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Showing posts from November, 2018

China is creating concentration camps in Xinjiang. Here’s how we hold it accountable. - The Washington Post

China is creating concentration camps in Xinjiang. Here’s how we hold it accountable. - The Washington Post : CHINA CONTINUES to see the uproar over its creation of concentration camps holding as many as 1 million ethnic Uighurs and others as a public-relations problem. In recent days, the government issued another white paper claiming it is protecting religious freedom and culture in the autonomous northwestern province of Xinjiang, despite evidence that it has corralled much of the Muslim population into spartan camps for forced brainwashing. When Western nations repeatedly brought up the camps on Nov. 6 at China’s five-year United Nations human rights review in Geneva, a top Chinese official dismissed the claims as “seriously far from the truth.” That is why recently introduced bipartisan legislation in Congress is vitally important. China’s leaders have dissembled for a year and cannot be allowed to escape accountability for the massive indoctrination and internment drive. Exposu...
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Theresa May’s unloved Brexit plan is much like the prime minister herself - The Washington Post

Theresa May’s unloved Brexit plan is much like the prime minister herself - The Washington Post : May, who voted to remain in the E.U., said Thursday her deal “brings back control of our borders, our money and our laws. And it does so while protecting jobs, protecting our security and protecting the integrity of the United Kingdom.” Her language reveals a defensive Brexit, a least-worst Brexit, an anxious Brexit, a better-than-nothing Brexit.�
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High-tech farmers are using LED lights in ways that seem to border on science fiction - Washington Post

High-tech farmers are using LED lights in ways that seem to border on science fiction - Washington Post : He doesn’t need varieties bred for disease resistance over flavor or plants genetically modified to handle the stresses of the field. And his harvest isn’t shipped across the country in refrigerated trucks from farms vulnerable to the effects of climate
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The Founder of Panera Bread Explains the Economic Forces that Led to Trump | The New Yorker

The Founder of Panera Bread Explains the Economic Forces that Led to Trump | The New Yorker : In the summer of 2017, Lynn Paine and Joseph Bower, two Harvard Business School professors, published a piece in the Harvard Business Review arguing that the idea that profits are all that should matter to a company’s leadership is a relatively new one. They trace it to an essay by the free-market economist Milton Friedman, which ran in the Times Magazine in 1970. In the piece, Friedman outlined what he called the “Friedman business doctrine,” which holds that ideas of corporate social responsibility, which had become popular in the business world, were undermining the American way of life. “The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned ‘merely’ with profit but also with promoting desirable ‘social’ ends; that business has a ‘social conscience’ and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discr...
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Managing for the Long Term

Managing for the Long Term In the fall of 2014, the hedge fund activist and Allergan shareholder Bill Ackman became increasingly frustrated with Allergan’s board of directors.  In a letter to the board,  he took the directors to task for their failure to do (in his words) “what you are paid $400,000 per year to do on behalf of the Company’s owners.” The board’s alleged failure: refusing to negotiate with Valeant Pharmaceuticals about its unsolicited bid to take over Allergan— a bid that Ackman himself had helped engineer in a novel alliance between a hedge fund and a would-be acquirer.  In presentations promoting the deal,  Ackman praised Valeant for its shareholder-friendly capital allocation, its shareholder-aligned executive compensation, and its avoidance of risky early-stage research. Using the same approach at Allergan, he told analysts, would create significant value for its shareholders. He cited Valeant’s plan to cut Allergan’s research budget by 90% as “r...
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Short sellers are struggling. Their massive bet against Elon Musk isn’t helping. - The Washington Post

Short sellers are struggling. Their massive bet against Elon Musk isn’t helping. - The Washington Post : The hedge fund manager spends much of his day at his dining room table, where he fires off tweets explaining his high-stakes bet that Tesla, a darling of Silicon Valley and a $60 billion behemoth, will eventually fail, sending its stock price tumbling.
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Facebook’s Sandberg now says the company’s work with the political consultancy Definers crossed her desk - The Washington Post

Facebook’s Sandberg now says the company’s work with the political consultancy Definers crossed her desk - The Washington Post : learned that George Soros was funding several of the coalition members. They prepared documents and distributed these to the press to show that this was not simply a spontaneous grassroots movement
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Trump’s assessment of himself is quite different from how Americans feel about him - The Washington Post

Trump’s assessment of himself is quite different from how Americans feel about him - The Washington Post : When Trump was asked what he was most thankful for, “a question that for commanders in chief usually prompts praise of service members in harm’s way,” according to The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey, Trump’s response was classic Trump. He said: “I made a tremendous difference in our country.”
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Baby Adolf Nazi Trial: Claudia Patatas and Adam Thomas of Banbury convicted of leading far-right group - The Washington Post

Baby Adolf Nazi Trial: Claudia Patatas and Adam Thomas of Banbury convicted of leading far-right group - The Washington Post : Thomas, a British warehouse security guard, and Patatas, a Portuguese-born photographer, were arrested in January with four other men and charged with being members of National Action, which was banned by the British government in 2016 and is labeled a terrorist organization. The group hoped to start a race war that would rid Britain — or at least the county of West Midlands, halfway between London and Liverpool — of anyone who didn’t happen to be white, according to police. When National Action was banned, after popular anti-Brexit campaigner Jo Cox was killed by a far-right extremist, the group re-branded, calling itself the TripleKMafia, a not-too-subtle allusion to the Ku Klux Klan. But authorities said the group’s members weren’t simply a bunch of photo-snapping Nazi-philes with white-power insignia decorating their homes.
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This Black Friday, Amazon employees across Europe are protesting ‘inhuman’ working conditions - The Washington Post

