- AT&T Breaks Another Merger Promise In Making ‘Friends’ Exclusive (Techdirt) Yes, it’s just “Friends”, but it underscores the point: These companies are monopolists, and relying on their good nature is idiotic.
- New Zealand penguins drop in for sushi (BBC) Too cute. Shades of the movie Madagascar.
- Banks Again Hoist on Their Cost-Cutting Petard: Burgeoning Credit Card Fraud (Naked Capitalism) Penny wise, and pound foolish.
- Failing to Plan: How Ayn Rand Destroyed Sears (Verso) Ayn Rand doesn’t work for capitalists either.
- This is Going to Get Worse (The Baffler) Money quote, “It will get worse because the leadership of the Democratic Party is not built, temperamentally or constitutionally, for this fight. It is built for 1996, ready to debate the V-chip or whether the top tax bracket should be 36 percent or 39 percent. It is a party built to negotiate, to concede, and to see “getting something done” as the value-neutral definition of victory.”
- U.S. Shale Is Doomed No Matter What They Do (OilPrice.com) It’s been obvious for years that the fracking boom was unsustainable from a business perspective.
- Bad governance: How privatization increases corruption in the developing world (Regulation and Governance) Corruption in privatization is a feature, not a bug: It is private entities looting public assets. [PDF]
- Your Data Were ‘Anonymized’? These Scientists Can Still Identify You (The New York Times) This has been known for over a decade.
- How a data detective exposed suspicious medical trials (Nature) Basic shoe leather journalism: He looks at the raw data and flags the studies when the samples have significant statistical anomalies.
The Movie version of Penguins and sushi: