weekly ncaa update

1) Ohio St.
2) Kansas
2) Duke
I'm getting the impression nobody really wants to be up top, but these three are still a pretty fair margin ahead of the rest. I am not seeing Ohio St as a potential champ, though if their offense picks up the pace a bit, maybe (it is very efficient, but they're not scoring at a high enough clip to make me confident they could still win against another efficient team, see the only team more efficient: Wisconsin).

Right now it's still Kansas and Duke, and then the rest. Just like last year.

4) BYU. Probably earned a #1 seed.
5) Texas. Probably lost a #1 seed. (update, definitely lost a #1 seed, Purdue moves pretty solidly past them after getting blown out at home by K State).
6) Purdue
7) Pitt. I'm convinced now that the Big East will not and should not get a #1 seed.

8) Wisconsin
9) San Diego St
10) Kentucky

11) North Carolina
12) Syracuse. Seems to have righted the ship.
13) Washington. I don't quite get these guys, but they're still a dangerous sleeper in my book.
14) Louisville.

15) Georgetown. Dropping. Injuries at a bad time.
16) Notre Dame
17) West Virginia
18) Villanova. Dropping REALLY Fast (update: Loss from Notre Dame drops them almost out of the top 25)
19) Belmont. Good luck to these guys in their conference tournament this week. If they don't win, they're not getting in the dance. ETSU is not bad either in their conference, but Belmont could actually drop somebody in the real show, maybe even win a couple games. ETSU won't get a good enough seed to do much of anything.
20) Utah St

21) Arizona
22) Illinois
23) Vanderbilt
24) Connecticut
25) Missouri

Maryland is still at #27 on my list. I'm very doubtful they will get in as of right now. But other than a home loss to Duke and a road loss to Virginia Tech, they've lost all their games by less than 10. And other than being swept by Boston College, all of those are quality losses, usually top 30 teams (Duke, Pitt, Illinois, Temple, Villanova). The real problem is that they've got nothing on the win ledger other than Florida St and Clemson at home, a thumping of Penn St on the road, and squeaking by Charleston. And none of those stands out as a wow win. The difference between them and Marquette is pretty minimal (lots of close losses to good teams, none as bad as Boston College, Duke, Wisconsin, Vanderbilt and Gonzaga out of conference), except that Marquette has wins over Syracuse, West Virginia, Notre Dame (by 22), and a road win over Connecticut, plus another win over a probable NCAA team (Bucknell) for good measure. That's enough to put you in this year.

I am very annoyed at the "Big East is getting 11 teams!, this is terrible" talk. I've had these same 11 teams high on the list since mid-January. St Johns has moved up nicely (I have them #31, they were in the mid 40s), and Marquette and Cincinnati looked a little shaky where they were in the mid 20s/low 30s, to be fair to this argument. But really, there aren't that many teams to take their places if they weren't included. The actual bubble includes one team I think is actually decent (Maryland), and MANY, many teams who are putting up legitimately weak tournament resumes. Fine, in an average year, Marquette would be looking at a 11 seed at best on my list and would be on the bubble. They're like an 7-8 this year. The reason is that the bubble teams I have like Alabama, Clemson, Michigan (rising fast), Richmond, Minnesota (fading fast), Georgia, etc have done nothing to distinguish themselves. They all have maybe one or two wins to their credit, Michigan at least played a brutal schedule (but didn't get many wins on it, the way a Tennessee, the team closest to them on my list, did). Other bubble teams like virtually anybody from Conference USA, also mediocre. Memphis looks like a 15 seed even in this field, and wouldn't be even in the conversation in an ordinary year. Yet they're listed as "safely" in on ESPN's bracketology because they've got a few top 100 wins (I have them at 9-5).

