Bitfinex/Tether, who are one operation, are by far the largest customer of Deltec, and when their chief counsel was asked whether they are investors in the bank, they demurred with respect to Tether's investments specifically.
Bitfinex/Tether's last banking relationship was with a firm called Noble Markets. Noble's board had compliance concerns and was worried their custodian would terminate services if thy banked Tether.
Bitfinex lead round; got banked; used Noble like skin suit. No longer exists.
In unrelated news I have had a recent interest in reading up on the S&L crisis in the 1980s, which was largely caused by real estate developers who rooted quasi-banks and then used them to perform control frauds.
A good history of this crisis, whose title does not do the actual content favors, is The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One.
At approximately 7:10 in that video. My transcription, and the audio quality / my ears are not great.
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We've now called about 700 California vaccine sites for covid19vaccineca.com and have 98 which are actively administering the vaccine, most of which require appointments.
We will probably ~2X those numbers by tomorrow.
Priorities for rest of the weekend:
1) Continue improving processes for contacting pharmacies.
2) Complete census of Safeway; prioritize CVS/Walgreens/etc based on observe hitrates.
3) Develop repeatable process for daily refresh on pharmacies, via humans or bots.
4) Outreach outreach outreach; we are getting to the point where we are better at data collection than getting data in front of people.
5) Improve usability on mobile; represents majority of clients.
I'm going to continue being heavily involved with covid19vaccineca.com updates the next few days (and if you need to mute me, no worries; back to normally scheduled SaaS advice and Bitcoin perfidy soonish.)
Last 3 hours: 150+ calls, ~30 locations w/ vaccines discovered.
We're getting an outrageously higher hit rate with Safeway than with any other subset of our calling operation, and will be pivoting efforts to complete our census of every Safeway in California and then add other pharmacy chains.
At current rate of improvement, I expect indicatively that we'll have contacted every pharmacy in California by Monday and have a process in place for daily updates at all of them shortly after that.
Representative examples of people who report this site got them a vaccine include an older person battling stage 4 cancer. This might be the highest leverage thing you can do on your phone this weekend.
We also appreciate help getting the word out about the site. Point people you know there, post to networks, suggest local likely-to-be-asked institutions add it to their standard "Ask your healthcare provider" language, etc.
covid19vaccineca.com is tracking availability of the covid-19 vaccines in California. @ca_covid volunteers are calling hospitals/pharmacies to ask if they will administer to 65+ year olds.
We called 100+ Thursday and will do 500+ Friday. 24 sites confirmed; more to come.
We plan are calling daily to keep the availability information fresh. We plan to do this for as long as necessary.
Before: call 25+ hospitals, hope to eventually find a yes.
After: call one hospital that told us Yes. Ask how to schedule appointment and/or confirm availability.
This is entirely a volunteer effort. If you know me, and want to pitch in making some calls, drop me a line via DM or email. We have a Discord + Airtable based workflow and a script; it takes about 3-5 minutes for the typical call.
You could either do some sort of crowdsourcing or just say “Look, there’s a finite number of hospitals in San Francisco and they all have a phone number. I’m going to call them all at 9 AM and publish which ones say ‘Yes we could give a walk-in 65 year old a shot.’”
You can wait until the city of San Francisco holds a hearing to determine whether the committee in charge of transparency has... or you could implement this by 10 AM PST tomorrow.
This is a useful question, and the answer is that some people will *specialize* in being creators. They will be much, much, much better at it than the median creator. They will get most subscriptions.
Some people will *choose not to specialize* because e.g. better options.
Indeed, one of the risks for creator economy platforms is that you get "too good" at making creators successful, such that they can take the new indicia of market demand for their offering to places which have much more distribution muscle than you do.
That's not a new risk in publishing, incidentally; more traditional publishers have many, many decades of experience dealing with it. Some of their countermeasures are basically unconscionable and I'm glad the creator economy mostly doesn't go in for them.