#enron movie review

[adamwatchesmovies]

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a documentary that isn’t only informative, it’s scary. If you’re familiar with the company and the whole affair, how the higher ups basically ran away with a fortune while the other investors and pensioners were left with absolutely nothing, you haven’t seen anything yet.

This documentary by Alex Gibney shows what can happen when capitalism is at its worst, crushing underfoot anyone who stands in the way of profits and nothing but contempt for anything that doesn’t directly result in profits. It shows the perfect storm that was created within Enron: the employees forced to claw at each other and constantly competing for their jobs, reckless spending policies, questionable management, and actions that weren’t only questionably ethical but downright evil. It'd be too crazy to believe if it weren't so very true. The footage and recordings are genuinely shocking but most frightening of all is a theory presented that explains how the corrupt heads of the company managed to rally countless amount of investors and associates in their schemes. Ever hear of Milgram's experiment on obedience to authority figures? Look it up, then watch this film. Suddenly, it all makes too much sense.

There is a flaw in the film: its hour and fifty minutes-running time. This is a complex story and you almost need a cheat sheet with the names and titles of the people involved, or to be familiar with several financial and fraud related terms such as “deregulated markets”, “pump and dump” and understanding several economic changes during the early 2000’s (such as the dot-com crash) to get it all in one sitting. The movie feels like it's moving very quickly and while it covers everything thoroughly, people who were not adults while the Enron scandal was going on will likely need to inform themselves to fully grasp everything that’s thrown at them. If the film was longer and paused a few times to clearly define some of the more complex terms, it would be a lot more accessible, though admittedly, I may be biased in this case. The film ends in a way that’s truly chilling with a quick update on the status of some of the people seen in the film and a song that perfectly caps it all off.

Every good documentary informs, but they almost always fall into two categories: the inspirational ones, who make you want to rush out and make your own dreams come true, and the ones that fill you with unbelievable rage at the injustices that are being presented. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is the latter kind, a movie that makes you realize that there are genuinely evil people out there and they aren’t necessarily slashing throats or enslaving children, they are robbing hard working people of everything they have worked for. What you will take away from the film is that these weren’t “special people” and that this is not an isolated incident that could never happen again, probably sooner rather than later. (On DVD, April 12, 2014)

[acemywriter]

Movie/Documentary review on Ethics in Organizations.

Movie/Documentary review on Ethics in Organizations.

Watch one movie/documentary related to the topic of Ethics in Organizations and submit an Individual Term Paper on or before October 31, 2021. Suggested movie/documentary film includes as follows: Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005) Devil Wears Prada (2006) The Corporation (2003) Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) Following the APA/MLA guidelines, the individual term paper will…

[extra-ordinari]

Module 02: Discussion - EnronManage DiscussionThis is a graded discussion: 25 po

Module 02: Discussion – EnronManage DiscussionThis is a graded discussion: 25 po

Module 02: Discussion – EnronManage DiscussionThis is a graded discussion: 25 points possibledue Sep 30Module 02: Discussion – Enron3838 unread replies.3838 replies. You are required to complete Part 1 AND Part 2.Part 1Read the article below and post answers to the questions posted below along with your comments on the Enron movie as indicated in that thread as well.Note: This is a book review by…

[essayprof]

ETHICAL CULTURE PROJECTWorth: 100 pointsInstructions:Watch the movie, â??Enron: The Smartest Guys in ETHICAL CULTURE PROJECTWorth: 100 pointsInstructions:Watch the movie, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room†AND review Enron’s Code of Ethics (posted on course website).Your paper should consist of the following sections: Part 1: Enron’s Culture (Length: two pages, double-spaced) ?-Describe the current organizational culture using the cultural dimensions discussed in the lecture slides (e.g.

[jbaquerot]

These days, we have the opposite problem we had 5-10 years ago…

Back then, it was actually difficult to find datasets for data science and machine learning projects.

Since then, we’ve been flooded with lists and lists of datasets. Today, the problem is not finding datasets, but rather sifting through them to keep the relevant ones.

Well, we’ve done that for you right here.

Below, you’ll find a curated list of free datasets for data science and machine learning, organized by their use case. You’ll find both hand-picked datasets and our favorite aggregators.

Datasets for Exploratory Analysis

Exploratory analysis is your first step in most data science exercises. The best datasets for practicing exploratory analysis should be fun, interesting, and non-trivial (i.e. require you to dig a little to uncover all the insights).

Our picks:

Game of Thrones - Game of Thrones is a popular TV series based on George R.R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice book series. With this dataset, you can explore its political landscape, characters, and battles.

World University Rankings - Ranking universities can be difficult and controversial. There are hundreds of ranking systems, and they rarely reach a consensus. This dataset contains three global university rankings.

IMDB 5000 Movie Dataset - This dataset explores the question of whether we can anticipate a movie's popularity before it's even released.

Aggregators:

Kaggle Datasets - Open datasets contributed by the Kaggle community. Here, you'll find a grab bag of topics. Plus, you can learn from the short tutorials and scripts that accompany the datasets.

r/datasets - Open datasets contributed by the Reddit community. This is another source of interesting and quirky datasets, but the datasets tend to less refined.

Datasets for General Machine Learning

In this context, we refer to "general" machine learning as Regression, Classification, and Clustering with relational (i.e. table-format) data. These are the most common ML tasks.

Our picks:

Wine Quality (Regression) - Properties of red and white vinho verde wine samples from the north of Portugal. The goal is to model wine quality based on physicochemical tests. (We also have a tutorial.)

Credit Card Default (Classification) - Predicting credit card default is a valuable and common use for machine learning. This rich dataset includes demographics, payment history, credit, and default data.

US Census Data (Clustering) - Clustering based on demographics is a tried and true way to perform market research and segmentation.

Aggregators:

UCI Machine Learning Repository - The UCI ML repository is an old and popular aggregator for machine learning datasets. Tip: Most of their datasets have linked academic papers that you can use for benchmarks.

Datasets for Deep Learning

While not appropriate for general-purpose machine learning, deep learning has been dominating certain niches, especially those that use image, text, or audio data. From our experience, the best way to get started with deep learning is to practice on image data because of the wealth of tutorials available.

Our picks:

MNIST - MNIST contains images for handwritten digit classification. It's considered a great entry dataset for deep learning because it's complex enough to warrant neural networks, while still being manageable on a single CPU. (We also have a tutorial.)

CIFAR - The next step up in difficulty is the CIFAR-10 dataset, which contains 60,000 images broken into 10 different classes. For a bigger challenge, you can try the CIFAR-100 dataset, which has 100 different classes.

ImageNet - ImageNet hosts a computer vision competition every year, and many consider it to be the benchmark for modern performance. The current image dataset has 1000 different classes.

