The idea of Lyft’s “Taco Mode,” where drivers happily cart their fares to the drive-thru line at their local Taco Bell, seemed like a fun marketing partnership and useful way to save passengers craving burritos from having an awkward conversation with their drivers. No one seems to have asked drivers about this idea beforehand, though, and they’ve been having visions of “taco hell” since the program was announced.
Drivers’ first issues were with the smell and cleanliness, Food on Demand notes, with drivers discussing on message boards how terrible the promotion could get. For their seats and carpets, that is.
“Shredded orange cheese makes a friken mess in the car. It’s easily seen and hard to get up,” one driver observed. “Crunchy taco shells and all the ‘loose’ ingredients in Taco Bell’s menu items are the messiest of all the fast food chains. You simply can’t help making a mess no matter how careful you are.”
Drivers who don’t even want to activate Taco Mode because of the potential cleanliness issues have a point. Keeping the car clean is an important part of driving for a ride-hailing service, and vacuuming tortilla chips out of the rug takes up valuable time that could be spent driving fares around.
However, drivers end up losing money by just making themselves available for taco runs, especially during peak times when Lyft’s “Prime Time” fare multiplier might be on the line. Even if the passenger just picks up an order from Taco Bell on the way home and doesn’t open the bag, the problem is the act of sitting in the drive-thru.
Drivers are paid per mile when driving and per minute when idling, which makes waiting in a Taco Bell drive-thru line an unprofitable proposition. Depending on where they live and the local rate for idling, drivers might be getting paid less than minimum wage to wait in line.
Since the announcement of Taco Mode, drivers have made their opinions known on the Uberpeople.net forums and on social media.
(via Business Insider)
Would better lighting and a place to charge your cellphone make you want to spend more time and money at the mall? Abercrombie & Fitch hopes so.
The mall staple recently rolled out a new fitting room suite, as it continues to dig itself out from years of slumping sales, closing stores, and a now-defunct plan to sell itself. And the revamped store concept plan — including new fitting rooms — appears to be working: Abercrombie announced Thursday stronger than expected sales for the second quarter.
That path includes opening seven new prototype stores and revamping others to feature a smaller footprint, “innovative fitting rooms,” and more omni-channel capabilities.
In the fitting rooms, customers will be able to change the lighting, adjust the music in the rooms, and charge their smartphones.
Additionally, some of the new rooms will be considered suites: They’ll include two individual dressing areas so that customers can share their experience with friends or family without having to parade in front of other shoppers.
The new stores appear to be a continuation of Abercrombie’s recent campaign to focus on shoppers’ feelings about themselves on the inside, not on the outside.
The company’s Hollister brand saw same comparable same store ales rise 5%, while Abercrombie saw sales fall just 1% during the quarter.
Total sales for the company declined just 1%, Abercrombie notes, with second quarter sales clocking in at $779.3 million, down from $783.2 million at the same time last year.
The company says it expects to continue to face challenges this year, but anticipates improvements in product assortment, marketing, and optimization of productivity.
“We are confident we are on the right path to deliver enhanced performance and long-term shareholder value,” CEO Fran Horowitz said in a statement.
Your morning coffee might be the jolt you need to make it to work without drowsily forgetting to put on your pants, but that caffeine may also be temporarily be dulling your taste buds, possibly leaving some folks still jonesing for something sweet.
In a study published today in the Journal of Food Science, researchers at Cornell University looked into whether consuming caffeine affected how people perceive flavors in food and drink.
Study participants drank cups of sweetened hot coffee served at 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Some of the coffee was caffeinated, while the remaining cups contained decaf. Subjects were then asked to note the sweetness level of the brew and also their own alertness level.
This was not a gourmet coffee experience: All of the beverages in the study were made from Folgers decaf instant coffee and Coffee-Mate sweetened creamer. Every cup had the same amount of sugar and coffee.
The researchers used an interesting method to precisely control the amount of caffeine that study participants received. Everyone drank decaffeinated coffee, and then the researchers added either 200 mg of caffeine or an amount of quinine that would add the same amount of bitterness.
Participants received either caffeine or quinine in their coffee on the first day, and then the other substance on the second. Otherwise, it could simply be the bitterness of the caffeine affecting how sweet participants thought their coffee was.
