Albener Pessoa

I double-checked these figures with [Philip] Cook, just to make sure I wasn’t reading them wrong. “I agree that it’s hard to imagine consuming 10 drinks a day,” he told me. But, “there are a remarkable number of people who drink a couple of six packs a day, or a pint of whiskey.”

As Cook notes in his book, the top 10 percent of drinkers account for well over half of the alcohol consumed in any given year. On the other hand, people in the bottom three deciles don’t drink at all, and even the median consumption among those who do drink is just three beverages per week.

The piece, by Christopher Ingraham, is interesting throughout.  Here is my earlier post on “The culture of guns, the culture of alcohol”, one of my favorites.

Addendum: Via Robert Wiblin, Trevor Butterworth offers a good critique of the data.

Ina Fried:

Microsoft’s lawsuit against Samsung was unsealed on Friday, revealing that the software maker believes it is owed $6.9 million in unpaid interest from last year.

Microsoft sued in August, asking a federal court to rule that its Nokia purchase didn’t breach the company’s contract with Samsung. That contract calls for the Korean electronics giant to pay Redmond a royalty for each Android phone and tablet it makes.

A lot is at stake in the case, as is made clear by the details unsealed Friday. Microsoft notes in the suit that Samsung paid it $1 billion last year under the patent agreement.

That’s incredible. In all seriousness, could Microsoft be profiting from Android more than Google is?

Thanks to a new marketing deal with Bose, NFL players will no longer be allowed to wear Apple's line of Beats headphones around television cameras, according to Re/code. The restriction is in place for TV interviews during training camp, practice sessions and game day, running from before the game or event through 90 minutes after play has ended.

Many professional athletes have sponsorship deals with Beats, with the headphones frequently spotted around the necks of players both before and after games. Beats accounts for more than 60 percent of the premium headphone market.

"Over the last few years athletes have written Beats into their DNA as part of the pre-game ritual," a Beats spokesperson said. "Music can have a significant positive effect on an athlete’s focus and mental preparedness and has become as important to performance as any other piece of equipment."

Beats, which has seen significant success with its athlete endorsements, ran ads last year with NFL stars Colin Kaepernick and Richard Sherman tuning out opposing fans with Beats noise-canceling headphones.

Something similar happened during the World Cup when headphone sponsor Sony banned Beats from stadiums, but not from outside the arenas where players frequently used their preferred headphones. Many advertising industry experts said Beats still won the day with its star-studded "The Game Before The Game" video, portions of which ran repeatedly during World Cup commercial breaks.

I wonder what he did. #9gag

What are you looking at?! #9gag

Such cool. Very relax. Much sand. Wow. #9gag

A mais nova pesquisa IBOPE sobre as eleições 2014 teve seu resultado divulgado há pouco. 98% dos eleitores estão felizes e comemoraram o fim do Horário Eleitoral Gratuito imposto pela lei 9504/97. A margem de erro para esse resultado é de 2% para mais somente. Por causa do conteúdo apresentado nestas eleições, as emissoras estão procurando encaixar humorísticos e filmes de terror nos horários em que a propaganda gratuita era exibida.

L.Lanna

Christopher Buccafusco and Chris Sprigman report:

…we ran an experiment to measure how much people value the ability to recline compared to extra knee and laptop room.

In an online survey, we asked people to imagine that they were about to take a six-hour flight from New York to Los Angeles. We told them that the airline had created a new policy that would allow people to pay those seated in front of them to not recline their seats. We asked one group of subjects to tell us the least amount of money that they would be willing to accept to not recline during the flight. And we asked another group of subjects to tell us the most amount of money that they would pay to prevent the person in front of them from not reclining.

It turns out that Barro was right: Recliners wanted on average $41 to refrain from reclining, while reclinees were willing to pay only $18 on average. Only about 21 percent of the time would ownership of the 4 inches change hands.

But it also turns out that Barro was wrong and Marron was right. When we flipped the default—that is, when we made the rule that people did not have an automatic right to recline, but would have to negotiate to get it—then people’s values suddenly reversed. Now, recliners were only willing to pay about $12 to recline while reclinees were unwilling to sell their knee room for less than $39. Recliners would have ended up purchasing the right to recline only about 28 percent of the time—the same right that they valued so highly in the other condition.

Arnold Kling poses that question., and he writes:

Suppose that when they meet with bankers, for example, Fed officials had to wear cameras and audio recorders, which could be obtained by FOIA requests. Or suppose that IRS officials had to wear cameras, for example, when they wrote emails or engaged in discussions about dealing with tax-exempt groups.

The intended consequences of the camera rule would be, as with having police wear cameras, to make sure that public officials remember that they are being watched and to reduce instances where they are wrongly suspected of acting against the public interest.

What might be the averse unintended consequences of forcing high-level public officials to wear cameras and recording devices when engaged in their ordinary duties?

I believe this practice would induce some offsetting adjustments.  First, public officials would much more frequently act as if they were on television.  We more or less know what that is like.

Second, the unmonitored positions would rapidly become much more powerful.  The monitored positions would become a bit like the British monarchy, namely of great ceremonial importance, and capable of causing a public scandal with ill-thought out remarks, but not the real decision-makers.

Third, the demand for unmonitored “private contractors” would go up.  These contractors would attach themselves to individual politicians, and carry out their will with the outside world, receiving  their instructions as those politicians were initiating their love-making, off camera of course.