Archive for July, 2009
A $100 Million Bonus For One CitiGroup Employee
Kim Peterson: Citigroup is considering paying a $100 million bonus — to one guy.
This is the same Citigroup that received $45 billion in bailout money. The same Citigroup that will soon be 34% owned by the U.S. government. The same Citigroup that has lost 95% of its share value since 2007.
Citigroup is in no position to be awarding bonuses of $10 million — let alone adding another zero to that amount. So why is it mulling such a colossally dumb move? Because the guy demanding it is probably the bank’s most valuable employee.
Enter Andrew Hall. He’s a rock star, a legend among banking circles. He makes a boatload of money for Citigroup as head of Phibro, the bank’s energy-trading unit. The Wall Street Journal calls Phibro a secretive operation, housed in a former Connecticut dairy farm, that “occasionally accounts for a disproportionate chunk of Citigroup income.”
Phibro made so much money…
Florida Court Finds Jack Kerouac’s WIll Was Forged
Decades later, actor Johnny Depp paid half that price for just Kerouac’s raincoat. The scroll manuscript for Kerouac’s On the Road fetched $2.43 million.
Did Kerouac want his in-laws to get all those riches?
In one of the longest-running probate battles in Pinellas court history, a judge on Friday declared the will purportedly signed by Kerouac’s mother — the mom who inherited Kerouac’s belongings at his 1969 death — to be a forgery.
Adventures Of A Would-Be Arms Dealer
“Adventures of a Would-Be Arms Dealer” is an intriguing eight-page comic taking from the annual Small Arms Survey. In a graphic adaptation of real events, the protagonist goes from Rwanda to Cyprus to the Channel Islands in order to set up an illegal arms deal. The task involves sharing some beers with a drunken Rwandan Defense Ministry employee, chatting on his cellphone, and learning that bullets go for 75 cents in Somalia.
Mom Decapitates Baby, Feasts On Brains
AOL News reports:
SAN ANTONIO – The scene was so gruesome investigators could barely speak: A 3½-week-old boy lay dismembered in the bedroom of a single-story house, three of his tiny toes chewed off, his face torn away, his head severed and his brains ripped out.
Officers called to the home early Sunday found the boy’s mother, Otty Sanchez, sitting on the couch with a self-inflicted wound to her chest and her throat partially slashed, screaming “I killed my baby! I killed my baby!” police said. She told officers the devil made her do it, police said.
Sanchez, 33, apparently ate the child’s brain and some other body parts before stabbing herself, McManus said.
Global Warming is the New Religion of First World Urban Elites
Ian Plimer has outraged the ayatollahs of purist environmentalism, the Torquemadas of the doctrine of global warming, and he seems to relish the damnation they heap on him. Plimer is a geologist, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University, and he may well be Australia’s best-known and most notorious academic.
Plimer, you see, is an unremitting critic of “anthropogenic global warming” — man-made climate change to you and me — and the current environmental orthodoxy that if we change our polluting ways, global warming can be reversed.
It is, of course, not new to have a highly qualified scientist saying that global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon with many precedents in history. Many have made the argument, too, that it is rubbish to contend human behaviour is causing the current climate change. And it has often been well argued that it is totally ridiculous to suppose that changes in human behaviour…
Michelle Malkin: The Poor Man’s Ann Coulter
Let’s all make fun of Michelle Malkin. I’ll go first…
College Girl Explains Magick and Crowley
Awesome, we at SittingNow had been wondering what all this ‘Magick’ stuff was about. Now, thanks to this young lady…we know.
Computer Games That Design Themselves
MIT’s Media Lab is building “a game that designs its own AI agents by observing the behavior of humans.” Their ultimate goal? “Collective AI-driven agents that can interact and converse with humans without requiring programming or specialists to hand-craft behavior and dialogue.”
With a similar project underway by a University of California professor, we may soon see radically different games “that can react with human-like adaptability to whatever situation they’re thrust into — creating instant drama and never-ending variations in play.”
Computer games that design themselves
MIT’s Media Lab is building “a game that designs its own AI agents by observing the behavior of humans.” Their ultimate goal? “Collective AI-driven agents that can interact and converse with humans without requiring programming or specialists to hand-craft behavior and dialogue.”
With a similar project underway by a University of California professor, we may soon see radically different games “that can react with human-like adaptability to whatever situation they’re thrust into – creating instant drama and never-ending variations in play.”
Policeman Takes ‘Big Cat’ Video
An off-duty Ministry of Defence police dog handler has taken a video of what he claims is a panther-sized big cat. Pc Swallow said he saw the animal on 30 June while working in the garden at Kildonan Drive, Helensburgh.
He could tell it was not a Labrador, as he first thought, because of the way it was walking, and because its tail was about twice the length that a dog’s would have been.
He said: “My friend’s house is next to the West Highland Line and at one point I looked down and saw what I first thought was a black Labrador on the tracks.It was then I realised that what I was seeing was a big cat and I shouted on my friend to come and have a look. We were stunned.”
Is Goldman Sachs Evil?
Inside Goldman Sachs, America’s most successful, cynical, envied, despised, and (in its view, anyway) misunderstood engine of capitalism.
