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Javier E

Inside the final seconds of a deadly Tesla Autopilot crash - Washington Post - 0 views

  • In a Riverside, Calif., courtroom last month in a lawsuit involving another fatal crash where Autopilot was allegedly involved, a Tesla attorney held a mock steering wheel before the jury and emphasized that the driver must always be in control.Autopilot “is basically just fancy cruise control,” he said.
  • Tesla CEO Elon Musk has painted a different reality, arguing that his technology is making the roads safer: “It’s probably better than a person right now,” Musk said of Autopilot during a 2016 conference call with reporters.
  • Musk made a similar assertion about a more sophisticated form of Autopilot called Full Self-Driving on an earnings call in July. “Now, I know I’m the boy who cried FSD,” he said. “But man, I think we’ll be better than human by the end of this year.”
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  • NHTSA said it has an “active investigation” of Autopilot. “NHTSA generally does not comment on matters related to open investigations,” NHTSA spokeswoman Veronica Morales said in a statement. In 2021, the agency adopted a rule requiring carmakers such as Tesla to report crashes involving their driver-assistance systems.Beyond the data collection, though, there are few clear legal limitations on how this type of advanced driver-assistance technology should operate and what capabilities it should have.
  • “Tesla has decided to take these much greater risks with the technology because they have this sense that it’s like, ‘Well, you can figure it out. You can determine for yourself what’s safe’ — without recognizing that other road users don’t have that same choice,” former NHTSA administrator Steven Cliff said in an interview.“If you’re a pedestrian, [if] you’re another vehicle on the road,” he added, “do you know that you’re unwittingly an object of an experiment that’s happening?”
  • Banner researched Tesla for years before buying a Model 3 in 2018, his wife, Kim, told federal investigators. Around the time of his purchase, Tesla’s website featured a video showing a Tesla navigating the curvy roads and intersections of California while a driver sits in the front seat, hands hovering beneath the wheel.The video, recorded in 2016, is still on the site today.“The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons,” the video says. “He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.”
  • In a different case involving another fatal Autopilot crash, a Tesla engineer testified that a team specifically mapped the route the car would take in the video. At one point during testing for the video, a test car crashed into a fence, according to Reuters. The engineer said in a deposition that the video was meant to show what the technology could eventually be capable of — not what cars on the road could do at the time.
  • While the video concerned Full Self-Driving, which operates on surface streets, the plaintiffs in the Banner case argue Tesla’s “marketing does not always distinguish between these systems.”
  • Not only is the marketing misleading, plaintiffs in several cases argue, the company gives drivers a long leash when deciding when and how to use the technology. Though Autopilot is supposed to be enabled in limited situations, it sometimes works on roads it’s not designed for. It also allows drivers to go short periods without touching the wheel and to set cruising speeds well above posted speed limits.
  • Identifying semi-trucks is a particular deficiency that engineers have struggled to solve since Banner’s death, according to a former Autopilot employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
  • Tesla complicated the matter in 2021 when it eliminated radar sensors from its cars, The Post previously reported, making vehicles such as semi-trucks appear two-dimensional and harder to parse.
  • “If a system turns on, then at least some users will conclude it must be intended to work there,” Koopman said. “Because they think if it wasn’t intended to work there, it wouldn’t turn on.”Andrew Maynard, a professor of advanced technology transitions at Arizona State University, said customers probably just trust the technology.“Most people just don’t have the time or ability to fully understand the intricacies of it, so at the end they trust the company to protect them,” he said.
criscimagnael

Nepal Plane Crash: All 22 Bodies Are Recovered - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Rescue workers recovered 22 bodies on Monday and Tuesday after a nearly 48-hour operation to reach and assess the site of a plane crash in the rocky heights of the Himalayas, according to officials in Nepal.
  • The flight normally takes about 30 minutes, but the plane went down in bad weather with 13 Nepalis, four Hindu pilgrims from India and two German trekkers on board.
  • “No one is alive,” said Narendra Shahi, an international mountain guide, who was sent to the crash site as part of the rescue operation. “The plane has crashed into pieces. It’s so heartbreaking.”
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  • Nepali officials on Monday said the cause of the crash was not immediately clear. The most likely possibility, they said, was that the plane crashed into a mountain after it lost contact with air traffic controllers while navigating in particularly bad weather.
  • To reach remote mountainous places like Jomsom, residents and visitors rely on small twin-engine planes. The route from Pokhara to Jomsom is considered one of the riskiest in Nepal because planes have to fly through narrow valleys, where visibility is often a challenge. Crashes are more common than usual because of frequent bad weather, rocky terrain and aging plane fleets.
Javier E

