q/a 2 (Patreon)

my fuckin skulled is being caved in by this gigantic snowstorm, so I wanted to say before the pain makes me forget that I've gotten enough responses to do another Q&A show, so leave a question in the comments for this post, and if you already did that for #1 and I didn't answer, asking it again here makes it much more likely that I'll remember it

pause: proceedeth howsoever thou may'st dare, Muck Rake

and you know what I forgot to say about Steph Curry vs. Caitlin Clark?

as some of you probably know, high school and college athletes who make loads of money for various pricks & criminals, like say the child-molestation factory that existed for decades under the guise of "Penn State University," have long been denied the ability to make any money via their sport, right up until the last few years,

till finally they managed to negotiate "NIL" rights (name, image, likeness – remember that, NIL) that allows these college athletes to get paid via whatever sponsorship is offered them, and though they still don't actually get paid for playing, NIL is a big step in getting the players a cut (nowhere near a fair cut, but a cut) of the insane revenue that flows into one of the sleaziest facets of American public life

(and speaking of getting a cut: the next time you see an NBA player get signed for $200 million, instead of getting mad at him, you should remember that his value is arbitrarily capped at a number vastly lower than the amount of money he's going to make for the team – if this were not so, professional sports would be a nonprofit enterprise; the fact that it's immensely profitable to own a pro sports team means, by definition, that no player ever gets paid what he or she is worth),

and I am unambiguously in favor of these kids getting paid however they can, most of them will never get anywhere near a professional league, much less have real careers as pros – last I knew, 1.7% of college basketball players logged a single minute in the NBA, ever in their entire lives, so the percentage of them who have actual bills-paying home-owning careers as NBA players must be infinitesimal, and even then, their entire livelihood (and often the safety & security of a LOT of other people, for players who come from rough places) depends on them not having a serious injury until they're already established and on a guaranteed contract. Even in the NBA, there are all sorts of contract exceptions and combined pro/semipro deals in which a guy's guaranteed salary will be $20k, and those guys tend to get cycled between teams and leagues so nobody ever has to pay them a livable guaranteed wage. And if a guy like that tears his Achilles or ACL, there's no surgery and rehabbing on the company dime, and no salary when he isn't playing, so a bad injury at the wrong moment can ruin a fucking life (Dru Smith, for example, has been in the NBA since 2022 but only had one guaranteed contract in that whole stretch, and just when his game seemed to be cohering with the Miami Heat, he ripped his Achilles the other day, after he tore his ACL last year and missed the whole previous season because of a horribly designed court in Cleveland, and though I do not want this to be true, Dru Smith – a 27-year-old who's already had the 2 worst injuries you can suffer as a basketball player – is probably finished in the NBA, and would be lucky to show up in a worse league overseas),

but, with all that said, and with my congratulations to anybody who's ever managed to squeeze an extra dollar out of the pigfucks who own sports franchises (or record labels, or film studios, or publishing houses),

... why does Caitlin Clark have an NIL licensing deal with Goldman Sachs