Category: Law

High school students in Maryland are using speed cameras as a tool to
fine innocent drivers in a game, according to the Montgomery County
Sentinel newspaper. Because photo enforcement devices will
automatically mail out a ticket to any registered vehicle owner based
solely on a photograph of a license plate, any driver could receive a
ticket if someone else creates a duplicate of his license plate and
drives quickly past a speed camera. The private companies that mail out
the tickets often do not bother to verify whether vehicle registration
information for the accused vehicle matches the photographed vehicle.

Here is much more. 

That’s Ford’s UAW contract.  You can read those 2215 pages, and other UAW contracts, here.  I thank Tim Miller for the pointer.

Maybe:

Google’s concession has made it more difficult for anyone to invoke fair use for book searches. The settlement itself is proof that a company can pay licensing fees and still turn a profit. So now no one can convincingly argue that scanning a book requires no license. If Microsoft starts its own book search service and claims fair use, the courts will say, "Hey, Google manages to pay for this sort of thing. What makes you so special?"

By settling the case, Google has made it much more difficult for others to compete with its Book Search service. Of course, Google was already in a dominant position because few companies have the resources to scan all those millions of books. But even fewer have the additional funds needed to pay fees to all those copyright owners. The licenses are essentially a barrier to entry, and it’s possible that only Google will be able to surmount that barrier.

Sure, Google now has to share its profits with publishers. But when a company has no competitors, there are plenty of profits to share.

Wall Street unwittingly created one of the catalysts for the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and American International Group by backing new bankruptcy rules that were aimed at insulating banks from the failure of a big client, lawyers and bankers say.

The
2005 changes made clear that certain derivatives and financial
transactions were exempt from provisions in the bankruptcy code that
freeze a failed company’s assets until a court decides how to apportion
them among creditors.

However, experts say the new rules might have accelerated the demise
of Bear, Lehman and AIG by removing legal obstacles for banks and hedge
funds that wanted to close positions and demand extra collateral from
the three companies.

“The changes were introduced to promote the
orderly unwinding of transactions but they ended up speeding up the
bankruptcy process,” said William Goldman, a partner at DLA Piper, the
law firm. “They wanted to protect the likes of Lehman and Bear Stearns
from the domino effect that would have ensued had a counterparty gone
under. They never thought the ones to go under would have been Lehman
and Bear.”

Here is the full story.  Here is previous MR coverage of this topic.  Here is a short article on petards.  Here is Wikipedia on petards.  Here are pictures of petards.

Government regulations — numerous ones I might add — are standing in the way of the Treasury plan to recapitalize U.S. banks:

The problem is this: Under existing rules, banks cannot count the
Treasury Department’s investment as part of their core capital, the
foundation of money that supports a bank’s operations. The very goal of
the plan was to buttress those foundations, which have been eroded by
recent losses, undermining the stability of the banks.

The Fed has changed its rule to accommodate Treasury policy and so has the OCC.  But will the Office of Thrift Supervision, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and state banking regulators follow suit?  Sooner or later, yes.  Get this: "All have their own capital standards and it remained unclear early this
afternoon how many of those standards might need to be adjusted."  I vote on the state authorities to come in last.

I do not think that either candidate will come out against the mandatory licensing of plumbers, but here is the real scoop on Joe:

Thomas Joseph, the business manager of Local 50 of the United
Association of Plumbers, Steamfitters and Service Mechanics, based in
Toledo, said Thursday that Mr. Wurzelbacher had never held a plumber’s
license, which is required in Toledo and several surrounding
municipalities. He also never completed an apprenticeship and does not
belong to the plumber’s union, which has endorsed Mr. Obama. On
Thursday, he acknowledged that he does plumbing work even though he
does not have a license.

Not only that, he calls himself Joe but his real name is Samuel.  He also owes back taxes.  I wonder if he has ever hired illegal immigrants to help him out.  Yes the Republican Party is ******* and I will not vote for them, but how many Democratic politicians will speak out against the coercive restraints placed on Joe (Samuel)?  That’s a serious question.

