Ahh, Fall, when the air is crisp and the reads begin to change colors. Pour yourself a tall mug of Joe, and settle in for our longer form weekend reads:
• J&J: The Credo Company (Highline)
• Workers in a World of Continuous Partial Employment — What’s The Future of Work? (Medium)
• A New Front: Can the Pentagon do business with Silicon Valley? (California Sunday) see also The new art of war: How trolls, hackers and spies are rewriting the rules of conflict (TechRepublic)
• Charlie Munger and the Pursuit of Worldly Wisdom (Farnam Street)
• McRevolt: The Frustrating Life of the McDonald’s Franchisee (Bloomberg)
• Mossberg: It’s Time to Free the Smartphone (Re/code)
• Why Is Art Expensive? (Priceonomics)
• Laissez Prayer: The secret history of the 1950s Christian right and its zeal for capitalism. (Democracy)
• 87 Deceased NFL Players Test Positive for Brain Disease (Frontline)
• Life on the Congo (Roads & Kingdoms)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Art Samberg of Pequot Partners.
Stock Buybacks Set Record for 1st Half
Source: Dana Lyons
Smell Something, Say Something: Obamacare, O’Reilly, and full-time jobs
This admonition came to mind, if not to nose, when I heard Fox’s Bill O’Reilly claim that the Affordable Care Act “has made it more difficult to create full-time jobs in America,” (around 2:30 in the video). The figure below, which indexes both full-time and part-time jobs to 100 in 2010, belies his claim …
I’m not going to waste a lot of time fact-checking Fox news, but I smelled something…I said something. And now, let the weekend begin!
“The best defense against bullshit is vigilance. So if you smell something, say something.” —Jon Stewart
”…Boehner blinked. A friend who was privy to the Speaker’s retirement deliberations tells Playbook: “He wanted to avoid winning the [Speaker reelection] vote with help from the Dems. [And, indeed, top Dem sources tell us that Pelosi was prepared to supply the votes.]
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/speaker-john-boehner-retiring-from-congress-at-the-end-of-october-214056
He won’t even reach across the aisle to support his own candidacy!
Tribune sues Rahm without evidence.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-chicago-tribune-sues-rahm-emanuel-met-20150924-story.html
This is how the Republicans operate. Accuse, Investigate. Publicize.
Republicans can’t keep doing this forever. The GOP is the problem in America.
Book Review: ‘$2.00 a Day,’ by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer
…This essential book is a call to action, and one hopes it will accomplish what Michael Harrington’s “The Other America” achieved in the 1960s — arousing both the nation’s consciousness and conscience about the plight of a growing number of invisible citizens. The rise of such absolute poverty since the passage of welfare reform belies all the categorical talk about opportunity and the American dream.
The Great Salad Oil Swindle
September 21, 2015 Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader
Start with a New Jersey businessman who has questionable ethics, add soybean oil, and let it stew in a broth of fraud and greed. Pretty soon you’ve got yourself a nice little scandal.
YELLOW GOLD
In the late 1940s, a combination of several factors led to an enormous increase in the production of soybean oil in the United States. The factors: soybeans are relatively cheap and easy to grow; they produce beans quickly; advances in technology allowed for better extraction of oil from the beans (as well as the production of safer and better-tasting oil); and in the post-World War II economic boom, the demand for products that could be made from soybean oil grew enormously. Those products included nonedible items, such as paint and plastics, and a wide variety of foods and cooking products, including margarine, salad dressings, and cooking oils. Before World War II, the most popular cooking oils in the U.S. were butter, lard, and Crisco, which was made from cottonseed oil. By the 1950s, the United States was the world’s leading soybean oil producer, and by the early 1960s, there was a soybean oil surplus.
Enter Tino De Angelis….
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/09/the-great-salad-oil-swindle/
US Poised To Join Rest Of The World In Adopting Modem ‘Smart Chip’ Credit Cards, But Many Merchants Don’t Have EMV Scanners
http://www.ibtimes.com/us-poised-join-rest-world-adopting-modem-smart-chip-credit-cards-many-merchants-dont-2115555
Washing away the Reagan legacies one at a time.
Want to watch TV repeats?
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Wednesday, 1 April 2009 UK
47 year old television signals bouncing back to Earth
While searching deep space for extra-terrestrial signals, scientists at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico have stumbled across signals broadcast from Earth nearly half a century ago.
Radio astronomer Dr. Venn described how he made the historic discovery after analysing a number of signals originating from the same point in space. “I realised the signal was in the VHF Band and slap bang in the middle of 41-68 MHz. It was obviously old terrestrial television broadcasts, but they seemed to be originating from deep space.” After boosting and digital enhancement the resulting video signals are remarkably clear.
Responding to questions, Dr Venn was at pains to explain that little green men are not showing repeats of old Earth shows. “They are signals that left the Earth about 50 years ago and have bounced off an object or more likely a field of objects some 25 light years away”.
…
http://www.rimmell.com/bbc/news.htm
Almost all .science malicious, .cricket rigged, boffins find .work, .party equally dangerous.
3 Sep 2015 at 06:30, Darren Pauli
Almost every one of the hundreds of thousands of websites in 10 top level domains including all under .review and .zip are malicious, according to research.
More than 95 percent of the hundreds of thousands websites in each of ten top level domains (TLDs) including .country, cricket, .science, and .party are flogging spam, malware, or adware.
The shocking findings published by security firm Blue Coat are part of a review canvassing millions websites requested by its clients of 15,000 businesses and 75 million global users.
….
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/03/blue_coat_domain_report/
Polish doctors save 8,000 people with a fake typhus outbreak,
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-a-fake-typhus-epidemic-saved-a-polish-city-from-the-nazis
Bureaucratic inertia left patterns to identify CIA spies in Russia – not moles?
http://www.salon.com/2015/09/26/how_to_explain_the_kgbs_amazing_success_identifying_cia_agents_in_the_field/
Missing Mass?
http://www.salon.com/2015/09/26/the_milky_ways_missing_mass_partially_found_partner/
Is the Pope an intellectual?
http://ksf.amu.edu.pl/wdioc.pdf
is the VW debacle just a sign of how a top down business ends up? seems that when VW found out the previous diesel engine, that they needed a new one, they told the engineers to do it in 90 days or they would be fired. little wonder they got the mess they ended up with that
Yes be very careful what you incentivize people to do.