Urologist Starts Hangover I.V. Treatment Service, Selling Relief For $250 A Pop

(C x 2)

For those of you’ve never had a hangover, I’m not going to go to lengths to describe how awful it can be because you don’t need that bad energy in your life. And if you’ve had one, well, let’s not dwell on things in the past, but it’s safe to say you’ve tried every method under the sun to make it all go away. One doctor says he’s got The Cure.

Not the band, no, but one method that purports to take that hangover and turn it into a bad dream. Color me skeptical, but the guy behind I.V. Doctor is an actual doctor, albeit not the kind you might associate with booze, if you were inclined to do such a thing.

He’s a urologist, reports CNNMoney, and his most popular package goes for $250, providing a cocktail of hydrating I.V. bags and various medications to fix what’s ailing you after a few too many.

The New York doctor and his surgical resident use intravenous hydration and “other medicine” in the service, making house calls to homes and businesses throughout the city, with the help of 60 nurses in NYC and 12 in the Hamptons. Because all those summer parties filled with fabulous people mean lots of expensive hangovers.

And the bulk of his clients, the doc says? People working in finance who work hard and play harder. No, but really.

“We’re the work-hard, play-hard type and everyone said they felt replenished,” one client who’s used the service said. “Even some of the server girls we hired for a barbeque got it done and they all said they felt better.”

Just going to leave that there.

Anyway, you can also call the doc for other common, somewhat related ailments, like food poisoning or the flu, or if you need a recharge after a big game or race.

The I.V. Doctor plans to expand to Chicago this summer, because clearly, hangovers know no geographical boundaries.



This doctor cures hangovers for $250 [CNNMoney]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Despite Lessons From Great Recession, Few Consumers Save For Emergencies

(frankieleon)

Did consumers learn nothing from the Great Recession? Okay, they learned several things, but putting away for a rainy day doesn’t appear to be one of them.

According to a new Bankrate survey, only 23% of consumers have the recommended emergency savings to cover six months’ of expenses in case they run into difficulties, such as losing a job.

In fact, nearly 26% of consumers have absolutely no emergency savings, while another 24% have enough to cover less than three months’ worth of expenses.

One might think that making more money would translate into a more robust savings account, but that’s not the case. According to Bankrate, of the consumers who make $75,000 or more a year only 46% have enough savings to cover six months’ worth of expenses.

So who is more likely to be saving for emergencies? Retirees. That age group was three times as likely to be saving as consumers ages 18 to 29. However, consumers 65 years of age an older say they feel less secure in their finances that they did a year ago, while nearly 32% of younger people feel more secure today.

With the Great Recession barely in the rearview mirror why are consumers not saving? The desire to deal with more near-term or tangible financial priorities. Additionally, financial experts tell Bankrate that it’s difficult for consumers to make progress on multiple goals such as saving for college, a house or retirement.

That’s exactly the case for Mary, a 33-year-old attorney in North Carolina. She and her husband have enough saved to pay three months of their mortgage, but the majority of their finances go toward paying down their college-related debt and childcare.

“The other financial obligations weigh more heavily on us — so if I were to stay up worrying, it would definitely be about the other things,” she says.

While the Great Recession didn’t appear to make people save more – at least not this year – it did make an impact on other financial behaviors.

One financial expert says consumers used the recession as a wake-up call in terms of their debt levels. In fact, nearly 23% of Bankrate respondents said they were more comfortable with their level of debt today than they were a year ago.

While many consumers might not be putting funds away for emergencies right now, that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t like to do so. Bankrate found that of those who were uncomfortable with the amount they had set aside for emergencies nearly half wish to boost their savings.

Financial Security Index: Saving for a rainy day [Bankrate]

by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist

Court Won’t Let Viacom Stop Cablevision’s Anti-Bundling Lawsuit

VH1 Classic and its love of countdowns is one of the dozen or so add-on channels that Cablevision doesn’t want to pay for just to get MTV, Comedy Central, BET, or Nickelodeon.

