If you think the Paradise and Panama papers are bad, wait until you hear about Delaware →

The exposure of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca’s work helping the global elite hide money from the tax man, and the more recent leak of the “Paradise Papers” from firms Appleby and Estera in Bermuda, have prompted outrage and interest in corporate secrecy. In the US, it also should provide occasion for introspection, because anything Panama does, Delaware, South Dakota, and Nevada can do just as well.
In fact, the US is one of the largest recipients of illicit financial flows from developing countries—money often smuggled out by corrupt politicians, drug dealers, or everyday criminals.
The key reason is corporate secrecy. When individuals or companies want to hide their assets, they transfer them to shell companies that hide the true owners behind nominee directors who act as the custodian of the firm. Often, and especially in tax havens, the directors of the company are not required to disclose, to the tax authorities or anyone else, who the true owners are.
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Just as small countries tend to breed the political culture that allows corporate secrecy, sparsely populated US states have competed in a race to the bottom to attract corporate investment through lax disclosure requirements. The tiny state of Delaware, called an “on-shore tax haven” by critics, garners more than a quarter of its public revenue—just over a $1 billion—from its business registry.
This probably factors into the World Bank’s assessment of the US as one of the worst offenders (pdf) when it comes to corporate secrecy. In fact, a 2012 academic study reports that it is easier to form a shell company(pdf) in the US than it is in Panama—or indeed, anywhere else but Kenya. At the top of their list? Delaware and Nevada.

World's witnessing a new Gilded Age as billionaires’ wealth swells to $6tn →

A big question:

“We’re at an inflection point,” Stadler said. “Wealth concentration is as high as in 1905, this is something billionaires are concerned about. The problem is the power of interest on interest – that makes big money bigger and, the question is to what extent is that sustainable and at what point will society intervene and strike back?”
Stadler added: “We are now two years into the peak of the second Gilded Age.” 
He said the “$1bn question” was how society would react to the concentration of so much money in the hands of so few.
Anger at so-called robber barron families who built up vast fortunes from monopolies in US rail, oil, steel and banking in the late 19th century, an era of rapid industrialisation and growing inequality in America that became known as the Gilded Age, led to President Roosevelt breaking up companies and trusts and increasing taxes on the wealthy in the early 1900s. 
“Will there be similarities in the way society reacts to this gilded age?,” Stadler asked. “Will the second age end or will it proceed?”

Think a Baby's Gender Determines Personality? That's Dangerous. →

But Brown has waded through much of the science around brains and gender, concluding that the sex we are assigned at birth has little to do with who we are as people. While there is no consensus within the scientific community, many studies assert that there is no male or female brain (one study calls them “intersex”), no inherent desire for cleats or ballet shoes tied to gender, no special skill sets or ingrained behavior. “There are very, very few differences in cognition and behavior,” between young boys and girls,” says Brown.
There are, of course, physical differences wrought by hormones — muscle mass, fat, and, of course, the development of sexual characteristics. Some studies also assert that there is an inherent preference for toys with wheels among boys, perhaps due to differences in the development of fine versus gross motor skills. (One study found this to be true even in monkeys.)
But it’s possible that many of the differences between young boys and girls come from the way we approach child rearing, and the messages kids get about how boys and girls should look and behave: the cultural stereotypes we impose on them that become self-fulfilling prophesies of sorts. “It’s almost entirely cultural,” Brown says. Natal sex, in other words, is less predictive of who your children will be than of how you will treat them.
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So rather than asking if a pregnant woman is having a boy or girl — or hoping for one or the other ourselves — why don’t we focus on raising our children free of gender-based expectations, to help them grow into their authentic selves? This doesn’t mean that we should ignore gender, or that biology or gender identity are irrelevant. It means that we shouldn’t define our children’s experiences because of those things.
The truth is, our children will always be different than who we imagined them to be. Indeed, the demure children in the girly outfits I envisioned those years ago aren’t the daughters I have. But that’s OK. Being sweet or courageous or patient or driven are good things. We just shouldn’t think they apply to kids based on gender.

