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Registered: 11-2017
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Paying College Players: Another Corruption of Academics (and America)



Californication has passed a law to allow academia to pay athletes to attend their schools of higher learning. After all, their alumina only care about winning at sports.

Barry Alevras, legendary coach of Wisconsin and current athletic coordinator, says he will not schedule a California team because they are abandoning the idea of the student athlete. He’s right of course.

The corruption of our institutions of higher learning is complete. It just about the money for the institutions/administrations. They are all corrupt and encourage everyone to vote Dem and pour more money into their pockets.

I hope it will be a donnybrook when the low IQ Ohio State plays the Badgers at the Horseshoe, then at Indianapolis. Killing Ohio State will be difficult. But it’s time.

The Badgers are the new American Team.

Watch. It'll be interesting.
10/5/2019, 6:48 pm Link to this post PM RedQ Blog
 
Extropia DaSilva Profile
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Re: Paying College Players: Another Corruption of Academics (and America)


On what might be a related issue, there is this controversial method of paying somebody else to attend an entrance interview or to write an essay. The reason for doing this, of course, is that this ‘somebody else’ is better able than you are at accomplishing the task.

This approach to advancing in academics has been called cheating. It’s paying somebody else to do the hard work and then appropriating the credit. But hang on a minute, isn’t this just the way business works? What is a business if not an organisation where those with capital pay others to do all the work and then take all the credit for it?

10/6/2019, 1:52 am Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 
Spikosauropod Profile
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Registered: 06-2007
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Re: Paying College Players: Another Corruption of Academics (and America)


quote:

This approach to advancing in academics has been called cheating. It’s paying somebody else to do the hard work and then appropriating the credit. But hang on a minute, isn’t this just the way business works? What is a business if not an organisation where those with capital pay others to do all the work and then take all the credit for it?


When you pay someone to make a product and sell it as your own production, you are not necessarily deceiving the buyer about the quality. When you pay someone to write an entrance essay, this is like having someone take a picture of a different product than what you are selling. The first is a crime of attribution. The second is actually false advertising that defrauds the customer.
10/6/2019, 2:14 am Link to this post PM Spikosauropod
 
greendocnowciv Profile
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Re: Paying College Players: Another Corruption of Academics (and America)


Yes, Spike. And really, Extie!

You are well educated, clearly, and also clearly very well-read. Your blog has lots of good essays - I plowed through some on econ some time ago, due to Spud admiring some of your econ ideas about money.

Your accept that it's wrong for someone to defraud a college by claiming that someone elses' work is your own - I'm sure.

I'm sure, because you appear to then use that as an example of why business in general is wrong. Wait - huh?

Why is the biz wrong? Consider me slow, and please use this example to explain it to me - pretty please.

Example: You to hire me to craft a chair. You pay me, and you then sell the chair for a profit.

A number of sales allow you to pay off loans on a schedule in your business plan. You had to take out the loans to pay for the tools, work-space, electricity, ventilation, bathroom, and wood.

All these things are needed for me to craft nice chairs in this example.

Your profit so far doesn't pay you anything, yet, as is true for many business at the start. Happily, your business plan is tracking well, and you should see some personal share of the profits soon. End of Example.

This is immoral? Or somehow wrong in some way, as the school-cheater so clearly is?

Help me to the light, Extie! 'Cause this biz stuff all looks kosher, while the cheater still simply looks like a cheater.




10/6/2019, 11:38 am Link to this post PM greendocnowciv Blog
 
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Re: Paying College Players: Another Corruption of Academics (and America)


Red,

I started feeling free and easy about it. Then, hearing Tim Tebow discuss it, I remembered my kiddie days, when the NFL teams were not staffed by superstars who could shoulder a ref or coach.

We could feel closeness to teams with rosters that didn't change like the weather.

His opinion brought me back to that:




I do hope they stop this, and work on enforcing bans on the off-books payment-in-kind stuff that goes on.


10/6/2019, 11:58 am Link to this post PM greendocnowciv Blog
 
Extropia DaSilva Profile
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Re: Paying College Players: Another Corruption of Academics (and America)


>Help me to the light, Extie! 'Cause this biz stuff all looks kosher, while the cheater still simply looks like a cheater<

One of that passages in ‘Atlas Shrugged’ that greatly amuses me is the part where Nat Taggart (father of Dagney and James and the founder of the Taggart transcontinental railroad) is said to have ‘single-handily built a railroad across America’.

