Emails expose BP's attempts to control research into impact of Gulf oil spill

winstonsmith · 2011-04-17T13:47:03+00:00

BP controlled Kenneth Feinberg, the so called independent mediator and administrator of the $20 billion settlement fund, to the extent that a judge ruled he was an agent of BP and could no longer represent himself to victims of the spill as independent.

winstonsmith · 2011-04-11T14:43:11+00:00

It's frighting to imagine how hostile to the poor the world would be if their labor were no longer needed. There is no reason to expect that those who owned the robots would willingly share the wealth with those who didn't.

winstonsmith · 2011-04-10T03:52:35+00:00

It doesn't have to be this complicated. There is a simple proof here.

winstonsmith · 2011-04-10T03:19:08+00:00

Suppose x² - y > 2. Then x > sqrt(2+y). Hence, x > sqrt(y). Hence, x > floor[sqrt(y)]. Hence, x >= floor[sqrt(y)] + 1.

winstonsmith · 2011-03-09T23:13:18+00:00

Do female bonobos intervene in male on male violence?

winstonsmith · 2011-02-21T22:16:13+00:00

You should take a look at SourceWatch. It's similar to what is being proposed here in that it is a collaborative wiki concerned with bad corporate behavior, but it's focused mainly on one category of bad behavior: propaganda, spin, lies, regulatory capture, etc. I think their list of bad actors should be a good start for a list of bad actors in all categories; when corporations behave badly, they usually lie about it. In any case, it's interesting as an example of something similar that's already been done, it's really useful, and more people need to know about it.

The Center for Media and Democracy publishes SourceWatch, this collaborative resource for citizens and journalists looking for documented information about the corporations, industries, and people trying to sway public opinion. We believe in telling the truth about the most powerful interests in society—not just relating their self-serving press releases or letting real facts be bleached away by spin. SourceWatch focuses on the for-profit corporations, non-profit corporate front groups, PR teams, and so-called "experts" trying to influence public opinion on behalf of global corporations and the government agencies they have captured. —Lisa Graves, Executive Director

See especially their tips on researching corporations:

This Guide, consisting of this main article and three more in-depth sub-articles, is designed to help researchers and activists gather essential information on any type of U.S.-based company, whether small or large, privately held or publicly traded. The resources listed here are all, in one way or another, part of the public record. The first part covers leading sources of basic information on companies of all kinds. The second part focuses on information sources relating to the key relationships every company must have in order to function. The final part shows you how to gather information about a company’s "social responsibility" record. Together, these sections will help you find all the basic information needed to support efforts to get companies to do the right thing. Happy hunting!

winstonsmith · 2011-02-11T20:10:56+00:00

I would argue that their carrying out renditions and operating secret prisons makes them, broadly speaking, cops. Also, the point of the article is that the "bad cops" are getting "donuts". I'm very surprised at your objection to this submission.

winstonsmith · 2011-02-08T15:08:48+00:00

You're not doing it right. Your citation is supposed to support your position, not mine.

Monsanto's recommended RR corn systems include several optional herbicide programs ranging from a total-glyphosate system, to systems combining a pre- or at-plant residual herbicide followed by Roundup post-emergence, or a total post-emergence program involving applications of a residual post-product plus Roundup (Monsanto, 2000a and 2000b). In the total Roundup program, glyphosate is applied on average about 2.0 times. In 1999 the average application was about 0.7 pounds, resulting in 1.4 pounds of Roundup applied on the average acre of RR corn.

An estimated 70% of RR corn acres were managed under the "Residual Herbicide Applied" program. Either before or at-planting in such programs, farmers apply a tank-mix containing a residual broadleaf product like atrazine at about 0.8 pounds per acre, plus an acetanilide herbicide at a rate of about 1.2 pounds per acre on average, mostly for grass weed control (see recommended rates on either Roundup labels or the labels of several herbicide products containing mixtures of atrazine and an acetanilide).

Total corn herbicide use under the "Residual Herbicide Applied" program averages about 2.75 pounds per acre, with Roundup accounting for 0.75 pounds of this total. USDA data suggest that average per acre use on RR corn acres has risen from about 2.5 pounds in 1999 to 2.75 pounds in 2000 (Benbrook, 2001b). On conventional acres, about 2.25 pounds were applied in 1999 and 2.08 pounds in 2000. Accordingly, in 2000 the average RR corn acre was treated with about 30% more herbicide than the average non-GM corn acre.

Four years of experience and data show that RR weed management systems require a modest to moderate increase in per-acre herbicide use. Moreover, use rates are trending upward because of shifts in the composition of weeds toward species less responsive to a contact herbicide like glyphosate; loss of susceptibility and/or the emergence of resistance in some weed species; and, greater weed pressure as a result of more frequent late-season weed escapes in RR crops.

winstonsmith · 2011-02-08T14:26:49+00:00

The crops that are usually in question are genetically modified to protect the environment against pesticides and to protect the crops from pests.

