daniel splittgerber - what I read online

We need musicians who know that music can take inspiration not only from other music but from the whole experience of life. Pitchfork and indie rock are currently run by people who behave as though the endless effort to perfect the habits of cultural consumption is the whole experience of life. We should leave these things behind, and instead pursue and invent a musical culture more worth our time.

On average the 31 companies in the Euro Stoxx Banks Index trade for 39
% of common equity, or book value, according to data compiled by
Bloomberg. France’s Credit Agricole SA for 23 % of book. Yet somehow
the European Banking Authority last month concluded it had no capital
shortfall.

Four years after the banking system nearly collapsed from reckless mortgage lending, federal prosecutors have stayed on the sidelines, even as judges around the country are pointing fingers at possible wrongdoing.

[E]very single photograph uploaded to Facebook is put through facial recognition software they call PhotoDNA which is used to find people for whom any law enforcement agency in the world is looking. You understand? So every time you upload a photograph to Facebook or put one on Twitter for that matter you are now ratting out anybody in that frame to any police agency in the world that’s looking for them.

Nowadays, yakuza run hedge funds. They speculate in real estate. The Inagawa-kai, one of the three biggest gangs, keeps its main office across the street from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in midtown Tokyo. […]

[…] and then [Miyamoto] talked about other corporate gangsters, mentioning a well-known gang. “They now have a guy who worked for Deutsche Bank,” he said. […]

“The Matsuba-kai guys play golf with the waste-disposal guys for TEPCO. That’s what you need to look into.”

When the era of wishful thinking ends, Europe will face a stark choice. It can have a monetary union without sovereign defaults. That option means fiscal union, accepting real German control of Greek and Italian (and maybe French) budgets. Nobody wants that, with good reason.

Or Europe can have a monetary union without fiscal union. That would work well, but it needs to be based on two central ideas: Sovereigns must be able to default just like companies, and banks, including the central bank, must treat sovereign debt just like company debt.

The final option is a breakup, probably after a crisis and inflation. The euro, like the meter, is a great idea. Throwing it away would be a real and needless tragedy.

As a simple rule of thumb, just imagine every time you’re telling a good vs. evil story, you’re basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more. […]

It’s just like the evidence that shows the most dangerous people are those that have been taught some financial literacy. They’re the ones who go out and make the worst mistakes. It’s the people that realize, “I don’t know anything at all,” that end up doing pretty well.

It’s quite simple,” Sarkozy said. “Beginning in the cradle, they were pampered and coddled and repeatedly told, ‘You’re the best, the most handsome, the most intelligent.’ And they studied at fance schools. Look how much they love themselves. I’m a different type. I’m the bastard. But there it is, the bastard is President of the Republic.

Her two overriding characteristics are independence and drive, and her performances attempt, whenver possible, to shake up conventional pianistic wisdom.