Morning Reading, selected articles of interest from various publications.

The Great Inertia Sector: A whistleblower’s account of council work where staff pull six-month sickies
Monday morning, it’s 10am and I’m late for work – but there’s no point hurrying because even though I should have been at my desk 30 minutes ago, I know I’ll be the first to arrive at the office.
Sure enough, the planning department is a ghost town.
Our flexi-hours policy means that employees can start any time between 7.30am and 10am, but council workers like to treat that as a rough guideline rather than the contractual obligation that it is.
I’m a senior planning officer: it’s my job to inspect buildings, grant planning approval and to guide members of the public looking to alter their homes.
Our department has 60 employees and – until last Tuesday – a budget of £22million.

I’ve been there for two years and in that period the only time I’ve ever seen every employee present and correct was at the Christmas party.

At least ten people will be off sick on any one day. The departmental record holder is Doreen – she has worked a grand total of eight days in 14 months.

Doreen must be the unluckiest woman in the country.
In the past year and a half she claims she has: fallen victim to frostbite; been hit by a car; and accidentally set herself on fire.

But she’s really pulled out all the stops with her latest excuse: witchcraft. That’s right, Doreen believes somebody in Nigeria has cast a spell on her and that it would be unprofessional of her to attempt to do the job she is paid £56k a year for while under the influence of the spell.
She has already been off for four months on full pay. I’ve no idea how long this spell lasts, but my guessing would be six months to the day – the exact amount of time council employees can take off on full pay before their money is reduced. [...]
Read Article

Lina’s comment: Well, by this account they seem to (almost) beat the Greek public sector. Shameful, wasteful, unacceptable – we must stop this type of government largesse with our money. De-construct the public sector now! (and – yes! – fire a lot of these people)

Socialist Pigs
Capitalism produces. Socialism distributes. The two systems do not coexist comfortably with one another. In fact, they are inimical.

Some of the most celebrated champions of socialism have coined terms like “greedy capitalist” or “capitalist pig.” By implication, a socialist is neither greedy nor a pig. But economic history suggests that socialists are just as porcine as their capitalist counterparts…maybe even more so.

One need only look to the recent goings on in Australia, your editor’s country of birth, for a glimpse into the real world outcomes of this ideological struggle. Kevin Rudd was last week ousted from Prime Ministership after a botched attempt to impose a “super profits” tax on the most productive sector of the Australian economy – the mighty mining sector. [...]

Ms. Gillard is certainly aware of the research released by the Western Australia Chamber of Commerce and Industry that suggests the “super profits” tax, as it stands, would have erased $4.4 billion and 17,000 jobs from the West Australian economy next year – before the tax was even scheduled to be implemented in 2012. The study further predicts the cost to the state’s economy would have risen each year to total $60 billion and 100,000 jobs lost by 2020. [...]

Read Article

Lina’s comment: Atlas shrugs in Australia and the prime minister falls – I hope his successor will soon follow. A lesson for all producers (don’t allow your abuse).

To the Taj in a stately rattler
We boarded the Maharajas’ Express later than scheduled, arriving at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly known as Victoria) about midnight. A red carpet led up steps. Staff, keen to avoid further delay, sped us along it. We ducked through a security arch, had our foreheads daubed with the ritual tilak mark and then, with just time to glimpse the splendid red livery with its crowns and stripes and loping tigers, we were on board. Waiters in smart tunics and tailed turbans offered glasses of melon juice. We glimpsed leather chairs in the bar and a vivid mural of a tiger. Then our young valet, Himanshu, was leading my wife and I along the corridors to our suite, Navratna. [...]
Leather seats and lunch with the maharana – Michael Kerr discovers that a new “cruise train” journey between Mumbai and Delhi comes complete with palace visits, elephant polo and a dash of opium at tea time. [...]
Read Article

Lina’s comment: Would love to see India in this “decadent” way – why not?

Morning Reading, selected articles of interest from various publications.

The unacknowledged giant – Norman Macrae
Few journalists have had as great an influence—or been proved right so often—as the man who, for 23 years, was the deputy editor of The Economist
[...] He kept the flame of free-market thinking burning during the long night of collectivism. He predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, at a time when the CIA was obsessed by Russia’s growing strength, and foresaw the privatisation of industry, when other intellectuals were celebrating the triumph of the “mixed economy”. [..]
Read Article

New Report – Sharia Law in Britain: A Threat to One Law for All and Equal Rights
Based on an 8 March 2010 Seminar on Sharia Law, research, interviews, and One Law for All case files, the report has identified a number of problem areas:

- Sharia law’s civil code is arbitrary and discriminatory against women and children in particular. With the rise in the acceptance of Sharia courts, discrimination is being further institutionalised with some UK law firms additionally offering clients advice on Sharia law and the use of collaborative law.

