Jon Huntsman attacks China’s One Child policy, saying it causes instability and sex trafficking. It’s interesting how, a couple of years ago I completely misread Huntsman. When he took the China Ambassadorship, I assumed that it meant two things: (1) He had decided not to run for president, which he had already been considering at the time, and (2) he was, in essence, cashing out. An ambassadorship to China can be very lucrative in the long run, especially to someone who speaks Chinese. And yet, here he is running against Obama and potentially burning his bridge to China.

I have to wonder if there’s something more going on in the Romney/Huntsman rivalry than mere political positioning. Huntsman has to know that he’s not going to get the nomination by picking off Romney support. Both come from very old and established Mormon families. Perhaps the writer in me likes to think that it’s a War of the Roses sort of thing, where Huntsman’s quest isn’t quixotic so much as a good Hatfield trying to settle some old score with a McCoy. The town of Phillippi in Delosa had this dynamic. You had two patriarchs (both white, conservative-ish Democrats) who repeatedly traded the mayorship every 4 or 8 years for about twenty or so years. One of them died and the the other moved on to another elected position (becoming a Republican in the process), but even after all of that each of the families continued to recruit people (sometimes family members, sometimes outsiders) to run so that there was always a Hatfield candidate and a McCoy candidate. You always know who won because they would rename the Phillippi Fairgrounds whenever they took office to either the Hatfield Fairgrounds (he founded it) or Phillippi Fairgrounds (to prevent Hatfield credit for getting it done).

For David Alexander: High-speed rail lines rarely pay their way. Britain’s government should ditch its plan to build one.

As amazing as it sounds, we may already be losing the housing surplus. Meanwhile, homes in Baltimore are selling for $10,000 and less.

California prisons are isolating inmates for years at a time. The deleterious effects are hard to fully state. It’s not hard to make the case that this is a passive form of torture.

It’s commonly argued that high-stakes testing is killing arts and music programs. It really doesn’t appear to be the case outside of isolated incidents and Arizona. The Redstone district has a music and an art teacher with weekly classes for each. That’s exactly what I had. The main difference: We had PE daily. They get it once or twice a week.

Statistics on country music (references to mama, booze, etc.). One of the odd things about country music, the “conservative” genre, is how often men cry about being women and women cry about being strong.

A while back, Conor Friedersdorf explored why the media has been paying so much attention to Huntsman and so little attention to the likes of Ron Paul and Gary Johnson, given their respective poll numbers. I would dispute that the media hasn’t been paying attention to Ron Paul. More like, the media simply isn’t taking him seriously, compared even to Michelle Bachmann whose chances of winning the presidency were always roughly the same (roughly 0%). Now Gary Johnson they are ignoring. Why? I think Friedersdorf is right that Huntsman tells the media what they want to hear, but I think it goes beyond that. Huntsman fits a John Anderson mold. Bachmann fits the new Tea Party mold. Johnson and, to a lesser extent Ron Paul, don’t fit the recognizable pattern. So they treat the former like he doesn’t exist and the latter like a Lyndon LaRouche who simply polls better.

Misconceptions about war.

According to a study, criminals are not so forward-thinking as to consider the punishment for their crimes:

The findings suggest that 76% of active criminals and 89% of the most violent criminals either perceive no risk of apprehension or are incognizant of the likely punishments for their crimes.

Of course, you could look at that the other way: Punishment acts as a deterrent for nearly a quarter of criminals and over a tenth of the most violent criminals. Of course, to really get their attention, the level of punishment may be such that it would be unconscionable. In any case, I find the lead-in to this to be problematic:

The tenet that harsher penalties could substantially reduce crime rates rests on the assumption that currently active criminals weigh the costs and benefits of their contemplated acts. Existing and proposed crime strategies exhibit this belief, as does a large and growing segment of the crime literature.

Actually, it can just as easily rest on the notion that a criminal in jail isn’t committing crimes against the general public while in jail. I’m not saying that I agree with this, but it’s there. As some proponents of the death penalty are inclined to point out, the only way to make sure that someone never murders again is if they are dead. It’s one of the reasons why death penalty opponents should vigorously support real life with possibility of parole sentencing.

