Readers by definition are ignorant. We read to quench our ignorance. Readers, in effect, are easy prey for newspapers and the people that own them. Newspapers have a knowledge advantage, an information asymmetry. They know what readers don’t know yet, but want to know. And so they can distort the news or even invent it.
– Julian Assange
Those of you who didn’t sleep completely through American history class probably recall the phenomenon of Hoovervilles throughout the U.S. in the early years of the Great Depression. These were shantytowns that sprung up all across the nation and were named after Herbert Hoover, who was President at the onset of the Depression and blamed for … Read more
That’s the thing I don’t understand about the climate in Washington these days. People want to have debates on television and elsewhere, but then you want to throw the people that start the debates in jail. – James Risen, New York Times Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist (he now faces jail time) The above quote occurred … Read more
I don’t follow the commodity markets as closely as I used to, but the following article related to beef prices really caught my eye. Last year’s drought and consequent spike in grain prices led to negative margins for cattle producers, who subsequently culled their herds. As expected, this has resulted in tighter supply today. We see this evidenced in the fact that retail ground beef prices were up 13% year-over-year in June, and the CEO of Ruth’s Chris mentioned during a recent presentation that they were forced to raise prices in February. While grain prices are much lower today, which should encourage expansion in cattle supply, this process will actually cause even more tightness in the near-term as more animals are set aside for breeding rather than slaughtered.
Don’t worry, you can always just eat the S&P 500. From Bloomberg:
U.S. beef production is plunging to a 21-year low after surging feed costs spurred ranchers to cut herds, signaling record prices for consumers and higher costs for buyers from McDonald’s Corp. to Ruth’s Chris Steak House.
Production in the U.S. will decline 4.9 percent to 10.93 million metric tons in 2014, retreating for a fourth year, the government says. The herd on July 1 was the smallest for that date since at least 1973, according to the average of four analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg.
Retail ground-beef prices in June were up 13 percent from a year earlier and near a record set in January.
Beef costs for Ruth’s Hospitality Group Inc., the Heathrow, Florida-based steakhouse owner, climbed 17 percent over two years, Chief Financial Officer Arne Haak said during a presentation on June 25. The restaurant raised its prices in February. Next year and 2015 will still be tough because of the lack of supply, Chief Executive Officer Michael O’Donnell said in a presentation June 18.
Does running this headline seem like a fireable offense to you? “Take your jobs plan and shove it, Mr. President: Your policies have harmed Chattanooga enough.” Apparently, the powers that be at the Chattanooga Times Free Press thought so. They may want to drop the “free press” part of the paper’s name going forward. The editor, … Read more
The latest buzz circulating around the gold market relates to news that Pakistan’s Economic Coordination Committee of the Cabinet (ECC) has decided to ban duty free gold imports for thirty days. Why you ask? Because those pesky Indians are using Pakistan as a conduit to get around the country’s recent 8% duty imposed on gold imports.
All of this of course begs the question: With the price of gold “plunging” over the past several months, why did Pakistan and India both feel the need to take such draconian measures against a barbarous relic that everyone is supposedly panic selling? If there is so much gold to be had and no one wants it, what’s the problem? Strange indeed. From the The Express Tribune:
The Economic Coordination Committee of the Cabinet, headed by Finance Minister Ishaq Dar, took the decision to ban the import of the yellow metal for one month with immediate effect.
During a meeting with Dar in Karachi last week, the Exchange Companies Association of Pakistan (ECAP) had claimed that smuggling of gold to India was causing rupee devaluation, as the importers were mopping up dollars from the market to meet the needs of the Indian buyers.
When we as a species use language to communicate and engage with one another, we have a certain understanding that certain words mean certain things. That is the entire purpose of language, effective communication between human beings that can be easily understood. As a result, we should be able to assume that when government bureaucrats utilize words that are commonplace within society, that these words represent specific commonly understood meanings. That would be a huge mistake.
Jameel Jaffer and Brett Max Kaufman of the ACLU have compiled an excellent list of some commonplace words used by the NSA to mislead us into thinking they aren’t doing the bad things that they are actually doing. Words such as “surveillance,” “collect,” and “relevant.” From Slate:
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has been harshly criticized for having misled Congress earlier this year about the scope of the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities. The criticism is entirely justified. An equally insidious threat to the integrity of our national debate, however, comes not from officials’ outright lies but from the language they use to tell the truth. When it comes to discussing government surveillance, U.S. intelligence officials have been using a vocabulary of misdirection—a language that allows them to say one thing while meaning quite another.
Surveillance. Every time we pick up the phone, the NSA makes a note of whom we spoke to, when we spoke to him, and for how long—and it’s been doing this for seven years. After the call-tracking program was exposed, few people thought twice about attaching the label “surveillance” to it. Government officials, though, have rejected the term, pointing out that this particular program doesn’t involve the NSA actually listening to phone calls—just keeping track of them. Their crabbed definition of “surveillance” allows them to claim that the NSA isn’t engaged in surveillance even when it quite plainly is.
Collect. If an intelligence official says that the NSA isn’t “collecting” a certain kind of information, what has he actually said? Not very much, it turns out. One of the NSA’s foundational documents states that “collection” occurs not when the government acquires information but when the government “selects” or “tasks” that information for “subsequent processing.” Thus it becomes possible for the government to acquire great reams of information while denying that it is “collecting” anything at all.
That definition of “collect” is completely and totally insane.
Crazy story here from late April that I hadn’t heard about before. Daniel Chong will receive a $4.1 million settlement as compensation for being forgotten about in a holding cell for 5 days without food or water. In fact, his situation became so desperate that he was forced to drink his own urine in order to survive.
While a cash payout should be part of any sort of justice for Daniel, I wonder if any of the individuals responsible for this will be held accountable? That to me is the key point. Just as bankers simply pay a fine for egregious crimes that represent only a small part of their profit from the activity (but almost never face criminal charges), so too it seems the police and government bureaucrats almost never face serious repercussions for any their actions, no matter how heinous or unconstitutional. From the Daily Mail:
The college student forgotten in a holding cell for five days without food or water, took a $4.1 million settlement from the Justice Department his lawyer announced Tuesday.
24-year-old University of California, San Diego student Daniel Chong was arrested on April 21, 2012 as part of a major drug bust.
He was taken to county jail and subsequently forgotten in a cell for five days – starving and hallucinating.
Mr Chong’s attorney Eugene Iredale said that the Justice Department is still trying to figure out how Mr Chong slipped from their notice, but the inspector general still has no answers.
You don’t say…
The DEA did not have a system in place at the time on how to treat detainees, but has since installed camera in each of the cells and holds daily inspections.
I suppose it just wasn’t enough that our allies, “the rebels” in Syria, have significant Al-Qaeda elements to them. No, we are the USA! USA! Best country ever. Defender of human rights. City on a hill. We must do far more than that. So we did. This story below from Bloomberg, highlights a 236-page report by … Read more
Yesterday was an absolutely amazing, jam-packed day at the Inside Bitcoins Conference in New York City, and I want to start out by thanking MediaBistro for putting it on and for having me as a media partner. 250-300 people attended the event, and roughly 30 of them took it to the next level and paid for their ticket in bitcoin.
BitInstant
The event kicked off with keynote speaker Charlie Shrem, founder and CEO of BitInstant. For those who aren’t familiar with it, BitInstant is one of the more convenient ways to acquire bitcoins for cash. Incredibly, he is a mere 23-years old and started the company while still enrolled at Brooklyn College. He shared his experience of pitching venture capital firm after venture capital firm, and his subsequent rejection by each and every one of them. He eventually convinced his mother to seed him the $10,000 needed to start the company.
Shortly after the speech, I was able to chat with Charlie in the hallway and he couldn’t have been nicer. He immediately pointed to my “Bought with Bitcoin” shirt and told me he wanted one. The shirt’s in the mail man.
Regulatory Panel
From there, the conference proceeded with a perfect mix of both subject specific panels and individual speakers. On the panel discussing regulatory issues, a really interesting debate emerged that I had not read about previously. It revolved around whether under the recent FinCEN guidelines on virtual currencies, bitcoin “miners” are considered money transmitters and thus require registration as such. Neither side could find agreement on the issue, which highlights just how much of a wild, wild-west type environment it still is.
BitPay
CEO Tony Gallippi of BitPay was a huge highlight for me. Not only have I recently integrated BitPay on Liberty Blitzkrieg to sell my Bitcoin shirts, but it was the company’s stunning growth earlier this year that got me obsessed with the entire topic. Back in late March, BitPay had 4,000 merchants and was adding them at a mind-boggling rate of 1,000 per month. Fortunately for them, they continued on that pace and Tony reported 8,000 merchants had signed up as of yesterday. Amazing.
Mr. Gallippi also made a particularly significant point about BitPay that I hadn’t even considered, one which represents a huge positive for any merchant using them. He noted that companies can avoid potentially burdensome accounting and reporting requirements since the merchant doesn’t legally hold any bitcoins themselves unless they want to.
However, the most powerful thing Tony covered was his discussion on some of the ways that banks are already going after merchants for accepting bitcoin by shutting down their bank accounts in retribution. Even more interesting, Tony sees the biggest future concern being that payment companies like Visa and MasterCard will threaten to pull their services from merchants that also accept bitcoin. Since merchants might get 95% of their revenue via the conduit of these payment companies, they would probably quickly kick Bitcoin to the curb. I think his foresight on this issue, as well as the fact he is already rallying people to prepare for it, makes him an even more impressive CEO and leader in the space than I thought.
Adam B. Levine – YouTube is Broken
Adam has a quick and interesting mind, one that hits you like a hurricane the moment he starts speaking. I was really excited for his talk, since he was focused on what I think is one of the biggest business problems on the web today. This has to do with the inefficiencies of website monetization. As a guy that runs podcasts, his particular area of concern was youtube. He demonstrated that by placing a QR code within videos to allow bitcoin donations, he was able to earn multiples of what he could via traditional ad networks. This really impressed me, mainly because such a small percentage of the population has ever owned a bitcoin.