PBS has the article How the NSA Can Get Onto Your Computer.  Read the original article to get all the links to other information.

Many of the NSA’s programs revealed in the Snowden leaks describe the agency’s ability to target specific pieces of software.

But as The New York Times and others reported earlier this year, there is a suite of programs, codenamed QUANTUM, which allows the NSA access to a much wider variety of computers.

We had security expert Ashkan Soltani break it down.

I have been talking to a group of people I work with who are wary of putting information into the cloud (on the internet) for fear of security breaches. I tried to make the point that our web site probably has more security protection than the average person’s home computer. The data may actually be safer on our web site than it is on the home computers from which the data originates.

I am not saying data is safer on a public cloud computer automatically. The web site to which I am obliquely referring has some software that I have specifically put in place to try to protect it. I know I am not enough of a security expert to kid myself that I have made it completely safe.

The UK Independent has the article Alexander Lebedev and Vladislav Inozemtsev: Western financiers welcomed dirty money but now it must be stopped.

Corruption in the “developing” or “peripheral” countries may greatly affect global politics. In addition to its direct influence – through instability, social unrest and civil wars – it affects developed countries indirectly by making them accustomed to their elites’ corrupt behaviour.

About $1 trillion a year flows to the Western banks and financial institutions from the countries identified by the UN as low and medium-developed nations. A large portion of this cash is stolen by public servants and then laundered in the rich countries of the West. The latter want this money: during the 1990s and 2000s, a powerful lobby of financiers, lawyers and politicians was formed with the specific aim of securing it.

Inevitably, this dirty cash will provoke the growth of corrupt practices in the West. So, bribery and fraud exist on two fronts: in the developing and developed nations. Therefore we are convinced that the West should launch the fight against corruption worldwide as soon as possible.
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Options may be many, but one point is clear: corruption today is actively  spreading from the peripheral countries to the developed ones, and infecting sometimes solid and transparent institutions. It’s vital we consider how to prevent this becoming an epidemic.

The rise in the number of billionaires in countries from the USA to Russia, China, India, and in South America is surely a sign of the world-wide spread of corruption.  I suspect that the reining in of the billionaires will be a sign that we are making progress.

IEEE Spectrum has the story After the Sun (Microsystems) Sets, the Real Stories Come Out.

Besides a time for sharing Sun stories, the reunion was also a time for stepping back, and taking the long view. That’s perhaps a particularly good thing to remember this month, with Hewlett-Packard’s recent announcement of another 11 000 to 16 000 layoffs sending a shudder through the valley, a reminder that even great companies don’t necessarily last forever. Companies rise and fall, young founders (Sun’s founders were all in their 20s) grow up, and even when the signs in front of a building change (or don’t; Facebook intentionally left a few Sun signs up when it took over the former Sun campus in Menlo Park to remind people of what can happen to a company) the people inside will still be working on cool technology.

I find this story particularly fascinating as it is part of my history too, in a less direct way.

In 1983/1984, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) sent me to Berkeley, CA to be a visiting industrial fellow at the University of California.  I found the name of Bill Joy (one of Sun’s founders) frequently mentioned and I think there were some remnants of his software around.  I really had no idea of who Bill Joy was or that he was working for SUN, or how young SUN actually was.

I also had the opportunity to visit XEROX PARC for a day with many graduate students from Berkeley.  We were all shown the technology that XEROX was working on.

SUN became quite the competitor to DEC and eventually took a lot of business away from DEC.  After I left DEC, the computers that I used in subsequent jobs were all SUN Workstations.

Getting together with some of my fellow DEC Alums for a lunch once a month these days, I find that the result for those who stayed wasn’t quite as rosy as the paragraph excerpted above.  In fact, the plant in Hudson, MA where I worked, was taken over by HP and Intel after the remnants of DEC were sold to them.  Intel is now in the process of closing the whole thing down and trying to find a buyer for the building and equipment.  The chance of another company buying the site and continuing the work that was done there seems pretty slim.

Most of the people in the our lunch group are retired now.  The ones that stayed with the succeeding owners of the site did have many years of productive work there, but it’s not the same as working at the home location of a technology star like DEC was in its heyday.

Naked Capitalism has the article Wolf Richter: The Big Hoax Of The Wall Street Hype Machine.

The S&P 500 index keeps bumbling from one all-time high to the next as corporations are issuing record amounts of debt to spend record amounts on buying back their own shares: $160 billion in the first quarter alone, according to CapitalIQ. Borrowing money to buy back shares and hyping it ceaselessly as “returning value to the shareholders” is the most effective way to manipulate up the stock, even if revenues are declining quarter after quarter.

