The scammers, which is to say most people at upper level positions in these companies, they just don’t respect human life at all, and they’ll take money wherever they can get it.

I think a lot of the profiteers in this space believe their positions are important and improve health outcomes, and that what’s good for the world is good for the company. Pfizer will tell their investors that inventing a life saving drug (e.g., a COVID vaccine) will be good for health, and that the shareholder therefore deserve to make a hefty profit from it.

Same with the hospital execs. They’ll pat each other on the back about how much good their hospital does, and see the very expensive billing department as an important function in their war against insurers.

And actual scammers, who bill for services not actually rendered, order unnecessary procedures, and prescribe the drugs the pretty rep is pushing, tend not to think they’re doing anything wrong or that they’re not hurting people.

People in each of these groups are saying in hushed tones that the insurance companies had it coming, and kinda sorta cheering the death of the United guy with their caveats (“well I’m not saying murder is OK but I’m not shedding tears,” etc.).

We only had enough trash to sustain a dumpster fire for one year but by some miracle it’s been stretched to 8 years.

The providers (hospitals, clinics, labs, doctor practices), insurers/payers (whether for profit like United, nonprofit like most Blue Cross Blue Shields, or government like Medicare), and pharmaceutical/medical device companies fight each other the whole time to make the most money off of the patients/beneficiaries/taxpayers. Big Pharma runs up prices and persuades doctors to prescribe their treatments, while doctors themselves have a profit motive in running up unnecessary treatments, all while insurers try not to pay for stuff, necessary or not.

It’s a broken system, but it’s also worth pointing out that the scammers in each camp hate the other camps just as much as the public does. There are hospital execs and pharma execs basically cheering on the anger at insurers, who will turn around and rip off the same victims in a different way.

That shouldn’t mean we make up the facts.

You’re the one getting facts wrong!

You’ve said that the Jones-affiliated bid was higher, which is incorrect. The Onion’s $7 million bid was higher, which is why the bankruptcy judge said that the other bidder should’ve been given an opportunity to improve its bid.

You’ve said that the $7 million valuation wasn’t based on anything. It’s a straightforward formula for determining the value when to reduce the claims of the creditors who wanted to credit bid.

You’ve said that the $7 million valuation was made up based on estimates of future cash flows. Future payments have nothing to do with the bid, and weren’t used in the formula to calculate the value at $7 million. That value is how much this bid brings to the estate immediately.

Even future payments were a percentage of profits and but not guaranteed.

That’s not part of the bid. The bid only had two components: a cash portion and a commitment to reduce claims by certain creditors. For non-participating creditors, it’s the exact same equivalent as a $7 million cash payment to the estate.

Future promises were made to families to incentivize them to reduce their claims (and therefore bring more money to the estate), but that’s not part of the bid itself.

I think you’re struggling to understand what’s happening here because you’re so anchored on your initial incorrect perceptions.

There was some future payments promised

It’s not future payments promised. Just a division of who to split the proceeds with. And so for the typical creditor who didn’t credit bid, The Onion’s bid was worth the equivalent of a $7 million cash bid, and therefore was more valuable than the Jones affiliates’ $3.5 million cash bid.

It’s just math. The Onion bid was higher, and the judge said that the losing bid should’ve been given an opportunity to improve the bid to get a chance to win, and maybe raise even more money.

The value of the Onion’s bid was $7 million ($1.75 million in cash, $5.25 million in credit), when you include the credit bids from the families. That’s where you’re getting tripped up in trying to understand what the court was ruling.

They are not telling the onion to offer more money, they are giving the one with the highest bid the chance to make it even bigger.

No, the Jones-affiliated bidder had a smaller bid, but should’ve been given the opportunity to try to outbid the then-highest bid from the Onion.

Basically the judge said that the trustee, as auctioneer, should’ve gotten the two bidders into a bidding war to maximize the price.

I’ve been following this closely.

