Posts Tagged ‘Nixon’
“I profess in the sincerity of my heart that I have not the least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good of my country”*…
“Scott Alexander” (also here) throws his hat into the Presidential ring…
The American people deserve a choice. They deserve a candidate who will reject the failed policies of the past and embrace the failed policies of the future. It is my honor to announce I am throwing my hat into both the Democratic and Republican primaries (to double my chances), with the following platform…
There follow eleven bold ideas, for example:
Ensure Naval Supremacy And Reduce Wealth Inequality By Bringing Back The Liturgy
The liturgy was a custom of ancient Athens. When the state needed something (usually a new warship) it would ask for volunteers among its richest citizens. Usually one would step up to gain glory or avoid scorn; if nobody did, the courts were allowed to choose the richest person who hadn’t helped out recently. The liturgist would fund the warship and command it as captain for two years, after which his debt to the state was considered discharged and he was given a golden crown. Historians treat the liturgy as a gray area between voluntary service and compulsory taxation; most rich Athenians were eager to serve and gain the relevant honor, but they also knew that if they didn’t, they could be compelled to perform the same service with less benefit to their personal reputation.
Defense analysts warn that America’s naval dominance is declining:
Only 25 per cent of America’s 114 commissioned surface combatants (cruisers, destroyers, and littoral combat ships) are less than a decade old. By comparison more than 80 per cent of China’s 141 destroyers, frigates, and corvettes have been commissioned in the past decade. In the same time period, the United States commissioned 30 surface combatants . . . The nearly 600-ship Navy of the late 1980s deployed only 15 per cent of the fleet on average. Today, with fewer than 300 ships, the US Navy deploys more than 35 per cent to service its global missions, contributing to a material death spiral.
So America is short on warships. But it is very long on rich people with big egos. An aircraft carrier would cost the richest American billionaires about the same fraction of their wealth as a trireme cost the richest Athenian aristocrats. So I say: bring back the liturgy!
The American rich already enjoy spending their money on exciting vehicles – yachts for the normies, rockets for the more ambitious, Titanic submersibles for the suicidal. Why not redirect this impulse towards public service? Imagine the fear it would strike into the hearts of the Chinese when the USS Musk enters Ludicrous Mode in the waters off the Taiwan Strait, with Elon himself at the wheel. And does anyone doubt that Elon – usually careful to avoid taxes – would jump at the chance to do this?
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Legalize Lying About Your College On Resumes
Colleges trap Americans in a cycle of burdensome loans and act to reinforce class privilege. I have previously advocated making college degree a protected characteristic which it is illegal to ask people about on job applications. But this would be hard to enforce, and people would come up with other ways to communicate their education level.
So let’s think different: let’s make it legal to lie about your college on resumes (it is already not technically illegal to lie on a resume, but companies can ask for slightly different forms of corroboration which it is illegal to lie on). Everyone can just say “Harvard,” and nobody will have any unfair advantage over anyone else.
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More modest proposals: “My Presidential Platform,” from @slatestarcodex.
* Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick
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As we savor the sad salience of satire, we might recall that on this date in 1935, Huey Long, Louisiana Senator and past-Governor (and inspiration for Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men), was shot in the Louisiana state capitol building; he died 30 hours later. Called a demagogue by critics, the populist leader (“every man a king”) was a larger-than-life figure who boasted that he bought legislators “like sacks of potatoes, shuffled them like a deck of cards.”
And on this date in 1974, President Gerald Ford offered his disgraced predecessor, Richard Nixon, “a full, free, and absolute pardon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in” during Nixon’s Presidency.
“Things gained through fraud are never secure”*…
… Still, the damage done to the defrauded is too often too real. A unsettling report from the front lines of financial accounting…
The level of corporate earnings manipulation is similar to that of past pre-recessionary periods, according to research by professors at the University of Missouri and Indiana University.
Their finding is based on the M-Score, a screening model that catches fraud in corporate earnings reports. Messod Daniel Beneish, a professor at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business, created the M-Score in the 1990s. The “M” stands for manipulation, and the measure is also sometimes referred to as the Beneish M-Score.
Based on known examples of past financial misreporting, the M-Score combines eight ratios on a company’s balance sheet to assess its fraud risk. A higher M-Score means a company is more likely to be manipulating its earnings.
“It allows us to assess fraud risk in real time,” said Matt Glendening, an accounting professor at the University of Missouri. “The advantage of using a measure such as the M-Score is that if you use actual instances of accounting fraud, not all cases are caught, especially the less severe cases. And also, there is a delay between the misreporting period and the time at which the fraud is actually revealed.”
