Author: The Goof (Page 42 of 43)

PUT YOURSELF in Mike Bolesta’s place. On the morning of Feb. 20, he buys a new radio-CD player for his 17-year-old son Christopher’s car. He pays the $114 insta llation charge with 57 crisp new $2 bills, which, when last observed, were still considered legitimate currency in the United States proper. The $2 bills are Bo lesta’s idea of payment, and his little comic protest, too.

For this, Bolesta, Baltimore County resident, innocent citizen, owner of Capital City Student Tours, finds himself under arrest.

Finds himself, in front of a store full of customers at the Best Buy on York Road in Lutherville, locked into handcuffs and leg irons.

Finds himself transported to the Baltimore County lockup in Cockeysville, where he’s handcuffed to a pole for three hours while the U.S. Secret Service is call ed into the case.

Have a nice day, Mike.

“Humiliating,” the 57-year old Bolesta was saying now. “I am 6 feet 5 inches tall, and I felt like 8 inches high. To be handcuffed, to have all those people lo oking on, to be cuffed to a pole — and to know you haven’t done anything wrong. And me, with a brother, Joe, who spent 33 years on the city police force. It wa s humiliating.”

What we have here, besides humiliation, is a sense of caution resulting in screw-ups all around.

“When I bought the stereo player,” Bolesta explains, “the technician said it’d fit perfectly into my son’s dashboard. But it didn’t. So they called back and sa id they had another model that would fit perfectly, and it was cheaper. We got a $67 refund, which was fine. As long as it fit, that’s all.

“So we go back and pay for it, and they tell us to go around front with our receipt and pick up the difference in the cost. I ask about installation charges. T hey said, ‘No installation charge, because of the mix-up. Our mistake, no charge.’ Swell.

“But then, the next day, I get a call at home. They’re telling me, ‘If you don’t come in and pay the installation fee, we’re calling the police.’ Jeez, where d id we go from them admitting a mistake to suddenly calling the police? So I say, ‘Fine, I’ll be in tomorrow.’ But, overnight, I’m starting to steam a little. It ‘s not the money — it’s the threat. So I thought, I’ll count out a few $2 bills.”

He has lots and lots of them.

With his Capital City Student Tours, he arranges class trips for school kids around the country traveling to large East Coast cities, including Baltimore. He’s been doing this for the last 18 years. He makes all the arrangements: hotels, meals, entertainment. And it’s part of his schtick that, when Bolesta hands out m eal money to students, he does it in $2 bills, which he picks up from his regular bank, Sun Trust.

“The kids don’t see that many $2 bills, so they think this is the greatest thing in the world,” Bolesta says. “They don’t want to spend ’em. They want to save
’em. I’ve been doing this since I started the company. So I’m thinking, ‘I’ll stage my little comic protest. I’ll pay the $114 with $2 bills.'”

At Best Buy, they may have perceived the protest — but did not sense the comic aspect of 57 $2 bills.

“I’m just here to pay the bill,” Bolesta says he told a cashier. “She looked at the $2 bills and told me, ‘I don’t have to take these if I don’t want to.’ I sa id, ‘If you don’t, I’m leaving. I’ve tried to pay my bill twice. You don’t want these bills, you can sue me.’ So she took the money. Like she’s doing me a favor .”

He remembers the cashier marking each bill with a pen. Then other store personnel began to gather, a few of them asking, “Are these real?”

“Of course they are,” Bolesta said. “They’re legal tender.”

A Best Buy manager refused comment last week. But, according to a Baltimore County police arrest report, suspicions were roused when an employee noticed some s mearing of ink. So the cops were called in. One officer noticed the bills ran in sequential order.

“I told them, ‘I’m a tour operator. I’ve got thousands of these bills. I get them from my bank. You got a problem, call the bank,'” Bolesta says. “I’m sitting
there in a chair. The store’s full of people watching this. All of a sudden, he’s standing me up and handcuffing me behind my back, telling me, ‘We have to do t his until we get it straightened out.’

“Meanwhile, everybody’s looking at me. I’ve lived here 18 years. I’m hoping my kids don’t walk in and see this. And I’m saying, ‘I can’t believe you’re doing t his. I’m paying with legal American money.'”

