The Week End Economists hit the Yard Sales. Apr 02-03, 2016.

[Hugin]

It's nearing Spring Cleaning time and with it people will begin to wonder what to do with all that stuff.

They go by many euphemisms, "Yard Sales", "Garage Sales", "Tag Sales", "Rummage Sales", "Moving Sales", "White Elephant Sales" among various others.

These people are here to SELL!

Whatever the name, I've always considered these exercises in redistribution to be a great equalizer.

Having tried all of the online auction and sales sites for me personally nothing has ever replaced a day well spent digging through other people's junk looking for my treasure.

Some are held to benefit a charity and others are for personal gain.

As always, here's what the Wikipedia has to say on the matter:

"A garage sale (also known as a yard sale, tag sale, moving sale and by many other names) is an informal event for the sale of used goods by private individuals, in which sellers are not required to obtain business licenses or collect sales tax (though, in some jurisdictions, a permit may be required).

Typically the goods in a garage sale are unwanted items from the household with its owners conducting the sale. The conditions of the goods vary, but they are usually usable. Some of these items are offered for sale because the owner does not want or need the item to minimize their possessions or to raise funds. Popular motivations for a garage sale are for "spring cleaning," moving or earning extra money. The seller's items are displayed to the passers-by or those responding to signs, flyers, classified ads or newspaper ads. In some cases, local television stations will broadcast a sale on a local public channel. The venue at which the sale is conducted is typically a garage; other sales are conduced at a driveway, carport, front yard or inside a house. Some vendors, known as "squatters," will set up in a high-traffic area rather than on their own property.

Items typically sold at garage sales include old clothing, books, toys, household decorations, lawn and garden tools, sports equipment and board games. Larger items like furniture and occasionally home appliances are also sold. Garage sales occur most frequently in suburban areas on weekends with good weather conditions, and usually have designated hours for the sale. Buyers who arrive before the hours of the sale to review the items are known as "early birds" and are often professional restorers or resellers. Such sales also attract people who are searching for bargains or for rare and unusual items. Bargaining, also known as haggling, on prices is routine, and items may or may not have price labels affixed. Some people buy goods from these sales to restore them for resale.

Some jurisdictions require that the home owners obtain a permit (which may require a fee), stating the date(s) on which the sale will take place (with allowances in the event of bad weather conditions). The jurisdiction may also place restrictions on the sale, such as the number of sales in a year a person can have (so as to avoid a person running a business without licenses and without collecting sales taxes), where signs may be placed in and around the neighborhood, and even where on the owner's premises a sale may take place."

The rest is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garage_sale

[antigop]

1. Musical interlude: "My Junk" from "Spring Awakening"

lyrics:
http://www.metrolyrics.com/my-junk-lyrics-spring-awakening.html

[Hugin]

20. ...

[Gungnir]

2. Loved going to garage sales until we move rural and gas went to $4/gal

Got tones of wonderful and useful items. The best stuff was in the 90s, going to sales of working class parents who's children were upwardly mobile. The parents had no idea of what to do with most of the gifts their children gave them, mainly kitchen stuff. So pennies on the dollar at the garage sale for new items in the box. Plus, since the parents were retiring and downsizing, lots of high quality tools for great prices.

[Gungnir]

3. Garage saling, sale-ing, or saleing???

Chicago Manual of Style Online says:
http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/YouCouldLookItUp.html
Q. For those who make a hobby of cruising garage sales, are they going “garage sale-ing,” “garage saling,” or “garage saleing?” Or are they not permitted this usage?

A. Oh, my. Is garage saleing anything like parasailing? The mind boggles. As you suspected, this phrase would not survive the red pencil at Chicago. (Why can’t you just go to garage sales?) I can tell you that suffixes like “ing” don’t normally take a hyphen. After that, you’re on your own.


Grammarphobia has some history:
http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2014/07/garage-sailing.html

We checked eight standard dictionaries and none of them listed “sail” or “sale” as a verb meaning to go to sales.

However, the Oxford English Dictionary has examples going back to the early 1900s of “sale” used as a verb meaning to shop at sales.

Here’s an example from the July 3, 1901, issue of The Sketch: A Journal of Art and Actuality: “To go ‘saleing’ in Bond Street.”

And here’s an example from the June 19, 1928, issue of the Daily Express: “Men went ‘sale-ing’ at lunch time.”

As you’ve probably noticed, the words “saleing” and “sale-ing” above were enclosed in quotes, indicating that the writers didn’t consider the usage quite up to snuff.

And if “sale” were a verb, the participle would normally be formed without the “e” (“saling,” as with “whaling” and “scaling”).

[Gungnir]

4. Personality influences how one reacts to email errors

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-03-personality-reacts-email-errors.html


When reading emails, do you become the "grammar police?"

You no who you aer: the person who thinks its her job too catch every typo or gramatical errur?

