Making the Right Difference, Right Now

“An extraordinary people and he wasn’t yet at home with them. One half seemed caught in a caste system which defeated him, the other in a dislike of it which at times came close to malice. In any other country he’d have called it a civil war.”
~ William Haggard, The Power House

Important link to be shared with Cheryl and Max before they board the cruise of the Pacific Islands (Marco Polo Aka Parliamentary clerk Russell Crowe (sick ) Antibacterial soap is a lie, just like everything else in our lives via MarrickVille Marketwatch

News from the Profession. PwC Has Had Enough Courtroom Fun (Caleb Newquist, Going Concern)

GOOD – “Every Sunday since March 13, Alyssa Harad has been hosting the weekly Flower Report (#FlowerReport) on Twitter. 

News from the Profession. New SEC Rules Have Made GAAP Great Again (in Press Releases Anyway) (Caleb Newquist, Going Concern)

Excellent piece entited "Paper Pushers" by Tim Carney:
Five years ago, a new quirky-sounding consumer-rights group set up shop in a sleepy corner of Capitol Hill. “Consumers for Paper Options is a group of individuals and organizations who believe paper-based communications are critically important for millions of Americans,” the group explained in a press release, “especially those who are not yet part of the online community.”

Some U.S. Drones Are Getting Longer Leashes MIT Technology Review. What could go wrong?

Dog owners already knew this

By Any Means or None LRB

The Speech Every High School Principal Should Give

"Beneath Louis Vuitton's inability to take a joke, a serious First Amendment question": Alison Frankel's "On the Case" from Thomson Reuters News & Insight has this post

Performance.gov: Long-Term Strategy Needed to Improve Website Usability, GAO-16-693: Published: Aug 30, 2016. Publicly Released: Aug 30, 2016:  “The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), General Services Administration (GSA), and the Performance Improvement Council (PIC) took several steps to improve the usefulness ofPerformance.gov, a website intended to serve as the public window to the federal government’s goals and performance. However, their actions do not fully meet selectedDigitalgov.gov requirements for federal websites (which are based on relevant statutes, regulations, and executive orders) and do not fully meet provisions of the GPRA Modernization Act of 2010 (GPRAMA):

• In accordance with Digitalgov.gov, GSA, on behalf of OMB, issued a usability test in September 2013. The test identified issues with the website’s accessibility, purpose, data visualizations, and search function. However, OMB and GSA have not addressed all of the test’s findings.
• OMB and the PIC are tracking 18 of 24 website performance measures required byDigitalgov.gov, but have not set goals for those measures. In June 2013, GAO recommended they track measures and set goals for those measures. However, those recommendations remain open.
• OMB has not met all of the GPRAMA public reporting requirements for Performance.gov. In particular, GAO identified several areas where OMB is not fully meeting agency priority and cross-agency priority goal public reporting requirements. OMB and PIC staff told GAO they are aware that Performance.gov is not fully GPRAMA compliant, but in moving forward, are focused on ensuring its compliance…”

Information designer Edward Tufte has said “to clarify add detail” and while I appreciate and often use the sentiment, the detail can be the devil. Across many projects I’m involved in I encounter the same thing – organisations are drowning in words Organisations are drowning in words ...

Fitter, dumber, more productive New Statesman

The Things You Might Be Doing That Will Force Your IT Guy to Start Spying on You Corinne New York Magazine

“Figure out your childhood passion, because there’s something there from your childhood that you can turn into a career.” Telling the Right Stories at the Right Time

“18F, which is part of the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Service, is building an authentication platform to make online interactions with the U.S. government simple, efficient and intuitive. This platform will be a service shared by agencies to streamline logging in and to allow the public to securely access personal information and federal government services. Federal agencies will be able to integrate our platform with their existing services as they choose…”

Intentionally or unintentionally, poorly crafted or outdated laws and technical standards threaten to undermine security, privacy and the viability of our most promising new technologies and networks, such as Bitcoin and Blockchain. We should vigilantly be reviewing and revising laws and standards for the public good and working to prevent the creation of fragile and cumbersome systems designed to comply with these poorly crafted or outdated laws. In this post, I discuss the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s Anti-Circumvention provision, Digital Rights Management, Anti-Money Laundering Law, Know Your Customer Laws and security backdoors.

