I’ll give our English cousins this: they don’t throw stuff out, and they know where to find it when the occasion demands it.
In case you thought Cambridge ceremonies were just for the tourists: the porters in my college have been delivering food to self-isolating students & announcing their arrival with an actual plague bell pic.twitter.com/YbF5cOngWA
— Nicholas Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) October 30, 2020
In a nod to modernity they have fitted the plague bell to a golf buggy which is kinda weird
— Nicholas Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) October 30, 2020
In other news from bizarro land–this time from the much less tradition-soaked environs of the left coast bjmkkj [leaving that in as an example of Champ’s typing skills],* Nathan Fenino and David Wharton in the LA Times report on the UCLA football team’s dining habits. The food bill for the currently mediocre wearers of the light-blue and gold ran to $5.4 million in 2019–during which the athletic department as a whole ran a deficit of $18.9 million.
I do love this article, mostly because it is devastating without ever overtly saying what the writers clearly mean.
The culprit, or, if you prefer, the mastermind behind UCLA’s fine football dining is formerly wunderkind-ish coach Chip Kelly, who did well at Oregon, badly in Philadelphia, worse in SF, and is now struggling to achieve mediocrity in the Pac 12:
Kelly started providing breakfast, lunch and dinner for his players, using UCLA Catering & Conference Services most often. During four months starting in July 2018, for example, the program spent $2.2 million on meals. The price per head ranged from $40 to $53 a meal, according to invoices reviewed by The Times, plus occasional late-evening snacks at $29 a person.
What lay behind such a generous food budget?
Science!
The coach was focused on “body composition,” wanting his athletes to possess more fat-free mass, a higher ratio of lean muscle. The team often worked with UCLA caterers, Kavarsky said, “to source the right type of proteins, carbohydrates.”
Menus featuring ostrich burgers, wild boar and venison offered different amino acid profiles. All of this came at a cost.
Brilliant, I’m sure. But strangely, UCLA’s competition manages (most of them) to feed their guys for much less:
By comparison, other Pac-12 schools spent from $399,000 to $1.2 million on non-travel football meals in 2019, according to financial disclosures filed with the NCAA. That doesn’t include Stanford and USC, which don’t have to provide the information because they are private.
Powerhouses such as Ohio State ($3.4 million) and defending national champion Louisiana State ($381,000) didn’t come close to the Bruins’ total.
(A UCLA response noted that some schools have football or athlete only dining halls, which the Bruins do not, and that a lot of spending gets tucked in there, and off the athletic department’s books. Still–the sample is big enough to give a sense of the scale of demented spending in Westwood.
But hey, the proof is in the pudding, amirite? Better nutrition and happy players must lead to gridiron success, right?
Ummm:
The increased spending at UCLA has not translated into success on the field so far, with the Bruins going 7-17 under Kelly. Average game attendance at the Rose Bowl has declined steadily, hitting a low of 43,849 in 2019. At the same time, ticket revenue dipped from $19.8 million in 2014 to $12.5 million last season.
If I were a CA taxpayer, I’d be pissed.
And with that, I hear there’s some drama going on in more consequential corners of the polity. But there are plenty of places on this blog to discuss that. Let’s treat this as an absurdity-themed open thread?
*Bonus Champ pix:
1: This morning’s portrait. Tres chic!
2. We know how this ends…
a:
b:
I once could see, and now I’m blind…
Over to y’all….
Open Thread: Biden Live in Iowa, Hopefully Kamala In Texas
TaMara (HFG)
She’s getting so big! The famish bell is oddly charming.
Calouste
How many people are on that program? Because doing some quick math it comes out to about 100, which seems a lot. Unless the coaches themselves also get free gourmet meals three times a day seven days a week…
Barbara
A pox on intercollegiate sports.
WaterGirl
The little Champ loves those glasses. I though the photo from a previous photo was so endearing –clearly loving you and oh so interested in your glasses.
[subliminal message to tom: get those Champ and Tikka photos in for the pet calendar]
different-church-lady
Tux are just the best. The best.
?BillinGlendaleCA
I lived in the dorm where many of the athletes lived back in my time in Westwood and back then they ate in the dining hall with rest of us. The food was, to be charitable, not the best.
@Calouste: There can easily be 100 or so, you have the scholarship players and walk-ons.
Go Bruins!
Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)
I’m so old that I recall a time when colleges were actually for academic pursuits.
