So if the taxman/(Big Brother) is now to get a share of the revenues some Big Tech obtain exploiting our personal data… who is going to defend us citizens?

Sir, you deem “The ability of some of the world’s most profitable companies to escape paying fair levels of tax…unfair both to other businesses which do not trade internationally and to governments, which lose substantial revenue” “France leads the way on taxing tech more fairly”, July 12.

It might be unfair to us taxpaying citizens but “unfair to the government”, what on earth do you mean with that? That sounds like something statist redistribution profiteers could predicate but, frankly, the government has no natural right to any income.

And since Big Techs like Facebook and Google obtain most of their revenues by exploiting us citizens’ personal data, then if there were some real search for fairness, a tax on ad revenues from such exploitation should better be returned directly to us, perhaps by helping to fund a universal basic income.

But what ‘s the worst with these taxes is that now effectively governments will be partners with these companies in the exploitation of our data. With such incentives do you really believe our interest will be duly defended? We, who are afraid of what all our data could feed with information a Big Brother government, must now recoil in horror from that we will also be suffering an even richer and more powerful Big Brother.

PS. Sir, it is not the first time I have warned you about this.

https://teawithft.blogspot.com/2018/03/our-need-to-concern-ourselves-about-use.html

https://perkurowski.blogspot.com/2019/05/i-have-some-ideas-about-what-could.html

@PerKurowski

Will there now be opportunities for gig unionists?

Sir, Sarah O’Connor thinks the unions might have a good chance to adapt to the gig economy “Gig economy deals promise a brighter future for trade unions” February 27.

I am not so sure. There is a de facto class war in the real economy between those with jobs wanting better conditions and those just wanting a job. And that is what nourishes the gig economy.

Imposing on the gig economy benefits, is just like raising minimum wages, it just raises the bar for the offer of jobs. An unconditional universal basic income would instead provide a step stool to better reach up to whatever jobs are offered.

Of course those who benefit, politically or financially, from a conditional redistribution, or from negotiating on behalf of workers, do not like that option as it clearly erodes their job opportunities. 

How will unions handle it? I have no idea; perhaps there will be some gig unionists.

PS. In the same vein, perhaps Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a gig politician. We’ll see if she lands a second term. Having helped New York lose Amazon’s 25.000 well paying jobs does not bode well for here there. Perhaps she will get a call from another state.

PS. Amazon is one of those entities automating and robotizing the most. So it is a bit surprising to read that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez opines “We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work. . . . We should be excited by that”

@PerKurowski

Let us issue shares fed with some results of our economy to all of us, and then worship these.

Sir, Rana Foroohar asking “At what point does bad corporate behavior become willful malfeasance?” writes, “Facebook is the natural culmination of 40 years of business worshipping at the altar of shareholder value.” “Facebook puts growth over governance” December 25.

Really? If all the incredible developments around Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft and similar, results from “worshipping at the altar of shareholder value” then perhaps we should issue a share to each citizens that feeds on a substantial part of profits, like those of Facebook, or taxes, like carbon taxes, and have us all worshipping these shares, instead of trusting the acts of genius politicians or bureaucrats with agendas of their own. 

Those shares, which would pay out an equal unconditional societal dividend to all of us, is by the way what a Universal Basic Income is all about. 

Of course, as usually comes with new developments, there are new and serious problems, and data privacy is one of them. Foroohar asks “ Have we reached one of those watersheds when US and European authorities are going to step up and do something about it? Let us beware, there’s no guarantee that would not be even worse. 

Foroohar says she is reminded of “bank executives who had no understanding of the risks built into their balance sheets until markets started to blow up during the 2008 financial crisis” 

I am though more reminded of regulators who allowed banks to leverage over 60 times their equity with what rated as AAA could be very dangerous to our bank system, and less that 8.3 times with what rated below BB- bankers do not like to touch with a ten feet pole. I am reminded of regulators who assigned a risk weight of 0% to the sovereign of Greece, and thereby doomed that nation to its tragedy.

@PerKurowski

Yes, cities can be great, but these can also be dangerous bombs in the making.

Sir, Edward Luce writes about how trying to attract big companies like Amazon to the cities might make it harder on the poor in the city. “Beauty contest reveals ugly truths” June 6.

Yes, of course, the weaker, the poorer, they will always be relatively more squeezed by any development that occurs in cramp conditions where there will be a fight for space.

But it is when Luce quotes Richard Florida with, “America’s most dynamic cities have played right into the company’s hands, rushing to subsidise one of the world’s largest corporations rather than building up their own economic capacities.” where the real discussion should start.

Why would a city want to bet so much of its future on so few actors as would here be the case with Amazon? Have they not seen what happened to Motor City Detroit? If you want to use incentives to attract jobs, which is of course to start “a race to the bottom”, why bet all on a number, would you not be better off diversifying your bets? 

If I was responsible for a city, one of the first things I would be doing is to analyze how its riskiness would be rated compared to other cities? For instance, what are the chances that suddenly another city offers your city’s wealthy, the possibility of moving to a place that has not accumulated impossibly high debts that will need to be served, supposedly primarily by them?

And, if your city faces a financial crash, what would be ones’ first priorities, to help the poor, or to make sure the rich do not leave without being substituted for by other rich?

PS. Luce writes: “Big fund managers… are putting cash into global urban real estate portfolios. As a result, property prices are becoming a function of global capital movements rather than local economic conditions”

Again, for the umpteenth time, what initially feeds high property prices is the inordinate ease of access to financing it, provided among others by regulators allowing banks to leverage much more with “safe” residential mortgages than with “risky” loans to entrepreneurs. 

The fund managers are just following the results of it… when that regulation-easing plan begins to be reversed, which will happen sooner or later, they run the risk of being left holding the bag. 

@PerKurowski

If you pick the wrong data stream, as bank regulators did, real tragedies can happen

Sir, Rana Foroohar writes: “The ability of a range of companies — in insurance, healthcare, retail and consumer goods — to personalise almost every kind of product and service based on data streams is not just a business model shift. It is a fundamental challenge to liberal democracy.” “Digital democracy is dangerous” January

Yesterday I received the following message from Amazon: “Based on your recent activity, we thought you might be interested in: The Complete Guide to Building with Rocks & Stone: Stonework Projects and Techniques”. Since, at least after the age of eight, I am absolutely sure I have never harbored any intention, much less a burning desire, to build with Rocks & Stone, I suppose that, in terms of using the correct data streams, they business are not really there yet. Neither are bank regulators, though that has much more serious consequences than me not clicking on that book.

Foroohar writes: “Illah Nourbakhsh, a professor at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon, [has] launched a project to educate elementary school children about the power of data, its risks and rewards, and how to use it to advocate for themselves.”

Great! I hope professor Nourbakhsh makes a case of explaining to the young that the regulators, when setting their current risk weighted capital requirements for banks, used the data about the riskiness of assets, and not the data about what risks those assets posed to the bank system. Had they picked the correct data stream, they would never ever have assigned a minimal risk-weight of 20% to what, perceived so safe as to be rated AAA, could be truly dangerous, and 150% to what, being perceived so risky so as to validate a below BB- rating, is totally innocous.

And then the professor could also, if he dares, explain to these youngsters that these perceived risk adverse regulations now have banks solely refinancing and extracting all value from the “safer” present economy; and not financing the “risky” future that they as young need to be financed, if they are going to have a reasonable future.

http://perkurowski.blogspot.com/2016/04/here-are-17-reasons-for-why-i-believe.html

@PerKurowski

Parent regulators, not even aware they were the ones blowing the bubbles, shamelessly put all the blame on their toddler banks when these burst.

Sir, Tim Harford writes: “As any toddler can attest, it is not an easy thing to catch a bubble before it bursts” “Forever blowing bubblemania” January 13.

That is entirely true. But though we should not expect our toddlers to know it, parents are fully aware that the bubbles their dearest are chasing, were blown up by them, in the clear expectation that these would burst, or delightfully disappear in the skies.

Harford concludes in that “It’s very easy to scoff at past bubbles; it is not so easy to know how to react when one may — or may not — be surrounded by one”

Not entirely true, because that should not excuse the case of parents not even being aware they’re blowing bubbles.

In the western world, regulators, for instance, by allowing banks to leverage their equity so much when financing residential houses, are, no doubt about it, blowing up a house credit bubble that will surely blow up in our face… even though we cannot exactly know when that will happen.

When with Basel II in 2004 regulators allowed banks to leverage a mindboggling 62.5 times their capital, only because an AAA to AA rating was present, it should have been clear to them that they were blowing a bubble. Seemingly they did not. Worse, when then the AAA rated securities backed with subprime mortgages exploded in their face, they should have been able to put two and two together, but no, they put all the blame on the banks, the toddlers in this case. Even to the extent of describing the excessive bank exposures to AAA rated assets, or to sovereigns like Greece who with a 0% risk weight they had decreed infallible, as an irresponsible excessive risk-taking by bankers. They should be ashamed!

PS. Like Harford’s senior colleague I was also very skeptical about Amazon’s valuation. In April 1999 I wrote in an Op-Ed that Amazon had “joined the rank and files of ‘tulipomanias’” Yes, I admit, it is now worth much more than it ever was at that time. That said, and though Amazon is now way more than about books, I still suspect that, long term, because of: “‘shopping agents’ will permit clients to quickly compare one company’s prices to those of its competition, which would seem to presage an eventual fierce price wars, would create an environment that is not exactly the breeding ground for profits that back the market valuations we are now observing”.