The normal way bankruptcy auctions go is basically some version of this:

1. Everyone who wants to bid has to sign an NDA about the assets.
2. Everyone who signs the NDA can perform their due diligence, look at financial statements and other confidential information about the assets in the auction, to figuratively kick the tires. If there’s actual physical property involved, bidders are generally allowed to physically inspect it (if it’s a tractor, for example, you can bring a mechanic to help sort out the tractor’s condition).
3. Before the deadline, every bidder submits a secret bid to the trustee.
4. The trustee evaluates the bids, looks to see which is best, and decides whether the top bids are close enough to hold a live public auction or allow topping bids for the bidders to say “hey you’re only $1 million short from the current top bid, you want to throw more money at this?,” and going around and around until the trustee is sure they’ve gotten the best and final bid from everyone.

The judge is upset that the trustee didn’t really do step 4, which in the bankruptcy process is designed to squeeze out the highest possible price for the sale. The losing bidder says they submitted a lower bid than their absolute top “best and final” they would have, because they thought they’d have an opportunity to improve the bid in a step that never happened.

So they’re going back to do it again. Presumably the trustee will propose a new auction process that explicitly puts out well defined rules on how creditors (like the Sandy Hook families) can credit bid with credit against their own claims, instead of actual cash. They’ll need to calculate exactly how much each dollar of credit bid brings to the non-participating creditors (like Sandy Hook families who don’t want to credit bid), and make sure that for each creditor who isn’t credit bidding gets the most money out of the sale.

I don’t think it’s over. The judge specifically said that he believes the trustee tried to do the right thing, but ultimately didn’t follow a process that was designed to raise the most money.

there was a $10k bounty,

$60k. $10k from NYPD and $50k from the FBI.

Yes it does. It’s only offered on an irregular basis, so for the people that would only go to McDonald’s for the McRib, and no other item, would need to be notified when it’s available.

Figuring out grid scale storage isn’t easy, but the good thing about it is that you can figure out storage at slightly smaller scales to alleviate the problem somewhat, and build on that success to try to get to daily storage to meet nighttime demand, then up to weekly storage to handle fluctuations in weather, and maybe even seasonal storage to deal with seasonal variation in both supply and demand.

But storage doesn’t have to just be chemical batteries, either. Some can be demand shifting, like desalination or water pumping based on excess power supply. Maybe even intermittently powering direct air capture of CO2 if there’s so much excess energy they don’t know what to do with it. Some can be storage of heat, whether really hot like molten salt that can run turbines for dispatchable electricity, or just at the residential scale with a bunch of distributed hot water tanks, or everything in between. There are also some storage technologies relying on gravity (pumped hydro if the geography supports it), compressed air, flywheels (could be important for maintaining grid inertia for stability).

And there’s always curtailment, where you just don’t generate the power, and turn off some the panels in the middle of the day.

Contracts can be modified by the bankruptcy code.

In 11 U.S.C. § 365(f)(1):

Except as provided in subsections (b) and © of this section, notwithstanding a provision in an executory contract or unexpired lease of the debtor, or in applicable law, that prohibits, restricts, or conditions the assignment of such contract or lease, the trustee may assign such contract or lease under paragraph (2) of this subsection.

So any continuing contract in which there are obligations on both sides, such as a premium account where the accountholder pays a fee and the service provider continues providing access to the service, is assignable in a bankruptcy, even if the contract itself says it’s not assignable.

There’s a few other bankruptcy principles at play, but that’s the main one that jumps out at me.

There’s also a classic case where the bankruptcy trustee can sell a bankruptcy debtor’s Pittsburgh Steelers season tickets, including the right to renew for the next year on the same terms as all other season tickets holders. Just because the season tickets are revocable by contract doesn’t mean that the team has the right to exercise that revocation against a bankruptcy debtor just because they don’t like what’s happening in the bankruptcy.

The “what is a bank” question is complicated, so “fintechs” have been operating in areas that are in some gray areas in between “definitely a bank” versus “definitely not a bank.”