Looking Back at the Economic Crash of 2008 - The New York Times - 0 views

  • e has persisted and produced an intelligent explanation of the mechanisms that produced the crisis and the response to it. We continue to live with the consequences of both today.
  • By 2007, many were warning about a dangerous fragility in the system. But they worried about America’s gargantuan government deficits and debt
  • it was not a Chinese sell-off of American debt that triggered the crash, but rather, as Tooze writes, a problem “fully native to Western capitalism — a meltdown on Wall Street driven by toxic securitized subprime mortgages.”
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  • Tooze calls it a problem in “Western capitalism” intentionally. It was not just an American problem.
  • One of the great strengths of Tooze’s book is to demonstrate the deeply intertwined nature of the European and American financial systems.
  • In 2006, European banks generated a third of America’s riskiest privately issued mortgage-backed securities. By 2007, two-thirds of commercial paper issued was sponsored by a European financial entity.
  • “Between 2001 and 2006,” Tooze writes, “Greece, Finland, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, the U.K., France, Ireland and Spain all experienced real estate booms more severe than those that energized the United States.”
  • while the crisis may have been caused in both America and Europe, it was solved largely by Washington. Partly, this reflected the post-Cold War financial system, in which the dollar had become the hyperdominant global currency and, as a result, the Federal Reserve had truly become the world’s central bank.
  • therein lies the unique feature of the crash of 2008. Unlike that of 1929, it was not followed by a Great Depression. It was not so much the crisis as the rescue and its economic, political and social consequences that mattered most
  • The Fed acted aggressively and also in highly ingenious ways, becoming a guarantor of last resort to the battered balance sheets of American but also European banks. About half the liquidity support the Fed provided during the crisis went to European banks
  • Before the rescue and even in its early stages, the global economy was falling into a bottomless abyss. In the first months after the panic on Wall Street, world trade and industrial production fell at least as fast as they did during the first months of the Great Depression. Global capital flows declined by a staggering 90 percent
  • But Tooze also convincingly shows that the European Central Bank mismanaged things from the start
  • China, with its own gigantic stimulus, created an oasis of growth in an otherwise stagnant global economy.
  • The rescue worked better than almost anyone imagined
  • The governing elite did not anticipate the crisis — as few elites have over hundreds of years of capitalism. But once it happened, many of them — particularly in America — acted quickly and intelligently, and as a result another Great Depression was averted. The system worked
  • The Federal Reserve, with some assistance from other central banks, arrested this decline. The Obama fiscal stimulus also helped to break the fall.
  • On the left, the entire episode discredited the market-friendly policies of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Gerhard Schroeder, disheartening the center-left and emboldening those who want more government intervention in the economy
  • On the right, it became a rallying cry against bailouts and the Fed, buoying an imaginary free-market alternative to government intervention. Unlike in the 1930s, when the libertarian strategy was tried and only deepened the Depression, in the last 10 years it has been possible for the right to argue against the bailouts, secure in the knowledge that their proposed policies will never actually be implemented.
  • The crash brought together many forces that were around anyway — stagnant wages, widening inequality, anger about immigration and, above all, a deep distrust of elites and government — and supercharged them. The result has been a wave of nationalism, protectionism and populism in the West today.
  • confirmation of this can be found in the one major Western country that did not have a financial crisis and has little populism in its wake — Canada.
  • No government handled the crisis better than that of the United States, which acted in a surprisingly bipartisan fashion in late 2008 and almost seamlessly coordinated policy between the outgoing Bush and incoming Obama administrations. And yet, the backlash to the bailouts has produced the most consequential result in the United States.
  • experts are considering the new vulnerabilities of a global economy
  • we are confronting a quite different problem — an erratic, unpredictable United States led by a president who seems inclined to redo or even scrap the basic architecture of the system that America has painstakingly built since 1945. How will the world handle this unexpected development? What will be its outcome? This is the current crisis that we will live through and that historians will soon analyze.
anniina03

Boeing 737 Plane Crash in Iran Prompts Conflicting Statements - The New York Times - 0 views

