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thinkahol *

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? - 0 views

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    Which is not to say that the Obama era has meant an end to law enforcement. On the contrary: In the past few years, the administration has allocated massive amounts of federal resources to catching wrongdoers - of a certain type. Last year, the government deported 393,000 people, at a cost of $5 billion. Since 2007, felony immigration prosecutions along the Mexican border have surged 77 percent; nonfelony prosecutions by 259 percent. In Ohio last month, a single mother was caught lying about where she lived to put her kids into a better school district; the judge in the case tried to sentence her to 10 days in jail for fraud, declaring that letting her go free would "demean the seriousness" of the offenses. So there you have it. Illegal immigrants: 393,000. Lying moms: one. Bankers: zero. The math makes sense only because the politics are so obvious. You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It's not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they're sorry, and move on. Oh, wait - let's not even make them say they're sorry. That's too mean; let's just give them a piece of paper with a government stamp on it, officially clearing them of the need to apologize, and make them pay a fine instead. But don't make them pay it out of their own pockets, and don't ask them to give back the money they stole. In fact, let them profit from their collective crimes, to the tune of a record $135 billion in pay and benefits last year. What's next? Taxpayer-funded massages for every Wall Street executive guilty of fraud?
Parycek

Customers in Control at Dell's IdeaStorm | Blogs | ITBusinessEdge.com - 1 views

  • It's not your traditional ROI model. Back to the culture, it supports the fact that you don't need a hard number at the end of the day. It's the right thing to do, we want to listen to our customers, so let's do it.
  • ... you get the whole funnel of ideas and it's a challenge as to how to disperse them. Everybody has full-time jobs. We make further strides every day in getting reporting and getting everything set up so people can get engaged, on the site and just with the information. To me, that's the hard part. And it goes back to making sure we're listening, making sure we're closing the feedback loop.
  • Their collaborative agreement on what's most important floats to the top for everyone to see. So you can easily see which are the most popular ideas and which ideas are new, should people want to jump on in and vote on those.
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  • Probably the biggest thing, we have more and more Dell employees joining in. I'm being contacted by a lot of areas within Dell. There's a big focus on innovation now. So everyone in product groups talking about innovation and collaboration is talking about IdeaStorm.
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    It's not your traditional ROI model. Back to the culture, it supports the fact that you don't need a hard number at the end of the day. It's the right thing to do, we want to listen to our customers, so let's do it.
thinkahol *

Rebecca MacKinnon: Let's take back the Internet! | Video on TED.com - 0 views

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    In this powerful talk from TEDGlobal, Rebecca MacKinnon describes the expanding struggle for freedom and control in cyberspace, and asks: How do we design the next phase of the Internet with accountability and freedom at its core, rather than control? She believes the internet is headed for a "Magna Carta" moment when citizens around the world demand that their governments protect free speech and their right to connection.
Johann Höchtl

Scott Adams Blog: Startup Country 07/27/2010 - 0 views

  • My idea for today is that established nations could launch startup countries within their own borders, free of all the legacy restrictions in the parent country. The startup country, let's say the size of modern day Israel, would be designed from the ground up for efficiency.
  • The entire banking system would be automated. There would be no cash in the start-up country. You wouldn't need to "apply" for a loan because the virtual bank would always have a current notion of your credit-worthiness.
  • The tax code in the startup country would be simplified to the point where residents might forget it exists.
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  • Most of what is scary about the government having power is the lack of transparency. The startup nation would have full transparency. Any citizen could log on to his computer and see what court orders had been issued for what videos and why.
  • Arguably, China accidentally performed a variant of this experiment with Hong Kong. Oversimplifying the history, Hong Kong was part of China and leased to the United Kingdom for 99 years, like a startup country within a country.
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    über das bin ich auch schon gestolpert. interesting!
Parycek

Crowd-sourcing is not empowering enough - 0 views

    • Parycek
       
      It invites individuals to foist and endorse (or not) ideas with no pressure to consider the full public consequences of them, including whether they can be sustained across ideological or partisan lines, or how practical they are, or how insulting of public officers. There is the published intention to attract a full range of public perspectives, but instead it tends to attract enclaves of people with committed strategies (eg. embarrass public officials) or perspectives (eg. technology is the answer). While national initiatives attract noise, in more local applications of such ideation, participation is often too thin to be meaningful. This all comes down the question of representativeness. If a governing body is going to legitimately use these ideas, and be compelled to do so, then there has to be good evidence that the contributors do actually form a descriptive representation of the public being governed. I think if you have a technical problem that requires particular expertise, then such ideation processes can find the needle in the haystack. Those of us who subscribe to technical forums know how well that works. I think some people feel that public policy ideation works the same way, but it doesn't because in a contested political environment, what "should be done" is claimed on normative rather than technical grounds. Another metaphor for the ranking in ideation is consumer selection, which many in political science would model as rational choice, privileging private over public interests. Should that be the motor for the selection of public policy? I write all this knowing full well that I risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I just think we can do better. Some ideation processes should invite people randomly, to ensure full demographic spread on relevant dimensions (eg. age, education, political leaning). Let's have multi-stage processes, where contributors do more than just introduce and rank ideas--to their credit, thi
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    I fear that ultimately crowd-sourcing is damaging the enterprise of dialogue and deliberation (D&D).
Johann Höchtl

Study links online transparency efforts, trust in government - Nextgov - 0 views

  • The first-ever quantitative assessment of online open government efforts has concluded that the perceived transparency of federal Web sites drives trust in government.
  • The longstanding approach to quantifying transparency has been, "well let's measure how much data they put out there," said Larry Freed, ForeSee Results' president and chief executive officer. "To me, that's not measuring transparency. That may be measuring confusion."
  • "If citizens find e-government transparent, they are more likely to return to the site, recommend it, and use it instead of a more costly channel," the study found. "They even express more trust in the government agency."
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  • Citizens who believe a site is highly transparent are 46 percent more likely to trust the overall government, 49 percent more likely to use the site as a primary resource and 37 percent more likely to return to the site, according to the study.
  • McClure also noted that a site's perceived transparency can save the government money by encouraging citizens to access services online, rather than through less efficient channels.
  • Other departments that want to make their sites more transparent "should stand firm when those at the helm pressure them to ignore what the audience wants, and instead design for the internal audience,"
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