Sick of being forced to accept Viacom’s massive bundle of barely watched cable channels — Palladia and MTV Hits, anyone? — just to get the handful that its subscribers want to watch (MTV, Comedy Central, BET, Nickelodeon), New York-based Cablevision sued Viacom in early 2013, alleging the broadcaster was violating federal antitrust laws. Viacom has since tried to have the case dismissed, but a U.S. District Court has ruled that the case can move forward.

Cablevision accuses Viacom of forcing the cable company into an illegal tying agreement by only making its most-watched “Core” channels available if the company also pays for and airs a suite of 14 other channels with much lower viewership.

Viacom had argued that Cablevision needs to prove there is an anticompetitive effect to this bundling arrangement, but the court disagreed[PDF], saying that A) the rule for determining whether a tying agreement is illegal does not take market conditions into account, and B) that Cablevision has made a reasonable argument that the forced bundling is anticompetitive, claiming there are only a limited number of channels available and every slot taken up by an unwanted channel is a slot that can’t go to anyone else.

Cablevision has also accused Viacom of the illegal practice of block-booking, which the Supreme Court previously defined, in a case involving Paramount Pictures forcing movie theaters to take crappy movies in order to get the studios’ good films, as “the practice of licensing, or offering for license, one feature or group of features on condition that the exhibitor will also license another feature or group of features released by the distributors during a given period.”

In response, Viacom tried to argue that a 2006 case, Illinois Tool Works v. Independent Ink, showed that block-booking was no longer an issue, as the Supreme Court ruled that the mere holding of a patent does not automatically confer market power on the patent-holder. However, the District Court ruling points out that this doesn’t prevent anyone from making a block-booking claim; it just means that such claims are subject to market power analysis.

The court did not grant Cablevision’s request to void its current license with Viacom, meaning the company will have to continue under its agreement to air all the disputed channels.

“We are gratified the Court has ruled that Cablevision has stated a valid antitrust claim against Viacom for illegal channel tying,” Cablevision says in a statement about the ruling. “We continue to believe that Viacom’s tying of its popular networks to carriage of its lesser-watched ancillary networks is illegal, anti-consumer, and wrong. We look forward to further pressing our case at the next stage of the proceeding.”

It seems likely to us that this case will eventually end up being put before the Supreme Court, but that’s not in the immediate future.

While some are encouraged that a Cablevision victory would result in truly a la carte cable for consumers, the company has yet to confirm that it would break up the bundles that it offers to subscribers.

Additionally, it’s possible the per-channel cost of a la carte cable may be prohibitive to those who want to pick and choose the channels they pay for.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

After Fire, Comcast Probaby Won’t Make Low-Income Seniors Pay For Burned Cable Boxes

(Mr.TinDC)

The good news was that no one was killed or injured when a fire destroyed an apartment building for low-income senior citizens in Battle Creek, Michigan last week. The bad news is that the seniors’ cable provider, Comcast, can’t rule out that they’re going to charge the residents for the Kabletown-owned cable boxes that were destroyed in the fire.

Generally, cable companies will send a bill to people whose cable boxes and modems have been destroyed by natural or man-made disasters, then wait for homeowner’s or renter’s insurance to cover the balance.

The CEO of the agency that runs the housing complex told local news that Comcast had asked for $120 per destroyed box from someone. When contacted, a Comcast spokesperson said that the seniors who have just lost their homes and belongings won’t be asked to pay that bill, and the fees will probably be waived, but they can’t guarantee

We get that cable boxes aren’t cheap and are important, but maybe telecoms should wait more than a week before they start hounding their customers for the balance. Maybe.

Seniors displaced by fire could be charged for cable boxes [WMMT]

Over 50 seniors displaced by fire at Battle Creek apartment complex [WZZM] (Warning: auto-play video)

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

Yo Founder: We Were Lucky To Get Hacked (And Everything Is Fixed Now)

The symbol for the element Yo-inium?

The makers of one-word messaging app Yo are sounding the all-clear after reports last week that the app could easily be hacked, leaving users’ phone numbers at risk. But also? That whole thing was a good thing, the founder explains.

The app only launched and hit that point of saturation where everyone is yakking about something for at least 48 hours straight recently, so the news that it’d been hacked spread quickly. And it was all for the best, founder Or Arbel wrote on Medium on Saturday (via the WSJ blog Digits). By June 22, it had 1 million users.

