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| 1591846013
| 9781591846017
| 1591846013
| 4.04
| 18,568
| Nov 05, 2013
| Nov 05, 2013
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really liked it
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I like this kind of book. It’s an irreverent view of the geeks and misfits who created Twitter, perhaps the most used but least necessary software on
I like this kind of book. It’s an irreverent view of the geeks and misfits who created Twitter, perhaps the most used but least necessary software on the planet. That is, until Elon got a hold of it. This book was first published in 2013 and so much has changed since then. Twitter (now X, in what has to be the silliest of rebrandings) has become perhaps less relevant than it ever was. Musk has seen the price fall through the floor and see value evaporate. Fun book if you like business origin stories, but he really needs to do a follow-up, perhaps annually. Just started Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter by Zoë Schiffer, that, so far, provides an in-depth view of Musk’s demolition of Twitter. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Dec 14, 2023
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Jan 14, 2024
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Hardcover
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| B08WK73TZR
| 4.28
| 396
| unknown
| Oct 26, 2021
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it was amazing
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In a 1955 news show called See It Now Edward R. Murrow asked the inventor of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk, who owned the patent to the vaccine. Salk
In a 1955 news show called See It Now Edward R. Murrow asked the inventor of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk, who owned the patent to the vaccine. Salk replied, "Well, the people. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" This book is about a specific case, but it's also about much more, an indictment of the current patent system. Myriad Genetics, a company held the patents on two key genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2. Everyone has those genes, but women with certain mutations in their BRCA genes face much higher risks of breast or ovarian cancer. Through its patents, Myriad had essentially cornered the market on BRCA testing. The company charged more than $3,000 for a test, and insurers didn’t always cover it. Some women weren’t able to get tested because they couldn’t afford it. And the problem went beyond cost: One woman who joined the lawsuit as a plaintiff tested positive for a BRCA mutation but before undergoing surgical removal of her ovaries wanted a second opinion; because of Myriad’s patents, no other lab could confirm the diagnosis. The Association for Molecular Pathology along with several other medical associations, doctors and patients sued the U.S.Patent and Trademark Office and Myriad Genetics to challenge several patents related to human genetics. The suit also challenged several method patents covering diagnostic screening for the genes. Myriad argued that once a gene is isolated, and therefore distinguishable from other genes, it could be patented. By patenting the genes, Myriad had exclusive control over diagnostic testing and further scientific research for the BRCA genes. Petitioners spearheaded by the ACLU, argued that patenting those genes violated the Patent Act because they were products of nature. They also argued that the patents limit scientific progress. Section §101 limits patents to "any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof." The district court granted summary judgment in favor of petitioners, holding that isolating a gene does not alter its naturally occurring fundamental qualities. (Judge Robert Sweet was ably assisted by his clerk who had an advanced degree in the bio-sciences. Sweey's opinion is worth reading as a clear exposition of both the science and the legal aspects of the case. You can read it here**.) The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (specializing in patent cases, it was known as the "nerd's" court) reversed, holding that isolated genes are chemically distinct from their natural state in the human body. In March 2012, Petitioners sought certiorari; and in light of Mayo Collective Services v. Prometheus Laboratories. the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the Federal Circuit judgment and remanded, i.e., sent it back for further consideration On remand, the Federal Circuit again upheld the patentability of the BRCA genes. Again appealed to the Supreme Court which ruled unanimously that genes were not patentable although cDNA was, as it was not a product of nature. The case was unusual in that the Solicitor General's Office took a position in opposition to that of the Patent Office which had declared that since they had permitted patenting of genes already, to reverse that would just mess up previously decided cases. That the SG's office did so, was the result of compromise worked out by many agencies brought together at the behest of Obama to determine what the position of the government should be. (It's worth remembering that Obama's mother had died of ovarian cancer at 56, fighting insurance companies until her death, and his grandmother died of breast cancer.) The compromise was orchestrated by Mark Freeman who serves a gold star for bringing such disparate parties together. It's also notable that Francis Collins, NIH director was adamantly opposed to gene patenting. He had been a co-worker with Mary Kelly and Mark Skolnick in isolating and linking the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations to breast and ovarian cancers. Skolnick had recognized the monetary potential in their discovery and founded Myriad genetics, over the opposition of Kelly and Collins, which monopolized BRCA testing and made lost of money. There are some very appealing characters: Lori Andrews, the "Gene Queen" an attorney who was upset with the patenting of a test for Canavan Disease; Michael Crighton, whose book Next and NYT op-eds laid some of the public groundwork for the court cases; Dan Ravicher, a successful patent attorney who became disillusioned with the way patents were destroying innovation and who formed his own public interest firm to challenge patents; Tania Simoncelli, the individual most responsible for getting the ACLU interested in gene-patenting; and Chris Hansen, the ACLU attorney who argued the case before the court. A very interesting read that raises all sorts of bioethical, medical, economic, and legal issues. **https://patentlyo.com/media/docs/2010... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Mar 07, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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| 1324001879
| 9781324001874
| 1324001879
| 4.22
| 1,262
| 2020
| Jan 14, 2020
|
really liked it
|
I am no fan of the Trumps. Nor do I approve of many of the financial shenanigans engaged by him, his company, and his family. But the problem lies pri
I am no fan of the Trumps. Nor do I approve of many of the financial shenanigans engaged by him, his company, and his family. But the problem lies primarily with the loopholes created by legislators at the behest of the rich so they can avoid taxes and get richer all the while sucking at the public teat through government contracts. Trump himself has acknowledged publicly in one of the debates that he used money to purchase influence and garner favor. The Fact is that politicians love power and want to keep it. To do that they need lots of money and people like Trump were there to fulfill their wishes. At a price. "Consultants" hire themselves out to help get politicians elected. Then get hired to work in the government they helped elect. Then leave that government and create lobbying firms to sell the influence and connections they now possess thanks to their time in that government. One of the advantages to owning a casino is how easy it is to launder money and get unregistered loans. His father bailed him out when Trump was close to insolvency and unable to make a bond payment by walking into one of Trump's casinos in Atlantic City and purchasing $3.5 million worth of chips and then just walking out effectively giving his son a free loan. Clearly, following the refusal of American banks to loan him more money following a string of bankruptcies in which they lost millions, the Russian oligarchs stepped in to fill the void. Given what Trump said during the debates, i.e., how he gave money to both parties in order to garner favor and influence, I should not have been surprised with the close political relationships between the Kushner family and the Democrats, especially Bill Clinton, but I certainly was with their connection to Benjamin Netanyahu. Perhaps the Jewish connection and appreciation for Israel stemmed from the horrific experience of their family under the Nazis. (The failure of Trump to denounce the anti-Semitism of his more radical followers is the more surprising given the Kushners' Jewishness and the conversion of Ivanka to Judaism.) Trump benefited from the Bloomberg policy of seeking foreign investment for New York. Bloomberg actively solicited money from overseas, proclaiming that the city needed them to help pay taxes and fund schools and police. The Trumps took advantage of this policy, and so did the Russians, who invested heavily in Trump projects, often buying condos and apartments in his buildings for millions of dollars in cash. It was a marvelous way to laundry money and curry favor with the future president. More than 50% of these units were occupied less than two months out of the year. A less beneficial impact was a doubling of rental costs in the city. Ultimately, this is a very depressing book. The clear lesson is that if you have money, you can flaunt the laws; if you have money you inherited, you can create an image for yourself that may be completely at odds with who you are; that if you have money, the rules that apply to everyone else don't apply to you; and, if you have money, you can buy influence among politicians who then build loopholes for you to drive your trucks through. One wonders what the net effect of the Trump presidency will be. One danger will be, as a reviewer in the Washington Post noted, " cottage industry of Trump biographers and researchers has uncovered so many examples of deceptive, fraudulent and mean-spirited behavior by the president and his family that one succumbs to outrage fatigue." ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Nov 28, 2021
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Nov 28, 2021
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0062878824
| 9780062878823
| 3.97
| 5,214
| Feb 18, 2020
| Feb 18, 2020
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it was amazing
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This is the book Trump should have tried to ban. Forget Bolton et al. It reveals the incestuous relationship between a bank, Russia, money laundering