YouTube 8M - Ready to tackle videos, but can't spare terabytes of storage? This dataset contains millions of YouTube video ID's and billions of audio and visual features that were pre-extracted using the latest deep learning models.

Aggregators:

Deeplearning.net - Up-to-date list of datasets for benchmarking deep learning algorithms.

DeepLearning4J.org - Up-to-date list of high-quality datasets for deep learning research.

Datasets for Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing (N.L.P.) is about text data. And for messy data like text, it's especially important for the datasets to have real-world applications so that you can perform easy sanity checks.

Our picks:

Enron Dataset - Email data from the senior management of Enron, organized into folders. This dataset was originally made public and posted to the web by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission during its investigation.

Amazon Reviews - Contains ~35 million reviews from Amazon spanning 18 years. Data include product and user information, ratings, and the plaintext review.

Newsgroup Classification - Collection of approximately 20,000 newsgroup documents, partitioned (nearly) evenly across 20 different newsgroups. Great for practicing text classification and topic modeling.

Aggregators:

nlp-datasets (Github) - Alphabetical list of free/public domain datasets with text data for use in NLP.

Quora Answer - List of annotated corpora for NLP.

Datasets for Cloud Machine Learning

Technically, any dataset can be used for cloud-based machine learning if you just upload it to the cloud. However, if you're just starting out and evaluating a platform, you may wish to skip all the data piping.

Fortunately, the major cloud computing services all provide public datasets that you can easily import. Their datasets are all comparable.

Our picks:

AWS Public Datasets

Google Cloud Public Datasets

Microsoft Azure Public Datasets

Datasets for Time Series Analysis

Time series analysis requires observations marked with a timestamp. In other words, each subject and/or feature is tracked across time.

Our picks:

EOD Stock Prices - End of day stock prices, dividends, and splits for 3,000 US companies, curated by the Quandl community.

Zillow Real Estate Research - Home prices and rents by size, type, and tier, sliced by zip code, neighborhood, city, metro area, county and state.

Global Education Statistics - Over 4,000 internationally comparable indicators for education access, progression, completion, literacy, teachers, population, and expenditures.

Aggregators:

Quandl - Quandl contains free and premium time series datasets for financial analysis.

The World Bank - Contains global macroeconomic time series and searchable by country or indicator.

Datasets for Recommender Systems

Recommender systems have taken the entertainment and e-commerce industries by storm. Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify are great examples.

Our picks:

MovieLens - Rating data sets from the MovieLens web site. Perfect for getting started thanks to the various dataset sizes available. Jester - Ideal for building a simple collaborative filter. Contains 4.1 Million continuous ratings (-10.00 to +10.00) of 100 jokes from 73,421 users.

Million Song Dataset - Large, rich dataset for music recommendations. You can start with a pure collaborative filter and then expand it with other methods such as content-based models or web scraping.

Aggregators:

entaroadun (Github) - Collection of datasets for recommender systems. Tip: Check the comments section for recent datasets.

Datasets for Specific Industries

In this compendium, we've organized datasets by their use case. This is helpful if you need to practice a certain skill, such as deep learning or time series analysis.

However, you may also wish to search by a specific industry, such as datasets for neuroscience, weather, or manufacturing. Here are a couple options:

Aggregators:

Awesome Public Datasets - High quality datasets separated by industry.

Data.gov - Curated government data separated by industry.

Datasets for Streaming

Streaming datasets are used for building real-time applications, such as data visualization, trend tracking, or updatable (i.e. "online") machine learning models.

Our picks:

Twitter API - The twitter API is a classic source for streaming data. You can track tweets, hashtags, and more.

StockTwits API - StockTwits is like a twitter for traders and investors. You can expand this dataset in many interesting ways by joining it to time series datasets using the timestamp and ticker symbol.

Weather Underground - A reliable weather API with global coverage. Features a free tier and paid options for scaling up.

Aggregators:

Satori - Satori is a platform that lets you connect to streaming live data at ultra-low latency (for free). They frequently add new datasets.

Datasets for Web Scraping

Web scraping is a common part of data science research, but you must be careful of violating websites' terms of services. Fortunately, there's a whole site that's designed to be freely scraped.

Our picks:

ToScrape.com - Web scraping sandbox with two subdomains. You can practice scraping a fictional bookstore or a site that lists quotes from famous people.

Datasets for Current Events

Finding datasets for current events can be tricky. Fortunately, some publications have started releasing the datasets they use in their articles.

Aggregators:

FiveThirtyEight - FiveThirtyEight is a news and sports site with data-driven articles. They make their datasets openly available on Github.

BuzzFeedNews - BuzzFeed became (in)famous for their listicles and superficial pieces, but they've since expanded into investigative journalism. Their datasets are available on Github.

[bk-lostintranslation]

Review: ENRON: The Smartest Guys in the Room

At its crux, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is about more than the social dynamics of the corporate world. Germinating within its edgy, dramatic content is a quiet lambastation of corporatism, within which Enron's downfall is portrayed as a symptom rather than an anomaly.

Alex Gibney's directorial talents shine through once again with his 2005 documentary-film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Based on the homonymous book by Fortune reporters Bethany Mclean and Peter Elkind, Gibney's page-to-screen adaptation layers vibrancy and pathos over the bestselling chronicle's already socially-relevant commentary. Like the book itself, Gibney's documentary traces the rise and fall of the megalithic corporation Enron, which is today synonymous with skullduggery and corruption. Also like the book, Gibney succeeds in demystifying a world of complex numbers by focusing on its intensely human underpinnings.

However, while Mclean and Elkind's book serves as a nuanced analysis for those already familiar Wall Street's basic workings, Gibney's documentary will undoubtedly succeed at resonating with wider audiences. Young adults and veterans of the early-2000s recession alike will appreciate its content, which is attractively-packaged and divided into mini-chapters with catchy titles ("Kenny Boy", "Everybody Loves Enron", "Guys With Spikes," etc) and set to a soundtrack that is at once over-the-top and fitting.

At its crux, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is about more than the social dynamics of the corporate world. Germinating within its edgy, dramatic content is a quiet lambastation of corporatism, within which Enron's downfall is portrayed as a symptom rather than an anomaly. As Peter Coyote dourly remarks in the voiceover narration, "Was Enron the work of a few bad men, or the dark shadow of the American dream?"

Although I was quite young at the time of Enron's bankruptcy, its collapse created a butterfly effect that was difficult to ignore. Equally impossible was remaining ignorant of the legal trials of its CEOs, which were recounted incessantly on television, and in magazines and newspapers. However, it was not until 2013 that I personally read the book by Bethany Mclean and Peter Elkind. As such, I found the documentary to be a fairly accurate condensation of the source material.

