Monday's Top 10 with NZ Mint: NZ's slave fishing debacle; 'The side show Bob and Tony Show'; Global Debt Jubilee anyone?; Steve Jobs book reviewed; Nanotrading; Dilberts

Here's my Top 10 links from around the Internet at midday in association with NZ Mint.

I welcome your additions in the comments below or via email tobernard.hickey@interest.co.nz.

I'll pop the extras into the comment stream. See all previous Top 10s here.

My must read today is the BusinessWeek story at #1 on slave fishing. New Zealand is in trouble on this one.

1. Slave fishing - Michael Field at Fairfax has been hammering away at the issue of  virtual slave labour being employed on Foreign Charted Vessels (FCVs) fishing New Zealand's quota.

Now Bloomberg's Businessweek has picked up on it with an exposé of its own.

The details are shocking and embarrassing for Christchurch's United Fisheries and Sanford.

An Indonesian fisherman was an indentured labourer who was physically abused on the ship and paid US$1 an hour.

Talk of boycotts of New Zealand fish exports have begun.

Here's Michael Field's piece from the Sunday Star Times detailing the harassment the whistle-blowing Indonesian now faces.

America's largest importer of New Zealand fish is particularly grumpy.

Mazzetta, a $510 million Chicago operation, pioneered orange roughy fishing with Sanford.

Mazzetta spoke to Sanford's board, including chairman Jeff Todd and board member and National Party president Peter Goodfellow, saying that "to say that I am extremely disappointed would be an understatement[Allegations] of this nature are simply unacceptable and warrant revision of Sanford's oversight to continue in our existing relationship."

Mazzetta listed steps Sanford had to take. Sanford said there were no labour issues and it had observers on FCVs and would be "in on-going discussions" with Mazzetta. Anti-slavery and human trafficking laws that came into effect last month in California mean US corporates must take slavery claims seriously.

2. 'Madness to support work-shy drones' - Damien Grant has written an impassioned rant about the evil of paying taxes to anyone who doesn't work in the NZ Herald.

He focuses on the Tania Wysocki case, the the DPB beneficiary threatening to become a prostitute because her NZ$43,000 of benefits is not enough to live on.

Here's Grant:

The reason for our uncompetitive state is the mindset of Wysocki and her ilk - that the world owes her a living and that she should not have to work for her money, even if that work involves little more than lying down and thinking of England.

We face rising inequality and declining competitiveness because too many people have failed to develop productive skills, and why should they?

We will not become a richer nation nor solve rising inequality by punishing those who are working and rewarding those who are not.

3. 'Sideshow Bob' - John McCrone at The Press has written a detailed review of the history of Christchurch's mayors and CEOs. HT Hugh via email.

Here's his view on Bob Parker and Tony Marryatt:

So what went wrong? Many are eager to offer an opinion, even if few want to be quoted. The general feeling is that unlike Moore and McTurk, Parker and Marryatt are both quite isolated by nature. They have not been good at getting out and connecting.

Instead, they have fallen back too easily on the argument that Christchurch has already decided its strategy and so their job is to get on with its implementation.

Isolation can lead to bad judgments. And observers also note that Marryatt is unusual for a council boss in that he is not just a dull corporate manager. He has a strong wheeler-dealer streak to his personality, a liking for bringing propositions to the council table.

"He just loves the cut and thrust of it," says one who has known Marryatt for many years.

4. Time for a debt jubilee - Here's Australian economist Steve Keen on BBC Hardtalk recommending a 'debt jubilee' where debt is written off, banks are bankrupted and the financial system is nationalised. HT Peter via email.

5. What the world might look like in 2050 - The Atlantic has a look. The chart below tells the story.

6. Steve Jobs no hero - I read the Walter Isaacson book on Steve Jobs over the summer and came away thinking he (Jobs) was a brilliant but unlikable man.

Here's a good and thoughtful review of the book in The New Republic from Evgeny Morozov.

