What Do Car Dealers Do? Gerard Magliocca, Concurring Opinions, March 17, 2014

What is the public purpose behind a statute or regulation that says that you can only buy new cars through a dealer? I’ll grant that the dealership model has been around for a long time, and dealers are a powerful lobby, but is there anything else to this regulation? For example, can you say that car dealers do a better job at protecting consumer safety or welfare than a store owned by the manufacturer? I find that hard to believe. I’m not sure these dealership statutes are constitutionally irrational, but they are ridiculous.

The NFL Now Wants $15.1 Million From M.I.A., Because The NFL Is Crazy, Tom Ley, Deadspin, March 17, 2014

It was pretty goddamn ridiculous…when the NFL decided that it was going to sue M.I.A. for flipping the bird during her Super Bowl halftime performance, but according to new documents obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, the league’s suit against M.I.A. has now gone from silly to batshit crazy.

According to THR, the NFL has added an additional “restitution” claim to its lawsuit, and they are asking for $15.1 million.

The Economist Notes that Patents Do Not Equal Innovation, Deven Desai, Concurring Opinions, March 17, 2014

There may be some relationship between patents and incentives to create certain things. But not all patents or all creations show a correlation to a general claim that patents equal innovation or whether innovation will occur without patents. Innovation as “Hey that rally changed the way we do things” probably can’t be identified until much after the event. Innovation as “Hey we made tons and tons of bitcoin, oh we mean cash” is easier to spot but a different metric as far as policy should be concerned.

Paul Krugman Eviscerates Paul Ryan For His Racist ‘Inner City’ Poverty Remarks, Americans Against the Tea Party, March 17, 2014

“American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People,” Krugman wrote.

Krugman went on to say that Ryan’s remarks are representative of the GOP and American conservative politics as a whole.

“One odd consequence of our still-racialized politics is that conservatives are still, in effect, mobilizing against the bums on welfare even though both the bums and the welfare are long gone or never existed.”

8 Problems That Only Guys Who Fuck Real Good Will Understand, Dan Hopper, College Humor, March 18, 2014

Hey there, other guys who fuck real good — we’re a rare breed, aren’t we? We always try to keep our weird, nerdy quirk to ourselves, but sometimes, our undeniable prowess at fucking causes some problems in our day-to-day life that those other “only ok at fucking” people simply just won’t understand.

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3. When You Fuck So Well For So Long You Suddenly Realize You’ve Missed Christmas. How many times has this happened to you: You finally wrap-up a steamy, marathon fuck-session only to glance over at the calendar and realize it’s December 27th, and you’ve both fucked your way through Christmas. Uhoh! Too bad your family won’t understand why you didn’t go see them… and we all know why they don’t GET it ;-0 ;-0

Photo credit: By John Martinez Pavliga from Berkeley, USA (Contemporary American Auto Dealer) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.