Good news from the SEC for a change!
They're requiring coal plant operators to report
health and safety violations, including fatalities,
within a few days of occurence.
Earlier this week, the SEC announced new rules that require mining
companies to start reporting any fatalities and all major health and
safety violations, mine by mine, in their quarterly and annual financial
reports. The filings are mandated in the wide-ranging Dodd-Frank Wall
Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which Congress passed to try
to increase corporate accountability.
The rules take effect 30 days after publication in the Federal
Register. They require companies to report within four days any
“significant and substantial” violations, citations, flagrant
violations and imminent-danger orders issued by the federal Mine Safety
and Health Administration.
Coal operators must also include the dollar value of proposed fines,
whether the company has been or may be designated a pattern violator
by MSHA, and any pending cases with the Federal Mine Safety and Health
Review Commission.
What problem does this reporting solve?
As the article points out:
Twitter
recognizes that a network upgrade is important, but the role twitter
is playing in Iran is more important, and
reschedules for 1:30 AM Iranian time.
Now that's risk management!
Would that U.S. states had all rescheduled Diebold and the like to the
junk heap after the 2000 U.S. election.
Also notice who twitter's hosting service is: NTT America.
I've been predicting for years that the U.S. duopoly's
intransigence would lead to NTT and other competent international
ISPs eating their lunch, and I see it's beginning to happen.
Hey, if you don't have any research, why not just pick some number
off the net?
Police agencies do:
However bogger Michael Geist thought there was something fishy about
the figure and asked for the sources behind the Royal Mounted Police's
$30 billion claim.
The letter came back from red-faced coppers confessing that they made
up the figure based what they had read on the Internet.
The RCMP did not conduct any independent research on the scope or impact
of counterfeiting in Canada, but rather merely searched a couple news
stories.
Yesterday, a TV comedy team succeeded in driving a fake motorcade with
Canadian flags right through all the security barriers and weren't stopped
until right outside President Bush's hotel. Inside their motorcade was
someone dressed up as Osama Bin Laden.
It wasn't just the tornado in Brooklyn -- the first in recorded history in
the borough -- it was the huge quantities of rain that flooded basements
and stranded rail and road commuters from Mineola to Midtown.
Only it's apparently not just in the U.K., considering the lame
excuses for terrorists that DHS has dug up.
Anyway, laughing at them seems more appropriate than fearing them.
Is the heyday of media and entertainment conglomerates behind us?
A panel of industry analysts and bankers discussed this and other deal
making questions as part of a PricewaterhouseCoopers event here Tuesday,
with several of them arguing that conglomeratization has no real benefits,
especially in the digital age.
"Consolidation in the old media world destroys value," said Laura
Martin, founder and CEO of Media Metrics LLC. "They are buying stuff
(and audiences) because they don't know what else to do."
Sometimes a politician says something so sensible you wonder why everbody
doesn't say it:
There are lots of threats to you in the world. There’s the threat of a
heart attack for genetic reasons. You can’t sit there and worry about
everything. Get a life.
You have a much greater danger of being hit by lightning than being
struck by a terrorist.
In terms of what you as individual on the streets should worry about
is not whether the person sitting next to you on the subway is a
terrorist. The likelihood of that is so small it is not something you
should worry about.
The outlet that originally quoted Bloomberg, wcbstv.com,
quotes several people
as saying terrorism is a big threat.
However, it also points out that New York City is the safest city in America,
with violent crime in general low and decreasing.
Maybe if that TV station and others reported that more often, instead of
constant, irrational fear,
more people would understand what Bloomberg is saying.
ActionBioscience.org: The figure "$33 trillion" was once projected as
the value of ecosystems globally. What do you think of this type of
economic analysis?
Polasky: The $33-trillion figure refers to one of the earliest studies
that was done on the value of ecosystem services. The lead author was
Robert Costanza. He and his coauthors tried to get at the notion of how
we can establish on a global basis what the value of ecosystem services
is. They came up with a number 33 trillion [USD] plus or minus a few
trillion. There are a number of problems with the study. The most basic
one is the question of what you are talking about when you consider all
the ecosystem services of Earth. The entire system is our life support
system. So what is our life support system worth? You don’t really
have to have a scientific study in order to answer that question. The
real value of the study was not the $33-trillion figure, which who knows
what that means, but that it spurred people to focus on these issues.
Such values can be big, and the dollar value isn't the only consideration.
There is a bit of risk in that we can't do without the biosphere,
and some risk management is in order.
Even beyond that obvious non-dollar value,
there are further questions of species diversity and esthetics.
Do we really want to kill off an ecosystem when we don't really know
what it's doing for us,
and do we all want to live surrounded by concrete?
Jared Diamond: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed The author examines societies from the smallest (Tikopia) to the largest (China) and why they have succeeded or failed, where failure has included warfare, poverty, depopulation, and complete extinction. He thought he could do this purely through examining how societies damaged their environments, but discovered he also had to consider climate change, hostile neighbors, trading partners, and reactions of the society to all of those, including re-evaluating how the society's basic suppositions affect survival in changed conditions.
companies to start reporting any fatalities and all major health and safety violations, mine by mine, in their quarterly and annual financial reports. The filings are mandated in the wide-ranging Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which Congress passed to try to increase corporate accountability.
I'm having a little difficulty finding historical statistics on wildfires.
Here's someone's understanding:
Recent Comments