  • A Ukrainian airliner carrying at least 176 people crashed shortly after takeoff from Tehran on Wednesday, killing everyone on board. It was unclear what caused the disaster, but the aircraft, a Boeing 737-800, went down amid an escalating, violent conflict between the United States and Iran.
  • Though the evidence remained sketchy, aviation experts said that what was known indicated that the plane could have been attacked.
  • Experts say that is an extremely rare sequence of events, even in a catastrophic accident — and all the more unexpected in a relatively new plane, built in 2016, of a model with a very good safety record.
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  • “Planes just don’t blow up in mid air,” said Richard Aboulafia, vice president for analysis at Teal Group, an aviation consulting firm. “It doesn’t work like that.”
  • Iranian news organizations tied to the government referred to technical problems with the plane, but they did not elaborate or cite evidence.
  • An airliner should be able to fly even if one engine fails. An “uncontained” engine failure, in which parts of the engine disintegrate, can spray shrapnel that damages and even destroys the plane, but such events are rare.
  • After the crash, Ukraine’s embassy in Iran initially issued a statement ruling out terrorism or a rocket attack as a cause of the crash. But the statement was later removed from the embassy’s website and replaced by one saying it was too early to draw any conclusions.
  • After an accident, the “black boxes” are often sent to the plane’s maker for analysis, but Iran would not send the flight data recorders to Boeing, an American company, Mr. Abedzadeh said in an interview with Mehr. “We will not give the black box to the manufacturer and the Americans,” Mehr quoted him as saying.
  • President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said he had ordered the prosecutor general to open a criminal investigation into the crash and that the country’s entire civil aviation fleet would be checked.
  • On Tuesday, the Federal Aviation Administration barred American airliners from flying over Iran, citing a risk that commercial planes would be mistaken for military aircraft. Several non-American carriers rerouted flights on Wednesday to avoid Iraq and Iran, according to Flightradar24.
  • The airline said it was canceling flights to Tehran indefinitely and promised a full investigation into the causes of the crash, involving officials from Ukraine, Iran and Boeing.
  • The airline began in the 1990s as newly independent Ukraine’s state flag carrier but was subsequently privatized. Its website calls the business a “public private entity.”
sarahbalick

Germany train crash: Several killed near Bavarian town of Bad Aibling - BBC News - 0 views

  • Germany train crash: Several killed near Bavarian town of Bad Aibling
  • At least nine people were killed a
  • nd scores more injured, police say, after two passenger trains collided in the German state of Bavaria.
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  • The trains' operator said both trains had partially derailed and were wedged into each other.
  • The drivers of both trains and two train guards were among those killed, regional broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk said, quoting police.
  • He added: "The site is on a bend so we have to surmise that both train drivers had no visual contact before the crash and therefore crashed into each other largely without braking."
  • Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann told the same conference it was "difficult to comprehend" how such a crash could happen given the amount of investment in railway safety following previous train accidents.
redavistinnell

No evidence of terrorism in Sinai plane crash, Egypt says | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • No evidence of terrorism in Sinai plane crash, Egypt says
  • Egypt’s chief investigator, Ayman al-Muqaddam, said the search for wreckage had extended more than 10 miles (16km) from the main crash site. He said investigators had analysed the plane’s computers and were currently checking the technical details and repairs carried out on the Airbus A321 since it was built in 1997
  • The civil aviation ministry in Cairo said a preliminary report into the Metrojet crash that killed 224 people on 31 October had been completed on Sunday. Nearly all the victims were Russian holidaymakers returning from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
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  • Last month, the federal security service’s director, Alexander Bortnikov, said an improvised bomb with the force of up to 1kg of TNT blew up onboard the plane, and traces of explosives had been found in the plane debris.
  • The country’s tourism industry has been badly hit over the years by the fallout from terror attacks. Holiday flights from Russia and Britain to its top winter sun resort will not resume until 2016, leaving it virtually empty for what should be peak season, and overall tourist revenues are expected to fall by at least 10% this year.
cdavistinnell

Russian plane crash kills all 71 people on board - CNN - 0 views

  • The crew of the Saratov Airlines flight that crashed near Moscow on Sunday didn't report any problems before the plane crashed into snowy terrain, killing all 71 people on board, state-run media said.
  • The Antonov An-148 aircraft was carrying 65 passengers and six crew members, the Russian news agency Interfax said
  • The cause of the crash remains uncertain. The Investigative Committee of Russia said officials have launched a criminal investigation, as all possible causes are being explored.
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  • Sunday's disaster ends a 440-day streak without a commercial passenger jet fatality -- the longest stretch in modern aviation history.
ethanshilling

Tennessee Plane Crash: Gwen Shamblin and 6 Others Presumed Dead - The New York Times - 0 views

