Retaliation

A while ago, I was having a discussion with a friend about legitimate uses of international power. We referenced the recent WTO decision against the US prohibiting offshore internet gambling from Antigua. Now the US is ostensibly a foe to online gambling but in reality, they are generally trying to create a protectionist racket where American companies have an advantage. A little low but that’s economics. So anyhow, the WTO ruled for Antigua and against the US and that was an example of international pressures a small state can use to bear on a large one. The counter to that was the US isn’t going to follow the ruling thus affirming the “might makes right” school of international politics.

Oh yeah?

Apparently, Antigua is discussing how to retaliate. Trade sanctions hurt Antigua more than the US–so one discussion is to refuse to enforce copyright restrictions. That’s right, make Antigua a haven for file-sharing. That would cause one hell of an uproar I’d think. I have to say that regardless of your position on copyrights, using enforcement as a weapon in trade disputes is pretty hard-nosed geopolitics.

Not the iPod.

Occasionally annoying but usually insightful pundit Kevin Drum points us to an article in the LA Times by Steven Levy on the glories of the iPod. It’s an excerpt from Levy’s book The Perfect Thing. Now The Girls know this about me already–particularly Lindsey–but I will never get an iPod and there are several reasons why. This was actually a comment from the Kevin Drum post that I edited and enlarged a bit.

1) Apple Product. I can build a computer (it takes me forever and I’m not very good at it but…) and that means that Apple’s emphasis on design is irrelevant to me. I like my compatability and the logical sense I find in PCs. Thus I am biased against Apple to begin with but the real issue is this: like many agnostic or atheists I know, I have been witnessed a few too many times by Mac evangelists and now I have a knee-jerk resistance to Apple.

2) It’s an eggshell player. I drop my mp3 player (Sony’s Walkman) regularly, it’s got some scratches and dents in it after just 5 months. I mostly listen to it while jogging and that means its going to take a pounding in my shirt pocket or shorts pocket or wherever. I am totally honest when I say that if I had an iPod it would crumble to dust inside two weeks with the abuse I put my mp3 player through.

3) The wheel. In most versions of the iPod they use the wheel panel. To me this is completely counter intuitive and despite using it off and on for 4 years, I still cannot get used to it. My fingers and my mind are not made for the wheel. (As a matter of fact Apple OS’s frustrate me to know end with the way their buttons are, same problem!) The Sony Walkman has a twist know left for forward, right for back, pull out and it switches playlists. Very simple at least for me.

4) Batteries. My Sony walkman can run on full volume on the battery for something like 40-50 hours. Say I listen to it about 12-15 hours a week. I only need to charge it every 3-4 and even just plugging it into the computer to add another song to it gives it another few minutes of power.

5) No advantages. The iPod can of course be used as a portable data transfer device, but so can my Sony Walkman. My walkman has 512 MB which while not in the iPod’s upperange models, was a nice buy at about $70 and it serves my needs just fine. For anything else I’ll use USB or CDs or DVDs.

6) I hate the shuffle concept. When I load music onto an mp3 player, because I am jogging or walking somewhere, I need to distract myself. I am a very visual person. If I listen to the radio and hear a song, I’m not thinking about the lyrics very often. Usually I’m getting images in my head that are personal and important to me.

That means the music I load onto my mp3 player and the order I put it in allows me to imagine a story (and indeed the story I imagined while jogging has now become a draft of a novel) and the shuffle breaks that narrative. I like the music I listen to when it’s more than the sum of its parts so the shuffle is something I rarely use except when I have the winamp open on my desktop.

So that’s why I’ll never get an iPod. It’s not a bad device though it is fragile and expensive, but it was not designed for me.

Man-Stingray Wars

Remember when Steve Irwin died?

Some time later, Australians started taking revenge on the Stingrays.

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australian authorities have urged fans of Steve Irwin not to attack stingrays after several rays were found dead since the TV naturalist was killed in a rare fatal attack by one of the normally placid animals.

