It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission. . . Overheard on Yammer
David Bromwich warns against the left’s complacency and presents a deeper concern: inhabiting a society without opposition... Democracy without Oposition
Planet Is Screwed, Says Bank That Screwed the Planet New Republic
The 10 most overpaid CEOs in the US - Fast Company – “The median employee at Align Technologies, the company that makes Invisalign, makes $13,180 a year. The CEO makes $41,758,338. That’s a pay ratio of 3,168:1. And if you look at how the company performed over the long term, he was only worth about about $14 million dollars, meaning he was overpaid by some $27 million. That’s according to a new report that compares CEO pay to a company’s total shareholder return, a metric that tracks performance over five years. In the report, “The 100 Most Overpaid CEOs,” the nonprofit As You Sow lists the most egregious examples. The CEO compensation and average employee compensation come from data that corporations now have to disclose to the SEC and are based on data from the most recent fiscal year. The “overpayment” calculation is based on a statistical regression model from the investment services company HIP Investor that looks at what CEOs should have made based on longer-term company performance. Here are the top 10, by the percent they were overpaid…”
The Grounds cafe empire failed to pay $1.6 million in tax but another company owned by its boss spent almost $5 million on a property buying spree.
The Grounds owner buys almost $5m in property despite tax debts
Turns Out It’s Not So Tough To Go From Tragedy To Comedy
Jane Alexander, the 80-year-old actress who has starred in Ibsen, Shakespeare, and Chekhov, and, not incidentally, who was head of the NEA during the (first) culture wars, is onstage again, “eliciting raucous laughter” this time. –The New York Times
- Teaching “On Bullshit” — C. Thi Nguyen and Imree Parma (Utah Valley) share their experiences
- Physicist Sean Carroll regularly interviews philosophers — recent guests on his Mindscape podcast have included Laurie Paul (Yale), Kwame Anthony Appiah (Princeton), Jenann Ismael (Columbia), & Daniel Dennett (Tufts)
- The force of nonviolence — an interview with Judith Butler (Berkeley) at the Partially Examined Life podcast
- When we seek someone who truly understands us, what are we looking for? — Iskra Fileva (Colorado) has started blogging at Psychology Today
- “We are stuck here now, and we don’t know when we will be free” — Xiao Ouyang, associate professor of philosophy at Wuhan University (via Joel Walmsley)
- The rhetorical trick of using conditional arguments to make pseudoscience seem scientific — Regina Rini (York) in the TLS
- A democracy, but without professional politicians — The New Yorker on “open democracy”, an idea developed by Hélène Landemore
How Google Is Stopping Malicious Office Docs From Targeting Gmail Users - PC Magazine: “At the RSA security conference today, Google offered a rare look into the kinds of malicious attachments hackers will send to Gmail users. It turns out Microsoft Office documents secretly rigged to download malware are in vogue. In recent weeks, about 56 percent of the malicious attachments detected and blocked by Gmail’s filters have been Microsoft Office documents, according to Google’s anti-abuse research leader, Elie Bursztein. These malicious Office documents can often contain “macros,” or series of automated commands in the file. If you enable the macros, the malicious document will be able to download and execute the hacker’s desired malware. The remaining 44 percent of the malicious documents Google will block include Adobe PDF documents, archived files, and HTML-based documents, among others. (By default, Gmail will also prevent users from attaching .exe programs and Javascript files to email messages.) …”
Printing’s Not Dead The $35 Billion Fight Over Ink Cartridges
Bloomberg – America’s onetime innovation icons are wrestling over their biggest remaining piles of money: “The HP 63 Tri-color ink cartridge retails for $28.99 at Staples. Stuffed with foam sponges drenched in a fraction of an ounce of cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes, this bestseller, model No. F6U61AN#140, can spray 36,000 drops per second in the Envy printers made by HP Inc. The 63 Tri-color cartridge may not look like much, but that ink, which needs a refill every 165 pages, is ridiculously valuable. HP’s printer supplies business garnered $12.9 billion in sales last year, and the printer division overall represented 63% of the company’s profits. Here in the year 2020, proprietary ink cartridges remain important enough to spark a fight worth at least $35 billion. With backing from Carl Icahn, Xerox has been trying to buy the much larger HP for what the target says is a laughable bid. On Monday, HP Chief Executive Officer Enrique Lores moved to protect his hold on F6U61AN#140 and its toner brethren. During his report on the company’s latest quarterly earnings, which met Wall Street’s expectations, Lores announced that HP would triple its share buyback program to $15 billion over three years as part of an effort to fend off the hostile takeover. While Lores said he was open to exploring new merger frameworks, he dismissed the size and technology of Xerox Holdings Corp. and stressed that HP already had a winning strategy…”