{ What it shows is the now extreme flight of foreign capital from Spain and Italy. As you can see, the graph only goes up to the end of January, but we know that the phenomenon has got, much, much worse since then. Anyone who can has been getting their money out. Any foreign company doing business in Spain and Italy removes the money as soon as they get paid. Since no money system could tolerate such a sustained attack for long, the outflows are compensated for by “target 2″ inflows from the European Central Bank, which in turn borrows the money from the eurozone’s creditor central banks, in particular the Bundesbank. | Telegraph }

{ The Economic History of the Last 2,000 Years in 1 Little Graph }

{ Salvatore Vinci | The best money hiding places in Greece | more }

Fallout continues from the MOCA board’s removal of chief curator Paul Schimmel.

“Jeffrey has always been supportive of my work, but I don’t understand the direction he’s taking the museum right now,” McCarthy said. “I see it as placating the populace. It’s not really what art’s about, but a ratings game.”

Among those in Deitch’s corner is Shepard Fairey, an art star of a younger generation, especially since he designed the “Hope” poster that became the unofficial image of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. (The design firm Fairey founded, Studio One, is now handling much of MOCA’s design work.)

In an email, Fairey, 42, praised Deitch’s “astute understanding of the interconnected nature of high and low art culture. When I say low, I don’t mean inferior.”

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

John Baldessari, citing Paul Schimmel’s ouster, becomes the fifth trustee to bolt since February.

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

threesome { Jeffrey Deitch, Yoko Ono, Jeff Koons }

Chemical giant Monsanto has partnered with the Gates Foundation, which reportedly works to suppress local seed exchanges and environmentally sustainable agricultural practices through its global agricultural charity work. Fraud-prone drug giant GlaxoSmithKline is a partner in the Foundation’s work to leverage its own relatively fractional contribution to vaccination efforts, so that it centrally controls enormous world funds for purchase, pricing, and delivery of vaccines for world public health. […]

The Gates Foundation, and Gates personally, also own stock and reap profits from many of these same partner corporations. In addition, the Foundation owns a profit-generating portfolio of stocks which would seem to work against the Foundation’s declared missions, such as the Latin American Coca-Cola FEMSA distributorship and five multinational oil giants operating in Nigeria. These corporate investments, now moved to a blind trust whose trustees are Bill and Melinda Gates, are collaterally supported by the Foundation’s tax-free lobbying and advocacy activities.

{ Education Week | Continue reading }

Legal action conducted by organisations deemed to be “patent trolls” cost US companies an estimated $US29 billion during 2011.

The study suggested that during 2011, 2150 companies mounted a total 5842 defences in US cases against intellectual property companies that owned and licensed patents without producing any related goods of their own.

{ IT News | Continue reading }

After 50 years of the current enforcement-led international drug control system, the war on drugs is coming under unparalleled scrutiny. Its goal was to create a “drug-free world”. Instead, despite more than a trillion dollars spent fighting the war, according to the UNODC, illegal drugs are used by an estimated 270 million people and organised crime profits from a trade with an estimated turnover of over $330 billion a year – the world’s largest illegal commodity market.

{ Neurobonkers | Continue reading }

In 1991, former MIT dean Lester Thurow wrote: “If one looks at the last 20 years, Japan would have to be considered the betting favorite to win the economy honors of owning the 21st century.”

It hasn’t, and it likely won’t. But 20 years ago, the view was nearly universal. Japan’s economy was breathtaking — rapid growth, innovation, and efficiency like no one had seen. From 1960 to 1990, real per-capital GDP grew by nearly 6%, double the rate of America’s.

But then it all stopped. […]

There are two key numbers to watch when looking at demographics: the percentage of the population that’s of working age (15-64), and the percent likely to be in retirement (over 65).

Though all countries age, within four decades the U.S. will likely have one of the lowest percentages of elderly citizens, and one of the highest rates of working-age bodies among large economies. China, meanwhile, will see its working-age population plunge and its elderly ranks soar — an echo of its one-child policy. Europe falls deeper into age-based stagnation. Alas, Japan becomes the global equivalent of Boca Raton.

{ The Motley Fool | Continue reading }

Yesterday we found out that Jonah Lehrer, the Gladwellesque whiz kid who’s The New Yorker’s newest staff writer, reused his own old writings for every goddamn blog post he’s written for The New Yorker so far. […] What’s the latest? […]

Repackaging the work of others without disclosure is arguably a much more serious offense than reusing your own work without disclosure. […]

This is also why you should never pay someone in their 20s to give a speech and expect to learn something new.

{ Hamilton Nohan | Continue reading }

Wired editor Chris Anderson cemented his speaker-circuit bona fides with a 2006 book, The Long Tail, that was hailed as cogent and disruptive. His last effort, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, met with considerably worse reviews, and its premise was derided on many blogs. Worse, chunks of it turned out to have been copied and pasted without attribution from Wikipedia. None of that matters on the speaking circuit, where Mr. Anderson’s agency says he is in more demand than almost any other client worldwide.

{ NY Observer | Continue reading }

What retail consultants call a Henry: High Earner Not Rich Yet.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

Google+ is functioning exactly as intended. […]

Google Plus is no longer attempting to be a social networking site as its primary focus.

Nobody uses it anywhere near the magnitude of Facebook, and Google is very aware of that. I’m told by people familiar with the situation that even internally the employees laugh at it as a social networking site, and almost everyone has a profile that they never even use past the first two days of experimentation.

But eventually, as indicated by the Google Plus links everywhere, Google Plus will be everything. Every YouTube account is really the video section of Google Plus. Search is just querying the Internet via Google Plus. GMail accounts are Google Plus recipients, and so on.

{ Silicon News | Continue reading }

Country number four, Spain, gets bailed out and we all of course know that it won’t be the last. Though I wondered over the weekend whether perhaps I was missing something, because when the Spanish prime minister Mr Rajoy got up, he said that this bailout shows what a success the eurozone has been.

And I thought, well, having listened to him over the previous couple of weeks telling us that there would not be a bailout, I got the feeling after all his twists and turns he’s just about the most incompetent leader in the whole of Europe, and that’s saying something, because there is pretty stiff competition. […]

I tell you, any banking analyst will tell you, 100 billion does not solve the Spanish banking problem, it would need to be more like 400 billion.

{ Nigel Farage | Continue reading }

Historically, casinos have been eager adopters of technologies that help them to gather knowledge about their customers. The knowledge-gathering repertoire of the modern casino has shifted from telephone surveys, focus groups, and rudimentary datasets to complex feats of reconnaissance and analysis enabled by player tracking systems, data visualization tools, and behavioral intelligence software suites.

Many surveillance techniques first applied in casinos were only later adapted to other domains—airports, financial trading floors, shopping malls, banks, and government agencies. […]

Nearly 70 percent of casino patrons in the United States participate in so-called loyalty programs, using player cards to gamble rather than coins, paper money, or tickets. While their participation grants them redeemable points based on the volume of their play, it grants casinos a wealth of information. Casino player tracking systems, inspired by airline and credit card reward programs in the mid-1980s, record the value of each bet gamblers make, their wins and losses, the rate at which they push slot machine buttons, and what drinks and meals they purchase.

Tracked gamblers are treated less as individual subjects than as “dividuals” in the Deleuzian sense—collections of traits, habits, and preferences that casinos can systematically compare to those of others in order to identify distinct customer niches.

Harrah’s, a franchise that tracks players seamlessly from coast to coast by pooling information from its national chain of properties into a single centralized database, parses its market into ninety different segments and addresses each with a unique marketing scheme. […]

As in the case of online venues like Amazon.com, individuals’ consumer behavior in casinos, recorded in a common data cloud and refracted through statistical analysis, becomes the basis for group classifications of which they may not be aware but in which they continue to participate—sometimes more robustly as a result of the customized product marketing that follows.

{ Limn | Continue reading }

China is a kleptocracy of a scale never seen before in human history. This post aims to explain how  this wave of theft is financed, what makes it sustainable and what will make it fail.

{ Bronte Capital | Continue reading }

artwork { Li Shida }

Unhealthy eating habits don’t develop as a result of instinct; they have to be learned — and a processed-food industry stands ready to teach them.

{ Christine Baumgarthuber | Continue reading }

photos { 1 | 2. Brian Finke }

There are billions upon billions of ad and spending dollars in our phones, waiting to be snatched up. Why can’t big, cynical corporations capture them? […]

We thought they were like laptops with different screens. We were, Gassée writes, very wrong.

{ IT World | Continue reading }

image { Karin }

unrelated { Raunchy dance routine a PR nightmare for Microsoft: “The words MICRO and SOFT don’t apply to my penis.” | GeekWire }

Why product prices end in 99p. […]

There are two theories at play here. The first, called the “left digit effect”, suggests that consumers can’t be bothered to read all the way to the end of a price. “£79.99” reads as “70-something pounds”. The alternative theory is that a price ending in 99p is simply a shorthand for good value. […]


It’s easy to imagine that the shorthand for a bargain was once a 99p price, but now it’s a nice round number thanks to the pound shops. […]

A $59 dress, for instance, would sometimes be priced at $54 or $64 instead. Mr Anderson and Mr Simester found that prices ending in “9” were more likely to find buyers, relative to the prices ending in “4”. This was always true but particularly if the product in question was something new. That last fact does suggest that the “9” was conveying overtones about an unfamiliar product. It’s some support for the “shorthand” theory.

{ Tim Harford | Continue reading }

Suppose in a large city somewhere in the western world, a man discovers on awaking from a two-hour nap that several hundred car accidents had occurred in the city while he slept. He wonders why. […] Something must be wrong with the traffic lights. He concludes that the lights are not working, leaving the drivers to figure out how to negotiate the intersections on their own. […] His wife […] suggests:  “If you came to a traffic light and saw it was not working at all, wouldn’t you slow down and proceed cautiously? In fact, after Hurricane Katrina didn’t people in New Orleans just treat broken traffic lights like four-way stops, without explicit direction to do so?” […] It’s not that the traffic lights were not functioning at all, but rather they were all green. […] Not only do green lights mean go, they also mean that the cross-traffic has stopped. […]

Not only was it not a dream, it was the reality of the post-2001 boom that generated the financial crisis and Great Recession. The Austrian economist Israel Kirzner has long used traffic lights as an analogy for prices. In the case of the boom and bust, the key price was the interest rate.  […] When the central bank intervenes, however, it turns all the lights green.

{ The Freeman | Continue reading }

photo { Lee Friedlander }

Queuing theory is the study of lines. All kinds of lines. The lines at supermarket checkouts, the lines at toll booths, the lines of people on hold waiting for someone, anyone, to pick up at the cable company’s 1-800 number. […]

Since the mid-20th century, queuing theory has been more about feelings than formulas. For example: Midcentury New York featured a rush-hour crisis—not out on the roads, but inside office tower lobbies. There weren’t enough elevators to handle the peak crowds. Complaints were mounting. “One solution would have been to dynamite the buildings and build more elevator shafts,” says Larson. “But someone figured out the real problem isn’t just the duration of a delay. It’s how you experience that duration.” Some buildings installed floor-to-ceiling mirrors near the elevators and, entertained by their own reflections and by the flirting that sometimes ensued, people stopped complaining quite as much about the wait time.

There are three givens of human nature that queuing psychologists must address: 1) We get bored when we wait in line. 2) We really hate it when we expect a short wait and then get a long one. 3) We really, really hate it when someone shows up after us but gets served before us.

{ Slate | Continue reading }

Science-fiction writers once imagined a galactic currency that would grease the wheels of commerce from here to Alpha Centauri. In fact, however, we are tending in precisely the other direction, toward a burgeoning number of ever more specialized currencies. These will circulate electronically, by means of the mobile phones that are increasingly part of the dress of every person on the planet.

Seemingly everywhere you look, you can see the emergence of this pattern in what futurologists call the weak signals [PDF] of change. These are the changes that will be seen, a generation from now, to have foreshadowed a technological revolution. […]

In Japan and Korea, mobile phones have been used for payments for a decade, and the technology is now a standard feature there in handsets. In March, one out of six Japanese users bought something in a shop using a mobile. People also use the system to pay bills and transit fares; businesses use it to funnel loyalty rewards to customers. At first, the number of retailers accepting the new technology remained flat; once about a third of consumers were using it, though, things started to take off, producing the “hockey stick” adoption curve that we technologists love.

What’s happening in Africa is even more astonishing. Kenya is now home to the world’s most expansive mobile payments scheme, M-Pesa. […] A third of Kenya’s gross domestic product now flows through M-Pesa. […]

The rest of the world is starting to move. […] In France, mobile phone operators and banks have gotten together to launch a system for mobile proximity payments, which lets a chip-­bearing platform transfer money when held close to the reader. In Germany, meanwhile, the mobile phone operators have decided to ignore the banks and go it alone. In the United States, Google is working with Sprint and MasterCard to launch Google Wallet. […]

Cash’s indirect costs are huge. […] In the United States 18 to 19 percent of total reportable income is hidden from federal tax men, a shortfall of about US $500 billion. […]

In the Netherlands, there are commercial streets that are cash free. […] In Sweden the labor unions want to remove cash from shops and banks because it is their members who get beaten and shot in robberies; the government wants to reduce the burden of police work.

{ IEEE | Continue reading }

photo { Marc Chaumeil }

In every economic downturn some intrepid journalist pens a story about the “Lipstick Effect”  – the tendency for women to buy more beauty products when the economy is in bad shape. In theory, the behavior is driven by evolutionary concerns. With fewer men able to offer the security of financial stability, women must enhance their beauty in order to deal with the increased competition.

{ peer reviewed by my neurons | Continue reading }

photo { Anthony Suau }