Weekend Edition 17 – SBF Arrested, Bad Twitter Influencers, Congress Looks to Ban TikTok, and More.

We 17.1 – SBF Arrested... Boy Was I Wrong... Maybe He Crossed too Many of the Wrong People...

Well, that escalated quickly. The US filed charges against him on Monday 12/12/22, and the Bahamian Authorities were more than happy to comply and arrest him. He requested bail, but was denied, and will be held in custody there until February 8th. He faces 8 counts of conspiracy and criminal activity related to wire fraud, commodities fraud, securities fraud, money laundering, and violating campaign finance laws. Any one of those, if they stick, could put him behind bars for a number of years. On top of these criminal charges, he is being slapped with civil charges brought by Gensler’s SEC. They allege that SBF “built a house of cards on a foundation of deception while telling investors that it was one of the safest buildings in crypto”.

I was perhaps a little too cynical last week. For that I apologize. We will see how much of the weight of the law crashes down on his curly head. The new CEO, who is presiding over the Chapter 11 proceedings after SBF ducked out last month, called the collapse “plain, old embezzlement” during a congressional hearing that SBF was unable to attend, due to being in Bahamian custody. He had a prepared statement read, but was absent. As an aside, all of this talk about the Bahamas has me thinking about an old song... Who Let the Dogs Out... Lol I guess he did...

https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/crypto/ftx-co-founder-sam-bankman-fried-charged-with-fraud-denied-bail/

#weekendedition #sbf #ftx #sbfarrested #crypto #bs #deception #TechFreedom

WE 17.2 – 8 Twitter Influencers Charged with Stock Fraud

Over the last nearly 3 years, 7 of the 8 charged individuals have allegedly used Twitter and Discord to manipulate a series of stocks, in a maneuver called a “pump and dump”, where they amassed $100 million in profits by buying, then hyping the stocks in question to artificially “pump” the valuation up, then dumping them when it had surged enough for them. The 8th charged individual is charged with “aiding and abetting” the schemes of the other 7, by giving them publicity on his podcast, then getting a cut of the profits when they traded their shares away without notifying their audiences/ followers of their intentions to do so. That’s right, it is illegal to do that, unless you are a government or quasi-government entity like the Federal Reserve, which regularly manipulates the entire market through screwing with the prime interest rate and announcing intentions to do so, one way or the other.

Can I be any more sarcastic about the fakeness of stonks and the ephemerality of the whole system? Not sure. I sure am reminded of that classic George Carlin bit about there being “a big club, and you ain’t in it”. This is bullshit from the start anyway, some businesses are legitimately worth something, based on their sustained profitability, or some technology or other thing they produce that perennially sells well. However, most stonks are not worth the figurative paper they are “written on”, though they are no longer physical things in most cases, now. In fact, if you are invested in the Market, you do not actually own stocks. You own nothing, and you freak out over the financial news, when not only is that stock literally never in your possession (it belongs to Cede & Company, you just purchase limited rights to it), Cede & Co processes stock certificate transfers for the Depository Trust Company, which is in turn held by the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation. These companies actually own the stock that you “purchase”, “hold”, and “sell”. Not only stock, but Mutual Funds, EFTs, derivatives, or any other securities traded on Wall St. I could go into the house of cards that is the rest of our financial system, predicated on “faith” or “fiat” currency, whose value is entirely immaterial. This is how certain countries with massive amounts of natural resources can have currencies that are regularly sent into hyperinflation, while others have ”stronger” standings. It is all nonsense until the world returns to precious metal-backed financial systems, which it seems as though Russia and the other BRICS nations are in the process of doing. People have their reasons to dislike Russia and Putin, but are we really any different in terms of free speech, here in the “liberal, democratic” West? I digress.

Do these comments make it ok to defraud anyone? Absolutely not. They do, however begin to shine a light on the fraud that is inherent in the current system, and will only get more pronounced with some type of CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) that is even more tightly controlled.

https://www.cnet.com/news/social-media/influencers-charged-by-sec-in-securities-fraud-scheme/

#weekendedition #stonks #stockmarket #bullshit #influencers #scammers #pumpanddump #finance101 #stocks101 #TechFreedom

WE 17.3 – Will Congress Ban TikTok? Let’s See...