RobertB
@Calouste: OSU would be comparable, and they have 139 players on the roster. I wouldn’t be shocked if they have some walk-ons to bump that number up that aren’t on the official roster. Div 1 FBS schools can offer up to 85 full-ride scholarships per year for football.
Martin
Almost positive that cost came out of the sports receipts. UCLA earns millions off of TV rights to their games. I’m trying to think of a mechanism where that could run through the general budget or student fees and I can’t think of one. I can see some subsidy from those funds up to the meal cap (what we can spend per student under normal circumstances, they do still qualify for standard meals), but that’s WAY below the numbers being quoted. I know our own food services were struggling over the summer to get the cafeteria deliveries under that cap given the added cost of packaging, etc. It wasn’t an issue of how much money they had, but how much they could spend per person. Now it’s an issue of how much money they have as we’re at ~⅓ capacity.
RobertB
@Boris Rasputin (the evil twin): You’re pretty old then. The president of U of Oklahoma made that crack, “I want to have a university that the football team can be proud of,” in the 40’s.
I read somewhere that at the beginnings of college football, Yale looked down on football as distracting the kids from their studies, until they found out that the football team was bringing in more money than the university was. The school then jumped on that in a hurry.
bluehill
SFBayAreaGal
Your kitty on your shoulders brings back memories of our cat Chandar. He was a beautiful smokey gray with brillant green eyes.
When he was a kitten he would love to sit on my mom’s shoulder and purr up a storm. He got bigger and still would find a way to camp out on my mom’s shoulder and purr up a storm.
CaseyL
Brent Staples’ tweet was close to my first reaction: “Bring out your…delicious deli sandwiches!” His is more accurate, though.
@Martin: On the one hand, if the money came out of sports receipts, at least they weren’t raiding the academic budget. OTOH, sports receipts are supposed to help support the academic budget – at least, that’s the rationale we always hear about why team sports are important to sustain the college as a whole.
Champ and Tikka pix are always appreciated! In some photos, Champ seems to be growing into her ears. In others, they seem as delightfully outsized as ever. And her toe beans (not visible in these photos, but seen in others) are parti-colored, which always makes me squee.
Wag
Bring out your bread!
Leto
Players Hold Power Over the N.C.A.A., if They Feel the Hunger
If I was a CA taxpayer, I’d be pissed that my universities weren’t feeding my student athletes properly for the preceding 75 years. You can Google how long this has been an issue. It was an issue when I went to a Div II school on a soccer scholarship, with soccer being the biggest sport on campus, and that was back in the early 90s. I had friends at Div I schools on football scholarships (Clemson, USC, Florida State, University of Florida) who had similar experiences.
This is pretty much the, “Oh, the military paid a million dollars for a hammer, when I can go to Home Dept and pay $5! GUBMINT WASTE!” style argument here. If your argument is, colleges can do better: prove it. We have extensive history that they can’t/won’t. If you argument is, we shouldn’t have such luxurious sports programs: fine. Figure out where these athletes are going to go. Most wouldn’t qualify for college, so where do they go? I can’t wait for you to launch a program at MIT welcoming them.
This is tone deaf. You want to criticize Chip Kelly’s coaching? Fine. He’s been a shit coach for years. You want to criticize the fact that the NCAA/colleges were more than happy to fucking starve their athletes as long as those same athletes performed, won them championships, increased their bottom line all around? Fine. Good criticism. But criticizing how much it costs to actually feed these kids is crazy. I can’t wait for your next insightful piece on how much it costs to feed the troops, or how much it costs to actually put us back together.
If I was a US taxpayer, I’d be pissed!
Calouste
@Leto: Did you do the math? The food bill comes to about $50,000 per person per year. As in a bit less than the average family income. That is … a lot.
Just One More Canuck
How much of the $18.9 million deficit is due to Chip Kelly’s salary?
indycat32
Champ is adorable. Will someone explain to me how Chip Kelly keeps getting jobs.
trollhattan
One of the kid’s soccer coaches is buddies with Paul Ratcliffe, Women’s soccer coach at Stanford, and he knows a bit about their sports and nutrition science, which I have to say is pretty mindboggling. The players are basically wired up 24/7.
Given that it’s the nation’s elite soccer program it must work (of course, being a top school means you get top recruits so one hand washes the other).