As Isaacson makes clear, Jobs was not a particularly nice man, nor did he want to be one. The more diplomatic of Apple’s followers might say that Steve Jobs—bloodthirsty vegetarian, combative Buddhist—lived a life of paradoxes. A less generous assessment would be that he was an unprincipled opportunist-a brilliant but restless chameleon. For Jobs, consistency was truly the hobgoblin of little minds (he saw little minds everywhere he looked) and he did his best to prove Emerson’s maxim in his own life. He hung a pirate flag on the top of his team’s building, proclaiming that “it is better to be a pirate than to join the Navy,” only to condemn Internet piracy as theft several decades later.

He waxed lyrical about his love for calligraphy, only to destroy the stylus as an input device. He talked up the virtues of contemplation and meditation, but did everything he could to shorten the time it takes to boot an Apple computer. (For a Buddhist, what’s the rush?) He sought to liberate individual users from the thrall of big businesses such as IBM, and then partnered with IBM and expressed his desire to work only with “corporate America.”

A simplifier with ascetic tendencies, he demanded that Apple’s board give him a personal jet so that he could take his family to Hawaii. He claimed he was not in it for the money and asked for a salary of just $1, but he got into trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission for having his stock options—in a move that gave him millions—backdated. He tried to convince his girlfriend that “it was important to avoid attachment to material objects,” but he built a company that created a fetish out of material objects. He considered going to a monastery in Japan, but declared that, were it not for computers, he would be a poet in the exceedingly unmonastic city of Paris.

7. The story behind the Olympus scandal - Here's the BusinessWeek version. A fascinating insight into Japanese corporate life.

8. The reformed broker - Here Advisor One interviews Joshua Brown, a former stock broker who writes a blog called The Reformed Broker.

The 35-year-old financial advisor, whose Reformed Broker blog has brought him wide acclaim in recent years, has just written a book meant to uncover the perfidy of Wall Street. Backstage Wall Street is part plea, part mea culpa, part screed. Brown unmasks the financial industry for all to see, revealing the less-than-honest sales tactics of boiler-room brokers and dressing down investment banks for running away with fees and riches while Mom and Pop retail investors are left holding the bag.

Brown makes some startling claims: wirehouse brokerage firms will be gone in 10 years, as will the “suitability” standard governing broker-dealers. Mutual funds? They’ll be gone too, replaced by their fast-rising cousins, ETFs.

9. Nano-trading - Wired has an excellent article on the dangers of micro-trading, where algorithms trade stocks with each other at microsecond intervals.

Here's a taste:

The programs are designed to trade enormous volumes of stocks, bonds and other financial instruments at superfast speeds, taking advantage of second-to-second fractional price shifts and market trends. It’s now estimated that high-frequency computer trading accounts for 70 percent of all equity trades. While some activity does occur at speeds with which humans can interact, much of it falls beyond the limits of human response time.

(One new computer chip built specifically for high-frequency trading can prepare trades in .000000074 seconds; a proposed $300 million transatlantic cable is being built just to shave 0.006 seconds off transaction times between New York City and London.)

In the early years of computer trading, algorithms were profitable and concerns rare. Designers and investors took their money and didn’t think much about what Johnson and co-authors call “ultrafast machine ecology.” After the 2010 flash crash, however, mainstream economists wondered if high-frequency trading systems might sometimes get weird and unpredictable. A $4.1 billion automated sale was ultimately blamed for triggering that crash, and economists started asking questions about the new, hazy relationships between machines and markets.

“We are certainly witnessing one of the major transitions in the history of financial markets,” said automated trading researcher John Cartlidge of the University of Bristol, who was not involved in new study. “Economic theory has always lagged behind economic reality, but now the speed of technological change is widening that gap at an exponential rate.  The scary result of this is that we now live in a world dominated by a global financial market of which we have virtually no sound theoretical understanding.”

10. Totally Stephen Colbert on an integrated 'sponsortunity' for Wheat Thins? Should we do 'sponsortunities' too?