Bolesta was then taken to the county police lockup in Cockeysville, where he sat handcuffed to a pole and in leg irons while the Secret Service was called in.

“At this point,” he says, “I’m a mass murderer.”

Finally, Secret Service agent Leigh Turner arrived, examined the bills and said they were legitimate, adding, according to the police report, “Sometimes ink on money can smear.”

This will be important news to all concerned.

For Baltimore County police, said spokesman Bill Toohey, “It’s a sign that we’re all a little nervous in the post-9/11 world.”

The other day, one of Bolesta’s sons needed a few bucks. Bolesta pulled out his wallet and “whipped out a couple of $2 bills. But my son turned away. He said h e doesn’t want ’em any more.”

He’s seen where such money can lead.

By JOE SHARKEY
Published: April 26, 2005

Everybody has a favorite story from what I think of as the T.S.A. Follies.

Here’s mine. A uniformed pilot waits impatiently at a checkpoint for 10 minutes while two screeners from the Transportation Security Administration scrutinize every item in his carry-on bag.

After he was allowed to go on his way, he explained why it took so long.

“They told me they had to make sure I wasn’t carrying anything that would allow me to take over an airplane,” he said, rolling his eyes.

Last week, reports from several government departments confirmed what most business travelers and other frequent fliers already knew: after spending more than $5 billion in federal funds on the agency, airport security is hardly any better now than it was before 9/11.

Created to impose tight federal control over commercial airport security after the 2001 terrorist attacks, the agency continues to get failing or barely passing grades. Covert screening tests by the Government Accountability Office and the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security showed virtually no improvement in overall screener performance since similarly poor performance reviews last year, said Representative John L. Mica, the Florida Republican who is chairman of the House aviation subcommittee.

“Over the last three and a half years, we have spent billions of dollars creating a Soviet-style centralized bureaucracy that has resulted in great inefficiencies and inflexibility, with little improvement in screener effectiveness,” Mr. Mica, a long-time critic of the agency, said in a statement last week.

In its reply, the agency said that it needed more money to improve performance with better technology, like new machines for detection of explosives.

Meanwhile, “we will continue to seek incremental gains in screener performance through training, testing and management practices,” the agency said.

Over the years, this column has reported regularly on the T.S.A. Follies, with enthusiastic assistance from perplexed business travelers. In Congress, partly as a consequence of audits that showed heavy spending by the agency on frills like parties and fancy offices, there are calls to scale back the agency’s scope and perhaps replace its screeners with employees from private companies.

Bureaucratic rigidity aside, frequent fliers have plenty of other complaints about the agency. For example, they protest that rules keep changing, with haphazard, inconsistent and sometimes rude enforcement at checkpoints. Personal searches such as poking infants in swaddling clothes or forcing octogenarians to wobble from their wheelchairs often appear to be unnecessary, they say, and are sometimes downright intrusive. Remember the outcry last year from female travelers subjected to invasive body pat-downs after reports that two female Chechen terrorists might have blown up a pair of Russian airliners?

Travelers also worry about theft from checked bags – more than two dozen of the agency’s screeners have been arrested on theft charges in the last two years – and they react with a mixture of bewilderment and resentment to the agency’s Catch-22 policy on taking off your shoes. You do not have to remove them, the policy says, but if you do not, you will be ordered off to the secondary inspection area, where you do have to take them off.

Let’s have a look at the most recent refinement of the agency’s list of prohibited items. Last week, it extended its ban on liquid-fuel and butane lighters in checked luggage to cover carry-on bags as well, while continuing to permit safety matches. A minor change, perhaps, but it created a strong reaction.

“They take my lighter away but allow me to have matches?” asked Burt Wolf, a broadcast journalist who roams the world producing reports for public television on travel, food and cultural history. “My son, Stephen, does special effects for movies, and one of his areas of expertise is explosions. I asked him, ‘Is there any explosive that I can’t blow up with a match?’ He said, ‘No, absolutely not.’ ”

Organizations as diverse as the Business Travel Coalition and the Zippo Manufacturing Company quickly became involved. The Business Travel Coalition, which represents the interests of corporate travel departments and business travelers, and which has no discernible interest in cigarette lighters per se, denounced the new rule as silly and said it would only cause longer security lines without adding any new measure of safety.