Unfortunately, the book and documentary differ substantially in tone. Whereas Mclean and Elkind are scholarly in their attempt to trace the rise and fall of Enron, the documentary oftentimes reduces its content to schlocky drama. To be sure, Enron is at its core a study of human tragedy. But the point is hammered in so often that it grows tiresome. Thankfully, the film's saving grace is that even when resorting to truisms and cheesy metaphors, the impact is made fresh by the accuracy of Sherron Watkins and Bethany Mclean's closing observations. "Looking at Enron is like looking at the flip side of so much possibility because like most things that end terribly, it didn't start out that way. It started with a lot of people who thought they were changing the world."

From the start, the film incorporates into its chronological narrative a near-ideal combination of cinematic foreboding and heavy-handed intrigue. With gravely lines from Tom Waits' "What's He Building?" interspersed between cut-scenes of a bleak Houston cityscape, the effect is at once fascinating and seedy. However, it is not until a re-enactment of Cliff Baxter's suicide, followed by shots of Jeffrey Skilling at the inquisition, that viewers are lured deeper into the sleazy charisma of sensationalism. In many ways, the recreation of the suicide is tasteless. Yet it serves its purpose: wreathing Enron and all its players within an atmosphere of danger and deception. Gibney's framing makes it clear: this is a glittering world of secrets that outsiders are not privy to. However, the documentary also offers its audiences the sly, tantalizing promise of playing fly-on-the-wall within this intricate corporate machine.

Structurally, the film's chronological order is easy to follow. Audiences trace Enron's rise and fall through a lens of interspersed interviews, audio tapes and video footage. We are introduced in dynamic, engaging detail to Enron's star players: Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Andrew Fastow, with segments devoted to their backgrounds and personalities. Kenneth Lay's close relationship with the Bush family is also touched upon, but within Enron's overarching structure of corruption, the fact seems to be almost tangential. In many respects, the Bush-Lay friendship comes across as the byplay of America's culture of wealth and exclusivity, rather than a political conspiracy to be explored.

As the film progresses, Enron's exploits – the positive and negative – are portrayed vividly.  There is a sense of awe at the fact that a small-time Texas company was able to rise with such dizzying speed into a multinational corporation. By the late 90s, Enron was not just involved in the gas and energy business, but in broadband, steel, shipping, plastics, weather risk management, and petrochemicals. There is also a quiet admiration for the fact that, despite its cutthroat business tactics, Enron was nonetheless one of the era's great innovators. Ideas such as commodifying energy for trade, the (failed) Blockbuster deal to rent movies online (a precursor to Netflix!), the focus on derivatives instead of hard assets, are all relevant to the current era. Unfortunately, Enron did not seem to grasp that the virtual marketplace came with rewards and risks in equal measure. Rather than owning up to its losses, it chose to sweep them under the rug in the form of illegal partnerships and fraudulent accounting.

Chillingly, there were ever-cropping red flags of Enron's unscrupulous practices early on. The documentary does not disregard these: incidents such as the Valhalla Scandal of 1987, or the disastrous Dahbol power-plant in Maharashtra, India, or sale of Nigerian energy barges to Merril Lynch, are all given careful attention. However, it is not until the chapter 'Kal-ee-for-Nyah', that Gibney brings Enron's corruption into sharp focus. Audiences cannot help but be appalled by Enron's tactics for gaming the Californian market. Business strategies boasting names such as 'Death Star, 'Black Widow,' 'Get Shorty' and 'Fat Boy' are intermixed between audiotapes of Enron traders flippantly discussing ways to bleed the state dry. As Loretta Lynch, president of the California Public Utilities Commission, remarks, "Those guys at the flip of a switch could just yank the California economy on its leash whenever they wanted to. And they did it, and they did it, and they did it. And they made so much money." It becomes eerily apparent that the firm's mentality was not just amoral, but deliberately malicious. During the California energy crisis, not only did they defraud the state out of billions of dollars, but they seem to have treated it as an elaborate shell-game.

Even from this mid-point of the documentary, it is clear to audiences that Enron's downward spiral is inevitable. In many ways it has become a Frankenstein monster that its own creators cannot control. It does not help that they are largely surrounded by enablers and sycophants who create a cavernous echo chamber. Neither renowned banks nor Wall Street analysts seem to question Enron's skewed accounting. To add to that, Arthur Anderson, then a leading auditing firm, chooses to look the other way when Enron decides to adopt mark-to-market accounting. The business press only feeds Enron's delusions of grandeur. Magazines such as Forbes and Fortune present it as a rising star in the business firmament. For years, the company embodies the zeitgeist of the 90s – riding a wave of innovative globalization and fast wealth. Given the weight of such fantastical expectations, it is no wonder that Enron's eventual collapse sends tremors throughout the economic world.

While the documentary is not filmed in a variety of international locations, it more than makes up for it with its diverse cast. Co-writers Bethany Mclean and Peter Elkind both contribute to the narration, and Gibney interviews a number of second-tier executives, attorneys, governors, and friends of Enron CEOs. With their input, Gibney is able to condense and simplify the complexities of the business world without sacrificing the nuances of its human side. Likewise, Enron's entourage of executives are shown to be competitive and resourceful, driven by a need to be the best in the game. Some, such as Kenneth Lay, born to a poor family in Tyrone, Missouri, are self-made successes who practically embody the American dream of rags to riches. Although the documentary details many of their questionable decisions as Enron executives, it does not gratuitously demonize them. Rather, they are portrayed as "victims of their own greed" – the byproducts of an overarching culture that rewards ruthlessness as long as the profits are big enough. Indeed, by the time the documentary ends, audiences are left not with a sense of smug self-righteousness, but immense sadness at what Enron could have been, as well as the still-rippling disasters that could have been avoided had it not fallen prey to avarice.

Overall, one of the most engaging aspects of the documentary is its message. At many points the narrative threatens to morph into a morality play, complete with fallen heroes battling against the Seven Deadly Sins. Its saving grace is how it stretches into an incisive assessment of corporate America, which, with its outsized focus on superficial appearances and financial success, often endorses the same mercenary values it claims to vilify. Another aspect I found pleasantly surprising was how Gibney does not veer into conspiracy theories and political propaganda, which is unfortunately the case for many documentaries. Granted, he has an angle – as many directors do. But he does not let it interfere with even-handed storytelling.

At the same time, one of the film's drawbacks is its Hollywood-esque gimmickry. "Show, Don't Tell" is the dictum for many successful works of art and media, and in this case I would have preferred less of the latter. Gibney's penchant for edgy, artistic mood-building – most apparent in the imagery and soundtrack – is undoubtedly captivating. But it can also be heavy-handed and tacky. Certain dramatizations – such as Cliff Baxter's suicide set to strains of Billie Holiday's God Bless the Child – are in poor taste. So too are recollections of Enron's enigmatic executive Lou Pai, whose penchant for strippers is juxtaposed with intercuts of topless dancers in low red lighting – an effect that comes across as more gratuitous than anything.