One notable M-Score success came in 1998, when a group of Cornell students used the M-Score to flag Enron as having an elevated fraud risk. This was three years before the public learned that the company was inflating its profits, resulting in what was then the largest corporate bankruptcy in history and several executives going to jail.
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Corporate earnings are traditionally manipulated either by overstating revenues or understating expenses. How companies do this varies, but it could include recognizing sales revenues early or understating inventory.
“There are all sorts of capital market pressures on firms to maintain stock price, maintain earnings growth,” Glendening said. “There could also be some compensation incentives at play.”
In 2019, Beneish expanded the M-Score, creating a new measure that goes beyond individual companies to the economy as a whole. With the help of Glendening and two other co-authors, Beneish created the aggregate M-Score, which now compiles the M-Scores of 2,004 companies to measure the likelihood of earnings manipulation across the economy. Earlier in 2023, the aggregate M-Score was at its highest level in 40 years.
“Accounting manipulation matters for the economy at large,” Glendening said. Companies use other business’ earnings data to inform hiring, purchasing, and production decisions. “What we are finding is that the level of aggregate misreporting is very similar to what we’ve observed in pre-recessionary periods.”
Ask not for whom the bell tolls: “This little-known accounting measure is ringing an economic warning bell,” from Kai Ryssdal (@kairyssdal) and Andie Corban on @Marketplace.
See also: “Corporate Fraud” (source of the image above)
* Sophocles
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As we look more closely, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that the House Judiciary Committee voted to recommend that America’s 37th president, Richard M. Nixon, be impeached and removed from office for a variety of offenses that arose from the Watergate Affair. Several days later (August 5), as the full house discussed the trial, the “Smoking Gun” tape was released, demonstrating that Nixon was in fact involved in the cover-up. His political capital destroyed, Nixon resigned– in a nationwide television address– on August 8, effective the next day.
“The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue”*…
Paywalls are justified, even though they are annoying. It costs money to produce good writing, to run a website, to license photographs. A lot of money, if you want quality. Asking people for a fee to access content is therefore very reasonable. You don’t expect to get a print subscription to the newspaper gratis, why would a website be different? I try not to grumble about having to pay for online content, because I run a magazine and I know how difficult it is to pay writers what they deserve.
But let us also notice something: the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, New York, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and the London Times all have paywalls. Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free! You want “Portland Protesters Burn Bibles, American Flags In The Streets,” “The Moral Case Against Mask Mandates And Other COVID Restrictions,” or an article suggesting the National Institutes of Health has admitted 5G phones cause coronavirus—they’re yours. You want the detailed Times reports on neo-Nazis infiltrating German institutions, the reasons contact tracing is failing in U.S. states, or the Trump administration’s undercutting of the USPS’s effectiveness—well, if you’ve clicked around the website a bit you’ll run straight into the paywall. This doesn’t mean the paywall shouldn’t be there. But it does mean that it costs time and money to access a lot of true and important information, while a lot of bullshit is completely free…
The political economy of bullshit– and thoughts on a remedy: “The Truth is Paywalled But the Lies are Free.”
On a related (and somewhat complicating) note, see also “It is possible to compete with the New York Times. Here’s how,” the source of the image above.
* Edward R. Murrow
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As we do like Diogenes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that President Richard M. Nixon resigned, as a result of the Watergate scandal— which was itself, of course, in large measure the result of (expensive) investigatory journalism of the highest quality.
Nixon departing the White House after his resignation (source)
“Of course our lives are regulated. When you come to a stop sign, you stop; if you want to go fishing, you get a license; if you want to shoot ducks, you can shoot only three ducks. The alternative is dead bodies at the intersection, no fish, and no ducks. OK?”*…
After a characteristically-clear explanation of the ways in which the “monopoly practice” concerns around Google, Amazon, and the other on-line giants are different from those the U.S. has traditionally tried to manage– they limit/manage choice– the ever-illuminating Tim O’Reilly argues for a fresh approach to anti-trust:
So how are we therefore best to decide if these Big Tech platforms need to be regulated?
In one famous exchange, Bill Gates, the founder and former CEO of Microsoft, told Chamath Palihapitiya, the one-time head of the Facebook platform:
“This isn’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.”
Given this understanding of the role of a platform, regulators should be looking to measure whether companies like Amazon or Google are continuing to provide opportunity for their ecosystem of suppliers, or if they’re increasing their own returns at the expense of that ecosystem.
Rather than just asking whether consumers benefit in the short term from the companies’ actions, regulators should be looking at the long-term health of the marketplace of suppliers—they are the real source of that consumer benefit, not the platforms alone. Have Amazon, Apple, or Google
earned
their profits, or are they coming from monopolistic rents?
