Breaking my weekend curfew, just for a change.

tomo,
Hadn't seen that Al Jazeera report before. Pretty grim. Worst for accident victims, but terrible too for long-term shareholders. I have a feeling that there must be an unholy alliance between speculative investors and senior management/directors which promotes this crazy short-termism. Surely the long-term investors could concoct a bonus scheme where the bonus only materialises in the long term

I feel the problem affects many companies and public-sector organisations too.

The Post Office false accusations are reminiscent of Australia's Robodebt scheme. As I recall, one of the key court rulings said that it was very firmly *not enough* to say the numbers don't add up, therefore it must be fraud; the department had to show a proper line-by-line account of the accused's transactions demonstrating the fraud. Hooray for the courts (for once).

That Wikipedia article, in fairly typical fashion, sheets blame for the Robodebt scheme to various right-of-centre governments, but it was pretty clear during the inquiries that it was a strongly bureaucrat-led scheme with ministers foolishly accepting the advice. Buck stops with the Minister, but one or two bureaucrats did take a fall. None got Bynged, despite suicides amongst the victims.

Jo Nova tells of some unrest in Germany over Net Zero. I don't expect it'll be on tonight's news, but I hope it persists long enough that even the ABC has to report about it.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/12/hydroxychloroquine-covid-increase-chance-death-trump

Tomo,

What gets me about all of this is the utter lack of curiosity from those investigating the "missing money" to those higher up the food chain seeing this all going on.

Surely someone must have wondered how, all of a sudden, there are literally thousands of post masters stealing money? Someone must have had a look in the past to see if there as a historic pattern to money going missing? Surely the investigators would have looked at whether there was any change of lifestyles going on, especially for the post masters being accused of stealing tens of thousands of pounds from the post office etc? Surely there was some form of financial forensics analysis carried out to see if these people were spending money they shouldn't have had or squirrelling it away where they shouldn't be??

What Im suspecting is the PO went in with a "THEY ARE GUILTY" mentality and from then on it was about putting the criminals away for DARING to steal from the Post Office. Probably never crossed their minds that the Post Office could be wrong in any way, shape or form.