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On Ikea:

From the start the company announced that even in Russia it would be adhering to its clearly-formulated Swedish rules, based on the Protestant work ethic and
unanswerable logic. As a result, Khimki officials turned off the electricity just before the first Moscow shop opened…IKEA’s legendary founder Ingvar Kamprad announced that investment in Russia would be scaled down. But local officials were unlikely to be fazed by such trifles.

And

«Managers at the State Bank VTB have run a scam which has robbed the country and the shareholders of hundreds of millions of dollars. One person has been dismissed.»

And more.

And how about this?

What is most interesting is that people working in the public sector are also anti-state in their hearts.  If you talk to any policeman or civil servant off the record, you will find levels of resentment, disillusionment and Jacobinism that the classical anarchists could only have dreamed of. 

I wonder whether they have some kind of internet surveillance there? You’d think that with these kinds of stories getting out that eventually you’ll have an educated public that will want to put an end to all the crap.  I’ll be interested in what happens when the first generation born after the fall of the Berlin Wall comes of age. They’re getting closer.

The most impressive beggars, however, get their own title: ‘metro dogs’. They rely on scraps of food from the daily commuters who travel the public transportation system. To do so, the dogs have learned to navigate the subway. They know stops by name, and integrate a number of specific stations into their territories.

More here.

The most interesting bit for me was learning that dogs can still breed with wolves, so they aren’t different species. Not mind blowing, really, but not something that would have occurred to me.

There was a study done once which suggested it does not.

This is potentially one of those facts that terrifies the polity. If we can’t spend out way out of it, what on earth do we do?

Sounds like we’ve got us some bias to overcome.

This is about the Oceans, but the message here for me is the steady increase in the amount of data we’re generating about the world:

“Chartering an oceanographic vessel costs $20,000 a day,” he says. “So we need a way to get more data more cheaply and we need as many options for getting it as possible.”

I’m reminded of the famous Harvard undergrad paper that Michael Lewis used in his book, the Big Short. The innovation of AK Barnett-Hart was not in her ability to use some fancy new technique on the data, but to sleuth out a data set that anybody could have worked on. Analytical capabilities are a commodity, now.

Human progress right now seems to be wedded to our ability to collect useful new data that we can work with. That is also my iron law of financial innovation: no new data? No innoation for you!

Robin Hanson says that until we can massively increase Humans’ ability to work with information (services economy, etc), we’ll never substantially increase economic growth.

Man I hope so.

By declaring that the genes can’t be patented because they are essentially products of nature rather than inventions, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York state has effectively cast doubt on whether patents on 2000 other human genes – around 20 per cent of the total – are valid, The Times of London reports.

More Here.

I have been influenced by some podcasts I’ve heard (try this and this and this and this and this) on patents.

I think the system sucks.

From Barker: Why large companies pay more.

Yeah, possibly.

It’s very sexy to talk about the “Capital Markets” in the reinsurance world, but I hardly think you’d find someone willing to dive in to keep the cat market soft right now.

It’s not 2006, folks.

“Not everyone was happy about it, but money is money,” the translator says. IM was paying around 60 per cent more than similar jobs elsewhere offered.

A mid-level employee, who left three years ago after realising what the company was doing, says that initially IM employed skilled developers to create genuine products. As managers became increasingly concerned with making money, quality declined and the fake scans came into use.

more here:

Love it.

You should be

The upshot of the study is that increased computer access for kids just increases computer game playing and is associated with a decrease in grades. I buy it.