How might we know whether a company operating an algorithmically managed marketplace is extracting rents rather than simply taking a reasonable cut for the services it provides? The first sign may not be that it is raising prices for consumers, but that it is taking a larger percentage from its suppliers, or competing unfairly with them.
Before antitrust authorities look to remedies like breaking up these companies, a good first step would be to require disclosure of information about the growth and health of the supply side of their marketplaces. The statistics about the growth of its third-party marketplace that Bezos trumpeted in his shareholder letter tell only half the story. The questions to ask are who profits, by how much, and how that allocation of rewards is changing over time…
Data is the currency of these companies. It should also be the currency of those looking to regulate them. You cannot regulate what you don’t understand. The algorithms that these companies use may be defended as trade secrets, but their outcomes should be open to inspection.
An important read: “Antitrust regulators are using the wrong tools to break up Big Tech.”
* Molly Ivins
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As we bust trusts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that the Supreme Court handed down its unanimous decision in United States v. Nixon, ordering him to deliver tape recordings and other subpoenaed materials to a federal district court. Special prosecutor Leon Jaworski had subpoenaed the tapes as part of on-going impeachment proceedings; the White House had sued to quash; and the decision is widely viewed as a crucial precedent limiting the power of any U.S. president to claim executive privilege.
“Where there is power, there is resistance”*…
There’s a long history of incorporating food into political protest (Boston Tea Party, anyone?), with written record dating all the way back to the early-’60s CE, when Vespasian, a proconsulate in Africa and a future emperor of Rome, was apparently so unpopular for his economic policies that he was pelted with turnips by the local populace. Although this time-honored tradition has never truly fallen out of fashion, recent years have seen a resurgence in the hurling of foodstuff — particularly eggs, like the one wielded by the teenager known as “Egg Boy,” who cracked one on the head of an Australian politician who blamed immigration for the Christchurch mosque shooting in New Zealand — and now we’ve arrived at milkshakes.
So how exactly does a person choose the perfect food for a protest? Mind you, this isn’t something we recommend you do — lobbing food at someone could constitute battery or assault — but it’s worth considering what makes a good food projectile, whether you’re on the giving or receiving end. Or maybe you’re like us and what you really want is simply to learn…
[Following is] a list of historic protest foods, ranked using the following criteria:
Convenience: How easy is it to acquire and carry this object without suspicion?
Cost: Will hurling this object be the real-life equivalent of the “money with wings” emoji?
Accuracy: How precise of a projectile does this object make, taking into consideration properties like drag, gravity, thrust, and lift?
Messiness: Does the object splatter, stain, or otherwise necessitate cleanup that’s a pain in the ass?
Smell: How much will the physical memory of the act linger in the nostrils, following the target the rest of the day like an unfriendly ghost?
Symbolic or historical resonance: Does the object represent something greater, or reference a long tradition of throwing said object?
Humiliation: While admittedly ambiguous, this last attribute can be summed up as: “You know it when you see it.”…
The ultimate act of dissent? “Milkshakes, Eggs, and Other Throwable Protest Foods, Ranked”
See also: “Milkshaking.”
*
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As we shop with care, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that an 18½-minute gap appeared in the tape recording of the conversations between U.S. President Richard Nixon and his advisers regarding the recent arrests of his operatives while breaking into the Watergate complex.
According to President Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, on September 29, 1973, she was reviewing a tape of the June 20, 1972, recordings when she made “a terrible mistake” during transcription. While playing the tape on a Uher 5000, she answered a phone call. Reaching for the Uher 5000 stop button, she said that she mistakenly hit the button next to it, the record button. For the duration of the phone call, about 5 minutes, she kept her foot on the device’s pedal, causing a five-minute portion of the tape to be rerecorded. When she listened to the tape, the gap had grown to 18 1⁄2 minutes. She later insisted that she was not responsible for the remaining 13 minutes of buzz.
The contents missing from the recording remain unknown, though the gap occurs during a conversation between Nixon and H. R. Haldeman, three days after the Watergate break in. Nixon claimed not to know the topic or topics discussed during the gap.[19] Haldeman’s notes from the meeting show that among the topics of discussion were the arrests at the Watergate Hotel…
Woods was asked to replicate the position she took to cause that accident. Seated at a desk, she reached far back over her left shoulder for a telephone as her foot applied pressure to the pedal controlling the transcription machine. Her posture during the demonstration, dubbed the “Rose Mary Stretch”, resulted in many political commentators questioning the validity of the explanation… [source]
Rosemary Woods, attempting to illustrate “The Rosemary Stretch”
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