This Black Friday, Amazon employees across Europe are protesting ‘inhuman’ working conditions - The Washington Post : “The conditions our members at Amazon are working under are frankly inhuman,” said Tim Roache, general secretary of GMB, in a statement on the organization’s website. “They are breaking bones, being knocked unconscious and being taken away in ambulances.” Earlier this year, the U.K.-based group said a Freedom of Information request aimed at first-responders showed that ambulances had responded to calls for help at Amazon facilities roughly 600 times over the past three years. “Our European Fulfillment Network is fully operational," Amazon said in a statement to The Washington Post. "And we continue to focus on delivering for our customers and reports to the contrary are simply wrong.” (Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Post.) More than 600 workers have gone on strike in Germany, where workers earn a starting salary of abou...
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Money game: How top soccer clubs clashed with sport's financial rules

Money game: How top soccer clubs clashed with sport's financial rules : Infantino, who is a striking figure, tall, slim and bald, frequently interacted with the clubs in negotiations over their compliance with financial rules. In an April 2014 email to colleagues,�Ferran Soriano, CEO of Man City, said he and Infantino had agreed to instruct Man City and UEFA lawyers “to negotiate a settlement that is more than a warning and can be seen as effective/dissuasive but does not affect dramatically MCFC (Manchester City Football Club) business.”
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Money game: How top soccer clubs clashed with sport's financial rules

Money game: How top soccer clubs clashed with sport's financial rules : Infantino, who is a striking figure, tall, slim and bald, frequently interacted with the clubs in negotiations over their compliance with financial rules. In an April 2014 email to colleagues,�Ferran Soriano, CEO of Man City, said he and Infantino had agreed to instruct Man City and UEFA lawyers “to negotiate a settlement that is more than a warning and can be seen as effective/dissuasive but does not affect dramatically MCFC (Manchester City Football Club) business.”
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‘Nothing on this page is real’: How lies become truth in online America - The Washington Post

‘Nothing on this page is real’: How lies become truth in online America - The Washington Post : He had launched his new website on Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign as a practical joke among friends — a political satire site started by Blair and a few other liberal bloggers who wanted to make fun of what they considered to be extremist ideas spreading throughout the far right. In the last two years on his page, America’s Last Line of Defense, Blair had made up stories about California instituting sharia, former president Bill Clinton becoming a serial killer, undocumented immigrants defacing Mount Rushmore, and former president Barack Obama dodging the Vietnam draft when he was 9. “Share if you’re outraged!” his posts often read, and thousands of people on Facebook had clicked “like” and then “share,” most of whom did not recognize his posts as satire. Instead, Blair’s page had become one of the most popular on Facebook among Trump-supporting conservatives over 55.
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Benedict Evans on cryptocurrencies: "Is like ignoring the Internet in 1993"

Benedict Evans on cryptocurrencies: "Is like ignoring the Internet in 1993" : “Crypto today has a lot in common with both the internet in 1993 and the internet in 1999. Huge potential with few of the use cases invented yet, combined with froth, scams and delusion. This makes it easier to dismiss. But dismissing crypto as a useless scam is much like looking at Usenet, Cuecat and Boo.com and dismissing the internet. It mistakes applications for the enabling layer”.
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mmm Football Calendar — Football Editions

Football Calendar — Football Editions : Football Editions’ celebration of the beautiful game continues with this monthly fantasy #One2Eleven. Imagine Pel�, van Basten and Maradona in the same team. Imagine no more. We’ve brought them altogether here for you! All born in October, these guys made it a good month for football. Check out the 5th of February. Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar and Tevez were all born on this day but unfortunately we could only pick one player per day. If you’re a May 7th baby then you might not be blessed with outrageous tekkers. We’ve picked the players for every day of the year and assembled the starting 11’s for each month. We’ve even figured out formations. So kick back, enjoy 2019 like your team has just won a Champions Leagu
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An Incredibly Fast 'Dark Matter Hurricane' Is Blowing Past Earth Right Now

An Incredibly Fast 'Dark Matter Hurricane' Is Blowing Past Earth Right Now : Dark matter is one of the big conundrums of the Universe. We have never directly detected it, and we don't know exactly what it even is - but we do know that it's out there. We can infer it based on the motions of the stars and galaxies, which are far too fast for the amount of observable mass.
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Werder Bremen Fans Protest Corporate Greed In Soccer With Big Banner

Werder Bremen Fans Protest Corporate Greed In Soccer With Big Banner Werder Bremen hosted Hertha Berlin today in a Bundesliga match held at a date and time that made some German soccer fans angry. In light of growing concerns about soccer officials’ greed ruining the sport fans love, some Werder fans in attendance held up a huge sign that read—well, you can see it quite clearly on FS2. Here’s a video that better shows the translated version at the bottom of the stands: As a spokesperson for a collection of Bundesliga fan groups  explained to ESPN FC,  the fans’ grievance stems from their dissatisfaction about the direction of German soccer—specifically with how things seem to be increasingly moving toward a raw profit-maximization focus at the expense of the fans’ interests: “Large parts of the society are more or less excluded from professional football through sometimes absurd price hikes, adjustments to kick off times for foreign markets and a reduction of standing areas,...
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