To save money during the Shutdown, Justice Kennedy is just going to go ahead and decide all of this term's Supreme Court cases on his own.
— Supreme Court Haiku (@SupremeHaiku) October 14, 2013
Author Archives: shaun
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Should tipping for large parties be left solely to the customer or should the restaurant tack it on to the bill?
The new IRS ruling that takes effect in January will treat automatic gratuities as service charges, rather than tips. The switch means servers will no longer be responsible for reporting those automatic tips as income. And it also means automatic gratuities will be considered a part of a server’s wages, making that money subject to payroll tax withholding and delaying receipt of those automatic tips until an employee’s next paycheck.
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– http://www.indystar.com/article/20131011/BUSINESS/310110015/Automatic-tipping-IRS-rules-change-could-taxing-hospitality-industry?nclick_check=1
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“If readers knew that reviewers had really been to the restaurant in question, it would not solve all the credibility problems but it would be a step in the right direction. That is the benefit of a new program that TripAdvisor and American Express introduced Tuesday. Amex card members will sign in to a new part of the review site and be given the opportunity to evaluate the places they patronized. Next to their write-up it will say, “Amex cardmember review.” The reviewer might still be a friend — or enemy — of the establishment, but at least he really went there.”
– http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/08/encouraging-the-reviewers-honestly/?ref=todayspaper
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I’ve long admired Gladwell’s work in The New Yorker, which employs many of the same literary techniques but is more persuasive, perhaps, because it is more contained and less ambitious. “David and Goliath,” on the other hand, is at once deeply repetitive and a bewildering sprawl. There are chapters, especially toward the end, whose relation to the rest of the book are hard to ascertain, even with his constant guidance.
Maybe what “David and Goliath” really illustrates is that it’s time for Malcolm Gladwell to find a new shtick.
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“Soon, the question of a name came up. Williams jokingly suggested calling the project “Friendstalker,” which was ruled out as too creepy. Glass became obsessive, flipping through a physical dictionary, almost word by word, looking for the right name. One late afternoon, alone in his apartment, he reached over to his cellphone and turned it to silent, which caused it to vibrate. He quickly considered the name “Vibrate,” which he nixed, but it led him to the word “twitch.” He dismissed that too, but he continued through the “Tw” section of the dictionary: twist, twit, twitch, twitcher, twitchy … and then, there it was. He read the definition aloud. “The light chirping sound made by certain birds.” This is it, he thought. “Agitation or excitement; flutter.” Twitter.”
– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/magazine/all-is-fair-in-love-and-twitter.html?pagewanted=all
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So you have this neighbor who has been making your life hell. First he tied you up with a spurious lawsuit; you’re both suffering from huge legal bills. Then he threatened bodily harm to your family. Now, however, he says he’s willing to compromise: He’ll call off the lawsuit, which is to his advantage as well as yours. But in return you must give him your car. Oh, and he’ll stop threatening your family — but only for a week, after which the threats will resume.
Not much of an offer, is it? But here’s the kicker: Your neighbor’s relatives, who have been egging him on, are furious that he didn’t also demand that you kill your dog.
And now you understand the current state of budget negotiations.
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While Blok worked on her design, she and her colleagues agreed that the logo, like the software, should be open-sourced. “We decided it would be a collaborative logo that everybody in the world could customize,” she says. “That was pretty daring.” Most companies, of course, defend their trademark from copycats, and million-dollar lawsuits have been filed over the rights to corporate insignia. This one would remain free.
In the years since, the Android logo has been dressed up as a ninja, given skis and skateboards and even transformed into a limited-edition Kit-Kat bar. Blok (who is now creative director at Edmodo, a social network for students and teachers) says that creating the logo was like raising a child: “You give a life to this individual, and then they have a life of their own.”
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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/magazine/who-made-that-android-logo.html?ref=todayspaper
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“The beauty of the stock market is that it’s an astonishingly easy place for buyers and sellers to connect with one another. If you want to sell almost any stock, you can find a buyer within seconds and know within a few cents how much the buyer will pay. (Compare that with selling a house or a car or even an old piece of furniture on Craigslist.) In the old days, the stock market worked because there were people — so-called market makers — whose job was to ensure that there was almost always a willing buyer and seller for every stock. In the past decade, their jobs have been largely replaced by high-frequency traders who provide this middleman service. Over time, this shift to technology has generally made it cheaper for everyone, including long-term investors, to buy and sell stocks. But there are notable exceptions. A trader using a high-speed connection to jump in front of a deal between a willing buyer and seller is driving up costs for the buyer and isn’t really improving the market.”
– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/magazine/high-frequency-traders.html?pagewanted=2&ref=todayspaper
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Legalisation may, as I noted last week, result in more adults using marijuana, but the negative consequences of any increase in use are likely to be modest given its relative safety compared with most other psychoactive plants and substances. Legal regulation offers the promise of safer use, with consumers able to purchase their marijuana from licensed outlets and to know the type and potency of their purchases—and to have peace of mind that such purchases will be free from contamination. Legalisation will also accelerate the transition from smoking marijuana in joints and pipes to consuming it in edible and vaporised forms, with significant health benefits for heavy consumers.
Hundreds of millions of people worldwide use marijuana not just “for fun” but because they find it useful for many of the same reasons that people drink alcohol or take pharmaceutical drugs. It’s akin to the beer, glass of wine, or cocktail at the end of the work day, or the prescribed drug to alleviate depression or anxiety, or the sleeping pill, or the aid to sexual function and pleasure. A decade ago, a subsidiary of The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal, speculated whether marijuana might soon emerge as the “aspirin of the 21st century”, providing a wide array of medical benefits at low cost to diverse populations. That prediction appears ever more prescient as scientists employed by both universities and pharmaceutical companies explore marijuana’s potential.
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– http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/1020#pro_statement_anchor
shaun james bockert 