Single-handily! Just try to imagine some fellow chopping down all the trees to get enough wood to make the necessary amount of sleepers, then all by himself making those sleepers and then all on his lonesome laying them down one after the other over thousands of miles. Oh, and he still has to mine the ore to smelt the steel so he can lay down the rails. All by himself.

Typical of a radical libertarian like Rand to completely disregard the efforts of the workers and attribute the building of a railroad to somebody who had the money to pay for that work.

Still, she had the excuse of writing fiction and I suppose she could have made Taggart a literal superman. But even in historical cases we find this ridiculous attribution of the work of many credited to the efforts of one.

Ever heard of Capability Brown? Should you ever visit a stately home in the UK, chances are that its grounds were designed by him.

The gardens which are said to have been designed by Capability Brown are truly epic in scale. We are not talking ponds and a few flower beds here. We are talking the planting of forests, the creation of lakes and waterfalls so tall you have to crane your neck to take them in. We are talking the redesign of hundreds of acres of landscape.

It must have been an enormous undertaking to do all this work and so I can only assume that a great many people helped to build these beautiful gardens. And yet, the contribution of all those workers is lost in obscurity and we are instead ‘informed’ that ‘these gardens were designed by Capability Brown’ as though he went out all on his own and built these landscapes all by himself! It’s like this one guy gets 100% of the credit for an achievement which must have required the talents of a great many. It’s quite possible that in reality Brown’s contribution did not consist of much more than yelling ‘get that lake built or by god you will be flogged!’

So why is it cheating to pay somebody else to write an essay and claim credit for their work yet in the world of business it is entirely legitimate to pay others to do the work and claim all the credit?
10/7/2019, 8:14 am Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 
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Re: Paying College Players: Another Corruption of Academics (and America)


>you appear to then use that as an example of why business in general is wrong<

Not at all. I am just pointing out that IF it is right to pay others to do the work required to run a business and then claim sole credit for it THEN it is also right to pay somebody else to do the work required to write a good paper and then claim credit for that paper.

Conversely, IF it is wrong to pay somebody else to write a paper and then claim credit for it, THEN it must also be wrong to pay others to do the work required to run a business and them claim credit for it.

But to claim one is perfectly legitimate while the other is immoral is just weird.

Having said that I do understand that an Elon Musk or a Geoff Bezos do contribute something to the business. But given the size of an organisation like Amazon it would be exceedingly generous to attribute even 1% of its success to that one member of the gigantic collective that is a major business.

 
10/7/2019, 8:32 am Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 
greendocnowciv Profile
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Re: Paying College Players: Another Corruption of Academics (and America)


"Claiming sole credit."

I think thats the nub of our disagreement. Rands' writing is allegorical, and her characters are very unrealistically stereotypical hero's, villains and other role-characters.

Her writing style made some puke, and reviewers weren't shy about it. Many know that it appealed and appeals to many millions, due in great part to the messages she was sending with her type of writing.

Her history, her work, and her philosophy of Objectivism are all mucho debatable - and I only read one of her books.

A short one, many years ago, called "Anthem." I remember it made an impact on me. I liked the movie done starring Garry Cooper as a rapist-terrorist-Architect. Happily, back in those halcyon, oh-so-innocent days of black and white movies, we knew not of 9/11. So the "terrorist" aspect was then quite out-of-mind.

Is it possible - is Roark Trump, and is that dame Malania?



And as to "Who Built What"

Regarding the guy I would describe as "he who built this or that" - yes, you have sound reasons to make the case that, for instance:

"You didn't build that business."

Consider your example of Brown. He was responsible for both his artistic imagining of how the land should be, and his management of getting it done. Long years working his way up from apprentice gardener gave him awareness of how it all worked, not just how hie wanted it to look.

His eye and imagination led to a new style of formal garden, sweeping away the old. A true "new thing" in English formal gardening at that time.

Those of us who see his role in that as more important, more crucial - to a massive degree - than any one of the myriad ditch-diggers who could be replaced in less than a day, or any other of the multitude of other trades and laborers in a similar timescale, leads to that short sentence construction.