Participants rated their drinks as less sweet on average when they contained caffeine compared to when they didn’t, showing that caffeine itself may affect our senses.
“When you drink caffeinated coffee, it will change how you perceive taste – for however long that effect lasts,” Robin Dando, assistant professor of food science at Cornell University, explained. “So if you eat food directly after drinking a caffeinated coffee or other caffeinated drinks, you will likely perceive food differently.”
Keep that in mind the next time you order a giant pastry along with your syrup-sweetened double latte.
Also of interest was the fact that test subjects were generally unable to accurately determine whether they had just consumed caffeinated or decaf coffee.
“We think there might be a placebo or a conditioning effect to the simple action of drinking coffee,” said Dando. “Think Pavlov’s dog. The act of drinking coffee – with the aroma and taste – is usually followed by alertness. So the panelists felt alert even if the caffeine was not there.”
Dando says the mental association of drinking coffee with being more awake may be strong enough to provide that effect: “Just the action of thinking that you’ve done the things that make you feel more awake, makes you feel more awake.”
Thanks to Facebook, the term “friend” has been stretched far beyond its traditional definition. Many Facebook users have “friends” they have never met in person, haven’t seen in years or decades, know very little about, and who you may actually find objectionable in spite of the “friend” designation. That’s why, according to one Florida appeals court, being someone’s Facebook friend is no indication of any genuine familiar or intimate connection to that person.
This issue recently came up before a Miami-based state appeals court, where a law firm sought to have a Miami-Dade trial court judge removed from a case because the judge is a Facebook friend of a lawyer representing a potential witness and party to that dispute.
The petitioners argued that trial court Judge Beatrice Butchko should have recused herself because her social media relationship to the other attorney — himself a former judge — engendered a “a well-grounded fear of not receiving a fair and impartial trial.”
A three-judge appeals panel pointed out [PDF] that the state’s highest court has long held that allegations of mere friendship are not sufficient for disqualifying a judge, but that a friendship can still be a factor in forcing a judge to step aside.
The question of judges’ social media connections has been evolving over the last decade, as Facebook and other platforms have become nearly omnipresent.
In 2009 the Florida Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee issued an opinion saying that judges in the state may not “add lawyers who may appear before the judge as ‘friends’ on a social networking site, and permit such lawyers to add the judge as their ‘friend.'”
The Committee later refined this opinion, saying that candidates for judicial office could friend and accept friend requests from lawyers, even if these attorneys would later appear before the judge, while reaffirming that sitting judges should not be social media friends with lawyers who might argue cases in their courts.
The state’s appeals courts have not been universal in their interpretation of these ethics rules. In 2012, one appellate panel compelled a trial court judge to recuse himself because of his Facebook friendship with the prosecutor. The court found that because the judge actively accepts or denies Facebook friendship requests (as opposed to Twitter where people can follow you without you having to follow them back), this action “conveys or permits others to convey the impression that they are in a special position to influence the judge.”
More recently, an appeals panel in a different Florida district also agreed that a judge must recuse himself for unsuccessfully attempting to Facebook friend the wife in a divorce case he was hearing, while also cautioning that the ethics committee’s opinions on judge’s social media use could have unintended consequences.
The panel in that case said it had “serious reservations” about the notion that a mere Facebook “friend”-ship creates a conflict of interest that requires recusal. The judges said that “friend” is probably not the best word to use to describe a Facebook connection.
“A number of words or phrases could more aptly describe the concept, including acquaintance and, sometimes, virtual stranger,” wrote the panel in the 2014 decision. “A Facebook friendship does not necessarily signify the existence of a close relationship. Other than the public nature of the internet, there is no difference between a Facebook ‘friend’ and any other friendship a judge might have.”
If you accept the idea that a Facebook friend is automatically cause for recusal, then judges would be forbidden from hearing any case involving anyone they may be even mildly acquainted with, said the 2014 panel. “Particularly in smaller counties, where everyone in the legal community knows each other, this requirement is unworkable and unnecessary. Requiring disqualification in such cases does not reflect the true nature of a Facebook friendship and casts a large net in an effort to catch a minnow.”
This week, the state appeals panel hearing the petition to remove Judge Butchko from the case agreed with the core of the 2014 conclusion, noting that Facebook connections no longer mean what they might have nearly a decade ago when the ethics committee released its opinion.
