It is absolutely gorgeous outside. Just stunning, really. It’s the kind of weather which actually makes you happy that most places require you to smoke outdoors; you can appreciate nature in all her beauty while also enjoying the bracing slap of hot smoke upon your lungs. It is indeed a marvelous day on which to be alive. I suggest you drop what you’re doing immediately and go stand in the sun for a bit, because it’s not going to last. While we’re talking about the outdoors and the appreciation thereof, I have some disturbing news for those of you with allergies.

Take it away, Anahad O’Connor:

Studies have found that alcohol can cause or worsen the common symptoms of asthma and hay fever, like sneezing, itching, headaches and coughing…. Beer, wine and liquor contain histamine, produced by yeast and bacteria during the fermentation process. Histamine, of course, is the chemical that sets off allergy symptoms. Wine and beer also contain sulfites, another group of compounds known to provoke asthma and other allergy-like symptoms.

This is indeed troubling, as I am both an allergy sufferer and someone who every now and then likes to take a drink. As my fellow Claritin addicts can attest, this has been a particularly rough season, and I am concerned that my occasional indulgence might be making it worse. O’Connor suggests avoiding alcohol altogether, but that seems like the worst sort of reckless hysteria. Seeing as wine is identified as the worst offender, my solution is to stick to the brown liquors (taken neat, lest the water somehow activate the small amounts of histamine within) and double up on my loratadine intake. Seems like a pretty foolproof plan, right? The more you etc.

WILL BARACK OBAMA RETURN $551,683 IN NATIONAL AMUSEMENTS INC. CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS?

And! WILL BARACK OBAMA RETURN $551,683 IN NATIONAL AMUSEMENTS INC. CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS? Those swindling pornographers from Massachusetts, owned by legendary grifter Sumner Redstone, provide Americans with 3D porno and make America fat at the same time with their absurd movie theaters! What’s more, National Amusements Inc. owns controlling interest in Viacom, which includes MTV, which includes JERSEY SHORE. When will Barack Obama stop doing Snooki’s bidding in our WHITE House?

A Colorado man who was picking up an iPad as a present for a co-worker was rewarded for his errand-running with a mugging that left him minus a finger. After leaving the Apple Store at his local mall with the bag tied around his fingers, Bill Jordan — who noted to his local CBS affiliate that he’d moved his family to the Rockies in order to get away from the wilds of New Jersey — was accosted in the parking lot. And then: “He was almost sitting on the ground he was pulling so hard and [the bag] was still tied around my fingers; and it wouldn’t come off and then finally he gave it one big jerk; and that’s when he stripped the skin off my pinky and it went right down to the bone.” The 59-year-old’s finger had to be amputated.

Crush videos-films in which attractive women smush small animals under their heels-are once again legal after the Supreme Court struck down a law preventing the depiction of animal cruelty. (Animal cruelty itself is still illegal in many places.) The Court, in a 8–1 decision, found the law to be an overly broad restriction that violates the First Amendment.

1. This morning, Goldman Sachs held its quarterly earnings call and all the questions were about the SEC investigation. “You go to trial — which is what we’re doing — but you always have the option of settling,” is what Goldman said. In fact, they brought up settling so frequently that everyone’s pretty sure they’ll settle up and this’ll go away. And they’ll be using a lawyer with a great brand.

2. Their executive compensation percentage of income for the 1st quarter was the lowest ever. Their 1st quarter income was an impressive $3.3 billion (revenues were $12.78 billion).

3. Meanwhile, the Times, while still going whole-hog front page on the investigation, has developed an opinion! “The Securities and Exchange Commission has taken on a risky case as it tries to re-establish its credibility as an enforcer,” for one thing. Oh, it’s a risky case now? Yet one that gets A1 coverage for days on end, I suppose! (Though it is also true that we have no idea what the SEC knows; we have seen but a tiny bit of what they have gathered from a deep sift of company emails and the like.) Interestingly, the Times refers to Goldman’s “sterling reputation”-a very different characterization of the firm coming from them!

4. Elsewhere, Felix Salmon characterizes the SEC as “a comatose beast run by supine Republicans”-one now desperate to take some action in light of America’s anti-bank rage.

5. In London, pretty much every party is up in arms about Goldman’s status as an adviser on debt issuance-and their SEC, the FSA, is “investigating” something or other.

5.5 There’s an undercurrent in all these conversations, sort of led by Goldman’s conference call, that what people who work in markets do is not “betting.” The popular convention to explain the SEC lawsuit is to say “Well Goldman was selling things that they were also betting against.” And Goldman’s point is that they don’t “bet,” which sounds like splitting hairs but is actually not a terrible point about how transactions are constructed. (They are constructed with “math.”) For those who’d like to hear Goldman’s defense, their response documents are here.

