Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning examine incompetence, corruption and political failures:
• The rise of influencer capital: How social media, celebrity promoters and quick-money banks have transformed markets. (New York Review)
• Right-wing group pushes US states to pass law blocking corporate ‘political boycott’: Lobbying group Alec has drafted model legislation to protect oil companies, big business and arms manufacturers from economic backlash. (The Guardian) see also Big Brother is Watching You: ALEC’s Doublethink Attack on U.S. Free Markets: When it comes to doublethink, Big Brother has nothing compared to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). (Forbes)
• Why does the Department of Homeland Security suck? The Department of Homeland Security’s 20-year mess: The Department of Homeland Security was supposed to bring together nearly two dozen agencies in a modernized, streamlined approach to protecting the country. So, what happened ? (The edge)
• The Bike Thieves of Burlington, Vermont: A hunt for stolen property has placed citizens and business owners at the center of a debate over policing and a growing, sometimes violent, crime problem. (New York Times)
• The experience of the 1960s created today’s biased police surveillance: The Police Beat algorithm mainly addressed four problems associated with police operations: 1) pattern recognition, the identification of crime patterns in a crime dataset; 2) profiling, associating criminal patterns with likely suspects; 3) dragnetting, linking likely suspects of a crime to past crimes or arrests; and 4) positioning of patrols, how best to place patrols in the appropriate geographic divisions of the city based on where most crime takes place and where profiles of known criminal suspects predict who will commit very probably these crimes and where. This is where planning issues and operational issues intersected. (Slate)
• The Hunt for the Dark Web’s Biggest Kingpin, Part 1: The Shadow The notorious Alpha02 oversaw millions of dollars a day in online narcotics sales. For cybercrime sleuths, he was public enemy number one and a total mystery. (Cable)
• ‘Dark vessels’ emerge from shadow of Nord Stream mystery: Satellite monitors discovered two ships with their trackers turned off in the pipeline area before the alleged sabotage in September. (Cable)
• DEA’s Most Corrupt Agent: Parties, Sex Amid ‘Unwinnable War’ José Irizarry admits he is known as the most corrupt agent in the history of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, admitting he conspired with Colombian cartels to build a lavish sports car lifestyle , jewelry and lovers around the world. (ABC News)
• What happened at Alameda Research: Despite the success of some discretionary positions, on the net, Alameda and FTX continued to jointly lose large amounts of cash and liquidity throughout 2021-2022 due to excessive discretionary spending, capital investments- illiquid risk, uncompetitive market making strategies, risky lending practices, lackluster internal accounting and general deficiencies in overall organizational capacity When loans were called back in early 2022, an emergency decision was made to using FTX user deposits to repay creditors This repayment spurred increasingly erratic behavior and unprofitable gambling, eventually leading to outright insolvency. (Milky Eggs) see also Every shady thing Sam Bankman-Fried has confessed or pseudo-confessed to since FTX collapsed: From the rubble of his crypto empire, SBF has repeatedly admitted that he “screwed up”. While we don’t yet know what the actual legal implications of this mess are, or who exactly bears the most blame, it’s clear that confession is a bit of an understatement. (Slate)
• Monuments to the Unthinkable: America still does not know how to commemorate the sins of our history. What can we learn from Germany? (Atlantic)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Marcus Shaw, CEO of AltFinance, which seeks to increase diversity in alternative asset management. The company was co-founded by Apollo, Ares and Oaktree with $90 million in seed funding for initiatives to recruit students to historically black colleges and universities.
A clear warming trend with temperatures in each of the past 45 years exceeding the 20th century average
Source: Statista
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