Amy Thuong:

When Scratch polled 3,500 millennials to find out which industry was most prime for disruption, the results were clear: Not only did banks make up four of their top 10 most hated brands, but millennials increasingly viewed these financial institutions as irrelevant.

The three-year study from Scratch, an in-house unit of Viacom that consults with brands, found that a third of millennials believed they’ll be able to live a bank-free existence in the future. In the age of Simple, Square, and Bitcoin, these millennials, defined as those born between 1981 and 2000, overwhelmingly believed that the way they access money and pay for things will be completely different in five years.

Randeep Ramesh:

A prominent Tory MP on the powerful health select committee has questioned how the entire NHS hospital patient database for England was handed over to management consultants who uploaded it to Google servers based outside the UK.
 
 Sarah Wollaston, who is also a family doctor and Conservative backbencher, tweeted: “So HES [hospital episode statistics] data uploaded to ‘google’s immense army of servers’, who consented to that?”
 
 The patient information had been obtained by PA Consulting, which claimed to have secured the “entire start-to-finish HES dataset across all three areas of collection – inpatient, outpatient and A&E”.
 
 The data set was so large it took up 27 DVDs and took a couple of weeks to upload. The management consultants said: “Within two weeks of starting to use the Google tools we were able to produce interactive maps directly from HES queries in seconds.”

Uwe E. Reinhardt:

About half a century ago, organized medicine and the hospital industry in this country struck a deal with Congress that in retrospect seems as audacious as it seems incredible: Congress was asked to surrender to these industries the keys to the United States Treasury.
 
 In return, the industries would allow Congress to pass a 1965 amendment to the Social Security Act, described as “an act to provide a hospital insurance program for the aged under the Social Security Act with a supplementary health benefits program and an expanded program of medical assistance, to increase benefits under the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance System, to improve the Federal-State public assistance programs, and for other purposes.” We have come to know it as Medicare.

Nikki Gamm:

Medicine in the Islamic world can trace its roots back to the Greeks and such famous physicians as Hippocrates, Galen and Discorides. To this was added medicine as practiced in Persia, India and Byzantium. “The result was the creation of an extensive field embracing nearly every branch of the medical sciences, some 14 centuries of history and a vast geographical area stretching from southern Spain to Bengal, for in this particular field nearly all the regions of the Islamic world made some contributions.” (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Islamic Science”)
 
 Medicine was generally taught in medreses along with the Qur’an and the shariyah and often the medreses had hospitals attached where practical lessons were taught. Sometimes there were separate medical schools that also had hospitals that included pharmacological studies and surgery.

David Cay Johnston:

State and local governments have awarded at least $110 billion in taxpayer subsidies to business, with 3 of every 4 dollars going to fewer than 1,000 big corporations, the most thorough analysis to date of corporate welfare revealed today.
 
 Boeing ranks first, with 137 subsidies totaling $13.2 billion, followed by Alcoa at $5.6 billion, Intel at $3.9 billion, General Motors at $3.5 billion and Ford Motor at $2.5 billion, the new report by the nonprofit research organization Good Jobs First shows.
 
 Dow Chemical had the most subsidies, 410 totaling $1.4 billion, followed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire-Hathaway holding company, with 310 valued at $1.1 billion.
 
 The figures were compiled from disclosures made by state and local government agencies that subsidize companies in all sorts of ways, including cash giveaways, building and land transfers, tax abatements and steep discounts on electric and water bills.
 
 In fact, the numbers significantly understate the true value of taxpayer subsidies to businesses, for reasons explained below.

The orthodox vs. the unorthodox: Tata, Tesla and Toyota. Why might an asymmetric competitor lose and a symmetric competitor win?
 
 We begin with Tesla and Apple. We continue with aluminum vehicles and re-visit information asymmetry as Horace exploits it to buy a Mercedes on eBay.
 
 We talk about car APIs (Aux input jack and ODBII) and much, much more.
 
 A brief discussion considers the perils of endless line extension up and down the market, perhaps fueled by financialization.
 
 This is a good one.
 
 Asymcar 10: Asleep at the switch | Asymcar.

Bill Barnett:

The good news is that by doing things myself, I learned how. I’m still unlikely to be called by Angelina Jolie any time soon, but I’m a better teacher for having done this myself. That is how things go; call it the “learn or buy” decision. Need food? Go to the store. Need to finish a math assignment? Get to work. You could pay someone to do your math assignment, but then you’d not only be a liar, you would never learn your math. Paying for things is a way to avoid learning. Some people change the oil; some people pay Jiffylube.
 
 Common sense, you say. But I work with companies all the time who don’t get this basic truth. Leadership wants their company to learn something, so they acquire another company that already knows how. But this purchase does not make their company learn; it just means they own another company that knows how to do things that they don’t. For their company to learn, they would have to do it themselves, and through that difficult process they might have learned. But paying someone else does not help you to know. In fact, since you can rely on the acquired unit, you can avoid having to learn.
 
 

Dan Neil:

I suppose at this point, I must observe that the sun is setting on manual transmissions. As it should. In an era of quick-twitch mechatronics—of continuously variable transmissions, 8-speed dual-clutch transaxles, 9-speed automatics with torque converters—using a series of steel linkages to engage and disengage gears while levering the clutch in and out of the way with your foot? It is barbaric.
 Sentimentalists argue that semiautomatic and automatic systems are uninvolving to drive. You want involving? We should go back to wooden wheels and cable brakes.
 
 Look, I only read the writing on the wall. I didn’t write it. Manual transmissions are, for example, slower than modern automatic and dual-clutch transmissions. Around a road course, a PDK-equipped, paddle-shifted Porsche 911 will steadily walk away from the exact same car with some stick-shifting yokel in the driver’s seat. As hybrid and electric parts take up a greater percentage of powertrain duties, gearboxes themselves will become obsolete.
 
 Manual trannies are also less fuel-efficient than other cog-swappers, and rising fuel economy standards will only marginalize manual transmissions further. The percentage of new light vehicles sold in the U.S. with manual transmissions is in the single digits. Meanwhile, only a small and aging segment of the driving population even knows how to drive a manual transmission. Go ahead, leave the keys in it: A car with a stick shift is practically immune to theft.

Bruce Schneier:

Broadly speaking, three types of NSA surveillance programs were exposed by the documents released by Edward Snowden. And while the media tends to lump them together, understanding their differences is critical to understanding how to divide up the NSA’s missions.
 
 The first is targeted surveillance.
 
 This is best illustrated by the work of the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) group, including its catalog of hardware and software “implants” designed to be surreptitiously installed onto the enemy’s computers. This sort of thing represents the best of the NSA and is exactly what we want it to do. That the United States has these capabilities, as scary as they might be, is cause for gratification.
 
 The second is bulk surveillance, the NSA’s collection of everything it can obtain on every communications channel to which it can get access. This includes things such as the NSA’s bulk collection of call records, location data, e-mail messages and text messages.
 
 This is where the NSA overreaches: collecting data on innocent Americans either incidentally or deliberately, and data on foreign citizens indiscriminately. It doesn’t make us any safer, and it is liable to be abused. Even the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, acknowledged that the collection and storage of data was kept a secret for too long.

PBS Frontline:

Thanks to social media, today’s teens are able to directly interact with their culture — artists, celebrities, movies, brands, and even one another — in ways never before possible. But is that real empowerment? Or do marketers still hold the upper hand? In “Generation Like,” author and FRONTLINE correspondent Douglas Rushkoff (“The Merchants of Cool,” “The Persuaders”) explores how the perennial teen quest for identity and connection has migrated to social media — and exposes the game of cat-and-mouse that corporations are playing with these young consumers. Do kids think they’re being used? Do they care? Or does the perceived chance to be the next big star make it all worth it? The film is a powerful examination of the evolving and complicated relationship between teens and the companies that are increasingly working to target them.