Welcome to the weekend, and the beginning of the end of Winter. To celebrate, pour yourself a strong cup of coffee, and enjoy our long-form Saturday morning reads:
• The East India Company: The original corporate raiders (The Guardian)
• Marissa Mayer Has Completed Step One (Medium)
• Are humans getting cleverer? IQ is rising in many parts of the world. What’s behind the change and does it really mean people are cleverer than their grandparents? (BBC)
• Top MLB prospect lives by his own rules — in a van (ESPN)
• Life After Cancer: How the iPhone Helped Me Achieve a Healthier Lifestyle (MacStories)
• One Nerd to Rule Them All: One app to find them, and a million dollars of in-app purchases every day to bring them all and in the darkness bind them (Bloomberg)
• Should you fact-check your grandma’s Facebook posts? (Aeon)
• Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Tracing the Mysterious Path to Disappearance (GQ)
• The Plot to Free North Korea With Smuggled Episodes of ‘Friends’ (Wired)
• People have been routinely put to death over the most absurd — and false –allegations imaginable. (Priceonomics)
Be sure to check out this week’s Masters in Business. which features BAML’s North American Economist Michelle Meyer.
Number of ultra-rich swells to almost 173,000
Source: Guardian
Aoen asks about nutty grandma, “But what’s the point in fighting the many-headed hydras of internet lies?”
Slam them. Provide the facts. It’s our responsibility to ourselves to make sure that not only all the right wing BS is shown to be false, but to make the people feel uncomfortable with the lies. It’s their emotional problem, make believing it an emotional problem too.
No one seems to talk about the sources. The Koch brother industrial machinery that funds this nonsense to keep people stupidly pulling the lever to keep top tax rates for the rich low.
Problem is they don’t know they are even lying!! It is hard-wired into them!! For more enlightenment try reading “The Republican Brain” by Chris Mooney. Most astute analysis of cognitive function ever!!!
Jeb Bush angers die-hard conservatives, doubles down on Common Core
Common Core at first enjoyed support in GOP circles, but after Obama announced his support for them, Republicans turned on the curriculum and called it a federal “scheme.”
http://natmonitor.com/2015/03/07/jeb-bush-angers-die-hard-conservatives-doubles-down-on-common-core/
Kind of like Obamacare. The GOP came up with it Romney implemented it successfully. It’s working for tens of millions so the Republicans will stop at nothing to end it just to not give Obama a success.
What a great group of people the Republicans are.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/06/britain-s-horrific-vip-pedophile-cover-up.html
another read for the weekend
Is there an echo in here?
“Conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill have begun pressing FBI counterintelligence and Pentagon security agents to take more active roles in the investigation of Washington’s latest sex scandal. The Probe centers on the bizarre activities of Craig Spence, a well connected lobbyist who vanished recently after federal investigators linked him to a male prostitution ring that serviced government officials, military officers and businessmen. Lawmakers are worried that the case may involve questions about national security because Spence has close ties to both the Japanese government, which paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars for lobbying work, and the People’s Republic of China. Indeed, so concerned were counterintelligence officials about the possibility that Spence may have been using prostitutes to blackmail government officials that when police raided the prostitution ring’s headquarters, a CIA officer is said to have accompanied them to help search for evidence. So far, however, the FBI and the Pentagon are resisting pressure to become more involved in the inquiry, which is being led by the Secret Service. Sources say that the FBI and the Pentagon fear that the scandal could become too sordid.”
U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT “Washington Whispers” 7/29/89
I’m telling you, my dear…it could never happen here…..
“Conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill have begun pressing FBI counterintelligence and Pentagon security agents to take more active roles in the investigation of Washington’s latest s*x scandal. The Probe centers on the bizarre activities of Craig Spence, a well connected lobbyist who vanished recently after federal investigators linked him to a male prostitution ring that serviced government officials, military officers and businessmen. Lawmakers are worried that the case may involve questions about national security because Spence has close ties to both the Japanese government, which paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars for lobbying work, and the People’s Republic of China. Indeed, so concerned were counterintelligence officials about the possibility that Spence may have been using prostitutes to blackmail government officials that when police raided the prostitution ring’s headquarters, a CIA officer is said to have accompanied them to help search for evidence. So far, however, the FBI and the Pentagon are resisting pressure to become more involved in the inquiry, which is being led by the Secret Service. Sources say that the FBI and the Pentagon fear that the scandal could become too sordid.”
U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT “Washington Whispers” 7/29/89
East India Company is hardly the first though. 1652 comes to mind with the Dutch East India Company setting up a refreshment stand in what is now Capetown, South Africa. We all know what that led to.
“Now virtually all formal schooling, when you get past the sixth grade into high school and college, means that you take hypotheses seriously,” says Flynn. “This is what science is all about. And you’re using logic on abstract categories.”
This Congress, your Honor?
There has been a lot written about Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” but I came away from this article understanding more than I had before, particularly about its future research and policy implications: That’s a good thing (ht BdL).
Capital Eats the World
…Piketty’s book reflects the promise and current limits of economics as a discipline. The ideas, which are powerful, could not have originated anywhere but mainstream economics. They require a command of the mathematical models of growth and taxation, and only economists would appreciate the painstaking reconstruction of the balance sheet data.
But Piketty oscillates between paying homage to fundamental forces of technology, tastes, and supply and demand, and then backtracking to say that politics and institutions are important.
So how to do better?
Atlanta Fed’s “GDPNow” model ain’t lookin’ too good
https://www.frbatlanta.org/cqer/researchcq/gdpnow.cfm
“Cash balance plans offer owner-employees in professional practices a vehicle to defer tax on income well in excess of the annual contribution limits of traditional Sec. 401(k) and profit sharing plans. This option has become increasingly valuable since the total tax burden on owners of unincorporated, flowthrough business entities increased in 2013.
Cash balance plans, often referred to as hybrid retirement plans, are defined benefit plans that in many ways resemble defined contribution plans. The number of active cash balance plans (those without zero participants) rose 70% between 2008 and 2012, and those plans held more than $800 billion in assets in 2012. Professional practices currently account for the majority of cash balance plans, with the highest concentration in the medical field. Cash balance plans are especially appealing to this demographic (e.g., doctors, dentists, lawyers, and accountants) because these professionals often earn much-higher-than-average annual salaries and get a later start in accumulating personal retirement savings.”
http://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2015/mar/cash-balance-plans.html