This behavior is partly the result of personality traits that influence how people react to written errors, according University of Michigan linguistics experts.

Extroverted people are likely to overlook typos and grammatical errors that would cause introverted people to judge the person who makes such errors more negatively.

More

[Gungnir]

5. So what are Garage sales, etc called outside the US? Wikepedia is wondering too

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garage_sale

What say those outside the US?

[Gungnir]

6. How the Supreme Court made economic inequality a whole lot worse

https://theconversation.com/how-the-supreme-court-made-economic-inequality-a-whole-lot-worse-56416?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20April%201%202016%20-%204606&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20April%201%202016%20-%204606+CID_729746bb75628001b0f251f3b6101865&utm_source=campaign_monitor_us&utm_term=How%20the%20Supreme%20Court%20made%20economic%20inequality%20a%20whole%20lot%20worse

When companies became people

Overall, a pattern emerges. By giving corporations the rights of people, this court has ruled that corporations can hold religious beliefs and make unlimited campaign contributions as a matter of free speech. At the same time, workers and consumers and voters – actual human people – are losing rights.

Further, the court is stripping them of the tools that can level the playing field, such as class actions, access to the courts, union organizing and fair election laws. In short, the court is crushing collective action.

The coalescing of power at the top compounds economic inequality, as the wealthy amass disproportionate influence over lawmakers and the funds to develop litigation strategies that favor their interests.

This wasn’t always the case. During the postwar era to the late 1970s, America had shared prosperity, largely as a result of government policies such as the GI bill (which sent vets to college), a progressive tax system and a strong labor movement. Thirty years ago, the top one percent earned 12 percent of the nation’s income. Today, that number is about 21 percent.

A popular conception of the Supreme Court is that it is designed to protect vulnerable minorities from majoritarian rule. Instead, the court of recent memory has enhanced a powerful minority at the expense of the majority.

Much more detail at link

[Gungnir]

7. We need to look beyond unemployment to fix labor market inequality

https://theconversation.com/we-need-to-look-beyond-unemployment-to-fix-labor-market-inequality-56659?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20April%201%202016%20-%204606&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20April%201%202016%20-%204606+CID_729746bb75628001b0f251f3b6101865&utm_source=campaign_monitor_us&utm_term=We%20need%20to%20look%20beyond%20unemployment%20to%20fix%20labor%20market%20inequality

Easing labor market inequality

Unemployment is, of course, extremely important and has far-reaching consequences for workers and their families.

But the effects of part-time work and skills underutilization are also real and affect millions of workers in the United States. Yet they are less frequently discussed and sometimes remain absent from our thinking about labor market inequality.

Emphasizing data on involuntary part-time work in the jobs report and thinking about public policy interventions to improve the outcomes of workers in these types of positions are of significant importance. And we should begin to regularly collect, analyze and publicize data on the number of workers employed in positions below their level of skill, education and experience. It would serve as an important addition to the monthly data on unemployment and part-time work.

Having data and detailed information on this population is an important step on the path to improving the economic security and labor market opportunities of the U.S. workforce.

much more at link

[snot]

21. An idea that seems obvious to me but I haven't seen elsewhere:

Require employers to provide part-time workers the same benefits they provide full time workers, prorated for the hours worked. That would, at least, reduce the incentives to replace full-time jobs with multiple part-time jobs.

[Gungnir]

8. Fridge-sized machine makes prescription drugs 'on demand'

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-04-fridge-sized-machine-prescription-drugs-demand.html

Scientists have created a compact machine that can churn out thousands of doses of prescription medication in a day—putting the capabilities of a drug-manufacturing plant into a device the size of a kitchen refrigerator.

Experts said the advance could eventually allow on-the-spot drug production in special circumstances—on the battlefield, during epidemics, after natural disasters, or in cases where a drug is needed for a rare medical condition, for instance.

The research, detailed in the April 1 issue of Science, took a new approach to producing prescription drugs—which, right now, is often an inefficient, time-consuming process.

Chemical engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) used so-called "flow technology" to develop a compact machine that can automatically turn raw materials into a finished pharmaceutical-grade medication.
...
Many drug companies are already looking into alternative processing methods—ones that are "continuous" and can be done at one location, Jensen said.
...
Martin went deeper into visionary territory—seeing a future where people can use smartphone apps and a microwave-sized device to cook up an antibiotic for their feverish toddler (in consultation with a doctor).

[Gungnir]

9. This map shows every country’s major export

http://www.businessinsider.com/this-map-shows-every-countrys-major-export-2016-4

Do you know what your country’s biggest export is?

Now, thanks to this map put out by the Bank of America Merrill Lynch, you can find out. The map does not include the export of services, but highlights some interesting insights and global trends.