So please, do not complain about the Big East. Complain instead, as usual, that there's a lot of undeserving teams who will not get into the tournament, each of which will look roughly indistinguishable from a couple teams who will get in. This will lead to predictable complaints that the field should be expanded. The truth is that about 30 teams get in every year who probably aren't very good. Many of these are auto-bids from mediocre conferences or surprise auto-bid upsets from better conferences, and a few are power conference or mid-major representatives who got in at-large but still aren't very good. This year will have about a dozen of such teams.

Here's a snapshot:
Florida St will get in basically because they beat Duke. Clemson won't because they didn't. They're otherwise tied. They even split the season series.
Texas AM will get in because they beat Washington (by 1 at home) and Temple. This is despite losing to Baylor twice, being blown out by Texas twice, and barely beating teams like Arkansas (OT at home). Washington St probably won't get in despite sweeping Washington and blowing out Gonzaga, mostly because they lost to Oregon and Arizona St on the road and Stanford at home. But again, not much difference here.

What's in a name

I've been trying to figure out a conundrum for a few weeks now.

There seem to be two public perceptions of atheists.

The first is that we actually do worship something, and thus have a religion. This belief is popular among Christian fundamentalists in particular, and seems to be busying itself with the assumptions that a) non-belief in something means you believe in it anyway, or something like it, or b) that all atheists share common attributes. I'm fairly sure both of these conclusions are wrong. But perhaps there's some other logical basis that I've missed.

The second is that atheists do not care very much about "big questions", metaphysical nature of the universe, and so on. This one is common among people who've actually studied theology or philosophy and are aware of many atheists indifference to metaphysics as a justifiable study beyond some basic assumption that there is a reality which we experience and interpret and that experiencing any other (usually imagined) forms of reality is beyond our experience or ability to interpret. I'm pretty sure this one is a little more accurate, as there are indeed many atheists who are indifferent to questions about deities or afterlives or some other metaphysical construct popular to religious dogmas. But it confuses indifference to these ultimately subjective questions with an indifference to reality or things like ethics, which seem to have more biological hard wiring behind them and certainly have more utility to their existence.

The problem is primarily I only encounter the former argument. It is rare that a common person is familiar enough with concepts of metaphysics or ethics or even theological analysis of religious beliefs to move past the first perception and actually perceive something of what an atheist is, as a person rather than as what they lack in common with you. And so it gets tedious to explain that a) atheists tend to be a diverse community, some are hardcore secularists, some maybe leaning agnostic, and some just don't believe in god and go about their daily lives without, so defining atheists as holding a core and unified set of beliefs seems a little strange b) that defining people by non-belief is a very, very silly way to look at them. We do not tend to define people by their non-belief in dragons, or goblins, or even zombies or vampires. These are just as imaginary as many atheists see religious deities and the associated mythology contained in canonical text. Why is this one distinction of non-belief so important? Is it so hard to make the leap from a firmly held belief to see that someone else sees your shadows as shadows and not as reality?

I suppose the inverse is equally true for many atheists. We do not tend to do the thought-experiments of what belief is used for by religious persons, to pretend for a little while that the shadows of our minds are real. Perhaps this is because, for the most part, we do not see any real benefits provided by religious belief that do not come with significant costs (benefits seem to be, fosters a sense of community, relative happiness is to be had in extreme belief, and people don't bother you about your lack of faith, costs seem to be, the sense of community is connected to an us-them sensibility which leads to extensive discrimination and out-group hatred, and you're kind of at a loss when someone asks a reasonable question presenting an iota of doubt). Considering atheists do not make up a considerable majority, it is rare that someone encounters one publicly and has to question their own belief or compel them to question their non-belief. So I doubt this is a very troubling problem for the atheist, given that they are, when openly so, confounded by dozens of requests for social conformity. It becomes easier for some to simply lie than to go through the tedious motions of beating back religious piety and its blithe assumptions with reasoned analysis of the theological questions and the psychological explanations for a theistic, anthropomorphizing mind.