The most rigorous sport I’m aware in this regard has to be cycling, but I also can’t name another money sport that requires as much from the athletes.
dm
@bluehill: Conan O’Brien is stealing from the best: https://xkcd.com/2378/
PsiFighter37
Just read an article on BBG about concerns among black/Latino turnout amongst Biden advisors. While it is worrisome, I think, for better or for worse, white college-educated voters and suburbanites are what is going to save our bacon this time around.
japa21
Semi related. Dropped off the 6 year old for his afternoon classes today. It being the day before Halloween most of the students were in some form of costume. Where he enters it is the 1st and 6th graders. The 1st graders were somewhat generic. Some of the 6th graders obviously felt themselves too mature to participate in the ritual. But two of them were rigged up as plague doctors. Have a hunch that is not an uncommon costume this year.
Just One More Canuck
@PsiFighter37: BBG?
PsiFighter37
@Just One More Canuck: Bloomberg News. Sorry, being in finance, I almost always abbreviate it to BBG.
Tom Levenson
@Martin: Maybe. The entire dept. is in deficit, though, which has to be covered by something…
@Leto: Absolutely athletes should get proper nutrition. They should get paid!
But I think the LA Times reporters did a good job of describing an approach to football nutrition that is clearly more/other than making sure no one in the program is going hungry.
I didn’t go into it, but some of what’s going on at UCLA seems to be gilded spending badged as “science.” Nutrition science is a real field, deeply fraught, but still, an genuine area of inquiry. Venison and ostrich as specific linebacker tuning (I exaggerate, but not much) is…tricky.
Leto
@Calouste: Here’s your alternative:
America’s obesity is threatening national security, according to this study
One of the things people always balk at is cost. People want Alabama/Clemson/OSU championships on MIT budgets. Even if you don’t want top caliber athletes, it’s probably also better to not feed them the same types of meals@?BillinGlendaleCA got, or the types of meals I routinely ate in the military.
I mean, if you want to give the students stipends and let them feed themselves, again, the nation has about 50 years worth of data in the form of single/first term military enlistees in which to probe. I’m going to tell you right now Cheetos, Dr Pepper, and Ramen figure prominently into those diets.
Here’s another issue that routinely pops up with this. Again, I’ll reference Bills comment of, “They ate with us”. Student athletes have varied practice schedules. They (coaches) have to fit those in/around classes. Which typically means morning and afternoons. Which means that after practice, the student then has to get over to classes, which invariably leads to skipping meals because the dining facilities aren’t around the classrooms. If they hussle over to the dining facility (if it’s still open), that usually makes them late to class. And then in the afternoon/evening, they have practice, and then have to hope the dining facility is still open at that time.
Again, I lived this life and had plenty of friends who did the same. It fucking sucks. You’ve had generations in which to fix it. Fucking. Fix. It. (last two sentences aren’t directed at you. The “you’ve” in the general sense.)
NotMax
Tying merry olde England and copious feasting together, UCLA still has to go some to outdo the Archbishop of York. And as for the common conception of monks’ tables being spare and lean, well, think again.
:)
(Knew a thread would come up sooner or later in which to make use of these snippets of history.)
hells littlest angel
Good to see UCLA paid premium prices for Cornish game hens — or as they are known in the poultry industry, small ordinary domestic chickens.
Yarrow
@PsiFighter37: FWIW, Mike Madrid, the Lincoln Project polling guy, says Latinos have a history of waiting to vote until election day. I guess we’ll see.
MomSense
Wow, kid had to wait in line almost three hours to vote today. He said that when he got inside they did temperature checks and asked the Covid questions.
Martin
@CaseyL: In a sense it does. The university still takes overhead from sports receipts, and that money is usually subsidizing other expenses the university would bear, but apart from the scholarships, I wouldn’t say it’s directly supporting academics.
Put another way, if the university is running properly, athletics don’t take away from the academics, they do help a bit around the edges. They are at worst part of the ever expanding search for revenue now that states have cut their subsidies.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
MSNBC just showed footage of trump mocking Laura Ingram, who’s at his rally, for being “so politically correct’ to wear a mask. The howler monkeys behind him love it. That crowd has more masks than their counterparts have in the last few days.
Leto
@Tom Levenson:
Again, I’ll state: when you find out how the military is spending it’s money wrt nutrition/individual programs tailored to the specific soldier’s recovery/care program, you’re going to be agog. And I’m not talking about VA care or post military care.
