1. Actual weekly number of hours worked in the UK, the data series. Not your grandfather’s AD problem.
2. Ross Douthat on conservatives and health care costs.
3. Publisher threatens blogger with $1 billion lawsuit, in India too.
4. Markets in everything, Bea Arthur edition.
5. Europe’s problem is the banks.
6. The new smart rifle, which hardly ever misses.
7. In the world of theater, is this vigilante justice or not?
Some wealthy Manhattan moms have figured out a way to cut the long lines at Disney World — by hiring disabled people to pose as family members so they and their kids can jump to the front, The Post has learned.
The “black-market Disney guides” run $130 an hour, or $1,040 for an eight-hour day.
“My daughter waited one minute to get on ‘It’s a Small World’ — the other kids had to wait 2 1/2 hours,” crowed one mom, who hired a disabled guide through Dream Tours Florida.
“You can’t go to Disney without a tour concierge,’’ she sniffed. “This is how the 1 percent does Disney.”
That is by the way much cheaper than Disney’s own “VIP service,” which costs over $300 an hour. Here is more, and I thank Neal and also Adam Cohen for the pointer.
The headline is: “Desperately Seeking Cichlid: Fish Species Down to Last 3 Males, No Known Females.”
Once upon a time the Mangarahara cichlid (Ptychochromis insolitus) lived in a single habitat: a river in Madagascar from which the species gets its name. That river has now been dammed and the habitat has dried up. Today there are just three Mangarahara cichlids left—all males. Two reside at the Zoological Society of London’s (ZSL) London Zoo Aquarium; the third lives at the Berlin Zoo.
Although the species appears to be extinct in the wild, ZSL London Zoo hopes that somewhere, somehow a female or two might exist in private hands. “We are urgently appealing to anyone who owns or knows someone who may own these critically endangered fish, which are silver in color with an orange-tipped tail, so that we can start a breeding program here at the zoo to bring them back from the brink of extinction,” aquarium curator Brian Zimmerman said in a press release last week.
The zoo has already reached out to other facilities around the world, with no luck. Now the only hope lies in private aquarium owners, fish collectors and hobbyists who might see the zoo’s appeal and realize that they own a female cichlid. The zoo has even set up a dedicated e-mail address for anyone with information: fishappeal@zsl.org.
Of course you can’t count on the market alone, as there are cultural preconditions for cooperation:
…even if a female does turn up, breeding won’t be guaranteed. Zimmerman told the BBC News that the Berlin Zoo used to have a female that it had hoped to breed with its male. Instead, the male killed its potential mate. “It’s a fairly common thing with cichlids,” Zimmerman said.
We’ll see how the supply elasticity works out on this one…
For the pointer I thank Chris MacDonald.
The market for methadone vomit in prison is lively, and the preferred recipe for this cocktail is one part puke (strained, please, bartender) to one part Tang.
Here is more, interesting on other points too, by Graeme Wood, mostly on the drug problem in the country of Georgia, and the pointer is from Wonkbook.
A New York City real estate company made the offer and dozens of employees are getting inked.
As CBS 2′s Emily Smith reported Tuesday, a tattoo can be a way to show off your personality. For Rapid Realty employees, it is the fast track to a 15 percent pay raise if you get inked with the company logo.
There are no size or location restrictions. Brooke Koropatnick got hers behind the ear.
The story is here, and for the pointer I thank Mark Thorson. By the way, there is this too:
The credit doesn’t go to Rapid Realty owner Anthony Lolli. He said he got the idea from a loyal employee who wasn’t doing it for money.
“He calls me up, he says ‘Hey Anthony, I’m getting the logo on me.’ I show up at the shop and I’m like ‘this is cool, how can I repay you?’” Lolli said.
1. Another look at the STEM job market.
2. What’s it like to live in the middle of nowhere?
3. In China the license plates can cost more than the car.
4. Markets in everything (or does this defeat the whole purpose of cross-dressing?)
5. What is the Philadelphia accent, and how is it evolving?
1. The culture that is manga Japan.
2. One look at why income inequality is growing.
3. Overview of the current economic crisis in Slovenia.
4. I met Bush once and also thought he was very smart. No need to waste comments space with banal observations about job involvement, morality, or Woodrow Wilson.
5. Markets in everything, Rhode Island breast milk jewelry edition, I am not sure if I believe this related product.
6. How much of the health care cost slowdown is due to the slowing economy?
7. Portland has a vegan strip club.
8. The wisdom of Scott Sumner, on the UK.
I heard reports of inmates checking out popular books like The Da Vinci Code, then auctioning off reading rights to fellow inmates.
That is from Avi Steinberg’s Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian, which is often annoying, intermittently very interesting.
Responding to an order from above, a Munich court has reopened the media accreditation process for reporters covering the biggest neo-Nazi trial in German history. Seats will now be allotted by raffle, with several being reserved for the Turkish, Greek and other foreign press.
Here is more, note there are several reserved for Persian, Greek, and Turkish media.
Hawkins’ clients are part of a growing trend: people paying to have their vacations professionally photographed.
Her clients say the results – clean, crisp, blur-free images ideal for holiday cards and brag books – are worth it.
Ugh says I, and the link is here, via Courtney Knapp.
1. Markets in everything: coffee cups made for squirrels. Why not?, I say. Given all the arbitrary causes which people take up, should we not in fact do just a small bit more for squirrels?
2. “Vervet monkeys solved a multiplayer coordination problem.”
3. Origami condoms.
4. Nine Queens do ferrets on steroids disguised as poodles.
5. Job openings but not everyone is getting hired, and data on Swedish female managers and professionals, compared to the U.S., older results on economists are here.
7. How does the Obama budget plan “work”?
1. The economy that is Singapore, cruises for pets.
3. U.S. infrastructure is better than you think.
5. China markets in everything, selling the phone numbers of foreign correspondents.
6. What is Europe’s most important renewable energy source? Wood, it turns out (there is a great stagnation).
2. 狗狗穿丝袜 (not recommended).
3. InTrade is facing liquidation.
4. Superfluid transport of information in turning flocks of starlings (pdf); “We argue that the link between strong order and efficient decision-making required by superfluidity may be the adaptive drive for the high degree of behavioural polarization observed in many living groups.”
5. In praise of Baiersbronn (and German food).
6. The market for fake Twitter followers.
2. Play-Doh 3-D printer (didn’t I have one of those when I was three, namely my fingers?).
3. Will drones revolutionize farming?
4. Samoa Air charges by the kilo.
5. Yelp reviews of a jail; excerpt: “The staff seem like former Walmart employees or even criminals themselves…” That commentator gave the jail only a single star. And cosmopolitan Norwich.
1. How has the sequester turned out for air travel?
3. Economic difficulties in the Netherlands.
4. Are Americans saving enough?
5. Kidnapping markets in everything.
6. Speculations about China and bird flu.
7. Good short review of Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan’s The Org. Here is an associated Freakonomics Q&A.
8. Fed odds from Neil Irwin; my prediction is we get one extra year of Bernanke and only then another candidate.
