Lowyat.NET: Latest topics by cocbum4

Ayam is officially doomsday peepers

cocbum4 — Tue, 06 Feb 2018 10:32:19 +0800

DDD SSS
Ayam on the way to stock up more gold

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Russian hacker did it again

cocbum4 — Sat, 03 Feb 2018 23:48:35 +0800

How Russian Hackers Stole the Nasdaq

It was easier than you think

More stories by Michael Riley
July 22, 2014, 4:11 AM GMT+8

Behind the cover
In October 2010, a Federal Bureau of Investigation system monitoring U.S. Internet traffic picked up an alert. The signal was coming from Nasdaq. It looked like malware had snuck into the company’s central servers. There were indications that the intruder was not a kid somewhere, but the intelligence agency of another country. More troubling still: When the U.S. experts got a better look at the malware, they realized it was attack code, designed to cause damage.

As much as hacking has become a daily irritant, much more of it crosses watch-center monitors out of sight from the public. The Chinese, the French, the Israelis—and many less well known or understood players—all hack in one way or another. They steal missile plans, chemical formulas, power-plant pipeline schematics, and economic data. That’s espionage; attack code is a military strike. There are only a few recorded deployments, the most famous being the Stuxnet worm. Widely believed to be a joint project of the U.S. and Israel, Stuxnet temporarily disabled Iran’s uranium-processing facility at Natanz in 2010. It switched off safety mechanisms, causing the centrifuges at the heart of a refinery to spin out of control. Two years later, Iran destroyed two-thirds of Saudi Aramco’s computer network with a relatively unsophisticated but fast-spreading “wiper” virus. One veteran U.S. official says that when it came to a digital weapon planted in a critical system inside the U.S., he’s seen it only once—in Nasdaq.

The October alert prompted the involvement of the National Security Agency, and just into 2011, the NSA concluded there was a significant danger. A crisis action team convened via secure videoconference in a briefing room in an 11-story office building in the Washington suburbs. Besides a fondue restaurant and a CrossFit gym, the building is home to the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC), whose mission is to spot and coordinate the government’s response to digital attacks on the U.S. They reviewed the FBI data and additional information from the NSA, and quickly concluded they needed to escalate.

Thus began a frenzied five-month investigation that would test the cyber-response capabilities of the U.S. and directly involve the president. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies, under pressure to decipher a complex hack, struggled to provide an even moderately clear picture to policymakers. After months of work, there were still basic disagreements in different parts of government over who was behind the incident and why. “We’ve seen a nation-state gain access to at least one of our stock exchanges, I’ll put it that way, and it’s not crystal clear what their final objective is,” says House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, a Republican from Michigan, who agreed to talk about the incident only in general terms because the details remain classified. “The bad news of that equation is, I’m not sure you will really know until that final trigger is pulled. And you never want to get to that.”

How Russian Hackers Stole the Nasdaq

July 17 (Bloomberg) -- Truman National Security Fellow Bob Stasio and Ernst & Young Americas Managing Director Stephen Howe discusses the cyber intrusion into the Nasdaq OMX Group. They speak on “Bloomberg Surveillance.” (Corrects company name.) (Source: Bloomberg)

Bloomberg Businessweek spent several months interviewing more than two dozen people about the Nasdaq attack and its aftermath, which has never been fully reported. Nine of those people were directly involved in the investigation and national security deliberations; none were authorized to speak on the record. “The investigation into the Nasdaq intrusion is an ongoing matter,” says FBI New York Assistant Director in Charge George Venizelos. “Like all cyber cases, it’s complex and involves evidence and facts that evolve over time.”

While the hack was successfully disrupted, it revealed how vulnerable financial exchanges—as well as banks, chemical refineries, water plants, and electric utilities—are to digital assault. One official who experienced the event firsthand says he thought the attack would change everything, that it would force the U.S. to get serious about preparing for a new era of conflict by computer. He was wrong.

On the call at the NCCIC were experts from the Defense, Treasury, and Homeland Security departments and from the NSA and FBI. The initial assessment provided the incident team with a few sketchy details about the hackers’ identity, yet it only took them minutes to agree that the incursion was so serious that the White House should be informed.

The conference call participants reconvened at the White House the next day, joined by officials from the Justice and State departments and the Central Intelligence Agency. The group drew up a set of options to be presented to senior national security officials from the White House, the Justice Department, the Pentagon, and others. Those officials determined the questions that investigators would have to answer: Were the hackers able to access and manipulate or destabilize the trading platform? Was the incursion part of a broader attack on the U.S. financial infrastructure?

