Misleading Headlines Я Us

[fivemack]

'France loosens job restrictions on Roma' turns out to be 'France removes a tax on French firms hiring Bulgarian and Romanian workers' - that is, it has arranged that LaurV could go and work for Alcatel in Villarceaux without imposing extra costs on them.

[LaurV]

It depends how you compile it. Here I get a higher salary then local people, and the company spends a lot more with me. They consider I worth the money, otherwise they won't keep me. I for sure drink a lot of coffee (company provided) but I spit dollars in turn. If you are enough unlucky to get a heart attach in France you will be surprised to see that in the operation room people speak Romanian, because all doctors and nurses are Romanians (they went there after the communism felt, and got jobs in spite of the taxes their employer had to pay, same way as programmers and computer scientists went to Microsoft, you may remember Bill Gates saying that 20% of his collaborators are Romanians, many of my former colleagues are there. During the communist era we had a very good school of medicine and computer science).

On the other hands, I have plenty of examples of Romanians (mainly gypsy, but not only) going to west after '89 and playing beggars, using lassos to steal satellite antennas from roof tops, eating the swans from the lake in Frankfurt... (that is no joke!).

I think THAT is the main problem now in France, they want to pursue (convince, force, don't know the right word) the thousands of beggars, pickpockets, people with no life there, sleeping in park, terrorizing the neighborhoods, etc, to get a job, do whatever, get a life.

There is a big fun in Romanian newspapers these days, the journalists say that if the Frenchmen wanna be successful in this goal, they have to invent new occupations to add to the occupation list, such as (difficult to translate the right words, so I will use the meaning only) beggar, hooker, whoremaster, sleeper-on-the-sidewalk, etc (you got the idea, so, fill in the blanks).

[fivemack]

A Telegraph article headlined 'Anger as Iran bans women from universities' ; meaning 'as some Iranian universities make some of their courses single-gender for the next academic year'.

http://www.roozonline.com/english/ne...for-women.html headlines a significantly more detailed article with '77 Academic Subjects Announced Not Suitable for Women', and includes the paragraph 'This limitation does not exist for women in other universities such as those in Tehran, Shiraz or Tabriz. This forces women who are interested in these fields to move to other regions of the country which makes them less competitive because of the strengths of the residents of those provinces.'




"Isfahan University provided a similar rationale for excluding women from its mining engineering degree, claiming 98% of female graduates ended up jobless" - which would suggest that any Turkish geophysics company wanting female Persian mining engineers can get them at a very good rate.

[Uncwilly]

Man hacks Google Street View to get revenge over a pickup truck

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technolo...222929264.html

The real story: He painted TOYOTA SUCKS on his roof. His roof is not visible from Street View, rather just from the aerial.
He has complaints written all over his truck, but that is just a common response. It is not 'hacking' street view.
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=2327+...57.89,,1,17.86

[retina]

I guess that ambiguous headlines can also be misleading. "clean" could be either a verb or an adjective.

http://phys.org/news/2012-08-automakers-cars.html

[Uncwilly]

In the Yahoo feed:
Olympic legend jumps ship

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/olympi...6732--oly.html

Actually he accidentally fell off the boat during a race.

[ewmayer]

There's a bit of a tempest in the local news and blogosphere about Chipotle restaurant chain rounding customer bills to the nearest nickel to save time. My local news last night described the practice of "rounding UP to the nearest nickel". Being well-acquainted with floating-point arithmetic, I could certainly see how a policy of round-toward-positive-infinity would be upsetting to customers, if not outright illegal. But today I did a bit of googling and according to Chipotle, the rounding was always to-nearest:

After an investigation by the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger's consumer watchdog, Chipotle revised its policy of rounding up or down to the nearest nickel at "a small number of restaurants in a few of our highest volume markets," as characterized by spokesman Chris Arnold in an email. He said affected markets included New York, New Jersey and the Washington, D.C. area.