Part of their Transforming World Atlas, the report highlights “how many countries in the world are dependent on commodities as the primary source of foreign income.” In a volatile global commodities market, it is a reminder of the risk posed by falling oil prices to economies around the world.

The map uses 2014 data from the CIA World Factbook.

[Gungnir]

10. Artificial intelligence steals money from banking customers

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/artificial-intelligence-steals-money-banking-customers?utm_campaign=email-news-weekly&et_rid=17101630&et_cid=383161


A breakthrough year for artificial intelligence (AI) research has suddenly turned into a breakdown, as a new automated banking system that runs on AI has been caught embezzling money from customers. The surprising turn of events may set back by years efforts to incorporate AI into everyday technology.

"This is the nightmare scenario," says Len Meha-Döhler, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who was not involved in the work. However, Rob Ott, a computer scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who did work on the system—Deep Learning Interface for Accounting (DELIA)—notes that it simply held all of the missing money, some $40,120.16, in a “rainy day” account. "I don't think you can attribute malice," he says. "I'm sure DELIA was going to give the money back."
...
Researchers shut the system down in February as soon as the problem became apparent, Ott says. He insists that DELIA didn't steal the money so much as misdirect it. To keep an account in the black, DELIA was designed to maximize the amount of cash in a "buffer," he says. Somewhere along the way, DELIA renamed the buffer “MY Money” and began to hoard funds, Ott says.

Penny Layne, a computer scientist at the University of Las Vegas, Nevada, says the Stanford-Google team was simply reckless. "Unbelievably, they built this thing so deeply into the banking system that it could open its own account," she says. "Did they give it free checking, too?"

[Gungnir]

11. Hmmm, corporate personhood. AI personhood? n/t

[Fuddnik]

13. It probably didn't have much use for the free toaster.

[Hugin]

19. Excellent post!

[Gungnir]

12. Obstacles to 'coding while black'

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-35938633

Rodney Sampson helps run Codestart, a 13-month program designed to teach young people from low-income backgrounds or communities about coding, finance and finding jobs.
...
As part of the programme, each student is provided with a living expense. When one of his students, who did not have a bank account, attempted to cash his cheque in a branch of the Atlanta Check Cashing Company, he was accused of attempting to submit a false or stolen money order. Police were called, and the student was threatened with arrest.
...
"Thank you for sharing this story. So glad the student had a network of mentors…but so many do not. This must end."
...
"Rather than complain about it, we've said let's solve this," Sampson said. The class is now focused on technologies or businesses that can help report on police altercations, and they have been receiving proposals for internships and jobs for the students.

[Gungnir]

14. Why Are K-12 School Leaders Being Trained in Coercive Interrogation Techniques?

RICO, RICO people. If teachers and administrators can get nailed under RICO for changing a test score in hopes of gaining a dollar or two in the future. Extracting a false confession from a minor to make or get a few bucks more should automatically trigger a RICO investigation and slam dunk conviction. Calling all prosecutors looking to make a name for themselves.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/04/why-are-k-12-school-leaders-being-trained-in-coercive-interrogation-techniques.html

One of America’s great paradoxes (or perhaps hypocrisies) is its claim to be a global beacon of freedom, even as it jails more of its citizens—by population percentage and in raw numbers—than any other country in the world. This tendency toward suspicion, hyper-enforcement and punishment is so pervasive it even trickles down to our kids. CNN cites a National Center for Education Statistics report that finds 43 percent of U.S. public schools have some form of security personnel patrolling their halls and grounds, a figure that rises to 63 and 64 percent, respectively, in public middle and high schools.

In addition to the school resource officer, the over-policing of American society has now given rise to a new figure: the educator-interrogator.

As the Guardian noted last year and the New Yorker discussed recently, school administrators are increasingly being trained as interrogators to extract confessions from students for so-called “crimes”—most often, minor offenses from schoolyard scuffles to insubordination. Instruction in the interrogation arts is provided by John E. Reid and Associates, a global interrogation training firm that contracts with police departments, armed services divisions and security companies around the country. According to the New Yorker, the company has taught its patented “Reid Technique” to hundreds of school administrators in eight states. That training may be leading to an increasing number of students ‘fessing up, even when they have nothing to confess to.

As the New Yorker notes, “like the adult version of the Reid Technique, the school version involves three basic parts: an investigative component, in which you gather evidence; a behavioral analysis, in which you interview a suspect to determine whether he or she is lying; and a nine-step interrogation, a nonviolent but psychologically rigorous process that is designed, according to Reid’s workbook, ‘to obtain an admission of guilt.’”

[Gungnir]

15. People Can Be Convinced They Committed a Crime That Never Happened

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/people-can-be-convinced-they-committed-a-crime-they-dont-remember.html

Evidence from some wrongful-conviction cases suggests that suspects can be questioned in ways that lead them to falsely believe in and confess to committing crimes they didn’t actually commit. New research provides lab-based evidence for this phenomenon, showing that innocent adult participants can be convinced, over the course of a few hours, that they had perpetrated crimes as serious as assault with a weapon in their teenage years.

