"What mystified Grove was the assertion, voiced by the economist Alan Blinder and others, “that as long as ‘knowledge work’ stays in the U.S., it doesn’t matter what happens to factory jobs.” This was not only inhumane, Grove declared; it was idiotic."

"But I think it’s clear what his real objection was: universal suffrage has the potential to advance socialistic causes, interfering with his laissez-faire project. From his autobiography: “Another extension of the franchise since made…will inevitably be followed by a still more rapid growth of socialistic legislation.” When he realized women’s equality could potentially interfere with laissez-faire economics, it was time for women’s equality to get cut from his overall theory of a better world. He would rather mutilate his intellectual project instead of allowing his enemies to continue to build their governance project."

"If the major publishers switch to selling ebooks without DRM, then they can enable customers to buy books from a variety of outlets and move away from the walled garden of the Kindle store. They see DRM as a defense against piracy, but piracy is a much less immediate threat than a gigantic multinational with revenue of $48 Billion in 2011 (more than the entire global publishing industry) that has expressed its intention to "disrupt" them, and whose chief executive said recently "even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation" (where "innovation" is code-speak for "opportunities for me to turn a profit").

And so they will deep-six their existing commitment to DRM and use the terms of the DoJ-imposed settlement to wiggle out of the most-favoured-nation terms imposed by Amazon, in order to sell their wares as widely as possible.

If they don't, they're doomed. And all of us who like to read (or write) fiction get to live in the Amazon company town."

"Consider events in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire. There, in the aftermath of a long civil war, the government is currently zoning its forests — which cover as much as 316 million acres, an area nearly the size of France, Germany and Spain combined — in preparation for their mass allocation to logging companies. Old European timber conglomerates want to reactivate their concessions, some dating back almost to the brutal days more than a century ago when the entire country was run by King Leopold of Belgium. Logging newcomers from Malaysia and China also want a slice of the action."

"In short, arguments favouring private over public provision are not just theoretically flawed, but typically favour the few at the expense of the many. The pendulum has swung too far to the right: it's time to stand up for public provision."

"I think it’s fairly simple. You know the classic “First they came for the X, then they came for the Y, and I did nothing, and then they came for me?” schtick? This is one of those stories. In fact, it’s the end of one of those stories. They already came for the doctors and the psychiatrists. They already came for the lawyers. They already came for the accountants and auditors. They already came for all the professions. Professors are the last to be broken on the wheel, the last to be put at their station in the new assembly lines of the 21st Century Service Economy."

"The tension arises from the fact that it is often more profitable to rip a customer’s face off in the short term than to defer potentially larger profit opportunities with the same client in the long term. When bankers whose personal franchises, careers, and compensation depends on the former are evenly balanced with bankers whose interests are aligned with the latter, an investment bank perches profitably if precariously on the knife’s edge of sustainable profitability. Notwithstanding industry critics’ perception that all investment bankers are all looking for a quick and easy score, those of us who actually work in the relationship side of the business know that our best personal outcome depends on a sustained career success lasting over a decade or more. Unlike, perhaps, traders who transact daily with equally ruthless hedge fund counterparties on a no-regrets, no-grudges basis, bankers like me in corporate finance and M&A transact with the same limited universe of clients year-in and year-out. We simply cannot afford to screw them over, because they do hold a grudge."

"No, Mr. President, we’re not in this together with corporate America. Corporations are in it to maximize profits and boost CEO salaries, not help the U.S. economy or put people back to work.

With no “healthy increase in demand,” on the horizon and unemployment heading back up, the President has talked more about government-led solutions that would actually create jobs in America. Near the end of his address on Afghanistan, and in a full-throated pitch at a Democratic fundraiser in New York City the next evening, Obama called for investments in education, infrastructure, and clean energy at home.

Democratic leaders in Congress have also started to sharpen their focus on the failure of corporations to create jobs at home. Nancy Pelosi’s reaction to the Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s walking away from budget talks was, “”Yes, we do want to remove tax subsidies for big oil, we want to remove tax breaks for corporations that send jobs overseas… ”"

"To Sanders, the conclusion is simple. "No one who works for a firm receiving direct financial assistance from the Fed should be allowed to sit on the Fed's board of directors or be employed by the Fed," he said.

The investigation also revealed that the Fed outsourced most of its emergency lending programs to private contractors, many of which also were recipients of extremely low-interest and then-secret loans.

The Fed outsourced virtually all of the operations of their emergency lending programs to private contractors like JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo.  The same firms also received trillions of dollars in Fed loans at near-zero interest rates. Altogether some two-thirds of the contracts that the Fed awarded to manage its emergency lending programs were no-bid contracts. Morgan Stanley was given the largest no-bid contract worth $108.4 million to help manage the Fed bailout of AIG.

A more detailed GAO investigation into potential conflicts of interest at the Fed is due on Oct. 18, but Sanders said one thing already is abundantly clear. "The Federal Reserve must be reformed to serve the needs of working families, not just CEOs on Wall Street.""

"British Columbia’s highest court has accused tech giant Cisco and U.S. officials of a massive abuse of process in order to have a Cisco whistleblower thrown in jail. B.C. Supreme Court Justice Ronald McKinnon said Cisco had the “unmitigated gall” to attempt to use Canada’s justice system, via U.S. officials, to pressure former Cisco exec Peter Alfred-Adekeye into dropping a civil suit against the company. Alfred-Adekeye had alleged that Cisco was illegally forcing customers into maintenance contracts. Cisco eventually settled the suit and abandoned the maintenance-contract practice, but not before Alfred-Adekeye spent 28 days in a Canadian jail. The Alfred-Adekeye case has caused outrage among many commenters, some of whom have suggested it’s a sign that the U.S. is becoming a “corporate police state.” The Mark interviewed Marilyn Sandford, who represented Alfred-Adekeye during his extradition proceedings."

"We should check back in a few years to see how the “inevitably” thing is working out. I liked Republicans better back when, like Richard Nixon, they were all Keynesians. So I have a hard time figuring out how any jobs will be created when millions of families lose disposable income through higher taxes, just to provide tax breaks to a much smaller number of businesses. (If we were investing the added revenue in public infrastructure to enable private profits, like roads, schools and bridges, it would be a different story.) To whom are Michigan businesses going to sell their goods and services, when me and everybody else in the state has to fork over all our extra cash to Rick Snyder?"

"The conclusion is as unpleasant as it is inevitable. The copyright industry lobby is actively trying to hide egregious crimes against children, obviously not because they care about the children, but because the resulting censorship mechanism can be a benefit to their business if they manage to broaden the censorship in the next stage. All this in defense of their lucrative monopoly that starves the public of culture."

"Speculation: There’s a critique of the regulators and key decision makers during the crisis that invokes cultural capital and the idea that regulators are socialized with Wall Street in a way that it is difficult for them to exercise any type of power over them, to see their interests in conflict. I wonder if the same is true for the corporate sector. As the firm goes global, and as the white-collar workforce is broken by computerization and globalization, more and more elite corporate positions will be filled by those leaving Wall Street. (Has this already happened? Data/Studies?) If so, you’ll see an even more lucrative revolving door between corporate elites and financial elites. As such, any natural checks to financial sector power coming from the corporate market space is less likely to happen."

"The lesson here is that if we want serious regulation of banks, we can't trust it to be done by bank regulators. We've seen the Fed and the OCC time and time again bend over backwards to let the banks out of statutory requirements. We've seen this with inaction (HOEPA regs), with aggressive preemption (and OCC is back to its old tricks...).

And this isn't just in the realm of consumer finance. This is also in the safety and soundness area. I'm not talking about stretched interpretations of section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act. I'm talking about affiliate transaction rules and Prompt Corrective Action, cornerstones of the safety-and-soundness regime. Saule Omarova has a great paper that shows how the Fed granted affiliate transaction waivers like a drunken sailor during the financial crisis.  Those were rules that went back to 1932-33 as part of Glass-Steagal.  

And remember Prompt Corrective Action? That was a response to all of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board's screw ups during the S&L crisis (Who you say? There's a reason the FHLBB doesn't exist any more...). PCA is clear of a bunch of tripwires as you can get. The whole point was to make sure that the bank regulators regulated, not coddled. But Bernanke announced that he was suspending PCA for the banks during the financial crisis. Only after the stress tests cleared the big banks did PCA get applied to the small banks, and with a vengance. What a sorry state of the world we live in where the bank regulators are the last people we can trust to actually regulate the banks. "

"Granting broadcasters and cablecasters intellectual property rights that apply independently of copyright in the programs being broadcast, together with legally enforceable technological protection measures, raises concerns for access to public domain works. These measures would add complexity to copyright clearance regimes for creators of podcasts and documentary films, and interfere with consumers’ ability to make home recordings permitted under national copyright laws. Granting broadcasters and cablecasters exclusive rights to authorize retransmissions of broadcasts over the Internet will harm competition and innovation by allowing broadcasters and cablecasters to control the types of devices that can receive transmissions. It will also create new liability risks for Internet intermediaries that retransmit information on the Internet."