  • All seven people aboard a small plane were presumed dead after it crashed shortly after takeoff into a lake outside Nashville on Saturday, including an actor who played Tarzan and the leader of a Christian weight loss group, the authorities said.
  • The plane, a Cessna Citation 501, crashed into Percy Priest Lake near Smyrna, Tenn., at about 11 a.m. local time, shortly after it had taken off from Smyrna Airport, south of Nashville.
  • Before noon on Sunday, crews found several parts of the plane as well as human remains in a debris field that was about half a mile wide, officials said.
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  • William Lara, also known as Joe Lara, played Tarzan in the movie “Tarzan in Manhattan” and in the television series “Tarzan: The Epic Adventures,” according to the website IMDb.
  • In a statement posted on Sunday on the church’s website, the congregation said it appreciated prayers for the seven fellowship leaders who were lost in the crash.
  • At a news conference on Saturday night, Capt. Joshua Sanders of Rutherford County Fire Rescue said that after searching the lake since 11 a.m., “we have transitioned from a rescue effort to a recovery effort.”
  • The crews at the scene were “no longer looking for live victims at this point,” Captain Sanders said. “We are now recovering as much as we can from the crash site.”
criscimagnael

China Eastern Pilots Were Experienced, Adding to Mystery of Crash - The New Y... - 0 views

  • The pilot of the China Eastern Airlines flight that crashed in southern China with 132 people aboard was an industry veteran with more than 6,000 hours of flying time.
  • His co-pilot was even more experienced, having flown since the early days of China’s post-Mao era, training on everything from Soviet-model biplanes to newer Boeing models.
  • How they piloted the Boeing 737 will be closely examined as investigators seek to explain what is probably China’s worst air disaster in more than a decade. Experts have said it is unlikely that anyone survived the crash.
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  • On Thursday, rescuers said they had found engine components, part of a wing and other “important debris” as they searched the mountainside in a rural part of the Guangxi region for a fourth day.
  • Mr. Zhang, who was born in 1963, was one of China’s most experienced pilots,
  • A day earlier, the workers had found a black box, believed to be the cockpit voice recorder, which could provide investigators with crucial details. Officials said it was damaged but that its memory unit was relatively intact. The plane’s second black box, which records flight data, has yet to be recovered.
  • Their past performance was “very good,” Sun Shiying, the chairman of China Eastern Airlines’ Yunnan branch, said on Wednesday. When reached by phone, an airline representative declined to answer further questions about the crew.
  • At the main crash site, a state broadcaster showed the workers digging with shovels around a large piece of wreckage that the reporter described as a wing, which bore part of the China Eastern logo and was perched on a steep, barren slope fringed by dense thickets of now-flattened bamboo. Heavy rains had left the roads slick and inundated the earth with muddy pools.
  • Over his career as a commercial pilot with China Yunnan, which later merged with China Eastern, Mr. Zhang flew four different models of aircraft and accumulated 31,769 hours of flight experience.
  • The airline commonly paired young pilots with older pilots, and Mr. Zhang had mentored more than 100, CAAC News said. Mr. Yang was one of them.
  • Experts said that investigating the crash, which involved a sudden dive from cruising altitude in good weather, would require a close look at both the aircraft and the pilots, including the possibility that the plane was deliberately brought down. But they stressed that the cause was far from determined.
  • “Certainly an intentional downing is always a part of any investigation, and especially with this particular flight profile,” said Hassan Shahidi, chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit organization created after World War II to promote aviation safety. But he cautioned that it was “premature to jump onto any possibilities.”
  • “If the captain were intending to commit suicide, they’d have to overcome the other flight crew members,” Mr. Marks said.
anonymous

Indonesian plane crashes after take-off with 62 aboard | Reuters - 0 views

  • A Sriwijaya Air plane crashed into the sea on Saturday minutes after taking off from Indonesia’s capital Jakarta on a domestic flight with 62 people on board, and their fate was not known.
  • The nearly 27-year-old Boeing 737-500 was much older than Boeing’s problem-plagued 737 MAX model, one of which crashed off Jakarta in late 2018, killing all 189 people aboard the Lion Air flight. Older 737 models are widely flown and do not have the system implicated in the MAX safety crisis.
  • There were no immediate clues on what may have caused the sudden descent and safety experts stress most air accidents are caused by a cocktail of factors that can take months to establish.
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  • 62 people had been aboard Flight SJ 182, including 12 crew.
rachelramirez

EgyptAir Flight Believed to Have Crashed at Sea; Egypt Cites Possible Terrorism - The N... - 0 views