- Sharia law is practiced in Britain primarily by Sharia Councils and Muslims Arbitration Tribunals. Both operate on religious principles and are harmful to women although Muslim Arbitration Tribunals are wrongly regarded as being of more concern because they operate as tribunals under the Arbitration Act 1996, making their rulings binding in law. [...]
Read Article

Genesis redux – Economist.com
A new form of life has been created in a laboratory, and the era of synthetic biology is dawning.
[...] Like Shelley’s protagonist, Dr Venter and Dr Smith needed some spare parts from dead bodies to make their creature work. Unlike Victor Frankenstein, though, they needed no extra spark of Promethean lightning to give the creature its living essence. Instead they made that essence, a piece of DNA that carries about 1,000 genes, from off-the-shelf laboratory chemicals. The result is the first creature since the beginning of creatures that has no ancestor. What it is, and how it lives, depends entirely on a design put together by scientists of the J. Craig Venter Institute and held on the institute’s computers in Rockville, Maryland, and San Diego, California. When the first of these artificial creatures showed that it could reproduce on its own, the age of artificial life began. [...]
Read Article

Morning Reading, selected articles of interest from various publications.

How Federal Crackdown on Bribery Hurts Business And Enriches Insiders – Forbes.com
[...] A former prosecutor, to be sure, does not work on the defense of the same case he had as a government lawyer. But there is nothing to stop prosecutors from ginning up cases that will feed the lawyers who used to have their jobs or from looking forward to a payday in the private sector that will be made possible by their busy successors at Justice.

Many of the 150 pending cases will probably end with so-called deferred prosecution agreements. These involve the government threatening to bring an indictment against a company–which could effectively put the firm out of business–unless it agrees to adhere to certain practices. This hammer gives the feds immense power–for one thing, they don’t have to prove their legal theories of bribery in court. [...]
Read Article

Lina’s comment: Amazing tale of ridiculous regulations, insane litigation and loss of common sense – all hurting business and prosperity.

Tim O’ Reilly, The Oracle of Silicon Valley – Inc.com
[...] O’Reilly never raised outside capital; he funded his projects through profits. “There is a wonderful rigor in free-market economics,” he wrote in an early company manual. “When you have to prove the value of your ideas by persuading other people to pay for them, it clears out an awful lot of woolly thinking.” Just in case anyone was worried the boss had lost his touchy-feely touch, he went on to compare free-market economics with the poetry of Alexander Pope.

Like almost everything O’Reilly Media has done since, the fortuitous decision to enter the book business — which coincided with the rise of the personal computer and, therefore, an explosion in the market for computer books — happened thanks to the founder’s observational acuity and a series of happy accidents.[...]
Read Article

Morning Reading, selected articles of interest from various publications.

Outfoxing the Counterfeiters- WSJ.com
The new $100 bill is the most sophisticated attempt yet to combat forgery. Since colonial times, the U.S. has engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with criminals and foreign governments eager to pass off brilliant fakes. [...]
Yet paper money flourished, thanks to private banks chartered by state legislatures. These banks began issuing their own paper money in denominations and designs of their choice. Thousands of different kinds of “bank notes” floated in circulation, each with their own unique design. Ben Franklin and the other founders appeared on some, but so, too, did everyone (and everything) from portraits of obscure politicians, Greek and Roman gods, scantily clad women, slaves, Indians and scenes of everyday life. Even stranger things—Santa Claus, sea serpents and rampaging polar bears, to name a few—showed up on these private currencies.

It proved next to impossible to remember what genuine notes looked like, never mind counterfeits, and the opening decades of the 19th century marked what one historian has called the “golden age of counterfeiting.” In those decades, millions of dollars in counterfeit notes flooded the economy. The masterminds behind these counterfeits created them with the hope of making money, not sabotaging the country.
Read Article

Lina’s comment: Fascinating story about banknotes and counterfeiting attempts through history, for profit and/or political reasons.

Gen Y & Loyalty – calacanis.com
My belief is that one third of Gen Y kicks ass. I meet these folks at
TechCrunch50, Open Angel Forum and on This Week in Startups all the
time. I love them. They inspire me and give me hope.

