“Movies are for entertainment. Western Union is for messages.”
Jack Warner
Oh — you mean that 55 billion
Lovely story on BBC News.
Germany has found itself 55bn euros ($78bn; £48bn) richer after discovering an accounting error at Hypo Real Estate (HRE), the troubled bank it nationalised in 2009.
The country now expects its ratio of debt to GDP to be 81.1% for 2011, 2.6 percentage points lower than previously forecast, the finance ministry said.
The miscalculation was at the so-called bad bank of HRE, FMS Wertmanagement.
The discovery was made earlier this month but only announced on Friday.
FMS will contribute about 161bn euros to Germany’s debt this year, compared with 216.5bn in 2010.
How to torpedo a Presidential candidate
Terrific analysis by the Political Editor of the Irish Times of how Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness comprehensively destroyed Sean Gallagher, the front-runner in the Irish presidential election, and handed the election to Michael D. Higgins.
The critical passage in the TV debate is here.
Rage against the machine
Good editorial in this week’s Economist. Excerpt:
To the man-in-the-street, all this smacks of a system that has failed. Neither of the main Western models has much political credit at the moment. European social democracy promised voters benefits that societies can no longer afford. The Anglo-Saxon model claimed that free markets would create prosperity; many voters feel instead that they got a series of debt-fuelled asset bubbles and an economy that was rigged in favour of a financial elite, who took all the proceeds in the good times and then left everybody else with no alternative other than to bail them out. To use one of the protesters’ better slogans, the 1% have gained at the expense of the 99%.
If the grievances are more legitimate and broader than previous rages against the machine, then the dangers are also greater. Populist anger, especially if it has no coherent agenda, can go anywhere in times of want. The 1930s provided the most terrifying example. A more recent (and less frightening) case study is the tea party. The justified fury of America’s striving middle classes against a cumbersome state has in practice translated into a form of obstructive nihilism: nothing to do with taxes can get through Washington, including tax reform.
Quote of the day
“He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.”
John McCarthy
John McCarthy RIP
John McCarthy has died. Good obit by Jack Schofield in the Guardian tonight.
In 1955, the computer scientist John McCarthy, who has died aged 84, coined the term “artificial intelligence”, or AI. His pioneering work in AI – which he defined as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines" – and robotics included the development of the programming language Lisp in 1958. This was the second such high-level language, after Fortran, and was based on the idea of computing using symbolic expressions rather than numbers.
McCarthy was also the first to propose a “time-sharing” model of computing. In 1961, he suggested that if his approach were adopted, “computing may some day be organised as a public utility, just as the telephone system is a public utility,” and that that utility could become the basis of a significant new industry. This is the way that ‘cloud computing’ is being sold today.
However, when obliged to choose between the time-sharing work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and AI, he chose AI. He said: “The ultimate effort is to make computer programs that can solve problems and achieve goals in the world as well as humans. However, many people involved in particular research areas are much less ambitious.”
Blue yonder
Jobs for the boy
Guess what thudded through my letterbox today. All 627 pages of Walter Isaacson’s Biography
That takes care of the next two days.
After the shower
Wonderful light after a Liverpool shower. Taken with an iPhone4.
What’s this? — the Digger admitting a mistake? Surely not?
From The Register.
War-weary News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch made one concession at the company’s high drama AGM on Friday, stating the MySpace acquisition was a “huge mistake.”
The sorry tale of the social network’s digital demise at the hands of NewsCorp began with the purchase of MySpace for $US580 million in 2005. “We paid $US600 million. We could have sold it for $US6 billion a month later,” Murdoch told shareholders.
“I made a huge mistake. We then proceeded to mismanage it in every possible way,” he said. But Murdoch then threw in the caustic barb, “all of the people concerned with it are no longer with the company.”
This isn’t strictly true as former AOL CEO Jon Miller, who joined News Corp in March 2009 as its great digital savant, is still apparently in Camp Murdoch as CEO of digital media and chief digital officer.
He was brought in to – among other digital super charging duties – turn the ailing fortunes of MySpace around. Despite ousting a lot of bodies and a couple of CEOs, it was pretty clear that this feat wasn’t going to happen. He then helped shift the asset into the hands of Justin Timberlake and Specific Media for $US35 million earlier this year.