As IF Times

Source: Jury selection begins in Erin Andrews $75 million lawsuit against Marriott | syracuse.com

Although stupid lawsuits are as common as insults during a Trump family dinner, when it’s worth 75 million dollars and involves an attractive female ‘personality’ it’s still news. The defendants in this peeping Tom case are not only the perp, but also the Marriott hotel chain which supposedly aided and abetted the creep in allowing him to film Erin in the expected privacy of her room.

You won’t find anyone taking the side of the creep who should get whatever punishment he deserves based on existing laws.  Without the benefit of a procedural legal system, the best solution would be for Erin’s brothers or friends to take this guy out in the back alley and sh0w him some manners.  No lawyers, no judges and possibly no repeat crime.

But the Marriot company is also drawn into this as a co-defendant and likely the only party that will have to pony up $75 million in the case of a court loss.  This is preposterous. It creates a wildly asymmetric cost/benefit profile for the hotel.  Imagine that for the price of a 200 or 300 or even a 500 dollar room, the hotel is expected to provide complete and absolute security for the entire duration of the customer’s stay.  It implies that the customer can never be harmed by virtue  of putting down a few hundred bucks per night.  If that were the case, the FBI witness protection program may as well contract out to hotels.

If in fact there is the expectation that absolute privacy and safety must be ensured by the hotel, a few hundred bucks per night isn’t going to pay the cost of such security.  They may have to reassess their business model and add a few digits to all room rates in order to prepare for the lawsuit contingency. You may need mortgage brokers in the lobbies of these places. Only in the west and the U.S. in particular,  are people so delusional that they think their ‘hurts’ have a legal price tag attached to them.  Every visit to a business including hotels,  grocery stores, yoga studio, movie theaters or fast food outlets which  results in real or imagined harm would have the potential to be  lotto ticket winners.

In Erin Andrew’s case, we wonder how they arrived at the $75 million dollar damages number.  If the point was to teach Marriot a lesson, why not claim $200 million and really teach them a lesson?  I suspect that the hotel can argue that sexism is at play here, because if it were Terry Bradshaw being the victim, he’d be lucky to be offered a room upgrade on his next visit.

Source: Global stock markets fall amid oil rout – BBC News

It’s unlikely anyone is spreading this misinformation on purpose; more likely it’s misinformed people grasping at explanations.  We don’t need to resort to scholarly explanations, the simple math goes like this;  when the cost of essential living instruments decline, that’s a good thing.  Fuel, food and shelter constitute the basic costs for most people’s survival.  Internet connectivity is not, nor is coffee, sports tickets or shoes.

When ‘analysts’ all agree in concert and point to the decline of a fundamental product like crude oil as being the cause of a stock market meltdown, it begs credibility.  Recall that years ago, when oil prices moved from $20 dollars a barrel to over $120, forecasts were common that havoc would ensue for all of the world’s economies.  Somehow, economies adjusted.  Things got more expensive, but they adjusted.

As the price of crude tumbles, there’s no question that oil related concerns will suffer, but the benefits to the larger economy far outshadows the grief in that sector.  The cost of everything from air travel, trucking of goods, vacations, heating and manufacturing, declines!  The losers; exporters of oil, including the Saudis and Canadians.

So, linking the stock markets’ declines to the collapse in crude is a spurious correlation. It is far more likely that the cause of the markets’ swoon is better explained by Occam’s Razor.  This is the principle in physics which posits that given different explanations for an event, the simplest one is probably the best.  Quite simply, prices were too high in the stock market and not sustainable.   But that’s too elegantly simple for people who make money giving iffy explanations of things post facto.  Let’s hope food and shelter prices don’t crater by 80%, it would certainly mean Armageddon.