Experian is getting hit with a class action on the novel theory that false advertising in a domain name is false advertising. My heart bleeds.

What he said.

Anyone tried it? I had VOIP with Packet8 and SunRocket in Cali, then had no choice but to revert to POTS in Virginia since neither cable nor DSL was available in the Land of Gooches at the time. I didn’t bother going back to VOIP upon moving to NC, as I got a pretty good deal on POTS, but $0 a month sounds like a better deal still. Any catch?

IKEA has an annoying habit of being too lazy to write instruction manuals for their furniture, relying instead on a bunch of cutesy drawings that are supposed to tell you what you need to do. Recently I purchased a bookshelf (Expedit) and learned this lesson the hard way. For future reference, this:

means “on the off chance you are not clairvoyant enough to figure out from these cryptic drawings everything you could possibly need to know, but are clairvoyant enough to recognize that there’s something you don’t get from the pictures, and are also clairvoyant enough to know Ikea’s phone number off the top of your head, but are too stupid to know that it’s Ikea you should be calling for assistance, here’s what to do.

Also note that this:

means “Don’t even think of putting this bookshelf in an upright position until it is fully assembled or the damned thing will collapse under its own weight.”

Betcha didn’t know that.

UPDATE: To their credit, they took it back without incident. Heading home now with a new one, and one more opportunity to find my same butt with my same two hands and the same flashlight, but a slightly more detailed butt-map.

FINAL UPDATE: The butt-map makes all the difference. Once I knew what should have been in the instruction manual but wasn’t, assembling the next one, and the rest of Mrs. X’s new set, was easy.

Apparently, many of those cool apps for the iPhone have more unlawful than lawful uses.

Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on title insurance, which some regard as a bit of a scam – enough so that one state, Iowa, prohibits it outright. OK, so maybe prohibit is the wrong word. Let’s just say they prohibit title insurance like most states that have lotteries prohibit gambling. Or given that their own title certificates are reinsured by the same eeeeeevil title insurers they forbid to issue policies in the state, maybe the better analogy would be to a hypothetical state that forbid gambling while maintaining a lottery and subcontracting that lottery out to Harrah’s. Something like that, I dunno.

The thing about title insurance is that it’s an odd bird that by all right really shouldn’t’ be called insurance. If I spent $20,000 on a new car, with $1,000 going to the manufacturing cost of the vehicle itself and the other $19,000 on its warranty, it might make sense to call my car an insurance policy, since after all, that’s where most of the price goes. But we don’t call cars insurance policies just because they carry warranties; we recognize that they are products that are primarily about doing something other than risk allocation. The element of the warranty is merely ancillary to that. Ditto for title insurance, where upwards of 80%, often more like 90%, is retained by the agent as commission that the insurer never sees. That’s because far more blood, sweat and tears is spent scouring public records for potential title defects, fixing such defects, etc. than in insuring against the relatively remote risk that the abstracter missed something. So calling the composite product “insurance” is a bit like calling a dog a tail.

That said, if you do think you’re paying too much for title insurance – the insurance part, not the abstracting – then it would seem that the most obvious solution would be to abolish the monoline laws in many states^* that forbid title insurers to write other lines of insurance and vice-versa. If every property and casualty insurer could compete with your title insurer, the market wouldn’t be so damned concentrated, and the famous invisible hand would drive prices down, no?

Full disclosure: When I lived in Virginia I worked for what at the time was the fourth largest title insurer in the country. There’s no love lost between me and that particular title insurer, however, and I can’t say I shed a tear when they declared bankruptcy last year. Schadenfreude ist die schönste Freude.

^*With ramifications for all states, since several of those monoline laws cover insurance written in other states, as well.

I’m long over my one-man boycott against Wal-Mart for doing the equivalent of handing someone a 12 caviar specimens for requesting a dozen eggs, but apparently, the gunnies are not done taking me to task for the same. What is it about gun owners that cause them to accept and even vigorously defend a craptastically low level of customer service no consumer would tolerate for anything else?

