Isegoria

Except not like the Middle East, with the influence of Farouk al-Kasim, and, more broadly, socialism. "The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil". Paywall at https://www.ft.com/content/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feabdc0 . HN discussions at https://hn.algolia.com/?q=The+Iraqi+who+saved+Norway+from+oil . In short, an Iraqi man married a Norwegian women. Their kid had cerebral palsy. They decided their son could get the best care in Norway, so moved to that country. The man has both academic training and industrial experience with the oil industry, at a time when the Norway’s oil administration had only three officials. When al-Kasim went to the Ministry of Industry looking for a job in the oil industry, they jumped at the opportunity to tap his expertise. He helped write the plan which puts the socialist state in control of managing the oil wealth, balanced between reply on private foreign companies and a "bloated, politicised oil sector" of only government control, quoting an excerpt from https://www.isegoria.net/2009/09/the-iraqi-who-saved-norway-from-oil/ . Statoil is a Norwegian state-owned private Norwegian oil company, giving the Norwegian government deep access to the costs and profits in oil extraction. I remember an account from the original FT story. The Norwegians told the oil companies the country would charge a super-profit tax of 40% on top of the 50% corporate rate. The companies said something like "what? That's too high!". The Norwegians replied "Since none of…

Can you expand on the backing off part, though? Peter Moskos has written a lot on this. As part of his PhD, he spent two years as an actual cop in Baltimore. Now he is a professor of criminology in New York. IMO, he does a good job writing in a balanced and truthful perspective about crime. "I don't know what's going on everywhere (or even most-where), but I can tell you a bit about Baltimore. And I suspect it holds true in many cities. I looked calls for service, arrest numbers, and crimes. Most dramatic is the drop of arrests in Western District....Now there are good and not so good reasons for this drop in arrests. But leaving that why: it happened. Police were less involved, by choice and necessity, and violence skyrocketed. Just because correlation does prove causing, correlation certainly doesn't mean causation is impossible or even unlikely. I mean, what else changed in the Western except police and crime?...Cops stopped making discretionary arrests and being proactive in clearing corners and frisking subjects. Look, it's no surprise where shootings happens and who gets shot." http://www.copinthehood.com/2016/01/the-baltimore-6-effect.html And then read this one about Chicago: http://www.copinthehood.com/2016/11/the-best-of-times-worst-of-times.h… And a few other posts http://www.copinthehood.com/2016/02/defining-ferguson-effect.html and http://www.copinthehood.com/2016/03/chicago-violence.html And the question I would ask is, "what should have been done to…

Hence the Larry Ellison trade, a cousin of the Bob Rubin trade. Rent-seeking behavior in software development. Wall garden, vendor lock, license, and litigate for every LOC. Make customers pay for technical debt by dumping more exotic spaghetti code. Larry Ellison's way of doing business is about him and what he receives at the bottom line. The customer is an after fact in the sales funnel. A resource that needs to be milked as a proper cash cow. Larry Ellison is as a evil as the offspring of Joffrey and Cersei Lannister could be. https://www.isegoria.net/2017/05/the-bob-rubin-trade/

It strikes me that the economics of product "bundles" seems to be one of those things that's just inherently hard for people to understand: http://www.isegoria.net/2010/04/paying-for-channels-you-never-watch/

People may have a crappy built-in magnetometer, but it seems you don't need one - just a lot of practice. There are cultures that put such weight on the cardinal directions that they always maintain a sense of where they are facing. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoception#In_humans http://www.isegoria.net/2010/08/does-your-language-shape-how-you-think…

>You see by all futurists accounts the Internet should have already done away with print media, but we just can't let go of our paper. The economist had an article on this, but it's behind the paywall now. http://www.isegoria.net/2008/10/not-dead-just-resting.htm Gist -- "American office workers’ use of paper has actually been in decline since 2001. What changed? The explanation seems to be sociological rather than technological. A new generation of workers, who have grown up with e-mail, word processing and the internet, feel less of a need to print documents out than their older colleagues did."

Honestly, though, speaking as someone who had to use things made by military contractors, having people who object to the military working on them seems like a recipe for disaster. But that's a pretty small slice of Google's business. > Working for a company while using it as a staging ground for a coup against it is unacceptable. So what does unacceptable mean? Historically, coups like this happen to organizations all the time, to the point where conservatives consider it a fact of life.[1][2] It may be unacceptable now, but they'll just keep at it until their view becomes orthodoxy; it's more or less the point of liberalism. I'm also skeptical that the people in senior positions are that far from them ideologically; they simply have legal obligations to shareholders. Another notion of acceptability is whether a coup sinks the company in the meantime. But it's a risk either way, unless the complaints are entirely without merit, and that seems unlikely. Let's say Googlers who dispute this did quietly leave over these issues as you suggest. Google's incentives are structured perversely, the "user as product" business model is just ethically dysfunctional. Losing people who act as a check on bad behavior can thus compound these problems over time. If people then decide they've had enough (buoyed by a string of complaints from ex-Googlers) and go to Congress, that can also effectively sink the company. [1]:…