Almost all the US jobs created since 2005 are temporary →

And when most temporary jobs don't come with pension and benefits...

Survey research conducted by economists Lawrence Katz of Harvard University and Alan Krueger at Princeton University shows that from 2005 to 2015, the proportion of Americans workers engaged in what they refer to as “alternative work” jumped from 10.7% to 15.8%. Alternative work is characterized by being temporary or unsteady—such as work as an independent contractor or through a temporary help agency.
“We find that 94% of net job growth in the past decade was in the alternative work category,” said Krueger. “And over 60% was due to the [the rise] of independent contractors, freelancers and contract company workers.” In other words, nearly all of the 10 million jobs created between 2005 and 2015 were not traditional nine-to-five employment.

What Experts Know About Men Who Rape →

A great overview of the studies on why people rape, beginning with a little history:

The most pronounced similarities have little to do with the traditional demographic categories, like race, class and marital status. Rather, other kinds of patterns have emerged: these men begin early, studies find. They may associate with others who also commit sexual violence. They usually deny that they have raped women even as they admit to nonconsensual sex.
Clarifying these and other patterns, many researchers say, is the most realistic path toward curtailing behaviors that cause so much pain.
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Early studies relied heavily on convicted rapists. This skewed the data, said Neil Malamuth, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has been studying sexual aggression for decades.
Men in prison are often “generalists,” he said: “They would steal your television, your watch, your car. And sometimes they steal sex.”
But men who commit sexual assault, and are not imprisoned because they got away with it, are often “specialists.” There is a strong chance that this is their primary criminal transgression.
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Men who rape tend to start young, in high school or the first couple of years of college, likely crossing a line with someone they know, the research suggests...

Insectageddon →

This is not to downgrade the danger presented by global heating – on the contrary, it presents an existential threat. It is simply that I have come to realise that two other issues have such huge and immediate impacts that they push even this great predicament into third place.
One is industrial fishing, which, all over the blue planet, is now causing systemic ecological collapse. The other is the erasure of non-human life from the land by farming.
And perhaps not only non-human life. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, at current rates of soil loss, driven largely by poor farming practice, we have just 60 years of harvests left. And this is before the Global Land Outlook report, published in September, found that productivity is already declining on 20% of the world’s cropland.
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The profits of these companies depend on ecocide. Do we allow them to hold the world to ransom, or do we acknowledge that the survival of the living world is more important than returns to their shareholders? At the moment, shareholder value comes first. And it will count for nothing when we have lost the living systems on which our survival depends.

To save ourselves and the rest of the living world, here’s what we need to do: ...

The tax on women in national security →

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Reading all of these responses, what struck me was the ongoing tax that most of these women reported experiencing. Even if not facing outright harassment, they had to constantly navigate a work environment in which inappropriate or problematic norms were on display. Each of these women reported constant internal debate over when and if to protest “minor” infractions.
These are problems I have never had to deal with during my entire professional career. I can only imagine just how less productive I would have been coping with this additional layer of challenges.

The Fundamentals Favor Democrats In 2018 →

Democrats had a really good night on Tuesday, easily claiming the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, flipping control of the Washington state Senate and possibly also the Virginia House of Delegates, passing a ballot measure in Maine that will expand Medicaid in the state, winning a variety of mayoral elections around the country, and gaining control of key county executive seats in suburban New York.
They also got pretty much exactly the results you’d expect when opposing a Republican president with a 38 percent approval rating.
That’s not to downplay Democrats’ accomplishments. Democrats’ results were consistent enough, and their margins were large enough, that Tuesday’s elections had a wave-like feel. That includes how they performed in Virginia, where Ralph Northam won by considerably more than polls projected. When almost all the toss-up races go a certain way, and when the party winning those toss-up races also accomplishes certain things that were thought to be extreme long shots (such as possibly winning the Virginia House of Delegates), it’s almost certainly a reflection of the national environment.
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