From Carpe Diem
Classic 30-minute video of Milton Friedman in 1975 (transcript here) discussing the minimum wage, Social Security, politics, the Welfare State, doing good by spending other people’s money, housing, rent control, government intervention and the Great Depression, collectivism, the free society, greed, private charity
From The Guardian
by Tom Parfitt
Russian citizens can be issued official warnings about crimes that they have not yet committed under powers granted to the security services today.
President Dmitry Medvedev signed off on a new law giving the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, the right to caution people suspected of preparing acts of extremism, or to jail them for obstructing the agency’s work.
The powers appear similar to those enjoyed by Precrime, the police unit in the 2002 Hollywood film Minority Report. “This is a draconian law reminiscent of our repressive past,” said Boris Nemtsov, a leader of the Solidarity opposition movement.
Rights activists had hoped Medvedev would rein in the security services, after his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel, stuffed his administration with hawkish veterans. The Kremlin’s tough stance comes against the backdrop of a disparate but emergent civil movement protesting against corruption and authoritarian government.
Under the new provisions, the FSB will be able to echo Soviet practices. The punishment for ignoring a warning was unclear, but 15-day jail sentences are envisaged for “obstructing an FSB officer’s duties”. Sergei Ivanenko, a leader of the Yabloko party, called it “the law of a police state”. He said: “If such a law exists in a democratic country then it is limited by a very powerful system of civil, public and parliamentary control. In our conditions it will mean absolute power for the security services.”
Yesterday I posted You Wanna Be Americano? Sorry, America is No More The Dream Land… the article had an example of a portfolio where almost all of the companies were overseas
The capital is leaving America. Rapidly. No one wants to invest in country where government is taking over the businesses.
Why would someone in their right mind invest in GM, if they do not have a voice in the business decisions? Government and unions are the ones, who are controlling the company.
Why would someone invest in the health insurers? Tomorrow there may be a public option and the Health insurance companies will be out of the business.
Why would someone invest in a country, where the regulations are making your product so expensive that it is almost impossible to sell it, and if you sell it the profits are going to be taxed at such a high level it would make it impossible for you to prosper.
What creates jobs? It is not the government it is the entrepreneurs. And if you remove that main engine behind the entrepreneur’s drive - to prosper, to excel, then…
Why would anyone here will be willing to create new products, new services, new jobs? Just because of the hassle of it?
If you still have doubts that the investors are leaving, read this article from today:
From Bloomberg
by Andrew Frye
Li Lu, the hedge-fund manager who helped Berkshire Hathaway Inc. find profits in China, may push Warren Buffett’s investment company to make more deals outside the U.S. if he takes a role at the company.
“He is a person that Buffett has confidence in from a trust standpoint and who has experience from an international standpoint,” said Michael Yoshikami, who oversees about $1 billion, including Berkshire shares, at YCMNet Advisors in Walnut Creek, California. Hiring Li would mean “Buffett recognizes that the strategy that has worked in the past has to be adjusted in the new environment where more stable economies are likely to grow at slower growth rates.”
Li, 44, is in line to be hired as one of the executives who would eventually replace Buffett, the 79-year-old chief executive officer, and help manage Berkshire’s investments, the Wall Street Journal reported. Berkshire Vice Chairman Charlie Munger said “it’s a foregone conclusion” that Li would probably become a top investment official at Berkshire, the Journal reported.
Buffett is seeking more opportunities abroad after the 2008 investment in China’s BYD Co., which has jumped eightfold. Li helped arrange the deal, according to the Journal.
Buffett plans to tour Japan and India next year in search of deals. In May, he praised the prospects for economic growth in China. Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire, which Buffett has run for four decades, is ready to spend $10 billion on its next takeover, Buffett said this year.
From WIRED
By Noah Shachtman
The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.
“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.
Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.
It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.
This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its “don’t be evil” mantra.
America’s spy services have become increasingly interested in mining “open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the daily avalanche of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports.
“Secret information isn’t always the brass ring in our profession,” then CIA-director General Michael Hayden told a conference in 2008. “In fact, there’s a real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open.”
U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called “unstructured text” of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military-intelligence units.
Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.
“We’re right there as it happens,” Ahlberg told Danger Room as he clicked through a demonstration. “We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”
Recorded Future certainly has the potential to spot events and trends early. Take the case of Hezbollah’s long-range missiles. On March 21, Israeli President Shimon Peres leveled the allegation that the terror group had Scud-like weapons. Scouring Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s past statements, Recorded Future found corroborating evidence from a month prior that appeared to back up Peres’ accusations.
That’s one of several hypothetical cases Recorded Future runs in its blog devoted to intelligence analysis. But it’s safe to assume that the company already has at least one spy agency’s attention. In-Q-Tel doesn’t make investments in firms without an “end customer” ready to test out that company’s products.
Both Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel made their investments in 2009, shortly after the company was founded. The exact amounts weren’t disclosed, but were under $10 million each. Google’s investment came to light earlier this year online. In-Q-Tel, which often announces its new holdings in press releases, quietly uploaded a brief mention of its investment a few weeks ago.
Both In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures have seats on Recorded Future’s board. Ahlberg says those board members have been “very helpful,” providing business and technology advice, as well as introducing him to potential customers. Both organizations, it’s safe to say, will profit handsomely if Recorded Future is ever sold or taken public. Ahlberg’s last company, the corporate intelligence firm Spotfire, was acquired in 2007 for $195 million in cash.
