The Best Paragraph I've Read: Big League Advance uses a proprietary algorithm to project the performance and earning potential of players, in order to establish the set amount it would be willing to pay a player in exchange for each percentage point of future major league earnings that player is willing to give up.  For instance, if Big League Advance offers a minor leaguer 100,000 up front for 1% of his earnings, that player can then decide to accept 500,000 in exchange for 5% or 1 million for 10%.  A player valued as highly as Mr. Tatis could receive a couple million dollars from Big League Advance. This paragraph comes from the Wall Street Journal.  The article is titled: "An Investment Fund Mines the Diamond."  The article is written by Jared Diamond.  You can read the article here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/fernando-tatis-jr-340-million-investment-fund-padres-11613732572 Zac and Don talk about who is getting the best deal.  Besides talking about baseball players signing away part of their big league contract they also talk about the following ideas from the following articles: Bloomberg Sneakerheads Have Turned Jordans and Yeezys Into a Bona Fide Asset Class https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-sneaker-investment/ The Athletic NBA Top Shot is no joke. Could it become a crucial part of the league’s future? https://theathletic.com/2429403/2021/03/05/nba-top-shot-digital-revenue-explained/ The Digital Art of Beeple https://www.instagram.com/beeple_crap/ https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a35500985/who-is-beeple-mike-winkelmann-nft-interview/ Picture of Man Binge Watching https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/binge-watching-healthy-diversion-or-waste-time New York Times Lost Passwords Lock Millionaires Out of Their Bitcoin Fortunes https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/technology/bitcoin-passwords-wallets-fortunes.html

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The size of the problem is difficult to measure, says Penn State professor Linda Treviño, coauthor of the 2012 book Cheating in College. Part of the challenge is defining what constitutes cheating. Is it getting an answer to a homework problem from a friend, peeking at a classmate’s paper during an exam, paying someone to take a test for you, plugging in answers from Chegg? It’s also tough to get reliable information. “You’re depending on people who cheat to be honest with you about whether they cheated,” Treviño says. Her book pegs the share of college students who cheat at roughly two-thirds. Students cheat for several reasons. To get better grades so they can get into an elite law or medical school. To pass required distribution courses (engineers forced to study Shakespeare and vice-versa) that they don’t care about. To save time so they can play varsity football or work a job that pays for school and supports loved ones. And because they feel that everyone else does it, and they don’t want to be at a disadvantage if they don’t cheat too. They don’t worry about getting caught. Even more troubling, they either don’t think they’re doing anything wrong or they don’t care. This paragraph comes from Forbes.  The article is titled: "This $12 Billion Company Is Getting Rich Off Students Cheating Their Way Through Covid."  The article is written by Susan Adams.  You can read the article here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2021/01/28/this-12-billion-company-is-getting-rich-off-students-cheating-their-way-through-covid/?sh=17ea5baa363f Zac and Don talk about cheating in college and in public school.  They discuss whether cheating is an indication of bad test design and instruction.  They also wonder if cheating is a big deal anymore in society. Zac and Don also mention the following books in the podcast: The Case Against Education  https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/dp/0691196451/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1614555061&sr=8-1 Race Against the Machine  https://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-Machine-Accelerating-Productivity-ebook/dp/B005WTR4ZI

The Best Paragraph I've Read: For our first case, the moderator projected a picture of a smiling girl in a yearbook photo, with a cartoon thought bubble that read “Kill All Men.” Facebook had removed the post for violating its hate-speech rules, which ban attacks based on “sex, gender identity.” To many, this seemed simplistic. “It’s a joke,” one woman said. “There has to be an exception for humor.” Facebook’s rules did include a humor exception, for instances in which the user’s intent was clear, but it was difficult to discern this person’s motivation, and attendees worried that a broad carve-out for jokes could easily provide cover for hate speech. Carmen Scurato, who works at Free Press, an Internet-advocacy organization, pointed out the historical disadvantage of women, and argued that hate-speech policies ought to take power dynamics into account. In the end, the group voted to restore the photo, though no one knew exactly how to write that into a rule. This kind of muddy uncertainty seemed inevitable. The board has jurisdiction over every Facebook user in the world, but intuitions about freedom of speech vary dramatically across political and cultural divides. In Hong Kong, where the pro-democracy movement has used social media to organize protests, activists rely on Facebook’s free-expression principles for protection against the state. In Myanmar, where hate speech has contributed to a genocide against the Rohingya, advocates have begged for stricter enforcement. Facebook had hoped, through the workshops, to crowdsource beliefs about speech, but the results were more contradictory than anticipated. In New York, for example, sixty per cent of people voted to reinstate the “Kill All Men” post, but only forty per cent did so in Nairobi. Amid other theories,... “Where countries are perhaps more concerned about safety, because they live in an area with less rule of law—and therefore there’s a chance of a group actually maybe trying to kill all men—there’s less concern about free speech.” The full explanation is likely more complex; regardless, the divergent results underscored the difficulty of creating a global court for the Internet. This paragraph comes from the New Yorker.  The article is titled: "Inside the Making of Facebook's Supreme Court."  The article is written by Kate Klonick.  You can read the article here: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/inside-the-making-of-facebooks-supreme-court Zac and Don discuss if there is merit in having a company appointed court that decides issues of speech on Facebook.  They discuss the difficult questions that the court will have to rule on.  They also talk about the best way to decide who is on the court.

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The International Olympic Committee's pursuit of urban events to lure a younger audience saw street dance battles officially added to the medal events program at the 2024 Paris Games.  Also confirmed for Paris by the IOC executive board were skateboarding, sport climbing, and surfing. Those three sports will make their Olympic debuts at the Tokyo Games which were postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic by one year to open on July 23, 2021.  Alongside the additions, the IOC made subtractions: The slate of 329 medal events in Paris is 10 fewer than in Tokyo, including four lost from weightlifting, and the athlete quota in 2024 of 10,500 is around 600 less than next year. Two sports with troubled governing bodies -- boxing and weightlifting -- saw the biggest cuts to the number of athletes they can have in Paris. This paragraph comes from ESPN.  The article is written by the Associated Press.  You can read the article here: https://www.espn.com/olympics/story/_/id/30470282/breakdancing-gets-olympic-status-debut-paris-games-2024 Zac and Don discuss the new Olympic Sports and whether it is a good idea to add them.  They also discuss the Olympics and how the event is seen today. Another Best Paragraph I've Read: Tug of War was an Olympic sport from 1900-1920. Check it out. How have they NOT brought this back? The strategic considerations are endless — and probably meaningless. I’m pretty convinced that virtually no insight or understanding is even remotely necessary to form an opinion about Tug of War. In other words: this is perfect for sports/entertainment media. Threshold decision — do you form a national team from scratch or draw from your country’s Olympic delegation, with Tug of War held just before the closing ceremonies? Finally, I would like to see a throwback USA-USSR match. For whatever reason, the IOC decided to dump Tug of War in 1920, just as the Bolsheviks were consolidating their grip on power in Russia, depriving the world of decades of American-Soviet matches that would have made the Cuban missile crisis look like an episode of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire. At the very least, there wouldn’t be any boycotting. The 1980 hockey team is a footnote if, also that year, the Americans had gone to Moscow and beat the Soviets at Tug of War — on their own commie soil. There’s just no way you boycott when Tug of War is on the program. Put simply — the absence of Tug of War for the past century might very well be one of the greatest travesties in Olympic history. Easy as it may be to hang your national pride on the performance of a bunch of pre-teen gymnasts once every four years, there is nothing more fundamental to national identity as Tug of War. This paragraph comes from a Mailbag Question on the Bill Simmons blog.  You can read the question and response here: https://havechanged.blogspot.com/2012/08/bring-back-tug-of-war.html Zac and Don discuss whether it is a good idea to bring Tug of War back to the Olympics.  

The Best Paragraph I've Read: In the past decade or so, genetic engineering has undergone its own transformation, thanks to CRISPR—shorthand for a suite of techniques, mostly borrowed from bacteria, that make it vastly easier for biohackers and researchers to manipulate DNA.  Crispr allows its users to snip a stretch of DNA and then either disable the affected sequence or replace it with a new one. The possibilities that follow are pretty much endless. Jennifer Doudna, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the developers of crispr, has put it like this: we now have “a way to rewrite the very molecules of life any way we wish.” With crispr, biologists have already created—among many, many other living things—ants that can’t smell, beagles that put on superhero-like brawn, pigs that resist swine fever, macaques that suffer from sleep disorders, coffee beans that contain no caffeine, salmon that don’t lay eggs, mice that don’t get fat... ... ... This paragraph comes from The New Yorker in an article titled: "CRISPR And The Splice To Survive."  The article is written by Elizabeth Kolbert. You can read the article here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/18/crispr-and-the-splice-to-survive Zac and Don talk about CRISPR technology and whether humans should consider using it more or less. Another Best Paragraph I've Read: Around the world, climate change is becoming an epochal crisis, a nightmare of drought, desertification, flooding and unbearable heat, threatening to make vast regions less habitable and drive the greatest migration of refugees in history. But for a few nations, climate change will present an unparalleled opportunity, as the planet’s coldest regions become more temperate... ... ...  And no country may be better positioned to capitalize on climate change than Russia... ... ... This paragraph comes from an article at ProPublica titled: "The Big Thaw: How Russia Could Dominate A Warming World."  The article is written by Abrahm Lustgarten.  You can read the article here: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-big-thaw-how-russia-could-dominate-a-warming-world Zac and Don discuss whether America should be concerned with Russia benefiting from global climate change. Another Best Paragraph I've Read: The tragedy of the time horizon.  Meaning we can't imagine the suffering of the people of the future, so nothing much gets done on their behalf.  What we do now creates damage that hits decades later, so we don't charge ourselves for it, and the standard approach has been that future generations will be richer and stronger than us, and they'll find solutions to their problems.  But by the time they get here, these problems will have become too big to solve.  That's the tragedy of the time horizon, that we don't look more than a few years ahead... ... ... This paragraph comes from the book: "The Ministry For The Future."  The book is written by Kim Stanley Robinson.  You can buy the book here: Zac and Don discuss the merits of a carbon coin and if the idea can help solve climate change.

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Meaningful work” is an expression that had barely appeared in the English language before the early nineteen-seventies... “Once upon a time, it was assumed, to put it bluntly, that work sucked...”  That started to change in the nineteen-seventies, both McCallum and Jaffe argue, when managers began informing workers that they should expect to discover life’s purpose in work. “With dollar-compensation no longer the overwhelmingly most important factor in job motivation,” the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange wrote, “management must develop a better understanding of the more elusive, less tangible factors that add up to ‘job satisfaction.’ ” After a while, everyone was supposed to love work. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” popped up all over the place in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, along with the unpaid internship, the busting of unions, and campaigns to cut taxes on capital gains. It soon became, in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, a catechism. “The only way to do great work is to love what you do,” Steve Jobs told a graduating class at Stanford in 2005. “If you love what you’re doing, it’s not ‘work,’ ” David M. Rubenstein, a C.E.O. of the Carlyle Group, said on CNBC in 2014. “Everywhere you look you hear people talking about meaning,” a disillusioned Google engineer told McCallum. “They aren’t philosophers. They aren’t psychologists. They sell banner ads.” It’s not pointless. But it’s not poetry. Still, does it have to be? This paragraph comes from the New Yorker.  The article is written by Jill Lepore and is titled: "What Wrong With the Way We Work."  You can read the article here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/18/whats-wrong-with-the-way-we-work Zac and Don talk about work.  Should we have to love our jobs?  is it true that if you love what you do you'll never work a day in your life? The following book are mentioned during the podcast: Drive https://www.amazon.com/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivates/dp/1594488843/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1612312910&sr=8-2 The Last Train to Zona Verde https://www.amazon.com/Last-Train-Zona-Verde-Ultimate-ebook/dp/B008P94QDA/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+last+train+to+zona+verde&qid=1612312940&sr=8-1 My Losing Season https://www.amazon.com/Pat-Conroy-Losing-Season-Hardcover/dp/B01FMW1XRY/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=my+losing+season&qid=1612312954&sr=8-2

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The day after New Year’s, John Reichert of Boulder, Colo., had a heated argument with his 14-year-old son, James. “I’ve failed you as a father,” he told the boy despairingly. During the long months of lockdowns and shuttered schools, Mr. Reichert, like many parents, overlooked the vastly increasing time that his son was spending on video games and social media. Now, James, who used to focus his free time on mountain biking and playing basketball, devotes nearly all of his leisure hours — about 40 a week — to Xbox and his phone. During their argument, he pleaded with his father not to restrict access, calling his phone his “whole life.” “That was the tipping point. His whole life?” said Mr. Reichert, a technical administrator in the local sheriff’s office. “I’m not losing my son to this.” This paragraph comes from the New York Times.  The article is titled: "Children's Screen Time Has Soared in the Pandemic, Alarming Parents and Researchers."  The article is written by Matt Richtel.  You can read the article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/16/health/covid-kids-tech-use.html Zac and Don talk about the rise of screen time that they have seen in their own lives and in their classrooms.  They talk about whether too much screen time is a bad thing.   Zac and Don also reference the following article and books: The Guardian: "Video games have replaced music as the most important aspect of youth culture" https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/11/video-games-music-youth-culture Book: Ready Player One https://www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-Cline/dp/0307887448/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=ready+player+one&qid=1611706186&sr=8-4 Book: What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. https://www.amazon.com/Video-Games-Learning-Literacy-Second/dp/1403984530/ref=sr_1_1?crid=12WUGT86BXOBC&dchild=1&keywords=what+video+games+have+to+teach+us+about+learning+and+literacy&qid=1611706424&sprefix=what+video+%2Caps%2C183&sr=8-1

