"I have been but little in," said Ninian hastily...

This is the sort of thing that makes average Americans loathe and detest lawyers.

I got a notice that I'm included in a class action settlement against Ticketmaster. The action sought to penalize them for their unreasonable fees. Well, not that the fees were unreasonable, but that they described them as fees, thus suggesting that the expense only covered the cost of handling, instead of acknowledging that the fees also included a hefty profit for Ticketmaster.

Well, of course they did. Did anyone seriously think that these were just fees? What people hate about Ticketmaster is that they have managed to get a monopoly of online ticket sales; having done that, of course they are going to charge exorbitant rates--over and above the cost of the ticket itself, to sell it to you online. But the courts' solution is not to break up the anticompetitive monopoly; it's to penalize the company for a purported deception that deceived no one.

And what's the redress? The attorneys for the class earn $15 million and an additional $1.5 million in costs. The two representatives of the class (two guys who happened to be the first to sue TM) get $20,000 each. The rest of us? Get codes that will discount future purchases from Ticketmaster by the grand sum of $1.50, as many as we have made purchases during the period covered by the action (so if we made three purchases from Ticketmaster, we get three coupons). That doesn't even cover the cost of the fees we were charged originally. And it requires that we make future purchases through Ticketbastard. And we can't use more than two codes at once (IOW, we can;'t discount a purchase by more than $3). And we are prohibited from using them for a substantial number of TM's concerts.

So Ticketmaster is not seriously harmed (they are paying out maybe $45 million, tops? this from a company with an annual revenue of over $4 billion) and are required to change their business practices in no way that substantially changes the outcome for the rest of us (all they have to do is add a statement that their "fees" include profit for them; well, of course!) One or two law firms make lots of money. And the rest of us get a derisory amount of money, but only if we spend it by purchasing services FROM THE COMPANY THAT SCREWED US TO BEGIN WITH.

Do Democrats wonder why their alliance with the trial lawyers industry makes them unpopular? Really?

We're having problems with one of our team at work who just isn't managing to keep up with their work. Being a semi-manager now, this is partly my responsibility. I and our PM (program manager) sat down withthe person yesterday and laid down the law: here's a plan for helping you do your work better, and we will help you to do so where we can, but if you can't show some improvement within the next 30 days, we will have to Take Steps.

So, today 4 more errors the person has committed showed up. The PM and I discussed it, and I rolled up my sleeves and tried to explain to the miscreant what they had done wrong and how they needed to fix it. They started insisting that they hadn't done *anything* wrong, that it was all a mistake, and I was tempted to say "To commit one such error may be regarded as a misfortune, but to commit nearly half a dozen looks like carelessness." Since I was fairly sure the reference would go flying high in the aether, I didn't bother, but proceeded to produce a detailed page of description of how and in what manner they had made the mistakes in question and exactly how I had had to spend four hours of my day tracking down the mistakes and figuring out how to fix them, so would they please correct them now? I also felt like saying "continuing to argue further about this will be mistake #6", but I thought I would just leave that for the moment.