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Miami-based Tech CEO Gets 6 Years in prison and must pay $100 million in restitution for selling Fake Cisco networking equipment
https://www.justice.gov/usao-nj/pr/ceo-dozens-companies-sentenced-78-months-prison-massive-scheme-traffic-fraudulent-and
Some of the networking equipment sold by 40-year-old Onur Aksoy 'ended up in US hospitals, schools, and highly sensitive military and other governmental systems,' the DOJ says.
To create the counterfeits, his business associates in China took older, lower-model products, some of which were previously discarded, and modified them to appear new, while loading pirated Cisco software on the hardware.
Another Florida resident, Donald Trump, has reiterated his promise "to defund the very crooked Justice Department."
Just as filing for bankruptcy is Donald Trump's super-power
The one thing Elon Musk has always excelled at is firing people, even people absolutely essential to his business he has to later apologize to and try to hire back.
It’s only been two weeks since Tesla began reducing its workforce by ten percent, a move that impacted at least 14,000 staffers. Now, even more pink slips are coming.
The company let go of two senior executives today and plans to lay off hundreds more employees, as reported by The Information.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/musk-plans-more-layoffs-as-two-senior-tesla-executives-depart
These layoffs include the entire Supercharger team, including senior director Rebecca Tinucci and 500 staffers. Daniel Ho, head of the new vehicles program, was also laid off, along with his team. Tesla’s public policy team is also being dissolved, which was led by former executive Rohan Patel.
CEO Elon Musk sent out a company-wide email that seemed more like a threat than anything else. "Hopefully these actions are making it clear that we need to be absolutely hard core about headcount and cost reduction," Musk wrote. "While some on exec staff are taking this seriously, most are not yet doing so."
This could be just the beginning. Musk also said that any staffers working under executives who “don’t obviously pass the excellent, necessary and trustworthy test” would also get cut. When all of this is said and done, Tesla’s headcount could be reduced by as much as 20 percent, as recently suggested by Bloomberg. This adds up to more than 20,000 employees.
Just how “hard core” is Musk about reducing costs?
Well, a judge recently rejected his proposal for a pay package that would grant him $55.8 billion of Tesla’s money, which was referred to in court as “an unfathomable sum” that was unfair to shareholders. Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick went on to call it “the largest potential compensation opportunity ever observed in public markets by multiple orders of magnitude.”
By comparison, these lay-offs all sound like kinda soft core cost-cutting to me.
Profit margins have sunk to a six-year low. The company’s most recent earnings report was abysmal, with profits falling by 55 percent. The Cybertruck continues to be something of a dangerous joke. Tesla’s Autopilot software was recently linked to 14 deaths. It has also reportedly given up on its budget-friendly EV in favor of a robotaxi, because why make a car everyone would want to buy instead of something only a few taxi start-up companies will buy? On the plus side, Tesla doesn’t really pay taxes, which is pretty hard core.
And car sharing start-ups have been so successful in China, less than 3,500 miles each, so there's that
We drove a Lexus ES300 4 cylinder hybrid (210hp) yesterday, as well as their ES350 6 cylinder (302hp). The hybrid with 43/44 mpg is impressive. Under $50k
Around town the hybrid acceleration feels comparable to my 5 series BMW, although it lags by 2 seconds on 0-60. But I'd need to access a freeway to experience that, and we only access freeways four times a year or less where we live in urban Los Angeles. To me the Lexus 6 cylinder has too much torque with this "benefit" largely lost by not having slip-differential.
Although the same size interior as a 2004 Lexus ES350, the interior feels "visually smaller" due to higher windows and the location of roof pillars. As with virtually all newer cars, two inches wider on the exterior to accommodate side airbags.
Wifi connected Android Auto or Apple Car Play is a big improvement over car built-in music or navigation.