The U.S. Secret Service pushed to be the lead investigative agency. Its representatives noted that they had already gone to Nasdaq months earlier with evidence that a group of alleged Russian cybercriminals, led by a St. Petersburg man named Aleksandr Kalinin, had hacked the company and that the two events might be related. The Secret Service lost the argument and sat the investigation out.

When the FBI notified Nasdaq of the intrusion, it turned out the company had detected anomalies on its own but had yet to report the attack. After negotiations over privacy concerns, Nasdaq agreed to let U.S. officials into its networks. Investigation teams arrived at the company’s headquarters at One Liberty Plaza in New York City and its data center in Carteret, N.J., where they found multiple indications of an intelligence agency or military.
The hackers had used two zero-day vulnerabilities in combination. A zero day is a previously unknown flaw in computer code—developers have had “zero days” to address it—that allows hackers to easily take remote command of a computer. It’s a valuable commodity, sometimes selling for tens of thousands of dollars in underground markets. The use of one zero day indicates a sophisticated hacker; more than one suggests government. Stuxnet deployed four—a sign that the code’s authors had done advanced reconnaissance and knew precisely how various systems worked together.

Whoever hit Nasdaq had done similar prep work and had similar resources. The clincher was the hackers’ malware pulled from Nasdaq’s computer banks. The NSA had seen a version before, designed and built by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB), that country’s main spy agency. And it was more than spyware: Although the tool could be used to steal data, it also had a function designed to create widespread disruption within a computer network. The NSA believed it might be capable of wiping out the entire exchange.

In early January, the NSA presented its conclusions to top national security officials: Elite Russian hackers had breached the stock exchange and inserted a digital bomb. The best case was that the hackers had packed their malware with a destruction module in case they were detected and needed to create havoc in Nasdaq computer banks to throw off their pursuers. The worst case was that creating havoc was their intention. President Obama was briefed on the findings.

Later in the investigation, some U.S. officials questioned whether the NSA had pushed the evidence too far. Malware often changes hands—it’s sold, stolen, or shared. And the technical differences between attack code and something less destructive can be surprisingly small. At the time, NSA Director Keith Alexander and his agency were locked in a fight with government branches over how much power the NSA should have to protect private companies from this new form of aggression. Such a brazen attack would certainly bolster its case.

As the probe deepened inside Nasdaq’s headquarters and its data center, investigators had to reconstruct the path of world-class hackers whose job depended on being untraceable. The team was surprised at how vulnerable a sophisticated operation such as Nasdaq could be. “Our assumption was that, generally speaking, the financial sector had its act together much more,” says Christopher Finan, a former cybersecurity expert in the Obama White House. “It doesn’t mean that they’re perfect, but on a spectrum they’re near the top.”

What the investigators found inside Nasdaq shocked them, according to both law enforcement officials and private contractors hired by the company to aid in the investigation. Agents found the tracks of several different groups operating freely, some of which may have been in the exchange’s networks for years, including criminal hackers and Chinese cyberspies. Basic records of the daily activity occurring on the company’s servers, which would have helped investigators trace the hackers’ movements, were almost nonexistent. Investigators also discovered that the website run by One Liberty Plaza’s building management company had been laced with a Russian-made exploit kit known as Blackhole, infecting tenants who visited the page to pay bills or do other maintenance.

What one investigator referred to as “the dirty swamp” of Nasdaq’s computer banks made following the trail of the Russian malware excruciatingly slow. The agents figured the hackers first broke into Nasdaq’s computers at least three months before they were detected, but that was just a guess. There were indications that a large cache of data was stolen, though proof was scarce, and it was hard to see what was spirited out. “If someone breaks into your house, trying to figure where they went and what they took is pretty difficult because, unlike a bank, you don’t have cameras in your house, you don’t have motion sensors,” says Jason Syversen, chief executive officer of Siege Technologies, a security firm in Manchester, N.H. “In terms of cybersecurity, most companies are more like a house than a bank.”

The agencies left it to Nasdaq to characterize the attack for its customers, regulators, and the public, which it did in a brief company statement on Feb. 5 and again in a regulatory filing a few weeks later. The breach couldn’t have come at a worse time for Nasdaq. It was on the verge of trying to acquire the New York Stock Exchange for $11 billion.

Nasdaq’s e-mailed statement gave no indication the attack was serious. The company said the malware had been discovered during “a routine scan” and that the incursion was limited to a system called Director’s Desk, which more than 230 companies used to share financial information among board members. “We have no information anything was taken,” the statement said. In an interview for this article, Nasdaq spokesman Joseph Christinat says: “Our own forensics review of the issue conducted in close cooperation with the U.S. government concluded no proof of exfiltration of data from our Director’s Desk systems. Importantly, 2010 was a watershed moment in our company’s commitment to cybersecurity resulting today in an enhanced ability to detect and protect the integrity of our systems, our technology, and market participants.”

