this kind of distinction is quite stupid in general as plenty of things that we rely on for day-to-day activities such as our houses, desks, chairs, beds, shoes, clothes, etc are all based on Newtonian/classical mechanics. Basically everything that we use which existed pre-transistor strictly speaking only required classical physics.
None of the highest up were sent to jail. CEOs perfectly fine taking responsibility for the profits, but what happened to taking responsibility for the fraud they enabled?
Literally dozens of CEOs went to jail, which is again why I think this may be the biggest ball-drop of the media this century (and there have been some pretty huge ones competing with it)
> None of the highest up were sent to jail. CEOs perfectly fine taking responsibility for the profits, but what happened to taking responsibility for the fraud they enabled?
> > Literally dozens of CEOs went to jail, which is again why I think this may be the biggest ball-drop of the media this century
The GP's remark is centered around the *sentiment* that none of the C-suite / execs in the Big Banks (Merrill, Goldman, BoA, Citi) were jailed for their involvement / excessive speculation in the 2008 crisis.
The keywords there being "Big Banks": If it's a national household name, OR if their positions are coveted by finance employees, it's a Big Bank. Otherwise, it's not a Big Bank.
> > > Your Google skills may need some work because this is the first result for "bank CEO jailed by TARP":
1) This is a goalpost shift from "bank CEOs jailed for causing / excessively speculating up to the 2008 crisis".
2) TARP was established as a result of the crisis (i.e. AFTER it happened), and therefore cannot be used to mark execs that were jailed for their involvement / excessive speculation in the 2008 crisis.
3) "TARP defraudment" is a different matter, and not "Causing the 2008 crisis" or "excessive speculation"
The case cited only tangentially involves TARP, when the bulk of the case was about the President of FirstCity Bank & his associates defrauding the bank with loans that *they themselves had involvement in*.
If you want to argue the wrong 200 bankers went to jail I think that would be a great discussion to have, but that's absolutely not where the public narrative is right now, which is that these convictions simply never happened
> but that's absolutely not where the public narrative is right now, which is that these convictions simply never happened
In terms of public sentiment, for the conviction to have happened, it has to happen to the Big Banks, and not anyone else. If it didn't happen to the Big Banks, then narrative-wise it didn't happen at all.
You're blaming the public for not caring about 200 irrelevant bankers going to jail for mostly other reasons (e.g. TARP fraud), when there's no reason for them to. There might as well have 0 bankers gone to jail. Getting pedantic about your definition of "bankers going to jail" being technically correct and the public's definition of "banker going to jail" being too specific, completely misses the point and serves nothing but to make you feel good. You well know what the public means, and that they're right about it.
Though it sounds like they're mainly talking about bankers jailed for fraud related to the TARP loans themselves, as opposed to the mortgage fraud that precipitated the crisis.
There were examples of both. In most of the cases where they were jailed for fraud related to the TARP loans it was lying on the required audit about what their positions prior to the crash were.
There was an entire damn database put out by TARP of the hundreds of people they jailed before DOGE killed it. All you people who claim you care about this intently never even bothered to read it. Which is why I don't actually think people cared; they just want an excuse to be mad.
Where is this database? Say names. Literally even one. Who are the dozens of CEOs? Why would you make something like this up and spread misinformation? It's been 18 years, even if someone had big stake in the game I can't understand why they would lie about this so steadfastly. Look it up.
Now if you want to argue that the wrong 250 bankers went to jail, I'm open to discussing that, but the simple fact is you thought the number was zero until five minutes ago and rather than being happy you were wrong, you're annoyed. It's the most puzzling part of this, to me.
I started by saying nobody that mattered and specified the largest companies who were involved. I think it's pretty easy to conclude I mean the C-suite in charge of the largest organizations that enabled and perpetuated the fraud. I don't care if a bunch of Bernie Madoff's lackeys went to jail if Bernie Madoff gets off Scott-free. I don't understand why you continue to misrepresent, but I think at this point it is malicious intent.
Three instances of TARP fraud (which obviously happened after the crisis started since it was a response to the crisis) and one small time fraud case whose victim was a bank.
The fact remains that nobody who caused the crisis day saw a day in prison, and the banks who did were bailed out when it easily could have been the soon-to-be-homeless citizens instead.
What about Pershing Square? in 2008 Bill Ackman gave a presentation on how to crash the housing market and profit from it. Looks like he's still out there destroying peoples' lives.
I see it differently: the crash was coming anyway (the market was being irrational). He can't crash the housing market, unless there's a good reason for the housing prices to crash. Turns out there was a reason.
Nobody that mattered went to jail. A few lackeys might have been thrown to the wolves, though it seems only 1 spent significant time in jail. Meanwhile the board members, C-suite of Lehmann, Bear Stearns, WaMu, etc didn't spend a second in jail. What's really shocking is you burying the lede.
Can you name any of them? As far as I know none of the CEOs of the major banks spent any time in jail. They tried to get the CEO of Wamu but he successfully countersued (LOL) to get the Feds to drop the charges?
edit: it's unfortunate that you can't bring up any actual evidence to support your assertion
The TARP inspector general used to have a database of everybody they jailed but unfortunately it got DOGEd. It wasn't anybody famous but kind of the whole point of doing illegal things is that you try not to be high-profile when you do them.
Because people are just straight-up misinformed about this and get angry when I point this out rather than being happy to find out they were wrong. Here's an article from 2016 which was before the big wave of convictions happened in 2017-2019; it was 35 already at that point:
These look to all be incidences of people who were convicting of defrauding TARP, which I doubt most people would even remember. Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling told me the credit rating agencies rubber-stamped bad derivatives and that banks were giving out loans without income verification. Did any executive or director ever go to jail for that?