Anti Money Landering backdoors


Every year there is a freak out over some decision from the U.S. Supreme Court. Sometimes, it's mostly a tempest in a teapot and that seems to be the case with this year's big paroxysm, Birchfield v. North Dakota, JUN16, USSC No. 14-1468

The Great 2016 U.S. Supreme Court Freakout: DUI's

Smarter Data: Saudis and Extremism: ‘Both the Arsonists and the Firefighters’ New York Times. Margarita: “This is good reporting; the question is what took NYT so long to notice…”

Jonathan Cohen has written wonderful pieces on The Immorality of Denial, 79 Tul. L. Rev. 903 (2005) and The Culture of Legal Denial, 84 Neb. L. Rev. 247 (2005), describing how it has become “normal practice within our legal culture is for injurers to deny responsibility for harms they commit.”  When defendants settle lawsuits, they often include explicit language refusing to accept responsibility.

Executive Briefing – McKinsey Quarterly August 2016: ” What do my customers want? The savviest executives are asking this question more frequently than ever, and rightly so. Leading companies understand that they are in the customer-experience business, and they understand that how an organization delivers for customers is beginning to be as important as what it delivers. This CEO guide taps the expertise of McKinsey and other experts to explore the fundamentals of customer interaction, as well as the steps necessary to redesign the business in a more customer-centric fashion and to organize it for optimal business outcomes. For a quick look at how to improve the customer experience, see the summary infographic…”  

Without Prejudice and Privilege: Should Larry Tribe Be Disbarred For His Trump Tweet?

Seriously? I don't think anyone believes that the identity of a lawyer's client, or a client's lawyer, is privileged information, outside of special circumstances (such as where disclosing the representation would effectively disclose some other confidential fact). Lawyers advertise their high-profile representations all the time. Privilege is generally limited to the actual advice provided by the lawyer, or the confidential information communicated by the client to the lawyer in seeking the advice. It is a massive stretch to suggest that the mere existence of a preliminary conversation -- without even hiring the lawyer -- would be privileged. (Note: I'm using "privilege" here to refer to confidential information that the lawyer is prohibited from disclosing under ethics rules, which is generally coextensive with the set of information that would be privileged from disclosure to a third party in a legal proceeding.)

Should Larry Tribe Be Disbarred For His Trump Tweet?

 
  Managing the Shadow Economy 2010-

How can cities boost their night-time economies? Prospect

The Fed’s Disastrous Facebook Page Launch American Banker 

Private Placement: European Companies Issue Debt Simply Because the ECB will Buy That Debt Michael Shedlock 

“Free at last, with no money troubles, and able to love, to sing, and to die,” Paul Gauguin wrote about Polynesia, as a member of the "exote school of art"... Joseph O’Neill on ‘The Glamour of Strangeness’

The political culture that is Russian

To Crack Down on Securities Fraud, States Reward Whistle-Blowers Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times

Diary — Jeremy Paxman

LawProfBlawg, Humble Is The Path Of The Law Professor: I remember back when I started in academia.  Then, giants roamed the earth.  Professors who were very humble, yet who had done great things.

The first way we kill stories is by drowning  the audience in detail because we don’t have the distance to see what’s important – essential – and what isn’t.
Why Aren't More Speakers Telling Stories?

“I am the man, the very fat man, who waters the workers’ beer.” [Science Daily, prompting Christopher Snowdon’s recollection of that line of song]

Who needs the Argument Clinic?

Yesterday Harvard law professor Larry Tribe sent out a tweet brusquely dismissing the IRS targeting episode as a debunked non-scandal. I and others promptly took issue with him, and pointed him toward the August 5 D.C. Circuit opinion laying out the scandal’s genuineness. (I also referenced my Ricochet article summarizing the decision and citing the Inspector General report from Treasury.)
Within an hour or two Prof. Tribe sent this tweet very graciously conceding error, along with several similar

“This consultation is about a proposal to extend HMRC’s bulk data-gathering powers to include customer data held by money service businesses (MSBs). This data will help HMRC to identify non-compliant customers trading in the hidden economy.”

