ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

Robert Reich, a former labor secretary and current Berkeley public policy professor, writes in his 1 June 2010 New York Times column about a new class of self-employed: the unintentional entrepreneur. These are folks who get laid off, can’t find gainful employment, so go to work for themselves. Citing analysis by Challenger Gray & Christmas, the number of self-employed in the US rose to 8.9 million in 2009, up from 8.7 million in 2008. The almost two million self-employed Americans aged 55-64 rose by five percent. But the shocker is the rise in those self-employed aged 65 and over: A whopping 29 percent. Reich proposes what he calls “earnings insurance” for the unintentional entrepreneur “that would pay for up to two years part of the difference between what they earned on the old job and what they earn now on their own.” It would be paid for with payroll taxes, but Reich reasons the total benefit bill wouldn’t rise because the recipients would receive fewer unemployment benefits. Reich goes on to propose tax credits for the unintentional entrepreneur’s long-gone corporate match to their 401(k)‘s. These are both really good ideas; I only wish they were around when I was full-time intentionally self-employed.

ESRD

Minnesota’s Agricultural and Economic Development Board, which to date has used its revolving loan fund for manufacturing companies, has granted a US$250,000 loan to Doris Taylor’s startup, Micromatrix Medical, Inc. Taylor, a University of Minnesota researcher, has developed a way to create replacement human organs from a patient’s own cells and the company was formed to commercialize the process. Private investors will match the Ag Board’s loan. “Micromatrix has the potential to revolutionize medicine,” Ag Board chair Dan McElroy told Wendy Lee, writing for the Star Tribune. “The state is aggressively pursuing policies to make sure that companies like Miromatrix gain access to crucial funding to help them succeed and stay in Minnesota.”

Investor’s Business Daily reports the US Department of Health and Human Services has subpoenaed DaVita for documents related to its financial relationships with physicians. It’s about time. For most dialysis patients in the US, the choice is between DaVita and Fresenius. Except there’s really no choice at all. Patients go where their nephrologists tell them. In my case, for example, my nephrologist is the partner of the medical director of the DaVita dialysis center in which I’m a patient. Not only will my nephrologist not see me in a Fresenius unit, neither will any of her partners.

Privacy

Longtime tech journalist Dan Gillmor has a new gig writing about media and technology for Salon. In his first real article for the venerable online publication, “Facebook founder sweats it out,” Gillmor provides insightful analysis of Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s repeated ducking of questions about his social media service’s privacy policies at this week’s Wall Street Journal All Things Digital conference. Gillmor links to Matt McKeon’s outstanding visualization of Facebook’s privacy evolution and sums up Facebook’s privacy policy quite effectively when he writes, “The evidence suggests that the company’s policy is to push and push the boundaries, roll back when enough people complain, and then keep pushing.” This becomes especially worrisome, Gillmor writes, when one considers that one of Facebook’s goals is to own personal identity on the web. “If Facebook becomes the default user ID for the Internet, it will have a power that no single company should own, period.”