Today’s Links: August 17, 2012

OPINION

ROB COX and RICHARD BEALES: “Since When Does a Huge Hedge Fund Need Subsidies?”
“Since when does a huge hedge fund need subsidies? Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates, the biggest in the world with $130 billion under management, may get up to $115 million in help from the U.S. state of Connecticut to build a new headquarters. Dalio’s firm, which made him nearly $4 billion last year according to Absolute Return, hardly seems a needy recipient of aid. And on the surface Governor Dannel Malloy has far more pressing priorities. Connecticut recently needed a budget that cut healthcare spending for the poor and tapped funds that had been set aside for other purposes in order to help close a $200 million deficit.”

AMITY SHLAES: “Maine Lobster Tastes Best With Dash of Supply Side”
“This year’s lobster crop has been enormous, probably because of warmer water temperatures this past winter and spring. For New England lobstermen, supply is now outstripping demand. As a result, lobster processors, most of which are in Canada, are paying very low prices to fishermen — $2.50 or $3 a pound, compared with the $4 a pound the lobstermen want. That’s hitting Canadian lobstermen hard. Because of regulations that aim to sustain lobster supply — which seem pretty unnecessary now — the Canadians are permitted to harvest lobsters for only part of the summer, unlike their U.S. counterparts. They thus need to earn more per pound.”

JACQUI CHENG: “Three Years Later, Deleting Your Photos on Facebook Now Actually Works”
“We first began investigating Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and Twitter in 2009 to see how fast our drunken-escapades-slash-cat-photos disappeared from the Internet after we deleted them from each of the social networks. […] Though it took mere seconds for Twitter and Flickr to remove the photos from their content delivery networks (CDNs) after deletion from the site, MySpace and Facebook weren’t so quick. MySpace got around to deleting the photos from its CDN several months later, but Facebook ended up being the embarrassing holdout.”

NEWS

RUSSIA – Anti-Putin rock band members sentenced to 2 years in prison for hooliganism
“A Moscow judge has sentenced each of three members of the provocative punk band Pussy Riot to two years in prison on hooliganism charges following a trial that has drawn international outrage.”

CHINA – Big story you missed
“Chinese officials handed Tang Hui, 39, an 18-month labor sentence ‘for protesting that the men who raped and prostituted her young daughter had been treated too leniently,’ the Guardian reported. Hui’s case refueled public desire for an overhaul of China’s 1950s-era ‘re-education through labor’ program.”

FOOD – Activists to take on Capitol Hill: Lay off our milk, lemonade
“The Raw Milk freedom Riders and Lemonade Freedom Day, two separate groups that each want the government out of their transactions, are unifying their voices, saying that together they can drive home a message that the government should butt out.”