“We’ve seen a nation-state gain access to at least one of our stock exchanges ... and it’s not crystal clear what their final objective is”
Photograph by Mario Tama/Getty Images
Meanwhile, the investigation into who was behind the attack took a dramatic turn. Unlike a bomb or missile, malware can be reused. Left behind in networks, it can be grabbed by other hackers, reverse-engineered, and redeployed in the computer banks of subsequent victims to muddy the trail, like a killer using someone else’s gun. As investigators began examining data on other hacks of government and military computers, there was evidence that the Russians’ malware was being used by a sophisticated Chinese cyberspy also known to have a thriving criminal business on the side. This hacker could have been given the Russian malware or pinched it from inside another computer network and used it to disguise his identity. Some evidence inside Nasdaq supported that theory as well. Obama was briefed again as the probe turned toward Asia.

As investigators followed the new leads, more teams fanned out across the country. The Treasury Department’s Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection and Compliance Policy drew up a list of 10 major banks and U.S. stock exchanges that might be targets for a broader campaign. Not all the companies agreed to cooperate with the investigation. In those that did, agents began scouring computer logs and examining servers, aided by the companies’ security teams.

The agents found little evidence of a broader attack. What they did find were systematic security failures riddling some of the most important U.S. financial institutions. It turned out that many on the list were vulnerable to the same attack that struck Nasdaq. They were spared only because the hackers hadn’t bothered to try.

The Asia connection didn’t pan out. Investigators turned back to Russia as the most likely suspect but kept stumbling over questions of motive. The hackers had been free to move around the Nasdaq network unmolested for several months. The exchange itself is isolated from other parts of the company’s network. It’s hard to access, but there’s no evidence that the hackers made the attempt.

Pushing for answers, the White House turned to the CIA. Unlike the NSA, which gathers intelligence solely by electronic means, the CIA is an “all source” intelligence unit and relies heavily on people. The CIA began to focus on the relationships between Russia’s intelligence agencies and organized crime. Someone in the FSB could have been running a for-profit operation on the side, or perhaps sold or gave the malware to a criminal hacking group. More analysis on the malware showed that its capabilities were less destructive than earlier believed. It couldn’t destroy computers like a wiper virus, but it could take over certain functions in order to cause a network disruption.

If the hackers’ motive was profit, Nasdaq’s Director’s Desk, the Web-based communication system where they first entered the network, offered amazing possibilities. It’s used by thousands of corporate board directors to exchange confidential information about their companies. Whoever got their hands on those could accumulate an instant fortune.

In Washington, an FBI team and market regulators analyzed thousands of trades using algorithms to determine if information in Director’s Desk could be traced to suspicious transactions. They found no evidence that had happened, according to two people briefed on the results.

National security officials revised the theory of the break-in once again. With encouragement from the CIA, White House officials began to conclude it was an elaborate act of cybercrime. The conclusion represented a certainty of only about 70 percent, according to one official, but there was little choice. The NSA was operating under a special authority known as a Request for Technical Assistance, or RTA, and the clock on the RTA was running out. After Obama was briefed for a third time, two people say, the intelligence establishment stood down, and by early March, the case was left in the hands of the FBI.

The bureau’s agents noticed that the hackers appeared to focus their attention on 13 servers containing Nasdaq’s most critical technology. That technology is sophisticated enough that the company has a side business licensing it to other stock exchanges around the world.

The timing of the attack had always been one of the pieces that didn’t fit. In 2008, Dmitry Medvedev had succeeded Vladimir Putin as Russia’s president, and Putin stepped into the less powerful role of prime minister. If anything, relations with the West were warming, and aggression against the global financial system didn’t make sense.

Russia might have been interested in Nasdaq for other reasons. In January 2011, Medvedev traveled to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to roll out a grand Russian vision for transforming Moscow into a global financial hub. The next month, Moscow’s two underperforming stock exchanges, the Micex and RTS, announced they would merge into what operators dreamed would be a world-class platform, the jewel in the crown of the globe’s newest financial capital.

To Russia’s senior leaders, the country’s national security and the success of the exchange were linked. Russian companies now mostly list on major Western exchanges, making them more vulnerable to U.S. and European economic leverage. When Putin returned to the presidency in 2012, he pressured Russian companies to list solely on the new exchange. At the same time, he poured billions of rubles into a financial hub in central Moscow that included Europe’s tallest building.

