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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
Oct 22
The story of peanut allergy is entering its final chapter.

Nowadays, we are beating back both peanut and other food allergies, and all it took was telling parents the right thing to do🧵 Image
The story begins in 2000, when the American Academy of Pediatrics decided to issue some simple advice to parents: Have your kids avoid peanuts early in life. Don't expose them until they're at least three!Image
Parents complied. It turns out, they do that. They just follow advice from professional associations that appear to have authority.

So peanut allergy rates rose, from 0.4% in 1997 to 1.4% in 2008, to 2% in 2015.

But if the advice was right, the opposite should've happened!
Read 13 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Oct 21
The CEOs managing Sweden's biggest companies tend to be smarter, taller, and to have better personalities. Image
The highest-paid CEOs in Sweden also tend to be taller, smarter, and to have better personalities. Image
To connect these things, CEO pay and firm size are considerably connected. Image
Read 4 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Oct 21
Individuals with higher genetically predicted intelligence tend to end up working more prestigious jobs. Image
They tend to be more emotionally stable, healthier, satisfied with life, richer, and educated too. Image
Additionally, they tend to be happier and to have fewer psychiatric problems.

They're more likely to be go-getters! Image
Read 4 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Oct 19
Boobtech is amazing.

It's an area that the rest of medicine could look to as an example.

The professionals making bigger, more realistic breast implants are simultaneously improving affordability, safety, and quality at a rapid rate🧵 Image
Consider one of the most recent improvements in boobtech: the Mia.

The Mia is the first successful "injectable" breast implant.

It cuts down scarring, complications, surgery time and cost, and it looks and feels more realistic than earlier implants. Image
The Mia is installed with a small armpit incision about 2 centimeters in length.

This is a significant reduction from earlier generations, which were regularly closer to 7 centimeters, or almost 3 inches. Image
Read 15 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Oct 18
This should be considered *far* more alarming than the polls about political violence.

Two-thirds positive views towards an evil ideology that has killed tens of millions and cannot work is *very* bad. Image
It doesn't really matter if, at the end of the day, they're actually tepid towards socialism. This is like 66% of people saying Hitler was OK.

Source: news.gallup.com/poll/694835/im…

And an article qualifying how we understand support for political violence: cremieux.xyz/p/lets-not-ove…
I get too many dumb comments.

The dumb comment for this post is going to be something along the lines of 'But they're thinking about [successful place] not [bad place]!'

Ten points if you realize why that is not a meaningful reply.
Read 9 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Oct 17
This is not true and there has never been a reason to believe it.

When we do have raw data for anywhere, we see that there's consistent scoring over time, not massive intelligence gains.

If we do not take measurement invariance seriously, we will be seriously misled. Image
I actually think it is exactly Noah's sort of post that helps to keep the culture of scientific fraud in academia and elsewhere alive.

Noah is smart enough and has been told enough to know better, and he still wrote something that he can't support.

But it's a popular message.
The message is just empirically wrong.

Will we ever move beyond the Cargo Cult version of the Flynn Effect that people like Noah, knowingly or otherwise, are wont to promote?

I don't think we will!

To learn more, see:
Read 5 tweets

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