As of August 1, Arnold said those restaurants only will round down in customers' favor, and a notification has been added to the bottom of each receipt. Arnold said Chipotle didn't profit when the rounding went both ways. "We never benefitted in any way other than making lines move faster," he said.

"I think if they were rounding up ... and weren’t disclosing it, it might be actionable by a state attorney general under unfair and deceptive practices laws," Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director with Public Interest Research Group said via email.

But I see lots of misleading headlines which indicate otherwise, and then promptly belie themselves in the ensuing article text:

The headline: Chipotle locations round cost up to nearest nickel

The reality:

A New Jersey newspaper reported that busy Chipotle locations in New York and New Jersey were rounding customers' totals to the nearest nickel.

The chain said it was to keep lines moving faster by limiting the amount of change needed.

The headline: Chipotle Caught Rounding Up Change, Changes Policy

The reality:

Has Chipotle been cheating us of our pennies?

News recently broke of the chain's practice of rounding checks up or down to the nearest nickel.

Their reasoning was that the rounding would help keep the lines moving and that Chipotle didn't profit when the rounding went both ways.

The headline: You’ll Never Believe What Chipotle Was Caught Doing to Food Bills

The reality:

Chipotle restaurants in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts have been caught nickel-and-diming customers by rounding up bills to the nearest nickel, according to a recent report from the Star-Ledger.

The discovery was made by an astute customer who noticed his bills just weren’t adding up.

“The receipts at the Chipotle in West Caldwell don’t add up when there are odd amounts involved,” Jayson Greenberg of New Jersey told the Star Ledger.

And to prove his point, Greenberg saved his receipts and documented the oddity:

July 13: Purchased nine items totaling $32.93. Tax was $2.31. Total should have been $35.24, but was $35.25 instead.
July 13: Total purchase was $8.64. Tax was $0.60. Total should have been $9.24, but was $9.25 instead.
July 17: Total purchase was $17.75. Tax was $1.24. Total should have been 18.99 but was $19.00 instead.

All of which were correctly rounded, but do not allow us to determine if the rounding is up-only or both-ways.

The article does note that Chipotle apparently failed to post signs informing customers of the policy, which I agree was a mistake.

A reader comment to the last piece captures the tempest-in-a-teapot aspect of the whole flap nicely:

When pennies are outlawed only outlaws will have pennies…

[only_human]

I posted this in the WTF thread yesterday but it fits here better:
Can firefighting mules balance California's budget? (BBC News)

The reality is that pack mules can move supplies and save money in constrained circumstances but fewer of them are being used these days.

[jasong]

The last job I had, I earned precisely minimum wage, which I believe is $6.90. I can honestly say, I would welcome a policy of rounding up, especially when the lines are long.

Mildly off-topic, but I'll bend over to pick up nickles, but only because I'm a bit OCD. I'll only pick up pennies if there are 3 or more and they are within a few feet of each other.

(You can stop here, I get a little off-topic now)

I made $6.90/hr at my most recent job, and that's if you ignore the taxes they take out of my check. 3600 seconds in an hour divided by 690 pennies is a penny per 5.2 seconds, rounded down. So if it takes more than about 10 seconds to deal with the extra pennies, pretty much everybody not on some sort of welfare loses out. Plus, the extra time in line affects everybody in the line, so 5 people in line means if it takes the cashier an extra 2 seconds to do the change then people are screwed. Bottom line, only cheeky bastards and dumb people think it's bad to do away with pennies. With credit cards, I suppose it's different since there's no actual cash involved.

[Xyzzy]

Back a long time ago, when we were in the Army, we used to chuck coins into urinals. It was one of our (many) ways of testing people. It also kept people a bit cautious around us. The key is that if people suspect you are slightly unbalanced then they leave you alone.

Anyways, nobody goes fishing for pennies, nickels or dimes, but some people will for a quarter. Most people will for several quarters.

Is there something to be learned from this social experiment? We do not know. But we do know that if you "keep people guessing" you have the power and they do not.

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

Most people will for several quarters.

Have you run the experiment with a chocolate dollar?