Even demonstrably false or irrelevant information can influence judgments, which in turn influence decisions. (…)
Policy makers have long recognized the potential danger of false statements by advertisers. But in the belief that most adults are suitably skeptical about promotional puffery, Congress has tried to prohibit only the most blatantly false or explicitly misleading claims.
But what about merely irrelevant statements, or only implicitly misleading ones? Standard economic models say such claims are, well, irrelevant, so there should be no need to regulate them. But according to recent behavioral research, it’s a distinction without a difference.
Although cigarette advertisements, for example, typically portray smokers as young, healthy and attractive, smoking can make people look older and less healthy. Such ads make no explicitly false claims, but that doesn’t make them less misleading, even for informed consumers.
Four dozen Prince George’s County police cadets had searched a wooded area in Glenn Dale for the BlackBerry of a woman who had been killed in her Upper Marlboro home. They found nothing.
Five days later, a county homicide detective, Benjamin Brown, the lead investigator into the strangulation of Antoinette Renee Chase, started a weekend night shift by driving back to the area. Brown suspected Chase’s husband but needed evidence before he could put him in handcuffs.
Brown, a Boy Scout leader who attained the rank of Eagle Scout, knows maps and Global Positioning System devices. The day of the slaying, the victim’s BlackBerry had made or received a phone call that placed the device within 200 meters of a particular location in Glenn Dale. Brown plugged longitude and latitude coordinates into his GPS device and identified an area about 300 meters from where the cadets had searched.
Behind a strip shopping mall, the detective inspected another wooded area. Nothing. He retreated to the shopping mall’s asphalt and, using a screwdriver, pried open a heavy metal storm drain cover. Then a second. Then a third. Jackpot.
On a ledge, Brown saw a plastic bag. Inside the bag, he found a purse that belonged to Antoinette Chase. At the bottom of the storm drain, Brown spotted another plastic bag, which had water shoes and work gloves. The shoes were the same size as those worn by Antoinette’s husband, Spencer Ellsworth Chase, according to court testimony. The work gloves contained the DNA of both Chases, according to testimony.
I wrote a few days ago about the Intel anti-trust settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. Those words stand unchanged but some readers have asked for more so I have given the deal further thought and have what might be a better context in which to place it — Too Big to Fail. This isn’t “too big to fail” in the Bush/Obama big bank context in which failing and stupid institutions are saved at any cost to the public. Intel, in contrast, literally is too big to fail, at least right now.
Everything about the Intel/FTC settlement screams of one thing — Microsoft. Redmond’s multi-year nightmare with the FTC, DoJ, and the attorneys-general of several dozen states wasn’t lost on Intel, which is a more rational company and doesn’t want a Microsoft-like anti-trust experience. Both companies are guilty and both are paying something for that guilt, but Intel clearly wants to avoid the decade of pain and distraction suffered by Microsoft.
For the record, Intel admitted no wrong-doing in the settlement. But they also promised to specifically change their behavior.
What this settlement (and the previous one with AMD) does for Intel is clear the decks for future action. Now Intel can attack new market segments and be aggressive in existing market segments within the rules of the FTC deal.
Microsoft was paralyzed with the FTC breathing down its neck. Intel is not paralyzed.
Roughly $2 billion in payouts and Intel is a free bird — a rich free bird at that — having proved that crime does pay.
For jazz fans, nothing could be more tantalizing than the excerpts made available by the National Jazz Museum in Harlem of newly discovered recordings from the 1930s and ’40s. Nearly 1,000 discs containing performances by masters like Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Billie Holiday and the long-neglected Herschel Evans suddenly re-emerged when the son of the audio engineer, William Savory, sold them to the museum.
The museum is doing its best to clean up and digitize the recordings. But because of the way copyright laws work, excerpts may be all that fans can hear for some time. The museum paid for the discs, but cannot distribute the music until it has found a way to compensate the estates of the musicians, many of which may be very difficult to track down after all these decades. Hawkins’s saxophone solo on “Body and Soul” may be reason enough for Congress to revisit this issue and free historical documents from excessive legal fetters.
Copyright laws are designed to ensure that authors and performers receive compensation for their labors without fear of theft and to encourage them to continue their work. The laws are not intended to provide income for generations of an author’s heirs, particularly at the cost of keeping works of art out of the public’s reach.
The Savory collection, like other sound recordings made before 1972, is covered by a patchwork of state copyright and piracy laws that in some cases allow copyrights to remain until the year 2067.
When police in Western New York pulled over Gary Korkuc for blowing off a stop sign on Sunday, they found a live cat in his trunk, covered in cooking oil, peppers, and salt. Korkuc told authorities that his pet feline was “possessive, greedy, and wasteful” and that he intended to cook and eat it. Korkuc has been charged with animal cruelty. Is there a legal way to cook and eat a cat?