“[S]ome people have thousands of Facebook ‘friends,'” writes the Butchko panel, pointing to examples like a Kentucky case where a court ruled that a juror’s Facebook friendship a family member of the victim was not enough to warrant a new trial; or a Tennessee trial judge who did not know that a potential witness in a case was one of his 1,500 Facebook friends. That witness, a basketball coach, had several thousand friends on the social media platform.
“Facebook members often cannot recall every person they have accepted as ‘friends’ or who have accepted them as ‘friends,'” adds the panel, who also pointed out that many Facebook connections aren’t the result of real-world connections, but rather of Facebook’s artificial intelligence.
“[M]any Facebook ‘friends’ are selected based upon Facebook’s data-mining technology rather than personal interactions,” explains the panel. “Facebook data-mines its members’ current list of ‘friends,’ uploaded contact lists from smart phones and computers, emails, names tagged in uploaded photographs, internet groups, networks such as schools and employers, and other publicly or privately available information. This information is analyzed by proprietary algorithms that predict associations.”
This “People You May Know” function on Facebook seems to undermine the previous court’s assertion that accepting or rejecting a friend request is some sort of conscious communication by the Facebook user.
“To be sure, some of a member’s Facebook ‘friends’ are undoubtedly friends in the classic sense of person for whom the member feels particular affection and loyalty,” concludes the ruling. “The point is, however, many are not. A random name drawn from a list of Facebook ‘friends’ probably belongs to casual friend; an acquaintance; an old classmate; a person with whom the member shares a common hobby; a ‘friend of a friend;’ or even a local celebrity like a coach. An assumption that all Facebook ‘friends’ rise to the level of a close relationship that warrants disqualification simply does not reflect the current nature of this type of electronic social networking.”
With disagreement among the state’s appeals court districts, it will ultimately be left to the Florida Supreme Court to decide when exactly a judge’s social media connections cross that ethical line.
For years, retailers, analysts, and others have theorized that Amazon — and the conveniences of online shopping — have killed the mall. In a development that seems to bring the idea full circle, Amazon will operate a new warehouse on the gravesite of one the country’s largest former malls.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports that Amazon will lease a soon-to-be finished 855,000-square-foot building on the site of the Randall Park Mall.
The new warehouse, which is expected to bring about 2,000 full-time jobs to the city of North Randall, is expected to cost about $177 million.
Randall Park Mall, once dubbed the world’s largest indoor shopping center, opened in 1976, closed in 2009 and was demolished in 2014.
The mall once housed more than 200 retailers before entering decline in the 1990s as shoppers began defecting to retailers in nearby suburbs, the Plain Dealer reported in 2014.
While consumers’ changing shopping habits — including looking online and moving to smaller stores — likely had an impact on the mall’s business, ownership played a large part in the facility’s demise.
Eventually, after the mall changed hands several times and numerous development plans fell through, the owners began terminating leases, closing sections of the building in 2008. The entire building closed for good in 2009.
A video from Bright Sun Films shows the once bustling mall transforming into an eerie, crumbling shell of retail-past.
Demolition of the mall came after the facility fell into disrepair. The Plain Dealer reports that at the time of demolition, the building had no electricity, no heat, and that floors were covered in brackish water and the remains of leaves.
While many retailers are gearing up to fight Amazon for business, the people of North Randall appear to be welcoming the e-commerce giant with open arms.
“I’m lost for words, because we are so fortunate to get this project,” Mayor David Smith tells the Plain Dealer.
Other community and business leaders say they look forward to working with Amazon for the long-haul.
“We’re taking on the next generation of e-commerce and where e-commerce and e-retail is going. … From the local viewpoint and lifting families, we’re deeply excited for North Randall and the area,” Ted Griffith, JobsOhio managing director, tells the Plain Dealer.
With Hurricane Harvey barreling toward the coast of Texas, the state’s residents have no doubt been busy preparing for any havoc the storm may wreak, including extreme flooding. But beyond the potential damage those rising waters could do to homes and property there’s another eventuality Texans should be ready to handle: Displaced alligators.
Harvey is expected to hit Texas as a category 2 hurricane when it makes landfall late on Friday or early Saturday, and could dump up to three feet of rain on the southeastern part of the state.
The Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office has been offering helpful tips and advice to its Twitter followers in the days leading up to the storm, like “don’t drive through high water” and which groceries you can eat without electricity.