On the whole, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a testament to Gibney's craft. Alternately gripping and horrifying, it displays an astute understanding of human nature, at its best and worst, as well as the way wealth and power can function as the potent nuclear force of social dynamics. Ultimately, if there is anything audiences will take away from the film, it is how skillfully Gibney exposes aspects of corporate culture that we are often too uncomfortable to confront ourselves.

[leitch]

Congratulations to the Houston Astros, who won their first-ever World Series on Wednesday night. I’d never been to Minute Maid Park before -- or Enron Field, as I always insist on calling it -- and while I obviously saw it at its best, I was a bit blown away by how truly loud it got. It is definitely the loudest baseball stadium I’ve ever been to. I have no idea how someone is supposed to hit a baseball that sort of noise. I don’t like it when I can hear a lawn mower down the street when I’m trying to write. Baseball is not a sport for the particularly particular.

Here are this week’s stories:

SATURDAY Writeup of World Series Game Three From Houston (Sports On Earth) Dive Dive Dive (Sports On Earth)

SUNDAY Writeup of World Series Game Four From Houston, Which Seems Even Further Away Than Game Three, Somehow (Sports On Earth)

MONDAY After That Nightmare Game Five, Was There Any Hope for the Dodgers? (Sports On Earth)

TUESDAY Man, Chill Out, Baseball (Sports On Earth)

WEDNESDAY We Got the Game Seven We Demanded (Sports On Earth)

THURSDAY An Astros’ Fan Guide to Their Glorious New Reality (Sports On Earth) Confidence Pool, Week Nine (Sports On Earth)

FRIDAY Who Will Be the Next Team to Win Its First World Series? (Sports On Earth) Every Cate Blanchett Movie, Ranked (Vulture)

This Week’s Story Count: Nine.

Podcasts!

Grierson & Leitch (subscribe in iTunes) This week: “Suburbicon,” “Thank Your For Your Service” and “The Manchurian Candidate”

The Will Leitch Experience (subscribe in iTunes) No show this week, college hoops next week!

Waitin’ Since Last Saturday (subscribe in iTunes) A preview of the No. 1 team in the country’s game against South Carolina.

I am watching horse races this weekend. Have a great weekend, and remember: If he’s going to persist in making bad movies, he’s going to have to grow accustomed to reading bad reviews.

[cse6441-blog]

Week 8 Morning Lecture

de_final_exam:

We’re going to have to watch the film ‘The China Syndrome (1979)’ as there will be a question on it in the FINAL EXAM. If you’re free there is the option of watching it during the movie viewing (security theatre) next week! (Tuesday 8-10pm). Take notes during it too :o

Another thing to note, there will be a question on one of the following, so research these disasters and review it (on your blog probably):

Chernobyl

Bhopal

Space Shuttle Challenger

For myself, I’ve done a little research on Chernobyl since the anniversary was very recent and it was poppin on the news. Also I have a write-up on the Challenger disaster on my blog here. I’ll most likely revisit these and blog about them so keep an eye out if you’re interested :) but do look into them yourself too!

Root Cause Analysis

When things go wrong, we often try and trace it back to the origin, or what caused it in the first place. This is what we call the root cause. So the process in which we try and find this is root cause analysis - which involves tracing the flow of events backwards in order to find out which factors contributed to the accident.

In these situations as humans, we are usually quick to point fingers and assign blame to others. This often stems from some form or bias or prior judgement however. However, the thing that is common between between all causes is that they all involve human error to a certain extent. As you know, humans are extremely fallible and are always prone to making mistakes. Therefore, it’s not at all surprising that this is the case, since we are awake of this human weakness.

As an example, in Aviation, there is a running inside joke which is called “The Last Touch”, where whenever an accident occurs involving a plane, the last person to have touched it is usually blamed and punished (even if it wasn’t their fault in the first place).

This is when you can pin accidents on a particular individual - but it gets a lot harder on a larger scale. If an accident stems from issues within a larger corporation, the resolution is to have a massive overhaul of employees; involving changes in regulation, training, organisational structure in order to completely change the environment and culture. With a large amount of people (like Enron) being able to successfully re-educate everyone is extremely difficult.

Human Weakness of the Week

Richard missed the last few Human Weaknesses of the Week (HWotW), so in attempt to salvage this, he decided to simply dump a whole load of them on us at once.

[whataninsecureworld]

Movie Review - The Smartest Guys in the Room

This movie covers another human weakness, corruption. Corruption occurs everywhere in the world and in every sector. You can see it on the news nearly daily but to see it as it unfold is a rare experience that is this film provides.

Enron was an American energy company which became known for its constantly increasing profits and reputation for having incredibly smart personnel. This myth was able to grow due to the many shady dealings within the company, the desire of others to believe in the myth itself and the corruption of others that worked with Enron despite knowledge of their shady work.

The film suggests that the corruption you see from Enron was a mixture of the greed for money, the pressure to maintain their pride and profits and the culture that promoted it all.

While monetary greed is easily understandable, the pressure to continue on with their illegal dealings in order to maintain their image is particularly interesting. The competitive culture led to unethical practices being made commonplace. Many of the employees were proud to be working in the company due to its reputation but for them to obtain the profits that the company was making they had to partake in unethical practices. The need to constantly grow profits and the success of the company despite their risks had many become corrupted and fail to reflect on their actions.

This story is also an interesting example of how risk can be invisible. For many on the outside the company appeared to be a good investment, based on its history it had continuously increased its value and outside of the oil scandal, which was distanced from the company anyways, there appeared to be nothing wrong with it. However in actuality the company partook in many risky and illegal activities in order to maintain that image and that risk was actively hidden through keeping the company as a black box. Even so, the company still was able to avoid the negative outcomes of their risky actions by committing even riskier actions. This snowball effect would continue to strain the company until it spectacularly failed leading to a catastrophic impact on their investors. While risks can produce no discernible impact, over time the effect of risks are more pronounced and can even be amplified. 

[security-engineering]

Wow. Enron's stock soared 34% in 2 days.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

Enron’s collapse was the largest corporate bankruptcy in America. Collapsed really quickly. A story on people, but hidden by numbers.

I’m not gonna tag spoilers since this is a true story. I apologise for any jumping around I do. Also, double check everything; this is mostly just a response to what I took down in the movie.

The main fatal flaw of the executives was pride, followed by arrogance, intolerance, and greed. It’s see to see the last, knowing that a 63.4 billion dollar company went bankrupt in 24 days. The top guys profited so much, and the little guys that had invested in the “sure bet” of Enron lost much more. 20000 employees lost their jobs and $1.2 billion was lost in retirement funds.

“You’re the only financial insinuation that can’t produce a balance sheet.” - An Investor in 2001 on a conference call

They criticised anyone that asked the sensible question: “How exactly does Enron make it’s money?”

