OK, so if you want to be specific, landlords are threatening to evict tenants as a result of the fines being imposed on the landlords as a result of the tenants' behavior.

So I should look to land on a nice cushy Rabbi?

"'Unfortunately, we can't provide individual legal assistance or review lease agreements for our 500,000 hosts, but we do try to help inform people about these issues,'

Bullcrap. If they wanted to actually ensure that their rentals were legal, they could do vastly more to ensure that. In NYC, for example, any whole unit rental (where the lessor isn't going to be there as well) of 30 days is illegal if the unit isn't a licensed hotel. If you try to post a property for a non-roommate rental in NYC, they could have the site simply say "Is this unit a licensed hotel? If not, then the rental would violate NYC law. Please confirm that the unit is a licensed hotel unit. Yes/No"

They don't even bother with this level of fig leaf.

While I agree that any attempt to deregulate would result in the current medallion owners screaming bloody murder, they wouldn't have a leg to stand on, legally. The city has never made any commitments as to the number of medallions it will issue. It could have another auction tomorrow with a minimum bid of $0.01 and 1 billion medallions up for sale. Of course, it's not going to, particularly since the Mayor De Blasio is 100% in the pocket of the taxi companies, who have been major campaign contributors.

This isn't an unreasonable position. Don't know why you're getting all the negs.

Usual benchmark for $/life saved is about $6 million, although might be higher in this case, since the lives saved are likely to be disproportionately children, so more years of life saved/lost, so more $/life. So, the saved lives are around $100 million. Depending on the severity of the injuries, $800k each doesn't seem that absurd. Still, does seem like a bit of a stretch to say that it's the best way to do this.

I'm as big a fan of actual medicine, and opponent of woo, as you're going to find, and there's a reason I'm making the point that I'm making.

If you classify alternative medicine as "stuff that's been proven not to work," then you open yourself up for the "hey, here's a case where it did work/appeared to work, so you're wrong, I love me some woo!" attack. By positioning the argument as "real medicine, proven to work, "alternative" medicine, no evidence it does work, so go away and come back with some if you can," you close off that avenue of attack for the woo crowd, and also remove the "evil medicine is trying to shut us down and won't even listen to our evidence" argument.

This isn't quite right. In reality, alternative medicine has not been proven TO work. That's very different from proven NOT to work. In fact, it's essentially impossible to prove that something doesn't work - any study has a margin of error. You CAN, however, say that there's no evidence that something DOES work, and hence we shouldn't be spending time and money on it (and possibly displacing treatments that HAVE been shown to work).

It's a nuance, but an important one.

$100M over the past 30 years is about 0.00016% of total federal spending over that period. It's really pretty trivial.

There's a famous HBS case study on Dewalt. Black & Decker bought the brand (which was at that point restricted to woodworking tools), and used it to rebrand their Black & Decker professional line. They chose yellow/black as a color scheme since it was familar both from the "safety sign/tape" schema and because blue was Makita and red was Skil or Hilti or probably a few others as well, so the black/yellow would stand out. They didn't change the actual tools (which got good ratings when people didn't see the B&D branding on them, but construction pros didn't want to bring something to the job site that was the same brand as their popcorn popper), just change the color and name. Market share went up about 8-fold in a year.

Really? 25% is ridiculous? The price has been stable for nine years. So, that's a 2.5% increase/year. Quite a bit less than the annualized increase in gas costs (which have got to be have a significant correlation to shipping costs).

Would love to see the math behind this. Do you have a source?

Unemployment peaked at 10% in October of 2009. It's now down to 6.6%, down 130bps in the last year. Still too high, but it has been declining steadily. This chart doesn't meet my definition of "stuck."

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries...

Disagree with you here. A national gun registry WOULD be useful for preventing gun violence. It might not be useful enough to justify the intrusion and confiscation risk, but it would be useful. How? By enabling law enforcement to go after the supply chain that gets guns into the hands of criminals. Typically, guns that end up in the hands of criminals (where we all agree they shouldn't be) were legally purchased initially, but then sold on (illegally) to a criminal. If law enforcement were able to say "hey, we seized seven guns last month from criminals that were all purchased by John XYZ," that would allow them to go after illegal distributors like John XYZ, and reduce the ease with which criminals can obtain guns.

Would it be perfect? Of course not, some guns would still end up in criminal hands through theft, etc. Would it be helpful? Definitely. Would it be worth the confiscation risk you cite? That's a debatable issue. I believe it would be, you clearly differ with me on that.

As I said, the fact that someone is trying to avoid a background check isn't per se an indication that the sale would be illegal, but it does raise the risk for the seller.