As most of you know, I am a critic of the iPhone. Truth be told, though, if you say that the iPhone is the best smartphone on the market, I won’t entirely disagree. The question, of course, is “best for whom?” For people that want a phone of its type (simple, tightly integrated design, thin, no keyboard, outstanding app selection), it is far and away the best. But that’s sort of giving it a heck of a home field advantage. Tim Lee sums up my thoughts better than I have yet to be able to:

A good way to visualize this is by thinking of a computing platform as a funnel. At the narrow end of the funnel is a human user with an extremely limited capacity for absorbing information. At the fat end of the funnel is “the world”—the collection of websites, devices, people, organizations, or other entities with which the user might wish to exchange information. The job of a computing platform is to connect the two—to filter and organize the vast amounts of information at the fat end of the funnel into a form that is digestible by the user at the skinny end. {…}

This explains why iOS has been losing ground to Android even though most people agree that the iPhone is the best single smartphone on the market. There are tens of millions of people who care most about the narrow end of the funnel. They want the best user interface, and are willing to make compromises on other fronts to get it. Most of these customers will opt for an iPhone. But there are hundreds of millions of customers who care more about some other factor. They want a phone from their favorite carrier, a phone with a physical keyboard or a removable battery, a phone with their choice of app store, a phone they can get for free with a contract, a phone they can get with a pre-paid plan, etc. No single phone (wireless carrier, hardware manufacturer, etc) can satisfy all of these diverse customers. Only a platform designed to support many different phones from many different manufacturers on many different networks can cope with this kind of diversity.

Armed & Dangerous talks about the success that Android has been having:

More interesting, perhaps, is what is not happening in the latest figures. Tragically for the contrarians, it is Apple’s U.S market-share growth rather than Android’s that has stalled. Android share growth continues to bucket along at about 2% a month, while Apple’s shows no increase in the latest figures.

The future is another country, of course, but right now it looks like those of us who thought that multicarrier iPhone was going to be largely unable to fix Apple’s long-term positioning problem were correct. The iPhone’s market isn’t exactly saturated in the normal sense, but sales volumes are only growing as fast as the smartphone userbase as a whole; the multicarrier ‘breakout’ only netted Apple about a 1% competitive gain, and that gain now appears to be over.

Apple is now relying on smartphones for 68% of revenue, so they’d be very vulnerable to an actual drop in marketshare. I’ve taken a lot of flak for saying the company looks like a late-stage sustainer with a principal product line about to experience disruptive collapse, but this is yet another straw in the wind. If next month’s figures show an actual share drop, expect it to be self-reinforcing and get the hell out of Apple stock.

It sounds ominous to talk about how much of Apple’s revenue comes from smartphones. That could just as easily be pointing out the other thing: Apple is actually making money from its smartphones.

There are a lot of questions as to why Google has taken it upon itself to purchase Motorola. Here is Farhad Manjoo’s take:

That’s why I’m betting that this deal will represent a turning point in how Google operates Android. Today, the platform is “open” but chaotic—because phone-makers get the software for free and can do whatever they want with it, Android is available on some good phones as well as lots and lots of cheap, bad ones. In the aftermath of this deal, Google will seek to exert greater influence over hardware companies. Eventually, the deal will help reduce the number of new Android devices that are released every year, and the few that are released will be of generally higher quality—and sell for higher prices—than what we see in the Android device market today.

This won’t happen overnight. Indeed, in a conference call announcing the deal, Google executives argued that the huge purchase won’t change anything about Android. The Motorola division will run as a separate entity within Google. This arrangement is meant to reduce Motorola’s ability to get preferential access to Android over other handset makers that use the OS. This is a signal that at Google, “openness” is still the ideal.

My hope is that Google’s main plan is to create a flagship product. That there are many products and designs that carry different versions of Android is not as much a problem as the fact that there is no real central design that they are all drifting from. If Google can create a serious of flagship products, it would be in the best interest of Samsung and others to fly relatively close to the formation so that the Android apps created for the Flagship will work on their product. Motorola is one of the big makers of Android phones, and with direct ownership over the product, it’s possible that they can be central enough to get the others to “fly right.” That’s my hope anyway.

It also allows them the opportunity to actually make money with their product.

