App-etite for nasty companies

As Michael Moore has discovered, business will give
you the chance to "damage the markets", as long as
those capitalists can make money. That's why they
funded Moore to write his anti-oligarch stuff.

The moral of the story is that Moore' writing did
not affect business as usual. Perhaps that was
also known beforehand, by his suitors.

This time, Forbes is leading the anti-capitalist
puerco battle, because it's also a story that
promotes one capitalist tool, and app, even though
that app attacks puerco-capitalism.

Now, the tech savvy can have their economically-
significant protest in the palm of their hands. There
is an app that can tell you who owns the products
in your supermarket. Some companies, like the
Koch brothers' are really just fronts for political
dealing, funding and skulduggery.

By the way, what are you doing buying their
overpackaged crap, anyway?

Nevertheless, it gives people the feeling of political
power. Maybe, if it's successful, it will be banned.

checkit:  Forbes

Watch Forbes Test 'Buycott' App On Anti-GMO And Koch Products In Supermarket Aisle

In early May, then-unknown 26-year-old freelance programmer Ivan Pardo quietly added an app he’d spent 16 months creating to the iTunes and Google Play stores. Then he called Forbes, and all his servers crashed.

Los Angeles-based Pardo hadn’t anticipated the level of interest in Buycott, a simple but clever tool aimed at enabling shoppers to make smarter choices in the aisles with their smartphones.

Use Buycott on your iPhone or Android to scan the barcode on any product, and the free app will trace its ownership all the way to its top corporate parent company. These include headline-hogging conglomerates like Koch Industries (owned by conservative billionaires and liberal bogeymen Charles and David Koch) and Monsanto, the agricultural biotech giant that’s become a byword for “evil” among those opposed to genetically modified food.

Once you’ve scanned an item, Buycott will show you its corporate family tree on your phone screen. Scan a box of Splenda sweetener, for instance, and you’ll see its parent, McNeil Nutritionals, is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson JNJ -0.81%.

Even more impressively, you can join user-created campaigns to boycott business practices that violate your principles rather than single companies. One of these campaigns, Demand GMO Labeling, will scan your box of cereal and tell you if it was made by one of the 36 corporations (most of them household names like PepsiCo) that donated more than $150,000 to oppose the mandatory labeling of genetically modified food.

There are also Buycott campaigns encouraging shoppers to support brands that have, say, openly backed LGBT rights. You can scan a bottle of Absolut vodka or a bag of Starbucks coffee beans and learn that both companies have come out for equal marriage.

occupy the drone, if you can

Alright New Yorkers, there's a new challenge
in the air. It's not something you can't handle.
You just need the right bore of weapon.

It's the NYPD drones, that are being planned.
Nothing like a drone in the air to catch
all the stray gunfight buckshot from gang fights.

There's a guy in Turkey who's got the right idea.
Fight drones with drones.

checkit: DIY Drones

Man whose RC drone was shot down over Turkey protest returns to the skies

   Posted by Matthew Schroyer on June 18, 2013 at 7:44am

Many of you might be aware of the situation in Turkey, where protests have been going on for longer than two weeks. Some of you on DIYDrones might also be aware that a man was flying a small RC drone above these protests, that is, until his aircraft was shot down by riot police.

I originally wrote about this on sUASNews, but I have an update: that man has a new drone, and has posted some new videos of clashes between police and protesters:

    The drone's pilot, who goes by the name Jenk, was able to capture dramatic footage of the violence from the sky before his aircraft went down on June 11. Video from his DJI Phantom showed billowing smoke, and demonstrators scrambling to find cover from high-pressure water hoses and lobbing back the gas canisters from the riot police.

    Now, it appears that Jenk has either repaired his drone or found a new one, and has returned to the Gezi Park protests to capture more aerial footage.

    His newest video, posted June 16 on Vimeo, shows what he claims to be a person who was shot by police. His aerial video, which was shot at night, appears to capture a person in a crowd laying prone on the ground.

I also write about a group of activists here in the states who currently are in a legal battle to have their drone returned from someone's private land. Here's video of the drone over the Turkey protests, a DJI phantom, being shot down.