This is the book Trump should have tried to ban. Forget Bolton et al. It reveals the incestuous relationship between a bank, Russia, money laundering, and its most famous client. The bank that Donald Trump came to rely on to subsidize his shrinking empire after banks in the US refused to loan him money, having been stiffed by him too often. He had a habit of just not repaying the loans.(A running joke is that Donald had written many books on making deals and business, but they all ended with Chapter 11.) The bank itself, after having been taken over by US traders, was getting into trouble by emphasizing short-term profits through ever-increasing levels of risk. Traders were paid by the estimated return on a bet, usually using derivatives which formerly had been better used to lower risk. They would often over-estimate the return knowing that their compensation would not be adjusted downward if the bet failed to return their estimate. Many were earning millions every year in bonuses. Steve Bannon, quoted in Fire and Fury, noted that the Trump family was all about cash. Eric Trump had been quoted as saying they could get all the money they needed from Russia, and Bannon (who himself has been charged with stealing money from Wall donors) saw the insatiable appetite for money that the Trump family had. Bannon"s story was interesting in itself. He had been a trader at Goldman Sachs, but his father had suffered financial collapse in 2008 and that turned Bannon into a flaming revenge artist vowing to get the eastern bankers, i.e. a standard economic populist. He allied himself with Trump's populist rhetoric. It gets even messier as Enrich lays out the connections between Justin Kennedy to the Trump family. In case anyone has forgotten, Brett Kavanaugh clerked for Anthony Kennedy, Justin's father, who interceded with Trump on Kavanaugh’s behalf. The banks affairs became so entangled that there were several suicides of bank officers and lawyers who despaired of unethical and illegal machinations. Greed and money laundering would appear to be at the heart of much modern finance and Trump was right in the middle. The all consuming emphasis on profit meant that traders would go anywhere, to any country, that needed hard currency. Since most of the world's trades were conducted in US dollars, much of those transactions occurred through New York. And since Deutsche was trading with rogue countries under US sanction, like Iran, Syria, and Russia, interest was aroused in intelligence and legal quarters. When it became apparent that US soldiers were being killed in Iraq by weapons used by terrorists being supported by Iran, the families of the dead soldiers filed suit against Deutsche. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, money laundering became endemic and an audit revealed that Russian mafia money was pouring into the US through Deutsche's Eastern Europe connections, most of it being washed in New York's lucrative luxury real estate market. Guess who was a big player in that market? After the crash of 2008, caused in large part by the risky bets using unusual financial instruments of big banks, especially Deutsche, country leaders looked to those bank leaders for advice. In Germany, Merkle went to Ackerman, head of Deutsche whose advice profited no one more than Deutsche itself. Without going into too much detail and having no desire to spoil a great story, thousands of emails from a Deutsche banker who had committed suicide fell into the hands of reporters. They revealed that the loans Trump had personally guaranteed (meaning the bank could go after his personal wealth should he default on the huge number of loans he had with them) had been layered off to a Russian bank, meaning that the loans were actually coming from the Russians. (Remember that Eric Trump had bragged his family could get all the money they wanted from the Russians.) So you had a situation where a new American president owed millions of dollars to a Russian bank that was controlled by the KGB. A fascinating, if disturbing, read. Stay tuned, the story continues. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 09, 2020
|
Sep 09, 2020
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ebook
| |||||||||||||||
| 1610398270
| 9781610398275
| 1610398270
| 3.96
| 1,191
| unknown
| Apr 24, 2018
|
it was amazing
|
I first became interested in the epic battle over the future of Herbalife by watching a documentary. Bill Ackman had bet enormous sums of money that H
I first became interested in the epic battle over the future of Herbalife by watching a documentary. Bill Ackman had bet enormous sums of money that Herbalife was nothing but a huge pyramid scheme (the more pleasant term with less baggage is "multi-layered marketing" - one is illegal, the other legal. Personally, I find but little difference between them.) What was astonishing was the amount of money thrown around in pursuit of even larger amounts of money and how each of the titans, Icahn and Ackman (one going long the other short respectively, used huge sums and PR in attempts to manipulate the market to their advantage; small investor and company employees matter for little. The market would move in substantial gains or losses simply by one or the other buying or selling large blocks of stock or by making comments in the press. Scott Wapner, the author, is a business reporter for CNBC, and one couldn't help but wonder if he wasn't being manipulated by the parties as well. He was eager for the scoop by having "breaking news" on his show and they were eager to use his platform for their own financial gain. It was on his show that the famous verbal brawl occurred between Ackman and Icahn. Lasting almost the entire show they hurled insults at each other. "Apparently, if you have enough cash to spend, it doesn’t seem terribly difficult to weaponize social justice in the cause of your portfolio," said one observer. Troubling, too, is the outsize influence these billionaires have with federal regulators like the FTC. Their money gives them instant access. Moreover, their decisions, we learn, may be influenced as much by personal animosities as good business, although none of them would ever admit it. Unfortunately those decisions have disproportionate impact on smaller investors. Fascinating book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 06, 2020
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Oct 06, 2019
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1250191270
| 9781250191274
| 1250191270
| 4.26
| 342
| Jul 30, 2019
| May 07, 2019
|
really liked it
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A common definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over while expecting different results each time. That is a good definition of Israel
A common definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over while expecting different results each time. That is a good definition of Israeli-Arab relations. Katz, enamored of the Israeli armed forces, writes hagiographically about the Israeli strike on the Syrian nuclear plant in 2007. Justification for this act of war was the assumption that a nuclear power plant -- Israel has several in addition to nuclear weapons -- could only be used to create the material for nuclear weapons, the presence of which Israel assumed could only be an existential threat to their country. ** There is an assumption that some countries act responsibly when it comes to nuclear weapons and others are not. Israel, while never admitting publicly it has nuclear weapons, clearly does, yet cannot seem to understand why that knowledge would not encourage hostile neighbors to want the same. Another assumption is that democracies will always act more sensibly than authoritarian governments. Recent events in the United States reveal just how fragile that assumption is. It's an assumption Plato warned about a millennia ago when he foresaw the seeds of its own destruction built into democratic governments. Israel has determined (at least the more recent governments) that countries in the Middle East will not (except for itself) be permitted to have nuclear weapons nor nuclear power plants that might be used to create the seeds of a nuclear weapons program. They see it as an existential threat. Then again, they see almost everything they don't like as an existential threat. From his extensive interviews with the decision-makers, advisers and planners — American and Israeli — Katz, the editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, has written a gripping story of the Sept. 6, 2007 destruction of a secret, nearly completed al-Kabar nuclear reactor in Syria. knowledge of which was confirmed only in March of 2018. The Syrian strike at al-Kabar was not the first time the Israelis felt compelled to act. On June 7, 1981, the IAF destroyed a nuclear reactor in Osirak, Iraq, which was, at the time, a nation ruled by Saddam Hussein, another dictator willing to use chemical weapons. A fascinating portion of the book is devoted to the discussions within the Bush administration on the proper response to the intelligence that had been shared by Israel about the construction of a reactor in Syria. It was the hawks (Cheney et al) v diplomats (Rice eta al.) each with valid concerns and suspecting different outcomes. What was the possibility of a wider war? What would be the reaction of the Russians? Would this help or hurt the Iranians? Was the intelligence legitimate. It was an example of how government should work, but often doesn't. Cheney, ever the hawk and advocate of preemptive strikes, whatever the issue, was alone in thinking the U.S. should bomb the site. Everyone else in the Cabinet thought otherwise. The Iraq war, begun on faulty intelligence, was not going well and the feeling was that each administration gets just one war; trying to conduct two would lead to disaster. A more nuanced role proposed by a few was that the facility should be destroyed, but better that Israel should do the bombing. It would reinforce the view that Israel had rebounded from the Lebanese debacle and help issue a warning that Israel could handle its own affairs and protection and was not the minor stepchild of the U.S. The author claims at the end of the book that it was less about the strike than decision-making. That's certainly true. But what a messy process, indeed, influenced less by reality than perceptions, ideology, religion, and politics. **It was just learned that Syria fired a missile that landed perilously close to an Israeli nuclear plant in April 2021. Israeli responded with a retaliatory strike. Agence France has reported that Israel is suspected to have between 100 and 200 nuclear weapons. [https://www.france24.com/en/middle-ea...] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 2021
|
Sep 18, 2019
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0385192096
| 9780385192095
| 0385192096
| 3.78
| 18
| 1985
| Jan 01, 1985
|
really liked it