"The other key thing to pay attention to is who this marketing campaign was targeted at: key decisionmakers at providers and insurance companies. Those are the people who decide whether medical procedures get ordered. It’s not patients. Patients aren’t going to experience a loss of freedom or satisfaction because an expert reviewer at the Independant Payment Advisory Board makes the call as to whether a procedure is medically beneficial, rather than the corresponding bureaucrat at their insurance provider or at the for-profit clinic they’re attending."

"Another provision in the plan would bar any University of Wisconsin campus from participating in advanced networks connecting research institutions worldwide, according to Mr. Evers’s memo. For example, the Madison campus would have to withdraw from Internet2, a high-speed networking consortium, said Mr. Giroux."

"With Box, the customers are businesses for the most part. That is a key difference to other challenges by the RIAA. And It sets up a conflict between service providers and their clients who now face a determined media industry with a historic interest in litigation to protect its copyrights."

After 15 years of fighting the sharing of culture in the name of an obsolete copyright regime, governments of the World are uniting to control and censor the Internet. The black-out of the Egyptian Net, the US government’s reaction to Wikileaks, the adoption of website blocking mechanisms in Europe, or the plans for “Internet kill switches”[1] are all major threats on our freedom of expression and communication. These threats come from corporations and politicians, unsettled by the advent of the Internet.

So despite most of the bill not applying to them, domain registers and registrars are now encouraged to simply take down sites on a voluntary basis, if they believe they're dedicated to infringement. And if they do so, they are immune from liability for damages caused. In other words, pretty much any domain can be disappeared by its register or registrar with little real recourse, and, in fact, there is encouragement for this to happen.

But the general agenda here is worth comment: like most of the other industry groups, BSA is very invested in proving that majorities of people approve of IP rights.  This feeds into a larger industry belief that, in the long term, the problem of piracy is one of cultivating respect for IP and, relatedly, demonstrating popular support for stronger enforcement measures.   Our view is that this notional ‘respect for IP’ is irrelevant in the face of (1) basic disconnects between high prices for media goods and low incomes, especially in developing countries, and (2) the ongoing rapid decline in the cost of digital technologies (that permit widespread copying, that need software, that facilitate music listening, and so on).

This was the first annual Data Scientist Summit, and I will no doubt be back. With that said, discussion of technical topics had a bit of an introductory flavor to them, which made the discussion of the technology seem dated. For example, “Vanilla” Hadoop was introduced as a tool for processing vast amounts of data. I would expect that most Data Scientists have worked with Hadoop, or at least know what it is. Hadoop is somewhat old news in terms of “cutting-edge technology.” Tools like Pig, Cascalog, HBase, Hive, Cascading, etc. would have been a better discussion topic. I was also disappointed with how little coverage of tools (except for Hadoop, NoSQL, and enterpise databases) there was. It seemed as if R had gone M.I.A. and I was surprised that there was such little discussion of visualization tools like Tableau, Processing, Gephi, D3, Polymaps, etc.

""They told me that EPA scientists had reviewed the originally lifecycle study and determined it wasn't scientifically sound, and I asked if it had been documented, if there was a hard copy," he says, "The [employee] said yes, and I asked if I could get a copy." And just like that, he had the proof he needed that the EPA had overlooked something that could be killing America's bees."

"At a minimum, this is clearly a company utterly lacking in the sense of urgency that this disaster warrants. And as McCallister contends, it is probably by design."

"The definition of "onshore" changes when you are a regulator captured by the industry you are supposed to monitor…"

"We present a methodology to extract the backbone of complex networks based on the weight and direction of links, as well as on nontopological properties of nodes. We show how the methodology can be applied in general to networks in which mass or energy is flowing along the links. In particular, the procedure enables us to address important questions in economics, namely, how control and wealth are structured and concentrated across national markets. We report on the first cross-country investigation of ownership networks, focusing on the stock markets of 48 countries around the world. On the one hand, our analysis confirms results expected on the basis of the literature on corporate control, namely, that in Anglo-Saxon countries control tends to be dispersed among numerous shareholders. On the other hand, it also reveals that in the same countries, control is found to be highly concentrated at the global level, namely, lying in the hands of very few important shareholders. …"

Ideally, investors should be watchdogs of a sort as well, not slaves to boardspeak. "BP may face criminal charges based on their own internal documents. This would amplify any BP civil liabilities."

"If the government can take over giant global insurer AIG and the auto giant General Motors and replace their CEOs, in order to keep them financially solvent, it should be able to put BP’s north American operations into temporary receivership in order to stop one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history."

"No matter who is technically in control of the company, i.e. receivership or not, the one thing that is needed is for the government to have the authority it needs to force the company to fully disclose all the information it has about the leak, and about how to stop it. It also needs to be able to force the company to take particular actions to stop the leak even if the actions demand so many resources it results in the company going bankrupt.…"

"Are "willful and flagrant violation" of safety and "intentional disregard" of safety criminal acts? Can they be criminal only if someone is injured or dies? These are questions that need to be addressed."

"Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself."

"Wow. If a person markets something, like a book they've written, or a product they are selling, it is regulated as if it were advertising published by a media company, such as a newspaper, TV, magazine, etc.

That means everyone is now a media company. And subject to the same regulations - at least in the UK. Wow."

"Personally, I’d love to see some of these problems above fixed and I’d love to be able to really nod my head in agreement when I read that Yahoo is serious about a more “open and relevant web.” That would be much better than me shaking my head in disagreement and writing letters."

"I don't know about you, but for most of us "the best solution available in the market" is the one that costs the least and does what I want it to. If it's free, even better. Can we say "Google"?"

"That someone with such a understanding of complex financial institutions highlights her naiveté, as if things are what they are, not because they are an equilibrium of borrower and saver preferences, but rather, the whims of The Captains of Industry in their top hats. To give her power, would merely reinforce what everyone in the industry knows, that Washington regulators are out-of-touch. For her, competition is simply a "race to the bottom to develop new ways to trick customers", and so we should expect her to create a 'stable' industry, like in our education and postal industries, where there is limited competition but lots of guarantees, and little or no productivity growth."

"Facing a $2.8 billion deficit and pending insolvency, Washington State's House Bill 3176 proposes changes to its B&O Royalty tax that would give Microsoft an estimated $100 million tax cut annually and possible amnesty for more than a billion dollars in past tax evasion."

"Why? No one makes money off of creating private communities in an era of "free." It's in Facebook's economic interest to force people into being public, even if a few people break up with Facebook in the process. Of course, it's in Facebook's interest to maintain some semblance of trust, some appearance of being a trustworthy enterprise. I mean, if they were total bastards, they would've just turned everyone's content public automatically without asking. Instead, they asked in a way that no one would ever figure out what's going on and voila, lots of folks are producing content that is more public than they even realize. Maybe then they'll get used to it and accept it, right? Worked with the newsfeed, right? Of course, some legal folks got in the way and now they can't be that forceful about making people public but, guess what, I can see a lot of people's content out there who I'm pretty certain don't think that I can."

"Franken's amendment is driving the Republicans crazy because they basically voted to protect rapists and are now paying a political price for that. And now they are whining that Franken was somehow "uncollegial" because the amendment put them in an embarrassing position (which makes me wonder how many other things issues are swept under the rug because it would make members of the opposition uncomfortable.)"

"...We find that award-winning CEOs subsequently underperform, both relative to their prior performance and relative to a matched sample of non-winning CEOs. At the same time, they extract more compensation following the awards, both in absolute amounts and relative to other top executives in their firms. They also spend more time on public and private activities outside their companies, such as assuming board seats or writing books. The incidence of earnings management increases after winning awards. The effects are strongest in firms with weak corporate governance. Our results suggest that the ex post consequences of media-induced superstar status for shareholders are negative."

"According to the Center for Responsible Lending, issuers are using the power they still have for a few months to implement “any time any reason” price changes to raise the interest rates for large groups of customers. "

"That said, the internet is pretty vast, and some of its denizens are smarter than others… and I suspect Wragge and Co’s fees for hunting down anonymous commenters will reflect those realities. It also remains to be seen how much they can achieve when working on sites hosted in countries where the jurisdiction isn’t so clear-cut, or sites like Wikileaks which are geared toward protecting their sources. What we can be sure of is that when lawyers can see a paycheck, there’s dirty laundry waiting to be washed… and we can expect the corporate (and political) world to wise up to the web pretty fast now that the full extent of its power is becoming apparent."

"The Supreme Court is going to decide if corporations have First Amendment rights that allow "direct, unlimited corporate participation in campaigns." Let's hope the decision is that they don't:"

"The second driver is a consistent ignorance, apathy and a serious underestimation of the impact of new technology on the businesses that HR supports (particularly social technologies). Technology moves so quickly and for HR leaders and professionals it can seem so easy (and sometimes necessary) to remain in their comfort zone of policy creation and enforcement, employee relations, or compliance reporting."

Interesting but innocuous HBR commentary on stuff we've actually all been doing for a while out here in the world

"If Sarah Palin has nothing to hide, if she's not a Terrorist, why would she mind anyone going through her emails? And just because these things -- those things that some overly-earnest people call "statutes" or "laws" or whatever the new trendy Leftist term for them is today -- say that you can't invade people's private communications without committing a crime, does anyone other than shrill Leftists really take that seriously, really think that someone who does what the law says you can't do should get in trouble or -- more absurdly still -- be arrested?"