Channel 4 News Exposes Swine Flu Scandal in 2010. Feedback – Quartz Obsession. Venture capital and the great big Silicon Valley asshole game. This piece originally appeared on PandoQuarterly, issue three. Silicon Valley has an asshole problem, and it’s high time we owned up to it. Let me be clear what I’m not talking about. I’m not talking about “brogrammers.” I’m not talking about Google buses, or the evils of libertarianism. I’m not even talking about greed, or at least not in that Gordon Gekko sense. Nothing that follows is about the fringe behaviors that crop up whenever a hot ecosystem like Silicon Valley is observed from the safe and judgmental perch of East Coast media, and wildly extrapolated to apply to everyone who has ever run a startup.
Also, when I say “Silicon Valley” I really mean the tech startup ecosystem that’s centered here but stretches to New York, LA, and beyond. That’s the problem. I’ve covered the tech industry too close for too long to think of anyone as purely a hero or villain. And thank God. Here’s the problem. “Why are we backing this guy?” His partner replied: “Hey, you gotta get over it.
Snapchat. The Race for the All-in-One Credit Card. There’s a revolution coming to your wallet. Soon, perhaps very soon, your wallet will become thinner. All those credit, debit, and gift cards littered throughout the sleeves of your bifold will disappear. Either people will start paying for everything with their phones, or the all-in-one credit card will become a staple.
The all-in-one credit card, while perhaps slightly less practical, would be pretty damn cool. If you’re thinking of becoming an early adopter, you probably want to know which one you should be excited about? Coin Cost: $100 Release: Spring/Summer The Good: Coin is simple and designed to mimic the credit cards you know and love. The Bad: EMV (EuroPay, MasterCard, and VISA) is a global standard for use of chip cards and devices that accept them. Site Cost: $49 pre-order / $99 retail Release: Fall The Good: It’s just like Coin except it can hold 25 cards in its encrypted memory. The Bad: While it functions just like Coin, we like the look of Coin better. Site Wocket Release: TBD. Pro-Fracking Guest: Appearing On The Daily Show 'Felt Like Three Hours Of Waterboarding' The "Daily Show" ran a segment on hydraulic fracturing on Thursday night that featured its "correspondent" Asif Mandvi interviewing people on the controversial oil and gas extraction process known as "fracking.
" Mandvi talked to Marita Noon, a former Christian speaker and the executive director of New Mexico-based Citizens Alliance for Responsible Energy, a non-profit lobbying organization that also operates a group called Energy Makes America Great. "Oil and gas companies are quite good at self-regulating or self-policing," Noon told Mandvi. She said she doesn't really see room for improvement and argued that oil and gas companies care about the communities where they operate.
"Because the average person doesn't understand fracking," she added, "the environmentalists are able to use fear, uncertainty and doubt to plant ideas into people's minds. " "I knew I was not the first person to whom they had reached out," she wrote. Rival Industries Sweet-Talk the Public. Your boss wants to be Nate Silver. When the Toronto Raptors traded small forward Rudy Gay to the Sacramento Kings on Dec. 8, the stats geeks who follow professional basketball exulted.
The news that Toronto was dumping Gay provided definitive proof, in their minds, of the value of “advanced statistics.” For years, they’d claimed that a set of statistical methods — basically basketball’s version of Sabermetrics – exposed Gay as overcompensated and underperforming. The eyeball test says that Gay looks like a prototypically great NBA athlete, but the newfangled “analytics” that are all the rage in professional basketball — “Efficient Shooting Percentage,” “True Shooting Percentage” and “Offensive Rating” — declared otherwise. And now here he was, traded for the second time in less than a year; from star to persona non grata in less time than it takes to dunk.
Proponents of “people analytics” say this new number crunching will lead to a fairer, more efficient workplace, in which employees are better suited to their jobs. Tar Heel Pinkertons | Citizen. Justice @ Smithfield campaigners held their first public forum Thursday night at Pullen Baptist Church in Raleigh, and their star witness was Manuel Plancarte, ex-manager on the overnight cleaning crew at the Smithfield Foods hog packing plant in Tar Heel, Bladen County. Plancarte speaks Spanish, and the translator's English version of what he said was pretty sketchy, but in outline it was clear enough: The cleaning crew, virtually all Hispanic men, walked out one night in November 2003 over issues of pay, working conditions and the fact that some of their leaders had just been fired; when they did, they were threatened, pushed around and beaten up (in some cases) by Smithfield Special Police Chief Danny Priest and other members of the company's armed private police department.
