Terrible journalism

The worst journalism is hyped and obscure about the facts. This is an example. It spends first nine-tenths of the article whining about this terrible amendment which will make Sarbanes-Oxley defunct - but when you get to the end, you find that the amendment which the House committee "voted to exempt those companies worth less than $75 million, and asked for a study on whether companies worth less than $250 million should be allowed to stop complying with the law". These are tiny microcap stocks. Yes, most of them are dirty and we need more effective regulation on them. But it's not hard to find the dirty ones, and we shouldn't be completely stifling competition.

Unfortunately one of my favorite bloggers has repeated the hype, as he took Floyd Norris at his word that the amendment would "allow most companies to never comply with the law". Now, maybe most companies are worth less than $75 million, but they aren't what we're worried about. It's possible that there are other things to the amendment, but unfortunately it's impossible to locate; THOMAS only shows the full-text introduced in the House. GovTrack, which I also use, mentions that the bill text was revised in one of its section, but doesn't show the amendment.

Privacy law

Since I read Facebook and Xmarks terms of use a while ago, I noticed this story on websites' compliance with privacy law with interest. I don't have time to read the actual article right now.