Emily Stewart’s private equity explainer for Vox is a great explainer on how the PE con works: buy up businesses, load them with debt, sell off their assets, slash their costs, then walk away as the house burns, leaving society to put out the fire — all while enjoying special tax status on your gains.
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Tag: explainers
Everything you wanted to know about money-laundering but were afraid to ask
“If we were serious about crime, we’d take most of the cops off the streets and replace them with accountants”: this, from the introduction to CZ Edwards’ amazing Twitter thread about the nuts-and-bolts of money-laundering and how it applies to modern geopolitics, including Trump’s assassination of an Iranian government official and the role that Trump’s real-estate, failed businesses and casinos played in the global money-laundry, without which most serious crime would collapse.
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Great backgrounder on the Hong Kong protests: what’s at stake and how’d we get here?
Vox’s 9 questions about the Hong Kong protests you were too embarrassed to ask by Jen Kirby does an excellent job of sketching out the political relationship between Hong Kong and mainland China, the history that created that relationship, the political controversies since the handback of Hong Kong to China in 1999, the eruption of protests last spring, the state’s (mis)handling of those protests, and the political situations in both China and Hong Kong that led to the catastrophic failures in Chinese leadership. (Image: Studio Incendo, CC BY) (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
Matt Taibbi finally makes sense of the Pentagon’s trillions in off-books “budgetary irregularities”
The finances of the US armed forces have been in a state of near-continuous audit for decades and despite spending billions of dollars and thousands of person-years trying to make sense of what the military spends, we’re no closer to an answer, and no one disputes that there are trillions of dollars’ worth of unaccountable transactions (but importantly, not trillions of dollars in spending) that make it impossible to figure out whether and when and how the Pentagon is being ripped off, or wasting money, or both.
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Me, Myself and Microbes: the relationship between microbes, brains and behaviors
Leon Hong writes, “I made this science-y animation for my wife Elaine Hsiao‘s research — with the hopes that people will learn something new about how all the microbes that live in and on us affect our brains and behavior.”
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John Oliver on monopolies, anti-trust and the death of real competitive markets
Lax anti-trust enforcement is destroying American democracy, growth and equality; it laid waste to minority-owned small businesses and “fleeced” the middle class, creating its own parallel “justice” system and laying waste to whole industries, with the complicity of the Democratic party (and the $1,000/hour expert “consulting” by superstar economists), and there’s no end in sight, from Yahoo to Whole Foods.
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The basics of crypto, in 4.5 pages, using only small words lawmakers can understand
Ed Felten (previously) — copyfighter, Princeton computer scientist, former deputy CTO of the White House — has published a four-and-a-half-page “primer for policymakers” on cryptography that explains how encryption for filesystems and encryption for messaging works, so they can be less ignorant.
What’s happening to Trump’s popularity? Parsing the polls with Nate Silver
Silver’s predictions of the election outcome took much of the shine off the statistician-pollster-guru, and no amount of statistical spin (“we were expressing our confidence that the unpredictable wouldn’t happen, but we left open the possibility of the unpredictable!”) can restore it to its former glory, but this Fivethirtyeight explainer on the polls that show a huge variance in Trump’s approval and disapproval ratings is the kind of detailed analysis that is mostly light, with little heat.
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Reminder: if you have one penny, your net worth is equal to the combined wealth of the world’s poorest 40%
Every year, Oxfam publishes a headline number about global wealth inequality that takes this form: “The richest X people own more than the poorest Y billion people on Earth” (some examples: 2014, 2016, 2017, UK edition).
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Webcomic explains how weakening the Voting Rights Act led to voter suppression in 2016
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On The Nib, Andy Warner posts a quick primer on the Voting Rights Act, which was weakened in a 2013 Supreme Court case that struck down the requirement for districts with a history of racist voter suppression to get federal oversight for changes to their voting procedures; of note is the section on Jeff Sessions, whose Attorney General confirmation hearing is underway right now. (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)