The 11 Laws of Systems Thinking...

  1. Today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions.
  2. The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back.
  3. Behavior grows better before it grows worse.
  4. The easy way out usually leads back in.
  5. The cure can be worse than the disease.
  6. Faster is slower.
  7. Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.
  8. Small changes can produce big results – but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious.
  9. You can have your cake and eat it too – but not at once.
  10. Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.
  11. There is no blame.
7 minute read at Thought Exchange

The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu.... Highly recommended!

“As one might gather from a painting of him scowling in a tall stovepipe hat, Day saw himself as a businessman, not a journalist. ''He needed a newspaper not to reform, not to arouse, but to push the printing business of Benjamin H. Day.''

Day's idea was to try selling a paper for a penny - the going price for many everyday items, like soap or brushes. At that price, he felt sure he could capture a much larger audience than his 6-cent rivals. But what made the prospect risky, potentially even suicidal, was that Day would then be selling his paper at a loss. What day was contemplating was a break with the traditional strategy for making profit: selling at a price higher than the cost of production. He would instead rely on a different but historically significant business model: reselling the attention of his audience, or advertising. What Day understood-more firmly, more clearly than anyone before him-was that while his readers may have thought themselves his customers, they were in fact his product.” 

― Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

Evan Greenberg stepping down from the board Coca Cola to focus as chief executive officer of insurer Chubb Ltd...

Greenberg joined ACE in 2001 having left AIG ( then headed by his father) at the age of 45. By 2004 he was CEO and has overseen 15 major acquisitions. In 2010 a major purchase saw ACE become one of the US biggest crop insurers wile a 2013 purchase saw the insurer become one of the major auto insurers in Mexico. It’s not yet known whether Greenberg’s move is to help with the insurance giant’s digestion, or whether it’s still hungry.

Salomon Brothers... Is really gone... Wall Street greed... just goes on. (John Gutfreund Dies)

I worked at Solly starting in 1989 building the software that monitored the trading floor systems at 7 World Trade Center.   I was there during the Bond Scandal in 1991.    It was the hardest I've worked and the most fun I've had on the job.  I highly recommend you click through and read the entire article at the Wall Street Journal.   I would say that his death closes the book on an era, but after 2008 it seems like it never truly ends.

"In the face of this daily siege, Apple is dedicated to enhancing the security of its devices..."

...Since the dawn of the computer age, there have been malicious people dedicated to breaching security and stealing stored personal information. Indeed, the government itself falls victim to hackers, cyber-criminals, and foreign agents on a regular basis, most famously when foreign hackers breached Office of Personnel Management databases and gained access to personnel records, affecting over 22 million current and former federal workers and family members.  In the face of this daily siege, Apple is dedicated to enhancing the security of its devices, so that when customers use an iPhone, they can feel confident that their most private personal information—financial records and credit card information, health information, location data, calendars, personal and political beliefs, family photographs, information about their children will be safe and secure...

If the government can tell Apple to write a custom operating system for it, what else could it do?...

It is essential to this story that the order to Apple is not a subpoena: it is issued under the All Writs Act of 1789, which says that federal courts can issue “all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.” Read as a whole, this simply means that judges can tell people to follow the law, but they have to do so in a way that, in itself, respects the law. The Act was written at a time when a lot of the mechanics of the law still had to be worked out. But there are qualifications there: warnings about the writs having to be “appropriate” and “agreeable,” not just to the law but to the law’s “principles.” The government, in its use of the writ now, seems to be treating those caveats as background noise.  If it can tell Apple, which has been accused of no wrongdoing, to sit down and write a custom operating system for it, what else could it do?

from The New Yorker - The Dangerous All Writs Act Precedent in the Apple Encryption Case

You should really understand what the government is asking Apple to do.... Create a back door.

Specifically, the FBI wants us to make a new version of the iPhone operating system, circumventing several important security features, and install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation. In the wrong hands, this software — which does not exist today — would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession.

The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control.
from Apple.com