|
A very enjoyable and interesting book that begins with a history of the reaper and its impact on American farming. The McCormick family, descendants o
A very enjoyable and interesting book that begins with a history of the reaper and its impact on American farming. The McCormick family, descendants of its inventor, built the company through beneficial mergers and clever marketing. Henry Ford was selling his Fordson tractor at a loss to gain market share. Harvester went one better by throwing in a plow, too. Their salesmen would travel around looking for Fordson dealers and demos, offering to match their tractors against Ford's, and they usually won, building a devoted customer base. IH's Farmall line was immensely popular as it was just that, a machine that did it all. It took a multitude of attachments like the 4 row cultivator that saved the farmer a huge number of man-hours. * I remember driving a Ford 9n on my uncle's dairy farm. It was a small, squat, tractor, useful for hauling wagons and small chores. He also had a Farmall MD (new in 1952); a diesel that used a small gas engine to get it started (the switch over with the lever was very cool), but my favorite was the Oliver 77 (might have been an 88, not sure) that was the absolute best because it had a six-cylinder engine. (I hated the two-cylinder John Deere tractors - they didn't switch to more cylinders until the early sixties. And we won't even talk about the stupid hand clutch.**) To my mind Oliver made the best tractors and only went under because of mismanagement, something that we will see more of in this book. By the fifties the company was thriving, engaged in supplying multiple markets besides farm machinery, including trucks, home appliances, and industrial machinery. However, several battles on the management and labor side threatened its dominance. There was a management battle between McCaffrey and Fowler McCormack. McCormack had become a devotee of Carl Jung and would spend months each year in Switzerland at the master's feet while McCaffrey fumed in the states. He eventually took his concerns to the board who, much to Fowler's surprise, sided with McCaffrey, relegating McCormick to a titular post. Bad blood between the two continued for years. Unlike Fowler, McCaffrey was a salesman with little feel for reining in sales demands and soon IH was offering its customers 168 different models of trucks driving the factories crazy. Harvester had a significant number of farmers who loved red and had the dealer network to support it. They were loyal because of excellent relationships with dealers who often carried them on equipment they needed immediately, but could not pay for right away. However, the company was falling behind John Deere, which produced superior equipment and service. The author also suggests that another reason for their success was the location of Deere's headquarters in Moline, Illinois closer to the farms they served rather than Harvester's dedication to Chicago as headquarters. Deere executives all live(d) on on near farms. They too had a strong dealership network. They did it by coddling the dealers rather than Harvester's tactic of hard sell of forcing dealers to do things their way. In the meantime the company was also battling unions and the unions were battling each other in a fight between the FE (Farm Equipment union) and the UAW each seeking to oust the other. Strikes were often called just to hurt the other union and in the decade following the war, there were 1,200 work stoppages and 48,000 job grievances between 1954 and 1959. That was unsupportable. In the end, HUAC destroyed the FE whose leaders were investigated for purported Communist activities. The union's rank and file were caught up in the anti-Communist fervor. That coupled with management's desire to break the union was its death knell. By the sixties and seventies, Harvester was running into problems endemic to older established entities. They had had a long and beloved history of paying substantial dividends, but as their factories aged and other lines required investment, the capital was being paid out in dividends, making shareholders happy, but starving the company for capital reinvestment. So they had to rely on borrowing but thanks to the Vietnam War and other factors, interest rates were at an all time high (I remember them as high as 17% when I was thinking about buying a farm) and that kind of interest rate will make borrowing exorbitantly expensive. It was a vicious cycle, the sales force kept pushing weakly designed and ill-tested new equipment out the door, which then failed pushing market share lower making even less capital available especially with the profits all going out the door as dividends. Harvard Business School (you know the school that gave us the creators of derivatives and other high risk financial instruments) was invited to visit and review IH's attempts at rebound. "In a sense [they wrote] the problems at Harvester faces are the problems of American industry, and to that extent is prototypical of corporate American industry,...how to compete in a slow-growth, capital-intensive market when you're not the market leader." By this time John Deere, which had recognized much earlier recognized the need for higher horse power tractors, dominated the agricultural sector and had built highly automated factories. And, of course, the changes Archie McCardle, hired away from Xerox with a huge compensation package, wanted and needed to implement, met with resistance from those who had been with IH a long time. His strategy of giving employees targets beyond what they thought were acceptable and possible could be disconcerting and morale busting when they were unable to meet those targets. But lest this review get completely out of hand, I will just summarize and say it's a fascinating examination of the rise and fall of an iconic American company, the kind of representative history that has happened to many other companies: Sears, Montgomery Ward, K-Mart, etc., etc. and that will no doubt happen to many others when their founders leave the scene. I only wish the book could have been updated past its 1985 publication. IH was sold to Tennaco in 1985 which merged the IH tractor line with their Case line becoming Case/IH. Fortunately they adopted red as the new paint scheme rather than Case's desert sand colors as well as the Farmall designation. Excellent read. *The Moline Model D was probably the first to offer multiple attachments on a tractor. For its time it was incredibly versatile and to my knowledge the first articulated design. See http://molineplowco.com/tractors/ **In John Deere's defense, the old two-cylinder had incredible fuel economy and lugging power. The 730, out in 1959, had accessories that beat the competition - like their seat, far and away the most comfortable. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 16, 2019
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Oct 08, 2019
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Aug 26, 2019
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1610394151
| 9781610394154
| 1610394151
| 3.71
| 261
| Feb 02, 2016
| Feb 23, 2016
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it was amazing
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As I write this John Bolton and Trump seem to be planning a major war with Iran. They are not paying attention to the incredible damage that can be do
As I write this John Bolton and Trump seem to be planning a major war with Iran. They are not paying attention to the incredible damage that can be done by state-sponsored or even independent actors to infrastructure by cyber-attacks. Iran caused millions in damage to Saudi oilfield computers; Russia virtually shut down Estonia for more than a week to punish them for their support of Ukraine; the U.S. and Israel wrecked havoc on Iranian centrifuges with a cleverly designed malicious worm; Iran caused millions in damages to Sheldon Adelson's empire after he made injudicious remarks regarding nuclear war and Iran; the list goes on and on. The web is used to wage war and spy on, coerce, and damage other countries. Israel and the U.S. is want to derail the Iranian nuclear weapons program. India wants to prevent Pakistani terrorists from using smartphones to coordinate attacks. Brazil has plans to lay new fiber cables and develop satellite links so its Internet traffic no longer has to pass through Miami. China does not want to be dependent on the West for its technology needs. These new digital conflicts pose no physical threat—no one has ever died from a cyber-attack—but they serve to both threaten and defend the integrity of complex systems like power grids, financial institutions, and security networks. What makes these attacks so problematic is that they can be designed to hide the source and can be initiated from virtually anywhere. The U.S. is so dependent on the Internet that even the slightest upheaval in some router farm could make bank deposits unavailable, the electrical grid unreliable, just to mention a few potential problems. State-backed hacking initiatives can shut down, sabotage trade strategies, steal intellectual property, sow economic chaos, and paralyze whole countries. Segal insists that MAD (mutually assured destruction - the bedrock of nuclear war prevention) applies here as well, i.e., that countries would be afraid of massive retaliation were they to engage in widespread harm to another country. Insidious targeted attacks could be more useful and determining where they are coming from is often a laborious and time-consuming process. Hacking tools themselves can come back to haunt their creators. "Cyber-security firm Symantec discovered that Chinese hacking group, APT 3 acquired National Security Agency (NSA) hacking tools used against them in 2016 to target U.S. allies. APT 3 is responsible for various attacks on the United States and has been tracked by the NSA for over a decade. Symantec does not believe the group stole the U.S. code, but rather acquired it from an NSA attack on its computers. APT 3 then used the hacking tools in cyber-attacks involving five countries in Europe and Asia. This is not the first time U.S. agencies’ cyber weapons have fallen into the wrong hands." (from Adam Segal's blog, May 10, 2019) Those hacking tools remain viable almost indefinitely and are impossible to eradicate The issues raised by Segal are mind-boggling. The cyber-attack by the North Koreans for example were supposedly in retaliation for SONY's production of a sophomoric comedy ridiculing the North Korean leader. 