HMRC Consultation: Tackling the hidden economy: extension of data-gathering powers to money service businesses 

HMRC Consultation: Tackling the hidden economy: conditionality

HMRC Consulation: Tackling the hidden economy: sanctions 

 
Jim Maule, What Happens When the IRS Tax Data Repository Contains Unverified Data? “In other words, there is insufficient control over what goes into the centralized taxpayer information database. Worse, of the 18 source systems that TIGTA was able to examine, 14 had “no validation of data for accuracy, completeness, and reliability.”
 
ABA Journal: What 'Hamilton' Teaches Lawyers About Framing a Story, by Philip N. Meyer (Vermont): Hamilton is a smash. We all know the story by now. Lin-Manuel Miranda recasts Ron Chernow’s life of Alexander Hamilton as a rap musical tipping the white elitist world of the founders upside down, reinventing the story with a freakishly compelling score and a superb cast of beautiful and talented multi-ethnic actors and actresses. We embrace Miranda’s adaptation because, despite the “tragic” ending, the story is basically an affirmative story wedded to a reimagined version of American history fitting our own time—a narrative that speaks to our best vision of ourselves. Miranda’s Hamilton is the outsider’s assimilationist story, a genius-immigrant’s heroic self-reinvention—as someone with the artistic ability to employ and transform words into the currency of ideas and ideals rising on the meritocratic intellectual and social landscape of the new America. Hamilton’s ascendency, like his hubristic downfall, occurs at the precise historical moment when the country was freeing itself and reinventing itself too.

Miranda’s own genius, and what lawyers can most learn from him, is in his fearless adaptations.

How many of us are red in the face and swearing on the inside when we come across red tapes and all those promotion with Peter's Principle tattooed on the forehead of the so called leaders ...


TaxGrrrl, More Than 100 Law Professors To Congress: Impeaching The IRS Commissioner Is A Bad Idea

New York Times, Report Accuses Mexico’s President of Plagiarism in Law School Thesis:

Already reeling from corruption scandals and a declining security situation, President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico was accused on Sunday of plagiarizing nearly a third of his law school thesis, according to a report by an investigative journalist. ...

David Brunori, Judge Not, That Ye Be Not Judged (Tax Analysts Blog). “In any event, the best adjudicatory system for state and local taxes is an independent tax court whose members are appointed for a set term and can’t be removed from office without cause. The adjudicators shouldn’t work for the Department of Revenue or any other tax agency.” Iowa has no such independent tax appeals agency

Kay Bell, National Taxpayer Advocate wants Congress involved in IRS Future State planning: 

Nina E. Olson has previously raised questions about increased computerization of IRS customer service options. She’s concerned that those not comfortable with conducting business on a computer or other digital device will be inconvenienced or worse. Those with limited broadband service also could suffer in a move to a more digital IRS, said the Taxpayer Advocate.
And now Olson is calling on Congress to look into the proposal, which the IRS has dubbed its Future State plan.

Joseph Henchman,  Tax Increases to Close Budget Gaps Up for Debate in New Mexico and Kansas; Strike Force to Switch Off Fake IRS Robocalls (Tax Policy Blog). Joseph’s “lunch links” covers the ongoing Kansas fiscal disaster, scam “IRS” calls, and the burning of the White House on August 24, 1814 by the British. I don’t think they still do house calls.

But blogging wasn’t just for the young ...

How Does the Language of Headlines Work? The Answer May Surprise You:
Sex and socialism. Women formed the bedrock of the Engels-Marx alliance. For Eleanor Marx, Muriel Lester, and others, the revolution was personal... Nature of the blogging revolution 

Bucknell economics professor now leads an Ethiopian rebel arms

Many colleagues at work such as Mark Vale were on the CIA side of the Afganistan war in 1979, while I was on the KGB side of the conflict in Czechoslovak Socialist Army ... In thirty seven years life just changes so much under the bridges of cold war rivers: One wonders where paranoid Ethiopian fighters on all sides of the bizzare conflict will end up in 37 years ...

