Words, words, words

FASB (the Financial Accounting Standards Board) wants to make it easier for corporations to withhold important financial information from shareholders. And they're doing it very simply by changing the word "could" to "would". Currently, corporations are required to make financial disclosures of information that “could” influence investors. FASB wants to change this so that corporate disclosure would be required only when there is a “substantial likelihood” that information “would” significantly alter investor decisions.

A related 2015 survey by researchers from Columbia, Duke, Emory and the National Bureau of Economic Research reveals that the nearly 400 financial executives surveyed believe 20 percent of firms intentionally distort their earnings figures by an average of 10 percent.

Can we pull it off?

Every empire has eventually failed. We are on the path to failure. Is this a step to forging a new path?

The Judge Rotenberg Center in the news again

I have been writing about the Center since 2006. It is "a special needs day and residential school located in Canton, Massachusetts licensed to serve ages five through adult". It features “aversive” therapy, using pain or other negative stimuli to change behavior; the pain is generated by electric shock. The Center has been charged by a number of government agencies, including the UN, of torturing children. The latest charge is from the FDA, which has accused the Center of under-reporting adverse effects from the device used, using flawed studies to defend its approach, and misleading families about alternative treatments. “FDA has determined that these devices present an unreasonable and substantial risk of illness or injury that cannot be corrected or eliminated by labeling".

The Rotenberg Center is the only place in the country to still employ such a device, which delivers a painful shock to residents’ skin when they engage in undesirable or dangerous behaviors. Currently, 56 of the center’s 251 residents can receive the shocks. Further, children have been tied down with leg and waist straps to punish them.

The FDA asserts that the devices can cause both physical and psychological harm, including risks of pain, burns, tissue damage, depression, fear and aggression. They may even have led a resident to enter a catatonic state, the agency said. The shocks can worsen the symptoms it purportedly treats. The FDA said peer-reviewed studies and experts make it clear that aversives have been largely replaced by more effective — and humane — approaches to managing behavior.

A Guantanamo Graduate

Times are tough in Venezuela

Shortage is one word for Venezuela today. There is a shortage of medicines and goods such as toilet paper and cooking oil. There is a shortage of power. The government is shifting its time zone forward by 30 minutes to save power by adding half an hour of daylight. There is a four-hour blackout in eight of the country's twenty-three states starting Monday and lasting at least 40 days. State workers are working fewer hours and have been ordered to lower their electricity consumption, along with shops and hotels.

A woman shopping

Surprise

For years I've thought and said that chance plays a big part in people's lives. I haven't heard many people agree with me. So, I was shocked when reading The Atlantic yesterday to see that Robert Frank, a well-known economist, agreed with me. In fact, he has written a book on the subject. Chance affects us all as where, when and to whom you are born is probably the major determinant of your life. I feel that chance played a major role in perhaps the two most important aspects of my life - who I married and how I spent my working career.

What drug labels should say

From the NY Times

Save Puerto Rico

Penguin adopts man

From a Duncaster correspondent

Painting Net Income

In the old days (the 20th century) the use of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) by public corporations was commonplace. GAAP was a way to assess a company's performance, as it set a standard to which the vast majority of companies complied. While regulations have not changed and corporations are still required to report their financial results under accounting rules, corporations have devised ways to feature non-GAAP results. 

Almost all corporations are using non-GAAP results. According to a recent study in The Analyst’s Accounting Observer, 90 percent of companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index reported non-GAAP results last year, up from 72 percent in 2009. Why do they do this? Non-GAAP net income was up 6.6 percent in 2015 compared with the previous year. Under generally accepted accounting principles, net income in 2015 actually declined almost 11 percent from 2014. Some expenses omitted in non-GAAP presentations: restructuring and acquisition costs, stock-based compensation, write-downs of impaired assets, data breach, dividends on preferred stock, severance costs.

We're killing ourselves more often

42,773 people killed themselves in 2014; in 1999 the number of suicides was 29,199. So says a study by the National Center for Health Statistics. The 2014 number works out to a suicide rate to 13 per 100,000 people, the highest since 1986. It did not matter what group you looked at young, old, male, female with one exception - we old folk, the suicide rate for men and women over 75 declined.

Representing the people

This presidential campaign has the lowest caliber candidates I have ever seen. I'm not yet convinced that I should vote in November. (I can't vote in Connecticut's primary next week as I am registered as an independent.) Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster, has some interesting observations as to how we have reached this state.

The basic point he makes is that not enough of us vote. There are about 226 million of us who are eligible to vote. But the candidate who is nominated will have amassed only about 10 million votes in the campaign; this represents 4+percent of those eligible. For the election itself only 153 million will have been registered; about 130 million, a little more than half of those eligible to vote, will probably vote. So, it is the activist groups and the political extremes that will elect the president, and not the broad population of the country.