Much of the business details and energy industry knowledge went over my head, but you can clearly see a collection of actions that hid the truth. It started with executives that were driven by money and okay with large gambles. They had an aggressive macho culture, forcing the bottom 10% employees to be fired each year at a minimum with their Performance Review Committee.

It couldn’t even be isolated incident. Other companies had to deal with Enron to deal in the market as it was a giant in its industry.

The executives publicly had morals, but didn’t seem to be practicing what he preached. There were phony books, offshore accounts with humorous names such as Jedi and Raptors as well as some more vulgar ones. In addition to this, there were manipulated and ignored trading limits. Jeff Skilling, COO and President of Enron, was a gambler, proven from the wild market purchases he made in his 20s, that was seen as a risk adverse individual. 

When “Valhalla” occurred and brought doubt on the company, the traders that were responsible weren’t fired or even disciplined, rather they were told to make more millions for Enron and gamble more. Well, that backfired, Enron losing 90m in 4 days. To Enron tried to hide this massive loss of all their reserves. 

It went on to “Hypothetical Future Value” accounting, where profits were listed at predicted values. For example saying investments would resulting X amounts of profits in 10-20 years. It’s hard to prove these numbers wrong.

Skilling wasn’t the only one. Other executives walked away with much cash. 

One such, Lou Pai, known as the invisible CEO since he was never in his office, gained 250m from Enron, selling all his stocks after his divorce to marry his stripper baby mamma. Though he got out a little before the others.

Enron invested in a powerplant in India when no one else would, for good reason. Their power plant remains unused even now as India couldn't afford to pay for the power it would produce. Well, that investment didn’t pan out.

Even with all these problems, analysts were unaware. Only near the end did anyone realise that the analysts just asked ‘Jeff’, who told them everything was good, and scrutiny was put on the books. Jeff had a hard time admitting this were wrong.

The fraud probably started with Andy Fastow, a CFO without a particularly strong moral compass, making little corrections that grew bigger and bigger until it was an massive unwieldy problem. He changed it up to hide the liabilities in the backdoor companies where investors couldn’t see it. He was the man behind the profits even with Enron’s losses. He eventually became a general partner of LJM, a company that Enron dealt with, which put him on both sides of a transaction, which is definitely a conflict of interest that made fraud easier. 

Even with all the fraud, Enron pushed for the deregulation of electricity in California and greater America. When it happened in California, Enron played with the price of power, creating rolling blackouts throughout the state as they exported said power to other states. This greatly increased the demand in California, driving up the prices, allowing Enron to earn more money when they returned the power. Enron also made artificial blackouts, informing power stations to occasionally shut down for a while, claiming small issues or lack of demand, fluctuating prices by the hour. Enron basically controlled the market and made money on demand.

Beyond just manipulating the prices, since they could control the price, they would bet on the price increasing, then artificially make it happen rather than rely on the natural supply and demand of the market. The free market of power was a destructive force for customers. 

The traders that were in charge of this joked about California and all the money they could make out of them. They didn’t consider the ethical nature, but rather just wanted to profit from California’s misery. Traders that felt conflicted went forward with it as management said it was okay. It’s a clear example of the results of the Milgram experiment, where 50% of people would shock a person to death if a person in authority told them to and it seemed legitimate.

Before it’s fall, the CEO abruptly resigned and then all the executives sold all their stocks. In response the market tanked and investigations went into why this happened. Enron actually shredded much of their documentation, so courts had to subpoena the shredded paper. 

The only humorous note was that Arnold Schwarzenegger became the Governor of California as no one liked the governor that brought power into the free market.  

[mexicodish98-blog]

Links 2/25/19

All the winners at Oscars 2019 as Green Book is named Best Picture Metro.co.uk

Stanley Donen, director who filmed Gene Kelly singing in the rain, dies at 94  WaPo. Take heart, this year’s Oscar losers:

For all its later acclaim, “Singin’ in the Rain” drew favorable but not ecstatic reviews when it was released. …

“We were ignored,” Mr. Donen told his biographer. “Not that it’s such a big to-do. The year of ‘Singin’ in the Rain,’ the best picture went to ‘The Greatest Show on Earth,’ one of the worst movies ever made.”

Giant Tortoise Feared Extinct Reappears After 113 Years Motherboard

‘DUTCH OVEN LADY’ PROMOTES A NEW — OLD — COOKING STAPLE Daily Yonder

The White Earth Band of Ojibwe Legally Recognized the Rights of Wild Rice. Here’s Why Yes Magazine (martha r)

Is Drilling and Fracking Waste on Your Sidewalk or in Your Pool? ProPublica

Half glitzy, half dowdy Times Literary Supplement. On comedy double acts.

Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? BBC

Could we soon be able to detect cancer in 10 minutes? Guardian

‘Stop Funding Climate Change!’: Jamie Dimon Interrupted for Important Planetary Message Common Dreams

Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth Guardian

New Cold War

How Politics Trump Intel in the US-Russia Nuke Treaty Pullout American Conservative. Scott Ritter.

Women at State Dept. fear incentive program contributes to gender pay gap The Hill

Nessel reversing 16 years of GOP ideology in Attorney General’s Office Detroit Free Press (marla r)

AOC

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Depicted as Superhero in New Comic Book Breitbart

GND

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delivers impassioned response to critics: ‘I’m the boss. How about that?’ Independent

2020

The Political Playbook of a Bankrupt California Utility NYT (Cal2) Hoisted from comments.

Will 2020 Democrats Help Trump By Destroying Each Other? New York magazine. Ahem. I’m posting this to allow members of the commentariat to exercise critical thinking skills.

Kamala Harris dismisses concerns about Green New Deal price tag: ‘It’s not about a cost’ Fox News. Yet another opportunity  to deploy  those critical thinking skills.

As Ex-Enron CEO Exits Prison, Some of Company’s Old Businesses Thrive WSJ. Seems like a different world, although it was only a dozen years ago when CEOs were  prosecuted and sent to jail for their crimes.

Health Care

After Vox story, California lawmakers introduce plan to end surprise ER bills Vox

US HEALTHCARE DISGRACE: GOFUNDME-CARE SYMPTOMATIC OF EXTREME INEQUALITY Who What Why

‘A dark and elaborate art’: How pharma executives are training to avoid disaster at Tuesday’s congressional grilling Stat

Big Brother IS Watching You Watch

Popular Apps Cease Sharing Data With Facebook WSJ

The snow patrol drones saving skiers from an icy death BBC

North Korea

Why North Korea won’t be the next Vietnam Asia Times

China

Donald Trump to delay extra tariffs on Chinese imports SCMP

India

Most People Trust ‘Neutral Media’, Says New Report on Fake News The Wire

Pulwama attack: Imran Khan urges Narendra Modi to ‘give peace a chance’, repeats promise of action Scroll.in

India toughens Kashmir crackdown; 5 dead in battle with militants, more detained Reuters

Brexit

Jerri-Lynn here: I’ve deliberately gone light on Brexit links today, so as to steer interested readers to Yves’s post today – and thus concentrate the discussion there rather than here on the Links thread.

Big banks divided on defaults strategy after Brexit FT

BlackRock CEO unhappy with UK’s handling of Brexit — report Financial News

BMW and Daimler put aside rivalry to take on Google and Uber Handelsblatt

Class Warfare

Our Twisted DNA New York Review of Books

After Superstorm Sandy’s Rain, Cooperatives Sprang Up Like Mushrooms TruthOut (martha r)

‘Austerity, That’s What I Know’: The Making of a U.K. Millennial Socialist NYT

Helicopter parents: the real reason British teenagers are so unhappy The Conversation

Syraqistan

As US withdraws troops from Syria, France and UK remain in the back seat France 24

Trump Transition

Lower refunds amplify calls to restore key tax deduction The Hill

Wary of Trump’s Approach, Governors Seek to Forge Own Trade Agreements Governing.com

Cuba sees high turnout at polls for constitutional referendum Reuters

Venezuela

Psychopathic US Senator Openly Calls For Maduro To Suffer Gaddafi’s Fate Caitlin Johnstone

Warning ‘Every Option Is On the Table,’ Pompeo Stokes Fears of Military Force in Venezuela Common Dreams

Venezuela in crisis: All the latest updates Al Jazeera

Thomas Friedman Is Right: Pie Doesn’t Grow on Trees Rolling Stone. Matt Taibbi– latest in a long series, the first of which ran in New York Press aeons ago IIRC, on Friedman’s crimes against the English language. No need to have read any of those to enjoy the latest.

Antidote du Jour (via):

See yesterdays Links and Antidote du Jour here.

This entry was posted in Guest Post, Links on February 25, 2019 by Jerri-Lynn Scofield.

Post navigation

← The Inevitable Death of Natural Gas as a ‘Bridge Fuel’ Skilling Released from Prison After A Decade of Doing Time : A Reminder of a Not So Distant Past, When the Rule of Law Applied to Corporate CEOs →

Source: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/02/links-2-25-19.html

[androidmart-blog]

Best Movies of 2000 - 2020 from the LA Times Movie Critics

This is something I put together was back at the beginning of 2000 -2020 when the top 10 movie lists were published by various publications. I thought it would be a good idea to republish the lists to give you some older movies to choose from. Hope you find something worth viewing.

 "Top 10" and "Best of" movie lists are a feature of the closing of every year. Hollywood blockbusters get plenty of coverage, but what about the less-marketed, less widely-distributed independent and foreign movies? The LA Times reviewers' picks for top 10/best of 2000 - 2020 movies contain an overwhelming line up of independent, foreign, and documentary films from 2000 - 2020. Most of their picks are movies that most people will not have heard of or had an opportunity to see unless they live in large metropolitan areas, but many are now released on DVD if you wish to buy them for your collection or rent from Netflix.com.

Best 10 Movies List by Kenneth Turan

 My personal favorite movie reviewer for LA Times, Kenneth Turan, found it impossible to list just 10 picks, and titled his "top 10 movies" list as "Ten Just Isn't Enough", giving multiple picks of related genres in his list of ten.

 Turan's first picks were described by him in a Shakespearean quote as "untimely ripped" from the screens:

You can watch all of these movien on Cyberflix app for Free. This guide from Techslott will help yout to install the app.

"The Best of Youth" from Italy's Marco Tullio Giordana and "Duma" from Carroll Ballard

Middle-Eastern focus: "Paradise Now" and "Syriana"

Family drama: "The Squid and the Whale" with "Brokeback Mountain"

Animated: "Howl's Moving Castle" and "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were Rabbit"

Meditations on the nature of violence and its outcomes: "A History of Violence" and "Munich"

Documentary: "Los Angeles Plays Itself", "Born Into Brothels," "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," "Gunner Palace", "Occupation: Dreamland", "Grizzly Man," "March of the Penguins" "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill" and "Ballets Russes"

Biographies: "Capote" and "Good Night, and Good Luck."

Blockbusters with auteur: "Batman Begins" and "King Kong."

Foreign language: "Head-On" "Saraband", "Tony Takitani" (Japanese), "The World" (Chinese), "Look at Me", (French), "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" (French), "The Holy Girl," (Spanish), "Machuca," (Spanish), "Lost Embrace" (Spanish), and "Torremolinos 73 (Spanish)

Last, but not least, and on its own, Turan's pick for 10th place was "The Constant Gardener."

Top 10 Movie Picks by Carina Chocano

 Like Turan, Carina Chocano found herself unable to limit her best 10 movies in 2000-2020 to ten, listing the following 13 movies:

"2046" (Wong Kar Wai)

"Brokeback Mountain" (Ang Lee)

"Capote" (Bennett Miller)

"The Corporation" (Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, Joel Bakan)

"The Edukators" (Hans Weingartner)

"Grizzly Man" (Werner Herzog)

"Head-On" (Fatih Akin)

"Junebug" (Phil Morrison)

"King Kong" (Peter Jackson)

"Last Days" (Gus Van Sant)

"The Squid and the Whale" (Noah Baumbach)

"Syriana" (Stephen Gaghan)

"Turtles Can Fly" (Bahman Ghobadi)

Top Ten Movie Picks by Kevin Thomas

 Thomas was actually able to restrain himself to an actual count of 10 in his picks for Top Ten Movies for 2005.

 "Mysterious Skin." (Gregg Araki)

"Brokeback Mountain." (Ang Lee)

"Crash." (Paul Haggis)

"The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada." (Tommy Lee Jones)

"Garçon Stupide" (Lionel Baier)

"Hustle & Flow" (Craig Brewer)

"Ballets Russes" (Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller)

"Tropical Malady" (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

"Keane" (Lodge Kerrigan)

"The Holy Girl." (Lucrecia Martel)

[firstdraftpod]

Erin Lee Carr

First Draft Episode #240: Erin Lee Carr

Erin Lee Carr is a director, producer, and writer whose upcoming four-part docuseries How to Fix a Drug Scandal will be released on Netflix on April 1st. Carr has also directed At the Heart of Gold, about the USA Gymnastics scandal, and I Love You: Now Die, about the Michelle Carter murder-by-texting trial, both for HBO. Her first feature length film was Thought Crimes: The Case of the Cannibal Cop.

Links and Topics Mentioned In This Episode

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

The Witches by Roald Dahl

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV show)

Pleasantville (movie)

Moulin Rouge (movie)

David Carr, legendary New York Times journalist and author of memoir Night of the Gun

James Frey is the author of A Million Little Pieces which raised a massive public debate about truth in memoir after it was revealed that portions of the book was fabricated or wildly embellished, and Oprah confronted him. She has since apologized for that confrontation.

David Carr on The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert talking about his memoir

The New York Times Book Review write-up about Carr’s memoir

Page One: Inside the New York Times, a documentary by Andrew Rossi (who is now a mentor to Erin) featured David Carr extensively

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room a documentary by Alex Gibney, was an incredibly influential film that made Erin want to pursue documentary fimmaking

Shane Smith, founder of VICE

Erin was an office PA for the TV show Girls before she moved on to making videos for VICE

“How true crime documentaries helped Erin Lee Carr move forward after her father’s death,” Erin’s interview with the Los Angeles Times, interviewed by Amy Kaufman

Patricia Bosworth, documentarian and memoirist, author of The Men in My Life: A Memoir of Love and Art in 1950s Manhattan, Diane Arbus: A Biography, Montgomery Clift: The Ultimate Insider's Guide for the Budget Savvy

Sheila Nevins, former president of HBO Documentary Films and currently launching MTV Documentary Films

National geographic photographer Cory Richards’s 2017 SXSW Keynote speech

Erin’s editor Andrew Kaufman

Cheer on Netflix (which was optioned)

McMillions

“The Girl from Plainville,” the Esquire piece by Jesse Barron about the Michelle Carter case

Erin’s episode of Dirty Money dealing with the pharmaceutical industry

Cindy Lee, editor on At the Heart of Gold

Sarah Gibson was executive producer on At the Heart of Gold

“Still rendering,” Erin’s Medium piece which she wrote in the wake of her dad’s death

Mary Karr’s books including Lit, The Liar’s Club: A Memoir, and The Art of Memoir

Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp

In an interview with Caryn Ganz for the New York Times, Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino talks about coming to the decision to be sober. I also liked how Jenny Slate spoke about her choice to stop drinking—at least temporarily— in The Cut on Tuesdays.

Erin on Fresh Air with Terry Gross

Erin loves the Fresh Air episodes featuring Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Howard Stern

Erin recommends watching documentaries every night for a month, and diagramming them. Then, she suggests, also go ahead and diagram the careers of some of the greats, including: Liz Garbus (director of There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Diane, What Happened, Miss Simone? and more); Alex Gibney (director of Going Clear: The HBO Special and The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley); Andrew Jirecki (director of Capturing the Friedmans); Amy Berg (director of The Case Against Adnan Syed and Janis: Little Girl Blue); Erroll Morris (director of The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara)

  I want to hear from you!

Have a question about writing or creativity for Sarah Enni or her guests to answer? To leave a voicemail, call (818) 533-1998.

Subscribe To First Draft with Sarah Enni

Every Tuesday, I speak to storytellers like Veronica Roth, author of Divergent; Linda Holmes, author and host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast; Jonny Sun, internet superstar, illustrator of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Gmorning, Gnight! and author and illustrator of Everyone’s an Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too;  Michael Dante  DiMartino, co-creator of Avatar: The Last Airbender; John August, screenwriter of Big Fish, Charlie’s Angels, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; or Rhett Miller, musician and frontman for The Old 97s. Together, we take deep dives on their careers and creative works.

Don’t miss an episode! Subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. It’s free!

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Please take a moment to rate and review First Draft with Sarah Enni in Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Your honest and positive review helps others discover the show -- so thank you!

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Listen now!

[crayonlead2-blog]

Links 2/25/19

All the winners at Oscars 2019 as Green Book is named Best Picture Metro.co.uk

Stanley Donen, director who filmed Gene Kelly singing in the rain, dies at 94  WaPo. Take heart, this year’s Oscar losers:

For all its later acclaim, “Singin’ in the Rain” drew favorable but not ecstatic reviews when it was released. …

“We were ignored,” Mr. Donen told his biographer. “Not that it’s such a big to-do. The year of ‘Singin’ in the Rain,’ the best picture went to ‘The Greatest Show on Earth,’ one of the worst movies ever made.”

Giant Tortoise Feared Extinct Reappears After 113 Years Motherboard

‘DUTCH OVEN LADY’ PROMOTES A NEW — OLD — COOKING STAPLE Daily Yonder

The White Earth Band of Ojibwe Legally Recognized the Rights of Wild Rice. Here’s Why Yes Magazine (martha r)

Is Drilling and Fracking Waste on Your Sidewalk or in Your Pool? ProPublica

Half glitzy, half dowdy Times Literary Supplement. On comedy double acts.

Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? BBC

Could we soon be able to detect cancer in 10 minutes? Guardian

‘Stop Funding Climate Change!’: Jamie Dimon Interrupted for Important Planetary Message Common Dreams

Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth Guardian

New Cold War

How Politics Trump Intel in the US-Russia Nuke Treaty Pullout American Conservative. Scott Ritter.

Women at State Dept. fear incentive program contributes to gender pay gap The Hill

Nessel reversing 16 years of GOP ideology in Attorney General’s Office Detroit Free Press (marla r)

AOC

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Depicted as Superhero in New Comic Book Breitbart

GND

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delivers impassioned response to critics: ‘I’m the boss. How about that?’ Independent

2020

The Political Playbook of a Bankrupt California Utility NYT (Cal2) Hoisted from comments.

Will 2020 Democrats Help Trump By Destroying Each Other? New York magazine. Ahem. I’m posting this to allow members of the commentariat to exercise critical thinking skills.

Kamala Harris dismisses concerns about Green New Deal price tag: ‘It’s not about a cost’ Fox News. Yet another opportunity  to deploy  those critical thinking skills.

As Ex-Enron CEO Exits Prison, Some of Company’s Old Businesses Thrive WSJ. Seems like a different world, although it was only a dozen years ago when CEOs were  prosecuted and sent to jail for their crimes.

Health Care

After Vox story, California lawmakers introduce plan to end surprise ER bills Vox

US HEALTHCARE DISGRACE: GOFUNDME-CARE SYMPTOMATIC OF EXTREME INEQUALITY Who What Why

‘A dark and elaborate art’: How pharma executives are training to avoid disaster at Tuesday’s congressional grilling Stat

Big Brother IS Watching You Watch

Popular Apps Cease Sharing Data With Facebook WSJ

The snow patrol drones saving skiers from an icy death BBC

North Korea

Why North Korea won’t be the next Vietnam Asia Times

China

Donald Trump to delay extra tariffs on Chinese imports SCMP

India

Most People Trust ‘Neutral Media’, Says New Report on Fake News The Wire

Pulwama attack: Imran Khan urges Narendra Modi to ‘give peace a chance’, repeats promise of action Scroll.in

India toughens Kashmir crackdown; 5 dead in battle with militants, more detained Reuters

Brexit

Jerri-Lynn here: I’ve deliberately gone light on Brexit links today, so as to steer interested readers to Yves’s post today – and thus concentrate the discussion there rather than here on the Links thread.