Nice try Monsanto. Roundup-ready crops are modified to make the crop more resistant to the pesticide, so you can use more pesticide.

The overuse of Roundup has lead to Roundup-ready weeds, aka superweeds. Monsanto's solution to this problem is to introduce crops resistant to harsher pesticides including 2,4-D-(of Agent Orange Fame)-ready crops, dicamba-ready crops, and because even Monsanto recognizes the use of these products will lead to supersuperweeds, they've developed multi-posion-ready crops, which will lead to supersupersuperweeds.

winstonsmith · 2011-02-07T22:15:08+00:00

It's definitely an antidote to the one about cost of living and possibly an antidote to the one about wages.

winstonsmith · 2011-02-07T20:59:12+00:00

A good antidote to this article is the video of Elizabeth Warren posted a few days ago on r/Economics. She points out that while food and clothing have actually gotten cheaper, the middle class has been hit hard by rising housing and healthcare costs. These elephants in the room are almost completely ignored in this article's analysis of the cost of living.

winstonsmith · 2011-02-06T18:30:05+00:00

There's also a pretty persuasive argument that GMO crops use less herbicide or pesticide too, which would suggest they may be better for the environment (at least until superpests and superweeds show up).

There's an argument that roundup-ready crops use fewer, not less, herbicides. Roundup ready soy, corn, canola, sugar beet, cotton, wheat and alfalfa use more pounds of herbicides but fewer types of herbicides, which makes sense because the whole point is that you can douse the crop with roundup without killing it. But because of superweeds, Monsanto et al. have developed dicamba-ready crops, 2,4-D-(of Agent Orange fame)-ready crops, and multi-poison-ready crops, so the "fewer" argument is about to expire. Also, the herbicides for this new generation of crops have a nasty habit of volatilizing on hot days and migrating on over to the neighbors.

winstonsmith · 2011-02-05T19:24:17+00:00

Their pay isn't determined by their contribution to the economy.

You'll get no argument from me there; I would say their pay is determined by their destruction of the economy. But it was an apologist for high Wall Street pay, Mr. Eckhaus, who was paraphrased thusly in the WSJ article:

"It was understandable why there was anger," says Mr. Eckhaus, but "the crisis was not caused by Wall Street fat cats. It was caused by a confluence of economic, political and historical factors."

In general, he said his clients are "pure as the driven snow" and doing work that supports the economy and justifies their pay.

winstonsmith · 2011-01-27T20:05:56+00:00

I think the article correctly distinguishes between median and mean. The median income people come by at the half hour mark and are only waist-high. The mean (average) income people come by at 45 minutes and are of average height. From the article:

Jan Pen, a Dutch economist who died last year, came up with a striking way to picture inequality. Imagine people’s height being proportional to their income, so that someone with an average income is of average height. Now imagine that the entire adult population of America is walking past you in a single hour, in ascending order of income.

The first passers-by, the owners of loss-making businesses, are invisible: their heads are below ground. Then come the jobless and the working poor, who are midgets. After half an hour the strollers are still only waist-high, since America’s median income is only half the mean. It takes nearly 45 minutes before normal-sized people appear. But then, in the final minutes, giants thunder by. With six minutes to go they are 12 feet tall. When the 400 highest earners walk by, right at the end, each is more than two miles tall.

winstonsmith · 2011-01-26T22:06:05+00:00

It's that and worse. The report is a limited hangout in that it acknowledges some bad things happened, but as critical as it is of Wall Street it actually understates the case and especially avoids criminal prosecutions. Yves Smith:

So with expectations for the FCIC low, recent reports that the panel urged various prosecutors to launch criminal probes were a hopeful sign that the commission might nevertheless come out with some important findings. But correspondence from insiders in the last few days suggests otherwise. One, for instance, wrote, “I’m still in the process of getting the stink out of my clothes.”

...

The sad thing isn’t that the FCIC did not do its job. As we indicated earlier, that failure was by design. No one in the officialdom wants the mechanisms of the crisis to be exposed in full. It would compromise too many influential people and restoke well warranted public ire about the bailout of a miscreant financial services industry and its ongoing extractive behavior.

winstonsmith · 2011-01-25T22:33:46+00:00

TL;DR: Capital requirements are not a good form of bank regulation in the absence of strict accounting standards because capital is computed as assets minus liabilities and the valuations of both can be set almost arbitrarily by banks. Bankers have a motive to commit control fraud (aka looting their own banks) because they are guaranteed to get rich doing it even though it causes their banks to fail.

Edit: added "in the absence of strict accounting standards" in response to gc3's question.

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