Google Ventures did not return requests to comment for this article. In-Q-Tel Chief of Staff Lisbeth Poulos e-mailed a one-line statement: “We are pleased that Recorded Future is now part of IQT’s portfolio of innovative startup companies who support the mission of the U.S. Intelligence Community.”
Just because Google and In-Q-Tel have both invested in Recorded Future doesn’t mean Google is suddenly in bed with the government. Of course, to Google’s critics — including conservative legal groups, and Republican congressmen — the Obama Administration and the Mountain View, California, company slipped between the sheets a long time ago.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt hosted a town hall at company headquarters in the early days of Obama’s presidential campaign. Senior White House officials like economic chief Larry Summers give speeches at the New America Foundation, the left-of-center think tank chaired by Schmidt. Former Google public policy chief Andrew McLaughlin is now the White House’s deputy CTO, and was publicly (if mildly) reprimanded by the administration for continuing to hash out issues with his former colleagues.
In some corners, the scrutiny of the company’s political ties have dovetailed with concerns about how Google collects and uses its enormous storehouse of search data, e-mail, maps and online documents. Google, as we all know, keeps a titanic amount of information about every aspect of our online lives. Customers largely have trusted the company so far, because of the quality of their products, and because of Google’s pledges not to misuse the information still ring true to many.
But unease has been growing. Thirty seven state Attorneys General are demanding answers from the company after Google hoovered up 600 gigabytes of data from open Wi-Fi networks as it snapped pictures for its Street View project. (The company swears the incident was an accident.)
“Assurances from the likes of Google that the company can be trusted to respect consumers’ privacy because its corporate motto is ‘don’t be evil’ have been shown by recent events such as the ‘Wi-Spy’ debacle to be unwarranted,” long-time corporate gadfly John M. Simpson told a Congressional hearing in a prepared statement. Any business dealings with the CIA’s investment arm are unlikely to make critics like him more comfortable.
But Steven Aftergood, a critical observer of the intelligence community from his perch at the Federation of American Scientists, isn’t worried about the Recorded Future deal. Yet.
“To me, whether this is troublesome or not depends on the degree of transparency involved. If everything is aboveboard — from contracts to deliverables — I don’t see a problem with it,” he told Danger Room by e-mail. “But if there are blank spots in the record, then they will be filled with public skepticism or worse, both here and abroad, and not without reason.”
Wells Fargo’s Stumpf Sees New Costs for Customers – Wells Fargo & Co. Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf said customers, not just the bank, will bear the financial burden for U.S. regulations that cover services ranging from home loans to credit cards.
U.S. debt not sustainable – Kai Ryssdal talks to Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson about the unsustainable debt load of the United States.
Sun could set suddenly on superpower as debt bites – Good read by Niall Ferguson
21 Reasons Why The So-Called Recovery Is A Joke For Most Americans – Yes, U.S. GDP is growing and corporate profits are beating expectations across the board. Companies are flush with cash, and banks are confident again. It’s surely a recovery… for them.
Recession in U.S. Was Even Worse Than Estimated, Revisions Show – The worst U.S. recession since the 1930s was even deeper than previously estimated, reflecting bigger slumps in consumer spending and housing, according to revised figures.
Taxes: A Defining Issue – At a time when the American people need to make some decisions about the nation’s purpose, along comes Barack Obama to make the choices crystal clear
Who Doesn’t Pay Taxes and Why – For the 2009 tax year, an estimated 47% of U.S. households did not pay any federal income tax. The percentage was a bit higher than normal due to the lousy economy and some allegedly temporary tax breaks that may not be renewed. The long-term percentage of non-taxpaying households is apparently around 40%…
Jim Rickards Compares The Collapse Of The Roman Empire To The US, Concludes That We Are Far Worse Off – the similarities are just far too many, starting with the debasement of the currencies, whereby Rome’s silver dinarius started out pure and eventually barely had a 5% content, and the ever increasing taxation of the population, and especially the most productive segment – the farmers, by the emperors, to the point where the downfall of empire was actually greeted by the bulk of the people as the barbarians were welcomed at the gate with open arms.
UNFUNDED LIABILITIES OF STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEE RETIREMENT BENEFIT PLANS (pdf file) -Total unfunded liabilities for all benefit plans are an estimated $3.1 trillion
Experts warn Obama panel: Fiscal crisis is getting ‘closer’ – The government should consider capping what it pays in benefit programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, experts told President Obama’s fiscal commission
U.S. Economy Grew 2.4% in Second Quarter, Below Forecast - Growth in the U.S. slowed to a 2.4 percent annual rate in the second quarter, less than forecast, reflecting a larger trade deficit and an easing in consumer spending.
U.S. Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index Fell to 67.8 – Confidence among U.S. consumers fell in July to the lowest level since November, posing a threat to the biggest part of the economy.
Free Enterprise — Not Government Oversight — Key to GM Turnaround, Say Company Officials - Free enterprise and the American marketplace – not the guiding hand of government – have revitalized the beleaguered automaker General Motors, which expects to announce another profitable quarter, according to GM officials.
Foreclosures boom among nation’s most creditworthy – A record number of borrowers once judged the most creditworthy are heading into foreclosure as the job market leaves more homeowners unable to keep up with mortgage payments.
How Uncertainty Hinders Economic Growth - Richard W. Fisher’s (currently the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas) remarks before the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce
China overtakes Japan as No.2 economy – China has overtaken Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy, the fruit of three decades of rapid growth that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
UCF gets $434K NIH grant – The University of Central Florida was awarded a $434,800 National Institutes of Health grant that will allow researchers there to develop a game using life-size avatars and real-life scenarios to promote sexual abstinence among Latina middle schoolers.
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