However, the majority of Gen Y seem to operating under the bizarre
rallying cry of: More money! Less responsibility! Shorter hours! No
stress! More freedom! It’s all about me!

It’s so obvious to me why our country is spiraling like a regional jet
piloted by a $9 an hour, 20 year-old pilot with under 1,000 hours of
flight time.

[...]

If you leave after a year, you don’t get a ticker-tape parade and you
don’t get celebrated. It’s not always about you and your karaoke going
away party–after 90 days! (really? 90 days and you host your own
going away party? lame.)
Read Article

Lina’s comment: Interesting post by Jason Calacanis (I like many of his posts because they are very personal and opinionated). I agree loyalty should not be forgotten. When a company treats you well, you must honour that and not slam the door on their face on your way out. It’s ungracious.

Morning Reading, selected articles of interest from various publications.

The Economics of Being Nice
Where the researchers and commentators go wrong is in the beginning. They think that buying an ‘ethical’ mutual fund…or a ‘green’ car…is a form of being nice. It is nothing of the sort. It is a substitute for being nice. Being nice is not always easy. Many people have a hard time with it. Others judge it not worth the effort…or even counterproductive. Niceness was probably as useless to Attila the Hun as virtue is to a prostitute or integrity is to a politician. [...]
Nice people don’t have to pretend to be nice by buying supposedly ethical products. They are nice; that’s what counts to them. The person who buys ethical products, on the other hand, is a scalawag and a hypocrite. He is not really nice at all, which is what the researchers really discovered.
Read Article

Lina’s & Roger’s comment: Just as we thought…
PS. “Fair trade” is an oxymoron – trade is by definition fair.

Doris Haddock – Obituary, The Economist
The question she wanted people to ask was not how (on earth!), but why. Why, in January 1999, had she set off to walk from Pasadena to Washington, DC? The simple answer was that she had lost patience with the power of big money in American politics. Congressmen and senators did not listen to people like her—people who spent years nursing their husbands when they had Alzheimer’s, or who battled to keep the interstate out of their small towns, in her case Dublin, New Hampshire. They patted little old ladies like her patronisingly on the head, while taking wads of money from special interests for whom they would do favours later. Mrs Haddock was sick of it. She had organised petitions for campaign-finance reform, with tens of thousands of signatures, but got nowhere. So it was sneakers on, and hit the road.
Read Article

Lina’s & Roger’s comment: What a life, what an achievement, what a woman!
Very inspiring story.

Morning Reading, selected articles of interest from various publications.

Coming To America – Open immigration is essential for a libertarian country
[ Forbes.com ]
So, I say to immigrants: Come on over! Bring your friends. Bring your families. Help us restore an America that was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. If you’re already here, I’m glad you are. Please stay awhile. If you’ve just arrived, welcome. I hope you like it here as much as I do.
Read Article

Scientific Regress: The Case of Scurvy
On his blog, IdleWords.com, Polish-born Maciej Ceglowski tells the fascinating story of how the cure for scurvy was won and lost in a culture confident in scientific progress, and why Robert Falcon Scott’s 1911 expedition to the South Pole struggled with a disease that had supposedly been cured in the 18th century.
Read Article
and Original Article

Morning Reading, selected articles of interest from various publications.

How Milton Friedman Saved Chile
Milton Friedman gave Chileans the intellectual wherewithal first to survive the quake, and now to build their lives anew. [...]
What Chile did have was intellectual capital, thanks to an exchange program between its Catholic University and the economics department of the University of Chicago, then Friedman’s academic home. Even before the 1973 coup, several of Chile’s “Chicago Boys” had drafted a set of policy proposals which amounted to an off-the-shelf recipe for economic liberalization: sharp reductions to government spending and the money supply; privatization of state-owned companies; the elimination of obstacles to free enterprise and foreign investment, and so on.
Read Article

Eulogy for Robert B. Parker by his son, David
We all know of his passion for social justice, civil rights and noblesse oblige, and because these traits are enshrined in his work, it’s easy to take them for granted. But we’ve only to remember how hard-won they were. In building his character, he had to reject the narrow-minded and bigoted conservatism of his parents and his parochial upbringing. A larger life beckoned him. He dared to eat the peach. He rode away from his mundane origins on a kind of daft confidence that allowed him to transform himself as needed but without losing his center. In contrast, I didn’t have to reject his values to build my character. I wanted to be like him.
Read Article

Morning Reading, selected articles of interest from various publications.