Over the past few months, we have learned about extraordinary levels of excessively bad corporate behavior.
As bad as the Bailouts were from an economic, wealth transfer, and moral hazard perspectives, it turns out that the grim reality was an order of magnitude worse than previously believed.
We have since learned that many TARP recipients, bailed out banks and other ne’er-do-wells were actively engaged in cooking their books. I don’t mean various FASB 157 permission to lie, and other legal but nefarious activities. I am referring to the 2002-2007 era of scams, frauds, and outright theft.
The public’s righteous indignation over the lack of just desserts for the perpetrators of these frauds has morphed since September 2008 into an unresolved, unfocused anger. When this all plays out, we might very well see bonus clawbacks, fines and penalties, disgorgement of ill gotten gains, and criminal arrests for some of the major names at the biggest brokerage houses.
Why do I think that 2 years later, some justice might be done? The truth is slowly coming out, as insiders provide testimony, release papers, and even offer up recordings of conversations to various investigators and prosecutors.
In town to promote his new film, “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” Banksy, the pseudonymous British street artist, has been leaving reminders of his visit around the city. But almost as soon as the paint was dry, the pieces were scribbled on overnight by taggers claiming to be the Smart Crew and Emjay, well-known local graffiti artists.
Some of Banksy’s pieces were also tagged with a picture of a man’s face and a stenciled message reading “Free Henry—Poster Boy,” a reference to the street artist Poster Boy (real name: Henry Matyjewicz), who was sentenced to 11 months in prison last week on charges of criminal mischief.
Street artists in the city seem to be under siege at the moment. The Banksy markings come on the heels of a massive tagging attack on Shepard Fairey’s mural on East Houston Street. (And that mural itself had already been targeted with a stop-work order by the city’s Department of Buildings.) Police say they’re investigating the tagging, and note that Banksy lacked a permit for at least one of his drawings.
Transportation Security Administration Service Animals
It is recommended that persons using an animal for assistance carry appropriate identification. Identification may include: cards or documentation, presence of a harness or markings on the harness, or other credible assurance of the passenger using the animal for their disability. (…)
Monkey Helpers
When a service monkey is being transported in a carrier, the monkey must be removed from the carrier by the handler prior to screening,
The service monkey must be controlled by the handler throughout the screening process.
The service monkey handler should carry the monkey through the walk through metal detector while the monkey remains on a leash.
When the handler and service monkey go through the walk through metal detector and the detector alarms, both the handler and the monkey must undergo additional screening.
Since service monkeys may likely draw attention, the handler will be escorted to the physical inspection area where a table is available for the monkey to sit on. Only the handler will touch or interact with the service monkey.
Security Officers have been trained to not touch the service monkey during the screening process.
Security Officers will conduct a visual inspection on the service monkey and will coach the handler on how to hold the monkey during the visual inspection.
The inspection process may require that the handler to take off the monkey’s diaper as part of the visual inspection.
Imagine a market for highly sought-after items in which the makers and sellers work hard to ensure that the items go only to certain buyers, even if other buyers might be willing to pay more. The favored buyers are then expected not to resell the items for many years, even if the values skyrocket. Ideally, in fact, the buyers are expected to give these items away eventually, for the public good. And if the buyers don’t abide by these expectations, they risk being cut off, cast out with the other unwashed wealthy who can afford to buy but have no access.
At least according to Craig Robins, a prominent Miami art collector and real estate developer who filed a federal lawsuit on March 29 in Manhattan, this is a portrait of the workings of the primary market for contemporary art, which, despite the recession, remains immense and highly competitive.
At its heart, the $8 million suit is a fairly ordinary contract dispute about confidentiality agreements and sales promises. But the details of the disagreement have provided a rare view into a normally very private world of high-end art selling in which membership rules, responsibilities, rewards and reprisals can be so complex and changeable that even art world veterans say they sometimes struggle to decode them.
Days after the sabotage, one of his best-known older pieces, a suspended, taxidermised horse titled The Ballad of Trotsky, was auctioned in New York for $2.1m (£1.15m). Cattelan claims he won’t get a penny of that money - he sold the horse in 1996 for $5,000. Still, what is it like knowing your work is worth so much? “It’s like going to sleep 14 years old and waking up 30,” he says. “Things that maybe seemed a joke before are now taken more seriously.”
On Monday, more than a year after a man was arrested outside a market in California with a $3.99 bag of Tillamook shredded cheese in his pants he had not paid for, a judge decided to go relatively easy on him, sentencing him to seven years and eight months in jail.
Prosecutors in Yolo County, Calif., outside Sacramento, had originally asked for a life sentence under the state’s “three strikes” law, arguing that the man, Robert Preston Ferguson, was a menace to society because of prior burglary convictions.