Irwin, whose “Crocodile Hunter” documentaries were watched by more than 200 million people, was killed eight days ago when the serrated barb from a stingray’s tail pierced his heart.

Well apparently the stingrays have decided to fight back.

MIAMI, Florida (Reuters) — A leaping stingray stabbed an 81-year-old Florida boater in the chest, authorities said Wednesday, leaving its poisonous stinger lodged close to his heart in an incident recalling the one that killed Australian TV naturalist Steve Irwin last month.

Fire Department officials in Lighthouse Point, about 30 miles north of Miami, said James Bertakis was in a small recreational boat with two grandchildren Tuesday when the spotted eagle ray leaped aboard and struck him.

Luckily for us, the man survived the attack.

But we must remain vigilant! There’s no telling where the stingrays will strike next. Remember, they struck first by killing the Crocodile Hunter. I am calling for an anti-stingray crusade. We must vacation in Australia and battle them there so we don’t have to fight them here! That’s right, Australian getaways for everyone! If you don’t, the stingrays win!

The Real Return

I am going home for the next few days.

Expect posts dealing with partying or sleeping or studying.
Or all three.

The Return

The Strib is reporting that the Twins have exercised their $12 option on his contract. Currently I’m taking a class on contracts and we’re just learning about options. So what is an option? Well I’m not too sure because I’m not a lawyer, but here’s how I understand the theory so far: when you offer someone a contract you may include an option in that contract. When dealing with non-sports law, generally the choice to exercise the option is made so that you can prolong the timeframe that the contract is alive. Wait too long and if there is no date in the contract saying when the offer expires, it will eventally “die a natural death.” In this case the regular contract with Hunter is over but the in that contract the Twins placed an option on another year. This requires consideration and that’s why the buyout of the contract is 2.5 million. The 2.5 million is given to Hunter to compensate him for giving the Twins the choice of whether or not to keep him around another year. It’s the payment for not letting him control his destiny.

UPDATE: There is something else dealing with an option contract. There may be sham consideration or nominal consideration [Restatement (Second) of Contrats § 87 ] which is why you can buy out contracts so cheap. Technically you don’t even have to really compensate him but because of the collective bargaining agreement he gets real consideration.

Now Santana is making 12 million next year too. So what’s this all mean? Is it a good thing? A bad thing? As Twins Geek says it’s a defensible decision. Personally? Well it depends on who’s available on the open market. While in 2002 the Twins had a logjam in the outfield that is clearly over. Our current outfield prospects are mediocre at best because we’ve taken mostly low drafts the last few years preferring instead to obsessively focus on pitching (not a bad thing) and middle infielders (also not a bad idea). Outfielders are the most common of baseball players.

So what to do with Hunter now? Well he wants a multiyear deal. The problem is that Terry Ryan is not as smart as Billy Beane (Beane’s team is currently experiencing the other side of the baseball coin) because they make roughly equivalent teams only Beane pays his team about $20 million less. So a multiyear deal that takes Hunter into 2010? Well traditionally teams back-load contracts, starting low and then going up as the years go by so they can defer costs. I’m going to propose something radical. Ready? Here goes.

Front-Load the contract.
If it’s possible, guarantee him the big money up front and decrease it as the years go on. This will do a few things, while thinks will be tight next year the pressure will ease as Hunter gets older and loses his skills. That means that after 2 years (the max time I’d like him to stay a Twin) we can trade him more easily for something more than warm spit. So how about this? 9 million in 2008 and go down from there to about 6 million in 2010. That’s still some $25-30 million over 4 years. Santana will get more. He could wear hats made of money with what he’ll get after 2008, and we need to remind Torii of that but not too harshly. And that’s my take on it for now…

Current Favorite Actress: Jena Malone.

