Hiltzik

As of this writing, the measles outbreak in Florida is up to nine cases, including the first one recorded outside the epicenter in Broward County, in the vicinity of Fort Lauderdale.Nine cases may not seem like a lot, but it’s enough to alarm epidemiologists. They point out that measles is among the most contagious viruses known to humankind, which means that the cases identified thus far are likely to be the tip of the iceberg.Who’s unconcerned? The chief public health official of the state of Florida, that’s who.…

It’s indisputable that the decline of state fiscal management in California began with the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978. The tax-cutting initiative upended the tax structure that provided most of the revenues needed by localities and school districts, undermining the locals’ control of their own spending. It was sold to voters as relief for beleaguered middle-class homeowners, but that was largely a scam: The chief beneficiaries have been the richest homeowners and commercial and industrial property owners, who have…

There was a time, I must admit, when the hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman was one of my Wall Street heroes. It started in December 2012. Ackman had decided to take a short position in the shares of the multilevel marketing firm Herbalife. Ackman justified his bet with a heroic 334-deck Power Point presentation laying out all the features of the Los Angeles company that he said made it indistinguishable from a scam: It marketed its nutritional supplements as unique products when they were actually commodity supplements…

It might be unusual to find Mickey Mouse and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” mentioned in the same breath. But you can chalk up their momentary fellowship to America’s copyright laws, under which both are entering the public domain on Jan. 1.That’s because both Mickey and Mellors, the Chatterley estate gamekeeper, made their first published appearance in 1928. The applicable law afforded them copyright protection for 95 years, a term expiring with the arrival of 2024. Thousands of other works — literary, dramatic and musical —…

If you’re making a list of big news stories of 2023, here’s one you might want to check twice: The surge in “organized retail crime,” or gang shoplifting.I’ve written before about the news media’s fixation on this phenomenon despite the unreliability of retailers’ claims about it, and especially when compared with the much more prevalent crime of employer wage theft, which gets almost no coverage. But there’s been a recent development on the topic, which demands your attention. Put simply, the retail lobby has admitted…

Strike 3 Holdings is a Southern California maker of pornographic films that identifies its products as “high-end, artistic, and performer-inspiring motion pictures produced with a Hollywood style budget and quality.” It has bragged that Greg Lansky, a former owner and the firm’s leading auteur, has been called the porn industry’s “answer to Steven Spielberg.”There’s more to Strike 3, however. Here’s how U.S. Judge Royce C. Lamberth of Washington, D.C., described the firm:“Strike 3 is ... a copyright troll,” Lamberth…

Myths and canards about Social Security and its supposed fiscal troubles have steadily proliferated over the years. But it’s rare to find them all concentrated in one place as they were in a recent article on the online news site Slate.Slate paired Eric Boehm, a writer for the conservative magazine Reason, with a writer named Celeste Headlee for a dialogue titled “Social Security Doesn’t Make Sense Anymore.” The roughly 2,000-word piece contained so many misconceptions, inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and flat-out lies…

The question of how you solve a problem like Elon Musk has crossed the line from an amusing little parlor game to an issue with serious implications for anyone doing business with him, including major corporations and the U.S. government.Little that Musk says or does escapes popular notice, but a tweet he posted Wednesday on X, the platform he owns which was formerly known as Twitter, is in a category all his own. Musk replied to a user’s antisemitic tweet accusing “Jewish communties” of “pushing the exact kind of…

Opening Tuesday’s House subcommittee hearing on the origin of the COVID virus, the panel’s chairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), promised an impartial inquiry. “This is not an attack on science,” he said. “And it’s not an attack on an individual.”He and his GOP colleagues proceeded over nearly three hours to accuse Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — one of the most respected such scientists in the world — of having masterminded the creation of the virus,…

Everyone loves a good heist yarn, so I suppose we should be grateful to Major League Baseball and a Northern California billionaire for providing us with one.It’s the saga in which the Oakland A’s ballclub and its owner, an heir to the Gap fortune, are plotting to abandon the club’s home city and move to Las Vegas, enticed by more than $380 million in municipal subsidies for a $1.5-billion stadium and permanent immunity from property taxes. The move still requires approval by the owners of at least 23 of the league’s 30…