eSports Gets An Introduction To Major College Sports At The University Of Utah
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We've been following the evolutionary milestones for eSports for some time now. What was once an event class considered equal parts fringe and foreign has made impressive strides towards the mainstream in mere years. It started with a small university granting scholarships for eAthletes, progressed into the realm of coverage on sports broadcasting giant ESPN, and made yet another leap with an eSports section of the pie being carved out by the NBA.Not all progress towards the mainstream needs to be of a new type, of course, and eSports reached another milestone harkening back to its first, with the announcement that the University of Utah, a member of the Pac-12 Conference, has started its own varsity eSports program.The University of Utah has announced a varsity esports program, starting with League of Legends. Part of the Pac-12 Conference, Utah is the first Power Five school to sponsor this type of program, and it doesn’t plan on stopping at one game.The team, sponsored by the EAE video game development program, hopes to expand to a total of four games, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. Students from the current campus esports group Crimson Gaming, as well as high school recruits, will be part of the team. Players will receive partial scholarships, with an eventual goal of over 30 student-athletes and coaches to be on scholarship. There will always be arguments about whether eSports are sports in the traditional sense, as well as how good a thing it is that colleges are getting in on this at all, but from a market and industry standpoint the progression is all about interest and advertising dollars. For a school like the University of Utah to invest in this sort of thing, it's likely it required the broadcasting success ESPN has had and the nod to that success that the NBA showed to push this along. And now that eSports has been formally introduced to one school in a Power Five conference, you should absolutely expect many of the other schools to follow suit.The growth at this point may tend towards the exponential. Once the broadcasting and advertising revenues really start to kick in, eSports will be here in a very big way.
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posted at: 12:00am on 12-Apr-2017
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Idaho Governor Says Cops Matter More Than The Public Or Its Representatives, Vetoes Forfeiture Reform Bill
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The governor of Idaho doesn't care about his constituents. State legislators had successfully pushed through an asset forfeiture reform bill with overwhelming support, but Governor Butch Otter vetoed it on April 6th. (h/t Ed Krayewski at Reason)The bill ran into some law enforcement resistance on its way to being passed. A 58-10 vote sent it to the governor's desk over the concerns of law enforcement, who apparently felt that law enforcement via asset forfeiture would just be too difficult if some form of actual due process was recognized.While Reps. Rubel and Harris did work with some law-enforcement groups while drafting the bill and these organizations decided not to oppose it, other police organizations came out against the bill, worried it would put too many restrictions on their ability to seize drug dealers’ ill-gotten gains or the cash they could use to commit further crimes. Apparently, those concerns were indulged by Governor Otter. His veto statement [PDF] makes the dubious assertion that Idaho law enforcement has never abused the process.There have been no allegations that Idaho law enforcement officers or agencies are illegally or inappropriately seizing property from alleged drug traffickers. Its sponsors contend that the measure is aimed at preventing improper forfeiture of assets in the future, but there is no evidence to suggest that such a problem is imminent. The absence of allegations is not the absence of abuse. Fighting forfeiture is prohibitively expensive and takes place in a closed judicial system that pretty much guarantees at least partial failure. Idaho isn't the worst of the worst -- not according to the Institute for Justice's grading -- but scoring a "C" is hardly an exoneration of the process. A "C" rating still stacks the deck in favor of law enforcement:Although Idaho appears to pursue forfeitures against property owners only modestly, its civil forfeiture laws still put the property of ordinary citizens at risk. To forfeit your property, the state only needs to show that it was more likely than not that your property was used in some criminal activity—the legal standard of preponderance of the evidence. To recover seized property, an innocent owner bears the burden of proving his innocence. Moreover, law enforcement in Idaho reaps all of the rewards of civil forfeitures—they keep 100 percent of all funds and face no requirement to report data on forfeiture use and proceeds. Otter also cited "public safety" as a reason for vetoing the reform bill. Somehow, seizing cash but letting suspected criminals go free makes us safer.[T]here is a legitimate public safety concern associated with allowing those charged with drug crimes to keep money, cars and other civil assets that may be connected with those crimes. Not the least of these concerns is the potential for evidence to disappear or be tampered with. Which is bullshit. If cops aren't seeking convictions, they don't need evidence. Forfeited items don't go into an evidence locker. It's converted for use by the agency seizing it -- 100% of it as allowed by Idaho law. If there's no prosecution pending, it's not evidence. It's just assets, but ones now in the hands of someone other than their original owner. The governor is deliberately muddying the waters (or he truly doesn't understand the subject matter) by conflating criminal asset forfeiture with the more popular version -- civil asset forfeiture -- which has nothing to do with the "criminal charges" Otter leads off with.But where Governor Otter's statement really shows his disdain for everyone but a small percentage of his constituents is this part:The fact that this bipartisan legislation was overwhelmingly approved by both the House and Senate is outweighed by compelling opposition from law enforcement and the absence of any benefit to law-abiding citizens from its enactment. The people and their representatives don't matter, not when weighed against the apparently onerous requirement that law enforcement seek convictions when seizing property. The benefit Otter can't see is intangible: conviction requirements eliminate fishing expeditions by law enforcement officers who may be more interested in assets than convictions. That does make the public safer, but the public's top representative only represents law enforcement interests.
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