Does Less Cash Mean Less Crime?

(twofishblu)

This might seem like a completely backwards question, especially when you consider the recent mega-breach of credit and debit card numbers at Target. But it could be that the wider adoption of credit cards and electronic payments contributed to huge decreases in crime rates in the United States in the 1990s.

Cards, after all, have built-in fraud protection: if someone takes your cards in a good old-fashioned mugging, you can report them stolen and limit your liability. That’s certainly not the case for cash.

A recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found some ideal data to figure out whether less use of cash really does decrease crime. The now-familiar Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) cards that replaced paper welfare checks in the 1990s rolled out in different parts of Missouri at different times. As people living in impoverished neighborhoods no longer have to cash their checks and carry large amounts of cash around, street crime should decrease. Right?

That is indeed what happened. The overall crime rate went down 16.6%, and rates of assault and larceny fell as well. What the change didn’t affect was the incidence of robbery: maybe, the researchers speculate, because robberies are relatively rare compared to lesser street crimes, so having less cash circulating in the local economy doesn’t affect the rate of robberies very much.

Less Cash, Less Crime: Evidence from the Electronic Benefit Transfer Program [NBER]

As Cash Use Drops, Do Crime Rates Follow? [Bloomberg Businessweek]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

¿Por qué los clientes abandonan el carro de la compra? #infografia #infographic #ecommerce

Hola:

Una infografía sobre ¿Por qué los clientes abandonan el carro de la compra?.

Un saludo

¿Por qué los clientes abandonan el carro de la compra?

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SeaWorld Edges Out Ticketmaster, Joins Walmart In Worst Company Quarterfinals!

Round Two action continued today, with two Worst Company tournament newcomers each taking on established WCIA vets. In the end, one of those freshmen fighters was sent packing, while the other managed to eke out a victory against a company who has left such an indelible mark on the tournament’s history that it belongs in the WCIA Runner-Up Hall of Something That Rhymes With Fame But Means The Opposite.

SEAWORLD VS. TICKETMASTER

For the last four or five tournaments, Ticketmaster was a lock to make it all the way to the Final Four. The company even had a shot at the Final Death Match back in 2010 before losing out to Comcast. Any hopes for Ticketmaster making another run at the Golden Poo in 2014 were dashed this afternoon when it lost a buzzer-beater to tournament upstart SeaWorld.

SeaWorld had an impressive WCIA debut in Round One, sending Johnson & Johnson home without even a Tylenol for its pain, but today’s match was much closer, with the controversial theme park operator not even able to get 53% of the vote against the combined powers of Ticketmaster and Live Nation. SeaWorld will test the time-tested theory that everyone hates banks when it goes up against Chase in the quarterfinals.

WALMART VS. ABERCROMBIE & FITCH

In Round One, Abercrombie pulled off a huge upset, handily beating Delta Air Lines (and looking good while doing it). But all that hair-mussing must have taken the overly-scented wind out of A&F’s sails, as the clothing retailer got the ever-living crud beaten out of it by WCIA powerhouse Walmart in today’s Round Two match.

The nation’s largest retailer took home more than two-thirds of the vote today, but it will have a much more difficult mountain to climb when it faces two-time tournament runner-up (and one-time winner if you include the Golden Poo given to Countrywide many moons ago), Bank of America in the quarterfinals.

We’re halfway through Round Two. Voting resumes on Monday morning!

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Personalidad y relato de marca para pymes #infografia #infographic #marketing

Hola:

Una infografía sobre personalidad y relato de marca para pymes. Vía

Un saludo

Personalidad y relato de marca para pymes

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Want Free Tickets To A Tampa Bay Rays Game? Eat This 4-Pound Burger And A Pound Of Fries

Dig in. (Tampa Bay Rays on Twitter)

Over at the Tampa Bay Rays clubhouse, or wherever baseball people hang out (a clubhouse makes sense, right?) I imagine there was a conversation after the Arizona Diamondbacks revealed its 18-inch, $25 corndog stuffed with cheese and bacon. And it went a little something like this…

“Isn’t that cute? They want people to pay for something excessively extravagant! Let’s turn this game up.”

And thus, the team’s Fan vs. Food challenge was born in the name of a bit of friendly inter-league competition: The Rays are pushing a promo where whoever can eat an entire four-pound burger and its accompany pound of fries can win two tickets to a game, plus a T-shirt to replace the one you’re going to split wide open in the pursuit of that reward.