Forbes reveals neo-lib God is fallible

The neo-liberal movement that is sweeping away the
planet and putting in its pockets is forgetting to
show respect to its proper Yodas. The wise people
who tell/told neo-libs what to do with the planet. like
Aynus Rand and Milton Friedman.

They are supposed to make gods, or angels or something
out of those two because they filled the minds of
f^&*king *ssholes with that can-do feeling, so that
they could steamroll over democracies.

more soon

checkit: Forbes

Steve Denning, Contributor

6/26/2013 @ 11:37AM |18,556 views

The Origin of 'The World's Dumbest Idea': Milton Friedman

No popular idea ever has a single origin. But the idea that the sole purpose of a firm is to make money for its shareholders got going in a major way with an article by Milton Friedman in the New York Times on September 13, 1970.

As the leader of the Chicago school of economics, and the winner of Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976, Friedman has been described by The Economist as “the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century…possibly of all of it”. The impact of the NYT article contributed to George Will calling him “the most consequential public intellectual of the 20th century.”

Friedman’s article was ferocious. Any business executives who pursued a goal other than making money were, he said, “unwitting pup­pets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.” They were guilty of “analytical looseness and lack of rigor.” They had even turned themselves into “unelected government officials” who were illegally taxing employers and customers.

How did the Nobel-prize winner arrive at these conclusions? It’s curious that a paper which accuses others of “analytical looseness and lack of rigor” assumes its conclusion before it begins. “In a free-enterprise, private-property sys­tem,” the article states flatly at the outset as an obvious truth requiring no justification or proof, “a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business,” namely the shareholders.

Come again?

If anyone familiar with even the rudiments of the law were to be asked whether a corporate executive is an employee of the shareholders, the answer would be: clearly not. The executive is an employee of the corporation.

An organization is a mere legal fiction

But in the magical world conjured up in this article, an organization is a mere “legal fiction”, which the article simply ignores in order to prove the pre-determined conclusion. The executive “has direct re­sponsibility to his employers.” i.e. the shareholders. “That responsi­bility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while con­forming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.“

What’s interesting is that while the article jettisons one legal reality—the corporation—as a mere legal fiction, it rests its entire argument on another legal reality—the law of agency—as the foundation for the conclusions. The article thus picks and chooses which parts of legal reality are mere “legal fictions” to be ignored and which parts are “rock-solid foundations” for public policy. The choice depends on the predetermined conclusion that is sought to be proved.

A corporate exec­utive who devotes any money for any general social interest would, the article argues, “be spending someone else’s money… Insofar as his actions in accord with his ‘social responsi­bility’ reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money.”

How did the corporation’s money somehow become the shareholder’s money? Simple. That is the article’s starting assumption. By assuming away the existence of the corporation as a mere “legal fiction”, hey presto! the corporation’s money magically becomes the stockholders’ money.

Set your weapons on 'vaporise'

It's only since the nuclear age that we have
ceased to wonder what it would take to
vaporise your nosey neighbour.

We are now certain that splitting the atom
is a good thing. It keeps that neighbour in check.

Now, some lazy summertime lab talk this year
has raised the issue of literally how much
energy has to be transferred to
vaporise a human. Star Trek stuff?
Nope. The Neighbour Syndrome

They coulda found it previously,
but the initial experiments were a failure,
in 1945. Nobody was around
to set up the measuring equipment when
the Americans bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I think about 10% were vaporised, if you
interpret wikipedia (below). You can't have
flash burns if you're vaporised, so anyway.

[the waste matter looks like a shadow. how interesting
I'll bet they could still swab for DNA. get him some comp]

[hey you. going somewhere?]
https://theatomicbombandhiroshima.wordpress.com/images-from-hiroshima/

68 

98

who do we appreciate?

Oppenheimer

America

Yaaaaay!

2 things
checkit: Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Within the first two to four months of the bombings, the acute effects killed 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki, with roughly half of the deaths in each city occurring on the first day. The Hiroshima prefecture health department estimated that, of the people who died on the day of the explosion, 60% died from flash or flame burns, 30% from falling debris and 10% from other causes. During the following months, large numbers died from the effect of burns, radiation sickness, and other injuries, compounded by illness. In a US estimate of the total immediate and short term cause of death, 15–20% died from radiation sickness, 20–30% from burns, and 50–60% from other injuries, compounded by illness. In both cities, most of the dead were civilians, although Hiroshima had a sizeable garrison.

