass 100% of the costs on by raising prices, because if they could, then they'd already raise prices and just have bigger profits. And I'm sorry if this multi-billion dollar industry can only survive or you can only support it if the overwhelming majority of labor goes unpaid. But the NCAA has no inherent right or need to exist, and if it can't function without taking adequate care of the athletes, then it should collapse. The NCAA is a joke, so why do you so strongly support their cartel actions that only serve to horde revenues?

QUOTE (Buehrle>Wood @ Jan 29, 2014 -> 03:47 PM) None of the outdoor events are even in the city. They are an hour north or south. I'm guessing all Winter Olympics are like this. For the most part. Vancouver had their ski events at Whistler, about two hours away. SLC's ski events were held at Park City, about an hour away.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jan 29, 2014 -> 03:25 PM) Right, and that's the part I could give two s***s about. You chose to play a sport in which you run full speed into another human and land on a hard ground. Why should anyone else be responsible for that decision? Some people don't see any good reason that the players who actually play the game should be treated as disposable while the coaches and administrators make millions of dollars a year. Why don't you give a s*** that these people who play a game for your entertainment can face lifelong health issues because of it? It doesn't even require you, as an individual, to do or change anything at all. They're just asking for some of the revenue to go towards the players themselves for scholarship guarantees and medical issues that directly result from the game. I'm also unclear as to why anybody but the industry that makes billions of dollars a year off of these athletes should be responsible for medical conditions that arise from playing the sport. What's the moral argument here against medical coverage for athletes and for keeping all of the revenue with the non-athletes? Against not giving athletes a voice when discussing working conditions and durations before adding more and more games and practices?

I took this as poking fun: http://www.soxtalk.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=91030

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jan 29, 2014 -> 02:49 PM) There is also a really bad propane shortage. I keep seeing people talking about triple the normal prices. Illinois (and several other states) have declared "propane emergencies." According to WBEZ, 40% of Illinois homes are heated with propane.

It's more of the long-term impact that injuries or even just playing DI football can have on your body that aren't covered. Sure, the surgery to repair your torn ACL may be covered, but not the lingering bad shoulder you'll have for the rest of your life or maybe the CTE you got playing.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Jan 29, 2014 -> 02:01 PM) Actually I would prefer this. Get the "professional athletics" out of the universities and make the NFL go like baseball and create their own minor leagues. We know this will never happen due to the money generated but it would solve many of the problems. I was more making a joke about public high school teams. NCAA Football and Men's BB are basically professional leagues these days, but what about NCAA swimming/track/wrestling etc.? I have plenty of issues with the amount of money sports can siphon away from academic institutions (e.g. Rutgers), but I don't know that eliminating the professionalized NCAA sports is really a solution.

Get rid of the socialist GOVERNMENT youth sports leagues and let the PRIVATE SECTOR innovate!

If they get injured, they can lose their scholarship and not have medical coverage for their injuries. These guys are going out there week after week, putting their bodies at risk for your entertainment (and money!). Colter signed up and took the risk that he did, but why is it wrong for him to want to lessen that risk or at least help protect against that risk for future players?

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 29, 2014 -> 01:22 PM) The American West, much of it, will also be (by models I have seen) getting less precipitation. Desertification continues. And at least in that regional case, it is exaserbating an existing problem. The southwest has been drying steadily for a few thousand years now, but the rate is increasing. We also seem to be draining the Ogallala Aquifer at a pretty good rate.

Telander was on Mac & Speigs a little while ago talking about this issue, and he also has an article out: http://www.suntimes.com/sports/25245552-41...lain-labor.html

As of January 10th, Chicago had already spent over half of it's $20M annual snow budget.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jan 29, 2014 -> 10:58 AM) Kinda-sorta change it = creates an incredibly obvious way to make it happen and look legal. I don't think the FBI (and other betters/bookies/casinos) are as dumb as you're portraying them to be.