Infinite Monkey Theorems 20100427

Calendar April 27, 2010 | Posted by Michael S. Langston

The 9th Circuit strikes again…. via LA Times (here):

SAN FRANCISCO — A sharply divided federal appeals court in California on Monday exposed Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to billions of dollars in legal damages when it ruled a massive class action lawsuit alleging gender discrimination over pay for female workers can go to trial….

Now I don’t claim to be a lawyer and haven’t even played one on tv, but part of the dissent seems obvious to me:

…Judge Sandra Ikuta wrote a blistering dissent, joined by four of her colleagues.

“No court has ever certified a class like this one, until now. And with good reason,” Ikuta wrote. “In this case, six women who have worked in thirteen of Wal-Mart’s 3,400 stores seek to represent every woman who has worked in those stores over the course of the last decade — a class estimated in 2001 to include more than 1.5 million women.”…

Maybe they like being overturned (here from 2007)?

…The 9th Circuit also has a long-running streak as the most overturned, which went unbroken this year. The Supreme Court reviewed 22 cases from the 9th Circuit last term, and it reversed or vacated 19 times….

Via WSJ, The Big Brown Union Bailout

If you can’t beat ‘em, have Congress hobble ‘em. That’s the motto of some in corporate America, and Exhibit A might be United Parcel Service’s campaign to get Washington to impose its labor woes on rival Federal Express. This would be one more union bailout at the expense of business competition and economic efficiency….

This is a continuation of this administration’s policies to pay off unions at the expense of others (DA posts here).

Via Reason.com, GM’s Phony Bailout Payback

Uncle Sam gave GM $49.5 billion last summer in aid to finance its bankruptcy….  So when Whitacre publishes a column with the headline, “The GM Bailout: Paid Back in Full,” most ordinary mortals unfamiliar with bailout minutia would assume that he is alluding to the entire $49.5 billion. That, however, is far from the case….

I say if you want to buy American, buy Ford – no bailout money and still going strong.

& cool science news via e!Science (here):

…In a study published as an Advance Online Publication in the journal Nature Nanotechnology on Sunday, physicists at Ohio University and the University of Hamburg in Germany present the first images of spin in action….

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