200 TB of emails and information was retrieved and then used as blackmail to force SONY to not release the movie. What role should states play in such an attack. For that matter what state did SONY belong too? They are a multi-national corporation. What nation should be responsible for its defense? The attack on Estonia by the Russians in 2007 raises additional issues. Russia (or its non-state actors) complained about the removal of a statue in Tallinn. Estonia refused to back down and soon a huge denial of service attack began that virtually shut down the country for about three weeks. Estonia is one of the most wired countries in the world having decided following the fall of the Soviet Union that it would be the most effective and economical way to build infrastructure in the new country. They had a strong cadre of programmers and IT people. Access to the Internet is considered a basic human right there. Western and Estonian analysts were confident the attacks came from a Russian source but were they state coordinated or simply vandals. And since Estonia was a member of NATO, what was NATO's responsibility in helping t defend against an attack on Estonian infrastructure? Ultimately, several western countries helped in thwarting and reducing the effects of the attacks and the resulting permanent damage was minimal, but for a while the country was at a virtual standstill. The Estonian response has been to develop a large volunteer (larger than their army) group of IT specialists who help to defend their cyber infrastructure. In the DDOS attacks on Georgia, the Russians claimed these were independent folks just wanting to express their opinions. So the freedom to launch cyber-attacks has now morphed into freedom of expression.The situation there was different, everyone having learned from Estonia and Georgian traffic was routed through the U.S. with help from Poland and Estonia. Whether that made the U.S. complicit in the conflict or not was problematic. Hacking of social media has become extremely sophisticated and the U.S. is woefully behind except as used by a certain U.S politician who dominates the Twitter world. The technique is to drown out the opposition. China used massive troll tweets and bots to overwhelm any discussion of opposition to their regime in Tibet. The Russians spread disinformation, anything to provoke and incite assorted groups. The idea is to confuse and promote their POV to the exclusion of others while preventing any kind of rational or reasonable debate on any issue. Doctored photos are spread about the opposition and soon it becomes impossible to separate reality from the simulated. Ultimately Segal is optimistic, forecasting that if not pacific, the world will at least have come to terms with cyberspace and information will flow freer and be less dangerous. I remain more skeptical. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 21, 2019
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Jul 21, 2019
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1524731641
| 9781524731649
| B077CR1JHV
| 4.10
| 910
| May 29, 2018
| May 29, 2018
|
really liked it
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This book should have been titled "Be Careful What You Wish For; You May Get It," or perhaps "Unforeseen and Unintended Consequences." He begins with This book should have been titled "Be Careful What You Wish For; You May Get It," or perhaps "Unforeseen and Unintended Consequences." He begins with a litany of problems facing the United States: income inequality, the highest poverty rate among the industrialized nations, a crumbling infrastructure, an attitude of American "exceptionalism"with a Congress that hasn't been able to pass a budget in decades, ("Like slacker schoolchildren unable to produce a book report on time, the country’s elected leaders have fallen back instead on an endless string of last-minute deadline extensions and piecemeal appropriations.") which is ruled by the more than twenty lobbyists for each Congressman. He then proceeds to zoom in on a variety of events and institutions he regards as the cause of these failures. Just a couple of examples. He discusses the rise of meritocracy, the intent being to support and encourage those with brains and talent. What happened was those folks succeeded brilliantly, went to the best Ivy League schools (Brill is really big on mentioning where individuals graduated from and I was hard pressed to discover anyone he mentioned who had come from anywhere but an Ivy League school except perhaps Bernard Baruch in New York, a special case) but then created themselves into a protected class. Brill divides the world into two classes: the protected and the unprotected. The protected build walls around themselves and their money that make it virtually impossible for those not in the class to join it. Another example is what he calls the "greening" of free speech. He cites Citizens United as a terrible decision because, in part, it emphasized the "personhood" of corporations. Yet, his informative history of free speech and corporations shows how critical that linkage is. Very much a progressive initiative, PACS were formed by unions first in 1943 as a way to support FDR's reelection. Through the 1950s and 1960s there was far more political money in union PACs than in business-oriented PACs. The New York Times case and the Virginia Pharmacy decision (ironically supported by Ralph Nader's Public Interest group as a way to make drug prices available on advertising and to create competition -- support they were to rue in when Citizens United came down) A law review article by Martin Redish, a progressive Democrat, in 1982 * was an argument for why free speech should be applied to corporations. That view began to become more and more popular in legal circles culminating in Citizens United. I happen to support that decision. What people often forget is that it was a case first, with a plaintiff who wanted to distribute a political movie and was told "no." During the oral arguments before the Supreme Court, which I listened to, I was absolutely horrified, as were most of the justices, by the response of the Deputy Solicitor General, who, when asked if the government could prevent the publication of a book that expressed political advocacy. That was a huge mistake. Stewart's argument played into the hands of Ted Olson, counsel for Citizens United. By taking an extreme position that could be seen as akin to throwing someone in jail for writing a book, or book-banning, Stewart went way down the slippery slope, making it more likely that a majority on the Court (Alito, Roberts, Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas) will want to say something about the Constitution, and not merely decide, as I've suggested, that the video-on-demand delivery of the anti-Clinton movie simply is not covered by the McCain-Feingold statute.** While I occasionally disagreed with Brill's interpretations of several events, it's certainly a provocative book that does provide some interesting examples of positive solutions. *https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/pen... **https://www.americanbar.org/publicati... ...more |
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| 4.16
| 14,139
| Oct 15, 1991
| Sep 01, 1992
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really liked it
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Part of the disgust with Washington and big business stems from the slew of mergers and acquisitions that began during the seventies and eighties and
Part of the disgust with Washington and big business stems from the slew of mergers and acquisitions that began during the seventies and eighties and which resulted in many people losing their jobs as the larger entities pulled cash out of the acquisitions, cut jobs, and moved much of the business overseas for cheaper labor costs. In part, what drove the acquisitions mania was the tax code that taxed dividends and profits from a business or stocks and made interest costs fully deductible. It paid therefore to borrow any amount to purchase a company driving the stock price up and then reselling the same company to someone else. The brokers in the middle as well as the managers of those companies became insanely rich from the shell game. One surprising tidbit that surprised me was how Milliken and others manipulated the press to achieve movement in stock prices and to get what they wanted. By carefully planting stories they could build momentum for mergers and speculation that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. The stock price would move in whatever direction they wanted. It was shameful how Ivan Boesky was hailed by business magazines and university departments as some kind of business genius. His speeches were lauded and yet he achieved what he did purely by cheating. It's instructive given today's PR strategies by the White House to see how Wall Street and the business community responded to SEC investigations and indictments. Once the information about Boesky's crimes and his indictment was released, the attacks on the SEC began. They discovered that the SEC had permitted Boesky to sell $400,000,000 of his position for a couple of reasons: the SEC wanted to make sure he would have money to pay the $100,000,000 fine he had agreed to in his plea, and they were worried that if news got out prematurely the market would tank and many investors would get hurt. As it was, his investors made a lot of money and the fine was paid. But that knowledge was used against the SEC by the business media (and others who had been guilty of the same insider trading) as a way to focus attention away from themselves and to make the SEC look bad, paving the way for future emasculation of the agency, already underfunded. The charge was that the SEC was letting Boesky get away with millions, an untruth. Boesky today lives in California and as a result of his 1991 divorce settlement, his wife (!) paid him $23 million and $180,000 per years. Not too shabby. Millkin and others involved made literally billions, some served prison terms, almost all came out of it quite comfortably. My own feeling is the deck is stacked against the average investor and that the whole idea of leveraged buyouts hurts everyone except those who orchestrate the deals and collect the fees. Then again, my pension relies on a healthy and growing stock market, so perhaps my complaints should be muted. ...more |
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| 4.30
| 163,013
| Mar 15, 2010
| Nov 16, 2015
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it was amazing
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The moral of this story is that people will see what they are paid to see and that if they are incentivized not to see the truth, they won't. That was