The big news with Apple is, of course, the departure (and likely imminent death) of Steve Jobs. Not being an Apple guy, I don’t have much to say about it other than that I wish the best for him. Despite my disagreements with the direction he took it, he did make everyone take smartphones seriously. Before him, there was serious resistance on the part of carriers because they couldn’t control a smartphone the way that they could control feature phones where ringtones and apps could be required to come from the company store. Jobs didn’t do me any favors, since I was perfectly willing to seek out a product that not everyone else was using, and preferred the niche devices over the standard that Jobs set. But… he introduced smartphoning to a whole lot of people.

However, even though I am not a Mac user and an iPhone user, there was one thing that he did that I loved. One of his “failed” ventures was a company called NeXT, which worked on OSes. In addition to kind of setting up their own shop, they created a front-end shell for Windows 3.1, which was the first Windows operating system that I ever used. Windows 3.1 relied on Program Manager, which was as user unfriendly as it was inflexible. NeXT made Windows 3.1 really easy to use and set the standard for how I would later customize Windows 95 and beyond.

Turkey is going to compensate victims of religious persecution.

The Pac-12 retroactively changed the score of the USC-Utah game after reviewing the game-ending penalty. I do not approve. Neither do the bookies, I would wager, since the points put USC covering the spread.

Linux is mastering Wall Street. I still don’t use it, but nonetheless, this is cool.

It’s important to note that in a recession that decimated male employment where women were hit the hardest. Otherwise, we might get the idea that sometimes men get the short end of the stick. More seriously, I don’t find it surprising that women were disproportionately laid off from the financial sector. For whatever reasons (and I can think of some involving sexism and some not involving sexism), they are more likely to hold the ancillary positions. It’s commonly said that HR and marketing are the first jobs to go.

Acts of God and Insurance. One of the novel ideas floating around my head (based on something some friends and I have already produced) involves a storyline about insurance adjusters whose job leads them to stumble upon the coming of the Endtimes.

If raising mileage standards is the second-best solution to cutting emissions, it’s a pretty distant second. It completely overlooks distance traveled. It does no good to subsidize high-mileage cars if it allows people to have longer commutes without paying more.

An interesting comparison between medical practice in the US and Canada.

How for-profit colleges can save themselves and higher education. It’s really quite unfortunate that the student loan system resulted in a bunch of for-profit colleges with little or no incentive to bring costs down. That was always the biggest potential contribution that they could make. And a respectful article from The New Republic on Rick Perry’s education vision. There is an exactly 0% chance that anyone on Hit Coffee will actively endorse Rick Perry, but it’s worthwhile to point out when he is right about something that nobody but him is really talking about.

I don’t know what’s cooler, that a 61 year old Vietnam Vet has become the oldest kicker in college football, or that the dude’s name is Alan Moore. I’ll go with the former, even if it is NAIA. Kicker is indeed a unique position.

A look at divorce and China.

My main thought, upon watching the last episode of last season of the office was: Let it be James Spader! Let it be James Spader! Sweet Lawrd above, let it be James Spader! Now granted, I am a Spader fan from his appearances on The Practice and Boston Legal, so I was anything but biased. But even with that, his character was just awesome. Ray Ramone’s was good, too. I didn’t like that British woman. But James Spader’s character was amazing.

But I knew it wouldn’t be James Spader. Everything appeared to be falling in place for it to go to Edd Helms’s character, Andy Bernard. It was the natural extension of things. Helms had recently broken the barrier to being on the opening montage. They’d already gone there with Jim and Dwight. The only other candidate was Darryl, and the way the episode shook out they explained why the qualified black guy wouldn’t get the job. It was his turn, so to speak. But not only was Spader’s character more interesting from the viewer standpoint, he was also by far the best candidate that they interviewed in the show.

So imagine my surprise when it did go to Spader! Sort of. Spader is going to be a regular guest star, having gotten the job and immediately been promoted to CEO. I assume that Andy gets the Office Manager job, thus making me part-right and part-wrong.

The only really disappointing thing about Spader’s character is his name: Rob California. Even though the pretext of it being a documentary is laughable, one of the things the show has done up to this point was giving us real, if exaggerated characters. With real names. Michael Scott. Jim Halpert. Andy Bernard. While some works of fiction go out of their way to have “interesting” names, The name “California” sticks out like a sore thumb. More than D’Angelo Vickers did.