But I have to wonder, why is this one question so persistent. The argument that the atheist makes a positive belief to not believe is absurd on its face. Partly because most atheists simply did not care, and did not ask such questions, but mostly because it asks atheists to do something ridiculous and unreasonable; namely to believe in something without any evidence being presented in favor of that belief and without any way to prove that belief. The principle difference between these people is that the religious person looks around and sees an answer for "why" as something external rather than something they have provided themselves, and more importantly, often confuses the answer for "how" as also one for "why".

I am contented with the notion that your beliefs make you feel safer, perhaps feel happier, and provide lines of networking with your fellow man and a reason to get dressed up once in a while. I am not contented that these beliefs are so inflated as to find it absurd when someone else does not share them, such that you must contort their lack of belief into a set of belief of its own, and attempt to blur the lines between how and why among our fundamental questions of the human experience.

This trade makes more sense

Deron Williams for Derrek Favors and Devon Harris.

Deron is +4.1 / 11.1

Harris + 1.0 / 7.0
Favors is a rookie but is a solid one on a bad team -1.8 / 2.7

Utah probably got back enough talent wise and skill wise (assuming Favors develops, and assuming they draft well with the two picks they received), and New Jersey got rid of a bad point guard to get an excellent one. There's some question regarding Utah's crowded power forward-center setup, but it seems Okur's injuries have added up, Kirilenko's out of favor (but still productive), and they haven't figured out how to mix Millsap and Jefferson together very well, but really their biggest problem was the persistence of playing Raja Bell instead of CJ Miles. Just swapping those two out takes the team's projected win % from a 40 win team to a 60 win team. Dropping Williams probably makes them a non-playoff team this year, especially with Memphis, Houston, Phoenix, or even the Clippers playing pretty well. They were already 11th in SRS in the Western Conference as it was, so staying in the 8th spot was rather unlikely.

But they should be reasonably good after that, and they weren't likely to be able to retain him in 2012 when his contract ran out. So, like the Melo deal, they got a reasonable price for a superstar.

I'm assuming this will revive Brook Lopez a bit (not much), and the New Jersey offense should flow a lot better than under Harris, who was basically a combo guard and/or playmaker rather than a distributor/playmaker. Williams is also not bad in the clutch, or at least he's far more efficient than Harris has been.

The next "big" trade was Mo Williams and Jamario Moon for Baron Davis and a draft pick. In this, I'd say the Clippers got fleeced, mostly because they also threw in a pick. But also because Mo and Baron were about equally average players and Moon is just about useless. Maybe the age and injury factors for Baron made it important to get something else, and certainly his contract didn't help, but unless they're cutting him at the end of the year for free agent purposes (because Baron's a notorious front-runner and won't play well on this terrible team), this one is just strange.

I actually really like the Hinrich trade for Atlanta. Giving up Crawford (Jordan, not Jamal) is probably worth it, since he wasn't playing anyway for them for quite a while. What they lacked was a decent point guard who could actually guard someone and Hinrich versus Bibby is about a wash on shooting threes.

I also like the Perkins-Green trade, probably for both teams in the long run. I'm a little less sure of it as far as this season, but Perkins hasn't played much and the Celtics still had the best record in the East without him. He would be useful against the Lakers and Magic, but not so much against the Heat, Spurs, or Bulls, where having an extra wing player who can spell Pierce/Garnett/Allen and giving them some lineup options (by moving Pierce over and playing big, or moving Garnett over and playing small) might be a better idea.

More on the union war

1) I don't think it was necessary or appropriate for Obama to inject into this one. Butt out. Let the local Democrats, or maybe the Democratic party, or its various advocates and surrogates fight it out. Your job is to be President, not to be a political Party's ace in the hole (other than at election time where your party may ride your coattails). Some of what pissed me off about Bush was the Rovian strategy that somehow being in high office was about establishing Republican hegemony over the federal government. I don't need/want a Democratic establishment copying the same strategy.