As others have stated, people are upset at the lack of prosecution for causing the crisis, not literally the lack of any CEO committing any financial crime related to the crisis at all. From your own link:
> Goldsmith Romero said it’s wrong to say that bankers now in prison only came from small banks. She said that that some banks had assets of as much as $10 billion and were very big players in the states where they were based. But she said it is true that top executives at the so-called “too big to fail” banks have avoided any criminal charges, even as their banks paid tens of billions of dollars in fines to settle charges of wrong doing leading up to the financial crisis.
> “I certainly understand the frustration of the people who want to see accountability for those who brought on the financial crisis,” she told CNNMoney. But she said even when the big banks admitted to wrong doing, investigators were not able to prove criminal action by the banks’ executives.
Five minutes ago I was unhappy there were no apples, and you're showing me a stack of oranges and then acting like it's irrational for me to not consider all fruit equivalent. I imagine you'd claim this is goalpost moving, but when you're apparently getting into conversations about this often enough to have formed your own narrative about so many people being irrational, it's worth considering that maybe it's more likely that you as an individual have been misunderstanding what everyone else has been saying rather than large swaths of people all suffering from a massive delusion that you alone have managed to see the real truth about.
Are you serious? You said “dozens of CEOs” have been jailed for their role in the 2008 crisis. That is categorically false.
The article you posted is about a banker convicted in 2013 for fraud committed in 2011 that has nothing to do with contributing to the 2008 crisis. No CEOs were jailed for that.
Take your anger somewhere else because the truth is that it’s still zero, just like it was 5 minutes ago and 18 years ago. What would you possibly have to gain from lying about stuff like this?
Nope, it's absolutely true. Sorry. It's (again) how I know nobody actually cares about this, because people would have noticed when the news reported on it in the 2010s.
That's literally just from the first page of Google results, which you are also free to use if you want to learn more about this.
And btw "it's just TARP fraud" is an idiotic thing to say: the fraud was in misrepresenting the banks' positions prior to the crash during the TARP audit.
> And btw "it's just TARP fraud" is an idiotic thing to say: the fraud was in misrepresenting the banks' positions prior to the crash during the TARP audit.
People want CEOs to go to jail for knowingly playing a role in causing the crash. Misrepresenting banks' positions afterwards isn't it.
The people committing TARP fraud may have been the same people that caused regular working people to lose their homes, businesses, and retirement funds, but unless that venn diagram is pretty clearly overlapped I think you're misunderstanding what the general public was / is upset about.
I know there were some really large settlements in 2012 and onward, but for everyone I know who lost their business or their home or their investments, I don't know anyone who received any of this settlement money.
> "it's just TARP fraud" is an idiotic thing to say
Some people might consider it idiotic to post 3 broken links to articles they clearly haven’t read; others would simply consider it obnoxious.
> the fraud was in misrepresenting the banks' positions prior to the crash during the TARP audit.
TARP fraud wasn’t what caused the crisis. The popular narrative is that the credit rating agencies failed to do due diligence because they were making a lot of money handing out high ratings on junk CDOs. So far as I know, no one involved in this went to jail. People were angry about the events that led up to the crisis not being punished; most probably didn’t even know about the fraud that went on with the program set up to bail out the banks after the fact.
you think we don't have enough space on earth for a few buildings? this seems like a purely western cope. China seems perfectly able to build out large infrastructure projects with a land area smaller than that of the continentenal USA
You're presumably looking at a source that's including water area. When talking about land area, China > USA > Canada. (As opposed to when including water area, Canada > USA > China)
We can make ten or hundred times the number of solar cells we make right now, we just don't have a reason to. The technology is fairly ancient unless you want to compete on efficiency, and the raw materials abundant.
Do we really need to say (on HN especially) that time-to-market does matter?
Not just for startups either. If you ramp up the Polio vaccine in 1 year vs 10 years, that has a big impact on human wellbeing. The two scenarios are not equivalent outcomes, even though it still happens "eventually."
The bottleneck is deploying solar physically, not making the cells.
We have increased the manufacturing of pretty much every piece of technology you see in front you by 200x at some point in history. Often in a matter of years.
I agree that part of the bottleneck is deploying solar physically. China is the best in the world in deploying solar panels. They are only managing linear increases in their solar capacity, year over year.
The raw materials: diffractive optical elements and single mode fibers from a materials perspective are all quite easy to manufacture. The primarily limitation with miniaturization is the single-mode fibers, which are limited by the optical wavelength you are using and the index of the fiber. For a conventional silica optical fiber, this is probably around ~100 nm diameter at a minimum. Newer materials can definitely change this 2-3x, but I'm not aware of anything more fundamental.
So in general this would be something that you would potentially be able to see in cars, but unlikely consumer electronics or handhelds without a modification in the operational principle (eg time-multiplexing to reduce the required number of fibers).
My personal opinion is that competing on low-power and small-scale is a lost cause for photonic computing. In terms of absolute energy efficiency and absolute miniaturization, photonics will never win. But at larger energy scales and larger systems, photonics can reach a regime where higher parallel throughput will dominate.
Best is a bit of an overstatement. It's middle of the pack (performing akin to a 7700, but significantly worse than AMD Zen 5 and the Intel 13th/14th gen). I think the main thing is that it is still plenty capable in 2025 if you're running at a reasonable setting for most games.
Certainly there are situations where it is still among kings like MSFS, but definitely not a leader in most games.
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