Naked Capitalism pointed out something yesterday that confounds conventional wisdom on what kind of capitalism private equity firms like Bain Capital really engage in: ... most members of the public do not know that close to half the investment capital in private equity funds is contributed directly by government entities. In this respect, private equity is little different than companies like Fannie, Freddie, and Solyndra that are regularly criticized in the media as recipients of government subsidies. “Government entities” here refers to public employee pension funds, or entities that ... Read More
The Wall Street Crackdown America’s Been Waiting for?
August 17, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
A bunch of outlets reported yesterday that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman subpoenaed seven of the world’s largest banks over the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (LIBOR) imbroglio this past month. The Financial Times’ version of the story, by Shahien Nasiripour and Tracy Alloway, is the only one I saw that hinted at the true significance of Schneiderman’s subpoenas: The state investigation comes on the heels of separate probes from prosecutors and regulators in countries including the UK, Canada, Japan and the US who are examining possible collusion by large financial ... Read More
Obama, LBJ, and the War on Poverty
August 15, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Paul Tough’s latest New York Times Magazine feature performs an admirable service illustrating contradictions between the Obama administration’s anti-poverty efforts and Obama’s own complex views on the topic, shaped by his early career as a community organizer in Chicago’s hard-luck Roseland neighborhood. But I have to quibble with one mildly disingenuous sleight of hand the piece performs. In discussing the history of the War on Poverty, Tough narrates: In 1966, at the height of the War on Poverty, the poverty rate was just under 15 percent of the population; in 2010, the most ... Read More
Bill Gates’ Solar-Powered Toilets
August 15, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Bill Gates wants to potty train the world on solar-powered toilets. The developing world, specifically, where 2.6 billion people lack access to modern toilets connected to advanced sanitation infrastructure. This contributes to 1.5 million deaths due to preventable diarrheal illness, according to the World Health Organization. To address the problem, the Gates Foundation awarded grants to teams from CalTech, Stanford, and elsewhere yesterday, at a “Reinvent the Toilet Fair” in Seattle. The winning latrines incorporate innovative features like the ability to generate their own energy from ... Read More
Is the Apple-ocalypse Upon Us? UPDATED
August 13, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
I’m a big apple guy. So imagine my dismay on Friday when the USDA staged a classic end-of-the-week bad news dump: We’re projected to come up about a billion pounds short of last year’s apple crop--around 3 billion apples, based on the last time I measured out a pound of apples at the store (luckily, it looks like we'll be laying off enough teachers to offset the shortfall). I've reached out to experts at the USDA for further insight, and will update this post if and when I hear back. UPDATE (Tuesday afternoon): If these apple projections come to fruition, they would represent the ... Read More
The Top Ten Reasons to Go to Mindshare
May 31, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
“This is what happens when you are raised by Wiccans at sci-fi conventions.” So said Jason Porath, effects artist and technical director at Dreamworks Animation. His comment was the first thing I heard when I walked into a steamy downtown Los Angeles warehouse on a Saturday earlier this month for Mindshare50/, the West Coast’s premier gathering of quirky, transcendent arts and engineering talent—and it was a good prologue for an only-on-the-West-Coast event. Mindshare organizer Doug Campbell invited Porath and dozens of others to present and perform at a blow-out 50th-month ... Read More
Your Brain is Making You Lazy
May 7, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Good news, slackers! It’s not your fault you’re lazy—it’s your brain chemistry that makes you focus on what a hassle it is to accomplish things, instead of on the rewards of doing so. A new study finds that the amount of effort a person decides to expend on a given task seems to depend on which parts of their brain have the highest dopamine levels. If so the so-called ‘pleasure chemical’ is highest in the parts of your brain known as the striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, then you probably focus on rewards, like the hardest workers in this test study by a team at ... Read More
Mapping the Evolution of the West
May 4, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
The U.S. West Coast: what’s not to love? It smells like citrus (at least near our office) and everybody wears sandals — even our CEOs. In the current issue of Pacific Standard, we took aim at the West—the people and their paychecks—to quantify a few ways in which it defined the latter half of the “American Century”. Click the graphic below for a breakdown of the ways the West won the last 50 years. For example: In population, growth in California, Washington, and Oregon has been more explosive than in major East Coast cities in recent decades; in terms of aggregate compensation ... Read More
Did Shoddy Editing Enable American Torture?
April 26, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
A new analysis in the California Law Review, the student-run publication of the University of California at Berkeley’s law school, argues that flaws in the student editing system in that same journal paved the way for John Yoo to publish a career-launching article in 1996. The article set forth a dubious legal basis for practices like waterboarding, which Yoo later applied to U.S. policy as the Bush administration official chiefly responsible for the infamous “torture memos.” A critical look at the article by any mainstream historian, though, would have thrown cold water on Yoo’s ... Read More
