I’m sure some of you have seen this story, but for those who haven’t, a baseball pitcher recently retired to make it so his team did not have to pay him the rest of the money owed on his contract, 12 million dollars. Many sports writers and others alike have been praising this decision. But there is nothing honorable about this decision, in fact it is the exact opposite of honor that should be bestowed on decisions like this.

Meche makes honorable decision

The main argument Meche himself makes for not wanting to take the money is “The Royals have already paid me enough, and I don’t think it’s fair to take money when I know in my heart I’m not going to be healthy.” But there is a mistake in the sentence: The word “fair.” Although to Meche it does not seem fair to him that he would get paid 12 million dollars for not playing, it is actually completely fair. His team, the Kansas City Royals, signed a contract with him 4 years ago with this agreement: We will pay you 55 over 5 years for your potential results over those 5 years, accounting for the risk that you do not live up to those expectations. The 55 million is accounting for that risk. If the organization knew that Meche would not take the last year of his contract if he were to get injured and be physically incapable, Meche would have been paid more money. Saying it isn’t fair that the organization must pay Meche for not playing is like saying it isn’t fair that the Yankees have not increased CC Sabathia’s pay for doing even better than expected.

What is really sad here is that he is actually getting praised for this decision, and that none of his friends and family were able to convince him otherwise. Why is not believing you’re worth the money a good quality? Why is low self esteem admirable? It seems like in the media whenever someone declines money they act like someone is being a great human being, but I can never figure out why.

People often talk to me about how it is “crazy” and “unfair” that athletes make so much money. But even that is completely fair. No one is forced to buy a $50 ticket to a KC Royals game, or $40 for a Royals sweater, or forced to take 3 hours out of their day to watch a game on TV. But tens of thousands of people do. And that voluntary exchange makes it worth it for organizations to spend a lot of money to improve their team, even on a mediocre player like Meche. But if you are really going to argue that baseball players should not be paid this much money, blame it on the fans. Blame it on the fact that they choose to spend their money on baseball instead of helping the homeless, third world, or whatever other noble causes. But personally, I’d like to have the  freedom to drop $200 on tickets to a Redskins game if I so choose.

I am having a home game tonight, coinciding with Thursday night NBA games, and I’m excited to watch. In the past several years, the only sport where I could stand watching a team that wasn’t “my team” was the NFL. But this year, I actually find myself enjoying watching the NBA this year, even if it’s not my team.

I saw this coming as soon as Wade, James, and Bosh all decided to play for the Miami Heat. For the entire week after “The Decision,” everyone in the media and who I talked to seemed to hate the move. I personally hated it too. But later I realized it was probably the best thing to happen to the NBA. I knew it when I was watching the Heat play after I busted out of the NAPT LA HU event. For some reason, I really wanted to see them lose. I actually cared. I had never cared about whether a team won or lost about any NBA team except my own. And it seemed like everyone wanted to see something, whether it was the Miami Heat becoming the greatest team in NBA history or failing miserably.

The NBA had already been making a comeback in recent years with the renewing of the Celtics, Lakers rivalry. The Miami Heat drama added more steam to that train. But as the season went another reason to watch the NBA came about: There are several teams that are championship caliber. Last year, it was only the Lakers, Celtics, and Cavs. This year, you have Orlando coming on strong with a double digit win streak. You have a team like Oklahoma City with a ton of talent. You have the Spurs with the best record in the NBA. And you have an improved Chicago team who seems to be able to beat anyone. Then there is Miami and the Celtics, with a huge possible Eastern Conference championship. And still the winner of that has to beat the defending champion Lakers in the finals.

Now when the NFL season ends I’ll have another sport to obsess on.

Cool, well written, article done by a sportswriter in the local newspaper in our hometown of Fairfield, IA. It’s fun to see yourself in the paper, even if it’s the newspaper of an Iowa town of only 10,000 people.

As I sat in the airport waiting for my flight to stop being so god damn delayed, I wanted to play some poker. However, I couldn’t play many tables because I forgot my mouse, but I wanted to possibly two table sit and goes. Since the airport connection was really bad, I wanted to use my phones connection through tethering. The problem was that I needed to right click on the easy tether icon in my shortcuts bar to connect. The problem with that is my right click doesn’t work on my touch pad because of a freak pepsi spilling accident (okay, maybe not freak).

What I did next was the stupidest thing I have ever done in my life.

I went to touch pad settings and set my left click button to perform the right click function. It seemed like a good idea. I would simply right click on the tethering short cut to connect to the internet, and set the setting back to normal when I needed left click. But when I tried to execute my plan I was met with one complication: I couldn’t set my left click back to the left click function without using left click. It was the best real life catch-22 I have ever come across. In order to restore the functioning of the left click, I needed to left click.

I called Dell Support actually excited to present them with this quandary because of the seeming impossibility of solving this issue without an external mouse. But apparently since my warranty is expired, customer service will cost me $40. I didn’t accept the fee out of principle, and because I felt there was a chance they wouldn’t be able to solve the problem in a reasonable amount of time. So I called my most computer savvy friend I knew. After about 20 minutes of talking, we decided there were 3 possible ways to fix the problem.

1. Attach an external mouse. Since I only changed the setting for the touch pad, this of course would work. But in a small airport there was no place to buy a mouse, nor people with mice in site.
2. Use a left click hot key. He did not know one and could not find one on the internet. Simply tabbing to the appropriate button and pressing enter or + did not work in this case.
3. Open a program that allows someone to take over my desktop and change it from his computer. I had such a program, but was unable to open it, and was unable to download a different one, because I couldn’t left click.

I told this story because I found it to be funny but it almost seems like a computer experts riddle. Is there anyway I could have fixed my computer without an external mouse?

This has nothing to do with poker. I was randomly looking at optical illusions when my brother said something to me about logical paradoxes. We browsed a bit and came to this wikipedia page that has a list of a bunch of paradoxes, many of them I had never heard of before but really interesting.

The Decision paradoxes are especially cool. One of my favorites is Abilene’s paradox. Abiliene’s paradox, in short, is that if people make decisions based on what they think everyone wants them to do, and everyone makes decisions this way, then everyone will make a decision based on what no one wants to do.