Let’s take a look at the uncropped version, just to get a real feeling for the scale of meat involved here:

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

“Google Naps” Maps Show The Best Places To Catch Some Shuteye, Antarctica Included

We wouldn’t trust the suggestion to sleep in the Atlantic Ocean even if there’s “tasty salt water for free.”

Sometimes you just need a nap. A refreshing, wake-up-invigorated-to-tackle-the-rest-of-your-day nap. But what happens when you’re not at home and are unfamiliar with the best place to lay your head? Fear not, because a pair of Dutch developers have the solution: Google Naps.

Google Naps, a parody of Google Maps (obviously), aims to uncover “the world’s coziest and coolest places to take a well-deserved nap,” The Next Web reports.

The program uses your computer or device’s location (it won’t work if you deny it access to your location, and you can’t do a search, both of which are definite negatives) and overlays user-submitted data on the best nearby napping spots. Napping locations are depicted with yellow icons sitting on benches, fields, beds and bridges.

Users can submit the best places to take a snooze in all corners of the world from China to South Africa, so you’ll never be without a comfortable place to catch a few Zs again. Although it doesn’t appear that the locations are vetted by anyone; there are a number of spots located in the ocean or submitted by users with innuendoes as names.

A quick search in our area of Washington, D.C., and you’ll find a plethora of options. Okay, so you might not want to actually nap in these places, but the user-submitted “Why should I sleep here?” rationalizations are at least good for a little laugh.

Our personal favorite is a bench outside the Federal Trade Commission offices because as one user named Snoozer puts it “Federal Trade Commission – cares about consumer welfare.”

“Federal Trade Commission – cares about consumer welfare.”

If you’re tired from doing all sorts of touristy things you can “hang out with Obama” on a bench near the White House. (The benches may exist, but we doubt the Prez will be power-napping on any of them during his lunch hour.)

If you like to be one with nature, you might prefer a field near Meridian Hill Park where there’s “lots of shade from the trees. Also fresh water from the pond.”

We may have found one area where Google Naps could be useful – college capuses.

It appears that users in Columbia, MO, have gone to town locating the best napping places at the University of Missouri.

“Nice view overlooking the quad.” – from Columbia, Missouri.

We’re not sure how long Google Naps will be around, but the developers are hoping the real Google Maps doesn’t take offense to the parody site.

Hello, please don’t be mad this is just a joke, a parody. We don’t mean to damage your brand or anything, we just want to bring a smile on the faces of Google fans. So please don’t take this to court, we only have a few hundred Euros in the bank. And we also don’t want to go to jail because we’re too busy with other things at the moment. But whenever you are in the Netherlands you can have a nap on our couch if you want, just e-mail us. We can also make coffee and bake eggs if you like that (for a small price).

If history is any indicator (remember, Dumb Starbucks?) it won’t be long until the parody developers hear from Google.

Google Naps: a parody of Google Maps that helps you find the best places for a snooze [The Next Web]

by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist

Right Guard Shrink Rays Aerosol Can By 15%

Bob currently works in China, and stocks up on his favorite deodorant, one that he isn’t allergic to, during his visits to the United States. Historically, a can of the stuff has lasted him a year. That’s not going to be the case anymore, since each 10-ounce can has lost 1.5 ounces.

Unlike many companies, they didn’t mask the shrinkage with a packaging change. That’s very bold: or maybe the exact opposite of bold, since the packaging remains exactly the same. Classic. Just smaller.

He sent us these handy comparison photos, writing, ” What a surprise to discover that the new can is 1.5 oz less for the same price…Guess the Dial Corporation took out their Shrink Ray machine and

used it sometime in the past year.” Naturally, it remained the same price.

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

Who Are We To Argue With Chemists Advocating Meat Marinated In Beer?

(Strupey)

Listen, when science tells you to do something, I’m not going to argue. And so if chemists says marinating meat in beer before you cook it to help kill potentially scary carcinogens, well, we’re listening. Because let’s face it, there’s a high possibility that you’ll have beer hanging around that summer barbecue (if summer ever shows its sunny face, sigh).

A team of European scientists wrote in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry that beer marinades provide a great way to cut down on polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs, as the science folk call’em), reports PSMag.com.

That’s the stuff that forms on meat when it’s cooked over open flames, “mainly, by contact of dripping fat with hot embers.” Because that substance can be carcinogenic, some health experts recommend limiting exposure to PAHs.

It sounds like researchers had a somewhat tasty time with this experiment, using pork loin steaks from a grocery store and marinating some in beer baths of varying types and others without anything as a control group.

According the findings, black beer did the best out of the three, reducing net weight of total PAHs by 53%. Next in line were non-alcoholic pilsners at 25% reduction and regular pilsner at 13%.