Dennis Falaschi, 77, the gregarious general manager of the Panoche Water District in Firebaugh CA, directed the theft of more than $25 million worth of water out of the federally owned Delta-Mendota Canal, already priced at a level heavily subsidized by taxpayers, over the course of two decades and selling it to farmers and other local water districts. - https://panochewd.specialdistrict.org/
The proceeds stolen from the canal benefited Falaschi, a former baseball coach, his water district and a small group of co-conspirators, much of it funneled into exorbitant salaries and lavish fringe benefits. The $25 million of water was already priced far below market, being heavily subsidized by federal taxpayers.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-04-28/san-joaquin-valley-official-accused-of-epic-california-water-heist
LOS BANOS, Calif. —
Robert Zavala was fresh out of the Marines and looking to escape dead-end work at a poultry plant in the early 1990s when his old baseball coach — now the head of a local water district — swooped to the rescue with a job offer.
Zavala was grateful for the job, which eventually paid more than $150,000 a year and included perks such as free housing and a new truck. Grateful enough, he later testified in state court, that when he learned the public agency he worked for was stealing water from the federal government he kept his mouth shut. For years.
And then one day in 2016, FBI agents showed up at his house.
“They told me they were investigating my boss for water theft, and they wanted to know if I wanted to go to federal prison with him,” Zavala said in his testimony.
Just three rate hikes this year?
China's best, a premier Hongshi H9 the limo always used by Xi Jinping, destroyed in a charging fire - https://www.hongqi-auto.com/
Yes, China is making a record number of chargers.
A field of 10,000 BYD battery-powered autos, all made in 2021, all registered, each with less than 35 miles on them. Yes, China is making a lot of EVs.
The end-result of ponzi-scheme EV-vehicle sharing businesses.
One innovative feature of the new BYD Han is its commemoration of China as the inventor of fireworks.
BYD Han fires are quite frequent. It's become the best known feature of the Han. Yes, China is making quite a lot of batteries.
Looks like we need some kind of Mary Tyler Moore
"Who can take a nothing day — And suddenly make it all seem worthwhile ?"
The Real Estate sector has imploded so badly in China that Automobile production is now the largest part of China's economy,
generating a total value of CNY11 trillion (approx. US$1.52 trillion), accounting for nearly 10% of the country's GDP and surpassing real estate, but also
creating a price war which has created economic deflation. https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20240426PD205/china-automobile-ev-market-price-war.html
This is long overdue. Many medical tests are hilariously inaccurate, Elizabeth Holmes . Theranos bad, with some test makers like Labcorp actually advising Doctors testing for pathogens or diseases to submit the same sample six different times in order to eliminate the bias built into their tests to avoid false positives. Sadly most existing lab tests will be grandfathered in.
What a douchebag
Musk looks to weak Chinese officials in order to approve half-blind self-driving Tesla taxis.
“Musk made a surprise weekend trip to Beijing to meet with a host of high-ranking Chinese government officials, including Chinese Premier Li Qiang, with a laser focus on cutting the ribbon on the long-awaited rollout of FSD software and permission/approval to transfer data overseas,” wrote Wedbush analyst Dan Ives in a Sunday report.
FSD is short for Full Self-Driving, Tesla’s highest-level driver assistance product that Musk believes will turn Teslas into truly self-driving cars today.
In the US, FSD requires driver supervision 100% of the time. Before self-driving cars can be unlocked. Tesla needs to be allowed to unlock all its FSD features for Chinese Tesla owners. Tesla sells driver assistance technology, but the Chinese version of FSD doesn’t even have all the features available in North America, such as stopping at traffic lights and stop signs.
Musk has long believed that achieving autonomous driving represents a huge financial windfall for the company. It’s been harder to achieve than anyone expected—the original DARPA self-driving challenge was 20 years ago—but Tesla has scheduled a robotaxi reveal event on Aug. 8. The company appears to believe it’s making significant progress.
Batteries supplied 3.4% of ALL California electricity consumed past 48 days
A place to store surplus solar power in being build fast in California.
But solar installations have run ahead of forecasts so the California Independent System Operator, aka Cal ISO, is periodically dumping power at a negative price during peak solar periods.
https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx#section-ra-capacity-trend
The supply constraints on Nvidia have been HBM (high bandwidth memory) and "special packaging" which is connecting typically 6 or more GPUs onto one substrate inside a CPU enclosure.
Special packaging also includes stacking HBM 2 or 6 layers high with connectors running through them - and this special packaging includes transmitting heat away from the electronics in the "CPU container". Packaging is a many step process that takes months.
The same goes for other GPU makers like AMD, Qualomm, and in-house development like Open AI and Google and others through Broadcom.
The validation of SK Hynix solved the HBM supply problem for Nvidia. Longer term Samsung is ramping up supply and AMD probably has most of what they want.
Hung says Nvidia has the packaging capacity they need under contract, but I strongly suspect they could sell GPUs faster if they there were more packaging plants. Intel wanted to buy Tower Semi TSEM for their packaging technology putting many processors on a glass substrate, but China objected so they're working with Tower giving over 2/3 of one of their new plants in Arizona.
So "packaging" will be supply constrained for perhaps another 3 to 4 years - then there will be a glut.
First NVIDIA DGX H200 in the world, hand-delivered to OpenAI and dedicated by Jensen "to advance AI, computing, and humanity".
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/h200/ $31k each
The H100s was first priced at $40k, with Nvidia currently selling them for $25k until the production of H200s ramps up fully.
Arizona grand jury indicts Meadows, Giuliani, other Trump allies for 2020 election interference
The former president is listed as an unindicted co-conspirator.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/24/arizona-election-indictments-giuliani-meadows-trump-00154241
Honda making solid state lithium batteries
Assistant professor Katey Walter Anthony ignites methane from under the ice in a pond on the Fairbanks Alaska campus in 2009.
Massive amounts of greenhouse gases trapped below thawing permafrost will likely vent into the air over the next several decades, accelerating and amplifying global warming.
Methane beautifully trapped in ice before it could escape from a remote Canadian lake.
Most of the organic sediment on the bottom of pristine lakes gets turned into methane due to low oxygen levels.
The largest source of Methane emissions has been thought to be decomposing waste in sewers, ponds, marshes along with Rice fields and Livestock.
But live Trees have now been found to possibly be just as large a producer of methane, which is really surprising to me.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/scientists-probe-the-surprising-role-of-trees-in-methane-emissions
Methane surveys of cities have found decomposing plant matter, garbage, and feces either wet or buried is the cause of most measurable methane in urban environments. Humans are champion methane producers when put up against cows. - https://medium.com/climate-conscious/do-humans-fart-more-methane-than-cows-a0f48c590fb0
For their small size, Gardener's compost pits are massive methane producers.
In agriculture, rice farming is the larger methane producer just because so much land is turned into methane swamps to raise rice. In the US those methane producing rice farms are in Northern California with irrigated land, Texas, and Texas - although the swamps in Florida produce massive quantities of methane, even without rice production.
Just four percent of all methane in the world is produced in the oceans, because most methane is eaten as food before it escapes the water - the same bacteria that chow down on oil in the ocean.
I can't imagine having a taxable trading account without margin to avoid "trading violations", among other things.
As might be expected with the dysfunctional systems at Merrill Lynch, when I open their Margin Account Application
It shows my Trading Account which has margin approved, and my Roth account.
"Based on your login, you have no accounts eligible for margin." LOL
Merrill is little changed from when I first did business with them for 3 or 4 months when I was 16 years old. When I noted their defects my grandfather suggested Sutro & Co which was far more modern.
This is a simple explanation from SoFi brokerage of Limited Margin https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/ira-margin-account/
This is an unnecessarily complex explanation from Fidelity of Limited Margin https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/trading-investing/trading/limited-margin-trading-IRA
In addition to having at least $25k in equity in the retirement account, you have to specify your investment objective is "Most Aggressive", and you also cannot use an FDIC insured default sweep account for excess cash.
"Limited Margin" doesn't allow you to invest more money than you have in your Roth account.
