bidness
mikethemadbiologist | December 5, 2010I ask this because Boston's local gourmet pizza chain, Upper Crust, which is loved by foodies, has been massively exploiting its undocumented workers:
Tobins [the owner of Upper Crust] needed lots of kitchen help; the Brazilians worked hard and didn't complain about workweeks that routinely stretched to 80 hours. Marilac prospered as Upper Crust's immigrant employees sent thousands of dollars home, and the company swiftly expanded from its original store in Beacon Hill to one upscale suburb after another.
Over time, however, this amicable but unlawful relationship would unravel. Documents…
mikethemadbiologist | December 2, 2010I've written before about how the housing fiasco required fraud and perjury. Well, there's no end in sight for the damage done by Big Shitpile. The latest chapter involves foreclosing on homeowners who not only are able to make their payments, but have actually done so. How does this Kafkaesque nightmare happen? Yves Smith explains:
It's called servicing errors and fraud. And whether by mistake or design, when a borrower gets caught in the servicer hall of mirrors of compounding fees and charges, there is no way to appeal and pretty much no way out.
Let's look at how this begins. A…
mikethemadbiologist | December 2, 2010"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine---too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."
-Stewart Brand
Many pundits have been discussing what Wikileaks means for either…
mikethemadbiologist | December 1, 2010I guess. Over at the Motley Fool, Brian Orelli asks, "Which Is a Better Buy: Complete Genomics or Pacific Biosciences?" While I agree that PacBio is probably the better bet (and bet is the operative word), I don't think the reasoning is right. Orelli:
If you're interested in trying to catch the boom and get out before the bust, both Complete Genomics and PacBio look like a good choice to benefit from an exponential increase in DNA sequencing.
It's too early to make a definitive call, but of the two, I like PacBio better because I'm not fond of the low-cost, high-volume business model. Sure…
mikethemadbiologist | November 28, 2010Or, at least, don't obey Massachusetts law and receive the healthcare they are entitled to. Esterline Technologies demonstrates that much of what passes for 'rational business decision making' is actually ideology combined with petty personal vendetta. From Yves Smith:
This story illustrates how far some companies are willing to go to preserve their bottom lines and assert their right to operate in an unfettered manner, even when that includes breaking the law and violating contracts...
Esterline is in the process of shuttering its Tauton manufacturing operation, Haskon Aerospace, which…
mikethemadbiologist | November 16, 2010A while ago, I discussed the observation that seventy percent of stocks are held for eleven seconds (yes, you read that correctly). It's absurd, since there's no way that the status of the underlying companies has changed (and that information has been made public) in an eleven second time span. This is nothing more than speculation which provides no useful purpose. A transaction tax would penalize this behavior and make it unprofitable.
Along come more examples of how this flash trading is leading to more insanity:
BlackBerrys were buzzing inside Progress Energy in Raleigh, N.C.: in a…
mikethemadbiologist | November 3, 2010By way of Yves Smith, we come across Eddie Braverman's (a blogging pseudonym) advice on how to take out a major bank (Warning: the link is to an article in Playboy (really); half-naked women in the sidebar are probably not work safe):
Step one: Give the plan a recognizable name. Like many ex-commodities brokers, Eddie appreciates action. A few months after he published his plan, he told me about it from the security of a Parisian café: "You could call it Tank-a-Bank or Flashrun or Bankbusters. Give it a name that tells people they're signing up for direct action, with one bank chosen to…
mikethemadbiologist | October 27, 2010They're almost there. The NY Times' Joe Nocera on Foreclosuregate:
The lawsuit uncovered a raft of similar examples -- case after case where the loan officers not only knew that fraud was being committed, but were actively engaged in committing it. "By about 2006," says the lawsuit, "Countrywide's internal risk assessors knew that in a substantial number of its stated-income loans -- fully a third -- borrowers overstated income by more than 50 percent." And that is just one small subset of what went on at Countrywide. The truth is, any rock you turn over in the Countrywide subprime portfolio…
mikethemadbiologist | October 23, 2010This is not a market that has any connection to the real world, but a casino--and you are definitely not the house:
As the New York Times dealbook noted in May:
These are short-term bets. Very short. The founder of Tradebot, in Kansas City, Mo., told students in 2008 that his firm typically held stocks for 11 seconds. Tradebot, one of the biggest high-frequency traders around, had not had a losing day in four years, he said.
....The fact that the vast majority of stock market trades are held for 11 seconds shows that the stock market is not a real market with real traders governed by…
mikethemadbiologist | October 7, 2010Think Progress has recently described the mechanism by which the 'U.S.' Chamber of Commerce is able to circumvent what few campaign finance laws remain and funnel money from foreign corporations to Republicans.
So I have a very simple question: why don't congressional Democrats censure the 'U.S.' Chamber of Commerce?
Well, there is the obvious answer:
Congressional Democrats are dumber than a fucking sack of hammers*.
But, seriously, if the Republicans can successfully censure ACORN--an organization that actually did useful things, then surely the Democrats can return the favor.
