The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse – “The latest available case-by-case records from the Department of Justice show that the prosecution of white-collar offenders in January 2020 reached an all-time low since tracking began during the Reagan Administration. Only 359 defendants were prosecuted. Almost all of these were individuals rather than businesses. January 2020’s prosecutions continued… Continue Reading
Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002
Category Archives: Economy
Why is the BLM clearing vast swaths of piñon-juniper forests across the West?
Slash and Burn – Sierra Club -“Over the years, I have often seen the evidence of this mass deforestation: in geometric clearcuts along the ranges of Catron County, New Mexico; in old-growth piñon forest reduced to pulp on the remote Tavaputs Plateau in Utah; in vast fields of stumps on rugged mountainsides in the basin… Continue Reading
Cisco: Avoid coronavirus, stay home, use Webex
ars technica: “Networking giant Cisco is getting into the coronavirus monitoring and mitigation game with its Webex remote meeting property. The company notes that in the wake of mandates issued to employees to halt travel plans and/or work from home, traffic across its Webex backbone has increased significantly. Webex meeting traffic connecting Chinese users to… Continue Reading
Libraries Could Preserve Ebooks Forever But Licensing Can Make Them Disappear
Gizmodo: “There are currently 342 potential borrowers waiting for 197 digital copies of Ronan Farrow’s investigative thriller Catch and Kill at the Los Angeles Public Library. “It’ll take months for that ebook to become available,” I mutter to myself as I do my usual dance: searching the LAPL’s ebook shelves for titles on my reading… Continue Reading
GAO – federal government misspent $175 billion in fiscal 2019
Federal Agencies’ Estimates of FY 2019 Improper Payments – March 2020 – GAO-20-344 – “Agency-reported improper payment estimates for fiscal year 2019 totaled about $175 billion, based on improper payment estimates reported by federal programs, an increase from the fiscal year 2018 total of $151 billion. Of the $175 billion, about $121 billion (approximately 69… Continue Reading
A Review Essay of Escape From Rome
Koyama, Mark, A Review Essay of Escape From Rome (February 25, 2020). Accepted for Publication in The Journal of Economic Literature. Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3544313 – “This essay reviews Escape from Rome by Walter Scheidel. It examines the argument that Europe’s persistent fragmentation following the collapse of the Rome empire is responsible for the origins of… Continue Reading
How to work during a pandemic
TechCrunch: “The world is bracing for the seemingly inevitable proliferation of SARS-COV-12, also known as COVID-19 and coronavirus, which has already paralyzed cities and isolated millions. In the U.S., especially the nonstop work culture in startups, we tend to think we’re immune to such things and carry on business as usual. We are not only… Continue Reading
Printing’s Not Dead The $35 Billion Fight Over Ink Cartridges
Bloomberg – America’s onetime innovation icons are wrestling over their biggest remaining piles of money: “The HP 63 Tri-color ink cartridge retails for $28.99 at Staples. Stuffed with foam sponges drenched in a fraction of an ounce of cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes, this bestseller, model No. F6U61AN#140, can spray 36,000 drops per second in… Continue Reading
When AI Can’t Replace a Worker It Watches Them Instead
Wired – Whether software that digitizes manual labor makes workers frowny or smiley will come down to how employers choose to use it….”Many jobs in manufacturing require dexterity and resourcefulness, for example, in ways that robots and software still can’t match. But advances in AI and sensors are providing new ways to digitize manual labor.… Continue Reading
New database aims to expose companies that make employees arbitrate sexual harassment claims
Washington Post – “Using the same spreadsheet-style activism she did with #GrabYourWallet, Shannon Coulter emailed some 500 companies, asking detailed questions about their forced arbitration policies for sexual harassment, which require employees to resolve complaints out of court. She and her partners, social impact investor Rachel Robasciotti and principal Iris Kuo, then published their answers… Continue Reading
AI Comes to the Tax Code
WSJ.com: “Governments are increasingly relying on machine learning and data analytics to analyze troves of data as they seek to detect tax evasion, respond to taxpayers’ questions and make themselves more efficient…The Internal Revenue Service is designing machine-built graphs to plot the relationships among participants in business deals, giving auditors a new tool to analyze… Continue Reading
The 10 most overpaid CEOs in the US
Fast Company – “The median employee at Align Technologies, the company that makes Invisalign, makes $13,180 a year. The CEO makes $41,758,338. That’s a pay ratio of 3,168:1. And if you look at how the company performed over the long term, he was only worth about about $14 million dollars, meaning he was overpaid by… Continue Reading
