“There’s Never Just One Cockroach in the Kitchen”
… and “once you put a spotlight and start looking at everything, you’re likely to find something additional,” Warren E. Buffett said on Wednesday in an interview with CNBC regarding Wells Fargo’s account scandal.
Almost a year after the bank’s eruption came into public view, more than a million additional accounts that customers may not have authorized have come to surface. Many of the questionable accounts were created by moving a small amount of money from the customer’s current account to open the new one. Last September, Wells Fargo agreed to pay roughly $185 million to settle multiple lawsuits over the bank’s undeniable creation of false accounts. Besides the additional accounts announced Thursday, a wider review uncovered another issue: unauthorized enrollments of customers in the bank’s online bill payment service.
Surprisingly, Wells Fargo’s illegal acts have not taken much of a toll on its profit. The fines, penalties and refunds it has paid out to customers and government are only a small fraction of the $11 billion it earned in the first half of this year. A slap on the wrist, we’d say. (Source: NY Times)
Goodbye, Harvey. Helloooo, Irma.
Since Hurricane Harvey’s unwelcomed visit, Houston residents have slowly begun returning home. Some came in trucks, others in boats; however, some are not returning quite yet for fear of what may be behind closed doors. “They realize how lucky they are to be alive, in many instances. You’ve got to have priorities: Their priority was one of survival and breathing. Now they want to get back to normal as much as possible,” said State Senator John Whitmire.
And while much of the United States’ focus is still on the destruction left behind by Hurricane Harvey, cue Hurricane Irma. This powerful hurricane is rapidly intensifying in the open Atlantic and poses a major threat to the Caribbean and potentially the United States as close as next week. Bottom line: stay safe out there. (Source: NY Times, CNN)
E.T. Phone Home.
A team of astronomers, set up by Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, have recorded 15 mysterious radio signals coming from a dwarf galaxy three billion light years away. As part of the Breakthrough Listen project, a search for alien friends is on their to-do list. And what could these signals be? Some say extraterrestrial civilizations are casually powering their spacecrafts. Apparently whatever they may be, they left their galaxy when our Solar System was just two billion years old, and life was just beginning on Earth.
Although it’s unlikely that these fast radio bursts are from an alien civilization, at least we know that their equipment works and is ready to pick up signs of life…if they exist. As Hawking puts it, “As we do more study we find more weird things… Somewhere in the universe intelligent life may be watching the lights of ours aware of what they mean.” Simply put… We. Are. Not. Alone.. #CueDramaticMusic (Source: The Telegraph UK)
A Skinny [not so skinny] Fact: Out of 7,076 millennials interviewed, 69% of them reported they suffer from anxiety after not having their cell phone. When the results were broken down by gender, 76% of females reported anxiety after not having their cell phone, while 63% of males reported the same. How many times have you been late to work because you forgot your cell phone? (Source: LendEDU)
We’re taking a skinny dip over the holiday weekend, but we’ll resurface next Wednesday!