  • EgyptAir Flight Believed to Have Crashed at Sea; Egypt Cites Possible Terrorism
  • the Greek authorities said debris believed to be from the wreckage had been found at a site around 205 nautical miles southeast of Crete and 190 nautical miles south of the Greek island of Karpathos.
  • Mr. Fathi said. Still, he said, “if you analyze the situation properly,” the possibility of “having a terror attack is higher than the possibility” of technical failure.
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  • At 2:37 a.m., shortly after entering Egyptian airspace, the plane made a 90-degree turn to the left and then a full circle to the right, first plunging to 15,000 feet from 37,000 feet and then to 9,000 feet
  • 30 were from Egypt, 15 from France, two from Iraq and one each from Algeria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Chad, Kuwait, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Sudan.
  • American and European officials have expressed concerns about security gaps in North African airports. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • Intelligence analysts who monitor jihadist websites and social media said there had been no claims of responsibility by terrorist groups.
  • At 4:26 a.m. — nearly two hours after the last radar contact — the plane emitted a signal, although it was not clear whether that was an emergency distress signal sent by a crew member or an automated signal from the plane’s onboard computers.
  • Egypt has come under criticism in the past for its lack of transparency in aviation accidents. In 1999, an EgyptAir flight crashed into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after takeoff from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, killing all 217 on board.
katyshannon

Islamic State says 'Schweppes bomb' used to bring down Russian plane | Reuters - 0 views

  • Islamic State's official magazine carried a photo on Wednesday of a Schweppes soft drink can it said was used to make an improvised bomb that brought down a Russian airliner over Egypt's Sinai Peninsula last month, killing all 224 people on board.
  • The photo showed a can of Schweppes Gold soft drink and what appeared to be a detonator and switch on a blue background, three simple components that if genuine are likely to cause concern for airline safety officials worldwide.
  • "The divided Crusaders of the East and West thought themselves safe in their jets as they cowardly bombarded the Muslims of the Caliphate," the English language Dabiq magazine said in reference to Russia and the West. "And so revenge was exacted upon those who felt safe in the cockpits."Western governments have said the Airbus A321 operated by Metrojet was likely brought down by a bomb and Moscow confirmed on Tuesday it had reached the same conclusion, but the Egyptian government said it has still not found evidence of criminal action.
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  • Explosives experts said it was feasible the device shown in the photo could bring down a plane, depending on where it was located and the density of explosives in the soft drink can. The most vulnerable locations include the fuel line, the cockpit or anywhere close to the fuselage skin.
  • Experts added that the photo could also provide a key clue in tracking Islamic State as the detonator pictured was a commercial one, which could be traced back to its manufacturer.
  • State Department spokesman John Kirby said on Wednesday the U.S. government was not in a position to confirm "the veracity" of the magazine's claim.
  • activity is likely the reason," he said, referring to the crash.
  • "We do believe that terrorist
  • also published a photo of what it said were passports belonging to dead Russians "obtained by the mujahideen". It was not immediately possible to verify the authenticity of the published photos.The group, which has seized large swathes of Syria and Iraq, said it had exploited a loophole at Sharm al-Sheikh airport, where the plane originated, in order to smuggle a bomb on board.
  • The airport is widely used by budget and charter airlines to fly tourists to the nearby resorts on the Sinai coast.
  • said it had initially planned to bring down a plane belonging to a country participating in the U.S.-led coalition bombing it in Syria and Iraq, but it changed course after Moscow started its own air strikes campaign in Syria.
  • Islamic State's Egyptian branch, Sinai Province, claimed responsibility for the attack the day it happened but Egyptian officials were quick to dismiss talk of a bomb as premature.
Javier E

The Crash That Failed | by Robert Kuttner | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