“We were lucky enough to get hacked at an early stage and the issue has been fixed,” he explained, because the whole thing shows how Yo is super simple and there’s basically nothing to be hacked, anyway.

“When you join it doesn’t ask you for your email, full name, Facebook account, or any other piece of personal information. The only identity within the Yo app is your username,” he adds.

The one exception — if users opt in to the “find friends” feature, which uses phone numbers to connect you to your real life pals.

So if you don’t use that feature, your username was the only thing that was compromised, he says. And your list of contacts is also safe, because those aren’t saved or stored by Yo.

But if you have used that feature — “your phone number was exposed together with your Yo username (again, not with your full name, not with your email, only a Yo username and a phone number).”

There’s also some more information about what exactly happened, with Arbel outlining the timeline of last week’s hack: He got a text message asking if he was the founder of Yo, to which he replied yes to — even though it was an unknown number. Red flag, it would seem. That triggered a blast of Yos and an alert saying “YoBeenHacked” in his app.

“We logged on to our back-end and immediately started investigating. Our initial findings were on the spoofed Yos and showing the custom alert,” Arbel writes. “We instantly closed these holes, but there was another issue to follow.”

Then he actually called the number from the texter and spoke to the hacker and had a productive conversation with emailed details of the attack.

Georgia Tech Students had claimed last week to have hacked Yo, not to do harm but to simply show that it could be done.

Yo and the hackers worked things out eventually, resolving the issue on Friday and verifying with the hackers that everything was righty tighty.

“One of them is actually now working with us on improving Yo experience in other aspects as well,” he adds.

He admits that things might’ve gone a bit too fast in the early stages, but heck, don’t we all move too fast, too soon in life? Tell it like it is.

“Yo started as a weekend project and exploded a little too soon,” he confesses. “We were just finishing up re-writing the infrastructure in a proper and secure way, as suitable for production grade apps, when it suddenly blew up and went viral.”

So annoying when you go viral too soon. So annoying.

Anyway, Arbel is really sorry this had to happen.

“We take your privacy very seriously, we apologize from the bottom of our hearts, and if you have any more questions regarding these issues you can contact me directly: or@justyo.co.”

We were lucky enough to get hacked [@YoApp on Medium]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Mazda, Honda And Nissan Issue Recalls Of Nearly 3 Million Vehicles Related To Faulty Airbag Deployment

(Listener42)

Nearly 3 million more Nissan, Mazda and Honda vehicles have been recalled related to potentially faulty, and painful, airbag deployment issues that are currently under investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Nissan, Honda and Mazda each announced they were recalling vehicles equipped with the potentially faulty airbags, bringing the total number of affected cars to roughly 10 million in the past five years, Reuters reports.

The recalls, which began last year, stem from issues with both passenger- and driver-side airbags. According to a NHTSA notification [PDF] of the original recall, a defect in the frontal airbags could produce excessive internal pressure causing the inflator to rupture upon deployment. At times, pieces of the airbag module can forcefully fly out striking occupants.

According to the New York Times, Honda is recalling 2.03 million vehicles, including the 2000-2005 Fit, Element and CR-V models. Nissan is recalling an additional 755,000 vehicles, including the Cube, X-Trail and some Infinity models produced between 2001 and 2003, while Mazda said it would recall 159,807 Atenza and RX-8 vehicles made between 2002 and 2004.

Additionally, Nissan and Chrysler are conducting regional recalls to replace the airbag inflators in vehicles located in high humidity regions of Puerto Rico, Florida, Hawaii and the Virgin Islands.

Reuters reports that since the airbag issue first came to light in 2013, BMW, Mazda, Toyota, Honda and Nissan have recalled more than 7.6 million vehicles.

The most recent issues with Takata airbags began nearly two weeks ago when Toyota reissued the 2013 recall of more than 766,300 vehicles because the company may have received an incomplete list of potentially defective airbags from the car part manufacturer.

Just a day later, NHTSA announced an investigation [PDF] into whether Takata airbags made after 2002 were prone to failing after receiving six reports of airbag ruptures in Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Mazda and Chrysler vehicles. Regulators are also looking to determine if high-humidity climates contributed to the reported airbag explosions.