Looks like we have very similar bills being put forward in both houses of congress to ban both TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, from operating in the US. Here are the sponsors: Senator Marco Rubio of FL, and Reps Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL). This idea is bipartisan, at least in the house, and that is encouraging to me. I know many people are addicted to it, and that is the cornerstone of these pieces of legislation. The reality is that roughly 1/3 of the US population (111 million people) uses TikTok at least monthly, according to Data.ai, an internet statistics company. Rep Gallagher calls it “digital fentanyl, that is addicting Americans, collecting troves of their data, and censoring their news”. I quite agree with his appraisal. ByteDance, of course, is on the defensive here, and is insisting that they aren’t hurting US national security, and that they are working hard to put in place better protections for US citizens. If you recall, they are being raked over the coals by the EU, and desperately wants to avoid losing their lucrative place in the US. We shall see what happens here.

I have to admit that as much as I abhor the overall dumbing down and infantilization of the US population through platforms like TikTok which incentivize short attention spans, along with videos that barely have any real meaning. Not to mention that it is a huge data siphon for users, with the funnel leading straight to servers controlled by the CCP, who certainly mines that data for anything that could possibly be useful to them and harmful to our wellbeing. I also struggle with countries whose governments are powerful enough to ban things for their citizens, rather than simply educating and informing them of the dangers of their behaviors.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/congressional-bills-would-ban-tiktok-in-the-us-to-thwart-china/

#weekendedition #tiktok #bytedance #creepy #bantiktok #privacy #security #TechFreedom

WE 17.4 – Could Clean Nuclear Fusion Be Around the Corner?

Researchers at the NIF (National Ignition Facility) in San Francisco have been chasing this holy grail of clean power for 60 + years. Nuclear fusion is the process which “powers” stars, so stable, viable nuclear fusion would entail creating a miniature star in a bottle, then siphoning off the energy it produces to benefit humanity. The problem is that until 12/5/22, it never produced a net gain in energy. Something changed in the fifth, however, and they changed the design of their experiment and were able to create a hot enough, dense enough environment to briefly release more energy than the lasers which created the heat energy deposited. The lasers had fired 2 megajoules of energy into the hohlraum (the container at the heart of the NIF facility where they attempt to create a fusion reaction. There are, however, massive inefficiencies in their systems, which lead to losses of 99.5% of the energy used before it even reaches the hohlraum. It takes about 400 megajoules to get a consistent 2 megajoules of power to reach the hohlraum. They were able to generate 2.5 megajoules through this experiment. This is the first net positive result* for this form of fusion experiment, but it is just a proof of concept. Cool, but not earth shatteringly cool.

Nuclear fusion is clean in that it does not produce radioactive waste at the end of the reaction, unlike nuclear fission, which involves splitting radioactive isotopes, such as uranium and plutonium.

*versus the amount of power that actually reached the hohlraum, not the energy it took to “fire muh lasers”

https://www.cnet.com/science/major-energy-breakthrough-milestone-achieved-in-us-fusion-experiment/

#weekendedition #crypto #lending #fintech #volatility #physicalassets #gold #silver #SEC #TechFreedom

WE 17.5 – Apple to Allow Alt App Stores in the EU... Maybe Here, Too?

Wow, Apple’s walled garden is being bulldozed open by EU regulators through competition laws. After all, if they don’t they’ll get slapped with a fine worth 10% of their global revenue... That, in the case of Apple, could be billions of dollars. Apple of course throws the “but muh security”, but “if we allow sideloading apps, it could harm the devices and open phones to someone other than just us”... Remember when Epic Games sued Apple over AppStore fees in Fortnite? Pepperidge Farms Remembers... Epic lost the case, but argued that Apple has too much control over the devices they make. That whole kerfluffle was largely noise and fury with little real meaning or substance, though the EU took notice. This seems to be much of what the EU was aiming at with this law. Apple has yet to decide if they’ll allow app developers to set up their own in-app payment systems or not, but that is another piece of the picture, here. The changes are targeted for the release of iOS 17

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-reportedly-to-allow-rival-app-stores-on-iphones-ipads-in-eu/

#apple #appstores #EU #monopoly #TechFreedom