And Now: Ex-Patriot Act
May 17th, 2012Wow. The full text of this should be interesting.
What’s next? Punishing the family members of people who flee?
Via: ABC News:
Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has a status update for Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin: Stop attempting to dodge your taxes by renouncing your U.S. citizenship or never come to back to the U.S. again.
In September 2011, Saverin relinquished his U.S. citizenship before the company announced its planned initial public offering of stock, which will debut this week. The move was likely a financial one, as he owns an estimated 4 percent of Facebook and stands to make $4 billion when the company goes public. Saverin would reap the benefit of tax savings by becoming a permanent resident of Singapore, which levies no capital gains taxes.
At a news conference this morning, Sens. Schumer and Bob Casey, D-Pa., will unveil the “Ex-PATRIOT” – “Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy” – Act to respond directly to Saverin’s move, which they dub a “scheme” that would “help him duck up to $67 million in taxes.”
The senators will call Saverin’s move an “outrage” and will outline their plan to re-impose taxes on expatriates like Saverin even after they flee the United States and take up residence in a foreign country. Their proposal would also impose a mandatory 30 percent tax on the capital gains of anybody who renounces their U.S. citizenship.
The plan would bar individuals like Saverin from ever reentering the United States again.
JP Morgan Bad Trade Loss $1 Billion Worse Since Announcement
May 17th, 2012Via: New York Times:
The trading losses suffered by JPMorgan Chase have surged in recent days, surpassing the bank’s initial $2 billion estimate by at least $1 billion, according to people with knowledge of the losses.
When Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive, announced the losses last Thursday, he indicated they could double within the next few quarters. But that process has been compressed into four trading days as hedge funds and other investors take advantage of JPMorgan’s distress, fueling faster deterioration in the underlying credit market positions held by the bank.
The Inequality Speech That TED Won’t Show You
May 17th, 2012I’ll never be for anything that hands more money to the state, but I do like the idea of a maximum compensation ratio applying to all employees of corporations. This is an old comment of mine on the subject:
One of my impossible to implement ideas would be to have a maximum total compensation ratio for the top and bottom tiers of employees of corporations. The CEO can only make some multiple of whatever total compensation amount the janitor makes. Total compensation doesn’t just mean salary. It means total compensation. Everything. Stock options, dividends, bonuses, etc. Contractors/temps are not exempt from this.
This would just apply to corporations. Sole proprietors would not have this constraint.
In general, big is bad, so, I thought, how can we deal with super-sized corporate fascism without requiring complex regulations?
This is a simple, structural mechanism that would cause more people to have the resources to become entrepreneurs. More entrepreneurs = more competition = rat poison for corporate fascists.
If sole proprietors are psychopaths, there’s only so much damage that they can do on their own without the absurd responsibility avoidance mechanisms that corporations enjoy. If they decide that they want the protections associated with a corporation, fine, then the maximum total compensation ratio rule kicks in.
I don’t agree with everything on this chart, but I agree with a lot of it:
If you think that taxing the rich is a far out topic for TED, their heads would explode if someone wanted to talk about a maximum compensation ratio rule.
The following link contains the text of Nick Hanauer’s speech.
Via: National Journal:
Prepare to meet Nick Hanauer. He’s a venture capitalist from Seattle who was the first non-family investor in Amazon.com. Today he’s a very rich man. And, somewhat jarringly, he’s screaming to anyone who will listen that he, and other wealthy innovators like him, doesn’t create jobs. The middle class does – and its decline threatens everyone in America, from the innovators on down.
You’ll read a lot more about Hanauer in the next installation of Restoration Calls, which drops tomorrow. In the meantime, check out the full text of a speech Hanauer gave in March at the TED University conference. You can’t find the talk online, because TED officials have declared it too politically controversial to post on their web site.
More: Nick Hanauer’s Powerpoint Slides from Censored TED Talk
DEA Rampage in Honduras Leaves Civilians Dead
May 17th, 2012The death toll is listed as four; two men and two pregnant women. I guess the AP leaves it up to the reader to decide if the babies that the murdered women were carrying should be counted.
Via: AP:
People in Honduras’ predominantly Indian Mosquito coast region burned down government offices and demanded that U.S. drug agents leave the area, reacting angrily to an anti-drug operation in which a local mayor said police gunfire killed four innocent people, including two pregnant women.
Animosity is being aimed at both Honduran authorities and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which confirmed on Wednesday that some of its agents were on a U.S.-owned helicopter with Honduran police officers when the shooting happened Friday on the Patuca River in northeastern Honduras.
Honduran and U.S. officials said only the police officers on the anti-drug mission fired their weapons, and not until the helicopter was shot at first. The officials said the aircraft was chasing a small boat suspected of carrying drugs on the river.
Local officials said the two men and two pregnant women killed weren’t drug smugglers. They said the victims were diving for lobster and shellfish.
“These innocent residents were not involved in the drug problem, were in their boat going about their daily fishing activities … when they gunned them down from the air,” Lucio Vaquedano, mayor of the coastal town of Ahuas, said in a telephone interview Wednesday.
