Since the riots in a number of cities across the U.K. this summer, scores of people, mostly men, have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms – and quite rightly so: only immediate and severe punishment can act as a deterrent. What I found particularly shocking is the age of some of those hoodlums: the youngest […]
Author: Grumpy Old Man
Striking Gold: Navigating Olympic Spirit vs. Commercial Interests
The modern Olympic Games were founded to celebrate amateur sporting ideals. But times change. As France is gearing up for the 2024 summer Olympics, it’s time to take a peek behind the scenes. Nowadays it’s all about money. Teams and athletes compete for medals, proud to be representing their nation at such a prestigious event. […]
$370’000 per hour
That lawyers among other professionals can charge exorbitant hourly rates for their work is nothing new. But what the three law firms representing Richard Tornetta, the Tesla-investor who while holding 9 shares only in 2018 successfully sued the company over Elon Musk’s $56 billion compensation package now claim is nothing short of outrageous! In total […]
McDonald’s stops AI experiment in the US
In a recent post I have shown how artificial intelligence sometimes is, well, neither artificial nor intelligent. Since then McDonald’s, who were also trialling AI-assisted ordering systems in the US have announced that following a number of rather comical mishaps they are abandoning the tests (at least for now). The technology developed by IBM has […]
Airfare Faceoff: Comparing the Comfort and Cost of Low-Cost and Legacy Airlines
Many of us are regularly travelling be it for work, to go on holiday or to visit family and friends, and if these journeys involved air travel, you might have had to ask yourself which airline to fly with. Most of my own traveling by plane is between Switzerland and the U.K., so besides both […]
Divided We Stand: Navigating Political Polarisation
As elections in Britain and the United States are upon us (and all of a sudden also in France), it is time to look at the political landscape and how it has evolved. Once upon a time in the United Kingdom there used to be the Conservatives and the Labour Party – and to a […]
Presidential Past, Criminal Present
The announcement on 30 May was not quite unexpected I suppose: a New York jury found former president Donald Trump guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records. So the former and aspiring POTUS is now a convicted felon. This means, should he get re-elected in November, that the most powerful democracy in the […]
Behind the Suits: Big White Collar Criminals
Crime doesn’t pay, the saying goes, at least it doesn’t if you get caught. The sentencing of Sam Bankman-Fried at the end of March to 25 years n prison for his role in the collapse of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange, made me curious as to what other big white collar crimes and criminals there have […]
Not so Artificial Intelligence
AI as in artificial intelligence is all the rage these days, isn’t it. Any service assisted by AI is novel – and the company which provides it finds itself no doubt at the cutting edge of technology. At least until someone finds out that all is not what it seems. You may have heard of […]
Autocracy on the advance
What have Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Venezuela in common? They all repress democratic expression by their populations, be it in general or as part of recent or upcoming elections. In Russia Vladimir Putin’s reelection at 87% of the population’s vote following the death of Alexei Navalny in an arctic penal colony in February is […]
The grumpy older man 