Makes sense I wasn't thinking about the full on laundering aspects. But even so, if the real estate is used in laundering, it will eventually have to be sold to get back clean money. This should still run up prices at the start, and run them down in the end. So I think the majority of the point still stands: there should be an uptick in sales (which there is not). They could be speculating on top of laundering, in which case they are taking some losses. We are -20% from peak. The time will come when they (the launderers) will need liquidity and sell which has not come. Will it ever come?
They can get clean money from the start if they structure things right.
Have other mules or partners purchase crappy properties at a low price. "Flip" the properties, having another mule purchase at a greatly increased price and service the mortgage with more laundered money.
So you get the capital gains immediately, and they are apparently completely clean. If the crappy house continues to appreciate naturally, that's also a bonus, but if not, you can eventually default the mortgage or short-sale.
I think they want to get their money out of china and parked into a safe place. If they pay off their mortgage, they don't want to find a new place to park their money, they can just keep the house as an asset. I think a lot of investing in china is real estate based and is part of the reason that market is struggling over there so much now. It would make sense for them to continue to follow that investing model when exporting their wealth to other countries.
Vaccination generally uses an adjuvant to increase immune response to the target antigen in order to provoke a response strong enough to produce lasting immunogenic memory. Antigens alone in small numbers aren't enough.
Taking random adjuvants consistently after minimal exposure to environmental antigens is more likely to give you deleterious allergies or issues associated with chronic inflammation.
>but does that make it surprising that people hate doing it?
When an activity validates you, it's tough to imagine other people having the opposite experience with it. Imagine every time you went to a round of interviews you were offered riches and status. It would be tough to understand why others just didn't muster up the gumption to go downtown and get what they're worth.
I am the person y'all replying to. This is a good prompt for my mental model on interviewing.
I assume that the answer in any interview process I go into will be "no" 90%+ of the time. That's not some defeated pessimism, it's just reality that the process is hairy (how many people do you go on dates with before you get married?) and every single instance can fail for reasons that have to do with you (how you did that day, fit for the role) or not (hired internally, headcount went away, etc.)
While obviously it's frustrating to fail a round / not get an offer, there's less sting to it when you manage your expectations as above, and then add to it that the frequency of at-bats + the learning process can lead to a better outcome despite - and in fact - because of - the rejections.
So yes, there's a big mental/attitude component that helps you engage with this productively and see the process as something you're doing for yourself - and thus even the fails are part of the plan - versus stepping into some sort of meat grinder.
And to be fair to your comment about "offered riches and status" - I would not put it that way and the 90%+ fail rate is very real. That said, I definitely feel positive about work and have been lucky with opportunities and there's no question that extensive experience interviewing - and learning from the fails - has been key to that.
I think most people recognize that you don't get every job you apply for, but there are people who contact hundreds to thousands of organizations, apply with custom crafted letters and tailored resumes, put in thousands of hours of job searching time over months of time and get jobs well under the median of their cohort.
The assumption that other people's experiences are like yours is a key cognitive bias. A 90% fail rate means 10 offers after a hundred applications - that's an incredibly solid success rate. Now imagine some people have orders of magnitude more difficulty because their name is strange, or because their social class shows through in their dress or mannerisms.
If I can offer a comparison, most people on this forum have it made. It's like asking a group of models how difficult online dating is and having someone say "I can't fathom anyone having trouble keeping their weekends full of new people to date... It's just so easy!"
Also, I note that you seem to assume I'm talking about my own experiences; I'm not. I am a very well established professional in a lucrative field.
Because for some people, the activity itself is incredibly unpleasant regardless of the outcome.
> It would be tough to understand why others just didn't muster up the gumption to go downtown and get what they're worth.
If I were guaranteed to make a million dollars and/or gain high status by cleaning a cesspool, that wouldn't make cleaning the cesspool any more pleasant.
This is only true to a point. Evaluating incremental cost benefits on the basis of the delta of energy loss along specific lines ignores the state change that occurs when main trunk elements of the grid become lossless and energy generation and storage solutions can be deployed in a near-location agnostic manner.
As with all toy models being applied to the real world, there are important factors to model in that aren't immediately obvious.
Retail banking is low margin high volume, but a bank's CMG or IB divisions are NOT low margin operations. Trading desk margins vary depending on the strength of the group and the clientele. If you're a primary desk for a trillion dollar AUM entity, you make a very pretty penny off your Bloomberg terminal subscription.
