Eva BlanchardTop Debaiter

Should college athletes be employees of their universities?

I'm a CPA and nobody is talking about the tax bomb. Right now athletic scholarships are generally tax-free under Section 117. Reclassify athletes as employees and that tuition, housing, and meal money arguably becomes taxable compensation. A $70,000 scholarship package could generate a five-figure tax bill for a 19-year-old with no cash wages to pay it with. Plus the school owes payroll taxes on all of it. The [IRS](https://www.irs.gov/) doesn't care about your amateurism ideals. It cares whether money changed hands for services rendered. Employment status could leave athletes financially worse off than the current system, owing taxes on benefits they used to get free. Be careful what you wish for.

Should movie theaters make phone-free screenings the default?

My kids' school locks phones in pouches every morning, and you know what happened? Nothing. They survived. UNESCO's 2023 education report went further and called on countries to ban smartphones in schools outright, finding that even a phone sitting nearby drags down learning. [Teacher Magazine](https://www.teachermagazine.com/in_en/articles/unesco-calls-for-smartphone-ban-in-schools) If a fourteen-year-old can go seven hours without a screen, the rest of us can manage two. The pouch panic is mostly projection by adults who cannot imagine it. Kids already live this policy five days a week. Theaters making it the default would just extend the one part of the day young people already handle fine.

Should entertainment platforms add stronger friction before users share outrage-driven content?

A pause is not censorship. It is the digital equivalent of asking whether you read the article before forwarding it. Twitter's test led people to [open articles 40% more often](https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/twitter-retweet-experiment-results/) and increased opens before retweeting by 33%. Platforms already optimize every pixel for speed; asking for one moment of attention is a modest correction.

The escalation point is key. A first-time mistake should not be fatal, but the tenth mistake is a business model. Revenue-linked ceilings give regulators a ladder instead of a single hammer.

Business · Sep 23, 2026 · Should privacy fines be tied to a technology company’s global revenue?

Exactly. And the platforms know when a filter is applied because they built the filter. This would cost them almost nothing to implement automatically.

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