One hazard is that inadequate half-measures like banning lighters instill a false sense of security, said Kevin Mitchell, chairman of the coalition. Mr. Mitchell argues that all anyone needs to ignite any nonmetallic explosive that gets through security (where screening for nonmetallic explosives is virtually nil) are a safety match or two AA batteries and a wire.

But by focusing on things like lighters and nail files and routinely changing signals, Mr. Mitchell said the agency had failed to develop long-proposed risk-based programs that would allow frequent travelers to use special security lines after registering some personal and travel information in advance. Mr. Mitchell said a program like that would enhance security by reducing crowds and confusion at checkpoints.

Travelers continue to experience inconsistencies at checkpoints from one airport to another and even within airports, Mr. Mitchell added. He predicted that ever-lengthening lines filled with tourists and other not-so-frequent fliers in the coming summer season would create soft, highly visible targets for terrorists.

Greg Booth, Zippo’s chief executive, said that the agency was listening carefully to his company’s assertion that lighters in checked bags had never posed a safety hazard. He said that he expected the ban on lighters in checked bags would be lifted.

In the meantime, you’re free to pack the following items in your checked bags: unloaded firearms, ammunition, hatchets, cattle prods, blackjacks, billy clubs, stun guns and meat cleavers.

On the Road appears each Tuesday. E-mail: jsharkey@nytimes.com

2005-02-14 00:19 (New York)

(Commentary. Gene Sperling, who was President Bill Clinton’s top economic adviser, is a columnist for Bloomberg News and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. The opinions expressed are his own.)

By Gene Sperling
Feb. 14 (Bloomberg) — Imagine the following: The father of a financially stretched family decides to live it up by leasing three fully loaded Hummer H1s for the bargain price of $9,750 a month.
As the family’s financial situation deteriorates, the father calls the family together for a belt-tightening discussion. He holds up a jar of Whole Foods chunky peanut butter and says, “Do you realize we are spending $4.49 on this? We could be saving $2.04 if we bought Skippy peanut butter for only $2.45.”
His teenage son responds, “Like, dad, man, why are you busting us about two bucks on peanut butter when you’re spending, like, almost $10,000 a month on cars?” The father sternly responds, “Don’t change the subject. We are talking about peanut
butter.”
On Feb. 7, President George W. Bush sought to use his 2006 budget to emerge as a born-again fiscal belt tightener. His goal was clear: Focus the fiscal debate on cutting programs for hardworking families and the poor — which are the financial
equivalent of peanut butter — while ruling out any effort to add up, put on the table or even acknowledge the budgetary equivalent of luxury Hummers — his tax cuts for the highest-income Americans.

The Cuts

Like the son in the family fable, most Americans understand the basic law that money is always fungible — a dollar on cars could also be a dollar spent on peanut butter. Yet Bush’s entire budgetary case rests on the assumption that no one will notice or change the subject to mention that his proposed spending cuts are dwarfed by the deficit-exploding tax reductions that he is seeking for high-income Americans.
Consider some of the cuts Bush is claiming are necessary to get tough on the deficit:
First, he would cut $500 million for job training and dislocated workers in the midst of what is still the slowest jobs recovery since the 1930s.
Second, he would virtually eliminate the $500 million Community Oriented Policing Services program when we are concerned about domestic terrorist threats.
Third, Bush would impose $4.5 billion in net cuts to Medicaid for the poor and disabled when health-care costs and the number of uninsured are rising.
And fourth, he would scrap the $1 billion a year in funding for the GEAR-UP and TRIO programs that reach out to economically disadvantaged children early and encourage them to go to college when our economy desperately needs a larger share of this population to obtain college degrees.

The Exemptions

Yet while these cuts add up to only about $6.5 billion a year, no one is supposed to mention that in the same budget Bush calls for implementing two obscure tax provisions that increase personal exemptions and itemized deductions that the top 2 percent of Americans can use to reduce their tax payments to the tune of $115
billion over the next decade.
That’s enough to prevent all these cuts and still reduce the deficit by $55 billion. Nor can we mention that if we pulled back on the income-tax cut (leaving alone capital gains and dividends) for the 0.5 percent of Americans making more than $400,000 a year, we could save $300 billion over the next decade — enough to buy a
lot of peanut butter and still make a big dent in the deficit.
Anyone who took seriously Bush’s commitment to deficit reduction might assume that his tight cap on domestic programs was motivated by the deficit exploding because such spending had gotten out of control.