No the reporter is doing a cost benefit analysis, as are you. “DID YOU SEE HOW MUCH IT COST TO FEED THESE PLAYERS? AND THEY ONLY HAVE A 7-17 RECORD!” when the NCAA, and colleges/universities, have a track record of starving their people. I don’t give a shit that they’re getting ostrich and venison. It’s a fucking red herring. How about going after the fact Chip Kelly gets $3.5M to go 7-17. Or how much his staff is paid $3.5M to do that? Or how about all the people in the hiring process who allowed 7-17? Nope, we’re going to focus on how much it costs to feed the kids. (A MILLION DOLLAR MR COFFEE MAKER?!?!?)
Do. Better.
FlyingToaster
My oddly prescient daughter dressed as a plague doctor LAST year.
WarriorTeen in action
Heh.
HumboldtBlue
Martin
@Tom Levenson: Yeah, I agree with all of that. Not sure how they’re covering their deficit. I’m guessing alumni giving. I wasn’t aware they were so much in deficit – Berkeley’s $100M deficit seems to get all of the attention these days, now that UC isn’t piling money in their crown jewel and the campus has to actually, you know, operate like the rest of us. That’s also part of UCLAs budget woes – their per student funding also got slashed, but not as much. Berkeley was getting I think 110% more per student (more than 2x as much) than the lower 8 campuses. UCLA was ~50% more.
And yeah, that diet is bullshit. UCLA even has a nutrition program, who I’d bet my annual salary wasn’t actually consulted on this.
Leto
@Martin:
And that’s the rub. They’ve been cutting subsidies since the late 70s. Along with all the other “social spending”, here’s another one. Want to decrease the importance of football/basketball/baseball? Increase taxes and properly fund your institutes. I know it’s not as simple as that, but it’s a start.
Bart
Thank you for paying the cat tax, especially since our esteemed blog master is severely derelict in his duty to post updates on and proof of life of his critters.
HumboldtBlue
@Leto:
Increase taxes and properly fund your institutes.
Which means amending Prop 13
Martin
@Leto: I think we’re viewing the cost to feed the students as part of Chip’s incompetence and mismanagement. He could be feeding his athletes perfectly well for far less. At a minimum, the UC system has enormous purchasing power, and a lot of time and effort is already invested in food sourcing and nutrition for the 100K or so other students that we regularly feed. We have two ag campuses, nutrition and sports science programs across the system.
And we all have budgets we need to work within, and Chip isn’t special in that regard. But he is special in that he has a massive revenue stream that he controls.
Leto
@Martin:
I have a better one: eliminate UCLAs football program. In the past twenty years, they’ve only had 8 winning seasons. This is a losing proposition. Eliminate the program. If we’re going to nitpick on meals, lets look at the larger picture: they can’t get the recruits needed to sustain a winning record. They can’t get/keep a coach. Their AD/staff aren’t competent enough to do the first two. Eliminate the program and move on.
Granted, the other major programs are renovating/expanding their facilities top-to-bottom (and they have the records to back it up), but it’s not like we need another football program in this country. We have plenty. Shutter it, move along.
Martin
@Leto: Actually, that goes a really long way. We don’t like that expanding search for revenue. We’re not very good at it, and it’s the main source of administrative bloat. We add 10 administrators to generate 12 administrators worth of new revenue. We’re coming out ahead, but it’s creating huge distractions and complications inside the institution. And in 2020, those 10 administrators likely generated 0 administrators worth of revenue due to Covid, so whatever progress we made in the last 5 years is suddenly wiped out.
Calouste
@trollhattan: Cycling isn’t even that much of a money sport. There are teams that take part in the Tour de France that have a yearly budget of less than $ 5 million. For which they employ 30-40 people. Compare that with the budgets of the major league sports in the US and the top soccer clubs in Europe.
Martin
@Leto: I have a short meeting, but let me respond to this when I’m done. There’s a crucial point to understand about how universities actually operate here.
HumboldtBlue
@Leto:
In fairness to the UCLA Athletic Department as a whole they are regularly at or near the top when it comes to success across the entire department — swimming, gymnastics, soccer, baseball, etc — and have accumulated 113 National Titles.
Ruckus
@Leto:
I was in the military half a century ago so this number is not anywhere near current, but the ship got $1.50/ day/ sailor for all our food.
catclub
Also “Porterhouse Blue”
Leto
@Martin: Lot of good points there.