I would…
mikethemadbiologist | October 5, 2010When I'm writing about politics, I've been regularly discussing the legal problems related to the collapse of Big Shitpile (the foreclosure crisis). At Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith lays out why this matters (so I don't have to stumble my way through this):
Make no mistake about it: the nature and scale of these frauds cut at the very heart of our judicial process. We didn't call the Florida courts "kangaroo courts" lightly. A home is most people's most important asset; shelter is a bedrock of personal security. Both the Fifth and the Fourteenth amendments enshrine the notion of due process…
mikethemadbiologist | October 3, 2010The problem is simply this: many people who have made a lot of money haven't been ethical about it (or even legal). That's why I'm surprised we haven't seen more ads like this:
In Ohio, Representative Betty Sutton calls her Republican rival, Tom Ganley, a "dishonest used-car salesman" who has been sued more than 400 times for fraud, discrimination, lying to customers about repairs, overcharging them and endangering their safety. She warns voters, "You've heard the old saying, buyer beware!"
In Arizona, Representative Harry E. Mitchell accused his opponent David Schweikert of being "a…
mikethemadbiologist | October 2, 2010I remember, back in the 1980s, there was a conservative school of thought that believed many of our problems could be blamed on poor, single, often non-white mothers who refused to 'take personal responsibility' (e.g., welfare queens, Murphy Brown! ZOMG!). I never quite understand how anyone could believe that the most powerless Americans would be able to destroy us. I thought that societal breakdown would be triggered by the failure of political and economic elites.
Well, guess what? We're approaching breakdown:
Let's look at one example of banana republic faux justice in the US, via a…
mikethemadbiologist | September 30, 2010Why, yes, I did. For a while now, I've been writing about how improper paperwork could completely screw up the foreclosure process. While I've never thought foreclosure was the way to go (I wanted subsidized cramdowns), we can't even get foreclosure to happen, which is a huge drain on the economy:
Lawyers for distressed homeowners and law enforcement officials in several states on Friday seized on revelations by GMAC Mortgage, the country's fourth-largest home loan lender, that it had violated legal rules in its rush to file many foreclosures as quickly as possible.
Attorneys general in…
mikethemadbiologist | September 28, 2010SEQUENCE GENOMES!!!
Proflikesubstance has a very good post about PR announcements in science, which stems from the duplicated sequencing of the cacao and Tasmanian Devil genomes. What struck me is this bit:
What also seems ridiculous to me is that there are TWO groups sequencing either of these genomes. I can understand the race for the human genome and maybe even things like fruit fly and Arabidopsis, but since when did the Tasmanian devil fan club go all cut throat? And I like chocolate as much as the next person, but two genome sequences*? It's hard to tell whether this is competition or…
mikethemadbiologist | September 19, 2010Why, yes, I did. And Senator Evan "I'm dumber than a sack of hammers" Bayh illustrates exactly what I'm talking about:
Today, MSNBC's Chuck Todd asked Bayh about the poverty data, and whether there is a disconnect between the real economic pain that people are feeling and lawmakers squabbling over tax rates for the wealthy. Bayh agreed that there is a disconnect, but then concluded that the poverty increase means lawmakers should forget about "fairness and things like that" and cut taxes for the rich:
TODD: Yesterday, the Census came out and said one in seven Americans are living below the…
mikethemadbiologist | August 25, 2010Having parasitized private industry, our economic betters are now turning their sights on the public sector:
The most popular deals in the works are metered municipal street and garage parking spaces. One of the first was in Chicago where the city received $1.16 billion in 2008 to allow a consortium led by Morgan Stanley to run more than 36,000 metered parking spaces for 75 years. The city continues to set the rules and rates for the meters and collects parking fines. But the investors keep the revenues, which this year will more than triple the $20 million the city was collecting, according…
mikethemadbiologist | August 23, 2010Meet your new Treasury Secretary
My guiding political principle is "people have to like this crap." That is, if a policy makes peoples' lives worse, then it's a shitty policy*. More about that in a bit.
Last week, a bunch of bloggers went to visit the Treasury Department, and one of the topics for discussion was the Home Affordable Modification Program ('HAMP'). HAMP has been accused of doing little to help people from avoiding foreclosure, and, instead, has only prolonged their attempt to meet a (doomed to fail) series of payments (this is derisively called "extend and pretend"). In…
mikethemadbiologist | August 6, 2010So much for that "Don't Be Evil" Google bullshit:
Google and Verizon, two leading players in Internet service and content, are nearing an agreement that could allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content's creators are willing to pay for the privilege.
This issue has been quite the rage in the lefty and righty blogosphere for the simple reason that most grassroots organizations won't be able to afford the high-price superhighway, but, instead, be stuck on the slow road to oblivion. I've never thought the opposition to net neutrality is political in…
mikethemadbiologist | July 28, 2010Or, for that matter, jumping into the water with financial sharks under any circumstances. The NY Times has an article about the ongoing legal trials of David H. Brooks, the chief executive and chairman of a body-armor company. The article primarily focuses on what a loathsome piece of shit Brooks is: not only did he rip off investors and the U.S. government, but his body armor doesn't work as advertised in hot weather. Which would be fine if we were engaged with Al-Queda...in Iceland.
But this section at the end caught my attention (italics mine):
One of the many former shareholders who…