From an office on Sunset Boulevard, a dapper 69-year-old has emerged as a go-to guy for musicians and songwriters looking for quick cash.

His name is Parviz Omidvar, and over the past two decades, he has been lending to artists and securing those debts with royalty payments his clients earn from their work. Michael Jackson was a customer, as is the son of late Motown legend Marvin Gaye. Omidvar’s website carries an old testimonial from Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Bobby Womack: “Thank you so much for always being there for me.”

Today, Womack is suing Omidvar for fraud. He alleges the financier tricked him into selling for $40,000 full control of a royalty stream that annually pays many times that amount on Womack-penned hits, including blaxploitation classic “Across 110th Street” and “It’s All Over Now,” the first U.S. No. 1 record for the Rolling Stones. Womack’s lawyer says the 68-year-old musician was misled into signing the deal in April last year, when he was incapacitated by painkillers following prostate cancer surgery.

Omidvar calls Womack’s claim “a simple case of buyer’s remorse.” Womack understood he was selling his royalties, and his allegations are “a complete lie,” Omidvar says.

Omidvar’s quick cash can come at a steep price. Reuters found scores of loans with interest rates ranging from 1.5 to 2.5 percent every 10 to 15 days - annualized rates potentially ranging from 43 percent to 81 percent.

{ Reuters | Continue reading }

Verizon is arguing before the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that broadband providers have a right to decide what they transmit online. […] According to Verizon’s argument:

In performing these functions [providing the transmission of speech from Point A to Point B], broadband providers possess ‘editorial discretion.’

Just as a newspaper is entitled to decide which content to publish and where, broadband providers may feature some content over others.
In effect, Verizon claims that by transmitting bits – providing Internet access – it gains the rights of a newspaper like the Washington Post or the New York Times. This assertion has no basis in constitutional law, and in fact repudiates many positions taken by Verizon before Congress, courts and the FCC over the years.

[…]

“Verizon and its predecessors have argued exactly to the contrary time after time — including when they were fighting for open access to cable companies’ wires a decade ago and when they have claimed immunity from liability based on their status as a transmissions provider for the content they carry,” said Tyrone Brown, who served as an FCC Commissioner from 1977-1981.

{ Roosevelt Institute | Continue reading }

With a homicide rate historically more than three times greater than the rest of the United States, Newark, N.J., isn’t a great vacation spot. But it’s a great place for a murder study.

Led by April Zeoli, an assistant professor of criminal justice, a group of researchers at Michigan State University tracked homicides around Newark from 1982 to 2008, using analytic software typically used by medical researchers to track the spread of diseases. They found that “homicide clusters” in Newark, as researchers called them, spread and move throughout a city much the same way diseases do. Murders, in other words, did not surface randomly—they began in the city center and moved in “diffusion-like processes” across the city.

The study also found that the there were areas of Newark that, despite being beset by violence on all sides, remained almost completely immune to the surrounding trends over the entire course of the 26 years studied.

{ Vice | Continue reading }

These days, the TSA’s major role appears to be to make plane trips more unpleasant. And by doing so, it’s encouraging people to take the considerably more dangerous option of traveling by road. […]

A longer list of TSA’s confiscations would include a G.I. Joe action doll’s 4-inch plastic rifle (“it’s a replica”) and a light saber. […]

Researchers at Cornell University suggest that people switching from air to road transportation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks led to an increase of 242 driving fatalities per month—which means that a lot more people died on the roads as an indirect result of 9/11 than died from being on the planes that terrible day. They also suggest that enhanced domestic baggage screening alone reduced passenger volume by about 5 percent in the five years after 9/11, and the substitution of driving for flying by those seeking to avoid security hassles over that period resulted in more than 100 road fatalities.

{ BloombergBusinessweek | Continue reading }

What exactly about a small salad with four or five miniature croutons makes Guy’s Famous Big Bite Caesar (a) big (b) famous or (c) Guy’s, in any meaningful sense?

[…]

Hey, did you try that blue drink, the one that glows like nuclear waste? The watermelon margarita? Any idea why it tastes like some combination of radiator fluid and formaldehyde? […]

Why did the toasted marshmallow taste like fish?

