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Crémieux Profile picture
@cremieuxrecueil
Dec 12, 2024 • 26 tweets • 7 min read • Read on X
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The COVID era Paycheck Protection Program was defrauded at an incredible scale. People received PPP loans for total nonsense at stunning rates.

Thread of funny claims.

Dodge Hellcat LLCImage
Reparations for Indigenous People LLCImage
Just Traffic TicketsImage
Free Money LLCImage
LobsterImage
They're Stealing Your Hubcaps IncImage
Fuck the System LLCImage
PPP, LLCImage
Rent LLCImage
Just read it Image
I Got LunchImage
VacationImage
GR&ASSImage
Wakanda MurkledoveImage
If you spend enough time going through this, it becomes apparent:

There are tons of businesses that have suspicious employee numbers (usually 1) and often enough, these suspicious loans were at the cap for sole proprietorships ($20,833), and they're addressed to wrong people.
The Small Business Administration estimated that at least 70,000 of these loans are fraudulent, and given that these are denominates in the thousands, that adds up fast.

People used these loans to buy Lamborghinis, Teslas, Ferraris, and lots of Dodge Hellcats.
The nature of fraudulent PPP loans seems to mirror other low-class behavior.

For example, tons of Hellcats obtained with PPP might be related to tons of Hellcats being targets for theft. Image
The excessive spending of PPP loans on travel might be related to record numbers of unruly plane passengers. Image
Excessive spending of PPP loans on lobster and crab was well-known.

I invite you to search for the keywords "crabs", "lobster", "steak", "travel", and so on coupled with "PPP". It's stunning.

Perhaps those record crab sales after loans went out were related. Image
Free Money! New Wakanda! Reparations!

There was an unreal amount of scamming going on and, per NBC, the dollar value may be 10% of the program's total spending.

A program designed to go after this and recover funds seems laudable, but I doubt they're very recoverable.

Ah well.
Here's a search tool if you want to look into this yourself: projects.propublica.org/coronavirus/ba… and h/t @ManDaveJobGood, who's been cataloguing so much of this.

NBC: nbcnews.com/politics/justi…

Hellcat theft: jgdattack.eu/blog/en/hellca…

Crabs: seafoodnews.com/Story/1183203/…
And yes, these things seem to be related:
Here's the estimated scale of the fraud from the Office of Inspector General at the U.S. Small Business Administration: sba.gov/document/repor…Image
Apparently Baltimore cops are going after known criminals for their PPP shenanigans.

If anyone has more info on this and anything like it, post it please.

As a reminder in case you skipped over it, Free Money LLC had their loans forgiven.

They got to keep that fraudulently obtained money.

Feel like a sucker yet?
As noted in the thread, there were also plenty of cases of people registering businesses to other people's addresses. You can even find people online claiming that they got PPP loans for businesses they didn't own.

It's not hard to see why this fraud could be hard to investigate Link: https://www.propublica.org/article/ppp-farms

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More from @cremieuxrecueil

Crémieux Profile picture
May 7
World War I devastated Britain and likely slowed down its technological progress🧵

The reason being, the youth are the engine of innovation.

Areas that saw more deaths saw larger declines in patenting in the years following the war. Image
To figure out the innovation effects of losing a large portion of a generation's young men who were just coming into the primes of their lives, the authors needed four pieces of data.

The first were the numbers and pre-war locations of soldiers who died. Image
The next components were the numbers and locations of patent filings.

If you look at both graphs, you see obvious total population effects. So, areas must be normalized. Image
Read 12 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
May 5
New Pangram validation!

You know how most books on Amazon are AI slop now? If you didn't, look at the publication numbers.

Compare those to the proportion Pangram flags as AI-generated. It's fully aligned with the implied numbers based on the rise over 2022 publication levels! Image
Similarly, the rise of pro se litigants has come with a rise in case filings detected as being AI-generated, and with virtually zero false-positives before AI was around.

You can also see the rise of AI-generated text and yet more evidence for Pangram's validity from looking at different journalists.

Large portions of the journalistic profession are lazy, so they cheat when they can.

For example, the Guardian's Bryan Graham = slop Image
Read 9 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
May 3
Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play argued that France's early fertility decline was driven by its inheritance reforms, where estates had to be split up equally to all of the kids, including the girls.

There's likely something to this!🧵 Image
For reference, the French Revolution ushered in a number of egalitarian laws.

A major example of these had to do with inheritance, and in particular with partibility.

In some areas of France, there was partible inheritance, and in others, it was impartible. Image
Partible inheritance refers to inheritance spread among all of a person's heirs, sometimes including girls, sometimes not.

Impartible inheritance on the other hands refers to the situation where the head of an estate can nominate a particular heir to get all or a select portion. Image
Read 11 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
May 1
In terms of their employment, religion, and sex, people who joined the Nazi party started off incredibly distinct from the people in their communities.

It's only near the end of WWII when they started resembling everyday Germans. Image
Early on, a lot of this dissimilarity is due to hysteresis.

Even as the party was growing, people were selectively recruited because they were often recruited by their out-of-place friends, and they were themselves out-of-place.

It took huge growth to break that. Image
And you can see the decline of fervor based on the decline of Nazi imagery in people's portraits.

And while this is observed by-and-large, it's not observed among the SS, who had a consistently higher rate of symbolic fanaticism. Image
Read 5 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Apr 23
I simulated 100,000 people to show how often people are "thrice-exceptional": Smart, stable, and exceptionally hard-working.

I've highlighted these people in red in this chart: Image
If you reorient the chart to a bird's eye view, it looks like this: Image
In short, there are not many people who are thrice-exceptional, in the sense of being at least +2 standard deviations in conscientiousness, emotional stability (i.e., inverse neuroticism), and intelligence.

To replicate this, use 42 as the seed and assume linearity and normality
Read 7 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Apr 22
I would like to live in a high-trust society.

The decline of trust is something worth caring about, and reversing it is something worth doing.

We should not have to live constantly wondering if we're being lied to or scammed. Trust should be possible again.
I don't know how we go about regaining trust and promoting trustworthiness in society.

It feels like there's an immense level of toleration of untrustworthy behavior from everyone: scams are openly funded; academics congratulate their fraudster peers; all content is now slop.
What China's doing—corruption crackdowns and arresting fraudsters—seems laudable, and I think the U.S. and other Western nations should follow suit.

Fraud leads to so many lives being lost and so much progress being halted or delayed.

I'm close to being single-issue on this.
Read 6 tweets

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