Category: Wasting your time

Earlier today, we learned that when faced with a regulatory deadline to test your products for lead, a good course of action is to lobby to delay or reverse the requirement. This afternoon, we learn the best course of action when your highly-profitable drug is about to lose patent protection. We’re all familiar with the…

On Nov. 16th at 9:50 Pacific, the answer remains no, but this site will help us keep track of this important issue after Jan. 20.

I have a love-hate relationship with credit and charge cards. They’re incredibly convenient, but my few puritan instincts tell me that they’re the spawn of satan. And the fees! The fees! No, not the ones for paying your bill late, or for paying your bill on time over the phone, balance transfer fees, application fees,…

The Journal reports the obvious under the headlines “Tainting of Milk Is Open Secret in China” and “Milk Routinely Spiked in China:” Before melamine-laced milk killed and sickened Chinese babies and led to recalls around the world, the routine spiking of milk with illicit substances was an open secret in China’s dairy regions, according to…

Libertarians hold dear the idea of the uberman consumer, the hyperrational, fully formed autonomous being that springs from the womb to take good decisions in the marketplace. But when one reads marketing literature, a different consumer is encountered. Often this consumer is an object to be manipulated; one who holds totally irrational ideas that must…

So, here it is. Titled “Berkeley’s Big People,” it is installed along I-80, so those of you driving north of San Francisco will probably see it, as it is 30 feet tall and visible from a mile away. Given the landscape of “free speech,” it would have been much more appropriate to have erected a…

It seems as though officials have been arguing forever about whether to erect an anti-suicide net along the Golden Gate Bridge. On Friday, the bridge directors voted 14-1 in favor of creating such a net: …the stainless-steel net system, which would be placed 20 feet below the deck, and would collapse around anyone who jumped…

Why? Well, among other things, for hating billboards. Max Colchester of the Wall Street Journal reports: On Friday, Alex Baret plans to board a train to central Paris, pull out a can of spray paint and deface a billboard, as he has done every last Friday of the month for more than two years. The…

The Journal reports this morning that: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned imports of more than 30 generic drugs made by India’s Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd., citing concerns about the safety of the company’s production practices. The ban affects low-cost versions of popular medicines such as the anticholesterol drug Zocor; Acyclovir, which treats herpes; the…