Shinycroak

My wife noticed this morning that some jewelry she had bought was a knock-off of a local craft artist's work. Which inspired me to do some research on intellectual property for jewelers. Turns out that designs can be copyrighted or (if three-dimensional) patented. Copyright protection is easy and cheap, but patents provide more protection. This bird's short take on this is to copyright almost everything; patent only designs that you expect to make a lot of money from. Cites: Creative Arts Advocate article .  Etsy policy statement . Nolo Press: The Craft Artist's Legal Guide . Oooh, shiny!

Akerlof and Shiller, Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception . Princeton University Press, 2015. 257 pp. This book, by Nobel-winning economics professors George A. Akerlof (Georgetown University) and Robert J. Shiller (Yale University), is an extended discussion of the role of fraud in economics. The authors argue that fraud is a natural feature of unregulated markets and that fraud is as subject to economic equilibrium as any other product. They back the argument with multiple historical examples, including a short history of advertising, abuses in the pharmaceutical industry, a history of the discovery of the health risks of cigarettes. One entire chapter is spent on the return on investment of lobbying (at least 100 to 1, in the examples they give) while avoiding partisanship and current issues. Their examples are chosen to be safely in the past. It must have taken serious self-restraint not to talk about the financial disasters of the 2000s and the...

I remember, back when I rented cars regularly, I would get enormous pressure from the rental agents to say that I was “completely satisfied.” I was pressured to give them fives on a one to five scale. They hinted, probably honestly, that their management penalized them if a customer gave them less than those ratings. I hated it. I despise pressure to give complements. On top of which, what would I say when someone did an unexpectedly good job, or an extraordinary one? There was no space on the scale. And then, it got worse. Firms like Uber fire drivers who get ratings less than 4.5 stars. Customers all know it, and drivers know what the customer ratings are, so if you want to do business with these firms, you are under enormous pressure to give five-star ratings. Thanks to this, five stars is a C. There is no way to give A’s and B’s. Maybe the drivers were all born in Lake Wobegon, where “all the children are above average.” Croak!

(As of May 3, 2015) It seems that Google has bought ITA, which is now Google Flights, and Microsoft has bought a bunch of other travel sites, whch are now all Expedia .  The remaining player in the market is Priceline’s Kayak.com .  Google will send you to a single airline site to book all of your flights, Microsoft’s Expedia acts as a travel agency, Kayak sends you to airline sites. For really cheap travel, priceline.com uses an auction system, but you never know if you’re going to be routed through New York on your way from Seattle to Walla Walla. Me, I travel as the crow flies. Links:   https://www.google.com/flights/   http://www.expedia.com/   http://www.kayak.com/   http://www.priceline.com/

At the end of the year, the various exchanges are required to send 1095-A forms to people who took advantage of the ACA tax credit. Unfortunately, there are conflicts between the exchange databases of tax credit data and the insurance company tax credit data and a large number of incorrect forms have been sent by two of the largest exchanges: the Federal healthcare.gov and Covered California. At the Federal level, some 20% of healthcare.gov users, about 800,000 people, have been sent invalid 1095-A forms. Statement from the Federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) . Corrected forms will be sent. People who filed based on the invalid forms will be contacted by "the Treasury," likely the IRS. If you have a healthcare.gov account, log in to it to find out if you have been affected. California has not yet issued a statement. The LA Times reports that 100,000 incorrect forms have been sent. According to that report, corrected forms will be sent out soo...