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The Giant of Shareholders, Quietly Stirring

.. at BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager. BlackRock’s size is mind-boggling. With almost $4 trillion under management, it is, according to a recent University of Michigan study, the single largest shareholder in one of every five United States companies. It manages money from pension funds and endowments as well as retail investors, controls large stakes in companies like JPMorgan Chase, Wal-Mart and Chevron and owns 5 percent or more of roughly 40 percent of all publicly traded companies in the country.
Read More Source: www.nytimes.com

Bill Gates' Commercial Use Exempt from Harvard Policy

Harvard officials were not pleased that Gates and Allen (who was not a student) had used the PDP-10 to develop a commercial product, but determined that this military computer was not covered by any Harvard policy; the PDP-10 was controlled by Professor Thomas Cheatham, who felt that students could use the machine for personal use. Harvard placed restrictions on the computer's use and Gates had to use a commercial time share computer until MITS provided access to a PDP-10 in Albuquerque.
Read More Source: en.wikipedia.org

Fair Trade for Clothing

Research shows that some American shoppers would prefer and pay more for clothes from factories that don’t exploit workers. The problem is that most brands and retailers offer very little information about how their products are made.

.. Mr. Locke argues that our insatiable hunger for cheap clothing in constantly changing styles has created a race to the bottom in which brands perpetually push suppliers in Bangladesh, Cambodia and elsewhere for faster delivery and lower prices. He argues that consumers need to break that cycle by, well, buying less of the cheap, fast fashion in the stores.

Read More Source: www.nytimes.com

Without Water, Revolution

“The drought did not cause Syria’s civil war,” said the Syrian economist Samir Aita, but, he added, the failure of the government to respond to the drought played a huge role in fueling the uprising. What happened, Aita explained, was that after Assad took over in 2000 he opened up the regulated agricultural sector in Syria for big farmers, many of them government cronies, to buy up land and drill as much water as they wanted, eventually severely diminishing the water table. This began driving small farmers off the land into towns, where they had to scrounge for work.
Read More Source: www.nytimes.com

What Is Autism?

Over the decades I’ve seen hundreds if not thousands of research papers on whether autistics have theory of mind—the ability to imagine oneself looking at the world through someone else’s point of view and to have an appropriate emotional response. But I’ve seen far, far fewer studies on sensory problems—probably because they would require researchers to imagine themselves looking at the world through an autistic person’s jumble of neuron misfires. You could say they lack theory of brain.
Read More Source: www.nybooks.com

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

Once again: would two hundred and fifty female Fortune 500 CEOs make a big difference to American women? Maybe a little bit, with things like pregnancy parking. Would they work doggedly to change American legislation in order to provide better access to child care, early education, and other programs that would make working life easier for women and men alike? Not necessarily. Would they help American men find employment in the changing economy, so they can help support their wives and families? Not very likely. Would they help the women around the world who suffer real hardship solely because they are women? On the evidence of this book, not at all.
Read More Source: www.nybooks.com

North Korea Unification Calamaty

Even the promise of reunification with the South will bring disillusion. Poor North Koreans will be exploited by South Korean employers and tricked by financial scammers. Members of the former regime, their criminal skills already honed, will seize chunks of the economy and even prey on hitherto safe South Korean cities. And what fate awaits educated North Koreans? Doctors can make drips out of beer bottles, but know nothing of the modern pharmacopoeia. The typical history teacher, Mr Lankov says, “knows a lot about events that never actually happened”.
Read More Source: www.economist.com

Mexico's cosseted elite

in the same week that Mr Benítez was sacked, a local radio station in the south-eastern state of Tabasco revealed audio recordings of Andrés Granier, a former governor of the state, bragging about his 400 pairs of shoes, 600 suits and 1,000 shirts, most of which he kept in his swanky homes abroad because, he said, he was obliged to dress down in Tabasco. Responding to the revelations, which were recorded shortly before he left office, he claimed that he was drunk at the time, and denied most if it. But newspapers were quick to note the old saying that children and drunks always speak the truth.
Read More Source: www.economist.com

How Twitter Is Messing With Al-Qaeda's Careful PR Machine

The evolution toward platforms such as Twitter that empower the individual are allowing Al-Qaeda's supporters to avoid forum censors and promote their own personal narratives, which are not necessarily in agreement with that of Al-Qaeda's messaging strategy writ-large.
Read More Source: www.theatlantic.com

Why Christian Pastors Are Talking About Scandal in Church

After all, Pastor Brown is right to call the Bible scandalous, filled as it is with stories of murder, adultery, deception, theft, and other risqué activities. Scandal is no more salacious than the accounts of Old and New Testament biblical figures, from King David and his philandering-but-wise son, King Solomon, to Apostle Paul, pre-conversion.
Read More Source: www.theatlantic.com

In Role Reversal, Goldman Chief Advises Dimon

Mr. Blankfein has had a public image makeover, thanks in part to initiatives by Goldman. After the financial crisis, Goldman announced new charitable efforts, started an advertising campaign and showed an increased willingness to engage with the media.
Read More Source: dealbook.nytimes.com

Chinese Citizen Bicycle Reporter

Every summer, the 59-year-old Chinese blogger Zhang Shihe rides his bicycle thousands of miles to the plateaus, deserts and hinterlands of North Central China. In this Op-Doc video, we meet Mr. Zhang, known to his many followers online as “Tiger Temple,” as he goes to great lengths to document the stories of struggling rural villagers whose voices are seldom heard in China’s state-monitored media.
Read More Source: www.nytimes.com

