"instant credit kiosks"
wtf!These sound ready-made for scammers. How many years did the GE executive get for aiding fraud! face-palm-shake head
A California man has admitted he was part of an international phishing ring and stole tens of thousands of identities so he could support his methamphetamine habit. Tien Truong Nguyen, 30, of Sacramento, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to five felonies, including conspiracy, access-device fraud and possession, aggravated identity …
GE finance became a bank and got a bailout in the last month of Bush's presidency as part of that Paulson stimulus package.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMAC#GMAC_becomes_a_bank
You can see the effect of 8 years of Bush. Cheney was spending like crazy, the Federal reserve trying to soak up the government treasuries, the money supply increasing as a result, ...gotta pump these dollars into the domestic economy or the dollar will collapse in value.... which leads to *instant credit* kiosks where just by entering a plausible name can you get $2000 free money!
Meanwhile, a country with an asset, for example, China and it's rare earth metals, digs them up and sells them, they get paid in US$, all of which are created in Walmarts instant credit kiosks in the US then exported when the redneck buys his laptop or other item that uses the metal. An economy built on the wealth of other nations.
The biggest threat to the US isn't terrorism, or disease or whatever, the biggest threat to the US is the Euro.
"How many years did the GE executive get for aiding fraud! face-palm-shake head"
I'd hope none. GE's actions are not illegal, merely stupid. Such kiosks can't possibly make adequate judgements of the identity of the person getting the credit, so GE cannot prove that the person named on the documents is the person who agreed to the credit agreement. Therefore, they have no obvious way of forcing the former person (who they know) to repay the debts of the latter person (who they don't).
I think if a court were to take that (eminently reasonable) line, you might see quite a number of financial institutions tightening up procedures. That might not be a bad thing, even now the horse has bolted.
Hm... Princeton Wordnet disagrees, all those cited by TheFreeDictionary disagree, but Merriam-Webster agrees with you. Yet I disagree with M-W because it is a corruption.
"The man and his cohorts" just means there's many conspirators. In the (correctly used) M-W quotation "the man and two of his cohorts," the "of" means "from," but M-W misinterpretes that as if each of the individuals is a cohort.
ElReg's Goodin thus shortens the correct usage "the man and two of his cohorts" using the M-W misinterpretation into the corrupt usage "the man and two cohorts".