  • the financial collapse of 2008. The crash demonstrated the emptiness of the claim that markets could regulate themselves. It should have led to the disgrace of neoliberalism—the belief that unregulated markets produce and distribute goods and services more efficiently than regulated ones. Instead, the old order reasserted itself, and with calamitous consequences. Gross economic imbalances of power and wealth persisted.
  • In the United States, the bipartisan financial elite escaped largely unscathed. Barack Obama, whose campaign benefited from the timing of the collapse, hired the architects of the Clinton-era deregulation who had created the conditions that led to the crisis. Far from breaking up the big banks or removing their executives, Obama’s team bailed them out.
  • criminal prosecution took a back seat to the stability of the system.
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  • the economic security of most Americans dwindled, and the legitimacy of the system was called into question. One consequence has been the rise of the far right; another is Donald Trump.
  • Germany insisted that the struggling countries had to practice austerity in order to restore the confidence of private financial markets. In a deep recession, even orthodox economists at the International Monetary Fund soon recognized that austerity was a perverse recipe for economic recovery.
  • Europe, because of Germany’s worries that these policies would lead to inflation, had no way to extend credit to struggling nations or to raise money through the sale of bonds, which would have allowed the ECB to provide debt relief or to invest in public services.
  • The political result was the same on both sides of the Atlantic—declining prospects for ordinary people, animus toward elites, and the rise of ultra-nationalism
  • Not so in Europe. Parties such as the German Social Democratic Party, the British Labour Party, and the French Socialists disgraced themselves as co-sponsors of the neoliberal formula that brought down the economy.
  • In nation after nation, the main opposition to the party of Davos is neofascism.
  • In his masterful narrative, the economic historian Adam Tooze achieves several things that no other single author has quite accomplished. Tooze has managed to explain a hugely complex global crisis in its multiple dimensions, and his book combines cogent analysis with a fascinating history of the political and economic particulars
  • when the collapse came, it was “a financial crisis triggered by the humdrum market for American real estate.”
  • the collapse reinforced the financial supremacy of Washington and New York. “Far from withering away,” he writes, “the Fed’s response gave an entirely new dimension to the global dollar.”
  • When the entire structure of borrowed money collapsed, the losses more than wiped out all the capital of the banking system—not just in the US but in Europe, because of the intimate interconnection (and contagion) of American and European banks. Had the authorities just stood by, Tooze writes, the collapse would have been far more severe than the Great Depression:
  • While insisting to Congress that the emergency response was mainly to shore up US finance, Bernanke turned the Fed into the world’s central bank. “Through so-called liquidity swap lines, the Fed licensed a hand-picked group of core central banks to issue dollar credits on demand,” Tooze writes. In other words, the Fed simply created enough dollars, running well into the trillions, to prevent the global economy from collapsing for lack of credit.
  • Bernanke instigated government action on an unimagined scale to prop up a private system that supposedly did not need the state
  • Using deposit guarantees, loans to banks, outright capital transfers, and purchases of nearly worthless securities, the Fed and the Treasury recapitalized the banking system. To camouflage what was at work, officials invented unlimited credit pipelines with disarmingly technical names.
  • The blandly named policy of quantitative easing, which drove interest rates down to almost zero, was a euphemism for Fed purchases of immense quantities of private and government securities.
  • The crisis, Tooze writes, “was a devastating blow to the complacent belief in the great moderation, a shocking overturning of the prevailing laissez-faire ideology.” And yet the ideology prevailed
  • In a reversal of New Deal priorities, most of the relief went to the biggest banks, while smaller banks and homeowners were allowed to go under
  • Banks were permitted to invent complex provisional loan “modifications” with opaque terms that favored lenders, rather than using their government subsidies to provide refinancing to reduce homeowner debts
  • How did a nominally center-left administration, elected during a financial crisis caused by right-wing economic ideology and policy, end up in this situation?
  • Turning to Europe, Tooze explores the fatal combination of Germany’s demands for austerity with the structural weakness of the ECB and the vulnerability of the euro.
  • Portugal or Greece now enjoyed interest rates that were only slightly higher than Germany’s, and markets failed to take account of the risk of default, which was more serious than that of devaluation.
  • instead of treating the Greek situation as a crisis to be contained and helping a genuinely reformist new government find its footing, Brussels and Berlin treated Greece as an object lesson in profligacy and an opportunity to insist on punitive terms for financial aid
  • A central player in this tragedy was the European Central Bank. Tooze does a fine job of explaining the delicate dance between the bank’s leaders and its real masters in Germany. Since Germany opposed continent-wide recovery spending, the bank could only pursue monetary policy. The model was the Fed. Yet while the Fed has a congressional “dual mandate” to target both price stability and high employment, the ECB’s charter allowed for price stability only
  • The ECB, with the consent of the Germans, came up with one of those bland-sounding names, Outright Monetary Transactions, for its direct purchases of government bonds. But the program, at the insistence of the Germans, was restricted to nations in compliance with Merkel’s rigid fiscal terms, which limited national deficits and debts. In other words, the money could not go to the very nations where it was needed most, since the hardest-hit countries had to borrow heavily to get themselves out of the recession
  • Reading Tooze, you realize that it’s a miracle that the EU and the euro survived at all—but they did so at terrible human cost.
  • the ideal of liberalized trade, and the use of trade treaties to promote deregulation or privatized regulation of finance, is a major element of the story of how neoliberal hegemony promoted the eventual collapse. But except for a passing reference, trade and globalized deregulation get little mention here.
  • he has almost nothing to say about Janet Yellen. Her nomination as Fed chair in 2013 to succeed Bernanke was an epochal event and an improbable defeat for the proponents of austerity, deregulation, and bank bailouts who influenced Obama’s policymaking. Yellen, a left-liberal economist specializing in labor markets, was the only left-of-center Fed chair other then FDR’s chairman Marriner Eccles. She also believed in tough regulation of banks. The extension of quantitative easing well beyond its intended end was substantially due to Yellen’s concern about wages and employment, and not just price stability, since low interest rates can also help promote recovery.
  • Tooze ends the book with a short chapter called “The Shape of Things to Come,” mainly on the ascent of China, the one nation that avoided all the shibboleths of economic and political liberalism, though it also, of course, does not have a political democracy.
anonymous