In this climate of ZIRP, any major corporation can do it. The heavy buying during these low-volume times pushes up shares, the hype surrounding the buybacks pushes up shares, expectation of more buyback announcements pushes up shares, the mere idea that shares are being pushed up pushes up shares…. And in the end, the buybacks lower the share count for the all-important EPS ratio.

There may be some good points of hoax mentioned in the article, but I commented on my appraisal of one point in the article.

“And in the end, the buybacks lower the share count for the all-important EPS ratio.”

Thinking as a dividend oriented investor, the buybacks also allow for higher dividends per share. What is wrong with that?

If it is true that non-financial corporate growth is going to be lower in the foreseeable future compared to post-WWII history, then the way for companies to prosper like they did before is to lower their output capacities to match falling demand. Companies can adjust to this new environment while we stock owners can have value inflation in the stock price per share and increasing dividends per share. If this buyback is done with idle cash rather than by borrowing, then it isn’t even mortgaging the future of the company.

What are the flaws in this line of reasoning?

I anxiously await any comment on whether or not there are flaws in my point of view.

Naked Capitalism has the post Randy Wray: Taxes and the Public Purpose.

If Congress ever got hold of its senses (no, I’m not holding my breath), it would increase spending (or reduce taxes) to employ idle resources. At some point (probably later rather than sooner) we could come up against resource constraints. At that point we might need to curtail spending and/or raise taxes.

We can examine how to deal with the happy problem of chock-full employment later—we haven’t seen it in the US since WWII and it isn’t on any horizon at present.

Taxes can serve other purposes, too, as I’ve argued earlier in this series. We can use taxes to discourage “sins”—in which case the purpose of the tax is to eliminate “sin” so the optimal sizing of the tax would eliminate sin and hence raise no revenue at all.

Previously, I argued that we can view excessive riches as a sort of “sin” that we want to tax away. Some commentators have argued that high tax rates on high incomes in the early postwar period “worked” by discouraging corporations from paying high incomes to top executives. Exactly! That is how sin taxes are supposed to work. The goal is not to raise revenue but to reduce sin.

This is the clearest description of the attitude MMT proponents have about taxes.  It doesn’t cover all taxes, though.  The topic will garner more attention in later articles.  Above, I have excerpted some statements on issues on which I am particularly focused.  There is more good stuff in the article.

The Real News Network has the interview Piketty: The Market and Private Property Should Be The Slaves of Democracy.

So the human capital illusion is saying that now with the modern economy all that matters is human capital. And education, personal skills, personal talent, as opposed to traditional forms of non-human capital – financial, real estate, etc. Now this is an illusion because in fact in the long run you have a rise of both human and non-human capital in comparable proportions. So of course you have a rise of human capital. You have more education and higher level of human skills today. But you also have a higher level of real estate, equipment, patents, robots and other non-human assets. So that in the long run, you know I’m not saying that robots will dominate humans but I’m just saying that the balance between human capital and non-human capital has no reason to move in the direction of human labor. And indeed, if we look at the recent trends, you know the capital share in GDP has actually been going up and the labor share, for the share of income going to labor earners in the form of wages or other forms of compensations for labor, has actually been reduced. And I’m not saying it’s going to reduce forever but it can very well stabilize at a level that is not so different from the 19th century. So in other words, the capital labor split today is not that different from the 19th century. And it would be wrong to assume, and this has been an illusion to assume, that technological change alone and modernity alone in the form of technical change would make the triumph of labor over capital, and the triumph of human capital. So this is the first illusion.

I am so glad to finally hear Piketty in his own words. Up till now I have just been reading and hearing what reviewers have to say about his book.

It is good to hear his own take on the applicability and limitations of what is in the book. He also puts his projections for the future into a proper perspective.

The excerpt that I chose to highlight above goes to the concern that I have expressed by my suggested thought experiment. Imagine a world where only a very few people are needed to run the automated systems that can produce all the goods that the world population needs to sustain a decent standard of living. How will the potential output of such a system be allocated in such a way that everybody shares in the benefits to some degree or other?

My thought, like Piketty’s above is that this allocation can not be depended on to happen automatically because of capitalism. We actually need to think about how humans and democracies can make decisions to shape that allocation.

The Real News Network has part 7 Financialization and the Collapse of European Social Democracy – Costas Lapavitsas on Reality Asserts Itself (7/8).

