Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Journalism and Corporations

Of course the biggest mafia in Russia has always been the government; in Soviet times, the Communist Party, and now a circle of former KGB and FSB.
~ Martin Cruz Smith

Trust that with time, consistent effort, and perhaps a bit of luck, you too can find yourself in an unexpected career that you adore... Malchkeon took some stunning images of Bra Beach and The rocks around Coogee and Bronte Huge Surf Just Before Divali

At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen reports that:
Stephen M. Bainbridge and M. Todd Henderson. Limited Liability: A Legal and Economic Analysis.  One of this year’s sleeper books, it is probably the best extant treatment of corporate limited liability and one of the best books on the corporation from a law and economics point of view.

The primary reason Washington operators can dictate the terms of engagement with Washington journalists is that the true insiders are few and the journalists are many. In medium-sized towns, the power dynamic is reversed, as the number of journalists is very small and sources are many. This means journalists need not ingratiate themselves in the same way to get a story. Until the Washington press corps is reduced by 90 percent—which won’t happen in our lifetimes—the mortifying dance we see in the Podesta emails will continue.
via Jack Shafer at Politico 

Australian Financial Review journalists have been nominated for excellence in the 2016 Walkley Awards to be announced in Brisbane on December 2. For business journalism the AFR's Neil Chenoweth, Edmund Tadros and Les Hewitt were nominated together with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the ABC's Four Corners for the Panama Papers, a global investigation of how money is used and moved through tax havens. The team revealed 800 Australians were being investigated by the tax office.

Elizabeth Ruth Carter (LSU), Estate Planning for MEdia Dragon Digital Assets: Assigning Tax Basis and Value to Digital Assets:
These materials were prepared in conjunction with the LSU 46th Estate Planning Seminar. They explore the various types of digital assets--including social media (Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, etc.), audiobooks, music and video files, and bitcoin--and the estate planning challenges these assets present.

“Free Speech on Campus: A Challenge of Our Times,” recent speech by University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone


A massive cyberattack knocked out major websites across the internet Business Insider. Let’s hope the upside is that this kills the Internet of Things. But these sites don’t have more than one DNS server, or more accurately, a backup service of some sort? Admittedly, It takes some time for a new DNS to propagate, an in hours, but you’d think that Big Rich Companies That Depend on the Internet would have recognized DNS as a point of vulnerability. Can expert readers pipe up?
Cyber attacks disrupt PayPal, Twitter, other sites Reuters. EM: “Latest IOT-botnet attack … ‘officials refused to comment on several eyewitness reports claiming to have seen a shadowy figure resembling The Putin lurking around Dyn headquarters in the days prior to the attacks’.”
When the Entire Internet Seems to Break at Once Atlantic. Um, Twitter being knocked offline for a few hours is a cause for hysteria only for journalists (and Twitter’s management). Laurse: “Sounds like fishing for more support for war with Russia – “‘Oh noes! Russia broke my internets! Lets nuke the f*ckers!'”
EU Crafting New Security Rules After IoT Debacle PYMNTS (Richard Smith). Closing the gate after the horse has left the barn and is in the next county.

Economic Anxiety and the Limits of Data Journalism James Kwok, Baseline Scenario. Massive takedown of Vox’s Dylan Matthews on his “forget economics, it’s all racism” theory of Trump voters.

Have intellectuals, focusing on the past, ignored the future? The economist Robin Hanson, who has a few ideas about our robot-dominated destiny, thinks so...  Future Tense  
(1) A Bustle writer uses PolitiFact's fact checks and figures out what politicians look like when they lie. (2) An ICFJ/Code for Africa grant will allow Africa Check to develop a promise tracker. (3) Basketball star Manu Ginóbili is a fan of Chequeado. (4) ICYMI, you have until Nov. 7 to submit an automated fact-checking silver bullet. (5) TheJournal.ie gets a politician to 'fess up on an inaccuracy. (6) University of Kansas librarians create a fact-checking guide for students, most of whom are first-time voters. (7) That Vegemite/Marmite Twitter war was not for real. 

The Wall Street Journal reported this week, that is not going to happen:
The technology revolution has delivered Google searches, Facebook friends, iPhone apps, Twitter rants and shopping for almost anything on Amazon, all in the past decade and a half.
What it hasn’t delivered are many jobs. Google’s Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc. had at the end of last year a total of 74,505 employees, about one-third fewer than Microsoft Corp. even though their combined stock-market value is twice as big. Photo-sharing service Instagram had 13 employees when it was acquired for $1 billion by Facebook in 2012.
Hiring in the computer and chip sectors dove after companies shifted hardware production outside the U.S., and the newest tech giants needed relatively few workers. The number of technology startups fizzled. Growth in productivity and wages slowed, and income inequality rose as machines replaced routine, low- and middle-income, human-powered work.
Marc Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sergey Brin and Larry Page don't give a damn about their fellow Americans. Nor does the rest of the Davos elite and the journalists who live to instruct them. And that's why Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders heterodox take on trade has captured the support of so many Americans.
It's also why the outrage industry Adrian Wooldridge derides in this week's Economist is likely to persist. It's not just the supply side factors on which his Schumpeter column focused, important as they are and as cogent as his assessment of them is, but it's also the demand side. As long as the working class is angry and the elite class does nothing but drink champagne on their private jets en route to Davos, there is going to be a market for outrage.


Most people believe it's a journalist’s responsibility to provide facts that correct misinformation uttered by politicians, according to new polling by Pew. In less cheery news, YouGov found that Trump voters were far less likely to trust fact-checkers findings than Clinton voters. Then again, Trump doesn't mind quoting fact-checkers when they side with him, so ¯\_()_/¯.

MM aka Monique McIntosh shares carefully selected (five) 5 thought provoking articles, from different perspectives, to help you focus on what matters... such as "Digital Transformation: Becoming a ‘Forgetting Organisation'" ;-) Going Digital