The moral of this story is that people will see what they are paid to see and that if they are incentivized not to see the truth, they won't. That was the situation described by Michael Lewis. It was the experts who failed us again. It was one guy with Asperger's Syndrome (which may have given him a huge advantage since the condition does help one to focus intensely) who realized that the banks, in making negatively amortized mortgages, were creating a situation to would inevitably fail. He decided to bet against it, was right, and made billions through the use of the banks own creations: the credit default swap, which is basically an insurance policy that pays off big if a bet goes south. Goldman Sachs, virtual lone survivor of the meltdown thanks to its friends in government, persuaded AIG to insure billions of the subprime mortgages. That was to their downfall. They never did their homework. Nor did the rating agencies. Nor did the regulators. "People who create disasters make a lot of money cleaning up the disasters because they are the only ones who know about the disasters." The current system is a very elegant form of theft. Basically, Wall Street could care less about investors and is only interested in getting the maximum number of fees. Alan Greenspan is labeled as the worst Fed chair ever, having kept money way too cheap for too long, and ignoring the whole sub-prime mortgage problem thinking, in good libertarian form, that it was none of his business. The big question is, have what have we learned from this debacle? I suspect nothing. Especially when I hear big wigs predict future financial meltdowns within 5-10 years. Ultimately, Lewis believes that Wall Street has divorced itself from American society and may have done itself in. Soon, as people learn that brokers are encouraging investment in stocks which their own firms might be betting against, customers will learn of the conflict of interest and their world will come tumbling down. It's not a pretty picture. The hatred of Wall Street and its minions is palpable outside NY and Washington. It elected Trump who has learned nothing, instead subscribing to Wall Street's code of doing nothing unless it benefits itself, and falling for its sycophancy. Whether that will ultimately unhinge him remains to be seen. ...more |
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Dec 06, 2017
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| 1585740284
| 9781585740284
| 1585740284
| 4.41
| 207
| 1979
| Sep 01, 2000
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really liked it
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The tsunami of 1964 caused by the earthquake wiped out a major portion of Kodiak, Alaska, but it vitalized the fishing community which now thrives wit
The tsunami of 1964 caused by the earthquake wiped out a major portion of Kodiak, Alaska, but it vitalized the fishing community which now thrives with canneries for salmon, crabs, halibut, and other seafood caught in the rich waters of the Alaskan shelf. Fishing these waters is extremely dangerous and the towns that support it resemble nothing less than the older frontier. The book is an interesting combination of fiction and non-fiction alternating chapters as McCloskey follows the career of Hank, college graduate and Vietnam veteran , who falls in love with fishing (for some unfathomable reason) in Alaskan waters for a variety of species. We're treated to a section on each kind of boat and species as Hank learns the skills needed for each finally (after being injured by the smashing force of a Halibut tail --I had no idea...-- they can weigh up to 400 lbs.) as submanager of a cannery, a job that displays all the intricate details of the operation and the vast quantity of material that is processed (millions of cans of salmon during an eight-week season) with the concomitant problems of managing people who don't want to be managed. He ends up as skipper on a boat so we get to see the business from that end as well. (The scenes of the boats icing up are tense and scary.) Being a bit bizarre myself, I found the mix of technology and culture to be fascinating. ...more |
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really liked it
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WARNING: This is a long review filled with citations, propositions, and insinuations. Read at your own risk. The demonization of the Koch Brothers poli WARNING: This is a long review filled with citations, propositions, and insinuations. Read at your own risk. The demonization of the Koch Brothers political machine by Mayers, while impressive, reminds me of one reason why the Democrats failed in 2016. They will have difficulty regaining Congress if they continue to focus on personalities rather than policies and issues. The book plays into the Democrats' (liberals?) need to blame someone else rather than their own failures. The Democrats' emphasis on right-wing-conspiracies, which may indeed exist, but are far more fragmented than Democrats suppose. The right is splt, e.g., the Koch's support for libertarian issues (note that they part company with conservatives on several issues such as immigration, free-trade, and justice – Liberals would be far smarter to join forces with the Kochs on those issues rather than antagonize them.) The Kochs are using the same techniques developed by the left in the sixties to build support for liberal agendas. In the meantime Democrats have lost sight of the needs of what used to be their core constituency, i.e., blue collar workers, the so-called middle-class. Trump represents a failure of both the right and left. He was able to appeal to economically savaged whites who wrongly blame immigration and free trade for their problems. Free trade and free immigration are core libertarian, i.e., Koch principles. The Tea Party movement may have backfired on the Kochs. "Ordinary conservative citizens and community activists, almost all white and mostly older, provided angry passion and volunteered their energies to make the early Tea Party more than just occasional televised rallies. Grassroots Tea Partiers accomplished an utterly remarkable feat: starting in 2009, they organized at least 900 local groups, individually named Tea Party units that met regularly."1 There is no doubt that money in politics decays government. That it has always predominated is hardly a justification. (I'm reading Rubicon, a history of Rome by Tom Holland. The wealthy predominated and controlled the political system. In this country, the wealthy have always controlled the press, and the distribution of information, so little has changed.) But I would have far more sympathy for the "scourge of money" position if the debate were not so content-centric, i.e., the antagonism for money comes primarily from those opposing the ideas promoted by the moneyed class. Theda Skocpol, author of a book on the rise of the Right3, in a review1 of Mayer's book said, "Mayer overlooks divisions within the right and offers no insights that could help us understand the unruly Trump surge. Dark Money portrays an unstoppable, unified far-right juggernaut led by plutocrats. It correctly alerts us to many aspects of their secretive, unaccountable machinations. But the full story of what is happening on the right is more complex and volatile. . . .We learned that grassroots Tea Partiers were far from disciplined libertarian followers of ultra-free-market advocacy groups. Local Tea Party groups met in churches, libraries, and restaurants, and collected small contributions or sold books, pins, bumper stickers and other Tea Party paraphernalia on commission to cover their modest costs. They did not get by on checks from the Koch brothers or any other wealthy advocacy organizations. Furthermore, the views of both grassroots Tea Party activists and of many other Republican-leaning voters who have sympathized with this label do not align with free-market dogmas. Research by political scientist Christopher Parker at the University of Washington reinforces our conclusion that ordinary Tea Party activists and sympathizers are worried about sociocultural changes in the United States, angry and fearful about immigration, freaked out by the presence in the White House of a black liberal with a Muslim middle name, and fiercely opposed to what they view as out of control “welfare spending” on the poor, minorities, and young people. Many Tea Partiers benefit from Social Security, Medicare, and military veterans’ programs, and do not want them to be cut or privatized. About half of Tea Party activists or sympathizers are also Christian conservatives intensely concerned with banning abortion and repealing gay marriage." I suspect Mayer was too enamored of professional politicians' view of the impact of AFP which according to Skocpol was negligible because they missed the true character of the Tea Party, many of whom became Trump supporters and activists. Others are not so sure, suggesting that the money spent by the Kochs on think-tanks and in academia was far more powerful in the long run. This was money not spent directly on candidates, but has had a far more reaching influence. One great sin ascribed to the Kochs is that “They said they were driven by principle, but their positions dovetailed seamlessly with their personal financial interests.” So who among us can say otherwise? We expect them to be more righteous? The debate becomes even cloudier and less germane when the Citizens United decision is added to the mix. It’s important to remember that the decision was about an anti-Clinton movie. The producers had paid for the right to show the movie to a pay-per-view audience. The Federal Election Commission ruled they could not show the movie during the 30-day period before the election. The group called Citizens United, which had sponsored the film, appealed. SCOTUS, in a 5-4 decision reversed a lower court ruling arguing that if the Constitution protects any speech at all, it protects political speech, and it overturned Austin.4 What bothers many people about the decision is they went a little further in saying the FEC could not prohibit political speech during the thirty-day period before an election, by also saying that “While corporations or unions may not give money directly to campaigns, they may seek to persuade the voting public through other means, including ads, especially where these ads were not broadcast.” 