But then I also assumed institutional “efforts aimed at prohibiting any monopolistic controls of the Web”, and in this perhaps I could have been way to naïve.

@PerKurowski

What if we in writing had to authorize phone companies to listen to our calls, in order to have access to phones?

Brooke Masters writes: “when I link our Amazon Echo speaker to my son’s Spotify account, I have no idea whether I am violating one of the thousands of terms and conditions he agreed to with his account. Furthermore, does that act give Amazon the right to send him advertisements based on the songs we play?” “Take ownership of the sharing economy” December 29.

She is absolutely right. The rights we seem to have to give up in order to gain access to social media and alike, though defined in small letters in thousands of unreadable pages, is one of the most undefined issues of our time.

Some questions:

Should the marginal cost for social media owners to access, and waste, so much of our limited attention span, be zero?

Should we be able to copyright our own preferences so that we at least can have something to negotiate with?

How much can we allow being distracted during working hours before our employer has the right to deduct our salaries paid?

How will such working hours distractions be accounted for in employment statistics?

How is all this free or very cheap consumption paid by used attention spans be accounted for, for instance in GNP figures?

Should social media owners be allowed to impose their own rules or should that not be subject to some kind of a special arbitration panel?

How our global differences be managed? Does a government that interferes with its citizens’ rights of access to social media have access to other web sites of other nations?

@PerKurowski

If Disney though dead makes money on Mickey Mouse © why can’t Per Kurowski do the same on Per Kurowski © while alive?

Sir, let me use Tim Harford’s “Copyright and wrongs” of October 3, in order to bring to your and his attention, my own copyright wishes.

I have spent my whole life, carefully, with great love and dedication, developing interest and taste for many different things. And now, all my efforts doing so, are being vulgarly commercialized by third parties, to whoever thinks he could use it in order to tempt me to buy something or to donate to some cause.

With that information on me, they pursue me on the web and on the phone, day and night. And I can hardly escape any longer. In fact I am no longer a completely free man, I am now being trapped by my own past preferences and blocked from exploring new horizons. “Tell me what you like and I will show you what you like” is a vicious spiritual deathtrap that engulfs you more and more.

And there’s little or nothing in it for me. Oh, if only I could have a copyright on my own preferences… only until I am dead, not one day more. I swear I would not hire lawyers to extend its validity.

If that were possible, I would immediately enlist one of those many emerging ad-blockers, to make sure I was reasonably compensated for any ad that targeted me using what is included in Per Kurowski ©.

And of course, if I also had to look at those ads, I would want some compensation for using up my so scarce attention span. I have initially been thinking about a low revisable fee of US$1 per 30 second of serious attention to anything serious information they want to feed me. 

In order to stimulate the ad-blocker for maximizing my copyright and my attention span revenues, I have thought of paying it a 30 percent commission rate. Sounds reasonable eh?

@PerKurowski ©

They pay just 0.0025 to 0.02 cents of a dollar per advert to reach me online? No way! I am worth much more!

Sir, I refer to Tim Harford’s “Online ads: log in, tune out, turn off” April 4. It contains some very enlightening data for someone not in the business of targeting ads but only being a target of ads. Harford mentions that the rate for cheap advert may be as low 25 cents of a dollar per 1000 views, while good adverts may pay the publisher 2 dollars per 1000 view.

So that means that someone reaching me with a cheap advert pays for that 1/40th of a cent of a dollar while someone reaching me with a good advert pays 1/5th of a cent of a dollar. What a shocker, I thought getting my attention span was worth more than that. De facto I am a Mechanical Turk working at the receiving end. Not only do I perceive any income for that, zero salary, but, to add insult to injury, they are valuing the access to my attention span at ridiculous low rates.

It is clear that I urgently need someone to develop an App that will only allow ads that produces me an income of X dollars per hour of my attention span to reach me. The provider of that service, in charge of collecting my earnings, would have to work on a commission basis, so that I can be sure we are both targeting the same end results.

Since now and again I would wish to see a little of what is available in the cheap advert markets, occasionally I authorize allotting some of my valuable attention span, on a pro-bono basis.

PS. That X dollars per hour of my attention span will fluctuate according to market conditions.

@PerKurowski

Maybe it is time to revisit the whole concept of progressiveness in taxes.

Sir, John Gapper, perhaps solely wearing his hat of a writer, basically proposes creating a publisher monopoly in order to counter the growing strength of a distribution monopoly such as Amazon, “Publisher must become giants to take on Amazon”, May 29.

As a reader, I am not certain I want to be squeezed by those who clearly would then have an interest coming into some agreements that might not benefit me, though the truth is that technological advances married to the reach-out of globalization, do seems definitively to be leading us down that path.

And what can we do to keep alive our alternatives? I have not given too much thought on how it could be implemented but I think that the introduction of tax-rate progressiveness, for corporate profits and or dividends, based on market shares, could be something worthwhile to explore.

Why for instance should “The Shop Around the Corner” have to face the same tax structure as Amazon?

And of course, in the same vein, why should a company that fights naked and unprotected in the markets face the same tax structure as one that operates under the protection of intellectual property rights?

Any self-respecting serious buyer on the web will surely like to have her own pick-up drone.

Sir Tim Harford writes about “How delivery drones could transform the world” December 6, and I just have to wonder whether it might not as well be “pick-up drones” which could transform the world.

And I say this because, looking only at some of my family´s members, I have an inkling that any serious purchaser on the web who respects herself, would want to have her own drone… at least for the last mile… just in order to be free to buy from anyone… yes even from Walmart.

I can see all those big houses, next to their cars, having a stand for the latest shiny pick-up drone model… and which, as a complementary service, has a built in camera so as to be able to better see what the neighbor is buying… and send that data to the local data-purchasing agent.

We need personal drones more than Amazon or Google, to get spare keys, and to buy anywhere we please, like in Walmart :-)

Sir, everywhere we read reports on Amazon using drones in the future to deliver us goods, like in Tim Bradshaw´s “Amazon delivers boost to drone pioneers”, December 4.

As I see it the real question is whether we citizens should all have our personal drone instead, so that for instance we could send it home for a spare if we lost our car key… or buy anywhere we please… like in Walmart :-)

Not even new jobs are needed, just a little income support would do

Sir Prof Jacob Borne makes a well argued case for to "Give the tree choppers more profitable jobs than logging" December 31 but I would add that since chopping logs is really not that profitable we should just give some income support to all those who live in the tropical rainforests and engage in traditional and environmentally sustainable non-logging activities.

We actually do not need to produce new high tech manufacturing jobs in the Amazon; a couple of hundred dollars per family a month, for them to improve their living conditions, while they keep an eye on their forest for all of us would do wonders.

The problem is that though we quite easily find ways to support our local parks and national forest reserves this seems so much harder when it comes to maintaining the health of our global common goods like our lungs in the Amazon.

What we need is not to cap the oil prices but to give them a decent floor

Sir the real oil crisis occurred in 1998 when the price of barrel fell under $10 per barrel and the Economist wrote in "The next shock?" March 1999, that "in today's condition the price would head down towards $5", and this is what primarily explains the current high prices of oil. Had the consumer countries acknowledged the growth in demand that for instance China would bring to the market (IEA did not say a word about it for years) and expressed their willingness to enter into those reasonable long term contracts that would have allowed producing countries to make the massive investments needed we would most probably have faced a completely different energy outlook.

From this perspective Ricardo Hausmann "Biofuels can match oil production" November 7, and that has 95 countries investing billions of billions in cultivating 700m of acres just in order to cap the price setting capacity of OPEC seems to say the least an astonishing proposition. The question to ask Hausmann is what he will do with those 700m acres when oil having been at last given such a real price floor really starts the pumps. Why don't you give OPEC a price floor without having to go into the environmental and economic nightmare of cultivating 700m of acres that will have to be subsidized in the future and that we pray will not include the Amazon?

Forest destruction is it a threat or is it a reality?

Sir John Aglionby and Fiona Harvey when reporting on September 13 that “Forest nations press for carbon credits to help cut greenhouse gas” mention “that many governments fear rainforest nations could use the threat of destruction of their forest as a bargaining chip in climate change negotiations”. What threat of destruction? They are destroying them now.

I recently told a prominent-save-the-Amazon person that they should, at 7 am each and every morning, put a matchstick to one hectare of pristine Amazon jungle and transmit this on the web and then perhaps the world could easier understand that it needs urgently to create some huge world forest reserves. These reserves could be managed and cared for by hundreds of thousand forest-guard families and who could all be helped to partially improve their lives receiving a small monthly salary from the whole world, financed perhaps through the levy of a special forestry tax of one cent per litre of petrol.

In 2004 while an Executive Director at the World Bank we were asked at the Board to approve a loan to Brazil for “Environmental Sustainability” and I told my colleagues that what we really should be approving was how much each one of all the world countries would have to chip in to help repay that loan, since obviously keeping our most important lung clean could not only be Brazil’s responsibility.

Does burning 365 hectares per year sound awful? Well the same report indicates that only in Indonesia 1.87m of hectares have been lost every year since 2000. Now having said that… please be careful with the matches though.

The addict and his new sourcerer!

Sir, Paulo Sotero and Edward Alden wrote about the United States and Brazil “Building a Biofuels Alliance”, Washington Post, March 8 and which in these days of climate change sound as far as it can from being a holy alliance. What a shame, when the United States should be cutting down on its addiction to cars, it is only looking for a new supplier, and when Brazil should be putting forward proposals to the world of how to keep the Amazon, they are just thinking of cutting it down in order to be that sourcerer.