We’re sure you’ve stopped reading at this point because “grilled meat” and “beer,” but hey, at least now you have a scientific excuse for dousing that steak in a fine brew.

Chemists Endorse Marinating Meat With Beer [PSMag.com]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

SiriusXM Swaps ’40s Music For Billy Joel, Learns That People Really Love ’40s Music

If you’ve never had SiriusXM satellite radio, you might not be familiar with their station “’40s on 4.” It’s exactly what it sounds like: songs from the first half of this century that your grandparents or great-grandparents might sing along with. You might assume that this sort of station wouldn’t be popular enough in 2014 to prompt a public outcry when it’s taken away. You would be wrong.

Now, ’40s on 4 isn’t being taken away forever. SiriusXM is running a temporary channel that’s all Billy Joel, all the time, which sounds like a pretty great idea. The part of this plan that doesn’t sound so great to us was that they’re putting this station on channel 4 for its 3-month run. The ’40s on 4 programming isn’t gone: you can stream it on a smartphone or a computer.

ADVISORY: The Billy Joel Channel takes over @40sOn4 satellite channel 4 starting Mar 26 and running through Jun 25. @SIRIUSXM—

SIRIUS XM 40s On 4 (@40sOn4) March 24, 2014

Let’s be honest: most people have satellite radio for listening in the car, and many of the people who would be interested in a ’40s station probably don’t carry around iPhones that they could use to stream it. “Obviously, [streaming the station] does not work for most of us who listen to the radio while driving,” writes Lindsay, the reader who originally told us about this consumer uproar.

Of course, there are some young, tech-savvy fans of the station. They’re tech-savvy enough to write to Consumerist and take to Facebook in anger.

Here’s a small selection of posts from just the last 24 hours or so:

SiriusXM is staying on message: ’40s on 4 will be back in June, once the Billy Joel station’s 3-month run is over. They don’t seem to understand why it is that people subscribe to satellite radio in the first place, especially people who have bought devices for their elderly parents to enjoy classic music.

We contacted Sirius and asked for their comment on the situation: they haven’t contacted us back yet. We’ll update this post if they do.

SiriusXM 40s on 4 [Facebook]

Bring Back “40s on 4″ [Facebook]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

Teen Way Smarter Than Us: Silly Government, Just Change Your Typeface And Save $400M

Teen says Garamond could save money over Times New Roman (Enokson).

For my sixth-grade science fair project, I played Hootie and the Blowfish for some bean plants and displayed a half-hearted cardboard poster with the inconclusive results. In comparison, a now 14-year-old figured out how to save governments, including the federal one, a whole lot of money on ink, to the tune of $400 million.

When the boy was in middle school, he realized he was getting a whole lot of handouts, more than he was used to in elementary school, reports CNN. That launched him on an ink-saving mission to figure out how to save money and conserve resources, all by experimenting with different typefaces.

After charting commonly used characters used in school handouts, he printed them in four different fonts: Garamond, Times New Roman, Century Gothic and Comic Sans. Using a commercial tool called APFill® Ink Coverage Software, he was able to measure how much ink was used for each letter.

He then analyzed all his work and found that Garamond, with its thinner strokes, could save his school district up to $21,000 per year.

From there he was on to bigger and better things, encouraged by his teacher, and got in touch with the Journal for Emerging Investigators (JEI), a publication founded specifically for the work of middle school and high school students. Of the 200 submissions to publish work since 2011, his stood out.

“We were so impressed. We really could really see the real-world application in [his] paper,” one of the founders said of his work.

JEI’s peer reviewers prompted him to tackle the question of how the federal government could possibly save cash, just like his school district, on its $1.8 billion per year printing expenses.

Using the same methods he employed on the earlier project, he got similar results: Subsituting Garamond for Times New Roman would save $136 million per year on government documents, with an additional $234 million in savings if state governments followed suit, he concluded.

So will it be making the change? The media and public relations manager at the Government Printing Office called his work “remarkable,” but didn’t commit to a typeface switch, as the government is focused on helping the environment by moving more toward the Web.

“In 1994, we were producing 20,000 copies a day of both the Federal Register and Congressional Record. Twenty years later, we produce roughly 2,500 print copies a day,” he said.

The teen still thinks his ideas could make a big difference.

“They can’t convert everything to a digital format; not everyone is able to access information online. Some things still have to be printed,” he points out, adding, “I definitely would love to see some actual changes and I’d be happy to go as far as possible to make that change possible.”

Teen to government: Change your typeface, save millions [CNN]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist