There are no medals for companies that decide not to take advantage of tax loopholes or tax-free havens. The law is black and white. You are either fulfilling your legal tax obligation or you’re not. I applaud Apple for stretching the loopholes to their legal limit. They are making it obvious how incompetent our government is in their inability to pass a law. If the government wants more revenue, then close the loopholes, instead of wasting Tim Cook’s time by dragging him down to Washington.
Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/business/apple-avoided-billions-in-taxes-congressional-panel-says.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
"Where I feel the most productive and engaged is when I’m buried in code, buried in some project, tweaking some designs,” he said. “I’m certainly introverted."
—
David Karp
Tumblr Founder
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/technology/david-karp-quit-school-to-get-serious-about-start-ups.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&hp
CVS, for example, has started to require its employees to submit their weight, body fat, glucose levels, and other vitals monthly or pay a fine to cover increased health insurance premiums. If that data was available for the majority of its employees via a quantified self company (or several), CVS and other employers might not even have to ask – and the seemingly fit employee with a secret pound of bacon a day habit may never know why his health insurance premiums are double those of co-workers.
http://pandodaily.com/2013/05/20/you-are-your-data-the-scary-future-of-the-quantified-self-movement/
"We are in this position as a country because we assumed that the magic of the marketplace would provide competition and provide world-class communications,” she said. “But history has demonstrated that left to their own devices, companies will gouge the rich, leave out the poor, cherry-pick markets and focus solely on their profits. It isn’t evil, it’s just the way things work."
— Susan Crawford
Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age
Quote from NYT Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/business/media/telecoms-big-players-hold-back-the-future.html?pagewanted=1&ref=business
In the United States, a former prison guard is suing the city sheriff, alleging that he was fired because he “liked” the Facebook page of the sheriff’s opponent in a political race. Freedom-of-speech laws typically protect workers from discriminating based on political affiliation. (If, for example, an elected official lets you go because you put a yard sign for his opponent on your lawn, you have grounds to sue.) But last year, a Virginia judge said “the court will not attempt to infer the actual content of Carter’s posts from one click of a button on Adams’s Facebook page…for the court to assume that the plaintiffs made some specific statement without evidence of such statements is improper.” For its part, Facebook has said that its “like” function should be protected speech.
Read More: http://qz.com/86451/facebooks-like-goes-on-trial-think-twice-before-liking-this-article/
disquietingtruths:
- Student-Loan Debt.
- Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance.
- Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy.
- “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.”
- Shaming Young People Who Take Education—But Not Their Schooling—Seriously.
- The Normalization of Surveillance.
- Television.
- Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism.
Read More
(Source: filmsforaction.org)