2) I don't want to hear comparisons to tyranny, comparisons to Egypt, complaints about corporations, or complaints that this isn't about money. A democratically elected government that favors policies that you don't like because a majority of people do is not tyranny. It's just something you have to provide better arguments against and hope to do better at the next election (or to stop the votes before it becomes law). It's not about Egypt where there was real tyranny, nor about opposing corporate power because we're talking about public workers here and not GM auto workers. And it's ALL about money. Shut the fuck up you are wrong because I'm not hearing other arguments which are not (like say, arguments about innovation). This includes Republicans arguing against the public sector unions just as much as it includes the teachers whining about "rights". Those rights are all about how to divide up costs and expenses (primarily because we have labour laws that accord to proper safe working conditions). "Benefits" are not, sadly, free or cheap. Ordinarily, these are the people who demonize private property rights, or the ability to bargain for them. I'm a little annoyed as a result to hear them now suddenly discover a need for private property rights when it benefits only their specific favored minority (unions).

3) I also don't want to hear that somehow this is going to fix the state's budgets (any of them, there are several fighting on this front). It might help somewhat. But there are usually bigger fish to fry than trying to torch the unions on bargaining rights. The biggest one of which is state health care expenses. Others might be tax revenues, economic growth being slow, currently high unemployment or social welfare costs, etc.

4) Another problem with the state's is their insistence on passing tax cuts in the midst of these recessions. State taxes have a lot less of Arthur Laffer to work with because they're almost always fairly low relative to the amount of money states spend on public services (because the federal government augments these services by providing funds for some of them, infrastructure, health care and education in particular). And targeting tax breaks don't seem like sensible policies to begin with. It is however arguable that these tax cuts, at least in Wisconsin, are better targeted at underprivileged groups, like the unemployed and sickly, by making exceptions for new hires by businesses, new businesses, and for health savings accounts. I have far more sympathy for the poor and downtrodden than for the middle class (ie, unionized public sector workers) when it comes to distributive social justice. In other words, this bad policy seems less bad than the alternative being proposed instead (give more influence and money to middle class people).

5) I still think the biggest concerns vis-a-vis the teachers in particular, along with the other major public sector unions, are abuse of the inflexibility of a system making it difficult to innovate new methods and also difficult to cull dead wood (such as, in Wisconsin, the cases of teachers lying about sick days). A more flexible system would allow bad teachers to be dismissed and fired, competitive schools to seek out better teachers from others. Such a system ultimately has very little to do with how teachers are paid, receive benefits, or how they bargain for their pay and benefits.

Lest we not forget

I never thought this was really a powerful motivating feature for why we invaded Iraq. Perhaps it was, and perhaps it remains clouded from me because I felt it was probably a lie at the time, and really a useless diversion away from a more pragmatic and honest explanation; something on the lines of "we, the American government, feel Saddam Hussein is deserving only of dethronement and death, and submit this course of action to you, the American people".

This explanation alone probably could have sold many people in the wake of 9-11's overly simplistic neo-conservative explanations for the machinations of terrorist plots. I feel it probably did, simply because many people have abandoned the weapons of mass destruction prospects years ago, but some have clung to associating Saddam with 9-11. A proposition which made even less sense to me than the WMD claims, which he did at least use the chemical weapons we gave him against Iran. Nevertheless, we arrive now at the point where people are willing to admit that the overriding factor, the real desire, was the desire to depose (and probably kill) a reigning tyrant. I feel no sympathy for the Saddam regime, and no great sorrow that he is gone.

But the Iraqi people suffer regardless because we went into this war with the false show that somehow this liberation would matter to them, that they would know how to build stable unified institutions that are the hallmarks of a liberal democracy and oh by the way, there were these mythical bombs and anthrax factories out in the desert. Somehow in the haste to kill one man, and maybe a few others, we sort of forget to mention that there was a country we were bombing, invading, occupying, rebuilding, and rearming. That this has always been a project undertaken both in stable quasi-western republics (Germany, Korea, Japan), and still lasting years, seemed to have escaped notice.