As most of you (who care) know, Two And a Half Men is replacing Charlie Sheen with Ashton Kutcher. I commented before that they could not have asked for a better drop-off point than they had. Charlie Harper and long-time obsessor-neighbor Rose were going off to New York (or was it France?) together. All they had to do was leave it at that. Charlie’s gone, kept in some sort of bunker with Rose, who won’t let him leave out of fear of what her non-existent, obsessive husband Manny Quinn might do.

But no. Instead, they’re killing off Charlie Harper. This strikes me as a matter of Chuck Lorre simply being spiteful at the expense of the story. The buying of the house could just as easily be done due to creditors going after Charlie’s assets after his disappearance. And it would have been a more fliud story, with what happens next following what happened previously.

So, color me disappointed. It’s gone from a show that was going to be high on my list by the curiosity factor alone, to one that’s going to be as low on my list for the next season as it was for the previous.

What English sounds like to non-English speakers. I have to say, I think they do a pretty good job with it.

A young lady was caught taking a goat out for a late-night walk. She should have said that they were out picking up litter.

I thought AT&T’s tiered data plan was one of the coolest things that any of the major carriers have done lately. So it’s disappointing that they’re being so uncool when it comes to texting by taking the opposite tactic (no more tiers, either unlimited or per-use fees, both of which are exorbitant).

A drunk moose was found in/on a tree. Article includes picture.

Doctors-in-training are experiencing widespread burnout. Which is, of course, historically a goal of the whole hazing process. One of the unfortunate aspects of all of this is that it unleashes a bunch of doctors who have sacrificed obscene amounts to get where they are and by-gawd are going to make as much money as they can. Not all doctors, of course. Maybe or maybe not most. But the temptation is there.

As news breaks that Apple has lost another iPhone, some people are wondering why phones are tested “in the wild.” Mindstorm did this when I worked for them, though they ultimately made a hash of it. They made everybody use their own SIM card. That meant for those that didn’t have a SIM card, they couldn’t test it. And people limited usage to whatever their plan was since it was on their dime. Developers and testers at Mindstorm are actually cheap bastards. This hurt the test lab, too, because much of my testing involved two phones and I would have to borrow someone else’s SIM card to run the test. During which, they couldn’t use their phone. By and large, I found Mindstorm to be a surprisingly well-run operation, considering my experiences with their end-product, but this one really threw me for a loop. Counterproductive cost-cutting in the extreme.

The death of free checking. Critics of Obama’s Credit CARD Act point to this sort of thing as proof that it was a bad idea. As mentioned before, I disagree. As Salmon points out, free checking was never free. It was just covered by some dope who lost track of how much he had in the bank.

According to Investor’s Business Daily, the Green Jobs revolution is being clogged by Davis-Bacon, the government contracting wage regime. The IBD is not an unbiased source, but it’s a point I’ve seen made elsewhere that I find convincing: The more posh you make government jobs, the harder it is to ramp up hiring. In this case, the same goes for government contracts.

Mental health experts psychoanalyze Batman villains..

Ramesh Ponnuru makes the argument for sales-state-side sales taxes for interstate commerce:

A far better solution would be for states to levy sales taxes based on where products are coming from rather than on where they’re going — or for Congress to tell them to do so. Under an origin-based tax rather than a destination-based tax, for example, Washington state would have the power to tax Amazon.com’s sales. For physical stores, sales taxes would keep being collected as before.

The immediate problem with this is obvious: Shipping centers (and/or corporate headquarters) would all relocate to states with no sales tax. Pannuru notes this, and actually approves.

This would be a much simpler tax system with lower compliance costs. It would tend to constrain sales taxes by increasing competition among the states: A state that raised its rates too high would induce businesses, particularly catalog or Internet businesses that can sell remotely, to locate elsewhere.

Anti-tax fetishes aside, does this really promote good tax policy?

The answer is… partly, depending on your point of view. But ultimately, at least from my perspective, no.