2 Citizens United was a public association funded primarily through private donations but also some from public corporations. Ironically, the Citizens United decision had nothing to do with the personhood of corporations. The incorrect - but widely held - reading of Citizens United is that the corruption of elections arose fundamentally because the Supreme Court adopted a legal doctrine of corporate "personhood" which endowed corporations with First Amendment free speech rights, which, combined with the notion that spending money to promote a candidate is a form of speech, gives corporations the right to spend unlimited amounts of their money in elections. This incorrect reading of Citizens United is compounded by the further error that a constitutional amendment is necessary and sufficient to remove those corporate constitutional rights and to remove corporate money from elections, or could prevent the pro-corporate majority on the Supreme Court from making further decisions corrupting elections. . . Many may be surprised to learn that no federal campaign finance law has ever been struck down by the Supreme Court on grounds of "corporate personhood" or any kind of corporate rights. The court has consistently hinged its decisions on the First Amendment rights of the listener to hear all sources of the free and open debate and of society to enjoy an abstract "freedom of speech" disconnected from the identity of the speaker.4 The court based its decision on long-standing decisions (going back to 1976 in Buckley v Valeo) that money is speech and that: ... voters must be free to obtain information from diverse sources in order to determine how to cast their votes. . . . . When Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves. Note there are lots of reasons to condemn the Citizens United decision, it's just that person-hood is not one of them so a constitutional amendment to revoke "corporate person-hood" would have no effect on campaign financing at all. What the Nine failed to do was to define the balance between free speech and the corrupting influence of money in elections. SCOTUS may have overstepped its mandate by going further than dealing with just the issue of the movie and striking down a legitimate attempt by the legislature to deal with money's corrupting influence. It certainly does not have authority to deal with election integrity under the Constitution. (See “The Problem with Citizens United is Not Personhood” by Rob Hager at Truth-Out.org4) The SpeechNow 7 decision was perhaps more insidious in opening the floodgates of money through individual contributions. In light of that, I think several questions need to be answered before making what I consider to be rash decisions to control money in politics: 1. Fairness. How would you allocate money to anyone to spend on issues. By issue? By mode of expressions, i.e., TV, newspaper, radio, etc.? Do you limit the amount of money anyone can spend? How is that fair if I may feel more strongly about an issue than you do? 2. What if I have a zillion dollars and decide I want to influence an election by hiring a bunch of writers to write and publish books about the opposing candidate. Would you prevent the publication of those books? (During oral arguments the issue came up as to whether a corporation could pay for or provide support to have a book published that might be read during the 30-day “black-out” period and the government, to its discredit” said, in response to a question from Justice Roberts, that “ we [the government] could prohibit the publication of the book using the corporate treasury funds. Now that’s pretty dangerous territory and the court was to make it clear in Kennedy’s decision that the medium, i.e. cable, satellite, print, whatever, should have no effect on free speech protection.) 3. Should the Koch brothers be prohibited from funding think-tanks or academic institutions like the American Enterprise Institute or the Hoover Institution or any number of right-leaning organizations? Or the Brookings Institute, a left-leaning group? Or endowing university departments? Where do you draw the line? 4. Do you prevent corporations and unions, or any type of association, from any kind of political speech? Isn't political speech exactly what the First Amendment was designed to protect? Aren't associations collections of people with a common interest? Should Move-On.org be banned from political support? 5. Isn't the issue content rather than policy? If the Koch brothers were spending their money on support for our concerns would we be equally upset? I doubt it. 6. Is public financing the answer? Perhaps, but let's not forget Obama was the one who threw that under the bus when he refused to limit his spending after receiving huge amounts of small donations. How do you determine who is a legitimate candidate to receive that funding? Would that not exclude third-party candidates? So what do we do about the corrupting influence of money in politics without impinging on vigorous political dialog? I would suggest the following: 1. Public disclosure and auditing of all sources of campaign funding. 2. Strengthen ethics rules to prohibit voting on legislation that would favor a person or group having donated to the representative. And make the Supreme Court Justices follow tighter conflict-of-interest rules. (The way it is now, each individual justice determines whether or not there is a conflict.) 3. From the Constitution: "The Supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact with such Exceptions and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make (US Constitution, Article III, Section 2)." Admittedly dangerous, Congress could simply say, hey SCOTUS, you don't have jurisdiction over election financing and then pass laws passing limits, e.g. banks, or manufacturers, or anyone buying stuff from the federal government can't give money to elected representatives. (Good luck with that one.) 4. Consider increasing the inheritance tax to 90%. People should earn their money, not inherit it. 5. Revise how government contracts are awarded and prevent congressmen and their staff from going to work in industries they may have regulated. (This is probably an unconstitutional infringement on free movement, but worth a shot.) 6. Give some thought (and action) on how to address income inequality. “Wealth begets power and power begets more wealth.” 7. Reform the tax code along the lines of New Zealand's which lowers the rates but broadens the base (BBLR), a scheme promoted by TR Reid in his book, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System. But it requires elimination of virtually all deductions. Dark Money is a fascinating book both for its exhaustive analysis of a political machine, but also the salacious personal details of the rich and famous. Sources: 1. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/onlin... 2.http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/... 3. Skocpol, Theda and Williams, Vanessa. The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism . Oxford University Press, 2013 (Skocpol is cited often by Mayer) 4. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/60... 5. For a discussion on the history of personhood and the Constitution see "Personalizing the Impersonal: Corporations and the Bill of Rights"By Carl J. Mayer Hastings Law Journal, Hastings College of Law at University of California, March, 1990; Volume 41, No. 3 republished by http://reclaimdemocracy.org/mayer_per... 6. For a really interesting take on the Democrats' desire for a constitutional amendment see Rob Hager's The Amendment Diversion: How Clinton, the Democrats, and Even Sanders Distract Attention from Effective Strategies for Too Much Money in Politics by Promoting Futile Remedies -- Book I: Hillary Clinton and the Dark Money Disclosure 'Pillar' https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c... 7. https://ballotpedia.org/SpeechNOW.org... ...more |
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Sep 15, 2017
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Sep 15, 2017
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| 1451692285
| 9781451692280
| 1451692285
| 3.78
| 761
| Feb 01, 2014
| Apr 08, 2014
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it was amazing
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Russell Gold is a Wall Street Journal reporter whose family had purchased a small Pennsylvania farm as a retreat from Philadelphia. His parents were
Russell Gold is a Wall Street Journal reporter whose family had purchased a small Pennsylvania farm as a retreat from Philadelphia. His parents were approached by an oil company offering them $400,000 plus royalties for the right to drill under their land. Being old time sixties environmentalists they were reluctant but it’s a lot of money and since almost all their neighbors had bought in they figured they might as well. He returns to their story periodically throughout the book to highlight the personal conflicts people have. Gold provides a riveting account of the development of fracking from its extraordinary technological success to its environmental impacts. It’s truly astonishing that this intricate technology has resulted in the United States becoming a net energy exporter barely a decade after “peak oil” had been proclaimed. The book mixes technical details with profiles of the major players, often focusing on the financial details, which can’t be easily separated from the evolution of oil drilling. It’s perhaps ironic, that most of the anti-fracking environmental antagonism comes from geographical areas not affected by the drilling. Larger cities that depend on natural gas and heating, for example, have become hotbeds of anti-fracking activity, yet those people are little affected by the economic and environmental plusses and minuses of the activity except for lower prices for energy. Some of the allegiances formed to promote fracking are interesting. The Sierra Club worked with Chesapeake Energy to fight the development of coal plants in Texas and elsewhere, arguing that global warming was a far greater threat.* That Chesapeake was giving them substantial amounts of money didn’t hurt either, but the environmental group has become split among those favoring just conservation opposed to some realists arguing that it’s better to focus on energy that reduces the carbon footprint like natural gas and nuclear power. Ironically, the shift to natural gas means the U.S., which hasn’t ratified the Kyoto protocols, will come closer to meeting the reduction in carbon emissions than any of the signatories. Gold says that’s a very good thing and supports fracking (the reason why it’s now spelled that way as opposed to the more technically popular “fracing” is interesting) but notes the industry and regulators need to work on better sealing of the wells which is where most of the problems arise. Surprisingly, there was no mention of fracking-generated earthquakes, although perhaps being published in 2014, the concern had yet to be raised. No energy generating process is unopposed. Dams drown villages; mines are dirty and dangerous; transporting fuel in pipelines, ships, and trains risks spills and fires; drilling is obnoxious, wind generators destroy the landscape and kill birds; and nuclear, in many ways the least harmful, suffers from ignorance of new technology and problems of early technology. A very interesting read. *Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame has embraced GMOs, nuclear energy, and other technologies, arguing that global warming is the greatest threat. An interesting article detailing his evolution in thinking is http://e360.yale.edu/features/stewart... ...more |
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May 07, 2017
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May 07, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 0374299293
| 9780374299293
| 0374299293
| 3.98
| 655
| Mar 19, 2013
| Mar 19, 2013
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it was amazing
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Arguably the most important service a city provides is garbage removal. All city functions become virtually impossible when trash is not removed in a