And in retrospect, this is probably because many people convinced themselves, at least temporarily, that we were invading because if we did not some mushroom clouds, or maybe just some poisonous mushrooms, would show up in an American city near you. Fear kind of blocks out the ability to look at things critically.

I don't begrudge "Curveball" for taking the opportunity to take advantage of American fear and a mutual hatred of the Iraqi regime to potentially benefit himself, and perhaps misguidedly thinking his people would also benefit (after all, it's not his fault the Americans subsequently carried out the invasion-occupation elements incompetently but the toppling Saddam part went swimmingly).

The fact that there were not leaders, elected or appointed by Americans, to make even partly clear-headed thoughts regarding foreign policy strikes me as a little bit of a problem. The departure of Obama from Bush is pretty slim in terms of actual policies being pursued (particularly the Bush that deviated from the Cheney-Rumsfeld playbook after 2006), but the one thing I do get from them is that these policies are being pursued with a much greater icy calm. I don't think that makes them any better, but it at least gives me some optimism that someone somewhere could explain that they are wrong and receive an honest hearing instead of being told to manufacture evidence supporting a pre-conceived notion. Or to fuck off.

Zombies take over

International relations...

Best parts of this one

Realism means things are pretty much what they are. Even when the undead start to feast on human flesh, nothing much would change. While it's definitely an absurdist take on realism, it's actually not that far off. This was essentially my reaction to 9-11 for instance. Things would change, but they would more or less just shift around some national goals, put things like "invade Iraq" into the hopper for example. Things did not change in the sense of what posed real and existential threats to American hegemony. People didn't like hearing this, some people still don't. But it's not less true 10 years ago simply because more people are now aware it's true NOW. (what put a real threat to American hegemony was our expending trillions of dollars on fruitless wars to install pro-Western leaderships in unstable countries).

Fear is overrated. Give me a potential nuclear war, yes, that's a real threat deserving of national attention. Give me a terrorist network living in caves. Meh. Not worth ignoring, maybe a lead news story for a while, but it's not worth creating new and invasive powers, invading countries that had nothing to do with it, bombing others, and so on.

Speaking of "invade Iraq", there's also this segment which describes the neo-conservative worldview as including this darker "kill all Muslims" aspect to it. Because obviously this book was written with zombies as the stand-in for Muslims. Also there's the "everything is an existential threat" paradigm and problem for neo-cons. There's a reason realists don't get along with them, and that's largely it. (there's also the problem that neo-cons never bothered to explain how they would "inject freedom" and make this proposed antidote work. It was just assumed that democracy=freedom, when actually the reverse tends to be more true, that free institutions support a democratic regime and that corrupt institutions like those of Iraq and to a lesser extent Afghanistan, which just lacked institutions period, will mean electing a corrupt autocracy instead of a free liberal democratic one).

And finally there's the philosopher's joke.

58% of philosophers believe zombies are possible.
15% of them believe in god.

I would think a zombie in the sense philosopher's define it is actually plausible, as all it is is essentially an animated corpse lacking consciousness. They don't define them as wishing to feast on human flesh, or being a contagion etc. Those are far more specific qualifications to the zombie hordes than mere lack of consciousness. It's likely these would be more equal numbers under more rigorous definitions than the mere concept of a zombie versus the concept of a deity. But it's still amusing.

The most depressing book I've ever read

Bloodlands has something like 10-20 thousand people dying on every page. When it opens up with the Ukrainian famines and the deaths of over three and a half million people, complete with cannibalism, deportations, shootings, and a bizarro world response by the Soviet government (that it was their fault, a form of terrorism against world socialism), one should know the ride will not be pretty.

There's several passages which I noted in particular however as the impassive horrors committed by the Nazi and Stalin regimes are documented.

Germans had policies of extermination toward Jews, this we know. We liberated some of the concentration camps of the West, and the Russians got a few in the East. But the Russians liberated some actual death camps. A slight distinction between Treblinka and Auschwitz was that, while Auschwitz's Zyklon B killed many more people than the carbon monoxide gassings at other locations, very, very few people survived Treblinka. Less than 50 out of over a quarter million, all of which escaped. Chelmno was even worse, less than a handful out of almost two hundred thousand people.