Self-driving shuttle bus in crash on first day - BBC News - 0 views

  • A self-driving shuttle bus in Las Vegas was involved in a crash on its first day of service.
  • Nobody was injured in the incident which city officials say was the fault of the human driver of the lorry. The man was subsequently given a ticket by police.
  • A spokesman for the City of Las Vegas told the BBC the crash was a “fender bender” - a minor collision - and that the shuttle would likely be back out on the road on Thursday after some routine diagnostics tests.
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  • Self-driving technology has been involved in crashes before, but almost all reported incidents have been due to human error.
Javier E

How to Get Rich and Famous From a Stock Market Crash - WSJ - 0 views

  • Michael Burry is the latest seer with a shaky encore. His early but successful bet on the 2007-08 housing bust made him rich and—after Christian Bale played him in the Hollywood adaptation of Michael Lewis’s “The Big Short”—famous. But he has also made at least five dire predictions about stocks in just the past four years with comments such as “could be worse than 2008” and “greatest speculative bubble of all time.”
  • Buying the S&P 500 instead would have made an investor money each time in the six months after his views became public. The average annualized gain was 34%—about four times the index’s long-run appreciation. His latest public warning was a one-word tweet this January from a frequently deleted account called Cassandra BC: “SELL.” 
  • To the uninitiated, the notional value of the derivatives makes it look as though he bet nearly everything on a crash. That isn’t the case at all, but Burry has done nothing to disabuse his 1.4 million followers on X (formerly known as Twitter) of that idea.
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  • It isn’t hard to understand why prophets of doom get so much public attention, but how does one explain famous ones being so unimpressive after they become famous?
  • Numerous studies of expert opinion have shown that pundits are, as a group, as accurate as a coin flip.
  • The explanation is simple, according to “Predicting the Next Big Thing,” a 2010 study by Jerker Denrell and Christina Fang. People who got rich and famous on extreme bets tend to follow up with more of them, and outlier predictions typically fail.
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fischerry

The French Revolution: Crash Course World History #29 - YouTube - 0 views

  • In which John Green examines the French Revolution, and gets into how and why it differed from the American Revolution. Was it the serial authoritarian regimes? The guillotine? The Reign of Terror?
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    A classic. Crash Course history of the French Revolution.
Javier E

Old Poland, New Nationalism - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • In July 2011, a government inquiry found that the causes of the crash were complex but mundane: organizational negligence, poor pilot training, bad weather and the shoddy state of the airport at Smolensk. In short, the presidential plane should never have taken off that day.
  • Yet wild theories abounded: The Russians had produced the fog; a “vacuum bomb” had been set off; the plane had been dragged to the ground by magnets; several passengers had survived the crash but been finished off on the ground.
  • Poland’s liberal intelligentsia coined a phrase for this overheated paranoia: the “Smolensk religion.” Its doctrine was a singular, explosive mixture of Polish messianism and religious fundamentalism, xenophobia and a love of martyrdom. For followers of the faith, any rational argument about the crash was instantly transubstantiated into further proof of the assassins’ cunning.
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  • The assassination theory has collapsed like a house of cards, as its pseudo-experts have been exposed as frauds or fools. And rational, liberal Poland despises “Smolensk folk.” If life went on only in the realm of ideas, you might say rightly so. But neither “Smolensk folk” nor Poland’s hard-line nationalists can so easily be wished away.
  • people lack jobs and prospects: One-third of young Poles are jobless. What unites them is anger. They hate the establishment, and they channel their rage through attacks on others: immigrants, gays or Russians.
  • The prevalence of the “Smolensk religion” has emboldened the ultranationalists. For successive years since 2011, mobs have set fire to immigrant apartment blocks in Bialystok, eastern Poland. In June, at a conference in Wroclaw, a lecture by the veteran leftist intellectual Zygmunt Bauman was disrupted by hecklers shouting anti-communist slogans. At the Independence Day marches, the extreme right is not just permitted but encouraged:
  • The great dilemma facing Poland, with an election coming in 2015, is how to halt the rise of the ultranationalists without resorting to illiberal, authoritarian measures like preventive detention, and restrictions on free speech.
Javier E

Tackle climate or face financial crash, say world's biggest investors | Environment | T... - 0 views