By mid-2011, investigators began to conclude that the Russians weren’t trying to sabotage Nasdaq. They wanted to clone it, either to incorporate its technology directly into their exchange or as a model to learn from. And they dispatched an elite team of cyberspies to get it.

Without a clear picture of exactly what data was taken from Nasdaq and where it went—impossible given the lack of logs and other vital forensics information—not everyone in the government or even the FBI agreed with the finding, but one investigator directly involved in the case says it was the most convincing conclusion. There were other pieces of the puzzle that didn’t fit. Were the malware’s disruptive capabilities meant to be used as a weapon or something else? If they hadn’t been interrupted, what else would they have done? Asked to comment on the Nasdaq incident, Russian Embassy spokesman Yevgeniy Khorishko says, “It is pure nonsense that it is not even worth commenting on.”

In a speech last January, amid the scandal over the NSA’s collection of data on millions of Americans, Obama obliquely referred to the NSA’s ability to “intercept malware that targets a stock exchange” as one reason he opposed stripping the agency of its ability to intercept digital communications.

For some U.S. officials, however, the lessons of the incident are far more chilling. The U.S. national security apparatus may be dominant in the physical world, but it’s far less prepared in the virtual one. The rules of cyberwarfare are still being written, and it may be that the deployment of attack code is an act of war as destructive as the disabling of any real infrastructure. And it’s an act of war that can be hard to trace: Almost four years after the initial Nasdaq intrusion, U.S. officials are still sorting out what happened. Although American military is an excellent deterrent, it doesn’t work if you don’t know whom to use it on.

“If anybody in the federal government tells you that they’ve got this figured out in terms of how to respond to an aggressive cyber attack, then tell me their names, because they shouldn’t be there,” says Rogers, the intelligence committee chairman. “The problem is that whatever we do, the response to it won’t come back at the government, it’ll come back at the 85 percent of networks in America that are in the private sector. And they are already having a difficult time keeping up.”

No video no downloads only read news surf forum

cocbum4 — Sat, 03 Feb 2018 15:48:38 +0800

How to save data usage?

P2P loan very easy to get

cocbum4 — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 14:59:19 +0800

Jew think Jew are safe if only Jew identity is leaked, someone in some place can use Jew Nekkid and ID to make loan. Not limited to boy or girl or alpha or beta or trans

Amol Agrawal
2 years ago
Crazy bit of news.

Shylock demanded a pound of flesh if loan was not repaid and today’s banks/lenders use force to get back their loans. Shame has also been used as a collateral in the past where those who do not pay back the loan are not seen kindly in the society. But now a Chinese lender is using different kind of shame to get back its loans:

Many Chinese university students were found to have used their nude pictures as IOUs onsome online lending platforms, putting themselves at the risks of having everybody –including their parents – see them naked.

Such risky methods of IOU is found usable on several online lending platforms, but it is usually more often accepted within the QQ group chats connected to such platforms.Borrowers are also required to upload pictures of their ID cards and report their family information, including their address and cell phone numbers.

Once a clear photo of a naked borrower holding his or her ID card is uploaded to lenders,he or she can get up to 15,000 yuan ($2,277) credit with a maximum of 36 month installments, the Nandu Daily reported. The credit varies based on the borrower’s education background. Usually an undergraduate student can receive 15,000 yuan in credit, while those studying at famous universities as well as doctorate students can receive even larger loans.

What comes with the seemingly easy business transaction is costly overdue repayment.

According to a self-claimed former borrower Li Li (pseudonym), the weekly interest ratewas 30 percent for her 500 yuan borrowed from an online platform in February. As she kept failing to pay back on set payment due dates, she borrowed more money from the platform with the same weekly interest rate until the overdue payment grew to 55,000 yuan, which then led to a threat with her naked pictures, the Nandu Daily reported.

Not sure how to react to such developments..

2017 is new age of inequality?

cocbum4 — Tue, 30 Jan 2018 22:26:24 +0800

Corporations in the Age of Inequality

Inequality isn’t just about individuals — it’s risen between companies, too.

O
n a sunny morning in December 2013, as Google employees boarded the bus that would take them on their daily commute from Oakland to the company’s Mountain View headquarters, protesters moved in. One unfurled a bright blue banner bearing the words “F— Off, Google.” Some handed out pamphlets explaining their anger: “While you guys live fat as hogs with your free 24/7 buffets, everyone else is scraping the bottom of their wallets, barely existing in this expensive world that you and your chums have helped create.” News outlets reported that people had thrown rocks and a bus window had been smashed.

Across the bay in San Francisco, Apple employees filing onto their own shuttle encountered a similar demonstration. There were several protests that winter, most attended by just a few dozen activists. Nonetheless, that was enough for Google to beef up security, and for one Googler to tweet from a bus surrounded by protestors that he and his coworkers were “under siege.” A protestor countered, “We’re here to send a message to the rich tech companies that their business has ramifications and consequences.”

The Business of Inequality: Get the reprint

The so-called Google bus protests failed to capture the national imagination the way Occupy Wall Street had two years earlier. The demonstrations were far smaller and seen as a mostly local phenomenon — one region’s reaction to rising rents and urban gentrification. But the episode highlighted an economic trend that the Occupy movement missed and that deserves wider attention. What the bus protesters understood — and what new research demonstrates — is that there’s more to income inequality than the 1% versus the 99%, CEOs versus typical workers, or the finance sector versus the rest of the economy. There’s more to it than skilled versus unskilled workers, although skills account for a lot. The real engine fueling rising income inequality is “firm inequality”: In an increasingly winner-take-all or at least winner-take-most economy, the best-educated and most-skilled employees cluster inside the most successful companies, their incomes rising dramatically compared with those of outsiders. This corporate segregation is accelerated by the relentless outsourcing and automation of noncore activities and by growing investment in technology. It’s no accident that a company like Google became a flashpoint for controversy; its employees fare much better than workers almost anywhere else.

The Author

Nicholas Bloom

bloom-bio
Tackling economic principles in common language is a passion for Nicholas Bloom, who describes his work as pub economics or “concepts I can explain to my friends over a pint in London.” Here he takes on common misperceptions about income inequality and proposes a new way of thinking about the problem. Citing Brexit in the UK, the presidential election in the U.S., the Five Star movement in Italy, and the resurgence of Marine Le Pen in France, Bloom says of income inequality, “It’s not only a huge social issue, but it’s now driving global politics.”

Of course, some say that income inequality is not a problem, but even in the business world their ranks are shrinking. In a 2015 survey, 63% of Harvard Business School alumni said that reducing economic inequality should be a high or very high priority for American society; only 10% said it should not be a priority at all. The Brexit vote and the recent U.S. presidential election shined a spotlight on the ways in which income inequality is giving rise to a global populism that threatens to destabilize governments and economies around the world.

If we want to truly understand income inequality — if we want to mitigate it and its pernicious effects — we must look beyond CEO compensation and tax policy and consider the role played by firms and their hiring and compensation policies for ordinary, non-millionaire workers. This is not a simple morality play in which evil companies are pitted against the middle class. There is nothing nefarious about Google’s goal of being the global leader in software and machine learning, or in its hiring the best employees it can find. Yet the result of countless strategic decisions in pursuit of such goals by Google and other elite companies throughout the world — not just in tech — has been to raise the compensation of some workers far more than others.

It’s time to turn our attention from comparing individuals’ fortunes to considering differences between firms.

FIRST, INEQUALITY DATA

Let’s start with a review of what most people already know about the inequality debate, even if they haven’t read all 704 pages of Thomas Piketty’s runaway best seller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Since 1980, income inequality has risen sharply in most developed economies, especially in the United States. Much of the public discourse has focused on the gap between the top 1% and everybody else. In 1980, the top 1% of adult earners in the U.S. made $420,000 a year, on average (before taxes and measured in 2014 dollars) — 27 times as much as the average for the bottom 50% of earners. Today the top 1% of earners make an average of $1.3 million a year — 81 times as much as the average for workers in the bottom half. (See the exhibit “Inequality Between Individuals Has Risen.”)

BLOOM_INEQUALITYBETWEENINDIVIDUALS_320px

But it’s not just the top 1% who are pulling away. The gap between workers with a college education and ones with only a high school diploma has increased dramatically as well. In 1979, the average annual salary for American men with a college degree was $17,411 higher (after adjusting for inflation) than the average for men with a high school degree. By 2012, the gap had nearly doubled, to almost $35,000; the gap between women with college degrees and those with high school diplomas nearly doubled as well.

Meanwhile, the bottom half of earners in the U.S. have seen virtually no growth in earnings, before taxes and social-security transfers, despite a rise in the number of hours worked. The problem of stagnant incomes for this group is not sluggish GDP growth, as is often suggested; the U.S. economy produces far more each year than it did decades ago. What matters more, a study by Raj Chetty and colleagues demonstrates, is rising income inequality. Their research shows that only half the workers born in 1980 — today’s 36-year-olds — make as much money as their parents did at the same age. When the researchers ran simulations testing the effects of diminishing GDP growth versus rising income inequality on wage stagnation, the percentage of 36-year-olds who did better than their parents jumped to 80% when income inequality was held steady, but only 60% did better when GDP growth was restored to the older, faster rate.

NEXT, LOOKING WITHIN AND BETWEEN FIRMS

But that’s not the whole story. Over the past several years, economists have begun to examine pay gaps between and within firms to see how company strategy and corporate trends affect the broader rise of inequality. The findings from this new area of study are striking and help explain why incomes have risen so much for some and not at all for others. They also explain why so many executives, managers, and other well-paid workers have failed to notice the growing disparity.

Companies can contribute to rising income inequality in two ways. As we’ve just discussed, pay gaps can increase within companies — between how much executives and administrative assistants are paid, for example. But studies now show that gaps between companies are the real drivers of income inequality. Research I conducted with Jae Song, David Price, Fatih Guvenen, and Till Von Wachter looked at U.S. employers and employees from 1978 to 2013. We found that the average wages at the firms employing individuals at the top of the income distribution have increased rapidly, while those at the firms employing people in the lower income percentiles have increased far less. (See exhibit “Inequality Between Companies Is Also Growing.”)

In other words, the increasing inequality we’ve seen for individuals is mirrored by increasing inequality between firms. But the wage gap is not increasing as much inside firms, our research shows. This may tend to make inequality less visible, because people do not see it rising in their own workplace.

This means that the rising gap in pay between firms accounts for the large majority of the increase in income inequality in the United States. It also accounts for at least a substantial part in other countries, as research conducted in the UK, Germany, and Sweden demonstrates.

BLOOM_INEQUALITYBETWEENCOMPANIES_320px

WHY DID ALL THIS HAPPEN?

Gaps among companies are growing for a variety of reasons. A big one is that some industries have boosted salaries more than others — law firms have increased their pay more than retailers, for example. But the gap between high-paying firms and poorly paying ones in the same industry has risen considerably too.

Why are some firms paying better than others? It could be that some are just more generous — paying their workers higher amounts than other firms pay for the same work — although that would surprise economists, who assume that the “law of one price” ensures that similar workers are paid similarly. The more likely explanation, our research suggests, is that companies are paying more to get more: boosting salaries to recruit top talent or to add workers with sought-after skills. The result is that highly skilled and well-educated workers flock to companies that can afford to offer generous salaries, benefits, and perks — and further fuel their companies’ momentum. Employees in less-successful companies continue to be poorly paid and their companies fall further behind.

I believe that much of the rise of between-firm inequality, and therefore inequality in general, can be attributed to three factors: the rise of outsourcing, the adoption of IT, and the cumulative effects of winner-take-most competition.

Outsourcing. In considering the effect of outsourcing on inequality, it’s instructive to look at GE. In the 1960s, it employed manufacturing workers, line managers, executives, janitors, administrative staff, and many other types of workers. Over the past several decades, it has automated or outsourced a wide range of functions. Yet during that time its head count has stayed relatively constant, at about 300,000 employees. That means GE has hired more engineers and coders, doubling down on its core competency as the premier maker of high-tech industrial equipment and paying other firms to handle tasks outside its core.

Or consider Google. It aggressively recruits software engineers and data scientists, pays them generously, and lavishes them with perks, such as free transportation on buses like the ones protestors threw rocks at. But its bus drivers don’t necessarily see all of those benefits — they’re contractors, not employees.

quoteImages
Highly skilled workers flock to companies that can afford to offer generous salaries while employees in less-successful companies fall further behind.
In 1990, C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel published “The Core Competence of the Corporation” in Harvard Business Review, urging companies to focus strategy not on products or markets but on “the collective learning in the organization” — GE’s expertise in industrial equipment, for example, or Google’s in software. Companies seem to have listened. One study found that from 1980 to 2008, the share of workers in Germany employed by temp agencies or cleaning, logistics, or security firms more than tripled, from roughly 2% to 7%.

As companies focused on their core competences and outsourced noncore work, the corporate world began to divide between knowledge-intensive companies such as Apple, Goldman Sachs, and McKinsey and labor-intensive companies such as Sodexo, which provides food service and facilities management services. Workers with lots of education and desirable skills were hired in the knowledge sector, with high pay, perks, and benefits. Less-educated workers got jobs in labor-intensive firms, where pay was stagnant or even falling and benefits such as health insurance were hardly guaranteed. Employees from these two types of firms often work in the same building, but they’re no longer in the same orbit. And when it comes time for the holiday party, the struggling contractors are nowhere to be seen.

