Showing a little too much ankle

Lands a California woman in prison for fraud;

A sex romp at a public park helped prosecutors convict a California woman of faking an ankle injury to collect workers' compensation payments, authorities said.

Modupe Adunni Martin, 29, was sentenced to nine months in jail on Thursday in San Mateo County after pleading no contest in October to felony workers compensation fraud.

Martin was caught on videotape in August 2009 throwing her crutches into a car and running in high heels to meet her boyfriend at a public park, where she took part in a sex act that doctors concluded she couldn't have done with an injured ankle, District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said.

Perhaps she can find work as an acrobat when she's let out. 

Barbarous relic

Afghanistan has had centuries of war, revolution, religious unrest, foreign soldiers occupying the land, and a newspaper is surprised to find an outflow of gold;

The cash and now the gold are most often taken to Dubai, where officials are known for asking few questions. Many wealthy Afghans park their money and families in the emirate, and gold dealers say more middle-class Afghans are sending money and gold — seen as a safeguard against economic ruin — to Dubai as talk of a postwar-economic collapse persists.

But given Dubai's reputation as a haven for laundered money, an Afghan official said the "obvious suspicion" is that at least some of the apparent growth in gold shipments to Dubai is tied to the myriad illicit activities that have come to define Afghanistan's economy.

There are also indications that Iran could be dipping into the Afghan gold trade. It is already buying up dollars and euros to circumvent U.S. and European sanctions, and it may be using gold for the same purpose.

Before officials can say whether the gold shipments are part of an illicit financial scheme, they first have to figure out how much gold is going out — or coming in.

It would be a mystery if gold wasn't being shipped out of this country. 

Tax the Nords!

Since, according to Daron Acemoglu, James A Robinson and Thierry Verdier, they're freeloading on the Americans doing the heavy lifting (not to mention benefiting from our military spending);

...the main implication of our theoretical framework is that we cannot all be like the Nordics! Indeed it is not an equilibrium choice for the cut-throat leader, the US, to become cuddly. As a matter of fact, given the institutional choices of other countries, if the cut-throat leader were to switch to such cuddly capitalism, this would reduce the growth rate of the entire world economy, discouraging the adoption of the more egalitarian reward structure. In contrast, followers are still happy to choose an institutional system associated to a more egalitarian reward structure. Indeed, this choice, though making them poorer, does not permanently reduce their growth rates, thanks to the positive technological externalities created by the cut-throat technology leader. This line of reasoning suggests therefore that in an interconnected world, it may be precisely the more cut-throat American society, with its extant inequalities, that makes possible the existence of more cuddly Nordic societies.

Isn't that what the Labor Theory of Value requires?

Suspicion confirmed

By an econometric analysis from Stefano Puddu and Andreas Wälchli; the Fed's Term Auction Facility provided needed liquidity to banks at a crucial time during the financial crisis...and the banks mostly used it prudently;

Between December 2007 and March 2010, the Fed auctioned a total of $3.81 trillion collateralised funds, with maturities of 28 or 84 days.

Which was needed because interbank lending had mostly dried up due to uncertainty.  Enter the lender of last resort;

Our findings highlight that all banks decrease their exposure in liquidity risk, but that banks that benefited from the programme decrease faster than others. The larger the amount of reserves received, the bigger the reduction in liquidity risk. In other words, TAF banks were able to more quickly adjust the structure of their debt maturity. 

Pretty much as the textbooks draw it up;

Our results highlight that:

• Banks did not adopt moral hazard behaviors, at least in the sample period observed.

This result can be explained by the fact that despite the fact that TAF banks were not subject to additional controls by the Fed or any other regulator, these banks might have felt themselves ‘under scrutiny’ and might have reacted accordingly, in order to look better when reassessed later on;

• The TAF programme provided the depository institutions with liquidity at the same time as a period of intensive restructuring on their liability side.

Therefore it is as if the TAF programme provided banks with extra time in order to adjust the exposures in their balance sheets. In this sense the Fed, through the TAF programme, acted as a lender of last resort, providing distressed banks with liquidity. 

Take Hinglish

Please.  The new lingua franca (why not mixaphor) is English with addition thanks to the internet;

Hinglish is a blend of Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu and English and is so widespread that it's even being taught to British diplomats.

Mobile phone companies are also updating their apps to reflect its growing use.

In Hinglish, a co-brother is a brother-in-law; eve-teasing means sexual harassment; an emergency crew responding to a crisis might be described as 'airdashing', and somewhat confusing to football fans, a 'stadium' refers to a bald man with a fringe of hair. There's even a new concept of time - "pre-pone", the opposite of postpone, meaning "to bring something forward".

Whatever.

Vote: Are we in the 21st century?

New York can't be too careful about allowing the brave new world to intrude;

New York's taxi authority is to vote on whether or not the city's iconic yellow cabs should accept bookings via smartphone apps.

A plethora of apps, such as Uber and Hailo, have been released to help commuters track down available cabs.

But some taxi companies are concerned about the impact these apps could have on their business.

Taxi-hailing apps have been widely adopted in other cities around the world.

In New York, where taxi operators are highly regulated, several companies have written to the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) calling for plans to allow the use of the apps to be rejected.

We knew the invention of the wheel was a mixed blessing. Next, the customers will want to carry 20 oz. sodas!

Hitting the check-out stand

Norman Joseph Woodland who claimed to have written a few lines in the sand, and eventually sparked a revolution has died at 91;

Woodland worked with university classmate Bernard Silver to create the now ubiquitous thick-and-thin-line system in the 1940s.

The system was patented in the US in 1952, a patent that was later sold for just $15,000 (£9,300).

The modern-day barcode is estimated to be scanned more than five billion times every day.

....Woodland's efforts were years ahead of their time. It took 22 years for the invention to make its first appearance in a US shop - due to the fact the laser technology required to read the lines did not exist.

What this story doesn't tell is how, once the technology did come into existence, it was applied to retailing.  That happened because a young junior executive at AT&T in New York was given, in the late 1960s, as his first assignment, to find a way to make some money from the agriculture sector.

At the time, most grocery stores didn't even have business telephone lines.  They used a pay phone located in the store for their occasional communication needs.  Mostly the stores re-ordered by mail, after eye-balling their inventory (both on their shelves and the back rooms).

The control of that inventory being the major headache of everyone involved in the food distribution business.  The young executive realized that AT&T had the communications technology, and IBM the computers, to solve that problem.

Cooperation between those two mid-century corporate giants was not easy.  In part because of anti-trust concerns (which also delayed the automotive industry's adoption of this cost-saving measure).  But, in the end, the profit motive was strong enough to overcome inertia, and consumers all over the world benefit.