Friday, July 14, 2017

I hope you will be treated unfairly, just like MEdia Dragon, so that you will come to know the value of justice


INK BOTTLE“A success that has outlived its usefulness may, in the end, be more damaging than failure.”
Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

So the next time you are tempted to make a snarky 'fake news' quip, instead look up the number of journalists who are killed every year in the quest for the truth. And maybe be big enough to admit that perhaps you simply do not like some of those truths." — Greg Milam, Sky News, in "Time to Spike the 'Fake News' Defence"

“The text-only internet tool Textise is a new way of looking at the Web. It’s an internet tool that removes everything from a web page except for its text. In practice, this means that images, forms, scripts, pretty fonts, they all go, leaving plain text. 
How to use this page:


1) Type or paste the URL of a web page into the box below and click “Textise”. A text only version of the web page will be displayed.
2) Type a search term into the box, select a search engine from the drop-down list, and click “Search”. You will be taken to a text only version of the search results.
Textise will also display search forms on selected sites (for example bbc.co.uk, amazon.com) if enabled on the Options page 
3) Read more 




CRS report via FAS – Foreign Direct Investment in the United States: An Economic Analysis, James K. Jackson, Specialist in International Trade and FinanCe

Report: Republicans think national news media is bad for the country, by an 8 to 1 margin
This SB Nation story has everything: Robots, football and 2.3 million pageviews

News Media Alliance seeks antitrust exemption to negotiate a better deal with Facebook and Google

Ted talk - 10 ways to have a better conversation

U.S. Court of Appeals sides with First Amendment right to video-record police

3 guidelines for effective content on social platforms


Forget an IPO, Coin Offerings Are New Road to Startup Riches WSJ (AF). AF: “This seems crazy, such pure gambling and for what?” I think I can answer that… Yves: “I also can’t believe this is legal. It has to run afoul of blue sky laws.”


EU Prepares “Right to Repair” Legislation to Fight Short Product Lifespans Bleeping Computer (Chuck L). We posted on this but glad to see some outlets in the US take notice.

Supreme Court Justice John Roberts gave the commencement speech at his son’s 9th grade graduation. This section was striking: 

Generations of Texans have spent summer days floating in the clear, cool waters of the Frio River.
Now the commencement speakers will typically also wish you good luck and extend good wishes to you. I will not do that, and I’ll tell you why. From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. 
Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes. 
“Young slung, hung here, showed that a person from here / With a little ambition, just what we can become here / And as the father pass the story down to his son’s ears / Young’ll get younger every year, yeah.” — Jay Z
Earlier this week, Kathryn Rubino suggested in these pages that Chief Justice John Roberts might have thrown some shade at President Donald Trump in the commencement address that Roberts gave at his son’s middle-school graduation from the elite Cardigan Mountain School.
Chief Justice Roberts’s recent speech was picked up by The Washington Post,SCOTUSblogQuartz, and ATL, among numerous other outlets. And for good reason.
At the time it was given, the Chief Justice’s speech didn’t receive much fanfare, but after being recorded and uploaded to YouTube by the school, it received wide praise.
While commencement speakers normally wish their audience immeasurable success, Roberts unconventionally wished Cardigan’s young graduates a bit of a tougher lot in life.
Chief Justice Roberts may have aimed his advice at the kids, and possibly Donald Trump, but surely we as young professionals can learn a thing or two from his wise words as well.
 Here are my top-ten takeaways for law students and young attorneys from last month’s address:

  1. Your success in life is not just about you. It is about your parents (and guardians) and what they have sacrificed to bring you to this point. If you are going to look forward, to figure out where you are going, it is good to know where you have been and to look back as well. It was not just success, but not being afraid to fail that brought you to this point.
  2. From time to time, in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope  that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty.
  3. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time, so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck again, from time to time, so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and the failure of others is not completely deserved either.
  4. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship.
  5. I hope you will be ignored, so you know the importance of listening to others. And I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion.
  6. Whether I wish these things or not, they are going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend on your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.
  7. In a certain sense, you should not be yourself, you should try to become something better. People say “be yourself” because they want you to resist the impulse to conform to what others want you to be. But you can’t be yourself if you don’t know you are. And you can’t learn who you are, unless you think about it.
  8. One important clue to living a good life is to not to try to live ‘the good life.’
  9. The last bit of advice I’ll give you is very simple, but I think it could make a big difference in your life. Once a week, you should write a note to someone, not an email, a note on a piece of paper. It will take you exactly ten minutes. By the end of the school year, you will have sent notes to forty people. Forty people will feel a little more special because you did. And they will think you are very special because of what you did. Now what else is going to carry that dividend during your time at school?
Chief Justice Roberts ended his speech by reading some historic lyrics:
These lyrics are from the great American philosopher Bob Dylan. They are almost fifty years old. He wrote them for his son Jesse, who he was missing while he was on tour.
They list the hopes that a parent might have for a son and for a daughter. They are also good goals for a son and a daughter.
The wishes are beautiful, timeless, and universal. They are good and true,except for one. It is the wish that gives the song its title and its refrain. That wish is a parent’s lament. It is not a good wish. So these are the lyrics from ‘Forever Young,’ by Bob Dylan:
May God bless and keep you always / May your wishes all come true / May you always do for others / And let others do for you / May you build a ladder to the stars / And climb on every rung / May you stay forever young...
The adoration has clearly gone to Macron’s already swollen bonce. He’s acting like a ‘liberal strongman’, says Politico, seemingly intending it as a compliment – he’s setting out to defend the so-called liberal order while garbing himself in the pomp and power of the old French monarchy. On Monday he summoned parliament to the Palace of Versailles, echoing ‘Sun King’ Louis XIV’s pronouncements to the nobility. And his team are talking up his ‘Jupiterian’ approach – a reference to the supreme Roman god, standing above the fray with thunderbolts in hand. 

It’s not just the imagery that’s autocratic. In his Versailles speech, he laid out plans to streamline parliament. He wants to cut a third of MPs from the National Assembly, restrict representatives to two-term tenures, introduce a ‘dose’ of proportional representation, and cut back on unnecessary lawmaking. These tinkering policies may not seem much on the face of it. But as one academic pointed out, all of this will serve to shore up executive power – emboldening bureaucrats over representatives, and filling parliament with newer, less battle-ready MPs.
Macron has styled himself as the successor to de Gaulle, the father of the Fifth Republic who redirected power to the French presidency amid times of imperial crisis and parliamentary gridlock. Under the guise of ‘getting things done’, and pushing through his controversial labour-law reforms, Macron is similarly seeking to disempower the parliament and boost the executive, which already has far fewer checks on it than, say, the US presidency. And yet for all the media fearmongering over Herr Trump, Macron’s machinations seem not to have worried commentators or the global elite.

That is Macron is overrated.  And here are brief remarks from Corey Robin.  Once you understand endogeneity, it should come as not a huge surprise that “the candidate you want” so often ends up resembling “the candidate you don’t want” more than you had expected.