I mean that’s a great hypothetical, but it’s based on what? Per the article, numerous other colleges aren’t even including what they pay to feed their players in their actual sports budgets. Better question: how much does it cost to feed an actual Div 1 football player, on a run of the pack team? Not even top tier. Just, run of the mill? Use that as baseline and go from there. A team that’s consistently 50% win average. (that’s not the Bruins)
Or what the AD/administration can do is, fire Kelly, and the next person they hire write it into the contract that they need to utilize the universities nutrition science div in feeding the athletes. They’ll probably also need a specific dining facility for that. Budget that in because the current dining facilities are already contractor run and probably won’t let a whole separate food staff in to do just that specific food prep. Also, make sure that that the AG department starts growing all the specific food needed. That runs the gambit from veg, fruit, and all meat. I know Cali has great food growing capacity, but we’re just utilizing UC’s system for this.
I’m sure that a re-tool of that system is much cheaper than just an outside contractor doing it. (Only partial sarcasm here)
raven
Go Dawgs!
trollhattan
@Calouste:
The elite cycling teams have megabudgets but they don’t all, to be sure. And yes, top European male soccer teams pay their top players megabucks, somewhat offset by the eyepopping money they get back selling merch.
F1 fun fact: Louis Hamilton’s 2019 salary was 40M GBP.
Sister Golden Bear
If anyone likes scary movies, “Smiley Face Killers,” has a special online premiere now through Sunday. A friend of mine is in it—she’s the “nasty woman with an ax.” Trailer here.
It was a hoot hearing Rachel talk about choreographing a scene where she murders someone in a car with an ax (which you see briefly in the trailer). Which had to be done in one take because the production was running late that night. No pressure, right?
laura
@Leto: Variation on a theme: private industry has weaseled into public agencies because there’s always plenty of cash. My experience at the school district, city and county government was an unrelenting pursuit of food service contracts – multi-year agreements and the “run government like a business.” A single example from a County halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento. Juvenile detention -which was a division of the Sheriff’s department. Food service was all in house- full time benefited positions filled by decent people and often cooks who came out of the military and who had a real constant daily connection with the population they served. They may use if government surplus food – not the non melting cheese of days gone by, but name brand and nutrition dense food and fresh meat dairy and vegetables. In comes a private for profit industrial food service corporation. Gone is any discount for purchasing that government agencies enjoy, so costs go up and the service contract is cost plus set profit percentage. Purchasing is now centralized and local markets are no longer providing fresh local goods and the local economy contracts in the absence of sales to the county. Stockpiles of previously purchased government food products sit unused because to use it would be to lose the profit of food purchased through the vendors central suppliers. Worker autonomy is eliminated as the workforce now services the vendor contract that tracks employee time management to optimize efficiency. Portions are strictly monitored. Instead of ensuring children had enough – or even an unexpected treat, any deviation such as a chicken leg and a wing was just cause for discipline.
Working people who for the most part made sure that the children in their care; be it young offenders or children removed from unsafe environments; were treated like people who mattered. Until they were prohibited from doing so by corporate, so corporate could increase the profit margin on our tax dollars.
In summation, I want a big, juicy, government and I want my tax dollars to be used for the social good and I want government run like a government. And to get it, I want confiscatory tax rates that will wring the idle capital out of the soft palms of the too rich and too comfortable.
Leto
@Ruckus: My per diem was $2.50 for my last deployment. We had full DFAC services. If we didn’t have that DFAC, it would’ve been $10. For all three meals. This was 2014 and Qatar. I guess all three meals would’ve been Burger King and Pizza Hut if we didn’t have that DFAC.
(To break this down for everyone: I had access to the DFAC almost 24/7. I could eat as much as I want. I could go back for more if I wanted. I made sure that all my people ate. We, in Comm, had it much better than flight line personnel who would routinely miss out on meals. They’d get these shit box lunches and have to eat around fixing jets/loading cargo/doing shit like that. Or cops. Jesus, cops and flight line people have it bad.)
Ken
In one of Charles Stross’s Laundry novels, he mentions that the UK has warehouses with mothballed steam locomotives, just in case. I was never sure if he was serious.
The canonical story along those lines involves an English University that found the oak beams in one of their great halls needed replacement. Checking their records, they found they owned a plat of oak forest, with a four-hundred-year old note that “this is for when the oak beams need to be replaced”.