The number of banks is not a good indicator of how much competition exists in a market. The elasticity of prices in that market is a better measure, but also has flaws. In general you need to look at how much margin a given industry is pulling in to determine how much leverage it has.
On the bank metric:
There are plenty of quasi non functional FDIC insured banks that are used as vehicles for reverse takeovers to allow a market entrant to avoid the hassle of obtaining their licenses.
Additionally given the substantially increased variability within different European markets we'd expect significantly different competitive dimensions between regional and international tier banks.
Interac is a great example of the opposite. The government of Canada had to strong arm the financial sector to create a non profit third party to allow zero cost transfers and a robust debit payment system. The banks have been lobbying to dramatically increase interchange and transaction fees on Interac payments for years to allow for an expansion in lucrative 'premium' credit card processing fees.
Competition did nothing to stop industry alignment against consumer interests.
This is misleading. Banks have capital sufficiency requirements following the implementation of the Basel 3 capital sufficiency framework. This has created an international growing market for bulk capital availability and reinsurance services.
In short, due to international capital sufficiency regulations, there's now a market for excess regulatory capital. The attempt to prune low performing assets is due to a market as an alternative to low return on capital investments.
It's not because of charges and overhead.
Banks aren't worried about bad assets more than usual, they just have another arena to make money in now.
>When you trust your government with the power to control the flow of information, you trust them with the power to hide their own actions from you
I think this is as false dilemma - no one's advocating that any institution or system that can regulate the flow of known bad information can operate without any constraints, oversight, etc.
If we assume any exercise of power will ALWAYS be misused under any circumstance, then taken to the extreme we literally shouldn't let people exercise under the notion that they can and will use physical force to coerce people. So we can't run on that assumption; sometimes governments can use power over information to do good things, like prevent the spread of pro-genocide propaganda.
We need to have a far more nuanced discussion about whether or not THIS instance of censorship is more positive or more negative.
> that can regulate the flow of known bad information
> prevent the spread of pro-genocide propaganda
This is a Motte and Bailey.
Your introduction advocates for: regulating the spread of known bad information.
In your second to last paragraph you substitute it with: prevent the spread of pro-genocide propaganda
I’ll engage with your second point only if you yield that the _only_ form of information that is acceptable for a government to censor is speech that is directly and explicitly calling for genocide.
Otherwise we are talking about the “known bad information” from your first paragraph.
Does “bad” mean false? Or just malicious? Who decides it’s bad? How does it become “known.”
As a citizen, are you allowed to challenge the classification of “bad” or does challenging the classification of “bad” itself count as “bad information?”
What protections are there for keeping inconvenient truths about our government from being classified as “bad information?”
> no one's advocating that any institution or system that can regulate the flow of known bad information can operate without any constraints, oversight, etc.
I’m suggesting that’s exactly what people are advocating for. They may not know it. They may mean well.
No it isn't. The motte and bailey tactic is when you advocate for a very broad position, then retreat to something more defensible. I've stated that the broad statement (that all censorship is bad) is false, so as a result we need to have a more nuanced discussion about when it's appropriate to exercise this power and how we can de-fang potential abuses of it. Your position regarding all censorship being bad is your bailey, which quite frankly, I've razed to the ground. Your motte is the position that censorship can be used by a government to manipulate their citizenry, which is true, but significantly more limited in application than the original concept that all censorship is antisocial.
>I’ll engage with your second point only if you yield that the _only_ form of information that is acceptable for a government to censor is speech that is directly and explicitly calling for genocide.
I mean, I wouldn't concede that because I can think of a ton of situations in which banning speech is appropriate. We can start with the classic 'fire in a crowded theater', we can discuss automated scam-driven robocalls, we can look at email spam filter, content moderation on websites, restrictions on the spread of child pornography, etc. What about speech designed to disenfranchise people of their right to vote by lying about where they're supposed to vote? What about financial fraud or any form of censurable misrepresentation?
From a tech perspective, should you be able to DDOS domains without authorization? Does your
>therwise we are talking about the “known bad information” from your first paragraph.
>Does “bad” mean false? Or just malicious? Who decides it’s bad? How does it become “known.”
>As a citizen, are you allowed to challenge the classification of “bad” or does challenging the classification of “bad” itself count as “bad information?”
Great questions. This is where real debates about how legislation and law intersect with censorship occur. Different jurisdictions have different approaches, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. None are perfect, but if you're actually interested in this topic, you can look up review articles looking at comparative law on the subject and I think you'll find a lot of substantive meat to chew.
Even the United States, which values freedom of speech incredibly highly in it's hierarchy of rights have a very large panoply of situations in which speech is restricted.
