1 Scotland ‘on cusp
of making history’ (BBC) Scotland
is on the "cusp of making history" by voting for independence, the
country's first minister has said. Alex
Salmond described the referendum as a "process of national
empowerment". He also called for an inquiry into what he said was the
leaking of sensitive market data by the Treasury involving RBS plans to move
its headquarters to London if voters choose independence.
Five banks have said they might move operations out of
Scotland, while John Lewis and Asda warned
prices may rise. RBS confirmed it would relocate its registered headquarters in
the event of a "Yes" vote, insisting that the move would not impact
jobs or operations. Mr Salmond accused the UK government of deliberately
leaking the news about RBS to news outlets before the bank made the
announcement officially.
He said it
was an attempt of scaremongering aimed at damaging the independence campaign
and called for an investigation into civil servants leaking market sensitive
information. However, former prime minister Gordon Brown was among
pro-unionists who questioned Mr Salmond's insistence that the warnings were
just scaremongering. "You can dismiss some of the warnings some of the
time, but you can't dismiss all of the warnings all of the time," Mr Brown
said.
2 The digital wallet revolution
(Edward Castronova & Joshua A T Fairfield in The New York Times) Apple’s digital wallet, if widely adopted, could usher in
a new era of ease and convenience. But the really exciting part is the
fast-emerging future that it points toward, in which virtual assets of all
sorts — traditional currencies, but also Bitcoin, airline miles, cellphone
minutes — are interchangeable, opening up enormous purchasing power for
consumers and creating tough challenges for governments around the world.
If you earned points
from Amazon, only you could use them, and you could exchange them for dollars
only within the Amazon marketplace. And, up to now, the only currencies you
could use everywhere in an economy were state-issued currencies, like the
dollar. That distinction is eroding: After all, the value of a currency lies in
what you can buy with it, not in the fact that a government says it’s worth
something.
Frictionless exchange
is a killer app. The revolution is what comes next: an exchange that connects
and trades these different stores of value to find the most cost-efficient one
to use, both within your wallet and between wallet users, worldwide. The idea
is that you can buy anything, with anything. The wallet will find the best deal
and execute it. In so doing, it will ignore the historical and cultural
differences between dollars, points, coins and virtual property. It’s all bits
anyway.
This sort of digital
wallet raises difficult problems for regulators, who rely on institutional
intermediaries like banks as the point for monitoring transactions. But a
digital wallet can be a phone app; just like the cash in your pocket, it
doesn’t require accounts with any intermediary. A wallet app can be written by
anyone, downloaded by anyone and secured and maintained by everyone. In this
huge river of money, there is no narrow channel from which the state can divert
flow into its own fields.
Consider the tax
implications. If you get caught cheating on your taxes and flee the country,
the government could compel your bank to freeze your assets and cough up the
money. But what if there’s no bank? One concern that doesn’t apply is
transparency. Digital wallets don’t hide trades or encourage criminal
transactions. The critical point is that, with a digital wallet, a government
or bank can see the trades, but it will be harder to compel or block them.
As exchange becomes
less costly to perform, it becomes more costly to regulate. That means
different things depending on your politics. You might celebrate the freedom
the technology could bring to the 2.5 billion people in the world without
adequate access to financial services, or you might worry about abuse by
criminals. One thing that will not work is pretending that these technologies —
and their revolutionary implications — don’t exist.
3
Power of the thank-you note (Kim Thompson in San Francisco Chronicle) Do you think there’s still value in sending thank-you
notes? Interviewers frequently struggle with choosing the best job candidate
because there typically is more than one candidate who matches the job
description. Sometimes the smallest aspect of an interview is what gets you the
job offer. For example, someone once told me that several weeks after he was
hired, his new boss told him the reason he was hired was, “of the 14 candidates
I interviewed, you were the only one who sent a thank-you note the next day.”
It may seem like a small
thing, but a well-written thank-you note can make a big impression. And, it’s
one more reminder of who you are, your skills and the benefits you can bring to
the employer.
Here are some tips to
use when writing a thank-you note: Express appreciation for the interview, and
convey what you had in common. Now is the time to distinguish your background from
other candidates. Approach your letter as you would when building rapport
during a conversation. Reinforce key skills you have that match the employer’s
needs, sending a clear message that you have the desired qualifications.
Confirm or correct any
concerns that might have surfaced in the interview, if needed. Close by
expressing your interest in working for the company.
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