No, I don't mean the security guards. (The company has them, too.) It's like something out of the days of the union-busting Pinkertons, except that this isn't some vestige of our hoary past. What happened? Straight Up - By Afshin Molavi. Mexico is rising. You can see it in the country's swelling exports, the net-zero migration to the United States, the excitement of international bond investors, a recent credit upgrade from Standard & Poor's, a newly confident middle class, and a per capita GDP that has doubled since 2000.
Not to mention a young, dynamic, handsome new president. In case you missed all these signs, though, you can also see Mexico's surge forward in a Scotch whisky ad. The television spot says nothing about the product but everything about the country's long march from poverty toward prosperity. But not so fast. It's a brilliant ad, and you'd be forgiven for not immediately realizing it's for Scottish booze. The Brookings Institution's Homi Kharas estimates that the global middle class will hit 4.9 billion people by 2030, growing by 3 billion from today -- and they'll spend $56 trillion a year, up from $21 trillion today. The campaign seems to be working. China is the big prize, though. Some Online Journals Will Publish Fake Science, For A Fee : Shots - Health News. Hide captionYou could do all that brain work. Or you could make it up. iStockphoto.com Many online journals are ready to publish bad research in exchange for a credit card number.
That's the conclusion of an elaborate sting carried out by Science, a leading mainline journal. The business model of these "predatory publishers" is a scientific version of those phishes from Nigerians who want help transferring a few million dollars into your bank account. To find out just how common predatory publishing is, Science contributor John Bohannon sent a deliberately faked research article 305 times to online journals. "This sting operation," Bohannan writes, reveals "the contours of an emerging Wild West in academic publishing. " Online scientific journals are springing up at a great rate. (It should be noted that Science is among these legacy print journals, charging subscription fees and putting much of its online content behind a pay wall.) These sleazy journals often look legitimate. Science. Insurance Company Gets Fucked Over By Another Cancer Patient. CHICAGO—Frustrated executives from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association announced Friday that they are getting “completely fucked over” by Allentown, PA resident Matthew Greison, a 57-year-old man suffering from an advanced form of Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Stressing that this is not the first issue they have had with such patients, company sources expressed their outrage to reporters over Greison's “totally unfair” comprehensive health care benefits and claimed the skyrocketing costs of his cancer treatment have gotten out of hand. “We got the first bill and just couldn’t believe how expensive it was,” said Blue Cross Blue Shield CEO Scott Serota, adding that at first, he thought the invoice was a mistake. “Every visit to the oncologist ran about $140, not to mention the thousands of dollars for every MRI and CT scan, and then the chemotherapy and cancer drugs were more than $10,000 per month. And he paid for maybe—maybe—5 percent of it. The rest was dumped on us.” You Won't Believe What the Food Industry Is Doing to Keep Americans Hooked on Junk. June 18, 2013 | Like this article?
Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. With the exposure of troubling obesity rates, outrage over undisclosed genetically engineered wheat (and other) crops, the successful worldwide March Against Monsanto effort in May and statewide bans of GE crops that followed, the US citizenry is expanding its awareness and concern about food health. The junk food industry is responding by getting sneakier in its tactics to entice, exploit and beguile people into consuming its concoctions. Here are a few of the most disturbing deceptions the industry is using to keep Americans hooked on its junk. 1.
Those grill marks on your burger? Kraft Foods engineers spent two years manufacturing a Carving Board line process that would create uneven turkey slabs, and Wendy’s intentionally created curvier “natural squares” out of perfectly square beef chunks so the squares would appear less processed. 2. 3. New Documentary To Finally Shed Light On Nation’s Fast Food Chains. Chaos, Anarchy Reign Supreme At Chuck E. Cheese Under Retired General Tommy Franks. IRVING, TX ‑ CEC Entertainment investors are keeping a wary eye on iconic Chuck E. Cheese children’s restaurants as 2013 financial reports showed the company getting off to a rocky start. With stock prices fluctuating, many are blaming one man: former Army four-star general Tommy Franks, once known as the “Beloved Savior of Iraq,” and since March 2008, an independent director of CEC Entertainment.
The retired general was pulled into the company for his strategic vision and legendary war record. Smashing initial successes had members of the board celebrating on Wall Street at their newfound financial returns. Unfortunately, the joy was short-lived. Soon after the FY 08 results were published, Franks inexplicably decided to fire every original manager of the company he had been hired to reinvigorate, then proceeded to recruit new handpicked personnel based solely on their ability to get along with his team. Today, despite the change in regime, the franchise is in a dismal state.