Limited Margin allows Fidelity and Schwab to extend you "a courtesy" of avoiding SEC settlement rules. Limited Margin makes your retirement investments safer.
"Limited Margin", which requires a balance of at least $25k in your Roth account, allows you to trade ALL of the money in your Roth account, regardless of whether it is "T+2 Settled Money" or merely your retirement money which is not yet "settled", eliminating "Trading Violations" which is just brilliant.
Fidelity and Schwab can't charge me interest for using my unsettled money because margin, the way you think of it, is not allowed in retirement accounts. How did this manage this last year? I don't care.
Mitch is a two-faced worm, but al least this indicates worms feel it's now safe to tell the truth.
Trump's influence must be on the wane
I just learned Fidelity allows you to add "Limited Margin" to Roth accounts as of sometime last year, which is well worth doing to avoid trading violations on selling securities bought with "unsettled funds".
Add Limited Margin to the account online, then call and have your holdings transferred from Cash to Margin.
Finally other self-driving cars will be able to actually see like Google Waymos. I'm certain any "Tesla Taxi" will have to be retrofitted with a Luminar Halo or other Lidar.
Luminar, an American Lidar company based in Orlando, Florida starts shipping lidar for China-owned Volvo and their EX90 — while readying its next-gen sensor
https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/23/24138224/volvo-ex90-production-start-luminar-lidar-halo-sensor
Luminar has worked with Swiss Re to measure how lidar can reduce the severity of accidents and found that its tech resulted in about 27 percent reduction in accidents and about 40 percent reduction in severity compared to the top-performing vehicles with camera and radar-based systems (aka blind Teslas).
Luminar’s new Halo sensor, weighs under one kilogram, and only uses about 10 watts of power. This uses four of the next-generation chips from Luminar Semiconductor Inc., which it says will enable four times performance improvements, three times the reduction in size, and twice the thermal efficiency compared to Iris. Luminar is moving forward with 1550nm lidars, stating it wants to “avoid future performance and power consumption issues associated with 905nm.”
The order of lidar sensors to Volvo, which Luminar notes is worth $4 billion, comes after Volvo announced last year that it had to push production start of the EX90 to early 2024. The placement like a visor on the roof of the car allows the sensor to sort of blend into the roofline/
Luminar’s lidar tech sits on top of the vehicle like a visor and uses lasers to create a 3D environment around it. The placement allows the sensor to sort of blend into the roofline; however, the company’s current “Iris” sensors are still a bit obvious when looking at its partner vehicles like the EX90 and new Mercedes Benz racing vehicles.
In 2022 Innoviz Lidar based in Israel signed a similar $4 billion contract for Lidars with VW and BMW.
You find some interesting companies
CRM is reminding me of Oracle - Larry Ellison met people from the CIA who wanted something called a relational database and Larry used government funding to create on called Oracle, which the Fortune 500 found uses for once it existed.
Most of Larry's input since that early time has been a mistake. ORCL works best when he's otherwise occupied.
I wish I knew better what to do with Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) 272
Investors appear to be back in the mode where no one trusts CEO-founder Marc Benioff again after his recent leaked contemplation of buying Informatica, which fortunately did not like the price he offered. https://qz.com/salesforce-informatica-no-deal-1851425746 It would have taken something like 5 years to integrate the two companies.
CRM is still in an uptrend, but it's not responding to the market upturn today.
I admittedly bought most of our CRM at 133 following another of Benioff's merger brainstorms that took too long to show profit.
Shame on me for buying some more in a Roth a month ago recently for 296 - at least it was the only Roth holding I didn't add to yesterday. All the additions are up smartly.
Even blind squirrels find nuts now and then.
Trying out one lot of AMD @148.50
Maybe they'll figure out a way to make money on graphics chips as well
Bad news and reassuring
There's nothing I sold Friday that I could have sold for more this morning.