Addendum: As is often the case, those few of you who are mad at me simply haven’t
read the post carefully enough.  Just for a start, I’m not at all
criticizing the guy for calling himself Joe rather than Samuel.  I was
making fun of those people who are upset by this. Some of you are
committing other misunderstandings as well.  By the way, here are details on Toledo and licensing.

We find that in 2006, 29 percent of the workforce was required to hold
an occupational license from a government agency, which is a higher
percentage than that found in studies that rely on state-level
occupational licensing data.

That is from a new paper by Morris Kleiner and Alan Krueger.  I am happy to see such respected economists turning their attention to a neglected issue.  Here is a non-gated version of the paper.

There is, by the way, an interesting sentence buried near the end of the paper:

In contrast, union members perceive themselves as less competent than other workers.

A detailed analysis of powerplants in China by MIT researchers debunks
the widespread notion that outmoded energy technology or the utter
absence of government regulation is to blame for that country’s
notorious air-pollution problems. The real issue, the study found,
involves complicated interactions between new market forces, new
commercial pressures and new types of governmental regulation…

China’s power sector has been expanding at a rate roughly equivalent to
three to four new coal-fired, 500 megawatt plants coming on line every
week…most of the new plants have been built to very high technical
standards, using some of the most modern technologies available. The
problem has to do with the way that energy infrastructure is being
operated and the types of coals being burned.

The good news is that there is a single lever — coal quality — that could have an enormous impact on Chinese pollution levels.  Here is the full story.

Via Craig Newmark:

QUICK: If you imagine where things will go with Fannie and Freddie, and
you think about the regulators, where were the regulators for what was
happening, and can something like this be prevented from happening
again?

Mr. BUFFETT: Well, it’s really an incredible case study in regulation
because
something called OFHEO was set up in 1992 by Congress, and the sole job
of OFHEO was to watch over Fannie and Freddie, someone to watch over
them. And they were there to evaluate the soundness and the accounting
and all of that. Two companies were all they had to regulate. OFHEO has
over 200 employees now. They have a budget now that’s $65 million a
year, and all they have to do is look at two companies. I mean, you
know, I look at more than two companies.

QUICK: Mm-hmm.

Mr.
BUFFETT: And they sat there, made reports to the Congress, you can get
them on the Internet, every year. And, in fact, they reported to
Sarbanes and Oxley every year. And they went–wrote 100 page reports,
and they said, ‘We’ve looked at these people and their standards are
fine and their directors are fine and everything was fine.’ And then
all of a sudden you had two of the greatest accounting misstatements in
history. You had all kinds of management malfeasance, and it all came
out. And, of course, the classic thing was that after it all came out,
OFHEO wrote a 350–340 page report examining what went wrong, and they
blamed the management, they blamed the directors, they blamed the audit
committee. They didn’t have a word in there about themselves, and
they’re the ones that 200 people were going to work every day with just
two companies to think about. It just shows the problems of regulation.

QUICK: That sounds like an argument against regulation, though. Is that what you’re saying?

Mr.
BUFFETT: It’s an argument explaining–it’s an argument that managing
complex financial institutions where the management wants to deceive
you can be very, very difficult.

Here is a good article on what the mortgage agencies have been up to.

Parents are abandoning teenagers at Nebraska hospitals, in a case of a well intentioned law inspiring unintended results.

Over the last two weeks, moms or dads have dropped off seven teens
at hospitals in the Cornhusker state, indicating they didn’t want to
care for them any more.

…Under a newly implemented law, Nebraska is the only
state in the nation to allow parents to leave children of any age at
hospitals and request they be taken care of, USA Today notes. So-called
“safe haven laws” in other states were designed to protect babies and
infants from parental abandonment.

..The moral of this story appears to be that safe haven
laws need to be very carefully and narrowly written to ensure they’re
not abused by parents.

From now on I will will tell my kids, "Behave! or we’re moving to Nebraska!"

Mercedes scoffs at such notions. "It is really, really difficult to harm a horse with massage, especially if all you’re using is your hands."

Here is the story and that is from The Washington Post.  Apparently it is legal to give a human a massage in Maryland, and legal to shoe a horse in Maryland, but not legal to give a horse a massage in Maryland unless you own that horse.  And there is no way to get the appropriate license.  The Institute for Justice is taking up the case.