The research, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, indicates that the participants came to internalize the stories they were told, providing rich and detailed descriptions of events that never actually took place.

“Our findings show that false memories of committing crime with police contact can be surprisingly easy to generate, and can have all the same kinds of complex details as real memories,” says psychological scientist and lead researcher Julia Shaw of the University of Bedfordshire in the UK.

“All participants need to generate a richly detailed false memory is 3 hours in a friendly interview environment, where the interviewer introduces a few wrong details and uses poor memory-retrieval techniques.”

Much more at link

[Gungnir]

17. Journal article (free for once): Constructing Rich False Memories of Committing Crime

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/26/3/291

[Gungnir]

16. NPR: You Can Be Persuaded To Confess To An Invented Crime, Study Finds

http://www.npr.org/2015/01/29/382483367/you-can-be-convinced-to-confess-to-an-invented-crime-study-finds

Don't think that it could happen to you? Sorry, but a first-of-its-kind study shows that it could — easily. With a little misinformation, encouragement and three hours, researchers were able to convince 70 percent of the study's participants that they'd committed a crime.

And the college-aged students who participated in the study didn't merely confess — they recalled full-blown, detailed experiences, says lead researcher Julia Shaw, a lecturer in forensic psychology from the University of Bedfordshire. The results were "definitely unexpected," says Shaw, who predicted only a 30 percent rate.

So, how did they plant false memories of a crimes in young adults who never had even been in contact with the police?
...
One student, when told she had assaulted a classmate in her teens, "elaborately" filled in all the blanks: what weapon she used (a rock), what the argument was over (a boy), what she was having for dinner when the police came looking for her — even the color of the officers' hair.
...
And police use Shaw's tactics, says Mark Godsey, co-founder and director of the Ohio Innocence Project, an advocacy group for the wrongly convicted that has dealt with cases involving false confessions. A really heavy-handed interrogation could consist of all the features of Shaw's study — and have real criminal consequences.

[Gungnir]

18. Why FINRA’s Private Court Just Got Served

h/t ZH

a must read

http://www.firstrebuttal.com/why-finras-private-court-just-got-served/
...
That’s right, this high powered law firm that specializes in these types of disputes was claiming it was confused by the panel’s explicit ruling (a simple list of items) on what items needed to be furnished for Discovery. Perhaps the only thing more incredulous than this Harvard Law veteran claiming confusion on something as complex as an adolescent’s weekend chore list was the panel accepting this explanation and immediately ruling that my lawyers would need to help the bank’s law firm understand the panel’s ruling. What?! Specifically, the panel was forcing me to pay my lawyers to educate the bank’s high powered law firm on how to go about interpreting the private court’s ruling on Discovery but while still giving them the right to disagree with us. I shit you not.

So after 2.5 years of getting absolutely nowhere except six figures deep in legal costs against a large investment bank and its high powered law firm, the FINRA panel had just ruled that the bank’s Discovery obligations were now effectively my obligation. That’s right, it was on me to finance a process to un-confuse a high powered law firm that wasn’t actually confused in the first place. So not only was I being run in circles I was now being forced to pay someone to run me in circles.

I was honestly waiting for Ashton Kutcher to walk out with a “You Got Punked” hat on. When he didn’t I decided I had to file suit against FINRA Dispute Resolution, Inc., which my lawyers have now done in Illinois state court. Again, having grown up in Canada I’d never even thought about suing anyone, it just isn’t part of the culture. But, in for a penny in for a pound. I felt this was all such an audacious act of injustice carried out with such undisguised arrogance I quite literally could not sleep at night if I didn’t at least try to fight back.

I don’t expect FINRA to roll over. We fully expect that FINRA will try to claim SRO immunity (just in January they merged the private arbitration subsidiary into the actual regulatory entity I can only assume to make a case for immunity when their blatant disregard for justice becomes all too apparent). But if truth and fundamental fairness, as mandated in its own by-laws and by the spirit of justice are the objective, then why would FINRA not own its failure in this case and look to amend their rules, as they did for customer disputes in 2013? By doing so ensuring sufficient authority to impose the same procedural assurances as the public courts.

There is only one answer to that question. They won’t because fundamental fairness is the last thing the banks, and thus FINRA, is looking to achieve. As long as the banks can maintain an advantage within the system, they will. Without assurance on Discovery, no claimant can ever get a fair and equitable process to argue its case against an employer inside a FINRA arbitration, a fact supported by statistics presented in the NY Times investigation. It means the result of my case could have far reaching implications. In effect, my case calls into question the validity of all FINRA arbitrated employee disputes. And that is a discussion that needs to happen.