Penn has some ideas for improving the system:

• When kids are born in the hospital, give them a voter card and not just a Social Security card. Leave no child behind when it comes to being registered to vote and having voting ID. 
• Election Tuesdays come from the horse and buggy days — we need to move voting to weekends, allow voting from the internet or from secure accessible facilities like ATM machines. I am not a fan of early voting because it tends to mute the effect of the last two weeks of a campaign, which can be pivotal in many elections. I would rather have extended voting all day Saturday and Sunday. 
• Third, caucuses need to be abolished. Often without even the secret ballot and open only to those with time on their hands, this is not a fair process for picking a president in the 21st century. Usually turnout to a caucus is only one-fourth of the turnout to a primary. 
• Fourth, we need to rethink the party primary process to bring in far more voters, and we need to rotate the geographic order so that no one bloc of voters becomes a permanent gateway to the presidency. If we are going to have just two parties, then almost everyone has to be welcome to vote in one of them.

Something has to be done.

Let's fly to work

From our Pawling, NY correspondent

It's a deal

All you can say is "wow"

From our Plymouth correspondent

Return of the Dark Ages

That's what William Gail, a distinguished climate scientist, thinks. His argument is based on changing weather patterns, which we have relied on to continue. But things are changing in unexpected ways. Cycles that have been largely unwavering during modern human history are disrupted by substantial changes in temperature and precipitation. And most of our knowledge of the Earth has come largely from historically observed patterns.

"As Earth’s warming stabilizes, new patterns begin to appear. At first, they are confusing and hard to identify. Scientists note similarities to Earth’s emergence from the last ice age. These new patterns need many years — sometimes decades or more — to reveal themselves fully, even when monitored with our sophisticated observing systems. Until then, farmers will struggle to reliably predict new seasonal patterns and regularly plant the wrong crops. Early signs of major drought will go unrecognized, so costly irrigation will be built in the wrong places. Disruptive societal impacts will be widespread."

Another half billion down the drain

Arresting kids

The Murfreesboro police arrested these kids (none of whom was older than 10) in school for the kids not stopping a fight in a neighborhood. What is the IQ of these policemen?

The value of scars

Where your money goes

Actions don't match the words

Laurence D. Fink, chairman and chief executive of BlackRock, the money management giant, has been preaching that companies should focus on the long term. A major reason why they don't is their compensation structure, which rewards short-term actions. Since BlackRock is the world’s largest investment manager, it likely would be listened to. Yet, BlackRock voted to support pay practices at companies 96.2 percent of the time.

Another expression of fear

"Inshallah" is apparently a dangerous word to Southwest Airlines. They are so fearful that they threw an Iraqi refugee who goes to UCal off a plane when a fellow passenger heard the student use that word in a telephone conversation. 

Southwest said that the student was removed for "potentially threatening comments made aboard our aircraft". "Inshallah," means "god willing", a very threatening phrase. 

Oliver on Lead

Does money talk?

50 donors to super PACs think it does as they  gave more than $607 million to super PACs as of February. That's just about 41% of the money raised by these groups. These donors supplied more money than the combined contributions of nearly 1 million supporters of Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, whose campaign raised $161 million in the same time period. 

Real punishment

How many years should it take?

One of the major concerns of Dodd-Frank is the bankruptcy of too-big-to-fail institutions. The government does not want to have to bail these companies out once again. So Dodd-Frank requires the banks to have credible plans for winding down their operations without taxpayer help if they start to fail. The plans are reviewed by the Fed and the FDIC. Would you believe that the following have yet to produce a credible plan: Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, J.P. Morgan Chase, State Street, and Wells Fargo

Rue the day

From The Big Picture

Fudging the numbers

That's what the federal government is doing with regard to the settlements it has made with the companies that helped create the Great Depression. Take yesterday's settlement with Goldman Sachs. State and federal officials said that Goldman Sachs would pay $5.1 billion to settle accusations of wrongdoing. However, the payment can be made in different ways.

Goldman is to supposedly spend $240 million on affordable housing. But the bank will have to pay at most only 30 percent of that money to fulfill the deal. That is because it will receive a particularly large credit for each dollar it spends on affordable housing. Goldman will receive $1.50 of credit for each dollar of loan forgiveness within the first six months after the settlement. Goldman supposedly would pay $280 million for community reinvestment and neighborhood stabilization in New York. But an annex to the agreement with New York explains that Goldman will get $2 of credit for every dollar it spends in this area, meaning that it will ultimately have to pay only $140 million. And, then, there is a potential $875 tax benefit.

Bangladesh, a poor country

It certainly is. Annual per capita income is $1314. Yet, some people there do quite well because the government truly favors them. The six state-owned commercial banks (SOCBs) manage their money rather loosely. Their rate of non-performing loans is very high, almost triple the rate in advanced countries. Individual illegal loans of almost a half-billion dollars have been given with very little punishment by the government.  The banks are constantly recapitalized, last year it was more than $700 million. And they easily move money out of the country illegally, last year it was $9.7 billion.

