the intersection of law and technology
Tyler Cowen in a piece about blackmail on Bloomberg column:
So what are some lessons from the apparent greater prevalence of blackmail risk?
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-13/bezos-and-national-enquirer-seven-lessons-about-blackmail
First: Be good! Minimize the chance that someone can blackmail you.
Yearbooks as horror shows:
Although they may appear to be innocuous collections of school memories, yearbooks have fueled major political controversies in recent months. Whether it be the racist photograph of a student in blackface and another in a Ku Klux Klan costume on Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s medical school yearbook page or Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook jokes about drinking and sex, decades-old school publications have returned to public scrutiny for politicians, and it’s guaranteed that Northam’s will not be the last.
Why it’s shocking to look back at med school yearbooks from decades ago
If 50 year-old yearbook pages are horrifying now, will 50 year-old Facebook posts be equally horrifying to our children? My guess is probably not, but it is incredible to see what was normal 50 years ago, and remarkable how much has changed.
Great book. But I haven’t a different question. Why did not one of the in-house counsel who worked there do a noisy exit? Just FYI, my belief is that in-house lawyers serve as the moral compass for their companies. Yes, this can sound overly optimistic and conceited – but who else is better placed?
Yesterday I amplified Juan Pablo Villarino’s comments on the importance of being able to demonstrate your value to your community.
Also yesterday, David Brooks wrote these words about the philosophy of Josiah Royce, a late 19th century American historian / philosopher:
Royce argued that meaningful lives are marked, above all, by loyalty. Out on the frontier, he had seen the chaos and anarchy that ensues when it’s every man for himself, when society is just a bunch of individuals searching for gain. He concluded that people make themselves miserable when they pursue nothing more than their “fleeting, capricious and insatiable” desires.
So for him the good human life meant loyalty, “the willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause.”
A person doesn’t have to invent a cause, or find it deep within herself. You are born into a world of causes, which existed before you were born and will be there after you die. You just have to become gripped by one, to give yourself away to it realizing that the cause is more important than your individual pleasure or pain.
. . . . .
Royce’s philosophy is helpful with the problem we have today. How does the individual fit into the community and how does each community fit into the whole? He offered a shift in perspective. When evaluating your life, don’t ask, “How happy am I?” Ask, “How loyal am I, and to what?”
Your Loyalties Are Your Life
No one knows. But lots of folks are asking.
Microsoft has one answer. Google has another, similar answer. The Future of Life organization has another (23 point!) list of ethical rules.
These rules have a lot of overlap, but also a lot of noise. Of course systems should be safe and reliable and just and secure. This is marketing noise and no one disagrees. We need to figure out the hard rules. How transparent should we require AI systems to be? How explainable? This could be hard.
In any case, this year seems the one for forming advisory boards to figure out what rules we should have around (1) letting AI’s defend / kill us; (2) letting AI’s treat us; and (3) maintaining US dominance in AI.
Transaction costs seem to be poorly understood by the general public. For example, it costs money to buy a house. It costs money to sell a house. People often don’t take these costs into consideration when they imagine their house investment. If you buy/sell a house every few years, that’s a major hit to your bottom line. It might even destroy your investment. (Houses should not be investments, but that’s a rant for another time.)
The common 1% financial advisor fee is another example. It is deceptively large and in general you should avoid it.
Big, sophisticated companies should know all about transaction fees. Maybe?
The Japanese tech conglomerate, run by billionaire Masayoshi Son, spent a staggering $894 million on investment-banking fees in 2018, according to financial-data company Refinitiv, securing financial advice on deals and procuring an array of bonds, loans, and equity investments.
That’s not the highest total for any company just last year but the highest in at least the past decade.
The next highest fee payer in 2018, German pharmaceutical giant Bayer, is leagues behind at $384 million — 57% less than SoftBank
SoftBank spent $900 million on investment-banking fees in 2018
You have to make a lot of money on your investments to make up for a one-year $894M investment fee. That’s not just $894M now. That’s more than $1B in three years at 3% returns. That’s well over $2B in 10 years at 10% returns. Take whatever you were going to make on those investments and lop off a few billion immediately.
Maybe Softbank knows what it’s doing? Maybe?
A new California law means pets don’t need to be treated as “just” property in a divorce.
Legal experts said the law means judges can take into consideration factors like who walks, feeds and plays with the pet when deciding who the animal should live with.
“Before it was an issue of who owns the dog and how you distribute the property,” Favre said. “But pets aren’t quite the same thing as china and sofas. They’re more like children, in that they’re living beings who have their own preferences.”
And as with children, he said, divorce can be “a trauma for animals as well.”
The law doesn’t just apply to dogs — it defines “pet” as “any animal that is community property and kept as a household pet.”
New California divorce law: Treat pets like people — not property to be divided up
This is an attention grabbing premise, but the law is about treating people better, not pets. Given the terrible incentives embedded in family law, I suppose we should be welcoming any improvement.
Matt Levine is awesome. The first topic of his editorial is just fantastic. If you don’t subscribe to his newsletter oped newspaper thing, you’re very much missing out. You don’t even need to subscribe to Bloomberg to get it for free gratis!
The article does a great job of capturing the job of thinking like a lawyer – and where people go wrong on their thinking.
I found this Slate Money podcast fascinating. A lot of this is about the abdication of morals in the process of growing a business – and how business schools and consultancies have helped this along.
I’m sure my enjoyment of this is wrapped up in my belief that in-house lawyers are now the moral core of a company and have a prominent role in manipulating guiding the company into doing the “right” thing.
I’ve definitely found this true in my career, what about you?
So this is bad:
On Thursday, a team of scientists offered a detailed accounting of how marine life was wiped out during the Permian-Triassic mass extinction. Global warming robbed the oceans of oxygen, they say, putting many species under so much stress that they died off.
And we may be repeating the process, the scientists warn. If so, then climate change is “solidly in the category of a catastrophic extinction event,” said Curtis Deutsch, an earth scientist at the University of Washington and co-author of the new study, published in the journal Science.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/science/climate-change-mass-extinction.html
Feels like this should be bigger news.