THE KNIGHT TIMES - October 2016

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14 OPINIONS Episcopal High School The Knight Times Volume 32, Issue 3 Creation of superteams is damaging for the NBA GAVIN GEIB Staff Writer This past offseason, the Oklahoma City Thunder’s Kevin Durant made possibly the worst free agent decision in NBA history. Here’s why. Last postseason, the Thunder was up 3-1 against the Golden State Warriors in the Western Conference Finals and ended up losing. Then, the Warriors went up 3-1 against the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Finals and also lost. To top that off, last year the Warriors won the most regular season games in NBA history (73), and if they would have won one more game in the NBA Finals, they would likely be regarded as the best team in NBA history. And Kevin Durant wants to join this team? A Most Valuable Player, seven time All- Star, winner of four NBA scoring titles, the NBA Rookie of the Year Award, and holder of two Olympic gold medals wants to join this team? After coming one game away from beating them? And then the Warriors Kevin Durant holds up his new Warriors’ jersey. Photo courtesy of thebigleadcom. being one game away from winning it all? Although the Warriors are favorites to win the championship this year, this decision hurts Durant’s legacy as well as the NBA, and here’s why. First, in the words of sport analyst Stephen A. Smith, the NBA regular season is “ruined.” I personally might be interested in watching the Warriors at the beginning of the season, but if their preseason games are any indication of how they will do this year, they are going to be up 40+ points every game, and that is definitely not interesting to watch. The Thunder also lost their best player, so watching them is also going to be less interesting. It is my prediction that TV ratings for the NBA are going to decrease this year. All the good players are going to select teams, while everyone else is just filling out teams to beat. In a seven-game playoff series, almost always the best team is going to win, and because of this we already know that there are only four or five teams that have realistic chances of making it to the Finals. This is not what professional sports should be like. The competition is completely gone. Additionally, NBA fans pretty much know that the Warriors are going to be the number one team in the Western Conference and will probably be in the Finals. This Warriors team is so good that it ruins competition. This isn’t the NFL or MLB where you could have three really good players and still have a losing season. There are only five players on the court in basketball at any given time. One or two good players can lead their team deep into the playoffs or a championship. We’ve seen this time and time again. We saw this last year with the Kevin Durant and Rus- sell Westbrook, and now the Warriors have three players on the first All-NBA team? This is absolutely absurd. The reasons Kevin Durant has cited for deciding to go with the Warriors include the fact that he likes how the Warriors play and that he wants to win an NBA championship. Nowadays, the media judges the merit of a player so much on how many championships he wins. I think this judgment is completely wrong and is a topic for another editorial, but clearly Durant is desperate to win an NBA championship because of how he thinks it will improve his legacy. However, winning a championship with this Warriors team will not elevate his legacy at all. The Warriors were one game away from winning it last year. They are already an incredible team. Even if Durant stayed in OKC and did not win a title, I would still think more of him than if he won a title or several titles with his new Warriors team. This is probably harsh, but I will probably think less of Durant if they win a championship. I already hated the Warriors before Durant joined, and now I really hate them. In my eyes, Durant should have stayed in OKC, and grinded it out another year to try and win a title. The Thunder already has the players in place to make a run. And don’t even bring up Lebron. His situation and decision was completely and utterly different from this dreadful decision. Hey! Papparazzi! Leave them (sic) kids alone! DRE GUTHRIE Staff Writer It’s inevitable that, at some point, you’ve run across a gossip magazine or news website or feature on a broadcast about celebrity children, and, in a sense, I get it. If you’re interested in the lives of today’s latest and greatest, you’d probably be interested in their home lives, including their families. I typed celebrity children into Google and received over 75,000,000 results in less than a second, so it’s obvious our fascinations span more search engine pages than anyone would ever want to read in a lifetime. Celebrity culture is blaring in our faces 24 hours a day, and, fair enough, I believe that if you earn enough money to buy yourself several multimillion-dollar homes, you can’t complain much when people want to watch your actions for fun. With celebrity children, it’s different. For instance, imagine if Brad Pitt was your father. You’d be living in the lap of luxury, certainly, could ask for whatever you wanted, and would not be in want of anything. Your playhouse in your backyard could be a larger-than-life castle if you wished for it, and the coolest person you could imagine would show up to your birthday party just to see you. It’s hard to imagine a five-year-old who wouldn’t be interested in being spoiled because children naturally turn away from what they hate and run toward what they like: it’s human nature. I bet you’re thinking how wonderful such a life would be when hearing that Blue Ivy wore an $11,000 dress to the <strong>2016</strong> MTV Awards or that Suri Cruise gets to visit the Clintons with her mother. But that’s not fair. They didn’t choose to become famous; they were born into it. Blue Ivy and Suri didn’t personally request to grow up around celebrities, life just happened to turn out that way. As children, they’re constantly exposed to large sets of cameras carried by shouting men and women who want to record their entire lives for an audience they don’t know; nor do they understand precisely why hordes of reporters want to take pictures of them while walking out divided between their Suri Cruise faces a horde of papparazzi. Celebrity children find themselves the subject of pubic fascination on a daily basis. Photo courtesy of nydailynews.com. divorcing mother and father, or even know what it’s like outside of this celebrity bubble. So my request for you is simple: give them a chance to grow up. By taking the clickbait on the Internet and looking at what the latest Pitt-Jolie kid is up to, or by wondering what a celebrity mom decided to dress their new baby up in for Halloween, you inadvertently are reinforcing the system of paparazzi bothering children in order to get a scoop. And I’m sure every one of you have a little brother or sister or cousin or family member or neighbor who’s still a kid, and I’m even more sure that you want a child to grow up happy and healthy and unbothered by the world around them until they’re old enough to understand a problem’s ramifications clearly. So, whenever you are skimming through the world wide web for any interesting celebrity news for gossip’s sake, consider what celebrity father Ben Affleck said in an interview with Playboy a few years ago: “My kids aren’t celebrities. They never made that bargain.”
