Folly of the DayBloomington Paid $95,000 for a Letter B. The 117-Page Manual Explaining It Promises 'High-Caliber Quirk' and Was 'Designed for Creative Collision'.
A town that must pay strangers ninety-five thousand dollars to find out what it is like has already answered the question. Note the direction of the transaction: six hundred residents were surveyed, which is to say the city gathered its own character from its own people and then paid Colorado to hand it back in a folder. 'High-caliber quirk' is what identity sounds like after it has passed through a billing department — the phrase is not describing Bloomington, it is describing the invoice.
Source: Indiana Public Media
The WireThe Secretary of Maharashtra's Own Department of Law and Judiciary Shouted at Two High Court Judges in Open Court. The Bench Called It 'Wholly Unpardonable' and Refused His Apology.
There is a particular species of official who has spent so long being the most senior person in every room that he has stopped checking which room he is in. The Department of Law and Judiciary is, definitionally, the arm of the state whose entire function is knowing how one addresses a court; its Secretary raised his voice at one and then blamed the court for the paperwork. The apology arrived through the Advocate General, which is to say through a man who could be trusted to say it properly.
Source: LiveLaw
The WireOrdered by a Tribunal to Hand Over the Documents in Thirty-Five Days, the Council Took Three Months. Among Its Reasons Was the Size of the Hearing Bundle It Had Itself Produced.
The 2,700 pages were not weather. The council generated them, by contesting a request it could have answered, and then offered their weight to the court as evidence that answering was hard. This is the closed loop at the heart of institutional excuse-making: the difficulty is produced by the resistance, and then the difficulty is produced as the reason for the resistance. A body that fought for two years to avoid a disclosure discovered, at the end, that fighting had been very time-consuming.
Source: Local Government Lawyer
The WireSix Councils That Declared Themselves Effectively Bankrupt Spent £207 Million on Consultants. One of Them Later Reported That £2.8 Million of Them Had Been 'Totally Unfit for Purpose'.
A section 114 notice is a council's formal admission that it cannot pay for what it has promised. The interesting fact is not that these six spent £207m on advice; it is that they went on spending it afterwards. Consultancy at this scale is not a search for an answer, it is the purchase of a co-signatory — somebody outside the building whose logo can appear on the decision you had already made and did not want to own. Slough at least discovered what it had bought, which puts it ahead of the other five.
Source: The Telegraph
The WireThe Advertisement Told Young Men They Would Stop Looking Unattractive. The Regulator Asked for the Evidence, and Found Rather More Wrong With It Than the Missing Evidence.
The self-improvement trade has arrived at the position of promising to fix an inadequacy it has just finished describing to you, and billing for both halves. What the ASA keeps documenting is not fraud so much as a business model: manufacture the deficiency, price the remedy, and hope nobody with a code of practice reads the caption. Somebody wrote those words believing that the only readers would be the ones who already agreed.
Source: Advertising Standards Authority
The WireThe Scrap Was Stacked Where the Public Walked. When It Came Down on a Father and His Son, the Bill Was £46,181.
Section 3 exists because the law long ago worked out that a business will secure what it fears losing and leave everything else where it falls. Metal stacked beyond its angle of repose does not require an inspector to identify the hazard; it requires a pair of eyes and thirty seconds of honesty about what gravity is for.
Source: HSE / The Workers Union
The WireThe Tribunal Asked How Many People Were Bringing It Cases Written by a Chatbot. The Answer Was Four in Ten, and Most of Them Were Using the Free Version.
The free tier is the detail that tells the story. These are not people who thought a machine might help; these are people who believed that the cheapest available imitation of a lawyer was, in their particular case, sufficient — because their case was so plainly right that it required only transcription. Confidence has always been the commonest substitute for preparation. What is new is that it now arrives formatted, with headings, and citations to judgments that were never handed down.
Source: ABC News (Australia)
Black-Robed EgomaniaShe Passed a Note to Her Own Clerk Telling Him to Dismiss a Neighbour's Traffic Ticket, Then Told Prosecutors From the Bench That the Vehicle Impound Was a 'God Damn Racket'.
'Leveraging judicial office for the benefit of friends leads to a dual system of justice,' the Commission's administrator said, 'one for the well-connected, and one for everyone else.' What the file actually shows is subtler and worse: a judge who had come to experience her own instincts as law. Every one of these acts is intelligible as kindness — help the tenant, help the driver, help the neighbour — and that is precisely the trouble, because a bench operated on sympathy is a bench operated on acquaintance, and the person who never gets any is the stranger who came in through the front door.
Source: amNewYork / NYS Commission on Judicial Conduct