I admit it. I did watch the Super Bowl. How could I not when my grandfather was one of the first season ticket holders back in the days when the Broncos were truly horrible? I can still remember him taking me to a game, and he went, rain, shine, or snow, until he was physically no longer able. I wasn’t able to go with him, unfortunately, because by then I was working in Washington, D.C.

And yes, I was definitely happy that the Broncos won, particularly since I’ve always felt that Peyton Manning is a class act, but that brings me to the point — Cam Newton’s postgame interview, if it could be called that, which was anything but a class act. Yes, he was disappointed, and he wasn’t the first great quarterback to be disappointed, and certainly won’t be the last.

Newton’s real problem is that he is so physically gifted and also has a mind good enough to use those gifts that he’s never considered a few key matters. First, in anything, no matter how big you are, how fast you, how strong you are, how intelligent you are… there’s always someone bigger, faster, stronger, and more intelligent. Second, football is a team game, and the team that plays better as a team usually wins. Third, sometimes you get the breaks, and sometimes you don’t. Fourth, you don’t win just because you have the better record or the better offense – as Denver found out two years ago. Fifth, it is a game, if a very serious one played for high stakes.

Newton also needs to realize that he’s paid extraordinarily well to do exactly the same thing that every writer does, except few of us, indeed, are paid as well as he is. He’s paid to entertain the fans, and while that means winning as much as possible, it also means not pissing everyone off and coming off like a spoiled kid. This is also something writers need to keep in mind.

Given his talent, I’m sure Newton will be a factor for years to come, but it would be nice to see a bit more class when things don’t go well. You don’t have to like losing, but in the end, as even the great Peyton Manning has discovered, we all lose… and the mark of the truly great is to show class both when things go well and when they don’t.

The United States is one of the high-tech nations of the world, yet our productivity has hovered around a measly two percent per year for almost a decade. In the depths of the great recession that made a sort of sense, but the “recovery” from the recession has been anemic, to say the least. With all this technology, shouldn’t we be doing better?

Well… in manufacturing, productivity has to be up, whether the statistics show it or not, considering we’re producing more with fewer workers, and that has to mean greater output per worker. Despite the precipitous drop in the price of crude oil, the oil industry is almost maintaining output with far fewer rigs drilling and far fewer workers.

But perhaps what matters is what technology is productive and how it is used. I ran across an article in The Economist discussing “collaboration” with statistics indicating that electronic communications were taking more than half the work-week time of knowledge workers, and that more and more workers ended up doing their “real work” away from work because of the burden of dealing with electronic communications such as email and Twitter. And, unhappily, a significant proportion of the added burden comes under the “rubric” of accountability and assessment. But when you’re explaining what you’re doing and how you’re accountable, you’re not producing.

This is anything but the productive use of technology, and it may provide even greater incentive for businesses to computerize lower-level knowledge jobs even faster than is already happening. It just might be that, if you want to keep your job, less email is better. But then, if your boss doesn’t get that message as well, that puts you in an awkward position. I suppose you could console yourself, once you’re replaced by a computerized system, that your supervisor will soon have no one to badger with those endless emails demanding more and more status reports… before he or she is also replaced by an artificial intelligence.

We’ve already learned, despite the fact that too many Americans ignore the knowledge, that texting while driving runs a higher risk of causing fatalities than DUI. Will the supervisory types ever learn that excessive emailing may just lead not only to lower productivity, but eventual occupational suicide?

Some of the complaints that the older generation has about the younger generation have been voiced almost as far back as there has been a way of recording those complaints, and they’re all familiar enough. They young don’t respect their elders; they don’t listen to their elders; they have no respect for tradition; they think they deserve something without really working for it, etc., etc. And, frankly, there’s some validity to those complaints today, and there always has been. That’s the nature of youth, to be headstrong, self-centered, and impatient with anything that hampers what they want.

But being adjacent, shall we say, to a university, I’m hearing what seems to be a variation on an old complaint, except it’s really not a variation, but a very troubling concern. What I’m hearing from a significant number of professors is that a growing percentage of their students can’t listen. They’re totally unable to maintain any focus on anything, often even visual presentations, for more than a few seconds – even when they seem to be trying. When they’re asked what they heard or saw, especially what they heard, they can’t recall anything in detail. We’re not talking about lack of intelligence – they do well on written multiple-guess tests – but an apparent inability to recall and process auditory input.

Unless there’s something of extraordinary interest, their attention span darts from one thing to another in a few seconds. Whether this is the result of a media driven culture, earlier teaching methods pandering to learning in sound-bites, a lack of discipline in enforcing focus, or some combination of these or other factors, I can’t say. But, whatever the reason, far too many students cannot focus on learning, especially auditory learning.

Unfortunately, the response of higher education has been to attempt to make learning “more interesting” or “more inspiring” or, the latest fad, “more experiential.” Learning through experience is an excellent means for attaining certain skills, provided the student has the background knowledge. But when a student hasn’t obtained that background knowledge, experiential learning is just meaningless and a waste of time and resources. And, generally speaking, learning has to begin with at least some listening.

Furthermore, in the “real world,” employers and bosses don’t provide “experiential learning.” They give instructions, usually vocally, and someone who can’t listen and assimilate knowledge from listening is going to have problems, possibly very large ones.