Over at Last

So it’s over. The Oakland A’s have swept the Twins right out of the playoffs. It was a fairytale season and a miracle comeback in the toughest division in baseball. But this is real life, and not all stories end happily. I won’t say they didn’t come up big when it counted because if they had lost 1 more game this year, any game, they would not be in this place, this day. They would be playing the Yankees and for at least a few more hours have life. No, what happened here is that the “piranhas” got shut down, and there was nothing for the middle of the order to bring in. I salute Johan, and Boof, and Radke, and Cuddyer, and Morneau and White. The rest? You should be ashamed of yourself. You played like you should have been contracted. Like you wanted to be contracted.

For now I want the team, every single one of them to remember this:

Brad Radke’s sacrifice and final year? You wasted it. Liriano establishing himself? You wasted it. Kirby Puckett’s year? You wasted it. Ozzie Guillen calling us Piranhas? You wasted it. The Division Crown? You wasted it. The Homefield Advantage? You wasted it. The good Karma from the stadium bill? You wasted it. That 16-2 run in June? You wasted it. That 96-66 record? You wasted it. You wasted it all, pissed it all away.

And you know what? Now you have win 95 more games to try again. Think you can do it? You’d better.

I sure hope you can! See ya next year Twins.

A/N: That’s not me, it’s a random sad girl. You should know I’m a guy by now.

Situational Blogging

So I’m sitting in the room we have our largest class in (next to two smart and snarky ladies) and the its between classes and they left the microphones on in the room. So one guy is talking and either he doesn’t realize or doesn’t care that he’s being picked up by the microphone and he’s talking and I can hear it clear as day…. and he just swore over the system.

Ah law school. When I kill time I blog.

Playoff Bound!

So it finally happened.

The Minnesota Twins have tonight assured themselves a spot in the 2006 MLB playoffs. I never would have believed it at the start of the season. To refresh your memory let’s hop in the Wayback Machine and travel to the lowpoint of the season, April 28, 29 and 30 at Comerica Park…

“The Craziest Goddamn Thing I’ve Ever Heard”

Or so says Matt Yglesias. I think I have to agree with him even if it’s not the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s in the top 5 though. Here’s the money graph:

“At this point, I think I need to bring up what one might call the Craziest Goddamn Thing I’ve Heard In a Long Time. This story came to me last week from an anonymous individual who I would say is in a position to know about such things. According to this person, the DOD has (naturally) been doing some analysis on airstrikes against Iran. The upshot of the analysis was that conventional bombardment would degrade the Iranian nuclear program by about 50 percent. By contrast, if the arsenal included small nuclear weapons, we could get up to about 80 percent destroying. In response to this, persons inside the Office of the Vice President took the view that we could use the nukes — in other words, launch an unprovoked nuclear first strike against Iran — and then simply deny that we’d done so. Detectable radiation in the area of the bombed sites would be attributed to the fact that they were, after all, nuclear facilities we’d just hit.”

Such a comforting thought…. and you know that at least 25% of the people would support it. You need to think about getting out when you’re hoping your country doesn’t launch a nuclear surprise attack.

Musings and the threat of Blogging

Does this automatically cross post at The Girls? Weird. Well anyhow I took a nap all evening so I’m up most of the night whee, start the day at 2am!. Ahem.

So did you know the first life lesson they gave us in Law School? The first that didn’t have to do with actually studying and so forth? Facebook. Either ditch it, or scrub it clean because if you don’t think firms look at sites like Facebook or MySpace then you are living in a dream world. Take the Armando Saga for instance. Aramando was a popular front page poster at DailyKos, and if you click on the Armando link you’ll go to Aramando’s goodbye post. In his own words a right wing site supported a campaign by one of the DKos commentors (the troll in his post) to find out his actual name. As a result, Armando’s job as an attorney (that’s no secret) was affected. Who is Armando? What does he do? What does he look like? Well you can find that out for yourself, I did it only took about 20 minutes on Google but then again, I knew what to look for. Let me just say this: I would be in my dream job if I share his areas of expertise when I become an attorney.