So these guys who were busted by the bankers in the credit crunch have found a way to fight back: sue the credit collection agencies on technicalities. They win a lot of settlements, get out of their debts and make some money!

Dallas News – Better Off Deadbeat: Craig Cunningham Has a Simple Solution for Getting Bill Collectors Off His Back. He Sues Them. – page 1.

Some background on the cost/value of gold and fiat currencies.

In a world with multiple fiat moneys, the zero value of money equilibrium lurks for each of the fiat currencies, including gold.  Admittedly, as regards gold, so far so good.  Gold has positive value.  It has had positive value for nigh-on 6000 years.  That must make it the longest-lasting bubble in human history.

http://blogs.ft.com/maverecon/2009/11/gold-a-six-thousand-year-old-bubble/

St. Anthony’s Central hospital charged a man $730,- for a couple of tablets he takes regularly at home. The cost for him at home? Around $30,-. After a complaint he got a 40% discount. Still ridiculous.

Patient Disputes Mark Up In Medication – cbs4denver.com.

The Germans want to create a swarm power plant by putting gas fired fridge sized units in people’s basements. They should release less CO2 than other power methods and they want to roll out 100,000 in the coming year, which will create the same amount of power as 2 nuclear plants. They’re calling it SchwarmStrom and sounds like a grand plan to me!

Lichtblick wants to charge people to set up their own powerplant, and then controlls them. So people are payed a modest rent to have the powerplant in their houses. Now I think I’d rather have my own powerplant and plug it into the Lichtblick network. Then they can pay me for any extra power I generate, don’t use and give them, which they can then in turn resell to people who don’t have their own powerplant.

Home power plants project unveiled in Germany | Grist.

Super Repo men get back your 747, learjet, whatever. They’ll reposess from men with guns, whole helicopter fleets, whatever. They make low to middle 7 figures every year. James Bond, eat your heart out..

Apple has decreed that any user may buy an application and have it refunded within 90 days – but that Apple will keep the protection money – euhm commission. So who pays the commission? The developer!

All those greedy content producers trying to hang on to their old delivery and economic models by their fingernails must be crying about this: Monty Python decided to put all their content onto YouTube for free and in high quality with links to their stuff. This raised their sales by 23000%. So it’s not about criminalising your customer base after all: it’s about making your content accessible, making it easy for your customers to buy the content they want from you, but most of all: making good content for your customers to buy!

The size of the bailout plan is truly staggering. Not just a little bit huge but immensely massive. Did you know it was larger than the following combined:

In the US wind farm power is so subsidised, that in Texas power prices around 33% of the year were negative, ie. the more power a consumer user, the more they got paid to use it!

In a surprise move, e-gold was dumped on by the US justice system because prosecution stated they must have known crooks were using the system to transfer money. Doesn’t this now mean that all banks in the US have to be slapped in the face, because, well, let’s face it – there are a load of crooks and they all need to put their money somewhere. Which means that all banks know their services are being used by crooks.

This is one of the reasons why defence contracting costs can go through the roof. This man wants to donate a high grade piece of marble and the costs of transporting it to the US military graveyard to fix a break on the Tomb of Unkowns. The cost of the marble, selected from the same mine as the original piece, was $31.000,-. The military won’t take it though, as they need to set up a tender, set up a committee to oversee the setting up of the tender, set up a committee to check the tender and the results etc etc etc. which means the cost of the project is a whopping $170.000,- to set up for the bid and $2.2 million (!) for the actual marble and transport thereof.

Where cocaine smugglers used to use cigarette boats, very fast boats and small aircraft to move drugs into the US, now they’re using partial submersibles, which travel just below the surface of the water and are easily scuttled. If the crew is caught by the navy, they sink the ship and the navy is left with a rescue mission, no proof and none of the crewmembers willing to talk, as they’re very aware that there is no evidence left.

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is to pay up to £100,000 for tip-offs leading to action against price fixing and other anti-competitive behaviour.

The new policy of financial incentives for information will initially run for 18 months and is similar to a scheme in South Korea.

A business found to be part of a cartel can be fined up to 10% of its turnover.

The move follows an OFT campaign offering immunity for UK firms that blow the whistle on cartels.

Official URL

The U.S. economy lost the title of “world’s biggest” to the euro zone this week as the value of the dollar slumped in currency markets.

…

Taking official estimates of 2007 GDP — $13,843,800 billion for the United States and 8,847,889.1 billion euros for the euro zone — the economy of the latter passed the United States once converted into dollars, shortly after the euro topped $1.56.

The dollar sank to $1.5688 per euro late in European trading hours on Friday, at which rate the euro zone’s 2007 GDP equates to $13,880,568.4 billion.

hehehe

Weak dollar costs U.S. economy its No. 1 spot | Reuters

This is the second time I’ve seen one of these calculations, and they’ve always made sense to me:

So, instead of this anti-smoking witch hunt, we should encourage it!

Hardly surprising, but putting points on a person’s licence isn’t going to stop them speeding. Or at least, not the 3.7 million motorists in this study. It increased the insurance company’s profits by around $36 million, as they charge more insurance fees if you get points.
The way to stop drivers from repeat speeding offences, is to give them a court probation.

This law firm in Amsterdam, Jeroen Zandt, insures you for unlimited judicial help, regardless of the amount of traffic violations you have, for around EUR. 200,- per month.

There’s a test people did a few times where they put different stock names at the end different exits of a maze and let a hamster ‘pick’ his favorite stock. It turns out that the hamster is no worse (and sometimes better) than real life stock brokers, showing how the market is random.

The Sun-Times has a monkey who has been picking stocks from a larger portfolio every year for the past four years and has been doing significantly better than the major indexes:

Welcome to the sad state of the world: here we have a possible inexpensive treatment for a variety of cancers which won’t get funded, because the molecule involved isn’t patented, so probably won’t get funded by pharmacutical companies due to ‘market forces’.