Despite all the academic rhetoric about students being unable to learn from lectures, lectures worked, if not perfectly, for most of human history. That suggests that much of the problem isn’t with the method, but with the listener. And it’s not just with professors. They can’t listen to each other, either. That’s likely why they’re always exchanging text messages. If this keeps up, I shudder to think what will happen if there’s a massive power loss, because they apparently can’t communicate except through electronic screens.

The state legislature here in Utah has proposed setting aside $14 million for legal action against the federal government to “force” the United States to turn over all public lands to the state. This is just the latest effort in Utah to grab federal lands.

There are several aspects of this hullabaloo over federal lands that neither the legislature nor the Bundyites seem to understand… or want to. First, the Constitution vests public lands in the federal government, and numerous court cases have upheld that reading of the Constitution. Second, a 2012 study calculated that managing those lands would cost the state of Utah something like $278 million a year, and while much of that cost might be initially reclaimed by oil, gas, and coal leases, once the resources were extracted, the costs of management would remain, and the lands would have even less value. Third, if the grasslands were leased to ranchers, either the grazing fees would have to increase, since the BLM only charges about a third of what it costs the BLM for management [and one of the problems now is that the BLM doesn’t have enough money to manage the wild horse problem and a few others], or the state would have to pick up the difference, which it can’t afford.

In short, not only is what the legislature proposes illegal and unconstitutional, but the federal government is actually subsidizing the ranchers and the state of Utah, something the legislators don’t seem able to grasp.

The ranchers here in southern Utah are furious that the BLM doesn’t essentially round up all the wild horses so that there’s more forage for their cattle, but even if the BLM had the resources to do that, which it doesn’t, because Congress has insisted on not fully funding the BLM and upon keeping grazing fees low, that still wouldn’t solve the problem, because not only were western water rights predicated on the climate of the early part of the nineteenth century [which geologists have discovered was one of the wettest times here in the west in something like 10,000 years], but so were grazing rights. That is why the BLM has cut down on the number of animals allowed per acre, which is yet another rancher complaint.

In short, the ranchers, the legislature, and the Bundyites are precluded from doing as they please by the Constitution, the climate situation, and the Congress, and they’re so unhappy about it that they think the second amendment is the only answer. So, despite all their railing about their Constitutional rights, I guess they really mean that they intend to comply with just those parts of the Constitution whose they agree with, and that they’ll continue to insist that the Supreme Court has been wrong about what the Constitution means for over a century.

Over at least a decade, there’s been debate about entitlements and about a younger generation that may or may not feel “entitled.” Almost always, the use of the phrase is derogatory and suggests individuals or groups who feel they deserve something without paying for it. Although the actual meaning of the word “entitled” means that someone has been given the right to receive something, Americans have a problem with those whom they believe do not deserve that right.

My problem with all the debate is that it’s not inclusive enough, that all too many groups and individuals are receiving societal/governmental benefits for which they either have not paid anything or for which they have paid a minimal amount in comparison to the value of what they have received. Now… in the United States, there are certain benefits to which law-abiding and tax-paying citizens are or should be “entitled.” We deserve fair and impartial laws and a justice system that supports them. We should have a government that protects us from attack by other countries and by terrorists or by law-breakers within our own society. We have decided as a society that part of the role of government is to support highway systems and air transport systems that benefit us all, and to regulate businesses and organizations so that we all have clean air, safe food, and various safe products. For these and other services we pay taxes.

The entitlement problem comes when people are perceived to receive services and benefits out of proportion to what they have paid. When people receive welfare benefits of various sorts for long periods of time, with some families receiving them for generations, people get angry, even though statistics show that most welfare recipients don’t receive benefits for nearly that long.

Likewise, often business owners or professionals in a field get angry when younger people express the idea that they are “entitled” to a job, especially a particular position, even when they don’t have the requisite education and/or experience.

Those are the well-known examples of “undeserved entitlement,” but what about those that aren’t so well known? For example, isn’t the corporation that receives the overall services, legal system, and national market provided by the government, but which pays no taxes on billions of dollars of income, receiving an undeserved entitlement? Or the Bundy family, which is supposed to pay $1.70 per cow and calf for federal grazing rights [a fee less than a tenth of that charged on private land], yet hasn’t paid any of those fees for almost a decade and claims that the land belongs to them through what amounts to squatters’ rights? What about a company that “bargains” for tax breaks from states when relocating a new facility [which effectively places more of the burden for state services on other taxpayers]? Are oil companies and others investing in oil and gas development entitled to a “depletion allowance,” which can reduce taxable income by as much as fifteen percent, simply because it’s possible they might run out of oil and gas to extract? Why are homeowners entitled to deduct their mortgage costs from their taxable income [perhaps as a subsidy to the construction industry?], but renters can’t deduct their rent payments? Then there are the unnecessary military bases that the Defense Department can’t close because senators and representatives insist their constituents are entitled to the remaining jobs at those facilities – which means the rest of us end up paying for those entitled jobs.

So… when people start complaining about entitlements, perhaps they should consider how many they enjoy that they haven’t considered. But then, those are always the exceptions that are deserved.