>I’m suggesting that’s exactly what people are advocating for.
Yes, that's a strawman, which is why people who actually work on the issue don't take the argument seriously. It's the equivalent of someone outside tech saying 'you can't host a website because you can get DDOSed' then being mystified that the internet is still chugging along. The threat is real, but the value of taking action is important, and finding out how to mitigate the threat in real world is where the actual complexity is; identifying a threat everyone knows exists isn't.
Anyways, this is boring. It's the same 101 level discussion every time on this topic and it really gets tiresome.
The “fire in a crowded theater” is an oft cited example that highlights this point. The phrase is a paraphrasing of a dictum from an opinion in Schenck v. United States, which held that the defendant's speech in opposition to the draft during World War I was not protected by the First Amendment.
Holmes argued, "the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent."
It’s a great example of how governments abuse these powers to silence inconvenient speech.
From child pornography to robocalls, I’d suggest that you don’t need “speech” to be a crime - though it’d be convenient to many pro-censorship arguments if it were.
The production of pornography without consent is illegal and is not speech. The production and possession of child pornography is a crime. Transmission requires both, which are already crimes. Possession with intent to distribute and the distribution of this content are already crimes.
You don’t need a carve out for sending these over TCP/IP conflating it with speech any more than you need a carve out for sending the photos through the U.S. postal service. It was a crime before you sent the photos, still a crime after. Free speech doesn’t wash the crime away and you don’t need to ask us to give up free speech to charge them with a crime.
Your rebuttal doesn't really address the substance of my point, but to put a fine point on it, "It's a crime, therefore it isn't speech" isn't a good argument - if anything it demolishes your own position that speech should never be restricted by government.
The very substance of your original argument is that the power to restrict these things is inherently dangerous, yet you don't seem to apply that standard in current cases where the acts of communication are criminalized.
Accordingly, your original argument falls flat based upon your own argument; the government can criminalize some speech and you don't seem to have an issue with it where it's obviously pro-social to do so.
So, again, work a little harder on refining the original position - the absolutist approach of complete governmental restriction doesn't exist in real life.
If you want to try redefining speech to only include vocal discussion between two people (which very much is not what freedom of speech entails), you'd still fall flat on almost all of the fraud related restrictions mentioned above in my previous post.
Anyways, that's all from me on the topic, the substance of the reply ignoring literally every area of nuance and actual productive conflict is just nauseating. It's like watching some tech guy tell a banker how bonds should work.
> the government can criminalize some speech and you don't seem to have an issue with it where it's obviously pro-social to do so.
I don’t think I believe this. You’ll need to explain a bit more why I do.
The best I can come up with is “photos are speech, no different than books or pamphlets. “Intellectual property” and pornography are already regulated and there’s no difference between that and other forms of speech. Taking a nude photo without the subject’s consent is speech and forcing someone to have their photo taken nude is speech. If you can’t take nude photographs of children, you don’t have free speech.” I’d have a problem with this argument but could agree with where it’s coming from.
I think what highlights the difference between “speech” and child pornography, for me, is best captured by loliporn and generative AI. I vehemently disagree with the depiction of minors in pornography. But, assuming the artist didn’t use actual child pornography as a reference (including in training the AI), I consider the content generated by those methods to be “speech.” I’d defend your right to produce and distribute it no matter how much I disagree with it. It was never about the “speech” part of the photo.
After reading your response, I’m left feeling like you missed the point of what I said. But maybe I originally missed yours?
I’m sorry for offending you. I assume your profession is law specializing in free speech. It must be exhausting having to engage with the general public on how they feel they feel they should be governed. You’re making me realize I treat my banker the same way, I try to understand (and I have opinions on) the financial instruments I put my savings into before I make the investment.
You must feel like an IT help desk clerk whose constantly burdened by users.
If you’d like me to withdraw from this conversation because I’m not worthy of having it with you, I’m okay with that.
I’ll leave with my general sentiment about your original Motte. I vehemently disagree with pro-genocide propaganda but I’ll defend an American’s right to post and read it.
Not the poster you're replying to, but despite the fact that I think you're right, the mistake you've highlighted on is pretty reasonable given that there's people from many countries here and plenty of people default to C vs. F. No need to go on the attack to make a helpful correction. :)
I'll be over here cooking an egg on the sidewalk if you need me.
Not really. Lying about the source of cashflow doesn't mean the cashflow isn't real.
The end objective for a lot of these frauds isn't to sink the bank with fake loans. It's to launder money.