Musings of a Modern Day Cyberneticist
Added by PressForward
Facebook’s leaders seriously discussed selling access to user data — and privacy was an afterthought.
The story somehow just gets worse and worse and still they just apologize and continue on as usual… It’s shocking to see so many who raised ethical issues along the way are remaining silent now, ostensibly because they are still on the gravy train and are enriching themselves by staying silent.
Prosecutors say it was an elaborate deception that involved roping in friends and family, while using nonsensical pseudonyms and a slew of mailing addresses. The plot seems to have come from China.
Directed by Jenner Furst, Julia Willoughby Nason. With Bella Hadid, Ja Rule, Billy McFarland, Cameron Davison. Concert promoters and rapper Ja Rule advertise a high-end festival experience that fails spectacularly when they don't plan for the infrastructure to support the venue, artists and guests.
When the two competing documentaries came out, I don’t think I ever really heard a reason why there were two other than the fact that the story was so over-the-top, blatant, and salacious. I’m glad I saw this one first as it indicates that the other documentary was made by Jerry Media, an entity that was involved in promoting and profiting from the Fyre Festival. Of course I want to dig into the background of the producers of this one now too to see what their ties may be. Always vet your sources, even for documentaries that present themselves as detached from the story.
This does a great job of showing cultural excess. At least the founder was put into jail before he had a chance to run for president…
Jussie Smollett on Twitter (Twitter)“Frauds are everywhere y’all.”
Ironically it’s like Jussie Smollett said himself almost three months ago to the day.
Ryan Barrett (snarfed.org)Any sufficiently advanced financial instrument is indistinguishable from fraud. — xthlc, on MetaFilter
In 2005, Donald Trump kicked off a decade-long buying and spending spree, vastly expanding his hotel and golf-course empire and cementing his image as a brash impresario. The unorthodox approach Trump took in making those bold bets — racing through hundreds of millions in cash and drawing loans from the private-wealth office of Deutsche Bank — came when he was on new terrain as a developer.
As prosecutors go after doctors, drug dealers and users, those who made billions of dollars from sales of a painkiller at the center of the epidemic have gone largely unpunished.
This is such a massive public health care issue, I’m shocked we haven’t gone to heavier regulation of the direct source.
Based on a trove of confidential financial records, the Times report offers the first comprehensive look at the inherited fortune and tax dodges that guaranteed Donald Trump a gilded life.
A quick précis of the whole 13,000+ word story for those without the time.
Three reporters spent over a year digging through more than 100,000 pages of documents and chasing down key sources familiar with President Trump’s father and his empire.
The president has long sold himself as a self-made billionaire, but a Times investigation found that he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.
I had suspected something like this for a long time and my suspicions were pushed during the election upon reports of Trump cheating sub-contractors and not paying them and again earlier this year when Jonathan Greenberg revised some of his 1980’s reportage for Forbes, but this is simply incredible!
While there are a lot of things one can take away from this stunning, thorough, and long read, the thing that strikes me is what Trump did to attempt to cheat his own father, who had been repeatedly been digging him out of trouble, when he was against the wall. He tried to defraud and steal from his greatest benefactor. How can anyone trust him to fight for America or real Americans when his entire substance as well as facade is a complete sham?
Combined with the millions he’s losing on real estate and other deals over the past decade, one is forced (again) to wonder who exactly is funding him now?
"Epidemics of fear repeat themselves. The first time as tragedy. The second time as farce. Margit Hamosh? Definitely farce."
What was it that Margit Hamosh did? What was her alleged fraud? I have been going on and on about this case for a good 20 minutes now, and I haven’t told you. Do you know why? Because we didn’t know.
It pains me to think of all these wasted hours over minutiae.
How the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology became a multimillion dollar organization promoting bullshit science through fake conferences and journals.
Mike Fleming Jr. (Deadline)EXCLUSIVE: Fox is poised to win the hot lit property in the marketplace at the moment, a giant Happy Meal that everyone wanted. Ben Affleck is attached to direct and Matt Damon to star in a true-crime story written by Jeff Maysh and published in The Daily Beast several days ago about an ex-cop who rigged the McDonald’s Monopoly game, allegedly stealing over $24 million and sharing it with an unsavory group of co-conspirators who offered kickbacks to the mastermind. The Pearl Street partners will produce with David Klawans, latter of whom got rights to the article and was exec veep on the Affleck-directed Best Picture Oscar winner Argo. Deadpool scribes Paul Wernick & Rhett Reese will write the script. Deal was a $350,000 option against $1 million if the film gets made. Affleck, Damon and the screenwriters get paid a lot more than that.
For almost 25 years, Shane Smith’s plan was that, by the time the suckers caught on, he’d never be stuck owning the company he co-founded.
A fantastic article.
This reminds me a lot of the recent Theranos stories and book. It’s sad how companies don’t do enough due diligence on potential investments like this. When I think about how much basic work and discussion Marcus Lemonis does for $100,000 investments, I’m appalled to hear what people are doing for multi-millions. It’s stunning that a company can get to this size and be worth nearly nothing. Using the relative size (ie number of employees) of business units like human resources and legal within a particular industry could be a reasonable guide for the internal management of a company.
This is also a good example that while investments may give a company a particular valuation, it can rarely be the actual potential present value of the company. As a result, workers who are working for near free plus stock should be paying closer attention to company internals to know that their stock portion is going to be completely worthless.
Worse, I’m always pained to hear that young people (rich or otherwise) are essentially giving away their work and sweat equity away for free to big companies that could easily pay them. Eventually the pendulum is going to swing back the other way and companies are going to need to pay more.
One of my favorite quotes from the piece:
“Shane would always say that young people are the No. 1 bullshit detector, which was annoying once you realized that the thing he mastered is getting young people to buy shit,” says a recently departed senior employee.
A great new book has me thinking about ed tech.
This is an interesting and useful analogy.
In ed tech, schools are the customers, but students are the users.
This also reminds me of the market disconnect between students and their textbooks. Professors are the ones targeted for the “sale” or adoption when the actual purchasers are the students. This causes all kinds of problems in the way the textbook market works and tends to drive prices up–compared to a market in which the student directly chooses their textbook. (And the set up is not too dissimilar to how the healthcare industry works in which the patient (customer) is making a purchase of health care coverage and not actually the health care itself.