Google has created a Doodle to celebrate the 37th anniversary of the publication of The Neverending Story. Michael Ende’s children’s fantasy novel was first published in Germany back in 1979. The English translation followed in 1983

The Call LA Times  Ever wonder what it would be like to be framed? This six-part series tells all

For your weekend, here’s a deep dive into the tale of the pair of lawyers who lost a massive civil suit over framing a PTA rival. [LA Times]

Taunted for being pretty, woman burns face

It's an empty gesture. But so are most symbolic policies, and yet that meaninglessness does not make them unimportant Stereotype threat

Hypocrite! First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend's eye.

 Some sins are as motes, while others are as beams; some as a gnat, others as a camel. Not that there is any sin little; if it be a mote, or splinter, it is in the eye; if a gnat, it is in the throat; both are painful and dangerous, and we cannot be easy or well till they are got out. That which charity teaches us to call but a splinter in our brother's eye, true repentance and godly sorrow will teach us to call a beam in our own... Conservatives criticize Michelle Obama for bare arms yet stay silent on Melania Trumps nude poses ...

Should you be especially suspicious of inspirational stories in psychology?

Jeremy Corbyn just announced a plan to end one of the biggest scams in modern history Canary

Health Care Is a Right, Not a Business CAF

Google now testing search shortcuts new circletastic Media Drgn

The explanatory power of marrying up and marrying down, for men vs. women

Ying Sa, I ate a goldfish (IowaBiz.com). If you think you’ve had a tough time getting to where you are, meet someone who had it tougher

“[This will be] the first time Wired (or any other magazine) has been guest-edited by a sitting president. The theme of the issue: Frontiers. … For this completely bespoke issue, he wants to focus on the future – on the next hurdles that humanity will need to overcome to move forward.” President Barack Obama Wired

“Artist and author Dennis Cooper re-launched his popular blog on Monday after months of legal disputes with Google, whom many accused of censorship. The artist posted a message on the blog’s Facebook account on Friday to explain Google’s reasoning for erasing his 14-year-old blog.” (It was a 10-year-old post.) Dennis Coooper DCS blog relaunched google censorship

What Were Blogs?

The demise of Gawker.com also marks the end of the 

utopian promise of blogging. Here's what killed them.

For the media-savvy members of a certain generation, who came of age as news consumers in the era of 9/11 and are now facing the prospect of middle age, the shuttering of Gawker.com marks more than just the end of an entertaining site that focused on media and political commentary (whose merits and sins can be endlessly debated). With Gawker gone, we have to face the prospect of the end of blogging and of the utopian enthusiasms of our youth.
We were all bloggers, or so it seemed circa 2003. Blogging was where those of us who didn’t trust the Bush administration’s push to war got alternative takes from Juan Cole, Marcy Wheeler, and other informed sources. Or if we were conservatives, blogging was where we fisked (remember fisking?) the lamestream media. Blogging was where a new wave of feminism was born on sites like Jezebel (a surviving Gawker Media property), launching writers like Irin Carmon and Anna Holmes. But blogging wasn’t just for the young. It also energized older writers (Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus) and gave them a much larger audience than they’d had before.
At the height of the blogging craze, there were even utopian claims made on its behalf: Blogging would give us (finally) the Republic of Letters that the Enlightenment promised, a world where everyone could be a writer and find an audience—an interconnected network where, in true McLuhanesque fashion, a divided world would become a unified global village. Thanks to blogs, journalist Trevor Butterworth wrote in the Financial Times in 2006, “power was shifting from the gatekeepers of the traditional media to a more open, fluid information society.” 
When protests broke out in Iran in 2009, conservative writer Michelle Malkin framed it in terms of the revolutionary potential of blogging: “In the hands of freedom-loving dissidents, the micro-blogging social network is a revolutionary samizdat—undermining the mullah-cracy’s information blockades one Tweet at a time.” Malkin was, of course, right to see Twitter as “micro-blogging,” but what she perhaps didn’t realize at that time was that Twitter and other social media were about to render traditional blogging old fashioned.

