Cristian

“Addressing Hester and the rest of the RBS board at the bank’s annual general meeting on 19 April 2011, shareholder and former SME customer Nigel Henderson said, ‘The jackboot culture is alive and kicking – literally as well as metaphorically – within your bank, despite your pious statements.’ Henderson alleges the bank misappropriated the Portree Hotel, on the Isle of Skye, and the £800,000 from the sale of the Park Hotel, in Montrose, from him. Henderson, having built a business worth £2 million making profits of £400,000, became an RBS customer in July 1997. He says, ‘Before signing two personal loan agreements for £400,000, I made it clear to the bank that we intended to redeem the proposed loans early. The bank assured us that this would be fine, that the maximum penalty would be three months’ interest, and that the loan documents would be drawn up accordingly. In November 1998 we deposited more than £800,000 with RBS, intimating we wished to exercise early redemption, as agreed. But they demanded £240,000, seized our cash and refused to allow us to exit the loans. They had embarked on a conscious process of deceit to engineer our total financial destruction.’ In early 2014, RBS headed off a Police Scotland inquiry into the matter by refusing to provide detectives with requested paperwork, and on 30 April 2014, an executive assistant of Sir Philip Hampton wrote to Henderson saying, ‘The bank’s position remains that it does not accept the allegations you continue to assert.”
― Ian Fraser, Shredded: Inside RBS, The Bank That Broke Britain

“Perhaps, very soon, we will learn that Iranian and Russian trolls are bouncing the president’s messages around social media echo chambers. But even if they are, they are getting drowned out by real Americans. If the goal of Putin’s 2016 interference was to sow chaos and undermine democracy, then what is now playing out is beyond his wildest dreams.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“Skills are taught experientially—meaning that students studying AI don’t have their heads buried in books. In order to learn, they need lexical databases, image libraries, and neural nets. For a time, one of the more popular neural nets at universities was called Word2vec, and it was built by the Google Brain team. It was a two-layer system that processed text, turning words into numbers that AI could understand.17 For example, it learned that “man is to king as woman is to queen.” But the database also decided that “father is to doctor as mother is to nurse” and “man is to computer programmer as woman is to homemaker.”18 The very system students were exposed to was itself biased. If someone wanted to analyze the farther-reaching implications of sexist code, there weren’t any classes where that learning could take place.”
― Amy Webb, The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity

“RBS is investing tens of millions of pounds in Bó, which is positioned firmly in the personal banking space and aims to compete head-on with the likes of Monzo, a three-year-old digital bank which already has over a million customers. Named after the Danish word for ‘to stay’, Bó aims to help customers manage their finances better, for example by alerting them to better deals from utility companies. RBS reportedly intends to shift around 1 million of its roughly 17 million UK retail customers onto the Bó platform after the launch, believing such cannibalisation is preferable to losing customers to rival fintech brands.”
― Ian Fraser, Shredded: Inside RBS, The Bank That Broke Britain