This we also know about, but it boggles the mind to see that much of the real evidence against the Nazi regime was not the walking skeletons who remained living at Bergen-Belsen to be filmed by victorious Western allies. It was the ashes of millions of Polish Jews, many of them women and children, who were already dead by 1943. (Incidentally, Auschwitz wasn't for Polish Jews, it largely was for Hungarian or Czech Jews).

What we also don't hear much about was the way Germans dealt with Jews in occupied Belarus, Lithuania, Ukraine, and other Soviet republics. They shot them. Almost all of them. They had a term for it. "Resettlement". Which was described thus. "Resettlement site: on the resettlement site eight trenches are situated. One squad of ten officers and men are to work at each trench and are to be relieved every two hours". The perversion of language took on a considerable level of tortured meanings throughout the war.

There's also the warped way in which all this killing was celebrated or became normalized.

"At one killing facility, the personnel celebrated the ten-thousand cremation by bedecking a corpse with flowers" (this was at a euthanasia site in Germany itself largely used for handicapped children, deployed in 1939 through 1941, over 70000 German people, mostly not Jews, were gassed in this one).

Or in this, a letter by a German policeman to his wife.
"During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it. By the tenth try I aimed calmly and shot surely at the many women, children, and infants. I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse. The death that we gave them was a beautiful quick death, compared to the hellish torments of thousands and thousands in the jails of the GPU. Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to be pieces in flight, before their bodies fell into the pit and into the water."

True, Soviets had killed millions of their own citizens in Ukraine and Belarus, and deported millions more to become slave laborers. By the end of the war, Belarus had lost something on the order of half its pre-war population to indiscriminate policies of mass slaughter, and almost all of its Jewish population.

But this .... justification of "they would do it to us", has always scared me. It was deployed by Americans even to "justify" programmes of torture for terrorist suspects. Those horrors are small in comparison to the mass slaughter and reprisals of the Eastern front in WW2 (and even prior to it). But they are not made less horrific by this knowledge.

They seem even more terrifying when we consider what else lies on that slope into darkness.

Things that make me go, huh?

I don't get this Carmelo trade.

Denver will need to trade Felton, because they already have their "under-sized North Carolina point guard" in Ty Lawson. But they actually did better than the usual 50 cents on the dollar for a superstar demanding a trade routine. They probably could have used a big guy (Kenyon's getting older after all), but maybe they can spin Felton off for a big guy and a backup point guard who's bigger. Gallinari and Chandler are both pretty solid players.

But as far as New York, I think this trade actually makes them worse this season. Billups doesn't impress me as someone who can run the uptempo style, certainly not as well as Felton did, and certainly not at his age. Amare's better with someone who can run pick and rolls with him (he's basically Karl Malone 2.0). Nobody on this team can guard a chair. What will probably happen is New York is assuming they'll get one of the Chris Paul-Deron Williams sweepstakes next year and then that point, with Boston getting older, they start looking a little more like a title contender, or at least pushes Miami for the Eastern Conference. Right now they still look like a 45 win team.

Oh and Minnesota didn't come out too badly here. Randolph's interesting. Curry's cap space. Brewer's never sorted himself out anyway.

Here's the numbers on 82 games and e82
New York gets
Anthony +7.9 / 8.8
Billups +0.8 / 5.6
Williams -6.0 / 1.8
Carter -11.6 in limited minutes 0.1
Balkman -19.4 in limited minutes 0.1
Brewer +2.0 / 2.3

Denver gets
Chandler +5.3 / 5.6
Felton -1.0 / 8.0
Gallanari -1.2 / 4.5
Mozgov -13.5 in limited minutes. 0.8


Sum that up, 18.7 wins versus 18.9 wins. Not much help there. As I said, Denver got pretty equal value here.