Just One More Canuck
@PsiFighter37: ok, that makes more sense than Bikini Body Guide, which is what Google came up with
catclub
@Just One More Canuck: but which would you rather ‘read’?
catclub
@Ken: I’ve heard that story! I want to guess the Whole Earth catalog guy – Stewart brand or Kevin kelly
Kent
No matter what happens, I’m pretty positive that Black and Latino voters are going to vote for Biden in MUCH MUCH higher percentages than college educated suburban white voters. If Trump wins again it will be because white suburban voters put him there, not because Black or Latino voters didn’t quite turn out enough
The problem in this country is White people, not Black and Latino people.
Leto
@laura: Yes! I wonder if you’ve read, Democracy in Chains By Nancy Maclean? Part of what you are talking about, as well as where did all the money go for colleges/university, she discusses.
JanieM
@catclub: I was going to say Gregory Bateson, but my memory isn’t as reliable as it used to be. It could have been Brand quoting Bateson…..
Just One More Canuck
@catclub: Honestly, I read it just for the articles
JanieM
@catclub:
@JanieM:
Bateson.
Kent
Regarding UCLA spending millions on food.
All this really shows is that big colleges and the NCAA will literally spend ANY amount of money to avoid actually paying athletes.
$5.4 million for food divided by 100 varsity football players equals $54,000 per year per player.
Ask the players whether they’d rather get $54,000/year to play football and then be responsible for their own meals and see what kind of response you get.
BruceFromOhio
@Ken: that is just so UK minded. We, The Colonies, could use some of that foresight.
BruceFromOhio
@Kent:
Boy howdy, ain’t that the fucking truth in one sentence.
Ken
@catclub: @JanieM: Found it: https://blog.longnow.org/02014/12/31/humans-and-trees-in-long-term-partnership/
(Other links, google university replace oak beams.)
JanieM
@Ken: See comment #62. ;-)
I googled oak beams Bateson
Van Buren
I have a relative who made a PAC 10 team in a pretty minor sport(crew FWIW) as a walk-on. She made it clear that despite the long hours and the being micromanaged in many aspects of her life, the separate dining facilities and menu made it very much worth it.
KenK
The Bruins were 4-8 in 2019. Apparently, the haute cuisine didn’t work. Maybe they should work on schedule composition. Or skills acquisition.
bemused
Champ is adorable. How is Champ getting along with the big kitty? When we adopted a new kitten, it was hilarious to watch him woo our older cat, so patient and knew just how far to go trying to play with the older one before getting swatted. It took awhile but kitten finally won over the older cat.
Baud
@Kent:
I don’t disagree, but the question is turnout, not the share of the vote of those who turnout.
KenK
@CaseyL: @#13 “OTOH, sports receipts are supposed to help support the academic budget”
I think it’s a case of “revenue sports” (football, men’s basketball) underwriting “nonrevenue” sports such as baseball, women’s basketball, golf, soccer, tennis, etc.
Kent
@BruceFromOhio: Yep. I’m a middle aged white male and I get fucking sick and tired of all the Dem hand-wringing about Black and Latino voters might fail us by not turning out quite enough.
We white people gave the world Trump. And its OUR fucking job to get rid of him.
Feathers
@Ken: The MWRA, which supplies Boston and environs’ water, still has the old reservoirs on standby should Quabbin need to go offline. There have been fights over allowing recreation. Some of them now allow boating, but you have to rent theirs, to avoid cross contamination from other bodies of water.
Realizing it’s been a while since I worked on this, but have heard nothing about it being shut down, and remember talk of how they might have to go to backup when some idiot construction crew broke the main water line from Quabbin to Boston near 128. Some underwater welder more than earned their pay that day.
catclub
@BruceFromOhio: of course, a key part of the royal navy’s dominance was extracting masts from the virgin forests in the colonies. No planning for the next one needed.
Feathers
@BruceFromOhio: Harvard has trees currently growing to replace each of the ones in Harvard Yard, when the time comes.
Kent
@Baud: Its both. If white folks split exactly 50/50 between Biden and Trump this election would be over and Trump would not even win a single state in the electoral college.
The problem in this country is that here, in 2020, after everything that has happened. A majority of white folks still think Trump is the best choice for president. THAT is the problem.