Last fall I bitched about Wal-Mart’s policy of refusing to accept returns on firearm or ammo purchase, even when they were the ones who screwed up, and the customer’s sole error was in trusting a Wal-Mart employee to know WTF he is doing. The official policy is that you can’t return ammo. Apparently, that’s not quite true. I’d like to say I don’t condone what this guy did, and that the right thing to do in such cases is to expose a bad policy publicly rather than to take the law into your own hands, but then again, I took a lot more grief from Wal-Mart apologists for bitching about the policy than this guy will likely get for … well … returning his ammo contrary to store policy.

Via Instapundit, here’s an invention that came two years too late for Sr. Xrlq, who was paralyzed in a low-speed bicycling accident in early ‘07 while wearing the old fashioned kind. If you ride, it’s not too late for you.

Via Instapundit, the New York Times has an article on the the high cost of a “free credit report” from FreeCreditReport.conm. This site is not to be confused with AnnualCreditReport.com, the one site where you really can get a free credit report. Except that it is to be confused with that site. That’s the whole point of calling the not-so-free site “FreeCreditReport.com.”

Now, I’m sure some of you armchair lawyers (and maybe even one or two real ones) will come back and say “But Xrlq, the statement is true, at least technically. You can get a free credit report from FreeCreditReport.con … er, I mean, com. All you have to do is sign up for a worthless service no one in his right mind would want, wait until your ‘free’ credit report arrives, and then call an AOL-esque ‘you don’t really want to cancel this valuable service, do you?’ maze to finally cancel the worthless service you never wanted in the first place, all to obtain a credit report you really could have gotten free from the site they hoped you’d confuse them with.” To which I say hogwash. Having to go through the trouble of canceling a service you never wanted in the first place is a cost, and correspondingly, a huge value to Experian for running the scam. That’s why they do it. The whole point of FreeCreditReport.con is to give away credit reports that are not free, while trusting that a significant portion of their victims will end up shelling out real dollars in the end. In other words, for those of us dinosaurs old enough to remember Joe Isuzu, the entire business model of FreeCreditReport.con is Joe Isuzu, minus the funny. [OK, maybe you think a Yugo, a pirate suit and a series of annoying songs are "funny," but that's beside the point. There's nothing humorous about calling a service "free" when it isn't, especially when done to con people out of using the site where they really could get that same service for free.]

Ah, you say, but the fact that you have to sign up for this not-free service is buried in the mice-print somewhere, so at worst, that makes the ad merely misleading and not, strictly speaking, false. Surely there’s no law against that, right? Wrong. 15 U.S.C. 55(a) defines a “false advertisement” as:

an advertisement, other than labeling, which is misleading in a material respect; and in determining whether any advertisement is misleading, there shall be taken into account (among other things) not only representations made or suggested by statement, word, design, device, sound, or any combination thereof, but also the extent to which the advertisement fails to reveal facts material in the light of such representations or material with respect to consequences which may result from the use of the commodity to which the advertisement relates under the conditions prescribed in said advertisement, or under such conditions as are customary or usual. No advertisement of a drug shall be deemed to be false if it is disseminated only to members of the medical profession, contains no false representation of a material fact, and includes, or is accompanied in each instance by truthful disclosure of, the formula showing quantitatively each ingredient of such drug.
[Emphasis added.]

Note that the basic rule of false advertising is that the statements made be misleading, not that they be false. Nearly everything Joe Isuzu said in the advertisements (including his name) was false, but the ads were not “false advertisements” because they were obvious jokes, not statements likely to mislead anyone with a high enough IQ to be able to afford an Isuzu. The only situation in which literal falsehood is even relevant to the analysis is the limited exception for drug advertisements, and then only when they are disseminated only to members of the medical profession and certain other stated criteria are met. In any other situation, even if one were to take the position that an ad like this

Call now for three free ounces of cocaine!!!!!!

Offer void were prohibited by law.

is technically “true,” it would clearly be a false advertisement for purposes of federal law. And so too is an ad for “free credit reports” coupled with a mice-print disclaimer to the effect that the product they are actually selling is neither a credit report, nor free.

As a conservative, liberatarian-leaning Republican, I’m generally among the last to scream “their oughta be a law” about anything. But in cases like this, where the fraudulent intent is clear, and where there already is a law, a little enforcement might be worth considering. And yes, that goes for you, too, Apple. Do you really think anyone would “buy” those things if you disclosed the fact that you are retaining ultimate control over a product they thought they had just bought and therefore was now their property rather than yours?