Will Smith’s Son Talks Aliens at The White House
May 17th, 2012The BBC clip is below:
Via: Silver Screen Saucers:
Men in Black 3 star Will Smith today told BBC Radio 1 host Chris Moyles that his 13-year-old son Jayden (himself a Hollywood star) put President Obama on the spot recently during a private tour of the White House. The subject of Jayden’s enquiry – aliens!
Remarkably, Obama anticipated Jayden’s question before the young star even had chance to ask it, and the President’s response was suitably tantalising:
“The aliens, right? OK, I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of extraterrestrials but I can tell you if there had been a top secret meeting and if there would have had to have been a discussion about it, it would have taken place in this room.”
DHS Considers Collecting DNA From Kids
May 17th, 2012Via: Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Documents just released by US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) in response to one of EFF’s Freedom of Information Act requests show that DHS is considering collecting DNA from kids ages 14 and up—and is exploring expanding its regulations to allow collection from kids younger than that.
The proposal appears to be working its way through DHS in the wake of regulations from the Department of Justice that require all federal agencies—including DHS and its components such as ICE—to collect DNA from individuals arrested for federal crimes as well as “from non-United States persons who are detained under the authority of the United States,” whether or not they have been involved in criminal activity. While the law specifically exempts a few classes of “aliens,” the documents we received show DHS may start DNA collection from anyone it fingerprints. Currently, that’s any child over 14 who’s detained, but we also found records that show ICE could lower that age even more.
DHS estimates that as many as 1 million people who are subject to administrative detention or arrest annually could now be subject to DNA collection. But it’s important to note that many of these people are not involved in criminal activity. Collecting DNA from anyone detained by the government for any number of non-criminal reasons—especially juveniles—seems to be yet another step on the slippery slope to collecting DNA from everyone in the United States, no matter their status.
Quiet Eye: Magic 8 Ball System in Prometheus Advertising Video
May 17th, 2012This is for the upcoming film, Prometheus.
A few influences for this clip:
“An integrated system maintains an unblinking eye”
Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales (ADAMS)
Future Attribute Screening Technologies
Via: YouTube:
Google’s Bots Now Running Javascript They Encounter
May 17th, 2012Via: Ars:
Google feeds its search engine’s index with site data from a virtual army of “bots”—Web-crawling applications that scour sites for content. But in the past, Google’s bots hit a wall when they ran into interactive content that was loaded through JavaScript—especially on pages that use Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) to allow users access to additional content without reloading pages. But now, according to Vancouver-based developer Alex Pankratov, it appears Google’s bots have been trained to act more like humans to mine interactive site content, running the JavaScript on pages they crawl to see what gets coughed up.
Wheat: Biggest Price Rise in 6-1/2 Weeks on Dry Weather Threat
May 17th, 2012DISCLOSURE: I’m long PowerShares DB Agriculture (DBA).
Via: Reuters:
U.S. wheat futures climbed on Thursday, extending gains from the previous session when the grain posted its biggest daily price rise in 6-1/2 weeks, on concerns about dry conditions damaging the winter wheat crop.
Chicago Board Of Trade July wheat futures rose 0.74 percent to their highest level since May 1 after soaring 5 percent on Wednesday, as weather concerns rattled the market.
CBOT July soybean futures rose 0.56 percent, having climbed 0.6 percent in the previous session, while CBOT corn futures opened flat after rising 3.8 percent on Wednesday.
The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps
May 17th, 2012Via: The Chronicle of Higher Education:
“I am not a welfare queen,” says Melissa Bruninga-Matteau.
That’s how she feels compelled to start a conversation about how she, a white woman with a Ph.D. in medieval history and an adjunct professor, came to rely on food stamps and Medicaid. Ms. Bruninga-Matteau, a 43-year-old single mother who teaches two humanities courses at Yavapai College, in Prescott, Ariz., says the stereotype of the people receiving such aid does not reflect reality. Recipients include growing numbers of people like her, the highly educated, whose advanced degrees have not insulated them from financial hardship.
“I find it horrifying that someone who stands in front of college classes and teaches is on welfare,” she says.
Ms. Bruninga-Matteau grew up in an upper-middle class family in Montana that valued hard work and saw educational achievement as the pathway to a successful career and a prosperous life. She entered graduate school at the University of California at Irvine in 2002, idealistic about landing a tenure-track job in her field. She never imagined that she’d end up trying to eke out a living, teaching college for poverty wages, with no benefits or job security.
…
A record number of people are depending on federally financed food assistance. Food-stamp use increased from an average monthly caseload of 17 million in 2000 to 44 million people in 2011, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Web site. Last year, one in six people—almost 50 million Americans, or 15 percent of the population—received food stamps.
Ms. Bruninga-Matteau is part of an often overlooked, and growing, subgroup of Ph.D. recipients, adjunct professors, and other Americans with advanced degrees who have had to apply for food stamps or some other form of government aid since late 2007.
Some are struggling to pay back student loans and cover basic living expenses as they submit scores of applications for a limited pool of full-time academic positions. Others are trying to raise families or pay for their children’s college expenses on the low and fluctuating pay they receive as professors off the tenure track, a group that now makes up 70 percent of faculties. Many bounce on and off unemployment or welfare during semester breaks. And some adjuncts have found themselves trying to make ends meet by waiting tables or bagging groceries alongside their students.
Research Credit: ottilie
