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Mr. Hattam said he hoped his journey ends not in Europe but in the United States, where, he said, “even the dogs live well.” He explained what he meant by telling a story an Iraqi friend living in the United States had recently told him. The friend, he said, had gone to the supermarket and left his dog in his car with the windows up on a hot day. A police officer, seeing this, scolded him, and told him he was putting the dog at risk. “That means they even respect the dogs,” he said. “Even the dogs have rights in America.”

from A New Wave of Migrants Flees Iraq, Yearning for Europe, New York Times

In a democracy, the power to make the law rests with those chosen by the people. Our role is more confined—“to say what the law is.” Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177 (1803). That is easier in some cases than in others. But in every case we must respect the role of the Legislature, and take care not to undo what it has done. A fair reading of legislation demands a fair understanding of the legislative plan.

Opinion No. 14-114 of the Supreme Court of The United States, deciding King vs Burwell, written by Chief Justice John Roberts

Trim - git helper to keep your local repo clean

# git trim - delete local branches that have been merged into remote master

# repo> git trim # Deleted branch feature/button (was 8a82a52). # Deleted branch bug/button-cant-click (was f8451e4). # repo>

# Add to .gitconfig or use command: git config alias.trim = …

[alias] trim = !“g() { git branch –merged | grep -v \"\\*\" | xargs -n 1 git branch -d; }; g”

#git #programming

Chinese debt boom was embezzlement boom?

Thesis: China's recent credit boom (adding $10T in debt in 10 years) was embezzlement on a vast scale. Summarized by UBS' former Chief Economist and Senior Economic Advisor: Credit kleptocracy in China

Positive: not much of a asset bubble to speak of, so little prospects of a Chinese economic crash.

Negative: a whole lot of corruption.

Death of IPO hurts the retail investor the most

In order to protect retail investors from Enron-style fraud, US Congress enacted the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act. As Marc Andreessen lays out [1], a direct result is that growth stage companies are no longer entering the public markets. Example: Microsoft IPO'd at a $1B market cap in 1986. Facebook IPO'd at $90B in 2013. This has sucked most of the growth opportunities out of public stock markets - the one place retail investors can buy stocks directly. Second-order effects and the law of unintended consequences rules again.

[1] Vox - The IPO is dying. Marc Andreessen explains why.

#sarbox #regulation #ipo #public markets

kanyi

The Fed has, to date, spent way more money [edit: $2 trillion in 2008 & 2009] on bailing out financial assets than the central government did on goods and services [edit: ~$830B via American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, 2009]. Way more. If you want to understand why we had an unequal recovery, and are facing the income inequality crisis we currently face, this is a good place to start.

Source: The Annals of San Francsico (1885)

Credit: Gaurav Ragtah

#san francisco #history #circular

An Economic Rational For WhatsApp’s price

Strategic considerations likely drove Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp. In addition, a convincing economic rational is required by the board of directors as part of their fiduciary duty to shareholders. How would Facebook justify the $19B price for a messaging app notable for its commitment to simplicity?[1]

“We [at WhatsApp] want to continue to have that minimalistic approach to the product. We want to get out of the way and let people communicate.” – Jan Koum, CEO of Whatsapp

#Facebook #Whatsapp #acquisition #valuation #irr

Discourse on the Gentrification of San Francisco

"Whenever I tweet about need for more housing supply in SF, people respond that new high-end housing won't help lower-income people. That is exactly backwards. New high-end housing supply will redirect demand that is currently causing prices of existing housing to rise. If you want existing SF housing prices to stop rising or fall, you should logically cheer for as much new high-end building as possible. And of course, any/all building restrictions that are holding back BOTH high-end and low-end housing construction should be reformed. The root cause of SF's housing problem is basic rule of supply & demand. Time to end the madness including restrictions & price controls." - Marc Andreessen

"Our approach to housing in San Francisco is very dysfunctional. The system is intentionally designed to make it as difficult as possible to build new housing." - Scott Wiener, member of SF Board of Supervisors

"I am flabbergasted at how the rebirth of cities like SF, New York, LA, and even Portland, get turned in a narrative about high-tech workers. The narrative is about multi-decade political failure with some successes that led to cities becoming attractive again. And yet it's "gentrification". The people with money didn't stop affordable housing. All that money spent on low-income housing turned out to be badly spent because projects turn into crime and they're all being torn down. And this is somehow all the fault of people with good jobs investing in urban centers! SF and most big cities have a huge political and zoning failure that was overlooked during the demise of urban cores and now is revealed as a failure." - Glenn Fleishman

#housing #gentrification #public policy

If you think of JPMorgan's businesses as operating more or less independently, but occasionally making each other money by cross-selling, then this [Bernie Madoff fraud scheme] makes more sense. A London investment bank that considered and rejected a derivative-linked investment in Madoff would have no obligations to report its suspicions to U.S. regulators. A boring custody bank that ran Madoff's checking accounts but had no derivatives traders to get suspicious about him also probably wouldn't be in trouble for missing the Madoff red flags. Combine the two businesses and the same behavior gets you in trouble. In that sense, JPMorgan's $1.7 billion forfeiture here looks a bit like a tax on bigness and integration: You can grow huge, offer a loosely integrated set of every conceivable financial product, and bask in the cross-selling opportunities, but every now and then it'll cost you a couple of billion dollars. So far that trade-off still seems to be worth it for JPMorgan.

source: Bloomberg News - JPMorgan Pays for Shorting Madoff Without Telling Anyone

A beer bar boasts of the freshness of its stock and not, like a wine bar, of how long it’s been sitting idle in a bottle, ‘aging’ like some discredited political philosophy.

- Antonio Garcia on "Beer is the new wine, and wine is the new fur coat"

Geoffrey Moore himself was awesome in the day. I remember meeting him and he was talking about how BMW had claimed the high ground. Someone asked what if someone else said they had a faster/better car, what should BMW do? Geoffrey said: ”You call them out ... you call them out.” I asked him later what he meant. “All my stuff is just a model, use it until it doesn’t work!” In other words at some level it’s all bullshit.

- from a private conversation. Geoffrey Moore is author of Crossing The Chasm, a highly influential book on how to bring disruptive technologies to market.

Flawless logic...

GDP of developing nations has eclipsed the 34 'advanced economies'. 1 billion people have risen out of poverty. Free-er trade is the key driver. I don't hear much anymore about the evils of globalization...

Credit: Quartz - Power In Numbers

#globalization

jindou

How we closed a bridge round within 1 week

Traction.

#truth

This is what fascist censorship looks like. CNNTurkey vs CNN covering live protests in Istanbul. credit: reddit.com

Apparently Canada's bottom 10% have a better quality of life than the average OECD top 10%. Most notably, they are nearly equal in quality of life to France's top 10%. You would think that would give people pause before complaining about Canada's challenges? But alas, lack of perspective... source: Economist Daily Chart - the examined life

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