Davos Newbies

Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen has embarked on an intriguing blog experiment.

One of the many good things about Gmail is that its spam filter seems very effective. The little that gets through is mostly dumped in a spam folder, which I check from time to time.

What’s amusing is that Google’s unstoppable ad machine knows no limits, even where the keyword spam is concerned. So at the top of my Gmail page I have a series of spam recipes, including creamy spam broccoli casserole. I haven’t decided whether this is an in joke from the Googleplex or whether Recipe Source is paying for the placement.

If you want to understand what’s going on in the courtroom in Houston, The Houston Chronicle has gone to heroic lengths with both a legal commentary blog and a blow-by-blow trial blog. The legal blog in particular is filled with fascinating detail and some great writing.

Kent Shaffer on whether people plead guilty to things they didn’t do:

The bottom line is that people really do plead guilty to things that they did not do; it happens all of the time. Their decisions can be motivated by money, by a desire to limit their exposure, or simply due to a lack of courage and if the cost of a lenient sentence is doing a few pet tricks for the government then it is simply the cost of doing business. Get ready to see grown men in Oxford suits and wingtip shoes rolling over, playing dead, and barking while on their hind legs; trying to earn a few extra biscuits.

And Samuel Buell, who was lead prosecutor on the Enron case until March 2004, explains what proving intent to defraud will require:

So look for this trial, and later judicial review of the case if it gets that far, potentially to turn on small pieces of evidence that might tell a great deal about the extent to which the defendants were thinking at the time of their conduct that they were engaged in something wrongful. Often, this telling kind of evidence takes the form of efforts to conceal some important fact about a defendant’s conduct from others, in a way that indicates the defendant feared reprisal or rebuke for what he or she was doing. This kind of evidence is what white-collar practitioners often refer to as “badges of fraud.” This might be more than a lawyer’s concept. Juries often focus on this kind of thing too, because it seems to connect to basic intuitions about how to distinguish fraud from routine business practice.

Compelling, wonderful stuff, that provides insight I wasn’t getting from most press coverage of the case.

My children’s wonderful school just issued the results of a diversity survey it conducted last year. There weren’t many surprises in the survey, but I was struck by a few of the choices.

Under religion, there was the expected scattering of Christian, Jewish, Islam and none. There was also one Wiccan. But it was the political affiliations that really made me double-take. No, it wasn’t the fact that two parents confessed to being Republicans (and, not surprisingly, two parents responded that they didn’t feel their political philosophy was supported by the school). What made me shake my head was one of the choices on the survey was Communist. And no one ticked the box (although four did say they were Socialists). What are Berkeley and Oakland coming to?

It’s far less important than the distortions about WMD or not publishing the NSA scandal for a year, but another example of how The New York Times completely misses (or conceals) the true story was explained to me the other day.

The Times recently wrote about the demise of The Berghoff, a landmark Chicago restaurant where my father, like many of his generation, ate lunch for most of his business career. I didn’t get to The Berghoff before it closed, but I read the Times article with a huge sense of nostalgia.

According to the Times, the closing was a family decision, taken with regret. No details. But everyone in Chicago apparently knows the real reason. The Berghoff is on an immensely valuable downtown site. The building is landmarked and required to remain as a restaurant. However, close the restaurant, wait two or three years, and, hey presto, you can probably free the land to build an office tower and make a huge, huge financial killing.