6. Speaking of “betting,” here is a rather excellent explanatory self-conversation here about Goldman, the SEC, Magnetar and branding. If you look at much of the writing about and even the investigations of banks as being about branding and brand management, things make more sense. Much of the risk to Goldman with the SEC investigation is “reputational,” not financial, although they are tied. And in many ways, this is a struggle of brands: “The same way the Obamas and the Kardashians and Apple are all brands, Goldman Sachs is a brand…. Then writer Matt Taibbi — who is employed by Jann Wenner, one of the decade’s wealthiest profiteers of the side game of keeping the public doped up on celebrity ephemera — found himself charged with the unenviable task of explaining the financial crisis to people who would rather be reading about Lady Gaga, and did the only thing he could in such a position: He eviscerated the Goldman Sachs brand…. The SEC has a terrible brand. If Toyota’s braking system department had its own brand, the SEC’s would still look worse.”

The FDA, following in Mike Bloomberg’s footsteps, is making plans to force food manufacturers to gradually reduce the amount of salt in their offerings. Salt content went unnoticed until now because it was “generally recognized as safe,” but that was back before the average American was eating 3,500 milligrams of it a day. (That’s the equivalent of 1.25 Triple Baconators. Which seems a little low!)

You’re Wasting Your Money On Subscription Personal-Ad Sites, Says Guy Who Just Happens To Work For Free Personal-Ad Site

The stats-obsessed romantics who break down the calculus of love at OkCupid are claiming that anyone who’s looking for love on its competitors — Match and eHarmony, specifically — is wasting their money and their time (which is money, you know!) by hunting around for potential partners there. All this through the power of math!

OkCupid editorial director Christian Rudder’s charts and graphs are out to prove that the subscription numbers put forth by Match and eHarmony actually do lie — that the dead profiles on both sites outnumber the active ones by a country mile, which not only makes the “millions and millions matched” claims suspect, it multiplies the chance for futility all around. (The sanctity of marketing materials, questioned? Be still my heart!) But one thing that’s interesting about his argument is his hypothesis that all these dead profiles are even dragging down the quality of initial pickup lines. It’s a bit heterosexist in that it assumes a man makes first contact with a woman, but we are talking about the Internet here. So!

A man can expect a reply to 1 in every 100 messages he sends to a random profile on a pay site. The sites of course don’t show you completely random profiles, but as we’ve seen they have an incentive to show you nonsubscribers. Even if they do heavy filtering and just 2 of 3 profiles they show you are ghosts, you’re still looking at a paltry 10% reply rate….

Basically, because the likelihood of reply to each message starts so low, the average man is driven to expand his search to women he’s less suited for and to put less thought (and emotional investment) into each message. Therefore, each new batch of messages he sends brings fewer replies. So he expands his criteria, cuts, pastes, and resends.

And that is the calculus behind those messages women get that just say things like “nice pic you look good” or “hey u look cute wanna hang??” (One commenter on the post suggested that this futility would best be broken only when these frustrated men decided to “grow a pair shut off the computer and talk to women in the real world and forget this ‘online dating’ nonsense.”)

Now, one might think that the closing line of this flowchart-studded, statistics-laden blog post — “Then you should go sign up for OkCupid.” — would seem to undercut any sense of objectivity behind its conclusions. The equivalent of, say, the Corn Refiners Association analyzing high fructose corn syrup’s relative healthiness to sugar. Which is true! And honestly, free sites are just as bad when it comes to dormant profiles and flooding-the-zone messages, and possibly worse; at least the $19.95-$59.95 (yow) paid per month to the likes of Match and eHarmony is something of a motivator to actually use them.

At the very least, this study accomplished one thing: It put into hard numbers the feelings of dread and overall yuckiness that crops up in some people when they try to navigate their way through various online singles bars of the free and paid varieties. Now when a “helpful” friend suggests you try out online dating, you can just fling a bunch of statistics back in their face instead of hemming and hawing!

[Via]

Do I even need to set this one up? There’s more information here, but, come on, SHEEP PIG!

The folks at Apple Action News (see earlier entries) have turned their attention to the recent White Sox bathroom sex hijinks story, with rather remarkable results. As the sharp-eyed correspondent who spotted it points out:

1) the feet are NOT pointing up, as clearly stated; this answers none of our questions.
2) i think there is a person holding a boom mike up over the stall door, which is my favorite part of the whole video
3) those girls are straight out of a dove “real women” ad

The organist in the restroom is a nice touch as well. Also, good morning!

Tonight Gizmodo semi-explained how they came by the next-generation iPhone: an apparently drunk developer left it in a bar in California. On March 18. Which then somehow wended its way to Gizmodo-to be posted about a month later. (We presume some of that time involved the Gawker Media legal department doing their job.) Gizmodo is currently being absolutely roasted in the comments for naming the drunk Apple employee. They do not confirm the amount paid to the “finder” of the iPhone in the post-but their boss confirmed our earlier-reported $5000 figure to the Times. And this is interesting! Title 18, US Code, Section 2314 and 2315: “Whoever transports, transmits, or transfers in interstate or foreign commerce any goods, wares, merchandise, securities or money, of the value of $5,000 or more… shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.” Isn’t it funny how the figure $5000 keeps cropping up? Some lawyers who are not your lawyers discuss it here; their opinion is that there is no practical (punitive) legal action for Apple to take, except to recover the phone-and neither is there any publicity-friendly legal action for Apple to take.