Tag 60 Minutes

Entries 4 Total

Inside the Collapse

Mar 19, ’10 8:21 PM

Last year I remarked on the subprime mort­gage induced fin­an­cial collapse:

To blame indi­vidu­als act­ing within the rationale of a sys­tem for pro­du­cing unwel­come out­comes is to deny the fun­da­mental flaws of the system.

Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short, being inter­viewed by 60 Minutes on the collapse:

The incent­ives for people on Wall Street got so screwed up that the people who worked there became blinded to their own longterm interests because their short-term interests were so overpowering.

Sounds like the defin­i­tion of cap­it­al­ism to me.

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Bloom Energy

Feb 23, ’10 1:33 PM

A com­pany called Bloom Energy and foun­ded by K.R. Srid­har is set to launch a new energy device tomor­row that he says is a break­through in fuel cell tech­no­logy — namely mak­ing it afford­able (the Holy Grail of fuel cell research) and thus provid­ing a loc­al­ised and com­par­at­ively cleaner and cheaper form of elec­tri­city than that which we cur­rently get from the grid.

There was a seg­ment cov­er­ing the topic on CBS’s 60 minutes Sunday night, includ­ing an inter­view with K.R. Srid­har, which can watch online here.

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God these people are loathsome

Jun 3, ’09 1:12 PM

In a dev­ast­at­ing inter­view with George Mon­biot Hazel Blears pulls this lovely com­ment out of the bag, regard­ing the decision to invade Iraq:

Des­pite the fact that hun­dreds of thou­sands of people have died — and that is a tragedy — I still believe that it was the right thing to do.

If there was a hell Hazel Blears would surely burn in it.

The whole inter­view is worth watch­ing. She’s a good example of the kind of spine­less per­son who makes their way into the major polit­ical parties simply to be in power.

Her state­ment on Iraq reminds me of Madeleine Albright, who in 1996, then the U.S. Sec­ret­ary of State, was asked by Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes what she felt about the fact that half a mil­lion Iraqi chil­dren had died as a res­ult of U.S.-led eco­nomic sanc­tions. Albright replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”

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It’s all just a big misunderstanding

May 21, ’06 10:09 AM

Kirk Mac­Gib­bon, a New Zeal­ander liv­ing in New York, says that Kiwi’s are pre­ju­dice against Amer­ic­ans and that this comes from, amongst other things, “their lim­ited under­stand­ing of Amer­ican for­eign policy.”

But we’re not the only ones to lack under­stand­ing. Much of the world mis­un­der­stands U.S. for­eign policy, espe­cially those who have to deal with it at the end of a gun barrel.

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