Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• Retailers have a crime problem. It’s in the numbers: The issue is complex and often clouded by imprecise data. Sometimes from the industry itself. (Retail Dive)
• Guns are seized in U.S. schools each day. The numbers are soaring. Last school year, news reports identified more than 1,150 guns brought to K-12 campuses but seized before anyone fired them, according to an investigation by The Washington Post. That’s more than six guns each day, on average. Nationwide, 1 in 47 school-age children — 1.1 million students — attended a school where at least one gun was found and reported on by the media in the 2022-2023 school year. (Washington Post) see also A third of schools don’t have a nurse. Here’s why that’s a problem. The schools that don’t have a dedicated nurse either share one with other campuses, or don’t have one at all. Meanwhile, the nation is facing high rates of chronic illnesses among K-12 students, such as diabetes and asthma, along with an unprecedented mental health crisis among youth, and school nurses are at the front lines — often, alone.. (CBS News)
• Inside America’s School Internet Censorship Machine: An investigation into internet censorship in US schools found widespread use of filters to censor health, identity, and other crucial information. Students say it makes the web entirely unusable. (Wired)
• In Alabama, another small-town paper hit in ‘open season’ on free press: It’s an increasingly familiar drama: Local authorities go after journalists and publishers of small papers, which find themselves on the First Amendment’s front lines. (Washington Post)
• The Robber Barons of Prison Tech: Meet the name-changing, monopoly-holding, profit-raking companies that control what it’s like to be in prison. (Slate)
• This porn company makes millions by shaming porn consumers. It should be obvious that this model harbors the real risk of extracting money from anyone caught downloading an adult film and even from innocent people who, aware of the difficulty of cleansing one’s reputation of an unwarranted smear, might be coerced into paying a “nuisance-value” settlement. (Los Angeles Times)
• Inside the deadly instant loan app scam that blackmails with nudes: A blackmail scam is using instant loan apps to entrap and humiliate people across India and other countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. At least 60 Indians have killed themselves after being abused and threatened. A BBC undercover investigation has exposed those profiting from this deadly scam in India and China. (BBC)
• America’s epidemic of chronic illness is killing us too soon: After decades of progress, life expectancy — long regarded as a singular benchmark of a nation’s success — peaked in 2014 at 78.9 years, then drifted downward even before the coronavirus pandemic. Among wealthy nations, the United States in recent decades went from the middle of the pack to being an outlier. And it continues to fall further and further behind. (Washington Post) see also Red vs Blue: The Life-and-Death Cost of Political Power: New research shows widening gaps between red and blue states in life expectancy. (American Prospect)
• User Data Has Become a Favorite Police Shortcut: Investigators increasingly use warrants to obtain location and search data from Google, even for nonviolent cases—and even for people who had nothing to do with the crime. (Businessweek)
• Sentenced to Life for an Accident Miles Away: A draconian legal doctrine called felony murder has put thousands of Americans—disproportionately young and Black—in prison. (New Yorker)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business with Michael Rockefeller, Co-Chief Investment Officer and co-founder of Woodline Partners, managing $7 billion in assets. Launched in 2019 with around $2 billion in initial assets, it was one of the fastest-growing emerging funds over the past few years. The hedge fund implements a market neutral equity strategy, focused on generating “idiosyncratic alpha” and “avoiding systemic risk factors.” Previously, he worked as a Portfolio Manager at Citadel Global Equities and as an Analyst at Millennium Management.
More than 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023 — a new record.
Source: Nature
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Off to vacation this week! Very light posting for the rest of the year!
