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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
Feb 3
Indeed!

This research directly militates against modern blood libel.

If people knew, for example, that Black and White men earned the same amounts on average at the same IQs, they would likely be a lot less convinced by basically-false discrimination narratives blaming Whites. Image
Add in that the intelligence differences cannot be explained by discrimination—because there *is* measurement invariance—and these sorts of findings are incredibly damning for discrimination-based narratives of racial inequality.

So, said findings must be condemned, proscribed. Image
The above chart is from the NLSY '79, but it replicates in plenty of other datasets, because it is broadly true.

For example, here are three independent replications:
Read 4 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Jan 29
How well-known is this?

A lot of the major pieces of civil rights legislation were passed by White elites who were upset at the violence generated by the Great Migration and the riots.

Because of his association with this violence, most people at the time came to dislike MLK. Image
It's only *after* his death, and with his public beatification that he's come to enjoy a good reputation.

This comic from 1967 is a much better summation of how the public viewed him than what people are generally taught today. Image
And yes, he was viewed better by Blacks than by Whites.

But remember, at the time, Whites were almost nine-tenths of the population.

Near his death, Whites were maybe one-quarter favorable to MLK, and most of that favorability was weak. Image
Read 5 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Jan 28
The Pope, like his recent predecessors, is good to take this position: anti-Semitism is manifestly idiotic!

On that note, did you know that the Catholic Church was actually one of the biggest forces in stopping the rise of the Nazis?

It's true!🧵 Image
You might say that the Catholics didn't vote for the Nazis because they had their own party: Zentrum.

This isn't the explanation.

Note: the Catholic Church opposed both forms of totalitarianism in Germany, but it had an asymmetric effect against the Nazis, not the Communists.Image
The real "Catholic effect" on far right vote shares was small.

In reality, Catholics only became poised against the far right when the church began to actively campaign against it.

But when the local clergymen were "Brown Priests" (Nazi-supporting priests) like Alois Hudal? Image
Read 22 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Jan 27
The researcher who put together these numbers was investigated and almost charged with a crime for bringing these numbers to light when she hadn't received permission.

Now we have an update that goes through 2020!

First: Where are Sweden's rapists from?

Mostly not Sweden. Image
What countries were those foreign rapists from?

We only got information on the top five origins, constituting roughly half of the foreign-born samples, and thus about a quarter of all the rapists. Image
What about welfare usage? 35.1%.
Alcoholism? 14.9%
Drug addiction? 23.7%
A diagnosed psychiatric disorder besides that? 13%

What about a criminal prior? 52%. That compares to 13.4% of non-rapist criminals. So rapes? Considerably more preventable.
Read 5 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Jan 17
Greater Male Variability rarely makes for an adequate explanation of sex differences in performance.

One exception may be the number of papers published by academics.

If you remove the top 7.5% of men, there's no longer a gap! Image
The disciplines covered here were ones with relatively equal sex ratios: Education, Nursing & Caring Science, Psychology, Public Health, Sociology, and Social Work.

Because these are stats on professors, this means that if there's greater male variability, it's mostly right-tail
Despite this, the very highest-performing women actually outperformed the very highest-performing men on average, albeit slightly.

The percentiles in this image are for the combined group, so these findings coexist for composition reasons. Image
Read 6 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Jan 17
One of the issues with understanding Greater Male Variability on IQ tests is that groups that perform better tend to show greater variance

Therefore, to estimate the 'correct' male-female gap, you need to estimate it when the difference is 0

In the CogAT, that looks like this: Image
In Project Talent, that looks like this: Image
And comparing siblings in the NLSY '79, that looks like this: Image
Read 5 tweets

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