OPINIONS Episcopal High School The Knight Times Volume 32, Issue 3 The tech barons of Silicon Valley: A digital Gilded Age 15 ANTHONY SMALL Editor-in-Chief In the late 19th century United States, a national society of small, rural farmers transformed into an urban, industrial machine dominated by mega-corporations. Mark Twain, noting that everything seemed glossy on the surface but deeply corrupt below, coined the term “Gilded Age” to describe this era. With the railroad and mining industries booming and factories rising on every corner in the Northeast, millions of Europeans flocked to the U.S. to carve out their piece of the American pie. With no precedent for such an explosion of the capitalist economic engine, wealth and power became increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few captains of industry. Government rules for the private sector were behind the times, and the feds rarely had the power to enforce existing or newly created regulations. These conditions fostered the rise of a select few industrial tycoons that singlehandedly ruled entire markets. The monopolistic practices, shady business transactions, and questionable political dealings of these fiscal titans like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan led them to be known as robber barons. These men exerted colossal control over American business and politics for years with philanthropic organizations and political initiatives, and it took decades to enact significant change to combat the crony capitalism throughout the nation. Fast-forward to <strong>2016</strong> and America once again faces another Gilded Age with the exploding rise of Silicon Valley’s fortune and influence on American society. Similar to the past, massive wealth has fallen into the hands of a few companies who command the digital sphere. Through lobbying groups and philanthropic organizations, tech magnates wield influence comparable to, and even greater than, that of John D. Rockefeller in his prime. Although these industry figureheads like to portray themselves as progressive, utopian-minded agents of change, industry behavior points toward the fact that “robber barons” would be a more fitting description. Yet, according to Gallup polls, the majority of Americans view the computer industry in an overwhelming positive light when these very mega-corporations have created, at minimum, borderline monopolistic business models much greater in scope than companies in other, more traditional industries like banking, real estate, and oil and gas. However, according to the same research, Americans view these latter industries in an overwhelmingly negative manner. To better understand this apparent dichotomy, a brief history of the computer industry is essential. When tech entrepreneurs rose to prominence in the 1980s, and even to this very day, the culture of their businesses has been that they are new and innovative corporate structures not beholden to traditional practices. In terms of outward appearance, this is largely true. Employees of tech companies more frequently don casual dress and tend to have a much more casual style in general. Moreover, the advent of personal computers and interactive software has created a formidable bond between the consumer and producer that simply does not exist in other industries. Lastly, these tech firms have incessantly branded themselves as working to “change the world” and “create a better future” instead of simply existing as an entity to make a profit. And for the most part, this claim is largely true, as these computer companies have fundamentally transformed our modern world. As a result, all of the aforementioned factors combine to create an environment in which the public views Silicon Valley as inherently less power-hungry and corrupt as well as largely exempted the tech elite from criticism carried out on more conventional industries. For example, Occupy Wall Street protestors paused to mourn multi-billionaire Steve Jobs’ death although when their entire protest movement was about justice for the 99%. While I do acknowledge that Jobs was obviously relatable to their plight as a previous hippie himself in the 1960s, the corporate actions of Apple prove starkly antithetical to the Occupy movement. Ultimately, this selective protesting has stifled the public debate on the anti-trust ramifications of tech companies and even emboldened Silicon Valley to further increase the occurrence and sheer scale of their questionable exploits. In terms of transparency and ethics within corporations, Silicon Valley is all talk and no action. While their public image emanates of inclusiveness and internationalist progressivism, corporations like Facebook, Google, and Apple fail to practice what they preach. To begin, Silicon Valley has a documented deficiency of women and minority leadership and employment. Furthermore, a few years ago Google, Apple, Intel, and Adobe settled an employee lawsuit against an industry wide wage-fixing scheme for hundreds of millions of dollars, which proves outright that they colluded to keep the working man’s wages down. Another unsavory business practice is the industry wide outsourcing of jobs to lower paid foreign guest workers to ‘replace’ a largely non-existent lack of native tech workers. For example, Facebook has lobbied significantly to maintain this steady inflow of cheap labor to the region. In spite of this unscrupulous activity, Silicon Valley has faced relatively no retaliation from organized labor. Many of these companies, like Google and Facebook, have been caught violating their user privacy terms of service. These companies routinely perform unethical and immoral data collection and tracking of consumers and have faced little consequence in the United States. Specifically, Google has been exposed collecting user IP addresses and every online action with spyware programs without user permission. For example, Google was forced to settle the Wi-Spy case after being caught illegally acquiring hundreds of gigabytes of Wi-Fi data from various unprotected user networks in filming for its Street View program. Lastly, Facebook tracks users significantly more than they realize - even when they are not on the site. Another corrupt activity of tech elites is aggressive tax avoidance. In