The stuff I didn't sell bounced up, but I'll look for lower prices to add.
sold DUK
"I cannot, with all sincerity, not wish the United States to plunge into a new civil war as quickly as possible." - Dmitry Medvedev - https://www.newsweek.com/russia-reacts-us-military-aid-ukraine-dmitry-peskov-medvedev-maria-zakharova-1892547
The former Russian president is not happy with the House vote subverting the Republican "Freedom Caucus'" plans to starve Ukraine of US aid.
Limiting the portion of the day during which you eat has become an increasingly popular way to lose weight.
"We were surprised to find that people who followed an 8-hour, time-restricted eating schedule were more likely to die from cardiovascular disease,” Victor Zhong told the American Heart Association.
“Even though this type of diet has been popular due to its potential short-term benefits, our research clearly shows that, compared with a typical eating time range of 12 to 16 hours per day, a shorter eating duration was not associated with living longer.”
People who followed a pattern of eating all their food during a period of 8 hours or less each day had a 91% higher risk of death due to cardiovascular disease.
Restricting eating to a 10 hour period per day was associated with a 66% higher risk of death from heart disease or stroke.
https://www.salon.com/2024/04/15/a-new-viral-study-linked-intermittent-fasting-to-cardiac--but-dont-worry-just-yet/
https://wwwn.cdc.gov/nchs/nhanes/
South African anger-management candidate Elon Musk totters on from one tantrum to the next announced a new Tesla megafactory in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico March 2023.
Three months later press reports in June 2023 suggested another megafactory in Valencia, Spain. The Elon was reported to be furious he immediately cancelled negotiations for the plant with Ximo Puig (aka Shimo Pwee, for those not familiar with Catalan), president of Valencia state. Said Ximo, "Viure és prendre partit."
In September 2023 Elon burst into Tesla's engineering offices in a fury after his self-driving Tesla "tried to kill him", after years of ignoring his engineers pleas to incorporate LiDAR sensors into Tesla vehicles so they can accurately place where objects are around them.
In October 2023 the Elon angrily announced there'll be no groundbreaking at the site in Mexico he had announced because he is furious about tepid consumer demand for Teslas, especially in China.
In March 2024 the Elon furiously halted all work at Tesla's Berlin megafactory after German Friends of Brandenburg Forest set fire to the high voltage power lines bringing power to Tesla's clearing in the forest for a future expansion of the megafactory.
We have a capital gain on a joke amount of TSLA, 200 shares @ 120.33, but having already made our allotted sales for this year I can't recognize even the $5k profit remaining, of a prior $35k of profit in Tesla this year. I may need to put in a stop-loss at 120 or 110. If we take a small loss I can sell other gainers. But you never know. In spite of the Elon it's possible TSLA might still be worth something more someday.
Reports this week say Elon is especially livid and now more furious than ever as loose lips in the cosmetic surgery industry issued claims that Elon has spent billions on extensive cosmetic surgeries over the past 24 years, since the age of 28, in an attempt to give him more human-like facial characteristics.
One surgical nurse claims Elon is just one surgery short of a full Michael Jackson when his nose fell off.
Thanks for those insights - I'll see what happens
I see House Republicans were able to vote down Border Security today, on the orders of Generalisimo Trump.
They've really all gone barking mad.
Wall Street - transitions into a Residential neighborhood
Today, a “Wall Street bank” is defined as a financial institution with trading operations that span the globe and investment bankers counseling CEOs. An actual location on the street doesn’t matter.
JPMorgan closed its branch Friday at 45 Wall St., ending more than 150 years of physical ties between the bank and the street that is a catchall term for the global money business.
A condo for sale inside 45 Wall Street - https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/wall-street-has-abandoned-wall-street-4b4696c1
It was down the block at 23 Wall St., facing the New York Stock Exchange, where J. Pierpont Morgan and his son transformed the firm into one of the world’s most powerful banks. 23 Wall St and other historic Wall Street buildings are empty shells with vacant storefronts and “for rent” signs on their facades.