KenK
@Leto: meh. $40-%53 per is a bit steep, unless that includes the liquor tab. But, if the mark-up went to foodservice/general fund, that’s good.
catclub
@Kent: my hobbyhorse version of this: if 18% of whites vote for Obama
in Mississippi, he wins it in 2008. He got 11%
Baud
@Kent:
Macro wise yes. We just need turnout to match polling assumptions for this election.
TomatoQueen
Oh please don’t take away my Daddy’s UCLA football. He’s 90 and very frail, but the occasional Bruins game on the teevee brightens him up.
I’m so old I remember when Daddy was in Library school (MLS ’58, Lawrence Clark Powell his mentor) we lived in Westwood on Gayley Avenue, in veterans’ housing–barracks overrun with cockroaches, barged down from Seattle. Tho’ my earliest childhood memories are of that time and place, including hordes of stray kittens, I hope those buildings were burned to the ground and salted over.
If we know something about athletes and nutrition, example non-bulk athlete Michael Phelps avg consumption was 10K calories per meal (not a mistake but something I read once) and a lot of eggs and butter involved, then I say lean meats such as venison and ostrich are perhaps not fatty enough for football in pads players, who apparently will not be looking like Walter Payton or Tony Nathan any time soon.
SFBayAreaGal
@Kent: BINGO!!!
J R in WV
@PsiFighter37:
Shouldn’t that be BbG then???
Danielx
@Boris Rasputin (the evil twin):
Ha…I’m so old I can remember when credit card interest was deductible.
I’ve told younger family members about it, they think I’m making it up.
Matt McIrvin
@PsiFighter37: I saw Adam Serwer freaking out about that (“this seems disastrous for Biden”) and Dave Wasserman dismissing it (arguing that Trump’s losses among whites far outweigh Biden’s difficulties with the black/Latino vote). Dunno.
Martin
@Leto:
So, here’s the challenge with that.
It’s hard for an institution to isolate the effect of a single program in this way. In fact, doing so it a bit of a hallmark for why we criticize capitalism.
So UCLA football team has a poor record, and the sports program is running a deficit. To start, the latter has to be addressed. But it may not matter that much to the institution. Consider the knock on effects of that program. It’s basically free advertising for student recruitment. UCLAs student profile is very strongly influenced by their national sports program (as I am very familiar as the next closest UC campus that also doesn’t have such programs). It also strongly influences alumni giving, and merchandise sales, both of which almost certainly exceed the amount of the budget shortfall.
So even if UCLA football loses a lot, and they run a deficit within the athletics program, it may still be revenue positive for the campus. But this takes us to the unspoken part of this, which is that universities do not sell educations. We should, but we don’t. We sell credentials. You are a UCLA grad, and UCLAs reputation infers a certain value to that degree. Is that value earned? Maybe. Do you get as good an education and CS San Marco? Probably, maybe even better given class sizes and the like.
The point is we don’t know. We sell our rankings and our national profile and students buy that reputation and quality of life at the school. Quality of education isn’t part of the value proposition on either side, nor is is a component of the ranking. To that end, UCLAs national profile through their football program, even when they suck, likely adds more value to a UCLA degree than any amount of addition funding for instruction. And it doesn’t just benefit student recruitment but faculty hiring as well.
That’s scandalous, but it’s true. It’s also starting to get revealed as Covid lays bare the kinds of investments in instruction relative to everything else. And students aren’t happy, parents aren’t happy, and there are class action lawsuits against every university I know of for failure to deliver on fees and services.
Kent
UCLA will still be on TV whether or not the athletes get fed $50/lb ostrich steaks for meals. They will be just as entertaining (or not) if they get fed PB&J sandwiches or have to go do the regular campus cafeteria like everyone else.
And, by the way I have visited over 20 different university cafeterias over the past several years on college visits with two different daughters. I have yet to come across an ordinary campus dining hall at a public or private university that did not have wonderful food options for any kind of athlete. It’s mostly the same few concessionaire companies these days operating in most schools, and they are mostly pretty damn good. Especially by contrast to what I remember of college cafeteria food from the early 1980s.
stinger
I think I love you.
Nora Lenderbee
@laura: Me, too.
@stinger: Me, too.
JanieM
@Nora Lenderbee:
Me three.
Tom Levenson
@Leto: This, we agree on.