2 Boing boing
How much energy does it take to vaporize a human?
Maggie Koerth-Baker at 1:46 pm Fri, Sep 13, 2013
According to a 2013 study published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Science Topics (Annals of Mad Science and the Journal of Sophisticated Villainery not having nearly as good of impact factors) completely vaporizing an entire human body would require about 2.99 GJ worth of energy. This fact should give you pause before you try to vaporize a place, rather than a person, writes blogger Kyle Hill. You'd need more than 70 of the most powerful lasers that currently exist just to off that one person. And that's not very efficient evil.

Are you Syria's?

I like the fact that there seems to be a solid-looking
agreement to stop hostilities of the imperial kind.
There's no stopping the funding of the rebels, but
that's life.That just means that someone will find
other means to their ends. Probably some US
senators with PTSD (McCain Frites).

As for the reasons for this conflict. There are
apparently at least two we know about:

-a Saudi gas pipeline to Europe, as per Max Keiser:


-a banking clique, as per JSKim (from Twitter):
SmartKnowledgeU • 1,232 like this
#thrive: "when 911 happened, there were 7 major
countries not going along w/the Rothschild banking
system. Now there’s only 2." #bankingtruth
[one of them is Syria. I assume one convert was Iraq]


It can be both. It's when too many interests are
hanging around that you know you're dead meat.

Haliburton, M&I&C, control of oil markets,
surrounding Iran, Rothschilds. these are some of the things
which did in Iraq.

Opium, copper, oil pipelines, co-opting the Stans.
These are some of the things that did it for
Afghanistan

It's never one thing. The neo-liberal economists
and business types are right behind the army,
looking over their shoulder.
Sometimes, like in the Eurozone, an army isn't
even necessary, as the societies have been
pacified by reams of treaty paper (soft& quilted)

The businesses of the big countries wait for their
chance to overrun Euro countries and shove out
the unions, the mom & pop stores, the small
factories; everything that makes an independent
economy tick.

Greece is a key example, not because of its size,
but because of it's economic make-up.
e.g. The pharmacies are limited by a pharmacists'
union, and that is keeping international "drug
dealers" from  getting a foothold. Letting them in
would destroy hundreds of small businesses and
make every pharma grad into an employee.

The government has periodically withheld the
health system money that they owe to the pharmacists
in order to break the back of the union, but have still
not succeeded.
 

Kiss my improper buttocks

It always amazes me how the oligarchs can come up
with new words for crimes that make them seem like
a cup of spilt milk.

Then they tell the media that "it's just spilt milk,
so f^&*king piss off", and the media laps up
the milk like only a pussy would.

Saying somebody

"improperly provided financial information"
is synonymous with

"the motherf%^&ker dun insider trading"

and should be in jail.

The sky is crying for this Rainman, and so is the jail warden.

the rainman has 567 435 124.2 horseshoes up his butt

checkit: Sky

Top City Rainmaker 'Forfeited £30m Bonuses'
Former JP Morgan banker who floated a string of FTSE 100 companies gave up £30m in bonuses when he left, Sky News understands.
By Mark Kleinman, City Editor
A top investment banker was forced to relinquish up to £30m in bonuses from the Wall Street firm JP Morgan after being accused by City watchdogs of improperly supplying inside information about a major oil deal.
Sky News has learnt that Ian Hannam, who was given the soubriquet "the king of mining mergers and acquisitions" because of his track record putting together multibillion pound takeovers, gave up the previously undisclosed sum when he left JP Morgan last year.
His departure followed a £450,000 fine and censure imposed by the Financial Services Authority (since renamed the Financial Conduct Authority) for market abuse, allegations that Mr Hannam is disputing at a tribunal which got underway on Tuesday morning.
The £30m figure is not expected to be made public at Mr Hannam's tribunal, although a statement released by him on Tuesday referred to him foregoing "substantial sums in the form of bonuses for 2008/9 as part of the arrangements for terminating his employment with JP Morgan".