Dirty money funded the making of a movie about dirty money? And it involves the prime minister of Malaysia? Now all we need is an assassination plot, brainwashing, and Blue Steel.
Only Mac and Linux coders; Windows coders can't wear jumpsuits to work ;)
Seriously, money trails are easier to suss out nowadays contrary to popular belief. At least in the past you needed to make lots of phone calls, write letters or get out of your seat to have F2Fs with potential leads or leaders. Only thing easier nowadays if you have cash, you can obfuscate with stubborn deniability and lots of lawyers. With all of the supposed anonymity with bitcoin they got to the bottom of Silk Road, didnt they? Family of the PM of Malaysia should be easy. I live in SE Asia, and this is par for the course in some more than other countries here.
The sad state of Malaysian politics is that their politicians play the race card rather heavily; so even an openly corrupt and incompetant leader gets reelected because the ethnic Malays are afraid of loosing their privileges if the Chinese or Indian ethnic groups get bigger say in politics.
If you haven't done any reading on the fund behind all of this (1MBD) then you should, its all stuff that sounds like an onion article.
It has
- ties to the highest level of wall street, with a few very high up people at GS loosing their jobs over this,
- the prime minister of a small country,
- Cayman islands shell companies
- a few hedge funds who have had to be wound down because of this
- and now a holly wood connection
There are investigations in over 10 countries now due to the activities of this fund. I'm guessing there will be more jail time handed out from this than over the 2008 financial crisis.
>Mr. Al-Husseiny is an American who then headed Aabar Investments PJS, which is an arm of an Abu Dhabi sovereign-wealth fund known as IPIC. The state-owned firms did business with 1MDB. For instance, IPIC guaranteed some of the Malaysian fund’s bonds.
>In connection with the IPIC guarantees, 1MDB reported in corporate filings that in 2012, it sent $1.4 billion to Aabar as collateral.
>Investigators believe this money never got to Aabar in Abu Dhabi but went instead to a separate, almost identically named company that Mr. Al-Husseiny had helped set up in the British Virgin Islands, called Aabar Investments PJS Ltd., said people familiar with the probes.
if you took away celebrity jets and yachts, what percentage of CO2 would we eliminate? How many zeros should I use? Would this be a good approximation?
Why should we section off people that indulge with jets and yachts in a separate category and explain away their behavior on the basis that this is only a small group of people?
I'm not even sure why we're even talking about it. it's irrelevant. "Fixing it" wouldn't delay the problem by a day. There are 100,000 commercial flights every day.
I'm rejecting how you are classifying the problem. Cornering off a specific subsection of the population and saying its too small to worry about is deflection.
Everyone can be classified and cornered off in some way. Does that mean that we should consider everyone's contribution to the problem irrelevant, or just those with a simple and easy to convey label?
You're worried about a slippery slope that doesn't exist.
If I said "let π = 3.1415" would you be objecting that I might as well set π = 3, just because I'm not using its exact value? Are you really arguing that we can't afford to overlook any pollution? You don't solve problems by rejecting any solution that isn't absolutely perfect.
I had a Bio professor in college who lectured every day about climate change, yet drove 2 hours to and from work every day, through the mountains. I booked to class, every day, and he still made me nuts.
I asked him about this hypocrisy, which led to a lower grade in the class. Worth it.
By how big of a factor do you believe consumer pollution effects outweigh industrial pollution? Also, do you really believe hypocrisy has any kind of standing as a rational argument?
How is that relevant? The concern here is industrial pollution in scale relation to consumer pollution. If consumer pollution is is significantly lower than industrial pollution, then it is easier to tolerate.
Nobody is hypothesizing the non-existence of consumers.
Because consumers drive industry, so more consumer pollution implies more consumption, which in turn creates more industry and more industrial pollution.
Of course we shouldn't. What we need is one simple rule: you pay for the damage caused by your indulgence.
If you can, fire away your jets. If you can't, don't. Just like every other aspect of life in a capitalistic society. I mean, can you imagine the chutzpah of hedge fund managers who claim they should be exempt from carbon tax because they are rich? Oh dear.
* Why are we talking about carbon tax here anyway?
"Paying for damage" seems working pretty well for national parks. Besides, the choice right now is not between paying and correcting, but between paying and not paying.
