The DMV. I have to renew my driver’s license.
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The DMV. I have to renew my driver’s license.
Posted via mobile.
Capital One Financial agreed to pay $210 million to resolve charges by banking regulators that its call-center representatives misled consumers into paying for extra credit card products.
The enforcement action, announced on Wednesday, is the first by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which said it unearthed the activities through an examination of the bank.
The CFPB was created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law and is nearing its one-year anniversary.
The government said $150 million of the sanctions will go to reimburse affected customers, while the remaining penalty will be split between the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which fined the bank $35 million, and the CFPB, which will collect $25 million.
“We are putting companies on notice that these deceptive practices are against the law and will not be tolerated,” said CFPB Director Richard Cordray.
The regulators alleged that employees at call centers used by Capital One pressured and misled consumers into paying for “add-on products” such as payment protection and credit monitoring when they activated their credit cards.
In a briefing with reporters, Cordray said he anticipated actions against other banks over similar tactics but declined to name any targets.
“We know these deceptive tactics are not unique to a single institution … we expect announcements about other institutions as our ongoing work continues to unfold,” Cordray said.
In a statement, the president of Capital One’s credit card business, Ryan Schneider, apologized to customers who were affected and said the bank is committed to “making it right.”
What’s in your wallet?
This is a week for the stupid.
Case in point, this exchange between award winning journalist and columnist Connie Schultz and an unnamed conservative blogger:
Email from conservative blogger, dated July 9, 2012:
Dear Ms. Shultz,We are doing an expose on journalists in the elite media who socialize with elected officials they are assigned to cover. We have found numerous photos of you with Sen. Sherrod Brown. In one of them, you appear to be hugging him.Care to comment?———————–
Response, dated July 10, 2012:
Dear Mr. [Name Deleted]:
I am surprised you did not find a photo of me kissing U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown so hard he passes out from lack of oxygen. He’s really cute.
He’s also my husband.
You know that, right?
Connie Schultz.
————————
July 17: Waiting, I’m waiting….
(emphasis mine)
Great googly moogly.
I guess Republicans live by the old Dave Sim adage, “I firmly believe that if you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, you should start breeding them for stupidity.”
Rush Limbaugh is claiming that the latest Batman movie is a Democratic plot, because the villain is named Bane. (As in Rmoney’s Bain).
Ummm Bane has been a fixture in the Batman universe for how many decades? (The Answer is almost 2)
The ever reliable Joke Line.
Why the f%$# does this man have a job?
It is therefore no surprise that an Israeli has set fire to himself to protest the continued right wing tilt of Israeli society:
TEL AVIV — As doctors struggled on Monday to save the life of Moshe Silman, an Israeli man who set himself on fire at a protest for social justice in this Mediterranean city two days earlier, a grim mood had already replaced the mostly blithe atmosphere that characterized Israel’s popular movement for social change last summer.
While activists said Mr. Silman’s desperate act reaffirmed the relevancy of a grass-roots struggle that had seemed to be floundering, they appeared traumatized as they searched for an appropriate response.
“We must never encourage such a thing,” Stav Shaffir, a prominent leader of the movement, said in a telephone interview. “On the other hand, it cannot be ignored. Moshe Silman cried the cry of a lot of people.”
At the peak of last summer’s rallies, at least 400,000 Israelis peacefully took to the streets in this city and others, in one of the largest protests in the nation’s history. In the past few weeks, though, efforts to revive those heady days have been met with a degree of public apathy.
Then on Saturday, thousands of demonstrators turned out to mark the anniversary of the start of last year’s protests, dividing up into clusters and gathering around small stages. One by one the protesters voiced a wide range of complaints, from limited resources for school psychologists to the lack of public housing for disadvantaged Russian-speaking immigrants. A few people danced nearby to a song by an Israeli rap group that boomed from large speakers.
Suddenly, a tower of flames shot up near one of the podiums.
Mr. Silman, in his 50s, a fixture at the street protests over the past year, came to Tel Aviv on Saturday night equipped with gasoline and a suicide note. He had once run his own truck delivery business, but he had gotten into debt and then suffered a stroke.
In a typed letter he had copied and distributed in advance, he complained that his pleas for help had been rejected by the courts, the Housing Ministry and the National Insurance Institute, and that he was about to become homeless.
“The state of Israel stole from me and robbed me,” he wrote. “They left me with nothing.”
He added, “And I will not be homeless and this is why I protest.”
One of the worst things that Netanyahu had done (and that’s saying a lot) was to shift political discussion in Israel completely away from any consideration of a just society.
This is some kind of Middle Eastern version of, “When you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back at you.”
Israel is now Tunisia.
U.S. retail sales fell in June for the third straight month, the longest run of consecutive drops since 2008 when the country was mired in recession.
Sales slipped 0.5 percent, with declines across a wide swath of industries from electronics and cars to building supplies, the Commerce Department said on Monday. Analysts had expected a small increase.
“Evidence is increasingly clear that the U.S. economy is slowing,” said Jim Baird, an investment strategist at Plante Moran Financial Advisors in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
The report adds to a spate of soft economic data that is raising pressure on President Barack Obama ahead of his November re-election bid. Republican challenger Mitt Romney is focusing his campaign on the weak economy, which has plagued Obama’s presidency.
Obama should have asked for about ½ trillion more for his stimulus.
The prosecution in the Bradley Manning Wikileaks trial the claims to have proof that he was aiding the enemy, a crime that carries the death penalty, but is refusing to produce any evidence”
The US government claims to have proof that Bradley Manning, the WikiLeaks suspect, knowingly passed state secrets to a location where it was bound to be obtained by enemy groups, a military court in Maryland has heard.
Captain Joe Morrow, a member of the five-strong prosecution team assigned to the case, said that the government would show at court martial that Manning had knowingly “aided the enemy” – the most serious of the 22 charges facing the soldier that carries the death penalty. Morrow said the evidence would show that Manning sent the information to a “very definite place” that he knew was used by the enemy.
He did not mention al-Qaida, though the terrorist network has been explicity named by the prosecution in previous hearings.
The insistence by the US government that it can prove Manning had actual knowledge that the WikiLeaks dump would be used by enemy groups was instantly disputed by the lead defence lawyer, David Coombs. He demanded that the government produce the evidence to which it was alluding.
“We haven’t seen any evidence that the government has provided by discovery that supports any knowledge that the information would be obtained by the enemy,” he said.
Note that if the court accepts this, to quote the ACLU, “the threat of criminal prosecution hangs over any service member who gives an interview to a reporter, writes a letter to the editor, or posts a blog on the internet. In its zeal to throw the book at Manning, the government has so overreached that its ‘success’ would turn thousands of loyal soldiers into criminals.”
I believe that this is one of the goals of this prosecution. When you define laws this broadly, every is a criminal, and so “troublemakers” can be dealt with.
Rather unsurprisingly, this one involves automobiles, and the Italian auto industry.
You see, FIAT will be offering an in car esopresso maker on the Fiat 500:
Oh how those Italians love their espresso. And starting in October, they’ll be able to have a doppio on the go in the new Fiat 500L.
At the presentation of the car to the global press in Turin this month, Fiat announced that the 500L will be “the first standard-production car in the world to offer a true espresso coffee machine.”
The espresso maker will be an option in the new, bigger, four-door 500L that goes on sale in Italy in October and in the rest of Europe shortly after. (Think of the 500L as the Fiat 500 equivalent of the Mini Cooper Countryman — there’s even a vague similarity in silhouette.)
A coffee IV drip I could understand, but an espresso machine is insane.
The US Navy conducted studies of LCS capabilities, and it ain’t pretty:
So, except for its high dash speed, it pretty much has failed every capability that was intended when it was conceived.
Cancel it, and get some honest to got frigates and mine hunters.
Saab put out a very impressive briefing on the next generation of Gripen at Farnborough, where the headline was much lower direct operating costs:
Third (and most important) is that all air forces are finally realizing that operating costs are more important than acquisition costs. The debate over JSF costs – from the Navair leaks of 2010, through program director VAdm Dave Venlet’s “it makes their knees go weak” quote in April 2011 to Lockheed Martin’s recent assaults on the competence of Pentagon accountants – revolves around operating costs, and that is a fight that Gripen wins.
Saab says that the E/F will cost under $5,000 per flight hour – one-third to one-quarter of its estimates for Eurofighter, Rafale or JSF (Saab uses Australian numbers for the latter, which are lower than some).
These numbers are not just pie in the sky. The Gripen has been in service for over a decade, as has its engine, and it’s half the size of its competitors, and you pay for aircraft like you pay for ground beef, by the pound. (And yes, the numbers for the JSF are unsupportable)
However, what I found most interesting was the fact that they touted the advantages of non-integrated avionics, (page 33) explaining how you can move more quickly if your tactical avionics are separate from flight critical systems, which also allows greater access by the operating nations who might want to make their own upgrades and weapons.
This is a direct challenge to the tightly integrated, and inaccessible avionics package in the JSF.
PDF after the break. (H/T Eric Palmer for the embed.)
When one looks at the phrase, “Jobs Americans Won’t Do,” which is frequently used to justify both a lax policy on legal immigration, and salutary neglect toward illegal aliens.
One of the jobs that is supposed to be in this category is working in meat packing.
Dean Baker makes the point that his is inaccurate and ahistorical.
There were many Americans who worked in meat packing, and made a decent living from doing so, until engage in a decades long program of pushing down wages in the industry, which involved aggressive pursuit of undocumented workers and a vicious campaign against the unions.
The idea that there are jobs that Americans won’t do is a myth.
When someone says that, they mean that there are jobs that Americans won’t do if you have sh%$ty wages and benefits.
Specifically, Wikileaks has won a case against Visa for cutting off their credit card donations:
The Reykjavík District Court has ruled that Valitor, formerly known as VISA Iceland, violated contract laws by blocking credit card donations to Wikileaks, according to a press release posted on the whistleblowers’ Twitter account.
The court also ordered that the donation gateway should be reopened within 14 days otherwise Valitor will be forced to pay a fine of $6,200 daily. Valitor CEO Vidar Thorkellsson told Bloomberg, however, that the company would appeal the ruling. He declined to comment further.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said “This is a significant victory against Washington’s attempt to silence WikiLeaks. We will not be silenced. Economic censorship is censorship. It is wrong. When it’s done outside of the rule of law its doubly wrong. One by one those involved in the attempted censorship of WikiLeaks will find themselves on the wrong side of history.”
Seen on Facebook.
Have you heard the latest? The FDA spied on outside critics in an attempt to find out who were the whistleblowers.
The f%$#ing F f%$#ing D f%$#ing A was engaged in a f%$#ing witch hunt and coverup?
Un-f%$#ing-believable:
A wide-ranging surveillance operation by the Food and Drug Administration against a group of its own scientists used an enemies list of sorts as it secretly captured thousands of e-mails that the disgruntled scientists sent privately to members of Congress, lawyers, labor officials, journalists and even President Obama, previously undisclosed records show.What began as a narrow investigation into the possible leaking of confidential agency information by five scientists quickly grew in mid-2010 into a much broader campaign to counter outside critics of the agency’s medical review process, according to the cache of more than 80,000 pages of computer documents generated by the surveillance effort.Moving to quell what one memorandum called the “collaboration” of the F.D.A.’s opponents, the surveillance operation identified 21 agency employees, Congressional officials, outside medical researchers and journalists thought to be working together to put out negative and “defamatory” information about the agency.F.D.A. officials defended the surveillance operation, saying that the computer monitoring was limited to the five scientists suspected of leaking confidential information about the safety and design of medical devices.While they acknowledged that the surveillance tracked the communications that the scientists had with Congressional officials, journalists and others, they said it was never intended to impede those communications, but only to determine whether information was being improperly shared.The agency, using so-called spy software designed to help employers monitor workers, captured screen images from the government laptops of the five scientists as they were being used at work or at home. The software tracked their keystrokes, intercepted their personal e-mails, copied the documents on their personal thumb drives and even followed their messages line by line as they were being drafted, the documents show.The extraordinary surveillance effort grew out of a bitter dispute lasting years between the scientists and their bosses at the F.D.A. over the scientists’ claims that faulty review procedures at the agency had led to the approval of medical imaging devices for mammograms and colonoscopies that exposed patients to dangerous levels of radiation.A confidential government review in May by the Office of Special Counsel, which deals with the grievances of government workers, found that the scientists’ medical claims were valid enough to warrant a full investigation into what it termed “a substantial and specific danger to public safety.”
There is a saying, “A fish rots from the head,” and this is completely in line with the Obama administration’s jihad against whistle blowers.
The Dutch Parliament has voted to ask the PM and cabinet to cancel the jet order:
The Netherlands should scrap plans to buy F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets because it cannot afford the project’s ballooning costs as the country attempts to cut spending, a majority of parliament said on Thursday.
One leading party, Labour, will submit a proposal to the 150-seat legislature on the last session before Sept. 12 elections calling for an end to Dutch participation in the Lockheed Martin Corp warplanes project.
Whether the Netherlands, which has already ordered two F-35 test planes, will quit the project depends on the outcome of the elections, and the new government that takes office afterwards.
The Dutch government collapsed over painful austerity measures in April, but the state has to cut costs by billions of euros to meet EU guidelines. About 4.5 billion euros has been set aside for the F-35 jets.