In a letter [PDF] to NHTSA on June 11, officials with Takata detail the company’s dealing with regulators and say both the supplier and car manufacturers are not admitting to any “safety defect” just yet.

During a June 5, 2014 conference call, you and other ODI officials requested that Takata support field actions by vehicle manufacturers to replace potentially suspect inflators in vehicles originally sold in or currently registered in Florida and Puerto Rico, and other states with similarly high

levels of absolute humidity. ODI proposed that the selection of the inflators to be replaced in these field actions should be based on the dates of the six incidents (separately for driver-side inflators and passenger-side inflators), with a “buffer” period of twelve months before and after those dates to maximize confidence that any potentially problematic inflators would be included.

These requested field actions would be analogous to “regional recalls.” However, at the meeting, Takata stated, and you agreed, that since the currently available information does not

indicate that any Takata inflators- other than those in vehicles that were previously recalled- contain a safety defect, neither Takata nor the vehicle manufacturers conducting these field actions would be expected to admit that its products contain such a defect.

Honda, others recall another 2.9 mln vehicles over air bag flaw [Reuters]

Honda, Nissan and Mazda Join Recall Over Faulty Air Bags [The New York Times]

by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist

Delta Wants To Trademark “World’s Most Trusted Airline,” But Probably Shouldn’t

(Erin Turowski)

Do you trust Delta Air Lines? It won’t really matter if the carrier succeeds in convincing the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to approve Delta’s application for a trademark on that term.

The airline has had catchy slogans, like “We love to fly, and it shows,” and “You’ll love the way you fly,” along with the less successful, more recent “Keep climbing,” but it really wants to cement its self-proclaimed position as “The world’s most trusted airline,” with trademark application filed earlier this month.

As L.A. Times travel writer Hugo Martin points out, the goal of the trademark is just to keep others from using the same slogan, though we think that any airline putting that in their advertising is just asking for it to come back and kick the carrier in the butt every time there’s a bad story…

Like “We trust Delta to know that there are no giraffes in Ghana,” or “Trust Delta to have planes with easily lost wing panels,” or “Delta, the world’s most-trusted airline… for college basketball players, who are obviously more important than paying travelers who booked travel months in advance.“

And is Delta actually that trusted?

First off, it’s not that impressive to call yourself the “most impressive” in an industry that has dwindled to only a handful of competitors in the last decade. It’s like me saying I’m the most handsome man living in my house… at this very moment.

But a look at various airline ratings finds Delta is about on average with what little competition it has.

A recent survey of Consumer Reports readers put Delta above other legacy carriers, but below other national airlines like Southwest and JetBlue.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index had the same results, with Delta coming in a distant third behind those two airlines.

Likewise, JD Power scores have Delta the second-highest among the “traditional” carriers, but its score is significantly lower than the aforementioned JetBlue and Southwest, and worse than almost all “low-cost” airlines.

And as for the “World’s” portion of the most-trusted trademark, the folks at SkyTrax give Delta a middling 3-star rating, which puts it far from the top of the list when factoring in the dozens of airlines from around the world with ratings of four and five stars.

So maybe the Delta application should be revised to state, “It’s an airline that will probably get you to your destination; no promises about your luggage though.”

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Walgreens Ejects Customer With Service Dog: Were They Justified?

Over the weekend, a news story out of Texas about a man asked to leave a Walgreens store because of his service dog spread across the Internet. The important question is, should we be filled with righteous fury at the store, or at the dog-toting shopper? While asking the pair to leave could have been handled more graciously, the important question is whether the dog is a service animal at all.

The customer is a Marine veteran, who says that his dog is therapeutic. Providing comfort and companionship isn’t the same as being a service dog, though: a dog can be your best buddy and provide emotional support, but that doesn’t matter if it lacks training to perform a specific function other than just being a dog, such as alerting people to its owner’s seizures.

