A depressing description of how Wall Street bought the Congress and the White House for pennies on the dollar:
…the real bonus turned out to be Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, who came up through the ranks as part of the bipartisan Robert Rubin–Hank Paulson–Citigroup–Goldman Sachs cabal. Geithner, a government-and-academe man from way back, never really worked on Wall Street, though he once was offered a gig as CEO of Citigroup, which apparently thought he did an outstanding job as chairman of the New York Fed, where one of his main tasks was regulating Citigroup — until it collapsed into the yawning suckhole of its own cavernous ineptitude, at which point Geithner’s main job became shoveling tens of billions of federal dollars into Citigroup, in an ingeniously structured investment that allowed the government to buy a 27 percent share in the bank, for which it paid more than the entire market value of the bank. If you can’t figure out why you’d pay 100-plus percent of a bank’s value for 27 percent of it, then you just don’t understand high finance or high politics.
Michael Shermer may be right, but he certainly doesn’t make the case for it. It just looks like an unsupported assertion to me. And he seems to conflate AI with the Singularity.
What would happen if all of the stories in the Times – or the Washington Post, or your local newspaper or television news – were subject to the sort of expert scrutiny as this Luo article, in a given day or week? What percentage of reporting would we discover is marginally biased, seriously slanted, or even fabricated?
I strongly suspect that the resulting scrutiny would reveal a dark and ugly secret that the media isn’t remotely interested in reporting the news, it’s interested in shaping the news, and your perception of the world.
Yes, and a full decade into the blogosphere, they still often get away with it.
This is the first time that I’ve seen the aircraft called a “Stratolaunch.” I wonder if the correspondent knows something we don’t, or is just making a false inference? Also, I’m a little surprised that the editors don’t know the difference between a hanger and a hangar. Unless it’s a British spelling.