Panera Bakers Battle For A Union In A Union-Free World. Kathleen VonEitzen heads into work at 10 p.m. with a long night ahead of her. A trained baker, VonEitzen spends the evening and early morning hours cutting and shaping trays full of dough, shuffling between multiple ovens, and constantly checking her crusts until they're browned just right. She pulls hundreds of fresh baguettes, bagels, cookies and scones from the ovens until her shift finally ends around dawn. VonEitzen, 55, doesn't work in some boutique bakery, but in a Panera Bread franchise in Battle Creek, Mich.
The company prizes VonEitzen's craftsmanship, referring to her as an "artisan. " "It takes a special type of person to dedicate their night to baking fresh bread," Panera says on its website. Though Panera bakers don't bake from scratch (the raw dough comes from a regional facility) they're still required to master a wide range of baking disciplines. But how much better are the jobs? "We are skilled bakers, and they advertise us as artisan bakers," said VonEitzen.
The Yellow Tail Story: How Two Families Turned Australia Into America's Biggest Wine Brand. In 1992, imports of Australian wine accounted for only around 3% of all imported wine to the United States, with Italy and France continuing to hold a tight grip on the market at 30% and 50% respectively. Wine from Australia was a relative novelty. Collectors knew of the country’s top-tier wines, but besides this, little Australian wine was on the shelves, and awareness from consumers was next to nothing. But only ten years later, Australian wine was on its way to capturing 20% of the U.S. import market, and the entire reason for this is the emergence of the wine brand Yellow Tail.
The fact that Yellow Tail has only been on the market for about 14 years is probably very surprising to anyone who came of drinking age in the early 2000s. In only a short amount of time, the wine became synonymous with affordable consumption. All of this was completely by design: the accessibility, the flavor profile, and of course, the market dominance. An Australian American Collaboration. Grocery Stores Are Losing You. Here's How They Plan To Win You Back. A little booze can't hurt: The Hy-Vee grocery chain has added a Market Grille to several of its locations in the Midwest and Great Plains.
You can order drinks and dinner before or after you do your grocery shopping. Courtesy of Hy-Vee Market Grille hide caption itoggle caption Courtesy of Hy-Vee Market Grille A little booze can't hurt: The Hy-Vee grocery chain has added a Market Grille to several of its locations in the Midwest and Great Plains. You can order drinks and dinner before or after you do your grocery shopping. Courtesy of Hy-Vee Market Grille If pushing a cart up and down the lengthy aisles of your neighborhood supermarket — past dozens of brands of packaged cereal and crackers lit by fluorescent lights — feels overwhelming and soul-sucking, you're not alone. But there's some good news: The days of shopping this way may be numbered. Here's why.
He spoke about the "grocery wars" and where the sector is headed in the next 10 years earlier this month at SXSW. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Police Chief Magazine - View Article. Paul LaCommare, Commander, West Covina Police Department, West Covina, California downward spiral in California city governments’ revenue streams has occurred for the last five years starting with the housing bubble that burst property tax returns by 40 percent. Warnings contained in the California Department of Finance’s Economic Indicators, January–February 2008 report state that the current economic slowdown afflicting California and the nation is the result of a one-two punch.
The first blow fell in 2005 and 2006 when real estate markets peaked and began a gradual slowdown. The common reaction to a budget crisis is reducing personnel and cutting services. While generating revenue streams is not new to most agencies, the focus and resources necessary to meet current and emerging public safety needs are unprecedented in law enforcement’s history. Five years ago, the current state of the economy facing cities and counties was not even a concern. Possible New Revenue Streams Act Now Notes: The connected card 'wallet replacement' - BBC News. The American Bounty Hunter Becomes an Endangered Species. It’s just after 4 p.m., and the late-afternoon clouds have grown dark with rain. Fast-witted and sharp-tongued Tushina Crum, 31 years old, has spent the whole day with her petite, pierced junior partner, Ileana Zamudio, pounding on doors in search of a man we’ll call Daniel. The women finally have a promising lead. Surrounded by the red rock canyons of rural Colorado, we drive to the next town over, where we turn down a series of side streets before coming to a stop.
Crum straps a bulletproof vest over her white V-neck T-shirt, and a black SUV pulls up behind us. Three baroquely tattooed men of varying ages, each clad in all-black and wearing bulletproof vests as well, step out: Our backup has arrived. For this close-knit crew of bounty hunters, today is just another day on the job, Daniel just another degenerate on the run. And it’s on the verge of extinction. “It’s scary.” When most people think of bounty hunters, if they do at all, they think blond mullets and the reality star Dog.
Here's What Happens When Wall Street Runs Hospitals | Wendell Potter. The Logic of Surveillance Capitalism.