Big banks divided on defaults strategy after Brexit FT

BlackRock CEO unhappy with UK’s handling of Brexit — report Financial News

BMW and Daimler put aside rivalry to take on Google and Uber Handelsblatt

Class Warfare

Our Twisted DNA New York Review of Books

After Superstorm Sandy’s Rain, Cooperatives Sprang Up Like Mushrooms TruthOut (martha r)

‘Austerity, That’s What I Know’: The Making of a U.K. Millennial Socialist NYT

Helicopter parents: the real reason British teenagers are so unhappy The Conversation

Syraqistan

As US withdraws troops from Syria, France and UK remain in the back seat France 24

Trump Transition

Lower refunds amplify calls to restore key tax deduction The Hill

Wary of Trump’s Approach, Governors Seek to Forge Own Trade Agreements Governing.com

Cuba sees high turnout at polls for constitutional referendum Reuters

Venezuela

Psychopathic US Senator Openly Calls For Maduro To Suffer Gaddafi’s Fate Caitlin Johnstone

Warning ‘Every Option Is On the Table,’ Pompeo Stokes Fears of Military Force in Venezuela Common Dreams

Venezuela in crisis: All the latest updates Al Jazeera

Thomas Friedman Is Right: Pie Doesn’t Grow on Trees Rolling Stone. Matt Taibbi– latest in a long series, the first of which ran in New York Press aeons ago IIRC, on Friedman’s crimes against the English language. No need to have read any of those to enjoy the latest.

Antidote du Jour (via):

See yesterdays Links and Antidote du Jour here.

This entry was posted in Guest Post, Links on February 25, 2019 by Jerri-Lynn Scofield.

Post navigation

← The Inevitable Death of Natural Gas as a ‘Bridge Fuel’ Skilling Released from Prison After A Decade of Doing Time : A Reminder of a Not So Distant Past, When the Rule of Law Applied to Corporate CEOs →

Source: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/02/links-2-25-19.html

[essayprof]

ETHICAL CULTURE PROJECTWorth: 100 pointsInstructions:Watch the movie, â??Enron: The Smartest Guys in ETHICAL CULTURE PROJECTWorth: 100 pointsInstructions:Watch the movie, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room†AND review Enron’s Code of Ethics (posted on course website).Your paper should consist of the following sections: Part 1: Enron’s Culture (Length: two pages, double-spaced) ?-Describe the current organizational culture using the cultural dimensions discussed in the lecture slides (e.g.

[where2buythat]

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

One of the Best Books of 2018: NPR • New York Times Book Review, Inc. • TIME • Wall Street Journal • Washington Post

“Chilling…Reads like a West Coast version of All the President’s Men.” — The New York Times Book Review

The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end, despite pressure from its charismatic CEO and threats by her lawyers.

In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work.

A riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.

In Bad Blood, the Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou takes us through the step-by-step history of Theranos, a Silicon Valley startup that became almost mythical, in no small part due to its young, charismatic founder Elizabeth Holmes. In fact, Theranos was mythical for a different reason, because the technological promise it was founded upon — that vital health information could be gleaned from a small drop of blood using handheld devices — was a lie. Carreyrou tracks the experiences of former employees to craft the fascinating story of a company run under a strict code of secrecy, a place where leadership was constantly throwing up smoke screens and making promises that it could not keep. Meanwhile, investors kept pouring in money, turning Elizabeth Holmes into a temporary billionaire. As companies like Walgreens and Safeway strike deals with Theranos, and as even the army tries to get in on the Theranos promise (there’s a brief cameo by James “Mad Dog” Mattis), the plot thickens and the proverbial noose grows tighter. Although I knew how the story ended, I found myself reading this book compulsively. — Chris Schluep

Review

“You will not want to put this riveting, masterfully reported book down. No matter how bad you think the Theranos story was, you’ll learn that the reality was actually far worse.”  — Bethany McLean, bestselling coauthor of The Smartest Guys in the Room and All the Devils Are Here

“[A] chilling, third-person narrative of how Holmes came up with a fantastic idea that made her, for a while, the most successful woman entrepreneur in Silicon valley… Prizewinning Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou tells [this story] virtually to perfection… [His] description of Holmes as a manic leader who turned coolly hostile when challenged is ripe material for a psychologist… His recounting of his efforts to track down sources — many of whom were being intimidated by Theranos’s bullying lawyer, David Boies — reads like a West Coast version of ‘All the President’s Men.’”  — Roger Lowenstein, The New York Times Book Review

“Carreyrou blends lucid descriptions of Theranos’s technology and its failures with a vivid portrait of its toxic culture and its supporters’ delusional boosterism. The result is a bracing cautionary tale about visionary entrepreneurship gone very wrong.”  — Publishers Weekly (Starred)

“Eye-opening… A vivid, cinematic portrayal of serpentine Silicon Valley corruption… A deep investigative report on the sensationalistic downfall of multibillion-dollar Silicon Valley biotech startup Theranos. Basing his findings on hundreds of interviews with people inside and outside the company, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Carreyrou rigorously examines the seamy details behind the demise of Theranos and its creator, Elizabeth Holmes… [Carreyrou] brilliantly captures the interpersonal melodrama, hidden agendas, gross misrepresentations, nepotism, and a host of delusions and lies that further fractured the company’s reputation and halted its rise.”  — Kirkus

“A great and at times almost unbelievable story of scandalous fraud, surveillance, and legal intimidation at the highest levels of American corporate power. . . . The story of Theranos may be the biggest case of corporate fraud since Enron. But it’s also the story of how a lot of powerful men were fooled by a remarkably brazen liar.”  — Yashar Ali, New York Magazine

“In Bad Blood, acclaimed investigative journalist John Carreyrou, who broke the story in 2015, presents comprehensive evidence of the fraud perpetrated by Theranos chief executive Elizabeth Holmes… He unveils many dark secrets of Theranos that have not previously been laid bare… The combination of these brave whistle-blowers, and a tenacious journalist who interviewed 150 people (including 60 former employees) makes for a veritable page-turner.”  — Eric Topol, Nature

“Engrossing… Bad Blood boasts movie-scene detail… Theranos, Carreyrou writes, was a revolving door, as Holmes and Balwani fired anyone who voiced even tentative doubts… What’s frightening is how easy it is to imagine a different outcome, one in which the company’s blood-testing devices continued to proliferate. That the story played out as it did is a testament to the many individuals who spoke up, at great personal risk.”  — Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, Science

“Crime thriller authors have nothing on Carreyrou’s exquisite sense of suspenseful pacing and multifaceted character development in this riveting, read-in-one-sitting tour de force…. Carreyrou’s commitment to unraveling Holmes’ crimes was literally of life-saving value.”

Buy Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

from Stories by No1GeekFun on Medium https://ift.tt/2Ph0Aa9 via Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou