The Punt: Ex-Coke boss's Dalkey plans

Ashton Carter, former deputy secretary of defense and U.S. President Barack Obama's nominee to be U.S. secretary of defense, places his hand over his heart after a nomination announcement with U.S. President Barack Obama, not pictured, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Friday, Dec. 5, 2014. Carter, 60, spent more than two years as the Defense Department's No. 2 civilian leader under former

Dublin-based businessman Warwick White has been getting settled in at his new job as president of international operations at Keurig Green Mountain. He took on the role at the US-based food technology company in March, having joined last October.

Australian native White was once the head of Coca-Cola Bottlers in Ireland, and also served as the head of Coca-Cola Amatil, which covers Australasia, for 12 years.

And while things are going swimmingly on the job front, Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown County Council has just given a mixed, but mostly positive, view of White and his wife's plans to refurbish their newly-acquired home on the upmarket Coliemore Road in the Dublin suburb of Dalkey.

The Whites bought the house earlier this year for €2.35m, according to the Property Price Register.

Coliemore Road has been home, at one time or another, to famous residents such as film director Jim Sheridan and Eddie Irvine.

Most of the work the Whites sought permission for at their new home, such as damp-proofing the basement and installing a new concrete floor there, conserving internal wall and ceiling plasterwork, and putting an ensuite into the master bedroom, have been approved.

The council told them they couldn't go ahead with a new dormer window and glazed balcony, however.

Will hardly take the fizz out of it though.

Dr Doom cashes in on the crash

There were lots of "think pieces" written over the weekend explaining how, because western markets ended last week higher than they were on Monday morning, the gyrations in the stock market between Monday and Friday didn't matter and might as well never have happened.

The Punt isn't so sure about the logic. Volatility itself is a sign of danger, even if the moves are positive as well as negative. Another person who is probably sceptical about that logic this morning? The academic Nassim Nicholas Taleb. "Dr Doom" hit the headlines when he called the 2008 crash, and has made a fortune out of his two books, 'The Black Swan' and 'Fooled by Randomness'.

The hedge fund Universa Investments, which is affiliated with Mr Taleb, reportedly gained about $1bn during the week, pushing its annual returns to about 20pc.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the fund follows a strategy that is set up to benefit from extreme moves in the market and it didn't get much better for it than the 1,000-point drop by the Dow Jones Industrial Average, followed by a 500- point gain the next day. Not a bad week's work.

Pentagon aims at Silicon Valley

The Pentagon is trying to bridge the gap between Silicon Valley and itself as it begins courting some of tech's biggest names.

Bloomberg reports that Apple and Google are being recruited to join traditional defence contractors on the frontlines.

US defence secretary Ashton Carter, below, visited the tech hub last week where he discussed the creation of a Defence Department page on LinkedIn with executives of the professional network.

A defence analyst with the American Enterprise Institute, MacKenzie Eaglen, said that Carter made the trip because "tech companies distrust US government officials and think there is little exciting work in government even if they were interested".

Carter says that the Pentagon is looking to tech companies to boost military capabilities in the way defence-funded projects did in the past with the likes of the jet engine and the internet.

The move is coming as contractors associated with the Department of Defence (DoD) in the US are accused of "not being risk-takers" but are instead more concerned with returning profit to their shareholders.

The DoD believes that tech companies are more likely to take risks and tackle problems.