Outsourcing isn’t the only factor driving firm inequality, however. If it were, inequality would have risen only between firms in different industries: between Goldman Sachs and Sodexo, for instance. But over the past 35 years, top firms have been pulling away from average companies in their own sectors, in terms of both profits and productivity. (See the exhibit “Winner Take Most.”)

BLOOM_WINNERTAKEMOST_320px

IT and automation. This dynamic appears to be driven largely by technology. My research and other studies suggest that between-firm pay inequality has grown faster in industries that spend more on IT. Investments in technology allow successful online firms to rapidly scale up and reap the benefits of network effects. In this way, leading companies such as Amazon and Facebook dominate their markets. Offline, improved enterprise software and automation of routine tasks make it far easier to manage and grow large businesses, from Shake Shack (burgers) to Xiaomi (smartphones).

Some experts, most notably Jason Furman, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors during the last three years of the Obama administration, argue that the rise of these “superfirms” results from a lack of competition. Industries have become more concentrated, and the number of new businesses has declined. But industry concentration doesn’t necessarily imply a lack of competition. In some sectors, such as manufacturing, evidence suggests that increased global trade has strengthened the ferocity of competition in recent decades, leading to more domestic competition as fewer and fewer U.S. firms survive. In my view, it’s unclear whether competition has increased or decreased in aggregate over the past few decades.

Winner-take-most competition. What is clear is that over the past 35 years, firms have divided between winners and losers, and between those that rely heavily on knowledge workers and those that don’t. Employees inside winning companies enjoy rising incomes and interesting cognitive challenges. Workers outside this charmed circle experience something quite different. For example, contract janitors no longer receive the benefits or pay premium tied to a job at a big company. Their wages have been squeezed as their employers routinely bid to retain outsourcing contracts, a process ensuring that labor costs remain low or go ever lower. Their earnings have also come under pressure as the pool of less-skilled job seekers has expanded, due to automation, trade, and the Great Recession. In the process, work has begun to mirror neighborhoods — sharply segregated along economic and educational lines.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

The picture of firm inequality I’ve sketched here doesn’t invalidate other theories of income inequality. On the contrary, it supports many of them. And to be clear, although firm inequality is a large part of the puzzle, it’s not everything. Notably, it doesn’t explain the rise of the 1%. That’s a separate and important trend that’s been well documented elsewhere. But in shifting the focus from individuals to companies, several unique recommendations emerge, for both policy makers and executives.

Focus on antitrust. For a start, a renewed focus on antitrust issues may be a good idea, to the extent that lack of competition can exacerbate the winner-take-most dynamic. But because that dynamic is global, more-robust antitrust policies alone will not solve the problem.

Reframe the policy debate. Second, established policies should be reassessed through the lens of firm inequality. Take the pay disclosure rules prescribed in the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which require companies to disclose the ratio of the CEO’s pay and the median worker’s. Intended to mitigate within-firm wage disparities, the measures may have limited value in light of the research showing that gaps within firms are not the main contributor to income inequality. They may even have unintended consequences: Savvy CEOs may very well decide that the easiest way to raise the salaries of median workers is to outsource more low-wage work, thus lowering the ratio of CEO-to-median pay. As an economist, I’m sympathetic to policies that make more corporate information publicly available, but if the Dodd-Frank disclosure rules are ever closely scrutinized, we may see that they could backfire.

Reframe corporate decision making and hiring practices. Executives at well-paying firms should recognize the extent to which their strategies and practices contribute to income inequality. You do not need to be a hedge fund manager to be on the winning side of some very profound economic divides. To be sure, companies should not start insourcing all services or stop automating tasks, but senior leaders and those responsible for hiring should understand the role their decisions play in the larger economy.

Invest in education. Perhaps the single biggest priority for policy makers and corporations should be education. Since between-firm inequality appears to be largely driven by workers being sorted according to education and skills, the best way to set people up for success is to ensure that they have the skills needed to compete in the 21st–century job market. It’s become fashionable lately to point out that more education for ordinary workers wouldn’t alter the extraordinarily high incomes of the top 1%. That’s true: Having more college graduates would do little to rein in the incomes of hedge fund managers and CEOs. But for the equally important inequality between the non-fabulously wealthy and the poorest — between the top 20% and the remaining 80% — education and skills training are clearly part of the solution.

Next in the Big Idea, May 2017
The Drone Economy
Join HBR, former Wired editor and CEO of 3DR Chris Anderson, and Berkeley-Haas Professor Toby Stuart as we explore the disruptive power of unmanned aerial vehicles. Whatever your business, you need a drone strategy. Start here.

Boost low incomes through tax policy. Governments should also consider measures that put more money into people’s pockets, such as negative income taxes — meaning that citizens earning below a certain threshold receive money directly from the government. For example, the U.S. should consider expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is basically a negative income tax with a work requirement. Rather than constrain companies with more onerous rules around compensation, negative income taxes supplement the incomes for workers whose skills are in less demand while allowing economies to organize efficiently.

At the very least, it’s time to change the debate around income inequality by recasting the roles of companies from greedy villains or heroic job creators to the fundamental system through which changes in the economy reverberate and the way that most of us get paid.

. . .

In her 2012 commencement speech at Harvard Business School, Sheryl Sandberg shared some advice that Eric Schmidt had given her when recruiting her for Google, then a little-known startup. By that point in her career, Sandberg had worked at the World Bank and McKinsey and served as chief of staff to the Secretary of the Treasury. The Google job didn’t seem big enough, and she told Schmidt so. He replied that she needed to pay less attention to the job title and more attention to the trajectory of the organization she’d be joining. His advice was succinct: “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.”

It’s good advice, and it illustrates the role that firms play in our economic fates. If you do get the chance to join a rocket ship, you absolutely should take it. But as a society, we need to become more aware of how much of the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots is driven by the advantages that accrue to the lucky few who get seats — and consider doing more to equalize things for those who are left behind on the launch pad, choking on smoke.The Big Idea

He can last for 8 hours

cocbum4 — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 15:19:04 +0800

Ayam never know can last so long.

Time to stock up gold?

cocbum4 — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 13:18:55 +0800

Nice or aye [attachmentid=9543048][attachmentid=9543051][attachmentid=9543505]

Ayam try to floss ma teeth at home

cocbum4 — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 12:04:17 +0800

Ayam try new toy.

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Result very effective: compare to just tooth pick, brush and floss. Remove most of the nasty white spot, some is hard to remove need special tool.

NSFW:

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How many GB used monthly?

cocbum4 — Sun, 21 Jan 2018 18:54:58 +0800

Why ayam think telco steal my quota
Ayam just bot 5 gb and only last for two days???

All in Buttcoin or wait at 3k?

cocbum4 — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 22:54:17 +0800

Ktard said will all in buttcoin if drop to xxxx pls bbb

Buttcoin just broken major support.

cocbum4 — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 20:10:27 +0800

DDD SSS
Ayam sudah cabut
Bila anda??

Bitum stole me money now don let me trade

cocbum4 — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 17:30:10 +0800

Dafuq ayam Black list butum now

iPhone Camera test

cocbum4 — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 21:23:12 +0800

Both took the same image with minimum proximity error, same distance, same focus, same default setting

Check post #2 for drillz

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Bit thumb penipu scammer

cocbum4 — Sun, 07 Jan 2018 14:58:39 +0800

Ayam bot some Ketum in Brittan and transfer to bit thumb and want to sell in bit thumb because of big price difference, now Ayam just realize Ayam ketum is locked inside bithumb and want withdraw they want my xxx yyy bbb UUU level 2 shit dafuq damn exchange shoddy as fuq

[attachmentid=9489590]

Ayam bet big into Qlink

cocbum4 — Sun, 07 Jan 2018 12:15:08 +0800

Qlink = Icon (ICX) = maxis + digi + celcom decentralised shit.
So ayam expect to see 10x
Also Qlink copy Icon and vice versa
Apa sarahan doto copy doto2 copy Warcraft copy iPhone copy Samsung

Buttcoin vs shit performance in 8 months

cocbum4 — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 10:26:37 +0800

In one picture!

Conclusion
-all shit are still shit
-old shit are delisted from top 30 very fast
-new shit are listed into the top 30 very fast
-some old shit keep their position most old shit do not.
Only top 3 are great for long term.

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XRP is the biggest scam in the world!

cocbum4 — Fri, 05 Jan 2018 13:47:12 +0800

Tenkiu for the donasi to the amurika
We luv jew long long time.

Install binance and kucoin on iOS

cocbum4 — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 12:36:57 +0800

Anyone can install them successfully?
Ayam cannot launch after install it
And no official apps store download available.

Epal product cut cost

cocbum4 — Tue, 02 Jan 2018 14:47:37 +0800

Sarahan Samseng supply poor quality screen
Boikot Samseng

Before
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After
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Cannot stop windows updates

cocbum4 — Thu, 21 Dec 2017 18:32:15 +0800

Ayam kolos gpedit
Ayam kolos regedit
Ayam kolos msconfig
Ayam kolos Internet
Ayam kolos everything
Windows still can updates
And Ayam see windows updates hogging all disk space
Ayam see winsxs has 9000 useless files and Ayam cannot delete
Ayam forced to format pc only