Lawsuits Gone Wrong

Anyone who follows American sports knows that there’s been a battle going on between the US Women Soccer National Team (USWNT) versus their own federation, the US Soccer Federation (USSF). The issue of contention was that the women should earn much more parity in pay as compared to the male counterparts; in general, women always earn less than men. But the USWNT has always been a dominant powerhouse for decades, and they have the most number of World Cup titles and just won the most recent one. The tournament was certainly popular internationally.

The federation and players have not been able to get on the same page, leading (like it always does in America) to a lawsuit. Here is where it gets interesting. Just have a look at the legal briefing, of which the language was written by lawyers without the federation having a look at it first:

“MNT players have responsibility for competing in multiple soccer tournaments with the potential for generating a total of more than $40 million in prize money for U.S. Soccer every four years. WNT players compete in only one soccer tournament every four years that has the potential to generate any prize money at all, and most recently that amounted to one-tenth of the amount the MNT players could generate.”
”MNT plays in matches watched on television by many millions more people than the WNT.”
”The average viewership for MNT matches over the first three years of the current WNT CBA was nearly five times as high as that for WNT matches, excluding matches in the Women’s World Cup.”
”As for the World Cup, when the MNT last qualified, the ratings for its four World Cup matches were watched by more viewers than all the WNT matches in 2019 combined, Women’s World Cup included.”
”In games for which U.S. Soccer holds the television broadcast rights (and therefore can monetize the ratings), the MNT has averaged more than three times as many viewers per game since 2017.”

Then the lawyers argue (again as per SI):

“He insists that men’s players face much more demanding working conditions and thus have fundamentally different—and, by implication, harder—jobs. He contends that men’s players encounter “opposing fan hostility” in road environments, particularly in Mexico and Central America, that is “unmatched” by anything experienced by women’s players. Stolzenbach stresses that the women don’t play in Mexico, Central America or the Caribbean when trying to qualify for tournament play. Further, Stolzenbach maintains that “science” confirms there are different levels of speed and strength required for men’s and women’s players. He insists it is not a “sexist stereotype” to recognize this distinction.”

The arguments are pathetic and discriminating, especially considering that the men’s team didn’t even qualify for the last World Cup, and has never reached a WC final. And at the moment, they’re bad.

And with that, the criticism has been so bad, from even people within the federation, that the president has been forced to step down after earlier making a public apology.

This is just as bad as Apple’s recent court battle alleging that the company doesn’t need to pay for store workers’ time when their bags are searched during off hours, because allegedly Apple Store workers don’t have to bring their Apple devices to work. What?

Coronavirus Has Hit Sports

There’s so many things to think about coronavirus. But the fact that it has finally hit mainstream international sports means that it won’t be going away. Initially one of the reactions was to play without fans in the sports arenas. But then athletes are now getting infected. Initially, just footballers (unsurprisingly) in Italy got infected. But today, it has finally hit NBA basketball right into the core, with a player infected, soon after making not so smart jokes (in retrospect) about the virus. Expect economies to crash.

Anyways, here’s a map showing the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. What’s interesting is the fact that despite the ease of international travel, the spread of the virus is not fully homogenous. Countries other than China with the highest number of infections (in descending order) are Italy, Iran, and South Korea. What fascinates me is: why? Only South Korea is truly next door. Does it have something to do with the climate? Genetic predisposition? To me the international public health control measures feel late (it’s always a balance); if it’s as easily infectious as it seems to be, I expected much more countries to have been affected already. And Malaysia, with its stream of mainland Chinese tourists, is lucky to not have as many cases. And no deaths. Let’s not jinx this.

What’s also (darkly) humorous is the fact that the Diamond Princess cruise ship is considered as a “country”.

My Side Distractions (Therapy) Regarding Music

With today’s high speed Internet, how people play music has shifted towards streaming. But I’m old school and love “owning my music”.

Many years ago I subscribed to iTunes Match, that matches what you have in your library and allows you both streaming and downloading access to either songs identified in the database, or uploaded songs if otherwise for a fee (RM 100). The service has worked relatively well, matching at least half of the songs in my database (a lot of game soundtracks are not on iTunes). I have quite a collection of songs, at the beginning almost exclusively collected by compiling songs from other friends’ computers during my university days. The rest are through cough, torrents, cough. Frankly, I can't afford to buy all of the music I want to own. A few months back I’ve found a way that would allow me to have new songs and get old songs that were previously uploaded but not matched “iTunes matched”.

The key to this is YouTube and having a program that could extract the media files from the YouTube videos being streamed. In the past, it's possible to download the media being played on YouTube by going through the web developer tools. This is no longer the case at present (or maybe I’m too lazy to Google it). What I use now is an app called iTube Studio, which allows me to extract any media on YouTube as either a video file, a music file, or subtitle file, of course for a price (using this only for music hunting is not the sole reason I bought this app). Another alternative to YouTube are some sites still available to download MP3s directly from (despite DMCA takedowns); I won’t publicly name the one I use.

When downloading/extracting these songs, it’s important to compare the YouTube video with what is in the iTunes Store database to ensure that the music file in both are as similar as possible. Don’t use the music videos as they are usually not the same as the album version of the song. Looking for lyric videos, presence of the same album cover-thumbnail, details like “original”/“remastered”, duration of the files, etc all will help. Once extracted and imported into iTunes, I then try to add them to the library and see if they get matched. If none of the YouTube videos work, then I go for the alternative MP3 sites.

Additionally, some of the songs in iTunes do get matched but actually have the wrong names of the tracks, artists, etc. That’s where Siri comes in, as Apple a while ago bought the company behind the Shazam app. Just use the command “Shazam this” and you’ll get the required information.

It is quite some work in sorting things out, but at the end of the day, if I decide to cut ties with iTunes Match, I can decide to download all unmatched and matched music (as DRM free 256 kps AAC) then call it a day.

Some might cry that it’s stealing, considering that it’s only RM 100 versus purchasing each song/album I want. But one, this is actually per year rather than a single payment. And two, you’re wrong if any streaming solution pays artists a lot (and Spotify’s among the worst).