One-Sided Reality

Yet, in an analysis conducted at the Washington-based Center for American Progress, it was found that when you exclude expenditure on defense, homeland security and international affairs, discretionary spending has actually decreased from 3.4 percent of gross domestic product in 2001 to 3.3 percent in 2005.
On the other hand, the decision to pass and extend three tax cuts and an expensive prescription drug benefit without any offsets is set to increase the deficit by more than $5 trillion over the next decade, including interest costs.
Even when looking at our long-term capacity to deal with the challenge of the baby boomers’ retirement, Bush is trying to construct this same one-sided budgetary reality.
While the Social Security Trust Fund is solvent, the president laments that in 2018 the government as a whole will have to “somehow” borrow an additional $200 billion to meet its legal Social Security commitments. Yet he seems oblivious to the fact that his own tax and spending policies will increase government borrowing that year by more than $500 billion.

Eat the Generic

Bush wants members of Congress to go home and tell their constituents that there is simply no choice but to achieve Social Security solvency entirely through benefit cuts with new price- indexing rules. Yet he disallows any discussion of the fact that making permanent his tax cuts for only the top 1 percent of earners
— as his budget calls for — costs almost as much as is needed to keep Social Security solvent for 75 years.
Still, I get it, Mr. President, I’m changing the subject. This budget isn’t about finding numbers that lead to deficit reduction, it’s about using the pretext of deficits to limit government’s role to help those most in need. Perhaps you think the father was right to forbid any discussion of luxury Hummers. Let them eat Costco
generic peanut butter.

First, let’s consider what actual P2P losses are to the industry.

They are much more difficult to calculate than the RIAA would have you believe. Why? First, downloaders pull songs they would never buy; I have Outkast’s “Hey Ya” somewhere; I consider it a goofy novelty song, and the only reason I have it is that someone else sync’ed it to a Peanuts animation (everyone on stage dancing to Schroder’s piano). It was an amusing but unauthorized use, which I downloaded, smiled at, and never saw again.

Oh ya: The CD that song came from — OutKast’s 2003’s release, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below — sold 10-million plus copies.

Lost sales? Hardly.

Consider the biggest of all downloaders — mostly-broke college students. They have a computer their parents bought them, and the campus gives them a big, fat pipe. They get access to music they would never have bought, resulting in future post-college sales. But the one-to-one lost sales argument is transparently false.

Next, let’s consider what the damages to the industry are. Consider the issues of substitution: What would it cost to purchase an “unlimited amount” of digitally distributed music? The answer is found in the Napster-to-Go model:

“The Napster to Go model . . . shows that the RIAAs claims of a lost sale for every download to be demonstrably false. If you can download an unlimited number of songs via napster and play them for as long as you continue to subscribe, then the maximum loss the RIAA suffers from a single downloader cannot exceed $15/month no matter how many songs a person downloads.” — via boingboing

Over the course of 10 years, that represents total gross losses of $1,800, of which Napster keeps between 15 and 20%. Net loss: $1,500 dollars.

But wait, there’s more: The Rhapsody Music Subscription from Real Networks charges only $10 per month. That’s $120 per year. Over a decade, the net loss downloaders present to the industry by not signing up for Rhapsody are: lost revenue of $1,200 (gross). In other words, the total net industry losses are ~$1,000 per decade. Hardly as apocalyptic as portrayed.

By approving the Napster/Rhapsody subscription models, the music industry has unwittingly created a viable legal defense, at least when it comes to damages portion of their litigation, for defendants in a RIAA P2P litigation. The claims of losses in the $100,000 or even $10,000 are silly — as long as this $1,000 net loss per decade option exists.

Of course, that doesn’t consider studies (such as the one from Harvard/UNC CHapel Hill) that shows P2P drives CD and concert ticket sales. I only buy music that I hear and like. Since that hardly happens via the radio anymore, P2P is my most common source of new music (that, and Apple adverts).

Further, the industry’s disingenous claims that its the artists are getting ripped off by downloaders are rather misleading. (Putting aside the industry’s own long and storied history of ripping off their artists for another day).