The Future of Web Content – HTML5, Flash & Mobile Apps, by Jeremy Allaire
I think it’s critical to first frame and understand this discussion with the broader political economy of Internet software platforms. Most of the debate and discussion over HTML5 vs. Flash vs. Native Apps has little to do with what is the right technical approach, or whether something is open or closed, it has to do with the expressions of power and control that drive the businesses of the Internet’s dominant platform companies — Apple, Adobe, Google and Microsoft.

Each of these companies seeks to create unique runtimes and APIs that provide a strategic wedge that can drive other aspects of their business. [...]For Apple, this is hardware and paid media (content and apps) sales. For Google, this is about creating massive reach for their advertising platforms and products. For Adobe, this about creating major new applications businesses based on their platform. For Microsoft, it is about driving unit sales of their core OS and business applications.
Read Article

10 luminaries look ahead to the business of reading
The tablet is the Holy Grail for media people: a more portable, more visually interesting way to deliver news that can be constantly updated. I’m very excited to see what will be possible in the relatively near future in terms of presenting information, curating content — the whole realm of things that magazine making is all about.

Unlike the computer screen, a tablet might be able to create for the reader more of a sense that you are in this carefully constructed closed garden; when you’re online you feel like you’re always just a click away into the great sea of media. I think that environment will be good for editors and content creators, and it can probably be useful for advertisers too.
Read Article

Lina’s comment: The luminaries include Matt Mullenweg, Kevin Rose, Marc Andreessen and Jimmy Wales.

Morning Reading, selected articles of interest from various publications.

Stephen Fry: why the Apple iPad is here to stay – Guardian.co.uk
There are many issues you could have with the iPad. No multitasking, still no Adobe Flash. No camera, no GPS. They all fall away the minute you use it. I cannot emphasise enough this point: “Hold your judgment until you’ve spent five minutes with it.” No YouTube film, no promotional video, no keynote address, no list of features can even hint at the extraordinary feeling you get from actually using and interacting with one of these magical objects. [...]
The moment you experience it in your hands, you know this is class. This is a different order of experience. The speed, the responsiveness, the smooth glide of it, the richness and detail of the display, the heft in your hand, the rightness of the actions and gestures that you employ, untutored and instinctively, it’s not just a scaled up iPhone or a scaled-down multitouch enhanced laptop – it is a whole new kind of device. And it will change so much. Newspapers, magazines, literature, academic textbooks, brochures, fliers and pamphlets are going to be transformed (poor Kindle).
Read Article

Roger’s comment: A refreshingly well-written appreciation of the Apple iPad, its desirability and potential. The article is a delight to read.

Adobe Co-founder John Warnock on the Competitive Advantages of Aesthetics and the ‘Right’ Technology
When Acrobat was announced, the world didn’t get it. They didn’t understand how important sending documents around electronically was going to be.
We met with [someone from] the Gartner Group, who said, “This is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard in my life.” But I said, “No, people have been trying to figure out universal document formats for decades, and no one has succeeded. The reason we can succeed is that we don’t have to ask anybody’s permission. No one has to do any development. We can capture the PostScript files and convert any PostScript file into a PDF file. And no one has to say this is a good idea or a bad idea. We can just make it a fait accompli.” [...]

I’ve thought about calling him [note: Steve Jobs, re: Flash on iPhone] and saying, “Steve, you know, at this point you want might to engage the partnership again.” Because I think otherwise he is going to get some competitive pressures from outside that he is not going to like.
He has never been great at hitting that middle ground [between] openness and proprietary [products]. He has always seemed to lean to the proprietary side, to want to own everything. I think this is one case where he probably would do better if he didn’t do that.
Read Article

Lina’s comment: Ironic how J.Warnock potentially “makes the case” for iPad (as a combination of aesthetics & right technology), yet Flash is not supported by iPad either…He may have to call Steve Jobs now.

Morning Reading, selected articles of interest from various publications.

Americans Will Come Down on Side of Freedom
It may turn out to be one of the most important facts of the 21st century that the American people — as exemplified by, but not limited to, the “tea party” fighters — came down on the side of freedom over fear. I don’t know that there is another people on the planet who would have had a similar impulse and judgment. It is, to use a word, exceptional (as in “American exceptionalism”).

It is why we live in hope this Christmas season that we may yet claw back our government in time to protect our grandchildren’s freedom and prosperity.

Read Article