[…]

ATMOSPHERE 500 seats, three levels, three bars, one chaotic mess.

SERVICE The well-meaning staff seems to realize that this is not a real restaurant.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

In July, Wells Fargo paid a $175 million settlement after the feds caught its brokers systematically pushing minority customers into mortgages with higher rates and fees, even though they posed the same credit risks as whites.

One study found that Wells Fargo charged Hispanics $2,000 more in what the Justice Department called a “racial surtax.” The bank docked blacks nearly $3,000 extra for their own improper pigmentation.

Across the country, in Minneapolis, U.S. Bank also swindled its customers, though at least it let whites in on the action. Instead of logging debit card purchases in the order they were made, the bank rearranged them from highest amount to lowest, the better to artificially stick customers with overdraft fees.

U.S. Bank paid $55 million to settle a class action suit in July. It was the 13th major bank caught running this scam.

These were just the opening salvos of the assault. Bank of America was caught illegally foreclosing on the homes of active-duty soldiers. Visa and MasterCard were charged with fixing the prices they charged merchants to process credit card payments. Morgan Stanley colluded to drive up New York electricity prices. And in the most depraved case of all, Morgan Stanley was even sued for allegedly swindling Irish nuns in an investment deal.

{ Village Voice | Continue reading }

For nearly a decade, scientists have told city and state officials that New York faces certain peril: rising sea levels, more frequent flooding and extreme weather patterns. The alarm bells grew louder after Tropical Storm Irene last year, when the city shut down its subway system and water rushed into the Rockaways and Lower Manhattan.

On Tuesday, as New Yorkers woke up to submerged neighborhoods and water-soaked electrical equipment, officials took their first tentative steps toward considering major infrastructure changes that could protect the city’s fragile shores and eight million residents from repeated disastrous damage. […]

“The construction of this city did not anticipate these kinds of situations. We are only a few feet above sea level,” Mr. Cuomo said during a radio interview. “As soon as you breach the sides of Manhattan, you now have a whole infrastructure under the city that fills — the subway system, the foundations for buildings,” and the World Trade Center site. […]

After rising roughly an inch per decade in the last century, coastal waters in New York are expected to climb as fast as six inches per decade, or two feet by midcentury, according to a city-appointed scientific panel. That much more water means the city’s flood risk zones could expand in size. […]

What scientists, who have devoted years of research to the subject, now fear most is that, as soon as the cleanup from this storm is over, the public will move on.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

related { What Will Happen to the NYC Subway Rats? }

In 1964–to the disgust and dismay of most of my academic friends–I served as an economic adviser to Barry Goldwater during his quest for the Presidency. That year also, I was a Visiting Professor at Columbia University. The two together gave me a rare entree into the New York intellectual community. I talked to and argued with groups from academia, from the media, from the financial community, from the foundation world, from you name it. I was appalled at what I found. There was an unbelievable degree of intellectual homogeneity, of acceptance of a standard set of views complete with cliche answers to every objection, of smug self-satisfaction at belonging to an in-group. The closest similar experience I have ever had was at Cambridge, England, and even that was a distant second.

The homogeneity and provincialism of the New York intellectual community made them pushovers in discussions about Goldwater’s views. They had cliche answers but only to their self-created straw-men. To exaggerate only slightly, they had never talked to anyone who really believed, and had thought deeply about, views drastically different from their own. As a result, when they heard real arguments instead of caricatures, they had no answers, only amazement that such views could be expressed by someone who had the external characteristics of being a member of the intellectual community, and that such views could be defended with apparent cogency. Never have I been more impressed with the advice I once received: “You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.

{ Milton Friedman | via EconLog }

Mr. Romney’s practice debates have gone worse than expected, with the former Massachusetts governor getting trounced by a variety of opponents, including the Apple personal assistant Siri.

{ Andy Borowitz/The New Yorker | Continue reading }

Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said its findings were persuasive.

The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.

The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008. […] The dropping life expectancies have helped weigh down the United States in international life expectancy rankings, particularly for women. […] Among developed countries, American women sank from the middle of the pack in 1970 to last place in 2010.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

{ From David Graham, here is the graph of the 47% — a.k.a. “non-payers” — by state. The ten states with the highest share of “non-payers” are in the states colored red. Most are in southern (and Republican) states. Meanwhile, the 13 states with the smallest share of “non-payers” are in blue. Most are northeastern (and Democratic) states. | Atlantic | full story }

At 12 or 13, we started taking buses to New York City and going to raves. My friends and I discovered this underground culture and adopted this great style that was still foreign to our small upstate community. At the height of the rave scene, I could have described myself as a “polo” raver. I’d wear 60-inch wide jeans called Aura’s E, which was a brand by this girl in Long Island named Aura. I shaved my eyebrows completely off, pierced everything on my face, put platforms on my running sneakers… I’d work day and night in the mall upstate so that I could buy my rave tickets and take bus trips to get all the cool clothes in the city. I found out about everything from shops like Liquid Sky and Satellite Records––they would put flyers out and you had to call hotlines to find out all the rave info. All the great mixtapes were sold at the stores too. It was a real beautiful time to be a teenager and so close to NYC.

{ David Benjamin Sherry | Continue reading }

Rates are at historic lows of 3.53% for 30-year mortgages. Rents are at record levels all over the country, hitting highs in 74 markets tracked by real-estate-data provider Reis Inc. And housing prices appear to have finally begun increasing, with gains posted for three months in a row according to the index put out by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. So why aren’t more Americans buying houses?

The answer to that is rather complex, but one major factor is that trade-up buyers — folks who upgrade from smaller, cheaper “starter homes” to pricier properties, and who classically are a pumping piston in the engine that drives the housing market — are finding it difficult, if not impossible, to trade up right now. This key segment of the market is especially likely to be “equity poor.”

{ Time | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Adams }

{ US man with huge penis stopped at airport }

Many CEOs, including Dow Chemicals’ Andrew Liveris, have declared their intentions to bring manufacturing back to the United States. What is going to accelerate the trend isn’t, as people believe, the rising cost of Chinese labor or a rising yuan. The real threat to China comes from technology. […]

Several technologies advancing and converging will cause this. First, robotics. […] Robots are now capable of performing surgery, milking cows, doing military reconnaissance and combat, and flying fighter jets. Several companies, such Willow Garage, iRobot, and 9th Sense, sell robot-development kits for which university students and open-source communities are developing ever more sophisticated applications. The factory assembly that China is currently performing is child’s play compared to the next generation of robots. […]

Then there is artificial intelligence. […]

Other advances in the next decade will likely affect manufacturing, particularly advances in nanotechnology that change the equation further. Engineers and scientists are today developing new types of materials, such as carbon nanotubes, ceramic-matrix nanocomposites, and new carbon fibers. These new materials make it possible to create products that are stronger, lighter, more energy-efficient, and more durable than existing manufactured goods. A new field — “molecular manufacturing” — will take this one step further and make it possible to program molecules inexpensively, with atomic precision.

{ Foreign Policy | Continue reading }

images { 1 | 2 }

{ Ad for Luna Park by Fernando Livschitz }

Fallout continues from the MOCA board’s removal of chief curator Paul Schimmel.

“Jeffrey has always been supportive of my work, but I don’t understand the direction he’s taking the museum right now,” McCarthy said. “I see it as placating the populace. It’s not really what art’s about, but a ratings game.”

Among those in Deitch’s corner is Shepard Fairey, an art star of a younger generation, especially since he designed the “Hope” poster that became the unofficial image of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. (The design firm Fairey founded, Studio One, is now handling much of MOCA’s design work.)

In an email, Fairey, 42, praised Deitch’s “astute understanding of the interconnected nature of high and low art culture. When I say low, I don’t mean inferior.”

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

John Baldessari, citing Paul Schimmel’s ouster, becomes the fifth trustee to bolt since February.

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

threesome { Jeffrey Deitch, Yoko Ono, Jeff Koons }

{ President Obama has dinner in Woodside, Calif., in February 2011 with tech leaders including John Chambers (Cisco), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Reed Hastings (Netflix), Carol Bartz (Yahoo), Steve Jobs (Apple), and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook). | One year ago tomorrow, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings took the first of a series of missteps that angered customers and nearly derailed his company. Current and former employees disclose what went wrong. }