Blogging was fun, and it broke the rules. As founder Nick Denton said in a 2013 interview, “The basic concept of Gawker was two journalists in a bar telling each other a story that’s much more interesting than whatever hits the papers the next day.” Which is another way of saying Gawker tried to harness the conversational informality of blogging, the way the medium bypassed the codified rules of print journalism. But Gawker is dead, undone (depending on which interpretation of history you believe) either by its own hubris or by the vindictiveness of its billionaire foe, Peter Thiel.
A funeral for blogging itself feels not far off—or at least a mid-life crisis. Blogs still exist, but they lack the youthful vigor of 2003. “It seems like the new young people aren’t very interested in blogging,” Kelly Conaboylamented Tuesday at The Hairpin. It’s not so much that blogging is dead, but that it’s splintered beyond recognition. Almost every publication you can think of has blogs, but the impact is very different than the blogs of yore.

The most successful bloggers are now running corporate media empires like Vox, or working for the mainstream media.

The most successful bloggers are now running corporate media empires like Vox, or working for the mainstream media. The first cohort of feminist bloggers have moved on to media development and books. Conservative spleen has reinvented itself as Breitbart.com and Nazi-themed anime memes from the alt-right. Mickey Kaus is now a Trump-thumping Twitter ranter. Andrew Sullivan is an aging rock star, largely quiet although he occasionally appears in New York magazine, where he’s a contributing editor, to warn about the dangers of Democracy or to live-blog political events.

What were blogs?

Rebels with a Cause: Why are movie stars paid more than firefighters?

The artist's duty is to reflect the times... a blend of soul jazz, classical and blues. Nina Simone: You only have to hear her once. No one sounds like her except her

The Call LA Times  Ever wonder what it would be like to be framed?

This six-part series tells all ... memories of the bear pit ;-)

Showcasing creativity programming and presenting first nations performing arts

 “Astoundingly, though, more than a quarter of all ticket buyers still decide what film to see only after showing up…” (NYT)

The more some people go, to movies the more other people want go too. It is something to share and talk about.  Movies as a shared experience: From the latest JPE

Yellow Skies presented by Bakers Dozen Theatre Company

MElbournefringe.com.au (Everyone is Face Swapping with Gabriella Imrichova)

 

Why are movie stars paid more than firefighters?

Via Marginal Velvet Revolution ...

Here’s an excellent letter from Don Boudreaux. I admit he had me at the title, Thinking At the Margin: It’s Revolutionary:

…I agree that most people are troubled that the likes of Tom Brady and Jennifer Lawrence earn far higher pay than does any firefighter or school teacher.  But this reality reflects not people’s correct understanding of a failing economy but people’s incorrect understanding of a successful economy.  It reflects also a failure of economists to better teach basic economics to the general public.  So let me ask: would you prefer to live in a world in which the number of people who can skillfully fight fires and teach children is large but the number of people who can skillfully play sports and act is very tiny, or in a world in which the number of people who can skillfully fight fires and teach children is very tiny but the number of people who can skillfully play sports and act is large?
I’m sure that you’d much prefer to live in a world in which skills at fighting fires and teaching children are more abundant than are skills at playing sports and acting.  Precisely because saving lives and teaching children are indeed far more important on the whole than is entertainment, we are extraordinarily fortunate that the numbers of our fellow human beings who possess the skills and willingness to save lives and to teach children are much greater than are the numbers who can skillfully play sports and act.
The lower pay of fire fighters and school teachers simply reflects the happy reality that we’re blessed with a much larger supply of superb first-responders and educators than we are of superb jocks and thespians.  Were it the other way around, then while we’d be better entertained with more top-flight sporting events and movies, all but the richest amongst us would suffer significantly greater risks of being unable to educate our children and of dying in house fires and from other mishaps.