Interesting Links for 05-12-2011

[andrewducker]

• UC Davis Pepper Spray - What Really Happened
  (tags: police students occupy video protest )
• Anonymised NHS patient data could be given to private firms for science research - (devil, as always, in the details)
  (tags: data nhs privacy )
• Welcome to Armageddon, USA: A Tour of America’s Most Toxic Town
  (tags: usa toxic industry abandoned )
• What Clegg meant by 'getting tough' on bosses pay
  (tags: business uk money libdem )
• Vladimir Putin set to lose majority despite massive electoral fraud.
  (tags: elections democracy russia vladimirputin fraud )
• Attacks take numerous sites offline for reporting Russian election fraud. (Including LJ, of course)
  (tags: livejournal elections ddos russia )
• Sites can work out what other sites you've been to by checking the browser cache.
  (tags: history browser logging privacy )
• Free schools and academies must promote marriage
  (tags: school relationships marriage education )
• Liking a lie-in is genetic
  (tags: genes sleep )
• Scots opinion on Independence depends on whether they think it will make them better off
  (tags: money scotland independence )
• Why doctors have less healthcare at the end of their lives than the rest of us
  (tags: death ethics medicine health )

Comments

[tobyaw]

I think a lot of the problems may be to do with collective ownership. I see the same issues in the governance of PLCs as in public-sector organisations. Where ownership is in the hands of relatively abstract groups (whether commercial investors like pension funds, or elected bodies like councils or the government) there has to be a difficulty in applying individual responsibility to decision making.

How can one expect people to engage in independent thought when the easy option is to agree with the status quo? With decisions made by committees that have no relationship with the ownership of the organisation, no wonder it is easier to decide to spend money, to fit in, to raise salaries, to pay bonuses, and to pay off failure.

[andrewducker]

I agree entirely. All of the biggest companies are owned by a bunch of pensions companies and investment houses, who have no interest in actually running the company. Which means there's no final point of responsibility, and any oversight comes from over-worked organisations like the FSA (if they happen to be a financial organisation).

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

For some financial companies, depending on the precise nature of their business, then the responsibility/oversight is actually mostly internal with the FSA really just the nominal sign-off but the actual serious checking is all really done internally. Depending on your point of view, of course, that could be good or bad.

Unless someone actively speaks out and decides to approach the FSA, or a company fucks up (or is in such dire straits that they can't hide it any more), the FSA will see mostly what a company want them to see.

I would characterise the FSA as being there to tell companies what they should be doing, and to step in when it becomes obvious that they haven't been doing it, but oversight gives a slightly false impression to what I understand the reality to be. Oversight implies actual monitoring to me, but I guess it could just be a (handy) different way of using language.