By and large, those like Ponnuru that favor lower taxes would welcome more states either lowering the state sales taxes or eliminating them altogether. Typically speaking, the more revenue streams a state has, the more taxes it will ultimately collect. While you might think that, for instance, states with a state income tax would have low sales taxes, but it isn’t necessarily the case that they get you here if they don’t get you there. There are differences between how much each state brings in, and it’s the states that do not have one form of tax or another that tend to tax the least, in the overall. This is true of conservative-leaning states like Texas and Tennessee, but also liberal-leaning states like Washington and Oregon.

Having said that, some states have sales taxes with no income tax, and some states have income tax with no sales tax. So the question should be asked: should we be rewarding one over the other? And if so, which one?

Ponnuru is a conservative, so you would think that he would favor the sales tax over the income tax. The sales tax is broadly more regressive. The income tax provides very specific opportunities to, as Ponnuru might see it, “stick it to the rich.”

From a practical standpoint, though, I really prefer state sales taxes and property taxes over income taxes. Most notably because the federal government already collects a pretty hefty income tax. So while a sales tax might go from 0% to 7%, a state income tax is raising overall levels of taxation from what might already be 25%. In other words, the income tax hurts a specific activity more, while the sales tax targets another that is untouched at the federal level.

In the greater scheme of things, perhaps this should matter since a state government that spends 10% of its state’s GDP is going to get its money anyway. But each of the taxes target a particular activity, and there are questions about whether or not you want to target any specific activity too much. An excessively high property tax, for example, encourages people to buy or rent smaller housing accommodations. Sales taxes encourage people to buy things outside of the sales tax zone (as it pertains to Ponnuru’s idea, to buy from online companies based out of Oregon or Montana). Income taxes can discourage second household jobs, working overtime, or taking on additional responsibilities for additional pay that they will be seeing less of.

While there are arguments to avoid balancing taxes too much, as that can simply lead to higher overall taxation (not necessarily a bad thing, but it certainly is in Ponnuru’s worldview), if we’re going to focus state revenue on only one or two of the streams, I don’t see any particular reason why we should favor the income tax over the sales tax (except progressivity, but you can account for that with the property tax).

So if Ponnuru’s policy were to be enacted, the end result is that states like Washington which have high sales taxes and no income tax would become states like Oregon. And while Oregon might be preferable to California for its overall legel of taxation, it seems far from clear to me that the Oregon model is preferable to the Washington model and should be rewarded for it.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban was last known in the college football world for trying to set up a playoff system. He certainly had the populist (albeit wrong) side of that argument. However, his latest on conference realignment represents a tremendous misunderstanding of how college football scheduling and television works, as well as a curious misunderstanding of basic mathematics. I know that we’re all supposed to bow before his fly-by-the-pants wisdom, but I can barely get past his “problems” to get to the justification of his solution. Taking the problems in order:

1. More schools will NOT mean more TV money. … Maybe the SEC has an escalator in their contract that increases the total value of the TV contract, but I’m guessing that it still will result in a reduction in the dollars paid to each school when compared to the amount paid had an additional school not joined the conference.

Either the SEC has an escalator or they believe that the temporary losses outweigh what they will get when it comes time for renegotiation. It doesn’t take a “guess” for this to be the case. We can be relatively certain of this because of what the SEC is doing. They are throwing themselves into uncertainty for a midling-performance Big 12 school in a media-rich state. I am more inclined to believe that they know what their contract states and if it meant losing money, they wouldn’t do it. I’m not one of those people that believes it is “all about the money,” but in this case there is little reason to do what they are doing except for the money. They don’t need expansion. They don’t need A&M’s performance. They are doing this because it improves their situation. Could they be wrong about that? Sure. But not in the obvious way that Cuban suggests. I suspect that they have covered that angle.

2. Fans will hate the scheduling impact … I’m guessing that the only way to get all those games through a single TV network partner is to start very, very early or to go very very late. … Which is exactly why the big networks are very supportive of the Super Conferences. They know they will be able to force matchups OFF of tv and on to internet based broadcasts.

This is where mathematics comes into play. Between the major conferences, there are (or will be, next season) 68 BCS teams of note (counting TCU, which enters the Big East next year, and Notre Dame). Depending on how everything unfolds, there is likely to be roughly…. 68 BCS teams of note when all is said and done. Maybe more (if a couple more teams get brought in to round out a BE+B12 merger) or maybe less (if a couple of teams get left out and have to go down to the likes of the MAC or Conference USA). Cuban overlooks something very basic here… the demise of the Big 12 (as we know it) will leave a huge, gaping hole in college football scheduling. One to easily be filled by the slightly larger conferences elsewhere.

3. Say Goodbye to Cupcake Football Games … With every school added to a conference they are going to have to remove a cupcake to make room on their schedule. Coaches are going to HATE this. Of course the smaller schools are going to lose their pay day as well.

Nonsense. This assumes that every team within a conference must play every other team within a conference. We already know this isn’t true because it’s already not the case. Conferences limit themselves to 8 or 9 conference even when they have ten or more teams. The same would apply if they went to 16. The only difference is that, in a Pac-16, almost all of the games would be intra-division. The old Pac-8 would spend seven games against fellow old Pac-8 members, and then one or two against eastern division teams. This isn’t rocket science. It’s already happening.

4. Goodbye Geographic Rivalry Games I don’t care how good a game OU vs Oregon could hypothetically be, fans from both sides are going to second guess the economics of going to the games. And if it’s an off-year for either team, then what ?

As I said above, Oregon would spend over three quarters of its conference games against old Pac-8 rivals. Only one or two of the opponents would be outside the Pacific time zone and teams that they have not been playing for decades. He’s not quite as far off the mark here, though, as you will have teams in Arizona and Oklahoma in the same division. But Oklahoma would be in a division with four former conference rivals in addition to the three in Arizona and Utah. I think they can live with that. The losers in this arrangement are actually Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah, who would be cut off from their California ties. I am actually genuinely curious why these three, in addition to Colorado (who was in a losing situation in the Big 12 and would not benefit from a B12-like situation) and Stanford (who can’t be salivating at the likes of being conference-mates with Oklahoma State and Texas Tech), would go for this. My guess is, contra #1, there is a lot of money at stake.

As for his A&M example, it’s true that they are switching out a number of Oklahoma and Texas schools in favor of southeastern, but it’s not like Louisiana is Pennsylvania. They are an outlying team, but the state borders two SEC states and Arkansas, which he also cites as a team out of its geographical depth, borders three (four if Texas A&M joins). But, apparently A&M feels as though its current conference arrangement has left it overshadowed by schools that are too similar and being in the SEC would give them a way to separate themselves from the pack. This is not exactly an unusual attitude, as Florida allegedly is less than enthusiastic about letting Florida State join because being in the SEC is a competitive advantage for UF. Separating yourself from in-state rivals is pretty common. Twenty years ago, A&M and Texas were both in a conference that was almost entirely in-state. It didn’t work out.

5. Big Dogs Hate Becoming Little Dogs In a huge conference a school that was once a “leader” in its conference will inevitably become an also ran. They will be the school that used to get national games that now is relegated to the internet broadcasts or a small coverage regional game.

This one actually isn’t far off the mark, at least as it pertains to A&M-to-the-SEC. It’s often been mentioned that Texas A&M may have trouble competing in the SEC. But Arkansas made the transition from conference leader to middling school and apparently has no regrets. Being in the SEC has meant more exposure to them than they had in the Southwest Conference and arguably what they would have had in the Big 12. That last part is less certain though. It remains to be seen how well the teams departing for the Pac-16 do when playing Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah rather than Baylor and the Big 12 North schools. Oklahoma State and Texas Tech have reason to be concerned, but they’re likely to be the tagalongs (at least, they hope they will be) and go where UTex and OU go. UTex and OU would be just as likely to be dominant forces in the Pac-16 east as in the Big 12.

Now, these are more legitimate questions for the four or five schools left behind in the Big 12. They could restock their shelves and become conference leaders, or (more likely) scramble to join or merge with other conferences. Either way they are reacting rather than acting. They would almost certainly prefer the Big 12 stay in tact. It’s just that their opinion doesn’t really matter.

As for his justifications for staying put, they are similarly wanting. I’ll go through these more briefly:

1. The Big12 becomes the AL East of College Football. Texas vs OU has the same cachet and regional and national intensity. If either team moves they will have a difficult , if not impossible time replacing the quality of this rivalry. What’s more, the remaining teams because of the quality of the programs can quickly evolve into significant rivalries

This is only true if they separate, and something I am sure they are both considering. But they played each other out of conference before, so there’s no reason that they can’t do so again (unless Texas were to join the Big Ten, in which case more of his arguments would apply, but nobody is talking about that right now). Because, as previously mentioned, more conference members does not mean more conference games. Anyhow, this is the status quo. It has its advantages, but it also has its limitations.

2. Money, Money, Money Probably the most important reason to stay in a smaller Big 12 is that fewer schools means more money to the conference. The Big 12 is looking at a new TV deal in just a few years. … Their TV partners want quality, marquee games with national significance. That happens with the top 2 to 4 teams in every major conference. It doesn’t matter whether your conference has 9. 12. 16 or more members. There are only 20 teams in the Top 20 and 10 in the Top 10.

It doesn’t matter, though, whether those top 20 teams are split between four conferences or six. You’re still dealing with the same number of teams. And the Pac-16 east is likely to be roughly the same as the Big 12. Arizona and Arizona State will likely be in a better position, since the Pac teams are historically better than the Big 12, but for the others it’s likely a push or only a little bit tougher. A 9-3 team is likely to be ranked whether they are the #3 team in the Big 12 or the #3 team in the Pac-16 east and #5 in the Pac-16 as a whole.

And here’s the other thing. The fewer top-tier conferences there are, the more leverage they have with ESPN. ESPN could afford to blow off one of the top 6 conferences, if it came down to it, but they cannot afford to blow off 1 of 4. And a single 16-team conference could provide the entire sports programming for an NBC Sports Network. Indeed, the CBS Sports Network is built off a 12 team mid-major conference, two independents, and periodic games from another mid-major conference. A Pac-16 spanning from California to Texas or Missouri offering to give all of their first-tier rights to CBS or NBC Sports would make the network and pose a real threat to ESPN’s monopoly.

This is why ESPN was one of the parties anxious to keep the Big 12 together, Cuban’s protestations notwithstanding. ESPN and Fox both really stepped up to the plate to renegotiate a contract that they were under no obligation to renegotiate, because they see the threat of bidding wars with 4 conferences to be that much more intense than with 6.

3. Out of Conference TV Ready Games Fewer teams in the conference means more opportunity for out of conference games.

No. See above.

4. They Can Pay Players Larger Stipends or Start an NFL Like Development Fund The Big 12 can take the 20mm, 25mm or whatever the amount that would have gone to Texas A&M and do any of the following or whatever else they can think of …

They could do that now, without dipping into the A&M departure fund. Larger stipends would be a drop in the bucket. This is a separate issue.

Conclusion:

None of this is to say that I like the idea of superconferences. On the whole, I don’t and would rather the Big East and Big 12 expand to 12 a piece and call it a day. However, what I want doesn’t matter. The Pac-16 could seriously benefit the schools involved. Or it might not, though hardly for the reasons that Cuban cites. The main concerns would be for specific programs like Arizona and those left behind. And those are schools that are vulnerable in part because they lack influence. As for the schools with influence? Well, they all have their own agendas, monetary and otherwise. And unlike the pro sports leagues, there is no central governing authority that can tell them what to do (unless they have a tribal mascot).

Captain Planet was truly one of the worst television TV shows of all time. Every episode was like a full-length version of one of those “and knowing is half of the battle” sketches of GI Joe, except always dealing with the same topic. I suppose you can say “Well, it’s good that young people are being taught about an important issue.” Except that half of the morals of the stories are already dated (it was before Global Warming was the issue of the day, back when it was all about the Ozone Layer) and they didn’t make it fun or interesting in the process. I mean, I was somewhere left of center on environmental issues when I was a kid, but that show was hard to take. Perhaps I was too old for it by the time it came out. As He-Man demonstrated, most young people will consume just about anything and think it good. It’s amazing that children’s TV programming has improved as much as it has.

I was a fan of Toxic Crusaders, though, which was also an earthy program. But one that managed to be at least a little bit interesting and humorous. I doubt I would appreciate it if I went back and watched it today. But it was at least tolerable to my younger self.