There is no national registry of service dogs, and another wrinkle is that the Veterans Administration isn’t currently using service dogs as a form of treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder: if it did, it would provide the dogs and training, as well as veterinary care for the dogs. Some nonprofits are filling in the gap, providing specially-trained pups or training for the dogs that veterans might already have or acquire from a shelter.

PTSD service dogs do exist: they are trained to distract their owners when a stress reaction occurs or is imminent. Slapping an orange vest on your BFF and calling him a service dog doesn’t automatically make him one.

The federal government has a very specific definition of a service dog:

Service animals are defined as dogs that are individually trained to do work or perform tasks for people with disabilities. Examples of such work or tasks include guiding people who are blind, alerting people who are deaf, pulling a wheelchair, alerting and protecting a person who is having a seizure, reminding a person with mental illness to take prescribed medications, calming a person with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) during an anxiety attack, or performing other duties. Service animals are working animals, not pets. The work or task a dog has been trained to provide must be directly related to the person’s disability. Dogs whose sole function is to provide comfort or emotional support do not qualify as service animals under the ADA.

An attorney explained to Fox 4 in Dallas-Fort Worth that there are two questions it’s okay for businesses to ask someone with a purported service dog in their establishments: “Is that a service dog?” and “What is it trained to do?” A demonstration isn’t required, since that would be dangerous for dogs trained to detect seizures or low blood sugar.

Vet says he was asked to leave Walgreens because of service dog [Fox 4]

COMMONLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT SERVICE ANIMALS IN PLACES OF BUSINESS [USDOJ]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

Starbucks Expands Made-To-Order Sodas To Southern United States

(Michael Sauers)

Does waiting in line at Starbucks seem never-ending? Well, it might be getting worse now that the coffee shop is expanding its made-to-order soda options – essentially giving indecisive customers hundreds more choices to make.

Starbucks announced Monday the expansion of made-to-order Fizzio sodas to 16 new states, Bloomberg Businessweek reports.

Consumers in Los Angeles, San Diego, Stockton and Modesto areas of California, as well as in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Hawaii can get their hands on the drinks.

The root beer, ginger ale and lemon ale sodas were first tested last year in Atlanta, Austin and Japan. Over time chains will add location-specific flavors. If you’re not interested in soda but want a little carbonation, customers can add fizz to any beverage for an additional 50¢.

A spokeswoman for the company said the soda options should be expanding to the rest of the United States over the next year. The expansion of the drink offerings is just one way Starbucks is focusing on increasing their lunch-time sales. Earlier this year, the company added two sandwiches and a plethora of tea options.

Starbucks Brings Made-to-Order Soda to 16 States [Bloomberg Businessweek]

by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist

Truck Spills Huge Load Of Instant Mashed Potatoes On Highway, Gravy Truck Sadly Absent

(North Yorkshire Police)

It could’ve been worse. It could have been a truck carrying a huge load of your grandmother’s signature, made-from-scratch, super special mashed potatoes. But still, we should pour one out in remembrance of the load of instant mashed potatoes that the world lost during a recent truck accident.

No one was injured in an accident with a truck carrying its load of liquid instant potatoes in England over the weekend, though the resulting spillage did cause unsafe driving conditions, reports The York Press (h/t to Gawker).

“Instant mash is covering the road and cars have skidded as a result of the mash swelling up,” a North Yorkshire police spokesperson said.

A witness said it looked like the truck was one made for corn or wheat, but it had perhapss been converted to carry a thick liquid.

“It just came over the blind crest of the road and had to hit the brakes as we were all stopped as there was a tractor on the road about a mile in front going very slowly,” he explained, adding “When he braked hard the mash went forward and over the front of the trailer on to the tractor unit.”

Police closed the road in both directions, and the local fire and rescue service was called in to eat — err, help clean the road of the mess. Eventually, crews used freezing chemicals on the mash that remained and high-powered hoses to help clear it, after about four hours of backups on the road.

Now is the time to remind all of your grandmothers/grandfathers/talented in-laws who can’t make anything else that well not to ship massive quantities of mashed potatoes in trucks that aren’t meant for it. Because if the loss of instant mashed potatoes is causing this feeling in my heart, I don’t know what would happen if homemade potatoes were involved.

Instant mash spill blocks A64 [The York Press]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist