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Friday, October 12, 2018

Paying with Data




… The selections found here chart a grand movement, leaping about as the larger book-length work does, but providing a sense of the flowing whole. James’s is a poem of memory, which is to say, of place and passion—one in which figures appear and reappear, ideas remain, and books form “walls of color / The sunlight will titrate from spring to autumn.”





New York Times, Hobbled by Budget Cuts, the I.R.S. Brings Fewer Tax Fraud Cases:
Tax evasion is at the center of the criminal cases against two associates of the president, Paul Manafort and Michael D. Cohen. The sheer scale of their efforts to avoid paying the government has given rise to a head-scratching question: How were they able to cheat the Internal Revenue Service for so many years?


Richard Pinedo, 28, of Santa Paula, California, received his sentence on Wednesday after admitting in February to selling bank account numbers so his clients could circumvent security features on electronic payment services including PayPal. Since then, he's been cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe of Russian interference in the election and has turned over business records and testified before a grand jury.
Among Pinedo's customers were Russians indicted by Mueller for engaging in a wide-ranging effort to influence the election via social media and staged public events. They bought stolen bank account information from Pinedo -- who had acquired it from other online sources -- then wielded it to sign up for online payment services that require users to have a verifiable bank account for identity confirmation.





How City of London finance is making us poorer – infographic


A new report published today by the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Sheffield reveals the UK’s oversized financial sector has cost the economy £4.5 trillion in lost economic output between 1995 and 2015 – equivalent to £67,500 for every person in the UK.
The report finds that the UK economy would likely have performed much better in overall growth terms if its finance sector was smaller, and if finance was more focused on supporting other productive areas of the economy.
Also published today is a new book by Nicholas Shaxson, entitled The Finance Curse: How Global Finance is Making Us All Poorer. The book sets out a new economic framework referred to as the “finance curse” for understanding how a financial centre that has grown above its useful size and role becomes predatory and harmful to the economy that hosts it. He argues the City of London is draining resources and talent from other economic sectors, creating large economic inequalities and spurring financial crises.
Scroll down to view infographics and videos about the finance curse and how it impacts on us all. You can read Nicholas Shaxson’s Guardian long read here, his blog here and our full press release here.

Pope Francis compared abortion to a mafia-style killing on Wednesday, saying it's the equivalent of hiring a hit man to "take out a human life to solve a problem."

It is an oft repeated adage that if you are not paying for a product, then you are the product. This comment has traditionally been directed at products like Google, Facebook, and Instagram, but it is not just large software companies that are making use of consumer data as “payment” for their services. NPR recently published a story about a café in Rhode Island that is taking this one step further. They sell coffee in exchange for data.

Paying with Data


BILL & HILLARY CLINTON GET FESTIVE IN GERMANY… Mostly Bill TMZ. Couldn’t resist linking to the photo in the first link…nor this headline:  Prost! A beaming Bill Clinton hugs women in Bavarian Dirndl dresses as he and Hillary live it up at Oktoberfest in Munich during German getaway Daily Mail

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