I don't see what the fuss is about, and between Chandler being a good defender who could guard multiple positions and Felton being a better fit for the offense they were running than Billups, I see this is a major downgrade for this season. The Felton-Fields-Chandler-Gallanari-Stoudemire lineup that New York mostly used was by far their best. Simply sub-ing in Turiaf for Chandler drops them from a 50-55 win team to a 25 win team, to give some idea of Chandler's value (it's not that extreme, but he's definitely a good player). 3 of those players are now gone, and they're sub-ing in an older point guard who can't run for 39 minutes a game (Felton's per game average) and who doesn't know the system on one practice. To anyone who thinks this team is thus scary in a post-season series, I say that you are a crazy person. They did get a fair amount of playoff experience. But they have to get a decent seed to make use of it, simply making the playoffs only to play against Boston or Miami or even a healthy Chicago team (with Noah) is not a recipe to stay in it long enough to matter.

The other downside is that they got older. Basically New York traded players and got players back who were contributing at about the same level but who are 3 or 4 years older on average. This does not compute in any universe.

One further caveat, this trade did put at risk one of my fantasy basketball team's victories, by moving Felton out of the D'Antoni adjusted universe of statistics (the Coors Field of basketball stats) and reducing his minutes unless Denver moves him again for somebody else or picks. So I am understandably annoyed.

NCAA ratings New #1

Obviously all those upsets this weekend took some tolls. Did not make a muddy situation look clearer.

1) Duke
2) Ohio St
2) Kansas

Still pretty close together up here, but no real surprise that Duke passed the field to move up to #1. I don't see them as a potential title contender however. Defense isn't as good as it was last year.

4) Texas (these guys I can't figure out, defense is smoking, but you lose to Nebraska?).
5) BYU
6) Purdue
6) Pitt

Purdue moved up a notch.

8) San Diego St
9) Wisconsin
10) Kentucky
11) Washington

12) Georgetown
13) North Carolina
14) Arizona
15) Villanova

16) Syracuse

17) West Virginia
18) Louisville
18) Notre Dame
20) Vanderbilt
21) Illinois
22) Utah St

23) George Mason
24) Missouri
25) Connecticut
25) Belmont

Bubbly high ranked (that are low ranked bubble teams in the RPI world).
Cincinnati, Maryland, Marquette, Duquesne, Alabama, Clemson.

Nebraska probably got the marquee win of the weekend. Moved into one of the play-in games. The Missouri Valley got smoked in the Bracketbuster weekend; Missouri St's completely off the sheet now. So is Colorado and Memphis. Conference USA is still way overrated by RPI.
Last four out looks like this now: Michigan, New Mexico, Washington St, Richmond. Northwestern moved up a bit. Colorado St moved back.

Breaking unions

I have mixed reactions here on these various state bills floating around (including of course, the one in Ohio).

Basically I have no problem with teachers (or most workers, including public workers) having unions for collective bargaining purposes. My preference would be that teachers are not employed or contracted with by the state anyway, which would mean they would be a private-sector union rather than a public sector union and neatly avoiding this whole bugaboo. Though that doesn't seem to be happening, and isn't remotely curious (many people do not seem to like school choice, including these supposed advocates, Republicans). I'm somewhat curious why in Wisconsin the police and firefighters are excluded, though it's not actually politically surprising that this happens (after all, cynically speaking, those are the groups which backed the Republican governor).

My real curiosity is what those unions are doing defending incompetent employees and negotiating, strangely, for better benefits (pensions especially) instead of more direct pay. Other than more or more flexible vacation time, there are not "benefits" that are of any actual value that exceeds that you can get out of having someone pay you more money and spending that money on these purported benefits yourself. Many teacher retirement funds I've seen are rip-offs for example, complete with excessive fees and relatively low pay offs. So more or less what my curiosity is is not why are there teacher unions, it's more like, what are these teachers doing defending the ones they have and instead demanding better unions that actually give them useful things.