It’s also got the scoop on what residents should do if they come across an alligator, with photo examples of where one might unexpectedly encounter these reptiles:
Got it? No picking up gators — not even if you think you could trade one for a six-pack of beer at your local convenience store (spoiler alert: you can’t).
*Thanks to Sarah for the tip!
As if Chipotle needs any more bad news right now, industry analysts are now warning that there may be more tough times to come for the beleaguered company: Namely, soaring avocado prices could hit the chain right where it hurts — its bottomline.
Analysts at Credit Suisse say that the recent uptick in avocado prices could have “material ramifications” for Chipotle’s third quarter earnings, reports The Street.
While Chipotle’s avocado buyers know how to weather these kinds of seasonal fluctuations, they’re not used to expecting changes on these levels, the analysts note: Prices have jumped about 75% just since mid-July, partly because of shortages in Mexico and California.
Compared to this same time last year, avocados cost about 50% more. That’s not great for Chipotle, as avocados are an estimated 10% of the company’s total costs.
The company may not have been ready for this price jump, either: Executives had predicted a 20% seasonal drop in prices going into the second half of 2017, but instead they will likely go up by 10%, reports Markets Insider.
This avocado inflation — along with recent headlines involving a norovirus outbreak — has Credit Suisse analysts saying they wouldn’t buy Chipotle shares right now.
Will these high avocado prices hit Chipotle’s customers? While the company could charge more for guacamole in an attempt to make up for paying more for avocados, it hasn’t done so during past shortages.
“We don’t provide financial updates between quarters, and will update all of our financials, including food cost trends, when we release third quarter results in October,” Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold told Consumerist when we asked whether there are any plans to raise prices amid the current avocadopocalypse.
Zillow’s controversial “Zestimate” lives to see another day: A federal judge dismissed a three-month-old lawsuit that sought to end the real estate listing site’s practice of estimating a home’s value, claiming it wasn’t just inaccurate, it actually hurt homeowners and homebuilders.
U.S. District Court Judge Amy St. Eve. dismissed [PDF] the lawsuit Thursday, ruling that Zillow’s Zestimates are not likely to confuse potential homebuyers as they are just a “starting point” for home buying research.
The now dismissed class-action lawsuit, filed in May on behalf of several Chicago-area builders, claimed that Zillow’s Zestimates misled potential homebuyers into believing the figures were actual appraisals.
The lawsuit contended that the Zestimates injured home sellers and builders because it listed properties with lower values than the asking price.
For instance, one plaintiff claimed that the Zestimate on his home was $1,068,677, when the house was on the market for $1.495 million, the Chicago Tribune reports.
Zillow previously conceded that its automated math isn’t perfect. Zestimates are within 5% of the actual sale price about 54% of the time, within 10% of the sale price about 76% of the time, and within 20% about 90% of the time, according to the lawsuit.
While these differences in prices might vary, St. Eve notes in her ruling that Zillow includes information on its website that the estimates are not necessarily accurate.
In addition to claims that estimates weren’t accurate, the lawsuit contended that Zillow’s practice of listing home values based on its Zestimates algorithm was fraudulent, as the company is not a licensed appraiser.
Companies are prohibited under Illinois state law from preparing an appraisal without a state-issued license.
Zillow countered that the section of law allows for automated valuations, such as those provided by the company.
St. Eve agreed, writing in her decision that Zillow’s webpage clearly indicates that its Zestimate is not an official appraisal.
“The word ‘Zestimate’ — an obvious portmanteau of ‘Zillow’ and ‘estimate’ — itself indicates that Zestimates are merely an estimate of the market value of a property,” the judge wrote.
Despite dismissing claims that Zillow acted as an appraiser in violation of state law and that its estimates were misleading, St. Eve told plaintiffs they could replead three claims, including that Zillow violated homeowner’s privacy for posting their homes on its website without permission.
A lawyer for the plaintiffs tells Reuters that they are looking into amending the complaint.
“Zillow has unilaterally imposed its opinions on the value of homes without the consent of homeowners,” the lawyer said. “It impairs people’s ability to sell their homes because the estimates do not comply with recognized appraisal standards, and some are way too low.”
For its part, Zillow tells Reuters that it was pleased with the dismissal.