Insects may solve food shortage for growing world population

"Producing a kilo of beef requires 13 kilos of grass or green matter. But to produce a kilo of cricket, beetle or grasshopper meat one needs just 1.5 to 2 kilos of feed and it produces a fraction of the carbon dioxide emissions”
Read More Source: digitaljournal.com

Chen Guangcheng: 'Communism Has Always Been a Scam'

To boil it down, I don't think Hu Jintao or Xi Jinping believe in Communism themselves. And I don't believe any of the political leaders believe in Communism themselves, otherwise they wouldn't need to accept bribes and they wouldn't be so corrupt.
Read More Source: www.theatlantic.com

Bumpy Road for Trophy Cars

Sometimes strings need to be pulled. When Sunny Thakur, the scion of a suburban family influential in politics and real estate — and, according to press reports, the underworld — realized that even with a hydraulic nose-lift system, his matte-black 2012 Aventador LP700-4 couldn’t clear the local speed bumps. His solution, he said, was to lobby his uncle, an influential politician, to have them lowered.
Read More Source: www.nytimes.com

The Origins of Bankrupcy

In this insight was the germ of Chapter 11 of the modern US bankruptcy code, the provision that allows an insolvent corporation to write off old debts and have a fresh start as a going concern.

The British devised the concept of legal discharge from debt not out of a sudden attack of compassion but because the economic crisis of the 1690s had put much of the merchant class in jail. The cause was not improvident or immoral behavior on the part of debtors, but general economic dislocation beyond their control, caused by the confluence of bubonic plague, recent wars with France, and a storm that devastated the merchant fleet in 1703.

.. Legal historians such as Bruce Mann have observed that, for capitalism to proceed, it was necessary to shift the economic thinking and legal policy governing debt from moral questions to instrumental ones.

.. after a brief flirtation with World War I–style reparations, the occupying powers agreed to behave differently: they wrote off 93 percent of the Nazi-era debt and postponed collection of other debts for nearly half a century. So Germany, whose debt-to-GDP ratio in 1939 was 675 percent, had a debt load of about 12 percent in the early 1950s—far less than that of the victorious Allies—helping to produce postwar Germany’s economic miracle.

Read More Source: www.nybooks.com

Alan Greenspan: on "Fedspeak"

As Fed chairman, every time I expressed a view, I added or subtracted 10 basis points from the credit market. That was not helpful. But I nonetheless had to testify before Congress. On questions that were too market-sensitive to answer, “no comment” was indeed an answer. And so you construct what we used to call Fed-speak. I would hypothetically think of a little plate in front of my eyes, which was the Washington Post, the following morning’s headline, and I would catch myself in the middle of a sentence. Then, instead of just stopping, I would continue on resolving the sentence in some obscure way which made it incomprehensible. But nobody was quite sure I wasn’t saying something profound when I wasn’t. And that became the so-called Fed-speak which I became an expert on over the years.
Read More Source: www.businessweek.com

Facing the Truth

I imagine that I’m a person who’s never sick, never needs medicine, has no vices, comes from a healthy family, and is so spiritually and emotionally balanced that he never needs help. The person I actually am is more than a little out of shape, is probably a candidate for heart trouble, enjoys a scholarly pipe smoke a little too much, and has several times been so beset with spiritual and emotional trouble that he needed serious help from a counselor. It’s official. Hello, Doc. My name is Andrew, and I’m a person with Real Problems. I sat on the papery hospital bed thinking about how uncomfortable I was that the doctor knew more about the “real” me than most people.

.. I saw the great Garrison Keillor at the Ryman Auditorium a few years ago when A Prairie Home Companion came through town, and was struck by how comfortable he was in his own skin. He has one of the most recognizable voices in radio history and has been entertaining us for decades—but he has, as they say, a face for radio. He’s not an attractive man. His eyes are bulgy, his nose is a little too small, he’s gangly, he hunches, and though his speaking voice is magical his singing voice is about as plain as you could imagine. But when he steps out onto the stage in his suit and bright red sneakers, he shines. He dances around as awkward as a goose on stilts, singing badly and looking odd—but he’s so joyful, so clearly doing what he loves to do, that he doesn’t care how weird he looks.

Read More Source: www.rabbitroom.com

Karl Rove: In Data We Trust

The extensive involvement of Rove, not only with Liberty Works, but with all aspects of Republican efforts to build a technologically advanced, integrated voter list has provoked new charges that Rove is acquiring unprecedented control over the Republican electioneering machine: over the aggregation of tactically valuable data and of sharing it; over fundraising; over candidate selection; over voter mobilization; and finally over issue prioritization.

.. Here’s why data ownership is a big deal. To paraphrase the geographer Halford Mackinder: Who controls the data controls the candidates; who controls the candidates controls the party.

Read More Source: opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

Are ‘Hot Hands’ in Sports a Real Thing?

In these big sets of data, which were far larger than those used in, for instance, the 1985 basketball study, success did slightly increase the chances of subsequent success — though generally over a longer time frame than the next shot. Basketball players experienced statistically significant and recognizable hot periods over an entire game or two, during which they would hit more free throws than random chance would suggest. But they would not necessarily hit one free throw immediately after the last.
Read More Source: well.blogs.nytimes.com

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