Arguably the most important service a city provides is garbage removal. All city functions become virtually impossible when trash is not removed in a regular manner. Not only that, but they are key players in fueling consumption and capitalism. Without regular disposal of consumed goods, there is no room for new goods to replace them.: "used-up stuff must be thrown out for new stuff to have a place." The euphemistic sanitation workers are the real "invisible" men. Workers are truly ignored. They can stare, whistle, remark, clatter,whatever, with impunity because as far as the general public is concerned they are part of the background noise. They are mere obstacles to be avoided. But an absolutely essential job, dwarfing most others in importance. And messy. Garbage from the trucks is taken daily to transfer stations, where “the smell hits first, grabbing the throat and punching the lungs. The cloying, sickly-sweet tang of household trash that wrinkles the nose when it wafts from the back of a collection truck is the merest suggestion of a whiff compared to the gale-force stink exuded by countless tons of garbage heaped across a transfer station floor. The body’s olfactory and peristaltic mechanisms spasm in protest. Breathing through the mouth is no help, and neither gulp nor gasp brings the salvation of fresh air; there’s none to be had.” What we have forgotten is that all of that used to be all over the streets. “ Householders no longer [have] to keep their windows clamped shut all day, even in the worst heat of the summer, against the nauseating dust that billowed from the streets. (In the rain that dust became an unctuous mud with a repulsive smell. God help the man or woman who found it adhered to shoe soles or skirt hems; the stench permeated forever anything it touched.)” It's not an easy job and a very dangerous one, vastly outranking police and fire in fatalities. (A check on the Internet listed them as fourth highest fatality rate behind loggers, fishermen, and aircraft pilots and flight engineers of all things --another source listed them as fifth, adding steel workers ahead of them.) One horrific example involved a worker who had been on the job twenty-three years. “It was the usual pile that awaited him at this stop, one of the last on the route. He tossed a load in the hopper and was just turning away from the truck when the blade bit through a bag and broke open a jug of liquid concealed within it. The resulting geyser that hit Hanly full on was a 70 percent solution of hydrofluoric acid. His funeral, which drew nearly two thousand Sanitation people from across the city and around the region, made the television news.” Then there are objects that don’t make it into the truck. The compactor blade can do strange things when it hits solid objects. “ Bolts, nails and screws, plastic bottles, cans, shoes, food debris, mattress springs, wood fragments, glass shards, become lethal projectiles. Workers tell routine stories of getting hit in the chest, head, back, arms, and legs. One man I worked with on Staten Island reminisced about the time someone had thrown away a bowling ball. When he tossed it in the truck and pulled the handles, it came back at him as if shot from a cannon, caught him in the belly, and knocked him out. The driver, who thought his partner was on the back step, didn’t notice that the fellow was missing until he’d turned the corner. When the driver went back to look for him, it took a while to find his unconscious body because he’d fallen into the tall grass by the side of the road.” The section on mechanical sweepers -- the drivers are called broomies -- had fascinating detail. The dials and readouts in the broomie’s cab rival that of a small airplane and learning just how much water to add, the angle of the brooms, and maintenance require vast experience. The annual celebration in Times Square that apparently involves enormous quantities of cut-up paper and other colorful detritus takes hours to clean up in the wee hours of the morning and incurs wrath when it’s not done on time. But sometimes, nature makes it difficult. Rain and snow for example. “The mechanical brooms were churning the wet litter into a thick soup dyed pink by the metallic red cards that had long since disintegrated into the mash. It looked like oatmeal made with Pepto-Bismol. Mechanical brooms don’t do oatmeal. Workers with hand tools moved it into the gutters, but then the brooms trundled past and sprayed it back onto the sidewalks. The hand sweepers and blowers pushed it into the gutters once more; the brooms splattered it back. All over Times Square, mechanical brooms and sanitation workers were having the same exchanges of pink spray. Our boots and pant legs and jacket hems started to look like Jackson Pollock had been experimenting with them as canvases. The equipment wasn’t up to the conditions, but short of a large sump pump I’m not sure what would have worked.” And all that is not even to mention snow removal, that bane of all mayors, which has caused more political defeats than sex scandals. It can be an almost impossible job when snow is falling at the rate of two-three inches per hour and the wind is blowing, maneuvering around stuck cars and with unrealistic citizen expectations. The drivers often have to work forty or more hours straight and conditions can conspire to make their jobs miserable. A fascinating look into an essential job that few appreciate and most are reluctant to pay for having long forgotten the alternative. ...more |
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| 9780670026265
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| 3.96
| 1,055
| Aug 02, 2012
| Aug 02, 2012
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A quote from his blog that got me interested: "And there was worse to come. Whether it was Rep. Joe Wilson boorishly yelling “you lie!”– unprecedented
A quote from his blog that got me interested: "And there was worse to come. Whether it was Rep. Joe Wilson boorishly yelling “you lie!”– unprecedented behavior during a joint meeting of Congress assembled to hear a presidential address – or the obscene carnival of Birtherism, Obama-the-secret-Muslim, death panels, and all the rest of it, the party took on a nasty, bullying, crazy edge. From my perch on the budget committee I watched with a mixture of fascination and foreboding as my party was hijacked by a new crop of opportunists and true believers hell-bent on dragging the country into their jerry-built New Jerusalem: an upside-down utopia where corporations rule, the Constitution, like science, is faith-based, and war is the first, not the last, resort in foreign policy." http://www.mikelofgren.net/?page_id=196 ...more |
Notes are private!
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0
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not set
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not set
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May 20, 2015
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0393351599
| 9780393351590
| 0393351599
| 4.14
| 85,657
| Mar 31, 2014
| Mar 23, 2015
|
Got interested in this book after the excerpt in Vanity Fair http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/0...
Got interested in this book after the excerpt in Vanity Fair http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/0...
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 02, 2015
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not set
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Apr 02, 2015
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 1455556610
| 9781455556618
| 1455556610
| 3.91
| 1,732
| Jan 06, 2015
| Jan 06, 2015
|
really liked it
|
Fascinating book. We are about to begin another in the perennial and interminable battles for the presidency. Several of the candidates claim extensiv
Fascinating book. We are about to begin another in the perennial and interminable battles for the presidency. Several of the candidates claim extensive experience as business leaders so it's always interesting to read the inside stories of corporate business successes, failures, and often malfeasance. I've read many books about Enron, the HP/Compaq merger problems, the 2008 housing crisis, etc. and much of the blame for those debacles can be blamed on individuals at the top. What is it we consider success for a company? Increased stock prices?Long-term viability? Best products and services? One common factor seems to be enormous compensation regardless of success or failure. Marissa Mayer was lucky. The initial investment in Alibabo was just paying off when she became CEO injecting huge amounts of capital into the struggling Yahoo whose founder, Yang, and Chairman of the Board Bostock had rejected a purchase of from Microsoft that would have paid stockholders a 62% premium! One of the first things she did was to institute a management system used at Google (and at Enron, I might add.) It involves employees coming up with quantifiable goals which they are then measured against annually and get a score. "It was a forced curve. In general, only 75 percent of any group got in the top three buckets. Twenty-five percent of every team had to go into the bottom two—“ occasionally misses” and “misses.” The result: Teammates directly competed with each other to make sure that they weren’t a part of that 25 percent." Those with low scores get no raises and/or the axe. A well-intended system, it's major flaw is (as Kurt Eichenwald noted in his article in Fortune) that employees work poorly in groups because since there are usually quotas for each performance category even a good employee might rank low in a team of high performers, someone has to. That means they tend to work poorly in groups and to undermine each other since they were ranked relative to their colleagues. That's what happened at Enron as well. It tends to destroy morale. Yahoo is currently under attack by shareholder activists who argue that Mayer has not turned Yahoo around, nor has she met any of her original goals or timetables. Whether anyone could have is another story. Yahoo got famous by providing something people needed at the right time in the evolution of the Internet. Reinventing oneself once a certain level of size is achieved is very difficult. The Yahoo saga continues and may be fun to watch. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 31, 2015
|
Jan 31, 2015
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0395321603
| 9780395321607
| 0395321603
| 3.70
| 10
| Jul 1982
| Jan 01, 1982
|
really liked it
|
Anyone who has followed publishing and the current battles between publishers and retailers, first Borders and Barnes and Noble, and now Amazon, will