Sloane Ranger
@Feathers: But this was probably arranged when Mass. was a British colony so counts as British foresight, not American. :-)
EthylEster
My pandemic reading started with exploring various plague descriptions: Black Death, cholera, legionaire’s disease, yellow fever, SARS, etc. This led me to stuff about microbes and thence to immunology and heritability. I am very impressed with the Seattle Public Library’s audiobook holdings. I’ve discovered more that a dozen “books” on these subjects, all serious treatments. Amazing what has happened since I took Biology 101 as a freshman in college in 1970. And very depressing. IMO the microbes are going to win. They are just toying with us now.
Martin
@Leto: We don’t quite have specialized diets for our student athletes (we contribute a lot of olympians, so I’m going to put them on par with UCLAs football team).
Student athletes eat in the regular dining halls, and generally eat the same as everyone else. There are some specialized diets/meals, but they’re still handled by the normal dining staff much as we handle a student with a disability who needed a specialized diet. Now, student athletes meal plans are different in that they have more access to the dining halls so they can eat at times when other students can’t.
My student workers who were athletes were required to log their eating for their coaches. They weren’t given specialized meals, they were given nutritional goals and told to meet those goals. But even so, at the most extreme, for an athlete trying to add weight with a specialized diet, their costs would be roughly double the typical student or about $25/day.
We kept student athletes in the normal student dining system because it was a virtuous cycle – coaches would put pressure on dining for certain things, but those would benefit the entire student population. So more low-fat proteins would arrive for everyone, etc. The coaches constantly complain about the extra effort, but it also means that athlete meals get the same economies of scale that residential dining normally provides, and non-student athletes get the nutritional benefits that the coaches push for. It’s win-win.
And we do this in a host of other ways. I mean, Kobe used to train at the student gym because it was the best gym in the city. And it wasn’t exclusive to athletes, it was for everyone.
Sebastian
@Ken:
That’s actually fairly common. Notre Dame has a forest like that.
Geminid
@TomatoQueen: Ostrich and venison! It seems to me that Chip Kelly is overthinking his players’ diet. Not surprising; Kelly is a Big Thinker. If I were the dietitian, I’d keep plenty of butter and eggs available. Maybe ask the Clemson dietitian what their players eat. And I’d also get input from the players. They are many spots down the totem pole from Kelly, but they’re not stupid. Some are probably smarter.
Tom Levenson
@EthylEster: That’s basically my next book ;-)
Martin
@laura: I would clarify a bit of that. One of the main ways that private industry has invaded public services is lack of flexibility in public budgeting.
For example, we needed to add student housing. We had land, being a land grant university, and that land is worth a lot (total land value of the campus is north of $100B – way more than everything built on the campus). But we are limited in how we can leverage that value, and how our revenue flows. Building housing is capex expensive – you put a lot of money up front and then extract value from it through student housing fees. But we don’t have many means to do capex. We get so much money per year, and we can’t actually save it – or else we lose it. So if you have a project that will have a 5 year ROI it should be a no-brainer to secure financing, build it, and then easily repay the money. But public agencies generally can’t do that. But private companies can very easily, so rather than float a loan for $50M to build (because we don’t have $50M all at once), and put $12M a year back into that loan from revenues derived from that project, we end up doing dumb shit like lease space for $10M a year, forever, because we can afford $10M/year but not $50M one time.
Cost smoothing is the main reason private business gets in. Building a cafeteria/food service space/hiring staff ahead of revenues doesn’t work in the budget but catering does.
This is again a cause for us to chase revenues because those new revenues are extremely flexible. We can save them, we can borrow against them, etc. In some regards we’d rather have $1 from fee for service than $1.50 from the state, because we can preserve the $1 as capital but the $1.50 is almost guaranteed to be lost to service cost.
otmar
It isn’t easy, but I can read and understand the German text in the medieval print.
Calouste
@trollhattan: Ineos, the biggest budget team in cycling, has a budget that’s about that 40 million GBP that Hamilton gets. Most of the other top teams are more in the 20-30 million range.
smedley the uncertain
@Leto: DFAC??
RobertDSC-Mac Mini
@smedley the uncertain:
Dining FACility.
EthylEster
@Tom Levenson: Your current one is On Hold now but seven weeks to wait….as audiobook.
Right now I am listening to “I Contain Multitudes”. Excellent.
O. Felix Culpa
@otmar: Thanks for mentioning that! I went back and read it too. Was hit or miss on the Latin and too lazy to look it up.