Banks occupy a couple hundred thousand square feet on the street, according to John Santora, chairman of real-estate broker Cushman & Wakefield’s New York operations. As recently as 2000, that had been 5 million square feet.
Sunil Rally, who has run a newsstand on Wall Street since 1991 is thinking about shutting down his stand because tourists visiting "Wall Street" don’t cover the loss from7towered the building at 60 Wall St., 55 stories tall, built in the 1980s and occupied by JPMorgan, then Deutsche Bank. It has been vacant since 2021.
JPMorgan left 23 Wall St. in the 1980s, then moved its headquarters to Midtown Manhattan in 2001. The bank explored buying back 23 Wall St., according to executives, but a deal never came together. JPMorgan is now building a glistening new bronze office tower for its headquarters on Park Avenue, several miles north.
JPMorgan had run the 45 Wall St. branch since 2006, but is moving several blocks away. “It kind of looked like a bowling alley,” said Sarah Roselli, Chase’s market director for New York’s Financial District. “We decided it was time to move.”
Peter Tuchman, a broker on the NYSE floor, has seen firsthand how the street has changed. He started working there in 1985 as a teletypist submitting stock orders for Cowen & Co.
“The minute I walked down here, I knew it was the place for me,” he said. “There was energy, adrenaline, and it was chaotic.”
Now, the floor of the NYSE is much quieter, filled with humming computers and a couple of CNBC anchors. Outside, the presence of young professionals living in luxury apartment buildings is leading to changes at historic financial landmarks.
The high-end gym chain Equinox occupies the former headquarters of Bankers Trust at 14 Wall St., whose top was designed to resemble the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. T.J. Maxx is in the basement.
Tuchman remembers when it was an actual bank.
“It had huge ceilings and there was beautiful handcrafted bronze at each teller window,” he said. “It was really unbelievable.”
A LONG TIME COMING
The US government seized 40 Wall Street in 1986 when it was discovered to be secretly owned by Ferdinand Marcos, the corrupt dictator of the Philippines. The action launched a succession of failed auctions, foreclosures, lawsuits and decay that cast a long, dark shadow over the Financial District for a decade. The building was built in 1929 as the headquarters of The Manhattan Company which merged with Chase Bank in 1955.
Tenants left one after another until the building was 80% empty in the mid-1990s. Donald Trump bought the leasehold for a lowball price — exactly how much is disputed — in 1995. He partially restored it and attracted new tenants until his interests turned to a television show called "The Apprentice"
Duane Reade drugstore, the largest store tenant with over 20,000 square feet, moved out last fall — a devastating blow to the dwindling rent roll — and the tower today is worth perhaps $200 million, brokers say — less than half of its estimated value ten years ago.
Since Trump took over the building in 1995, discovered that "prosecutors have filed criminal charges against at least 29 people connected to 12 alleged scams tied to 40 Wall St.. Nine other firms have faced serious regulatory claims. Authorities prevailed in most but not all of the cases." Additionally, "no U.S. address has been home to more of the https://www.sec.gov/investor/oiepauselist.htm]unregistered brokerages that investors complain about, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission's current public alert list." http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-trump-40-wall-street
So what exactly are we talking about? A faked suicide? Check. A ponzi-schemer? You betcha. A penny-stock scam? Yep, there was one of those too. https://theweek.com/speedreads/631650/donald-trumps-most-valuable-building-home-dozens-criminals
The day of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and killed 3,000 people, Donald Trump bragged in a TV interview that 40 Wall Street was suddenly the tallest building in the city. Not only was his claim offensive in the way he specializes, it was also a lie. Another nearby skyscraper on Pine Street in Lower Manhattan became the tallest building after the destruction of the Twin Towers.
Trump's 40 Wall building has been placed on "Lender Watch" as vacancies and costs soar.
Another former Chase Bank property is the Seamen's Savings Bank headquarters, founded in 1829 and declared insolvent by the FDIC in 1990 with its assets sold to Chase Bank. After decades of chasing tenants with ever lower rent, the building now lies empty.