Some passengers on a United Airlines flight this week heading for Newark were more worried they’d end up in Oz instead of New Jersey after they say the pilot warned them before takeoff that they’d be heading through some particularly nasty weather.
In an announcement over the plane’s speakers on Tuesday night, the pilot “seemed angry” while telling passengers that they’d be flying through “horrific storms including tornadoes” on the flight from Chicago to New Jersey, one traveler told NJ.com.
According to her, he also told passengers to “get to know your neighbors” as the flight would be “very turbulent,” before walking into the cockpit and shutting the door.
That didn’t sit well with passengers, as the flight was already delayed by two hours.
The passenger who spoke with NJ.com said flight attendants attempted to soothe worried passengers by saying that it wasn’t unsafe to fly, but that the pilot just wanted them to know there’d be additional delays.
However, as the plane was preparing to taxi to the runway, the pilot announced that they’d have to return to the gate to address a maintenance issue.
Some passengers had had enough by that point, and told the crew they wanted to get off the plane. By that time, the pilot and flight attendants had already worked their allotted hours, so a new crew had to be swapped in for the trip to Chicago.
About 50 passengers decided to make alternate plans and deplaned. The flight eventually took off at 1:14 a.m., about 7 hours after it was originally scheduled.
United says it’s looking into the incident.
“We would never put our crew or our passengers in a situation where it was unsafe to fly,” a United Airlines spokesperson said in a statement. “The safety of the passengers and the crew is always our No. 1 priority.”
This might be stating the obvious, but the backs of the cards on a solitaire machine in McDonald’s PlayPlace locations are supposed to have something kid-appropriate on them, not a photo of a woman in a seductive pose. Yet that’s what one girl found on a machine that was marked as being for ages 3-12, and her mother is upset that the game was left running until a local TV station stopped by to ask questions.
According to KDKA-TV, the machine has various games on it, and an 11-year-old in Moon Township, PA, was playing a touchscreen solitaire game when she saw a photo that was definitely not a cartoon character.
“You could almost see some private parts on it,” the girl observed in an interview with KDKA-TV. “I don’t think younger people should be seeing that, either.”
Her mother told the TV station that she alerted employees to the issue, but they didn’t shut the machine off. It was still running hours later when a KDKA reporter showed up in the restaurant.
A spokesperson for McDonald’s corporate told the station that it had never heard reports of problems with this machine before.
“This is not in keeping with the spirit of those games,” the representative said. “The game has been pulled and will be researched tomorrow. This game has been around for some time and has never been an issue.”
The franchisee that owns this location also said that the game had been operating for a long time with no problems.
“The game in question has been in operation for more than a decade without issue,” the franchisee’s director of operations said in a statement. “As soon as I learned that a customer had expressed concern, I immediately had the on-site team remove the game so we can further investigate. McDonald’s is committed to providing quality experiences for families.”
The New York Times bestseller list is, at this point, an institution. Reaching number one is a coveted spot that not only allows you to sell more copies of your book, but also lets you put “NYT Bestselling Author” in front of your name on your next one. The prerequisite for the list, is, of course, selling lots of copies of your book. So how did a book that barely exists and nobody ever heard of manage to become a bestseller?
That’s what happened this week on the Young Adult fiction chart, where the reigning champion of the last six months just got booted out by an upstart. Seemingly out-of-nowhere hits do happen; a super-famous person will mention a little-known title and sales soar. But several in the publishing industry felt that this instance was something different, claiming there were not the usual signs that any readers were rushing out in droves to buy this title.
So how did a book that very few people have heard of, by a new author, from a new publisher, and with no real publicity push behind it suddenly rocket to the top spot on a NYT bestseller list?
Media news site Pajiba did a deep-dive investigation into one new book’s sudden — and improbable — appearance on the list.
For the last 25 weeks, the top of the New York Times bestseller list for YA books has been The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas. The novel is a genuine blockbuster at this point, Pajiba reports, with a strong fan base and lots of publisher buzz behind it. There’s even a film adaptaion in progress, starring Amandla Stenberg.
But of course, nothing lasts forever; even the most popular book, novel, or film eventually falls in the rankings. And this week, The Hate U Give was finally displaced from its number one slot. The new top dog is Handbook for Mortals, by Lani Sarem.