  • Global investors managing $32tn issued a stark warning to governments at the UN climate summit on Monday, demanding urgent cuts in carbon emissions and the phasing out of all coal burning. Without these, the world faces a financial crash several times worse than the 2008 crisis, they said.
  • The investors include some of the world’s biggest pension funds, insurers and asset managers and marks the largest such intervention to date. They say fossil fuel subsidies must end and substantial taxes on carbon be introduced.
  • “The long-term nature of the challenge has, in our view, met a zombie-like response by many,” said Chris Newton, of IFM Investors which manages $80bn and is one of the 415 groups that has signed the Global Investor Statement. “This is a recipe for disaster as the impacts of climate change can be sudden, severe and catastrophic.”
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  • Investment firm Schroders said there could be $23tn of global economic losses a year in the long term without rapid action. This permanent economic damage would be almost four times the scale of the impact of the 2008 global financial crisis
  • Lord Nicholas Stern, of the London School of Economics said: “The low-carbon economy is the growth story of the 21st century and it is inclusive growth. Without that story, we would not have got the 2015 Paris agreement, but the story has grown stronger and stronger and is really compelling now.”
  • A key demand of the Global Investor Statement is to phase out coal-fired power stations across the world
  • Dozens of nations will affirm their commitment to end their coal burning on Thursday
  • the UN summit has seen US, Chinese and Japanese financial institutions cited as leaders in providing nearly $500bn in backing for new coal plants since the Paris agreement was signed.
  • The French president Emmanuel Macron’s botched attempt to increase fuel taxes and the gilets jaunes protests that followed were a model of how not to do it, said observers in Poland.
  • “It failed to take people along with them, accompanying the policy with social measures to allow citizens to embrace the opportunities of the transition and ride out the challenges,
  • They also want an end to subsidies for coal, oil and gas, which the IMF rates at $5tn a year and which the G20 has been promising to tackle for a decade. This measure alone could cut global CO2 emissions by 10% by 2030, according a UN report released in time for the Poland summit.
  • The investors said current national pledges to cut carbon would lead to a catastrophic 3C of global warming and that plans must be dramatically increased by 2020
Javier E

The bright side of Britain's Brexit chaos - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • One month ago, before British politics turned upside down, the country faced three possible futures. Prime Minister Theresa May was negotiating a compromise Brexit from the European Union, and her odds of prevailing appeared around 50 percent. A group of hard-liners in May’s Conservative Party wanted to crash out of the E.U. without a deal, and the odds of that costly result were around 30 percent. Finally, moderates wanted some way of postponing Brexit, or putting it to a second referendum. Their chances probably stood at around 20 percent
  • With today’s triggering of a no-confidence vote in the prime minister, Britain has descended into maximum “Game of Thrones” chaos. Yet the odds of a stabilizing outcome have brightened. Of course, all statements about British politics should be assumed to include the word “probably” at least twice. But a fair guess would be that the odds of a delay or a revote on Brexit stand at around 60 percent. The odds of some sort of compromise stand at 30 percent. The odds of crashing out are down around 10 percent.
  • If May won the no confidence vote comfortably but still failed to get her compromise through, what would happen? May would not want Britain to crash out, and neither does the majority in Parliament. So the alternative to getting her deal through would be to consider other deals.
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  • But there aren’t any compelling ones
  • In short, if May wins the no-confidence vote by a comfortable margin, and if she nonetheless fails to get her compromise through, Brexit will probably be postponed or put to a new vote. Britain might exercise its right to freeze the exit process and then never return to the negotiating table. Or it could freeze and hold a new referendum.
  • The third possibility is that May wins today’s vote, but only by a narrow margin. This seems quite likely: Let’s give it 50 percent. This outcome would deprive May of any hope that she had the political strength to get her compromise deal through Parliament. This would force a consideration of the alternatives laid out in option two: Norway, Canada, and so on. The outcome would be the same: Either an indefinite postponement or a referendum. So all 50 percentage points in option three flow into the postpone or revote bucket, bringing the cumulative total to 60 percent.
davisem

Saudi Minister Says Adding Women Drivers Will Reduce Car Crashes | World News | US News - 0 views

  • RIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's lifting of a much criticized ban on women drivers will reduce the number of car crashes in a country with one of the world's worst traffic-related death rates, its interior minister said on Thursday.
  • Saudi Arabia was the only remaining country in the world to bar women from driving, a policy that will officially end in June 2018 after a ministerial committee reports on measures needed for implementation.
  • While Saudi women have generally praised the lifting of the driving ban, some men expressed concern it would dramatically increase the number of cars on already crowded Saudi roads.
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  • The royal decree promises to change lifestyles for many of the 10 million women over the age of 20, including foreigners, who live in Saudi Arabia.
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