Letters of Note: I am a lousy copywriter
Nice.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/i-am-lousy-copywriter.html
Fascinating letters. Interesting correspondence.
Fascinating letters. Interesting correspondence.
Unlike many in the banking industry, Petrou is not ideologically opposed to regulation. For instance, she was a critic of the lack of regulation that allowed so many sleazy subprime mortgage originators to emerge from the precrisis ooze. Yet, now, she’s worried about something different: that the hundreds of new mandates required by the Dodd-Frank law are creating a new kind of risk. She calls it “complexity risk.” As she put it in a speech she delivered last week in New York: “If we don’t understand the cross-cutting effects and inherent contradictions in all of the stringent standards now being written into final form, we risk doing real damage to the sound, stable and — yes — profitable financial industry regulators say they support and the economies sorely need.”
In a paper she wrote in November, Petrou laid out a number of examples of new regulatory proposals that were either mind-bogglingly complex or contradictory — or both. For instance, she told me recently, bank board directors will have 184 more things they will have to acknowledge responsibility for under the latest systemic standards. “I think boards have to be responsible for what happens at their institutions,” she said, “but requiring them to be on the front lines of forward-looking cash flow is ridiculous.”
Here is the article.
Regulation is hard. Especially dealing with complexity of regulation, since that ends up being death by a thousand cuts. Related, but unconsumed by me yet, Unchecked and Unbalanced and Roberts interviewing Taleb on Antifragility.
When the companies that supply motor fuel close the books on 2011, they will pay about $6.8 million in penalties to the Treasury because they failed to mix a special type of biofuel into their gasoline and diesel as required by law.
But there was none to be had. Outside a handful of laboratories and workshops, the ingredient, cellulosic biofuel, does not exist.
The article.
This is such an inefficient way to do legislation. The sad thing is that the answer is simple, tax carbon producing fossil fuels. Let the market find a way to produce energy that doesn't produce carbon. Instead, the government has experts that make plans.
HT KPC
I recently built a version of the CDC’s Vital Statistics database for Google’s BigQuery service. You can read more in my post on the Google Research Blog.
they call it Technical Phone Interview. I've used vanilla collab edits in the past and they have been pretty good. It's not clear what the pricing is, but I think it's a decent idea.
The Shame of College Sports, by Taylor Branch
But what Vaccaro said in 2001 was true then, and it’s true now: corporations offer money so they can profit from the glory of college athletes, and the universities grab it. In 2010, despite the faltering economy, a single college athletic league, the football-crazed Southeastern Conference (SEC), became the first to crack the billion-dollar barrier in athletic receipts. The Big Ten pursued closely at $905 million. That money comes from a combination of ticket sales, concession sales, merchandise, licensing fees, and other sources—but the great bulk of it comes from television contracts.
The article goes on, and I found it super interesting. How an organization evolves into its role partly through intimidation and just grabbing more and more power. Definitely worth the read.
I want something to recommend one netflix instant movie for me to watch every week. I suppose I could just go to Netflix Instant, and see what they have.
Perhaps I want something that's less personalized to me and is just a quality movie recommendation in general. Maybe something like a book club? kthxbai
impress.js is a presentation tool based on the power of CSS3 transforms and transitions in modern browsers and inspired by the idea behind prezi.com.
A suburban dad. A fictional television blowhard. And now a political money launderer. How one funny guy became three.
To anyone familiar with this Golden Age, roughly spanning the eighth through the thirteenth centuriesa.d., the disparity between the intellectual achievements of the Middle East then and now — particularly relative to the rest of the world — is staggering indeed. In his 2002 book What Went Wrong?, historian Bernard Lewis notes that “for many centuries the world of Islam was in the forefront of human civilization and achievement.” “Nothing in Europe,” notes Jamil Ragep, a professor of the history of science at the University of Oklahoma, “could hold a candle to what was going on in the Islamic world until about 1600.” Algebra, algorithm, alchemy, alcohol, alkali, nadir, zenith, coffee, and lemon: these words all derive from Arabic, reflecting Islam’s contribution to the West.
Today, however, the spirit of science in the Muslim world is as dry as the desert. Pakistani physicist Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy laid out the grim statistics in a 2007 Physics Today article: Muslim countries have nine scientists, engineers, and technicians per thousand people, compared with a world average of forty-one. In these nations, there are approximately 1,800 universities, but only 312 of those universities have scholars who have published journal articles. Of the fifty most-published of these universities, twenty-six are in Turkey, nine are in Iran, three each are in Malaysia and Egypt, Pakistan has two, and Uganda, the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan, and Azerbaijan each have one.
I learned a lot of things I didn't know. Autonomy and the individual are key.