Apart from its content or fan base, The Hate U Give is, in a publishing sense, a perfectly normal book. It’s published by HarperCollins, a major house, and you can buy paper or electronic copies, in several formats, from bookstores, Amazon, or the publisher directly. Basically, exactly what you expect when you think, “book.”
The same, however, cannot be said of its successor on the list.
A large publisher like HarperCollins has a whole process behind book releases. Industry publications get notices, PR sends out praise, and reviewers get copies. Bloggers blog, influencers influence, and readers gossip. There’s a system, and folks in the industry expect it to work.
Smaller publishers don’t necessarily work the same way. But even then, there’s usually some attempt at promotion, or some kind of marketing. At the very least, if you’re aiming for the hardcover bestseller list, there’s an actual book that you can buy and read if you so choose.
But Handbook for Mortals came out of nowhere, Pajiba explains. Not just in the sense that it flew under the radar while people were looking at other things, but in the sense that literally nobody ever heard of it until just before it hit the bestseller list. At all.
Handbook for Mortals was being billed as the first novel from the publishing arm of the website GeekNation. But searching for information about either the publisher or the author leads to… almost nothing. There are press releases about the book — but only press releases, Pajiba notes, and those date from only one week before publication.
You would think that, to be a bestseller, you would have to, you know, sell copies of a book. And in order to do that, you need a book to sell.
But you can’t actually buy Handbook for Mortals, it seems. Author Phil Stamper couldn’t find a single copy at any Barnes & Noble in the greater New York City area. Nor can you buy a physical copy on Amazon — the hardcover is out of stock.
You can buy a Kindle version, at least, so the text itself is real. But that appears to be the only way you can acquire it.
The publisher itself seems to have absolutely no interest in promoting or in fact even acknowledging that the book exists — a distinctly strange stance for a company that presumably wants to make money.
GeekNation makes absolutely no mention of any publishing arm or any new book on its website. The last mention of Handbook for Mortals on the site’s Twitter feed dates to Aug. 15, and the one and only mention of the book on the site’s Facebook page is a share of the press release Hollywood Reporter published on July 28.
This is, to put it mildly, unusual. The Twitter feeds for major publishers like Simon & Schuster or HarperCollins are always working to promote new titles, and self-published authors and small publishing houses usually work even harder to talk up their books anywhere and everywhere.
Pajiba notes that the Amazon and Goodreads reviews for the book are also deeply questionable, inconsistent with usual reviewing patterns and highly likely to be fake.
Meanwhile, folks had started to notice that a film for this mysterious new book was already listed as “in development” on IMDB… with its author, Lani Sarem, listed as the star.
After Pajiba published the story about inconsistencies around Handbook for Mortals, sources started leaping out of the woodwork to confirm that all was not well.
Three different booksellers confirmed that someone had called and placed or tried to place a bulk order for the book, without actually caring that the book was not in stock and would take some time to arrive.
A librarian also came forward to share information with Pajiba, noting that the book had gone through none of the normal channels and didn’t appear anywhere that she and other librarians usually source information or order new books from.
The book did show up on the list from one distributor that indie publishers and bookstores often use for wide distribution. More than 18,500 copies had been ordered from that distributor — a feat that, Pajiba notes, is “basically impossible” to do “in the first week with no pre-sales or early numbers before that.”
Pajiba then received details from two separate sources, each of whom claimed that the author herself admitted she had a plan to push the book onto the NYT bestseller list by manipulating the sales numbers. “Both sources also noted that the author and publisher’s primary concerns were to get a film deal,” Pajiba notes, “With the movie having been promised funding if it became a bestseller, hence a bulk buying strategy with a focus on reaching the convention circuit.”
By the end of the day, the New York Times appeared to have agreed with the findings from Pajiba’s reports and a legion of internet sleuths. The Hate U Give author Angiue Thomas noted Thursday evening that the bestseller list had been updated once again — and Handbook for Mortals was no longer on it.
A spokesperson for the NYT told The Hollywood Reporter, “After investigating the inconsistencies in the most recent reporting cycle, we decided that the sales for Handbook for Mortals did not meet our criteria for inclusion. We’ve issued an updated “Young Adult Hardcover” list for September 3, 2017 which does not include that title.”
Author Sarem, however, expressed her frustration, particularly with the Twitter users who dug up and posted numbers. “My personal opinion: I’m a first time author, I did some great numbers,” Sarem told the Hollywood Reporter. “They put me on the list. The list is curated. They didn’t have to put me on the list despite how many books I sold. When these people made a big issue they [the NYT] were like this is to [sic] much effort.”
Sarem defended her book and her publisher, telling The Hollywood Reporter that to the best of her knowledge, nobody involved with the book engaged in an organized campaign.
Although many air travelers are counting down the minutes until they can get off the plane and away from sitting in cramped quarters with hundreds of strangers, there’s a certain cachet these days in offering extreme long-haul flights. Qantas Airways wants to be the next to claim the title of world’s longest nonstop flight, with plans for a new route that would take 20 hours.
Qantas announced Friday that it’s dreaming of a flight from Sydney to London that would take 20 hours and 20 minutes with no stopovers along the way, something that isn’t possible at the moment. It would also offer a nonstop route to New York that would take 18 hours.
Again, being trapped on a plane for a long time is probably not anyone’s idea of a dream situation, but as we all know, time is money — and these new routes would definitely save some time: The Sydney to London route would be almost four hours less than the time it currently takes to get from Australia to the UK, including a stopover. Travelers between Sydney and the Big Apple would save about three hours.
The airline says it wants to offer these flights by 2022, and that it’s issued a challenge to Airbus and Boeing to give their next-generation aircraft currently under development — Airbus’ A350ULR and Boeing’s 777X — the range to make these non-stop flights possible with a full passenger load.
Both manufacturers are working on planes that can “almost do the job,” CEO Alan Joyce says.
“We believe advances in the next few years will close the gap, and Qantas has the unique operational experience to be the airline that helps make it happen,” he told investors in a statement.
Airbus told Bloomberg that it’s game.
“We’ll have the A350-900 ULR in service next year for ultra-long range flights of up to 20 hours,” the company said in a statement. “We’ll look forward to working with Qantas to see how we can meet its requirements for Sydney-London non-stop.”
Boeing hasn’t yet chimed in, but we’ve reached out to the company and will update this post if we hear back.
Even if it sounds like hell to you to be stuck on a plane for almost an entire day, airlines have been trying to outdo each other with these extreme long-haul flights for years.
Earlier this year, Qatar Airways claimed to have the world’s longest flight, with a route that travels 9,032 miles from its home base in Doha to Auckland, New Zealand and takes 17 hours and 30 minutes.
Before that, its rival Emirates took the title with a trip that was actually a bit longer in the air — 17 hours and 35 minutes — but was only 8,590 miles. That flight usurped Qantas, which has a 8,578-mile trip connecting Dallas and Sydney.
Samsung vice chairman Jay Y. Lee, who was indicted and arrested in February in connection with a massive bribery case in South Korea, has been found guilty on multiple charges and sentenced to five years in prison.
Reuters reports that Lee was found guilty of bribery, hiding assets abroad, embezzlement, and perjury after a six-month trial related to a corruption scandal involving the country’s former president.
Lee, who denied any wrongdoing, was first publicly tied to the case in January when he faced 22 hours of questioning related to his part in the scandal.
The questioning and eventual indictment came after the South Korean special prosecutor’s 90-day investigation into a corruption scandal involving now-former South Korea President Park Geun-hye.
The case involves whether or not millions of dollars in payments from Samsung to businesses and foundations run by an associate of the President’s — Choi Soon-sil — constituted a bribe, and if Lee had any personal dealings with the contributions.
The prosecutor’s office alleged that Samsung’s contributions — including $17 million in donations to Choi’s foundation and millions of dollars worth of contracts to companies she ran or was involved with — were made in exchange for a decision by the National Pension Services to support a merger of two of the electronic company’s affiliates.
The merger was personally reportedly beneficial to Lee, as it eventually led him to take over control of Samsung from his father.
A lawyer for Lee tells Reuters that they will appeal the decision, calling the verdict unacceptable.
Here are seven of the best photos that readers added to the Consumerist Flickr Pool in the last week, picked for usability in a Consumerist post or for just plain neatness.
Want to see your pictures on our site? Our Flickr pool is the place where Consumerist readers upload photos for possible use in future Consumerist posts. Just be a registered Flickr user, go here, and click “Join Group?” up on the top right. Choose your best photos, then click “send to group” on the individual images you want to add to the pool.