At the most informal, you’ve got things like a roommate who collects everyone’s fair share of rent before sending one payment to the landlord, or a parent who keeps track of their kids’ virtual balances of what the kids are allowed to spend. These definitely aren’t banks.

Then you’ve got things like short term balances between people who deal with each other: an employer who keeps track of hours and pays the employee at the end of the pay period, a retail customer who has some store credit from a returned item, a contractor who periodically invoices a customer for work performed, etc. Despite the “credit” and “balances,” these aren’t bank accounts.

Some gray areas get a little bit more complicated. You have airline mileage and hotel point programs where the miles/points can be used to purchase goods and services, including sometimes those not even being offered by the business where the miles were accumulated.

Then you get into banking-like structures that might be, or might not be banks. Is it banking when you buy something on a periodic payment plan? What about when you put down a deposit to reserve a preorder for something you expect to buy when that product is released? Or give someone a gift card for a specific store? Does it matter if these programs are administered by third parties separate from the buyer or seller?

Even things like Apple Cash or PayPal or Venmo or CashApp perform functions that can be bank-like, or not really bank-like.

Fintechs have looked at the constantly updated rules of what they can or can’t do before needing to comply with certain banking regulations, and usually try to avoid accidentally triggering certain rules. And the rules don’t divide into just bank versus not bank, as many of the rules apply to non-banks that do certain things, and many of the rules don’t apply to even banks that stay out of certain product lines. So it’s not a binary yes or no, but a series of complicated areas where some are yes and some are no.

The big problem, where this Synapse bankruptcy is hurting people, is when people worked with an entity that provides certain services, who relied on the back end on a middleman that provides other services, and then the middleman fails. People operating in the gray areas are exposing themselves to systemic risks they might not fully understand.

This isn’t about shareholders being wiped out. It’s about account holders of what they thought were bank accounts losing everything because their accounts were powered on the back end by a company they’d never heard of or directly dealt with.

These are supposed to have AI facial recognition for matching to government issued IDs, which just sounds like a huge attack surface (or even unintentional bugs).

Cigarette vending machines used to be quite common. Even today, there are some alcohol vending machines in controlled areas (some fancy hotels have 24/7 vending machines stocked with a particular brand of champagne bottles).

leftist themed nujob conspiracy mill

The Republican party is ripe for conspiracy theory targets.

Epstein had close ties with Trump and his attorney general Bill Barr (whose father hired Epstein to teach at a prestigious private high school without a college degree, where he was known for ogling the high school girls and showing up to parties where underage drinking was happening). The waitresses and hostesses at Trump’s Mar a Lago were also regularly recruited to work at Epstein’s island. Alex Acosta, the federal prosecutor who agreed to a secret plea deal where Epstein served a slap on the wrist in a local jail instead of real prison was later elevated to Trump’s cabinet, as Labor Secretary.

Now, Trump has named another child sex trafficker as his nominee for Attorney General.

There are suspicious ties between the Saudi royal family and key members in Trump’s orbit, including his son in law Jared Kushner. Elon Musk has been doing sketchy shit with the Saudis and the Russians, as well. Basically everyone in Trump’s circle, including his nominee to be the director of national intelligence, has shady ties with foreign adversaries.

There’s lots of other little things about financial profiteering by the Trump folks: an SBA COVID bailout that went to huge businesses, a move to privatize or sabotage the public postal service and the weather service to help the private competition, arbitrary or politically motivated regulations to help certain businesses while hurting others, etc.

I mean, it really wouldn’t be hard.

There’s been some reporting that Musk’s Super PAC has been paying its workers so well that it’s poached a bunch of the volunteers from the official campaign, and is so poorly run/audited that a lot of the workers are entering false data into the canvassing reports to qualify for bonuses. If that turns out to be true, then it will have been the case that Musk is burning his own money while hurting the Trump campaign.

I’m not ready to call the race, but stories like this at least reassure me that for Republicans, they’re not sending their best.

I made my own “cell phone service” but it only works within 10m of my home.