During a debate with Dutch Defence Minister Hans Hillen, lawmakers complained about the project’s escalating costs and said there were no guarantees over Dutch jobs or future costs.
I’m beginning to think that this will end up a lot like the F-111.
The only people who bought that plane were us and the Australians. (The British canceled after escalating costs)
We had another bank failure this week, which gives us:
Not really much to say.
So, here is the graph pr0n with last years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):
JP Morgan is now claiming that its traders intentionally deceived them when they lost $2 4.4 5.8 7 billion:
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)’s announcement that an internal inquiry may show “intent” to misprice trades in a unit that lost $5.8 billion may help a U.S. investigation while putting distance between management and any wrongdoers.
“E-mails, voice tapes and other documents, supplemented by interviews” were “suggestive of trader intent not to mark positions where they believed they could execute,” the bank said in a presentation yesterday as it reported net income fell 9 percent to $4.96 billion. “Traders may have been seeking to avoid showing full amount of losses,” the bank said, noting management had concerns about the integrity of the prices used. The bank didn’t provide evidence to support the allegations.
The U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in New York in May began a probe of the bank’s trading losses, a person familiar with the matter said. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates derivatives trading, are also examining New York-based JPMorgan’s trading activities, according to people familiar with those probes.
Yes, of course, none of it was senior management’s fault, it was all the fault of those damn Eskimos.
Quoting Richard Widmark playing Col. Tad Lawson in Judgement at Nuremberg:
There are no Nazis in Germany, didn’t you know that, Judge? The Eskimos invaded Germany and took over. That’s how all those terrible things happened. It wasn’t the fault of the Germans, it was the fault of those damn Eskimos!
This is such a transperent case of cover-your-ass as I have ever seen.
Yes, in response to proof that one of the most critical benchmarks in international finance was being fraudulently manipulated, Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner sent a memo, and then followed up by doing ……… absolutely nothing.
What a surprise.
Geithner has always been supportive of allowing the banksters to amass ill gotten gains in order to fill the holes in the balance sheets.
The Israeli defense company Rafael is working to develop a successor to the Python 5 and the Derby based on their Stunner surface to air missile (paid subscription required):
Rafael, Israel’s leading missile development center, continues to work quietly on an air-to-air derivative of the Stunner interceptor—to be designated Python 6, or the Future Advanced Air-to-Air Missile (FAAM).
The Stunner is a surface-to-air weapon being developed in partnership with Raytheon for Israel’s David’s Sling air and missile defense system. The Python 6 has been chronicled for almost a decade.
Although the Israeli air force (IAF) still has not officially endorsed an air-to-air version, sources at Rafael say consultations over the features of such a missile have been underway since the final stages of development of the Python 5, currently in production.
The IAF could avoid committing its own funding to FAAM development, hoping that Rafael can first strike a deal with a U.S. partner to obtain the next-generation air-to-air missile. But according to Chairman Ilan Biran, Rafael is in the meantime using its R&D budget, estimated at $125 million, to fund the project.
………
The Stunner was designed as a “platform-agnostic” missile that can be adapted for air and ground launch, from rail or ejector racks, in conventional or internal carriage configurations. The Mach 5.5, long-range missile is equipped with a dual electro-optic/radio-frequency seeker and an advanced multistage rocket motor. Designed as a hit-to-kill anti-missile weapon , Stunner has no warhead and instead can carry a more powerful rocket motor capable of ranges beyond any air-to-air missile available today.
Druker says the FAAM will likely cost significantly less than today’s AIM-120 , Derby or Meteor, but more than the current short-range missiles. Although the FAAM and Stunner do not share a common configuration, Rafael expects that the overall life-cycle cost offered by the Stunner will be much lower than any other missile combination.
Personally, I’m a little bit dubious that the missile will go completely without a warhead, the PAC-3 Patriot, for example is hit to kill, but contains a “lethality enhancer” (basically a tiny warhead to scatter shrapnel in the path of the target.
That being said, using a dual mode seeker (you can see how the IR seeker is offset so as to allow a radar to be placed behind it) the missile’s accuracy should be pretty high.
They also expect this to be the last AAM they develop.
Yosi Druker, director of Rafael’s Air-to-Air and Air Defense Directorate, suggests that they will be superseded by new technologies, because “the next generation of interceptors will employ other kill mechanisms, not necessarily a missile, to defeat airborne targets,” which I take to be a reference to directed energy weapons.
I’m dubious of this, but I’ve been wrong more often than not when I have been dubious about a technological development.
Background here.