Folly of the DayHe Argued a High Court Execution Case From a Moving Car. The Bench Fined Him a Lakh and Told Him the Convenience Was Not the Point.
"The convenience offered by virtual hearings cannot come at the cost of the decorum of the Court" is the ruling; the diagnosis is older than video conferencing. A technology that removes a cost always finds a man who concludes the cost was the only thing that had been asked of him — that the robes, the silence and the standing up were decoration rather than discipline, and that a profession is a set of inconveniences one may now decline. He did not forget where he was. He decided it no longer mattered where he was, which is a different and more expensive error.
Source: LiveLaw
The WireA Man Ran a 260km Ultramarathon Through the Amazon on Nothing But the Meal Replacement, the Advert Said. The Regulator Noticed a Serving Is 400 Calories.
A company sells a powder on the premise that food is an inefficiency, then expresses astonishment that its customers took the premise seriously. The anecdote was offered as an anomaly and landed as an advertisement, which is what happens when a brand builds its entire identity on contempt for the thing it replaces and then asks for moderation.
Source: Advertising Standards Authority
The WireThe Plug Does Not Switch Anything Off, Limit Anything, or Control Anything. It Was Sold as the Outlet Play Power Augmenter.
The confidence is in the name. A thing that does nothing has been called an augmenter, which is the whole of modern commerce in four syllables, and when the regulator wrote to ask what it augmented the company declined to reply — the only honest act in the file.
Source: Advertising Standards Authority
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He Had Been Paid On Time Once in Seven Months. He Complained on the Thursday and Was Put on a Performance Plan on the Friday.
The employer could not manage the single task on which the entire relationship rests — paying the man — and responded to being told so by producing a document about his shortcomings. A performance improvement plan drafted overnight is not an assessment; it is a confession with a letterhead, and the adjudicator read it as one.
Source: The Irish Times
The WireOne Man Filed Around Twenty Thousand Right-to-Information Applications in Seven Years. The Commission Blacklisted Him. The High Court Censured Everybody.
A statute written to let a citizen ask the state a question has produced a man who asks it twenty thousand of them, and an information commission whose remedy for too much information is to stop answering. Both parties believe themselves the injured one. Transparency, like every other virtue, eventually attracts the kind of person who will perform it until it breaks.
Source: LiveLaw
The WireHe Drove an Arcade Machine, a Fridge-Freezer and a Gaming Chair Up a Mountain Road Rather Than to the Tip.
Consider the labour actually expended: an arcade machine does not load itself, and a mountain road is further from a man's house than a household waste site is. He did not take the easy option. He took the harder one because it was the one in which nobody was watching, which is the only definition of character anybody has ever needed.
Source: Swansea Bay News
The WireThe Lorry Was Caught by Number-Plate Cameras on Public Roads 467 Times in 58 Days. The Transport Manager Said It Had Only Been Moved for Its MOT.
Four hundred and sixty-seven sightings is not a loophole, an oversight or a grey area; it is a photographic record assembled by the state and handed to the man who had to explain it. He explained it anyway. The remarkable thing about a barefaced lie is never the lie — it is the settled belief that the person listening has not read the file.
Source: Motor Transport
The WireNew Zealand's Councils Spent $12.3 Million of Ratepayers' Money Last Year on Subscriptions to Organisations That Lobby on Behalf of Councils.
The ratepayer funds the council, the council funds the body that argues the council should have more money, and the argument is then made to the ratepayer. It is a closed circuit with a toll booth on it, and everybody inside it can explain at length why it is not one.
Source: New Zealand Taxpayers' Union
Black-Robed EgomaniaHe Changed His Instagram Handle to 'judge.markspears' and Used It to Advertise His Law Firm and His Sports Agency. He Had Already Been Warned in 2022.
The handle is the whole case. He did not use the office to help the businesses by accident; he renamed himself after the office because the office was the most saleable thing he had, and then spent four years explaining to the body that gave it to him why he should be allowed to keep selling it.
Source: The Advocate
LazyTownIt Had $4.8 Billion to Spend on Flood Defences. For a Full Year It Awarded Nothing at All.
The programme exists to spend money now so that less money is spent later. Doing nothing for twelve months has achieved the precise inverse, at no effort whatsoever, and nobody involved will ever be able to point at the thing they failed to do.
Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office
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