Anyone who has followed publishing and the current battles between publishers and retailers, first Borders and Barnes and Noble, and now Amazon, will realize there is a fundamental shift going on in the publishing world, each side claiming the high ground and righteousness in the unending quest for more profits. If you dig a little deeper into the quagmire, the name Shatzkin will pop up. I’ve been following Mike Shatzkin’s blog for several years and it’s become obvious, as a consultant for the publishing industry, he looks at the world through their eyes. When a comment I made on the blog regarding changes I thought needed to be made in the publishing industry to maintain profitability, he simply dismissed most of it by saying I didn’t know what I was talking about and recommended this book, by his father, Leonard, who had worked in the industry for many years, and whom Mike had a tendency to quote perhaps a bit too often given the radical changes now occurring more than a decade after Leonard’s death. “In Cold Type” is very good. Written for the layman (I’m a primarily a reader although as a librarian and micro-micro-micro publisher whose uncle was president of Silver Burdett, I have been fascinated by the economics of publishing all my life,) it’s a wealth of contrarian information about the industry as it existed in 1982, just before the cataclysm began to occur. Indeed, it comes with its own publisher’s disclaimer, not so unusual now, but then, before everyone became afraid to even remotely associate himself with any kind of idea, rare, indeed. First, my biases. I’m a reader, and therefore have an interest in a vigorous and competitive market for books. I’m also not wedded to any particular format, being primarily interested in content. It’s what’s written that makes the book, not whether it’s used, hardcover, paperback, clay tablet, or ebook. My preference currently is solidly in the ebook camp since I can carry around my whole library on any number of electronic devices. (Did I mention I love electronics, too?) I think ebooks have many, many advantages for authors and their incomes. So I remain astonished at the continued inefficiency of the publishing world and its resistance to change. The remainder system is stupid. Even in 1982, Leonard saw that: “For every copy of a hardcover book sold at its normal retail price, one book is sold as a remainder-- a book that goes from the publisher to the remainder dealer for less than the cost of producing it and with zero income to the author. No other industry can make this claim. And it's truly insane.” That particular inefficiency raises costs for everyone, but it has an even more insidious effect as it removes accountability from the buyer for trying to estimate how many copies of a title s/he might be able to sell. If there is no penalty for over-ordering, what the heck, order tons. Another of my biases is warehousing, particularly after the IRS decision that products warehoused would be taxed (the infamous Thor decision.) That makes storing stuff expensive. POD, i.e. printing on demand, and ebooks have the potential to eliminate warehousing; IF, publishers move away from printed copies, or change to POD. Why not have a POD machine in the bookstore. At the Frankfurt Book Fair, I saw one of these deliver a bound, trade paperback with color cover in just a few minutes. Those machines are now going for less than $100,000 last time I looked. The downside to that is the cost per book remains flat, whereas, for example, the last book we had printed in a 2,000 copy run (I did say micro-micro…) provided us with a declining cost per copy over 500 copies and would have been much less per copy for 10,000. One type-setting, etc. have been costed out, the printing is really cheap. That was 15 years ago. Today, I wouldn’t bother. I don’t want inventory so POD and ebook would be the way to go and the initial investment is much less, even after accounting for copy-editing and design. That “should” permit higher royalties for the author. Shatzkin’s first chapter is devoted to a review of problems in the industry in 1982: 1.)Remainders, which distort the market by providing for expensive distribution, a devaluation of the book when people wait for the price to drop soon after release, and competition from remainder stores that compete with full price independent bookstores; 2.) Books are too expensive, resulting from “antiquated book production methods and “poor distribution and poor production,” and he believes with more efficiency retail prices could be “half their present level.” Consumers deal with this by waiting for the book in a cheaper edition or buying remainders.; 3.) Consumers leave stores disappointed, not finding what they went in to get, from the “skimpily stocked stores that make up the majority of retail shops.” He cites surveys showing this number of disappointed people may be as high as thirty percent. 4.) Competition from chains. In those days he cited B. Dalton and Walden, both of which are now gone. Publishers like chains because distribution is more efficient and “dealing with the chains seems so much simpler and less expensive.” 5.) General lack of profitability in book publishing, where most of the profits come from selling subsidiary rights providing a stronger push toward the “blockbuster.” 6.) Not being able to provide support for excellent writers, the horrifying example of Confederacy of Dunces being an example; 7.) The short life of the trade book caused, he says, by an inefficient distribution system that means “as many as 90 to 95 percent ...are stone cold by the end of their first year.” Thirty percent of books are returned unsold and 25% never make it to bookstores, going directly from warehouse to remaindered. (Another thirty percent go to libraries, a problem he worries about but I won’t deal with here except to say that a New Yorker article years ago reported that the trade book market would collapse without libraries.) 8.) How all these factors enter in to making lousy editorial decisions, “Tens of thousands of titles published into an unstructured distribution system, millions of unpredictable negotiations between sales reps and booksellers, the happenstance of a book getting into a particular store, together with unforeseeable outside influences—reviews, attention by celebrities, quirks of public taste—lead to results in which chance is the dominant factor. The remaining chapters go into detail about each aspect of the industry and the problems he has identified. Now what’s interesting is that the ebook revolution solves every one of those problems but one: libraries. Distribution is cheaper, no returns, online stores can stock literally everything, prices are less, and theoretically dealing with a store like Amazon solves their “simplicity” problem. The long tail and a book never going out of print means a book can technically sell forever removing the incentive to seek the blockbuster and books need never go out-of-print. With ebooks one could literally publish just about everything (that’s what’s happening with the rise of digital self-oublishing.) One can only surmise how profitable and better the industry would be today had they fully embraced the ebook revolution instead of fighting it. There are some independent publishers opting out of the traditional morass so well described by Shatzkin. I know of one small publishing company devoted to high quality young adult and middle grade reader books, namelos.com, run by the famous editor Stephen Roxburgh of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux (he was Roald Dahl’s editor) and Cricket Books who is doing just that. His new company is publishing in POD and ebook formats only. That means he has difficulty in getting his books into bookstores, but they are widely available online. Whether he’ll be successful or not remains to be seen. Be forewarned. My view of the industry is biased. I’m a reader. On the other hand the symbiosis between readers and authors is essential. The mediation of a publisher/’gatekeeper perhaps less so. Leonard’s warnings might have helped stave off catastrophe for a while. Whether they will be heard today with a vastly different environment remains to be seen. I hope so. P.S. I read this book on my Kindle. In one of life’s lovely ironies, the ebook comes with a big, gold QED Approved sticker promising the highest quality assurance. So not a few pages later I laughed when I saw the following: “...the methods of pofit [sic] and loss…” On the other hand, the new technology such as Amazon’s Createspace and digital delivery would permit virtually instant revision, even so far as to make changes to the purchaser’s copy in his device. A book well worth reading. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 24, 2014
|
Jun 24, 2014
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0393244660
| 9780393244663
| 0393244660
| 4.14
| 85,657
| Mar 31, 2014
| Mar 31, 2014
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None
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Notes are private!
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0
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not set
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not set
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Apr 06, 2014
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Hardcover
|
|
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|
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my rating |
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|
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 4.04
|
really liked it
|
Dec 14, 2023
|
Jan 14, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.28
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
Mar 07, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 4.22
|
really liked it
|
Nov 28, 2021
|
Nov 28, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.97
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 09, 2020
|
Sep 09, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 3.96
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 06, 2020
|
Oct 06, 2019
|
|||||
|
| 4.26
|
really liked it
|
Aug 2021
|
Sep 18, 2019
|
|||||
|
| 3.78
|
really liked it
|
Oct 08, 2019
|
Aug 26, 2019
|
|||||
|
| 3.71
|
it was amazing
|
Jul 21, 2019
|
Jul 21, 2019
|
|||||
|
| 4.10
|
really liked it
|
Nov 04, 2018
|
Nov 04, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 4.16
|
really liked it
|
Apr 08, 2018
not set
|
Dec 13, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 4.30
|
it was amazing
|
Dec 06, 2017
|
Dec 06, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 4.41
|
really liked it
|
Oct 08, 2017
|
Oct 08, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 4.31
|
really liked it
|
Sep 15, 2017
|
Sep 15, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.78
|
it was amazing
|
May 07, 2017
|
May 07, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.98
|
it was amazing
|
Nov 2015
|
Nov 01, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.96
|
not set
|
May 20, 2015
|
||||||
|
| 4.14
|
not set
|
Apr 02, 2015
|
||||||
|
| 3.91
|
really liked it
|
Jan 31, 2015
|
Jan 31, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.70
|
really liked it
|
Jun 24, 2014
|
Jun 24, 2014
|
|||||
|
| 4.14
|
not set
|
Apr 06, 2014
|
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