Toward the end of 2013, an internal email changed everything. Entitled "Whistleblowing disclosure — knowingly dealing with criminals in Estonia branch", it was written by Howard Wilkinson, Danske's head of markets in Estonia. Its content was explosive. Detailing a "near total process failure", he referred to a UK limited liability partnership called Lantana Trade which had opened an account at Danske in Estonia the previous year.
Its account was marked "dormant" at UK Companies House and yet it had a credit balance at Danske of $965,418 on the same date. A colleague later told Mr. Wilkinson that the bank did not know who the beneficial owners were but "apparently it was discovered that they included the family of Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, and the FSB [Russia's intelligence service]", according to the email seen by the FT.
Danske's internal audit team was sent to investigate the Estonia operation in January 2014. Yet Mr. Wilkinson complained in a further email in April that despite his warnings "no related client account has been closed by management" and "there appears to have been no attempt by management to identify the full scope of the problem of UK LLPs submitting false accounts".
He reported that a senior executive told him "[Danske Bank] is not the police" and "[Danske Bank] has no obligation to report false client accounts to the authorities." That same day, he resigned and sent an email to Copenhagen, signing off: "Sad to say, it seems to me that things are totally broken here."
Wow. So internal whistleblowing procedures are token efforts which are actually shortcuts to get yourself 'resigned'. I become less and less surprised when reality turns out to match Dilbert one-to-one. Which is sad.
Questions have also been asked as to whether Danske received special treatment from its regulator, which was until May headed by the bank's former chief financial officer.
I.e. the body that had sole responsibility to enforce anti-money laundering on the bank was its former CFO. SMH...
> I don't doubt he's capable of doing that with his background
Which background is that? He has an undergraduate degree in economics and a bachelor's degree in physics.
I respect the guy but he clearly puts a lot into managing his image. As a relevant example, he used to claim to have been in the Ph.D. program at Stanford, but had to retract that (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to find that on Google).
I met Elon just after he raised $3M for Zip2[1]. He had moved to Palo Alto to enroll at Stanford, but then got sidetracked into Zip2 (later sold for $300M+). The company was about 8 people in one small room at the time.
>undergraduate degree in economics and a bachelor's degree in physics.
I'm in the UK my understanding is a bachelor's is a synonym for an undergraduate degree; so why did you use the different terms here?
Ah, I think I see it: you copied from Wikipedia; wherein it says he did a bachelors degree in Economics (BA?) and a further bachelors in physics (BS/BSc) whilst he was a graduate. Two undergraduate degrees.
Other sources suggest he did the degrees coterminously:
>"Musk graduated from UPenn in 1994, with double bachelor degrees in Physics (from the College of Arts and Sciences) and Economics (from the Wharton School)." (http://studyadvantage.co/elon-musk-education-study/)
I remember reading in Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future something that Elon had been formally admitted to the PhD program at Stanford, but dropped out after three days. Vance contacted the Registrar's Office (or the graduate department itself?, I cannot remember) and received the confirmation that he was admitted.
Mostly right :). He actually thought it better to be involved in creating an internet company. This led to the founding of Zip2 (a kind of precursor to Yelp whose pivots ended up trying to help newspapers get online). The money from that led to the founding of X (think, transaction), which later took over and ultimately merged with its competitor, PayPal.
I second the recommendation of watching the interview. There is way too much misinformation surrounding Tesla and Elon Musk.
My guess would be that you aren't technically in the PhD program until you've passed your qualifying exam. Until that point, you're a graduate student but not a PhD student. After you pass your preliminary exam, you're a PhD/Doctoral candidate.
Also, it's a moot point. There are no bragging rights to be found in simply being admitted to a PhD program. Plenty of very intelligent people fail to complete a PhD program (usually, IME, because of personality issues/conflict with the advisor (sadly extremely common), inflexibility of the advisor and/or department, or personal reasons (economic, social, health)).
(to be clear, Musk didn't brag that he was admitted to Stanford - he suggested that he felt dropping out was more useful than continuing. His fans often hold up being admitted to a PhD program as evidence of his engineering background)
In the USA, this is how it typically works. People who are enrolled in PhD programs are called "PhD students." Once they pass their advancement to candidacy exam, they are called "PhD Candidates." In both cases, they are enrolled in a PhD program. Typically people are accepted directly to PhD programs and they are not just admitted as generic graduate students.
The biography of Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance talks about this. Which I recommend everybody read. I don't remember the details but I think he was admitted but not enrolled. He ended up not going because he thought pursuing an internet company in Silicon Valley was more valuable than research work at the time.