Thirty floors up in the black-tinted box that is Goldman Sachs headquarters on 85 Broad Street, there is a whiff of panic in the air. The Goldman of legend—pillar of the free market, breeder of super-citizens, object of envy and awe—has vanished. Ever since the bank crossed paths with U.S. taxpayers, getting saved with at least $10 billion in government aid last year and then parlaying that into $5.1 billion in profits in 2009 (so far), the firm has been seen as the ugly essence of capitalism at its most cynical—by Washington, by the public, by the financial press, even by some of its clients. Stalwart voices of Wall Street like the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal have criticized the firm’s undue influence on government and its ruthless pursuit of risky…
Spitzer: Federal Reserve Is ‘A Ponzi Scheme, An Inside Job’
The Federal Reserve — the quasi-autonomous body that controls the US’s money supply — is a “Ponzi scheme” that created “bubble after bubble” in the US economy and needs to be held accountable for its actions, says Eliot Spitzer, the former governor and attorney-general of New York.
In a wide-ranging discussion of the bank bailouts on MSNBC’s Morning Meeting, host Dylan Ratigan described the process by which the Federal Reserve exchanged $13.9 trillion of bad bank debt for cash that it gave to the struggling banks.
Spitzer — who built a reputation as “the Sheriff of Wall Street” for his zealous prosecutions of corporate crime as New York’s attorney-general and then resigned as the state’s governor over revelations he had paid for prostitutes — seemed to agree with Ratigan that the bank bailout amounts to “America’s greatest theft and cover-up ever.”
Advocating in favor of a House bill to audit the Federal Reserve,…
Copyright Industries By the Numbers
Interesting stats compiled by Publishers Weekly, the U.S. book trade’s publication of record.
$837.3 billion: Value added* by copyright industries to GDP (Gross Domestic Product), 2006
$889.1 billion: Value added by copyright industries to GDP, 2007
6.4: Percentage of GDP generated by copyright industries, 2007
7.2: Percentage growth of copyright industries, 2007
2.0: Percentage growth in GDP, 2007
5.5 million: Number of people employed by copyright industries, 2006
5.6 million: Number of people employed by copyright industries, 2007
$73,554: Average annual salary of workers in copyright industries, 2007
$56,817: Average annual salary of all American workers, 2007
$116 billion: Copyright sales in foreign markets, 2006
$117 billion: Copyright sales in foreign markets, 2007
$95.6 billion: Aircraft sales in foreign markets, 2007
$56.8 billion: Car sales in foreign markets, 2007
*“Value added” reflects the economic contribution of labor and capital of a particular industry.
Copyright industries include book publishing, software publishing, film and DVD production, TV production, and music and sound recording production.
Warren Buffett’s “Secret Millionaire’s Club” (Video)
Clip from “Secret Millionaire’s Club,” an online animated series in which Warren Buffett teaches children about investing. The web series will debut on AOL in the fall.
Blue M&Ms ‘Mend Spinal Injuries’
The food dye that gives blue M&Ms their colour can help mend spinal injuries, researchers have claimed after tests on rats.
The compound Brilliant Blue G blocks a chemical that kills healthy spinal cord cells around the damaged area — an event that often causes more irreversible damage than the original injury.
BBG not only reduced the size of the lesion but also improved the recovery of motor skills, the rodent tests showed.
Those treated with BBG were later able to walk, although with a limp. Rats that did not receive the BBG solution never regained the ability to walk.
On the downside, the treatment causes the skin to temporarily turn bright blue and BBG needs to be injected soon after the trauma. The test injections were given within 15 minutes.
The new findings by researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Centre in New York build on work reported five years ago by the…
When Cheap Is No Bargain
Ellen Ruppel Shell, a journalism professor at Boston University, once enjoyed a bargain as much as the rest of us, maybe more. “Low price is an end and a victory in itself, a way to wrestle control from the baffling mystery that is retail,” she writes in her introduction to “Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture” (Penguin, 320 pages, $25.95).
But, as she discovered in her reporting, there are problems with the cheap underwear, cheap watches, cheap shoes and cheap stuff in its numerous iterations. Craftsmanship, once prized, has lost its appeal and value, she writes. Good-paying jobs related to skilled labor are harder to find. Who needs skilled furniture workers when you can buy Ikea bookcases for $80?
With many consumers trying to reduce expenses, Ms. Shell’s broad message — bargains aren’t what they seem — appears contrarian. But her argument that Americans need to be more discerning about what…
Pirate Party’s Copyright Reform Cannon Could Sink Copyleft
Free Software Foundation (FSF) founder Richard Stallman published a statement last week expressing concern about the Swedish Pirate Party’s copyright reform platform. The party’s ambitious goals for copyright term reduction would blast holes in copyleft licensing, a serious blow to Stallman’s Free Software movement.
The GNU General Public License (GPL), a widely-used open source software license that was originally written by Stallman, exploits fundamental characteristics of copyright law in order to guarantee that the freedoms granted by the license are extended to derivative works. The underlying legal principles that facilitate copyleft cannot function without conventional copyright.
Open source software licenses grant recipients the freedom to study, modify, run, and redistribute software. Copyleft licenses are a category of open source software licenses that require linked code to be distributed under the same terms, meaning that copyleft code generally can’t be used in proprietary software. This distinguishes copyleft licenses from more permissive open source…
U.S. Army designs killer robot soldier “ethics” software
The U.S. Army is currently developing robot software to provide “ethical guidance” for the killer soldier robots of the future!
With no fear, anger, or recklessness, robot soldiers could reduce non-combatant casualties, even if that means disobeying a commanding officer. “In our prototype ethical governor (and in the design itself) we do provide the robot with the right to refuse an order it deems unethical,” reports Ronald C. Arkin, the director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory commissioned by the army. “It must provide some explanation as to why it has refused such an order.
“With some reluctance we have engineered a human override capability into the system, but one which forces the operator to explicitly assume responsibility for any ethical infractions that might result.”
