Wednesday, September 23, 2015

SAR #15266


Voting doesn't count, counting votes does.
Multiple Answers: 1) VW's CEO was shocked to learn they'd been caught. 2) The renegade low-level coder responsible will be fired. 3) The CEO will be spending more time with his family. And 4) No one will go to jail.
Calling Ms. Nightingale: The Seattle Children's Hospital has told 12,000 families that their children need blood tests to see if the hospital managed to infect them with HIV, Hep B & C or lesser infections. Seems that “procedures for sterilizing surgical instruments were not always followed.”
Asked:Are bankers evil or stupid?”
Vengeance: The SEC has successfully concluded its case against two former Fannie Mae executives who, behind their bosses' carefully turned backs, committed multiple instances of criminal fraud “misled investors” about $100 billion in sub-prime loans. The culprits will be fined $35,000... and not go to jail. They also charged then CEO (who got the job when his predecessor was caught fiddling the books) and the two underlings have agreed to rat out their former boss, Chief Executive Daniel Mudd.. A similar suit against folks at Freddie Mac netted a fine of $310,000.
Money Matters: Men at the bottom 20% of the income scale who turned 50 in 1980 had a 27% chance of living to 85, as did those born 30 years later. But the odds for those in the top 20% of the income scale jumped from 45% to 66%.
Conform: A pre-school teacher in the Okemah, OK public school system was forcing a naturally left-handed 4 year old to write with his right hand because “being left-handed is evil”.
Porn O'Graph: Homes Alone.

2 comments:

McMike said...

Re homeownership chart. It occurred to me that declining rate could be a good thing. Inasmuch as homeownership is increasingly a debt trap, a job flexibility trap, and a liquidity trap, along with a means to subject captive "owners" to a variety of fee extraction schemes...

Not that renting your dwelling from a hedge fund is any great shakes either....

McMike said...

It's the era of simulacra. Wherein hospitals are places you go to get sickened or made more sick than you were when you came in. And the best choice for overall health may be to stay away from the medical/pharmaceutical system as much as possible. People in the future may someday look back on this period with a combination of horror and fascination, just as we do towards the period before ours.

Re crapification of VW. A strange sort of era are face indeed, where storied brands willfully undercut their core competency, and put their entire reputation and positioning at risk, alienate their customer base, and do so on a massive scale, over long periods of time. First Toyota, then GM stagger with revelations of short-cuts, incompetence and cover-ups. Who's next? Simulacra again. Cars that are celebrated and sought as environmentally-friendly turn out to be the opposite: highly polluting deliberate frauds. We might also wonder how these companies manage to cover these frauds up for so long, despite the obvious involvement of large numbers of staff and oversight of regulators.

The comparison is not so much to the Queen and a horse race, as it is to Chinese baby formula manufacturers, who added a toxin in order to spoof the protein content. The Chinese, to their credit, put two people to death for that.