This sentence embodies what repulses me about current Silicon Valley culture: The self-satisfied claim to San Francisco 60's heritage, only, you know, with peace and love being replaced by greed and egotism.
Steve Jobs was not deeply technical, nor was he ever a programmer. And in a way, that makes his accomplishments even more impressive.
I think one of his key strengths was the ability to know if someone knew what they were talking about and to recognize outstanding people - in any field. So many Apple stories, from early times to more recent, are about how he always hired the very best people, and then somehow made them do the best work they ever had. I think he could just tell if someone had the fire inside them, and knew how to fan those flames.
That is incredibly cool. Genius way to preserve, and even honor, the old, even though it is replaced by something newer. Wish we did this kind of thing more.
The self-conciousness, the fawning... This was a toe-curling read. And then it turns out ultimately Steve Jobs did not give a flying fuck about watches but happily wore a cheapo Seiko on the few occasions that he did use one. Ouch. Yet the author's great regret is that he did not get to spend ~$50,000 on that watch, as if it is has some special significance, rather than being a statement of the opposite, that takes missing the point to another level.
I'm not saying there is not a finer point to extremely expensive watches, beyond the status symbolism, but this article kind of makes me think, no.
> hen I get a text message, it gets archived to Gmail with a label so it's searchable. And every incoming/outgoing/missed call puts an entry with the details and timestamp in my calendar
What? I have used Android phones for many years and had no idea that is possible. Teach me your ways!
I found two apps a while ago which have been pretty reliable.
One is Backup to Gmail [1] for the text messages. The other one is called Calltrack for the calendar things.
It's nice to have it all integrated and searchable inside Gmail and Google Calendar.
[1] Just checked the Play store, and I think it's called SMS Backup+ now. There are a few alternatives too...
I'm not a big car guy, but I am nostalgic for my 9000. Like a true Saab it was in many ways a strangely put together car, but it had a hard to describe feel of being well engineered and a great ride. I owned a 900 too, and had Saab still existed I would most likely still be driving a Saab today.
Perhaps the new Chinese owners jump onto the electric wave and need a good base vehicle? One can dream!
At least an electric 9000 wouldn't have the balance chain chewing up the engine block ;)
It's such a solid car. Over engineered I dare say but such a lovely thing to drive. And personally, I still think it looks quite contemporary amongst cars of today. My father had a 900 and I feel that was my gateway Saab as I adored that thing. In a way I don't really feel for any other cars. I like cars, but often can give or take. Saabs make me feel all funny. Perhaps I should see someone about it... Must admit, I've never had any issues with the balance chain. After a head gasket (that was skimmed, fixed and happy for another 80k) I had a heater matrix go and a radiator, then water pump but I put all these down to the gasket going. Another brilliant thing with the ones of my era, is they are designed to be worked on. No job was ever that much of a pain.
Saab designs have always been timeless (mostly pre-GM of course) and still look great today.
The easiest fix for the balance chain issue on 9000s is to simply remove it. It's a whole subsystem only there to counter vibrations for smoother engine operation. This speaks to your point about over-engineering, but is also an illustration of the kind of design that makes the car feel so good.
Makes sense. One of the ways well-known authors make money is by selling bogus endorsements. Basically just giving someone the right to quote them that they like their product. I doubt Stephenson's "employment" with Magic Leap goes much deeper than that.
Of course it's listening, at all times. Otherwise it would not be able to react to the trigger phrase. What is interesting is whether it sends this data anywhere, and that is probably impossible to ascertain, since it could store it for a while and tunnel it out with innocent looking traffic.
It would be interesting if it could be determined if it stores the passively obtained data at all. If one could monitor writes to memory while in passive state it might give a clue.
Its account was marked "dormant" at UK Companies House and yet it had a credit balance at Danske of $965,418 on the same date. A colleague later told Mr. Wilkinson that the bank did not know who the beneficial owners were but "apparently it was discovered that they included the family of Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, and the FSB [Russia's intelligence service]", according to the email seen by the FT.
Danske's internal audit team was sent to investigate the Estonia operation in January 2014. Yet Mr. Wilkinson complained in a further email in April that despite his warnings "no related client account has been closed by management" and "there appears to have been no attempt by management to identify the full scope of the problem of UK LLPs submitting false accounts".
He reported that a senior executive told him "[Danske Bank] is not the police" and "[Danske Bank] has no obligation to report false client accounts to the authorities." That same day, he resigned and sent an email to Copenhagen, signing off: "Sad to say, it seems to me that things are totally broken here."
Wow. So internal whistleblowing procedures are token efforts which are actually shortcuts to get yourself 'resigned'. I become less and less surprised when reality turns out to match Dilbert one-to-one. Which is sad.