Buying diapers is not easy for some

Why not let us read the 28 pages?

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Move to a big city and live longer?

That's one conclusion you can come to from a study of mortality by the Washington Post. The study points out that mortality rates were most likely to decline in the Northeast corridor and in large cities that anchor metropolitan areas of more than a million people, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, St. Louis and Houston. 

And for some reason women are not living as long when compared to men as they used to. In the 20th century, the average white American woman lived eight years longer than the average white American man. Today, that health advantage has narrowed to just five years.

Another anomaly: From 1990 through 2014, the mortality rate for white women rose in most parts of the country, particularly around small cities and in rural areas. Rates often went up by more than 40 percent and, in some places, doubled. Women in their late 40s were especially hurt. In 2000 for every 100,000 women in their late 40s, 228 died. Today, 296 are dying. Since 1990 death rates for rural white women in midlife have risen by nearly 50 percent. In the hardest-hit places — 21 counties arrayed across the South and Midwest — the death rate has doubled, or worse, since the turn of the century for white women in midlife.

The experts think the increasing mortality rates have come about because the women are far more likely than their grandmothers to be smokers, suffer from obesity or drink themselves to death. We are among the heaviest people in the world; more than a third of adults in the United States are considered obese. The average American woman today weighs as much as an American man did in the early 1960s.

Reporting on Credit Reporters

Get paid for sleeping

That's happening to employees of Aetna Insurance who sleep more than seven hours a night. For every 20 nights employees get 7 hours or more of sleep, they earn $25. That comes out to $1.25 a night. The reward is capped at $300 a year. Measuring sleep is automatic for employees using Fitbit and other devices. Aetna does accept manual input from employees. Aetna thinks this will improve productivity. “You can get things done quicker if people are present and prepared,” said Mark Bertolini, Aetna chairman and chief executive officer, in an interview with CNBC. “You can’t be prepared if you’re half-asleep."

This cake can only be eaten by Red Sox fans.

The picture is not of Fenway Park; it is a cake made in the image of Fenway by Montilio’s Baking Co. It weighs 80 pounds.

How the game is played

A 9-year-old real reporter

Hilde Kate Lysiak does not publish a typical neighborhood newspaper. She has been profiled in the Columbia Journalism Review and on the Today show. She loves crime stories. Recently there was a murder in her town in Pennsylvania. She was tipped off about it by one of her readers and was the first reporter covering the case. She does cover other issues. The video is her response to people who complained of her writing a story about a murder.

Will the scientists be proven right or wrong?

The first casualty of the Panama Papers

The prime minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson, has resigned. The Papers state that Gunnlaugsson and his wife set up a company in the British Virgin Islands that he then did not disclose to parliament, which has been interpreted as a conflict of interest by thousands of Icelanders who protested in the streets of Reykjavik.

A new tournament that truly embraces madness

The Sea Turtle Hospital

Another sound observation by Bacevich

"Imagine if, within a matter of weeks, China were to launch raids into Vietnam, Thailand, and Taiwan, with punitive action against the Philippines in the offing. Or if Russia, having given a swift kick to Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, leaked its plans to teach Poland a lesson for mismanaging its internal affairs. Were Chinese President Xi Jinping or Russian President Vladimir Putin to order such actions, the halls of Congress would ring with fierce denunciations. Members of both houses would jostle for places in front of the TV cameras to condemn the perpetrators for recklessly violating international law and undermining the prospects for world peace. Having no jurisdiction over the actions of other sovereign states, senators and representatives would break down the doors to seize the opportunity to get in their two cents worth. No one would be able to stop them. Who does Xi think he is! How dare Putin! 

Yet when an American president undertakes analogous actions over which the legislative branch does have jurisdiction, members of Congress either yawn or avert their eyes."

From Tom Dispatch

The biggest leak

You'll be hearing a lot about the Panama Papers, a collection by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists of 11 million documents used by the elite to avoid taxes and government regulation.

I don't want to visit this museum

It's the National Poo Museum located on the Isle of Wight. It has exhibits from the animal and human worlds. Material displayed comes from many places. They've even been able to display excrement from fossils.

Demographics are changing

From the Pew Center

What do you have confidence in?

A Play or a Reading

Last night I saw "Having Our Say", a play about the Delaney Sisters, two African-American women who lived over 100 years. The play is based on the book of the same name published in 1993. The sisters, who never married, were well educated and worked as professionals, one as a school teacher, the other a dentist. Continuing my spell of being disappointed in supposedly well-written plays, I was disappointed at the Hartford Stage production. The major problem was the difficulty I and my daughter had understanding the woman who played the older sister; I understood perhaps half of what she said. The other problem I had was that it was not really a play. Yes, there was an elaborate set. Yes, they moved around the stage. But, they may as well have simply read excerpts from the book.