Benefits are generally non-taxable forms of income, true, but the larger portion of these taxable benefits accrue not to employees, but their employers (health care in particular). Pensions are usually deferred tax, rather than actual non-tax, which is again a bad deal (depending on who issues the pensions, some of them are federally excluded, most are just state-tax excluded). Tax rates are low. They seem to be going up, at some point. And I'd rather pay low taxes than high ones.

I see a lot of resistance to introducing competition into teaching, or to schools generally. Especially from teacher's unions themselves. I think this is foolish. Teachers should want to extract the best benefits they can for themselves, but they should not want to carry deadweight, or to captured into doing things only the way they are permitted to do them by state or local school boards say they can do them. One of the largest impediments to better quality teaching is the lack of better quality people going into the profession. Money is one incentive, but it's not actually the primary one (it is a problem in the sense that pay is set out based on seniority which does provide some perverse incentives of its own, but it's not a problem in the sense that the sort of people who would make good teachers would necessarily want to be well paid if they are a better teacher). The primary problem is the lack of control and professional respect. Creative people may not want monetary incentives, but does not mean they do not have incentives. In other countries, with better education systems than here, such as Finland or Singapore, there is not only a greater degree of cooperation between teachers, as well as innovative freedom to design a lot more of your own course material.

As for police in particular, police unions really should not be in the business of defending bad cops, and in forcing out good ones who call others out for their bullshit. And this seems like a way too popular event, in some jurisdictions becoming increasingly opaque rather than a transparent process with citizen input and participation. Being a cop, much like being a teacher, should not mean that you can get away with ridiculous, even illegal, actions and still get to keep doing your job. It all too often does mean exactly this. It is this, by far, which annoys and agitates the general public against the actions of unions (see "Rubber Room" in NYC, the new DC school contract which allows dismissals only after 100 days of arbitration to fire someone, which was actually progress from the previous arrangement, or virtually any criminal act which a cop is accused of). Being unable to dismiss incompetent personnel is one thing, certainly a problem, but given our ability to form a market economy for schools and make sounder determinations of competency or incompetency regarding public sector employees like teachers or cops, it's kind of a side issue. Being unable to properly and swiftly dismiss reckless, dangerous, or destructive personnel is another thing entirely.

Side note: I don't think test scores are a very good measure for teacher evaluations. It's possible that looking at progress from year to year on test score measures may be a useful tool to have in a toolkit for administrators to evaluate good teachers from bad, but if it makes up more than about a quarter of an evaluation I think we're getting away from what makes up good teaching and spending too much time teaching to a test. I'd stress things like parent-student evaluations, peer evaluations, administrator evaluations, and doing things like placing a lot more free time for teachers during the school day to be spent in other teacher's classrooms, or to just flat out start hiring a lot more teachers (many to replace the chaff being culled or be fired themselves) in order to have a wider pool of talent available. I think merit pay is probably fine, but really what is needed to fix the system is to introduce much more educator freedom over curriculum and that's mostly what a school choice system is needed for, to allow for this sort of market experimentation and innovation. Focusing on the money, the direct pay people get, is getting us nowhere.

Second side note: there are two places where these public workers are definitely sucking up unreasonably the public's money, benefits, in particular public sector pension funds, and regular pay for low-skilled workers (as well as employing too many of them, though this is often contracted out to private firms now, fortunately). There's a third in the pay of incompetent or under-competent skilled workers. I would definitely think we should be going after all three of these. If breaking public sector unions is somehow necessary to achieve this, I guess that's the cost. I don't think it should be the primary goal. I see unions as basically a neutral force for good or evil, often exploited to commit real economic atrocities against the public interest and to a lesser extent against the real interests of their members, but sometimes exploited to commit real goods for their members as well.

What really needs to be taking place is that there need to be more smaller unions which can more competitively remonstrate for their membership's demands, and the economic and distorting power of large urban school districts does seem to be at issue here.