Rather than this clumsy description of, say, Ford:

"Ford worked with many co-workers and subordinates and needed loans to make his first run of successful Model-T's, and the rest of the accomplishments accredited often to him - so we will from now on say that thousands of people created the Model T."

Several reasons lead to most just saying "Ford did." To many of us, we see his role as so much more pivotal.

But sure, even a fraction of a second grants the obvious: "Yes, sure, all those others sure did play necessary parts.

Is this "urge to the long sentence construction" description use part of a desire to see no person who was driven to get "it" done, and who was indeed the prime mover of the project, get the credit?

Oh - and the blame>

Elon got us the Tesla, and got us back to supplying the ISS from Russia with his rockets.

His Solar City may be a bust. His Boring company may go either way, and his "mega-battery" factory looks successful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_1

You aren't wrong in my eyes if ya wanna use a loooong construction rather than just say "Elon did" this or that...

Either way, the traditional short way, or the loooong way, it doesn't make the school cheater not a cheater.

You do understand that cheating is wrong, right? I mean - pronouns, et al - so, so much changes so fast, now. Cheating is still wrong, right?


10/7/2019, 7:43 pm Link to this post PM greendocnowciv Blog
 
Extropia DaSilva Profile
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Re: Paying College Players: Another Corruption of Academics (and America)


Movies tend to begin with a credit saying ‘A Film By (whoever the director is).

Why not, instead, say ‘A film directed by so and so’, which would acknowledge that this person contributed to the movie in a very significant way rather than implying it was all down to him or her and all those names that come when the credits roll and the audience leaves the cinema didn’t have much to do with it?

It seems to me that people like Spielberg and James Cameron can be credited with the ability to organise such a talented team. The crew that work on those movies are world-class and they can certainly pick and choose who they work for. That they choose to work on a ‘James Cameron’ movie says a lot about what an inspirational character James Cameron must be.

You can say the same of Elon Musk. How did he manage to organise a team that could build rockets that can park themselves back on a landing platform like something out of a sci-fi movie? That feat requires the coming together of a great many brilliant minds and that they chose to collaborate on his vision speaks volumes about what a team leader he must be.

There is no doubting that the big names in business are visionaries. Now, one of the ambitions of building a business is to get it to a stage where it is ‘autonomous’. How do you reach that stage? Well, you get there by building a business that brings in enough revenue for you to pay others to do all the work required to keep it going. You remain a major stakeholder and that generates a tidy stipend for you, but you no longer have to do any work. Fair enough, you might say, you did build the business.

But then, likely as not, that stake you hold becomes an inheritance. I once saw a documentary about a rich family. The grandparents had built some successful business and now, generations later, the family are still major shareholders but they didn’t lift a finger to contribute to the running of it, since long ago the job of running the business had been handed over to professional managers and other employees.

It would be reasonable to credit the grandparents with having helped make this business so successful, but what credit should we give to this generation of rentiers who don’t run the business at all yet receive an income that is in excess of the lifetime earnings of many who do contribute to its continued operation every single day? The name of the business might be ‘Walton’s Carpets’ (it wasn’t, I don’t remember what it was actually called) but I don’t see why we should credit the ‘Walton’s’ anymore than we should say that somebody who pays somebody else to write an essay should claim credit for the high rating it receives. And yet, because we have this societal attitude that it is the person who stumps up the capital who is the major contributor to a businesses’ success and not the people who do the actual work we continue to praise and reward the wealth extractor over the wealth creator.

10/8/2019, 2:51 am Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 
greendocnowciv Profile
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Re: Paying College Players: Another Corruption of Academics (and America)


Ah! The vagrant mind. I too wander.

We had been disagreeing on if the school cheater was cheating.

You said - no, implied, kinda, that the cheater was only a cheater if businessmen who built businesses were cheaters for not (in my shorter construction) using a long sentence-construction to describe their role in the biz.

You seem to have tired of that. Now it's back to denying the right of someone to leave property to their chosen heirs.

Really! In countries where the confiscation mindset is far-enough along, yes, the property will be confiscated.

Justifications can be propounded with admirable wisdom and great rhetorical skill.

"Eat the rich" is just the crude version. Sure, Extie - take it if ya can. An old, old definition of "what is yours" is:

"What you can keep."




10/8/2019, 9:05 am Link to this post PM greendocnowciv Blog
 


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