Yet to have held something in your hands
is worth the bitterness of losing it.
(The Observatory, p. 161)
IF YOU’VE EVER turned to the dark side, joked about the government creating a Death Star, called yourself a Jedi, or compared anyone to Darth Vader, you’re fluent in “Star Wars” as a second language. Since Charter 77 in 1977, George Lucas’s sci-fi fantasy has done more than create stunning visuals, Joseph Campbell-type mythology, and movies of varied quality: It’s been a prolific source of new terms and expressions, many of which are now commonplace Star Wars lexicon
Cost transparency and shame pricing. And secret data, by John Cochrane
Crikey! Call it a guilty pleasure, but there’s almost nothing Crikey does that gets as much recurring interest as our media couples list. But we haven’t updated our list of media power couples since 2010, so we thought we’d use the January lull to see about that.
The last time we did this, the list had more than 250 media couples Dragons and media couples a significantly updated crikey list
College party culture is worse than you think especially if Thomas is around ...
The new Europe: Poland wants more US and less EU Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten
Is fame fair?
Is Media Dragon the best whistler in the world? “We cannot have mushy lips and be a champion!”
Measures to Control the Abuse of Offshore Tax Havens
“Finishing every book you start is not just annoying — it’s counter-productive. There will never ever be enough time to read every worthwhile book. Even spending almost every spare second reading, there were titles I returned to the library, spines woefully uncracked.”
Vox
Largest ever ‘age map’ traces galactic history BBC
In Chicago, distrust toward mayor has turned ‘personal’ Washington Post. Donna M: “Couldn’t be more deserved.”
Here is Fermat’s Library:
New York Times editorial, Political Dark Money Just Got Darker:
Rob Bray (Australian National University), 100
Years of the Minimum Wage and the Australian Tax and Transfer System:
What Has Happened, What Have We Learnt and What are the Challenges?
Washington Post: A Harvard Medical School Professor Makes the Case for the Liberal Arts and Philosophy, by David Silbersweig (Harvard Medical School):
 |
| Thomas #1 Again ... |
Is Media Dragon the best whistler in the world? “We cannot have mushy lips and be a champion!”
Measures to Control the Abuse of Offshore Tax Havens
“Finishing every book you start is not just annoying — it’s counter-productive. There will never ever be enough time to read every worthwhile book. Even spending almost every spare second reading, there were titles I returned to the library, spines woefully uncracked.”
Vox
Compose is among a handful of companies trying to judge potential hires by their abilities, not their résumés Blind hiring
Largest ever ‘age map’ traces galactic history BBC
In Chicago, distrust toward mayor has turned ‘personal’ Washington Post. Donna M: “Couldn’t be more deserved.”
Here is Fermat’s Library:
Fermat’s Library is a platform for illuminating academic papers. Just as Pierre de Fermat scribbled his famous last theorem in the margins, professional scientists, academics and citizen scientists can annotate equations, figures and ideas and also write in the margins. Every week we send you a new paper annotated by the community.Here is Fermat’s Library on John Nash on ideal money in the Media Dragon Economies ...
New York Times editorial, Political Dark Money Just Got Darker:
As
untold millions of dollars pour into the shadowy campaign troughs of
the presidential candidates, voters need to be reminded of the rosy
assumptions of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that legitimized the new spending frenzy. ...
The
court majority in the 5-to-4 decision should have been watching this
month when the Republican-controlled Congress, which has firmly bottled
up all campaign disclosure legislation, voted to further cripple
disclosure at two of its most vital points.
In
the new budget bill, Republicans inserted a provision blocking the
Internal Revenue Service from creating rules to curb the growing abuse
of the tax law by thinly veiled political machines posing as “social
welfare” organizations. These groups are financed by rich
special-interest donors who do not have to reveal their identities under
the tax law. So much for effective disclosure at the I.R.S.
Washington Post: A Harvard Medical School Professor Makes the Case for the Liberal Arts and Philosophy, by David Silbersweig (Harvard Medical School):
Recently,
when philosophy and America’s higher education system were devalued by
Sen. Marco Rubio during the Republican presidential debate and in
subsequent statements, my thoughts returned to my sophomore year at
Dartmouth, when I went back to my childhood dentist during a school
break.
In
the chit-chat of the checkup, as I lay back in the chair with the
suction tube in my mouth, he asked: “What are you majoring in at
college?” When I replied that I was majoring in philosophy, he said:
“What are you going to do with that?”
“Think,” I replied.
And what a continuously giving gift philosophy has been.
Wall Street Journal: Yahoo’s Mayer Can Still Be a CEO Hero: No Longer Expected to Produce Miracles, She Can Win for Shareholders by Beating the IRS, by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.:
Ms.
Mayer is now regarded as a failure because she didn’t levitate the
stock, leading to an outpouring of news stories detailing her missed
appointments, interest in haute couture and habit of speaking in
riddles. Her real failing, though, was not getting lucky on any of her
acquisitions, aimed at boosting Yahoo’s eyeball traffic and revenues.
...
Following up on my previous posts, The Problem Is Not Just IRS Lawyers; The Problem Is All Federal Government Lawyers and A Cincinnati IRS Lawyer Speaks: We Are Democrats, But Nonpartisan Democrats: The Daily Caller News Foundation, IRS Employees Fuel Democratic Candidates, Causes:
A Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of OpenSecrets.org data found
Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employees have backed Democrats over
Republicans by 2-1 in their political donations over the last 25 years.
Wall Street Journal: Yahoo’s Mayer Can Still Be a CEO Hero: No Longer Expected to Produce Miracles, She Can Win for Shareholders by Beating the IRS, by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.:
Ms.
Mayer is now regarded as a failure because she didn’t levitate the
stock, leading to an outpouring of news stories detailing her missed
appointments, interest in haute couture and habit of speaking in
riddles. Her real failing, though, was not getting lucky on any of her
acquisitions, aimed at boosting Yahoo’s eyeball traffic and revenues.
...
New York Times: The Bad Fortune of Some Ultrawealthy People, by Paul Sullivan:
Dov
Charney, the founder of the now-bankrupt retailer American Apparel, and
Sam Wyly, who has bought and sold a dozen companies over the decades,
from computer companies to steak houses, were both larger-than-life
characters with checkbooks to match.
The biggest sea-dwelling crocodile ever found has turned up in the Tunisian desert, according to theNational Geographic
How do others see Paulina? She is, Julian puts it frankly, “a benevolent monster who fucks well.” “A sociopath,” says someone else. On a student trip to Norway, Paulina meets Fran Hixon, and the two hit it off, even if Fran understands that friendship with Paulina tends to be intense and exclusive. “She couldn’t visibly socialise with others on the trip.” Also, “being with Paulina was like being under Soviet rule […] but it was worth it.” For Paulina’s part, Fran’s attention means she no longer needs her old friends, Sadie (who “loved pictures of cats and dogs but not the creatures themselves”) and Allison.
The book proceeds by way of social situations, from parties where “everyone was inside the same big mood” to brittle one-to-ones between the recurring trio of Paulina, Fran and Julian. Everyone is self-centred in the most obvious way, never thinking about anything directly outside their own lives, and feelings are only expressed in order to further selfish ends. “Sincerity felt queer.” Glaser, in other words, has no desire to make her characters likeable, and this is what gives Paulina & Fran its astringency and edge. It also observes acutely its characters’ worst flaws, which chime so strongly only because they seem recognisable to us. “Paulina didn’t just want their approval; she wanted them to be jealous.” Sometimes the most enjoyable passages of bad character are enjoyable because of, not despite, the cartoonish awfulness of the sentiments, as when Paulina attends the funeral of an acquaintance, Eileen:
If Paulina had to die one day, as every woman had before her, she liked to think her funeral would outdo this one in elegance and expense. There would be swans, and celebrities, and a river of tears. The gods would hover. Horns would sound. Just a glimpse of this eventual funeral left Paulina feeling ill. No event, no matter how impressive, could diminish the loss of Paulina’s existence. Tears filled Paulina’s eyes and she dedicated them to Eileen. Poor Eileen. If anyone wrote her biography, it would be very short *Pauline Fran
Pre-crime has arrived. And if you think it’s hard getting your credit record corrected, it’s a piece of cake compared to fixing errors in your threat score. Plus it’s not hard to imagine how threat scores can be used to deter certain types of activity, say like visiting certain parts of the world, or watching deemed-to-be-radical documentaries.
By Sarah Burris. Originally published at Alternet
Police have found a new way to legally incorporate surveillance and profiling into everyday life. Just when you thought we were making progress raising awareness surrounding police brutality, we have something new to contend with. The Police Threat Score isn’t calculated by a racist police officer or a barrel-rolling cop who thinks he’s on a TV drama; it’s a computer algorithm that steals your data and calculates your likelihood of risk and threat for the fuzz.
Beware is the new stats-bank that helps officers analyze “billions of data points, including arrest reports, property records, commercial databases, deep Web searches and…social-media postings” to ultimately come up with a score that indicates a person’s potential for violence, according to a Washington Post story. No word yet on whether this meta data includes photos and facial recognition software. For example would an ordinary person, yet to commit a crime, be flagged when seen wearing a hoodie in a gated Florida community.