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Last week, many asked whether the assault on the Capitol, fueled by Trump and his many political and media enablers, was the start of something or an end.  It is neither, of course. It is a moment when we each get to decide how we want to proceed." This paragraph comes from Ken Burns who made a guest appearance on Politico's Playbook.  The paragraph and more can be read here: https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2021/01/12/americas-fourth-great-crisis-491367 To discuss America's current political issues Zac and Don have reformed the Government Teacher Roundtable.  They are joined by their Government Teacher friends Kevin and Tom.  The four educators share thoughts on the recent capital riots, the presidential transition, social media bans, the world's opinion of America, and what we may see with the new administration.    The following are other articles and books that are quoted during the discussion: "The decision Friday night by Twitter to permanently ban Trump from its platform is a signal moment — a historic move, even before we know the consequences that will flow from it." https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/09/trump-twitter-are-you-sure-456794 "The problem is that something is too obviously wrong. Too many diplomats and politicians on this side of the Atlantic now believe that the U.S. is simply too divided to stand alone in the world for much longer. It is too riven and aggrieved, shorn of a unifying cause. Oddly, the weirdness of the moment normalizes America. It is becoming just another country, richer and more powerful than the rest, but less so than it was. So is this how greatness ends—not with a bang, but by being sullied and made normal?" https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/01/donald-trump-us-capitol-europe/617584/ "Political donations, especially the $5 or $10 hits on ActBlue or WinRed, make “you feel good about yourself. It takes five seconds. And you feel like your identity is that you’re the good guys, you’re smart, and the other side is evil and stupid,” Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts University, told me. This is what politics has become in America: not a means to implement policy goals or improve people’s lives, but an expression of hatred for the other side." https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/money-spent-georgia-senate-runoffs/617545/ Book: Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity: Mason, Lilliana: 9780226524542: Amazon.com: Books

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "People in many countries are longing for the good old days. When asked if life in their country is better or worse today than 50 years ago, 31% of Britons, 41% of Americans and 46% of the French say it’s worse. Psychologists say that this kind of nostalgia is natural and sometimes even useful: Anchoring our identity in the past helps give us a sense of stability and predictability. For individuals, nostalgia is especially common when we experience rapid transitions like puberty, retirement or moving to a new country. Similarly, collective nostalgia—a longing for the good old days when life was simpler and people behaved better—can also be a source of communal strength in difficult times.  But when exactly were the good old days?" This paragraph comes from an article in the Wall Street Journal titled: "Why We Can't Stop Longing for the Good Old Days."  The article is written by Johan Norberg.  The article can be read here: https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/why-cant-stop-longing-for-good-old-days Zac and Don discuss if there ever was a better time to be alive.  They also discuss the power that nostalgia has on our lives.   Zac and Don mention the following:   Thomas Cole's Voyage of Life Paintings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voyage_of_Life Voltaire's book Candide: https://www.amazon.com/Candide-Voltaire/dp/1087113490/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=candide&qid=1610451442&sr=8-1

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Experimental studies support the idea of a ‘successful’ dark personality, but only up to a point. One study found that people with psychopathic personality traits win more points on a negotiation task where they are required to compete with a partner, but fewer points on a task that involves cooperation. Those with dark traits are more likely to ‘defect’ in the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma task – an approach that means maximising your own outcome while duping the other participant. But their success in the real world is questionable. In corporate settings, those with dark personality traits are slightly more likely to emerge as leaders and are seen as charismatic but, when it comes to getting the job done, they tend to achieve less and are considered poor team players. Our recent study also found that political figures with dark personality traits are more likely to get elected and hold their positions, but other studies show that they are much poorer at getting legislation passed. Hedge fund managers with these traits generally obtain significantly lower financial returns on the investment funds they manage. Overall, individuals with dark traits engage in more counterproductive work behaviour, such as theft and abusive supervision. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they don’t end up with higher average incomes than their peers with light personalities." This paragraph comes from an article on the website Psyche.  The article is titled: "Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed."  The article is written by Craig Neumann and Scott Barry Kaufman.  The article can be read here: https://psyche.co/ideas/are-people-with-dark-personality-traits-more-likely-to-succeed Zac and Don discuss how light and dark personalities impact people.  They talk about whether people with dark personalities can get ahead in life.  They talk about whether schools should test students for the color of their personality.  They also discuss the results that they each received after taking the personality quiz.  You can take the Light and Dark Personality Quiz Here: https://scottbarrykaufman.com/lighttriadscale/