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Saturday, August 10, 2019

Dirty Money Spotlights Role of Family Offices as Enablers


“Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” 

~Leonard Cohen



“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov


AI lie detector developed for airport security FT. “One challenge is false positives: a machine might register as suspicious a microexpression if someone is in pain or confused.” Highly unlikely in airports.




July 19 was a red letter day.  Series Three of my favourite Netflix show, La Casa de Papel – Money Heist.  Welcome back The Professor, Nairobi, Tokyo, Rio and (spoiler alert) the charismatic Berlin.  Rio is captured and Tokyo turns to The Professor for help.  The band is back in town

Wall Street Journal op-ed: The Seven Leadership Secrets of Great Team Captains, by Sam Walker (author, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force That Creates the World’s Greatest Teams(2018))


Let’s imagine that Dr. Frankenstein gave you the keys to his laboratory and that it was your mission to build the perfect captain for a sports team. Maybe you would start with the donor body of a freak talent—a superstar with transcendent skills and abundant charisma. You’d then probably want to inject qualities such as eloquence, diplomacy, institutional fealty and dedication to the highest principles of sportsmanship.
Conventional wisdom suggests that these are the key traits of a superior captain. But are they really?

Some years ago, I set out to identify the greatest teams in sports history across the world, from the National Basketball Association to international field hockey, and to see what, if anything, they had in common. In the end, only 16 unambiguously outstanding teams made the cut. The list included several teams that were familiar to me and some that weren’t.


Rebecca M. Kysar (Fordham), Dynamic Legislation, 167 U. Pa. L. Rev. 809 (2018):
To overcome congressional gridlock, lawmakers have developed devices that, under certain conditions, provide easier paths to policy change. Procedural mechanisms may eliminate the threat of filibuster and other barriers to legislating. Laws may prompt Congress to act through sunset dates, penalties like sequestration, or other undesirable policy outcomes. Alternatively, the legislative product itself may spontaneously update without further action by Congress, a category I label “dynamic legislation.” For instance, during consideration of recent tax legislation, lawmakers proposed that certain tax cuts be automatically ratcheted down if the bill failed to generate sufficient economic growth and that delayed tax increases not go into effect if revenue hurdles were met.



“A Finnish company is saying that they have managed to create “food out thin air”—and it could be hitting out grocery store shelves within the next two years.
The engineers at Solar Foods have succeeded in making a protein powder using only CO2, water, vitamins, and renewable electricity.
The powder, which they have called Solein, was created using technology that was developed by NASA. It reportedly looks and tastes just like wheat flour, except it is made up of 50% protein.”  Link here.
Ben Carson still underrated.  And this start-up wants to put a tiny house in your backyard.