Gone But Not Forgotten?
The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum is one of three potential sites for a future (or rebuilt) NFL stadium in Los Angeles.
Apparently the Rose Bowl is only prepared to offer limited naming rights to sponsors, but on Tuesday I heard a spokesman for the Coliseum say that they would offer complete naming rights, meaning a sponsor could name the stadium, "XXX Memorial Coliseum."
The two specific examples floated were "Yahoo! Memorial Coliseum" or "Coca-Cola Memorial Coliseum."
Personally I do not think that Yahoo or Coca-Cola should jump at this advertising opportunity, for the reason that Yahoo and Coca-Cola are not dead.
Internet Taxation
[
From a comment on the Becker-Posner Blog.]
A few comments and an idle thought regarding "tax-free" Internet purchases:
- Consumers who avoid paying state sales tax by buying on the Internet generally owe an equivalent state use tax on the purchase. So the uneven tax playing field does not exist in theory, only in practice-- because for the consumer, use tax is inconvenient to track, easy to forget, and tempting to disregard.
- The existence (in practice) of the uneven playing field is probably more due to the Quill v. North Dakota decision than to the Internet Tax Freedom Act per se. Catalog retailers enjoy this de facto subsidy whether their orders arrive by Internet, telephone, or mail.
- Large etailers such as Amazon practice tax avoidance by maintaining a legalistic separation between their operations in different states. Amazon has distribution centers in Kentucky and an A9 search engine subsidiary based in Palo Alto, which might be supposed to create nexus in Kentucky and/or California, but Amazon still does not collect sales tax in Kentucky or California.
- The idle thought: since state governments evidently have some power to regulate the credit card industry, I wonder if they could impose on the credit card company, instead of imposing on an out-of-state retailer, to aid them in collecting use tax on out-of-state purchases. I don't believe this scheme conflicts with the Internet Tax Freedom Act (although there may be other objections) since it would merely further the collection of an existing use tax, not impose a new tax on Internet transactions.
You Would Think I Would Be Better At Poker
Today I was approached by a panhandler. This was the one-hundredth time this particular panhandler has asked me for a charitable donation. As I side-stepped and walked past him, the panhandler's friend said, "He's on a mission, ain't he? He looks so serious. He looks like the Terminator!"
This marked the second time that someone has compared me to the Terminator (it must be the muscles) and the one-thousandth time that someone has told me I look too serious.
If You Don't Know Me By Now
Why do I have to open
each and every session with an ATM with a choice of language? Is it really likely that, having selected English on 300 previous occasions, today I am going to want to practice my Spanish?
The Washington Mutual ATM greets me with, "Hello Richard J Mason/ What language would you like to use?" It knows my name, but not my native tongue!
It may seem a trivial issue, but with, let's say 100 million people losing 5 seconds a week pushing unnecessary buttons, that's about 15 person-years of life being wasted every week. Every month we're losing 60 person-years of life. It's like killing a baby every month, those silly ATMs.
The Smartest Guys In The Room
As part of our hot Saturday date, we went to see
Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room.
It was pretty good, but then again,
Frontline is usually pretty good too, and this felt like merely a typical
Frontline documentary. I don't know that we necessarily needed to spend $19 to see this on a big screen with a couple of dozen strangers.
It did have an interesting soundtrack. Is there an award for Best Sound Mixing In A Documentary?
I never bought any Enron stock, but I did think about it. It was on my Yahoo Finance list of stocks to possibly put my meager savings into. And in 2001, we were occasionally inconvenienced by California's rolling blackouts, but utilities were included in our rent, so our landlady got stuck with the electric bill. So, I guess we escaped being directly victimized by Enron, but only narrowly.
Stage Fright
On Thursday night a reporter from
Marketplace came by to talk to us and see us testing the truck. We put him in the driver's seat for a spin around the parking lot. Predictably, although the truck had been working fine the day before, now it wouldn't go anywhere because of a bug in the continually-updated software.
Speaking of self-driving cars, I just today became aware, via huge Westwood billboard, of the
new Herbie movie!
Later: This "billboard" is actually the painted side of a building, and it perhaps caught my attention more because they hadn't finished painting yet. When I saw it on Friday, Lindsay Lohan was there but Herbie was not yet in evidence, except perhaps as a Volkswagen-shaped negative space. On Saturday most of Herbie was painted in, but he didn't have wheels, or a number 53 on his hood yet.