LAPAVITSAS: Yes, in Germany and so on, different traditions and so on. But nonetheless we find social democracy in many parts of the world. Social democracy has suffered terribly as a result of financialization, particularly the [incompr.] financialization now, because it basically accepted all that stuff about neoliberalism and so on, and it really believed that this was the future and free-market capitalism was a stable, wonderful system that was going to produce good results, and really went for it. And, obviously, now that it has become clear that financialization is a highly unstable, highly unequal, and deeply problematic system, social democracy hasn’t got a message to come up with.
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Now the strongest party is the left. Greece has always had a left presence, political presence, away from social democracy. And as the social democratic core has collapsed, then the voters of that party or government have migrated to parties of the left, which is why we have SYRIZA, the main party of the left now, you know, bidding for power. So we’ve had a complex movement whereby a large part of the electorate has gone to the left. But also a significant part of the electorate, mostly from the right, now has gone to the extreme right, because obviously the voters of the right have been disillusioned in governments of the right applying the neoliberal programs so viciously too. So we’ve had a polarization. We observe a polarization in Greece pretty naturally as part of this financialization

In the comments on YouTube, you can see that there is debate in Greece over some of what was said in this interview.

There was a promise that in part 8 there will be some talk about what are the solutions. My experience is that this is usually the weakest part of such a discussion. It takes a lot more imagination and creativity to talk about a new social system that does not exist that will solve the problems than it does to talk about the current system and what is wrong with it. So, we should not expect that there will be as many people who can say profound things in this domain as there are people who can be profound about what already exists.

The Real News Network has published 40% of Profits Buys A Lot of Politicians – Costas Lapavitsas on Reality Asserts Itself (6/8).

LAPAVITSAS: That’s it. And this ideology is very, very powerful, and in the United States it’s exceptionally powerful compared to other countries. A very powerful ideology. And that is–you find it in the policy-making field. You find it in the academic departments. You find it in think tanks. There’s a vast array of institutions and mechanisms across the United States and elsewhere that produce and reproduce this kind of thinking and this kind of approach to the economy and society.

Now, I don’t want to go into a deep debate of it. I think it’s a great lot of nonsense, if you really want to go into the substance of it. What I want to stress is something else. This image they present of we are for the market and the free interaction of agents because that produces the best results, and the state is problematic, and we are against the state and we want to limit the state because that’s the way to get progress and welfare and so on, this is actually not true in terms of what they want, in terms of committed, sophisticated neoliberals truly want. And that became very clear over the last two years. These people understand very well what the role of the state is, and they know that the state isn’t really an enemy of financialization or an enemy of free-market capitalism or anything like that. Actually, it’s the tool you need in order to put all these policies in place. And neoliberals have a clear aim and a clear strategy to capture the state. There’s no doubt at all about it.

So there’s been a neoliberal capture of the state and a sort of–it’s almost like self-censorship or self-limitation of thought and options within the ruling elite, within the ruling class about what might be feasible. And anything that goes outside the neoliberal box is not even considered.

Now we are really getting down to the nitty gritty of what this is all about. I haven’t heard it expressed this clearly before.

Part 7 of the series has been published, and I am off to look at it. I can hardly wait to see what other insights Lapavitsas has in store.

The Real News Network has another segment of the ongoing series. This one is Is Financialization Necessary for a Modern Economy? – Costas Lapavitsas on Reality Asserts Itself (5/8).

LAPAVITSAS: I know. But let me just get this stuff on households a little bit clearer.

So what have we got here? We’ve got a system in which households have got to depend on private finance, basically, and they’re sucked into the system, and their wages and salaries and savings become a social profit for banks. We’ve got a direct transfer. I would call that financial expropriation. It’s a kind of secondary exploitation of households. Our incomes, our savings become a social profit-making for banks. And predatory lending is just the extreme case of this. Right?

JAY: So you’re not only making–you’re not only getting taken, if you want, on you buy something, and usually there’s a profit made when you buy the thing; but they’re skinning you twice, ’cause they’re getting you on the credit card interest.

LAPAVITSAS: Well, that’s it. That’s it. And you’re getting–and there’s interest that comes out of your income, which goes to the private financial system, or other fees, commissions, and so on. For what?

The interview also covers international capital flows and whether or not the big banks are actually helping the world economy.

Both aspects of this segment are fascinating.

CBS News has the story Intel hopes to bring 3D printed robot kits to market this year.

The hardware designs will be available through an open-source platform, allowing anyone with access to a 3D printer to make and create basic parts. Essential parts that can’t be printed, such as motors, wires, battery and processors, will be available to consumers in a kit that can be purchased on the project’s website, according to Re/code.

Take that Apple and Google. At $1600 per kit, I don’t think this market will use enough Intel chips to replace declining sales of PC’s. However, this project could lead to some amazing changes to our world.

I think I may keep my Intel stock for a little while longer. Even if I doubt I am going to spend the money on the robot kit at the initial prices, I may be able to buy one eventually. The prices will come down, but not as fast as smart phone prices have come down. Too much of the cost is in hardware that is not produced like a semiconductor chip.