Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
“Clearly there was never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group. [The opening ceremony] tried to celebrate community tolerance,” the Paris 2024 spokesperson Anne Descamps told a press conference. “We believe this ambition was achieved. If people have taken any offence we are really sorry.”
Following a 2018 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, 38 states have legalized sports gambling. We study how this policy has impacted consumer financial health using the state-by-state rollout of legal sports gambling and a large and comprehensive dataset on consumer financial outcomes. Our main finding is that overall, consumers’ financial health is modestly deteriorating as the average credit score in states that legalize sports gambling decreases by roughly 0.3%. The decline in credit score is associated with changes in indicators of excessive debt. We find a substantial increase in bankruptcy rates, debt collections, debt consolidation loans, and auto loan delinquencies. We also find that financial institutions respond to the reduced creditworthiness of consumers by restricting access to credit. These results are stronger for states that allow sports gambling online compared to states that restrict access to in-person betting and larger for young men in low-income counties. Together, these results indicate that the ease of access to sports gambling is harming consumer financial health by increasing their level of debt.
That is from a new paper by Brett Hollenbeck, Poet Larsen, and Davide Proserpio.
Family patriarch, media mogul, nonagenarian and serial groom Rupert Murdoch has been famed for his remarks that he will live forever. He now appears to be aiming for the next best thing – the right to rule from the grave.
For the past nine months, he has been ensconced in an (until now) secret legal battle with three of his children aimed at securing his eldest son Lachlan as his successor to the corporate throne of his media empire.
Yet again , the Murdoch clan is demonstrating that truth can be stranger than fiction. The HBO television series Succession, which is loosely based on the machinations of this dynasty, doesn’t do justice to reality.
Through the decades, Murdoch senior has been no stranger to taking risks, but this latest roll of the dice is next level.
If his legal strategy backfires, the future of the empire could fall to a different heir with a very different plan for its future.
To facilitate his plans, he needs the court to approve a change to the terms of an irrevocable family trust – one which currently splits the controlling stakes in News Corporation and Fox Corp between his four eldest children (Prudence, Elisabeth, Lachlan and James) upon his death. (Rupert’s younger daughters Chloe and Grace have a financial interest, but no voting interest.)
Rupert is arguing in court that only by empowering Lachlan to run the company without interference from his more politically moderate siblings can he preserve its conservative editorial bent, and thus protect its commercial value for all his heirs, according to the New York Times, which obtained legal documents that spewed the contents of the tawdry succession battle.
Unlike most succession battles, Rupert’s move isn’t about money – it’s about power and control. He wants his business empire to continue to reflect his political views by giving control to the child who is most closely cut from his ideological cloth: Lachlan.
If Rupert loses, he has managed to galvanise three of his children into a bloc against Lachlan, which would likely ensure he will not remain on the throne of the Murdoch empire, which controls Fox and an international stable of publishing assets across the US, Britain and Australia.
To execute this legal manoeuvre, Rupert will rely on a narrow provision that enables changes to be made for the sole purpose of benefiting all of its members – the four elder Murdoch children.
Yet again, the Murdoch clan is demonstrating that truth can be stranger than fiction.
Murdoch’s lawyers have argued that he is trying to protect James, Elisabeth and Prudence by ensuring that they won’t be able to moderate Fox’s politics or disrupt its operations with constant fights over leadership, according to the New York Times.
The rationale is that Lachlan will allow media assets like Fox to retain their ultra-conservative political bent, one that has charged their profitability. And in doing so, this will be financially advantageous to his siblings.
It feels like Rupert is mounting a risky argument, given the counterfactual that if Elisabeth or James end up in control, their corporate strategies would diminish the value of Fox and/or News Corp.
Elisabeth in particular has been highly successful in her own business endeavours, and has been viewed by media experts as the most capable of the four children.
Happier days: Rupert with (from left) James, Elisabeth and Lachlan at a private family gathering in London in 2007.CREDIT: GETTY
The trial will begin in September, with the more liberal-leaning Prudence, Elisabeth and James jointly fighting their father’s move. They are being represented together by the same counsel.
Apart from the obvious strain Rupert’s move will place on family relationships, it calls into question whether his actions are necessary.
Over recent decades, allegiances between various family members appear to have changed, but division has been a recurring theme.
James and Elisabeth have previously competed with each other, and Lachlan, to eventually take over the company. James left the company in 2019 and now oversees an investment fund, and Elisabeth runs a successful movie studio, Sister.
Rupert Murdoch, 93, at his most recent wedding to Elena Zhukova in 2024.
Since leaving the family business, James has been vocal in his criticism of parts of the business, and in particular the corrosive impact of the ultraconservative Fox News.
His views may be supported by Elisabeth privately, but she has been scrupulous about not revealing any partisanship.
Prudence, who is most distant from the corporate empire, keeps a low profile, and while there have been suggestions over the years that she is most aligned with Lachlan, she also keeps her private counsel.
Had Rupert not intervened through the courts, it’s possible that Lachlan could have garnered enough sibling support to retain his position after his father’s death.
But if Rupert is unsuccessful, he will probably have ensured that Lachlan will no longer be wearing the crown. That is a very bold roll of the succession dice.
unpaywalled]- This Machine Exposes Privacy Violations. A former Google engineer has built a search engine, WebXray, that aims to find illicit online data collection and tracking—with the goal of becoming “the Henry Ford of tech lawsuits.”…It’s a search engine for rooting out specific privacy violations anywhere on the web. By searching for a specific term or website, you can use WebXray to see which sites are tracking you, and where all that data goes. Its mission, he says, is simple; “I want to give privacy enforcers equal technology as privacy violators.” To level the playing field.
webXray – Privacy is inevitable: “webXray is a specialized tool for finding privacy violations on the web. While it shares similarities with a typical search engine like Google or Bing, its purpose, and features, are geared towards professionals in the legal and compliance sector who need to find specific violations of privacy law.
The best way to approach webXray is to first come up with some category of protected data you are interested in, many of which are defined by laws referenced in our knowledge base. Once you have an idea of what you are looking for – be it violations of children’s privacy, medical privacy, or other such topics – you are ready to begin a search. Each field below has text to help guide your use of the search engine.”
