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Money, Power & Wall Street
New York City’s Hidden Subway Station
Deep in the belly of New York’s subway system, a beautiful untouched station resides that has been forgotten for years with only a limited few knowing of its existence. Stunning decoration with tall tiled arches, brass fixtures and skylights run across the entire curve of the station, almost a miniature imitation of Grand Central Station… But it sounds like something straight out of Harry Potter, right?
Two brilliant moves that helped create the Apple iOS powerhouse
Most new announcements by Apple are digested and understood by the tech press instantaneously. Great products are great products, and it doesn’t take much time to realize how exciting things like the iPad or Retina displays are. But some moves can take years to completely understand.
So, I now bring you, my two favorite tactical moves by Apple, which I have only recently come to fully appreciate.
Why Nurses Need More Authority
Think it takes a long time to get an appointment with a primary care provider now? Brace yourself: it will likely only get worse. We’re facing a severe shortage of primary care physicians in the nation. The Association of American Medical Colleges predicts a shortfall of 29,800 primary care physicians by 2015, and 65,800 by 2025, mainly because of the anticipated increase in demand for services from the Affordable Care Act (ACA), deterrents to entering the field, such as relatively lower incomes, and growth in the general population and specifically growth in the elderly population. Should the ACA pass muster with the Supreme Court next month, an additional 30 to 33 million previously uninsured Americans will be covered — and even if ACA is not implemented in full, and in the end merely expands Medicaid, it will add 17 million to the insured ranks by 2020.
One of the best ways to alleviate this shortage is to expand the scope of practice for advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs), well-trained registered nurses with specialized qualifications who can make diagnoses, order tests and referrals, and write prescriptions. APRNs could provide a variety of services that primary care physicians now provide.
Lessons from Twenty Years of the Kauffman Foundation’s Investments in Venture Capital Funds and The Triumph of Hope over Experience
Venture capital (VC) has delivered poor returns for more than a decade. VC returns haven’t significantly outperformed the public market since the late 1990s, and, since 1997, less cash has been returned to investors than has been invested in VC. Speculation among industry insiders is that the VC model is broken, despite occasional high-profile successes like Groupon, Zynga, LinkedIn, and Facebook in recent years.
The Kauffman Foundation investment team analyzed our twenty-year history of venture investing experience in nearly 100 VC funds with some of the most notable and exclusive partnership “brands” and concluded that the Limited Partner (LP) investment model is broken 1 Limited Partners—foundations, endowments, and state pension fund—invest too much capital in underperforming venture capital funds on frequently mis-aligned terms. Our research suggests that investors like us succumb time and again to narrative fallacies, a well-studied behavioral finance bias. We found in our own portfolio that:
Google’s problem is that it now believes itself above others – even governments
It’s never the offence; it’s the cover-up. And if there’s one thing that the last few years have taught us, it’s that the suggestion of a “rogue” worker having acted alone to do something which led to an intrusion is never correct. There has to be a failure of management oversight as well.
That’s why Google is in such hot water now over the revelations contained in the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) report into what went wrong with its Street View Wi-Fi data collection program.
Here’s what the FCC said: the engineer who wrote the code to capture the data told his managers about it. He told his colleagues about it. He wrote the code in his “20% time” – the “spare” time that Google allows staff to do projects that interest them – and it was then incorporated into the code used on the Google Street View cars which drove around the public byways of the world, capturing pictures … and also data from open Wi-Fi networks.
Google’s Poor & Defiant Settlement Record
Google’s poor and defiant track record in respecting government agreements and settlements is likely one of the reasons the FTC hired an undefeated former Federal prosecutor and litigator to lead their Google antitrust probe and potential litigation against Google. The EU and the FTC are naturally exceptionally skeptical about negotiating an antitrust settlement with Google, given the substantial evidence that shows Google is consistently less-than-trustworthy in abiding by its agreements with Governments.
Specifically, the evidence shows that Google has not abided by either of its privacy agreements with the FTC concerning Street-View WiSpy or Google-Buzz, nor has Google fully-abided by its criminal Non-Prosecution-Agreement with the DOJ concerning its advertising of illegal prescription drug imports. In addition, Google attempted to broadly game the justice system in negotiating a Google Book Settlement that would have rewarded it with a partial monopoly for its mass copyright infringement.
“The number one threat facing America is its debt burden”
Beyond the naval shipyard in south-east Washington lies Fort McNair, America’s third-oldest continuous fort, which looks across the Potomac at the Ronald Reagan national airport. Sacked by the British in the war of 1812, the fort is today better known as the home of the National Defense University (NDU) – the descendant of the Army Industrial College that was set up in 1924 to prevent a recurrence of the procurement difficulties that had blighted the US military during the First World War. It was also supposed to act as a kind of internal think tank for the military.
NDU was the place where promising officers were sent to prepare their minds for leadership. Dwight Eisenhower, after whom its main redbrick building is named, graduated from here. By focusing on the resources needed to sustain the US military, these mid-career officers think differently to others: they grasp the importance of a robust economy. “Without it, we are nothing,” says Alpha, a thoughtful air force colonel, who, as is the custom, is known by his military nickname (a name I have changed to protect his identity). “People forget that America’s military strength is because of our power. It didn’t cause it.”
I got to know Alpha in peculiar circumstances. Unusually for a foreigner, particularly one whose forebears once trashed the place, I was invited by the NDU to judge the school’s annual exercise in national strategising. Along with two other “distinguished visitors” – a label that has never before, and is unlikely again, to be bestowed on me – I was invited to assess a ten-year national security plan for the US that the students had spent the previous two weeks thrashing out. The campus also conducts hi-tech war simulations in which outsiders with military or diplomatic expertise are invited to participate.
Why is it so expensive to buy or sell a house in America?
I made $970,000 last year. How much did you make?
IN BRITAIN, if you want to sell your home, an estate agent will list the property, find a buyer, help you negotiate a deal and guide you through the transaction, all for a commission of 2-3% of the sale price. In America, realtors provide the same services for roughly double the fee.
Are they worth it? The shouty realtors in David Mamet’s film Glengarry Glen Ross (pictured) certainly think so. (“[My] watch costs more than your car…that’s who I am.”) Others disagree. Chang-Tai Hsieh of the University of Chicago finds that American property brokers cause “social waste” of $8 billion a year via overcharging and inefficiency.