general, there are three ways for these tech tycoons The tech giant oasis - Silicon Valley. Image courtesy of siliconmaps.com. to largely exempt themselves from taxes. The first one, a tactic dating back to the Gilded Age, is to set up a tax-exempt philanthropic trust and funnel money to groups that questionably can be defined as charitable contributions. For instance, Zuckerberg has pledged 99% of his $45 billion fortune to charity. However, what many do not know is that the money remains unable to be taxed in his philanthropic LLC whose stated mission is to “advance human potential and promote equality,” which, in terms of being considered charitable contributions, very subjective. While he does admirably give significant amounts to charity, a considerable percent of the money is being used as if it were a tax-free lobbying foundation. Secondly, these mega-corporations, armed with legions of the best lawyers in the country, can seek out legal loopholes in the tax code. For example, Facebook paid zero taxes on over $1 billion in profits in 2012 by taking great advantage of tax deductions. In this case, it is obviously the fault of the government for failing to recognize loopholes. Lastly, the multinational tech companies also avoid paying tax by offshoring billions of dollars in profits to tax-exempt safe havens even when the companies are based in the United States! They intentionally do not move the money back into the U.S. to avoid taxation, so when it comes time to reinvest capital to build office, factories, and infrastructure – where do they do it? Not in the good ‘ole MR. DAN BINDER Guest Writer The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights speaks directly to the necessity of a robust and vibrant free press, and now more than ever, do we have it! Between Fox News, NPR, Telemundo, BuzzFeed, the Associated Press, Tomi Lahren, Infowars, and more, there is an abundance of diverse journalistic voices available at the click of a button or the swipe of a screen. With the advent of platforms like Twitter and Facebook, more people than ever before can share their ideas, experiences, and perspectives with the world, and one could argue that any concept of ‘the media’ that doesn’t include amateurs as well as professionals is not fully grasping the reality we live in. However, when we talk about the media, we generally refer to the larger, more professional entities – the newspapers, television or radio networks, and news agencies that have established large audiences for themselves. All of these entities strive for professionalism and excellence, and they all work to adhere to the traditional principles of journalistic U.S.A. but instead in these foreign countries where they keep the money. Ultimately, the fact that our government allows this type of behavior is just more evidence that we are living in another Gilded Age. While these Silicon Valley mega-corporations like Alphabet (owner of Google) have failed to be charged with significant antitrust violations in the U.S., the European Union, Russia, and United Nations have been working to crack down on their monopolies. For instance, Google has been charged in foreign countries for violations of anti-monopoly laws by promoting their own systems while discriminating against their competition in their search engine results. These deceptive practices are antithetical to American trust code and should be further investigated, as no single entity should be allowed to control search, advertising, and their own systems within the same user interface. The 19th century Gilded Age elicited a strong cultural backlash with the rise of populist politicians at and after the turn of the century such as Democrat William Jennings Bryan and Republican Teddy Roosevelt. With remarkable success of populist politicians like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump who have railed against corporate monopolies this election cycle, we seem to be witnessing the past repeat itself as a smaller and smaller amount of corporations and individuals disproportionally impact our lives. In conclusion, I’m not trying to lay 100% of the blame for this current economic environment on Silicon Valley or even degrade them as an evil entity, as I recognize that the computer industry has made revolutionary changes and immense contributions to our society that have made life both easier and more efficient. All I’m articulating with this opinion piece is that there is a serious need for this topic to be acknowledged and understood by all Americans so a real debate can take place between citizens, Silicon Valley, and the government to work toward a solution. The bottom line, which most Americans fail to grasp, is that Silicon Valley megacorporations are just as ruthless as other mega-firms in other industries, and thus should be regulated and held accountable for their breaches of antitrust legislation and infringements on civil liberties by both the citizenry and the federal government. Total objectivity unrealistic in media objectivity. Unfortunately, true objectivity is in fact quite hard to practice, as the nature of the industry and the limitations of time, space, and financial backing force editors, for example, to choose which stories to cover, reporters to choose which sources to quote, producers to choose which stories to run first – even when it comes to matters of global importance, like our upcoming presidential election. Despite the best of intentions, even the grand media institutions with decades or even centuries of practice inevitably fall short of true objectivity. Simply put, ‘the media’ are not perfectly objective, and it is unrealistic to expect perfection. This is exactly why the skills we learn at Episcopal High School are so important – skills like critical thinking, source evaluation, independent research, etc.. A citizen who is equipped with these skills can rather easily do her own digging on the internet, through scholarly resources, and via other mechanisms. To expect the media to simply deliver truth to a passive consumer is misguided – a truly responsible citizen will do his or her own share of the work.
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THE KNIGHT TIMES - October 2016

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