A recent NYT article reveals that most musicians make their bread and butter not by selling CDs, but by touring and performing:

“According to a new list of the 50 top-earning pop stars published in Rolling Stone, over the hill is the new golden pasture. Half the top 10 headliners are older than 50, and two are over 60. Only one act, Linkin Park, has members under 30.

The annual list, which entails some guesswork, reverses the common perception of pop music. Not only is it not the province of youth; it’s also not the province of CD sales, hit songs and smutty videos.

While sexy young stars take their turn strutting on the Billboard charts or MTV – or on the cover of Rolling Stone – the real pop pantheon, it seems, is an older group, no longer producing new hits, but re-enacting songs that are older than many of today’s pop idols.”

This has serious financial repurcussions for the business model the industry is presently wed to. And the list of artists who are making the big bucks reveals industry mismanagement has led to mostly ignoring the key economic demographic driver of our century: The baby boomers.

Here’s a little secret the RIAA would rather not have you know: Musicians make most of their money performing and touring — not selling CDs or downloads. Rolling Stone has a detailed analysis of the top 50 acts . . . here’s a top 10 list to whet your appetite:

2004 Music Money Makers
1. Prince $56.5 MILLION
2. Madonna $54.9 MILLION
3. Metallica $43.1 MILLION
4. Elton John $42.9 MILLION
5. Jimmy Buffett $36.5 MILLION
6. Rod Stewart $34.6 MILLION
7. Shania Twain $33.2 MILLION
8. Phil Collins $33.2 MILLION
9. Linkin Park $33.1 MILLION
10. Simon and Garfunkel $31.3 MILLION

Note that 9 of the top 10 grossing performers aren’t the hot new thing — they are the better known rock classics — which the labels have mostly also been paying little attention to for so many years.

The industry can scapegoat P2P for all their woes, but a closer analysis of the math demonstrates the claim is illusory. (Mis)management is the primary sources of the industry problems.

Read it and weep, folks. In the Order, every single geek argument is
slammed, and slammed *hard*. In particular:

“This Court finds, as did both the Corley and Elcom courts, that legal
downstream use of the copyrighted material by customers is not a defense
to the software manufacturer’s violation of the provisions of – 1201 (b)(1).”

Fair Use is no defense to the DMCA tools provision, sayeth that Court.

Electronic Frontier Foundation Urges Digital Copyright Law Reform
http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/MGM_v_321Studios/20040220_eff_pr.php

San Francisco – Consumers suffered a setback to their digital rights
today when a California federal court sided with the major motion
picture studios in ruling that a company creating tools people can use
to make backup copies of their DVDs is liable under copyright
law. Citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the court
ordered 321 Studios, creator of DVD backup tools, to stop selling its
DVD Copy Plus and DVD-X COPY products within seven days. 321 Studios
is likely to appeal the ruling.

[Source material at:
http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/MGM_v_321Studios/
http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/MGM_v_321Studios/20040219_Order.pdf]

Italian police seek huge breasted woman
Ananova
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_866580.html

Italian police are looking for a woman with huge breasts who has gone on the run after failing to pay for £5,000 implants.

The 46-year-old woman, who has been identified only by her initials AM, slipped out of her hospital bed following the surgery and disappeared.

Doctors at the clinic in Rome say that apart from the unpaid bill they are also concerned for her health as she requires close monitoring following the surgery.

Dr Jamal Salhi said: “She told me that she needed the surgery because she worked in a hostess bar and that clients preferred big chested women.

“She went from a size four to a size eight which is the largest you can get in Italy. When she came to my surgery she said: “I want the biggest chest possible.”

“‘It has since emerged that she gave false information when she arrived at the clinic and apart from running off without paying, as with any surgery she needs to be monitored afterwards.”

Dr Salhi then revealed it was not the first time he had been the victim of a fraudster. He said: “This has happened to me several times before, the most recent was last December.

“A man paid for a penis enlargement and disappeared without paying. We still have to be paid for that operation.”

Police spokesman Adriano Lauro said: “We have issued a warrant for the woman’s arrest and also one for her husband following the complaint from the clinic.”

Story filed: 10:33 Monday 16th February 2004