Since when is Chime a bank since their customer service repeatedly told me in no uncertain terms that they are a "spending account" and absolutely not a bank.
On their own "About Us" page: "Chime® is a financial technology company, not a bank." eyeroll
These leeches want all the profits of banking and none of the customer service and regulatory obligations.
New rule: if we ask 100 of your customers if they think you're a bank, and the majority say yes, congratulations, you're now a bank under law, because you sure as hell are pretending to be one.
It's more that they want to disaggregate the customer service and tech stack responsibilities from the financial ones, with the profits split accordingly. At least in the US, Chime and other "banking fintechs" do have real banks underpinning them (The Bancorp Bank and Stride Bank, in Chime's case). This new the three-way relationship (customer-"fintech"-bank) can present new types of risks, and there's definitely room for overhauling the rules that regulate it, but it isn't an inherently bad business model.
While Chime, the company, isn't a bank, they do resell banking services. They are functionally value added resellers for The Bancorp Bank, N.A. and Stride Bank, N.A.
Yep, that's how they do it in here Vegas. Datacenter water use isn't the problem, the state law mandating 15% of electricity must be bought from the privately owned state utility monopoly is.
The problem with the article cited as the source is that it's unclear as to how many are former public servants or serving ones. Of course, Peers hold their seat in the Lords by virtue of appointment and title, and unless they quit, the implication is that at least some of these are basically side gigs and hence, not a revolving door (that would be how regulatory capture happens in the US and the mere fact that one can straight up a member of the Upper House, however broadly powerless it nowadays, is frankly, asking for the appearance of impropriety). Also 18 people still work there and the PR firm might have screwed up by making a statement that needlessly bring up the question of whether those who no longer work for companies and the veterans mentioned overlap in part or whole. The list of names don't add up to to 30, but 26.
But it'd be really helpful if this obvious moral hazard is explicitly enumerated in the law somehow. Look, the Commons runs the country, and the PM can't violate the constitution (not that there is one and I don't think it's a coincidence that countries have tended to write theirs down, apologies of Bagehot). Why does the Lords still exist when they are basically a rump branch anyway? If the lower house can simply legislate every aspect of it, it's a liability and not that great of a look from afar, whether some sort of influence peddling actually occurred or not. In the US the standard is appearance of impropriety in addition to actual bias and conflict of interest (as in, more than appearance) because this kind of relationship erodes public trust. At some point, it can't be worth the potential PR problem to keep around a rump branch of the government. There's almost 1000 years worth of sunk cost so gotta know when to let go. Are the OBEs and CBEs and all that honours list stuff not good enough? I'm with David Bowie on this one.
Commercially, almost all Python is fairly badly written, with types either not documented or not passing with any consistency even when documented. It is the default state of Python. I blame Python for it because it could have made type definition and conformance a default, but it didn't.
It's symbolic since these cases broadly speaking need to be adjudicated in federal court for the most part and the federal law doesn't mention any immunities, it's a court-created doctrine. But neither the court nor congress thinks it's urgent enough of an issue, the last time a bill had support it ended up with around 70 cosponsors and it adds nothing but affirms that the law is applied as written and didn't get a vote, during the short period of tri-partisanship in 2020, because nbd it only accounts for 3-4 billion dollars of money that is taken from those who aren't able to be charged with any crime and redistributed to cops around the country in a sort of slush fund fashion, chump change if you consider how much debt we're running for... god knows what at this point. When you speak in trillions and can simply handwave that sort of deficit away, a few billion eventually sounds trivial, I'm guessing.
Back in 2019 the police in Fresno stole a bunch of rare coins during a search of a house where the warrant did not cover anything like said coins, valued at $125,000, by reporting that they seized $50,000 when they actually took twice that much in cash and the coins. The 9th Circuit ended up deciding that while it was obviously morally wrong, qualified immunity applied because there's clearly established case law that stealing property that was specifically targeted for a search does violate the Constitution, because there's no analogous case regarding property stolen by police that the police did not know was there and are not covered by the warrant, there's no clearly established violation of the 4th Amendment even though it is literally an unlawful seizure of property. Supreme Court denied cert, allowing the decision to stand. I wish I was joking.
Qualified immunity is a stain on American jurisprudence and an insult to the idea of America as a free society.
Demand of people who want your vote in the coming elections that they support a legislative correction to this judicial activism. This country was founded in large part because 250 years ago the British sent soldiers into American cities and American homes, with powers to detain, arrest and deprive of life and liberty with no accountability. If a colonial was wrongly treated they would force adjudication in favorable courts back in Britain, effectively making their soldiers immune from accountability.
The fact our judicial system has saw fit to independently replicate this injustice that none of us voted for is a crime against the very notion of what it means to be an American. Hold your leaders accountable.
Despite how the USA barely pretends to be egalitarian, there is 100% an importance totem pole, with billionaires and businesses on the top, then politicians, the police, the military, religious leaders all somewhere in the middle in some order, and then the rest of the population on the very bottom. Any fight between these cohorts will be decided based on where they are on the totem pole, not based on the law, the Constitution, or what's right.
eBay currently allows (or at least tolerates) sales of items not in the possession of the seller and are effectively lottery tickets. Lotteries are illegal in my state (NV) but eBay does not restrict me from bidding. That's low hanging fruit right there.
It's not great for sellers either. I was banned during the time period before the Paypal divestment for having the galls to subpoena a nonpaying buyer's records. They take a cut from both sides. Sotheby's takes 10.5% (I think). eBay takes twice that for something comparable in value.
Yes, so much so that cards that were sold at retail in 2024 after grading sold went from around $100 in cost to well over $1000 in 18 months, and this was me making the market. The prices have since 2.5x-ed on the same card (2024 Topps Chrome Sapphire Base #500 PSA 10). It's correcting a little, but a 10x rise on a card that is effectively not considered limited edition and most had placed in storage suddenly 10x and then 2.5x is quite rare, especially since it's a new card.
These are just public sales. Private deals are done with agents on both sides routinely and without any reportage. There's an element of gambling to most transactions but on the origination side, mostly because Topps, who owns licenses to the major sports leagues, are neither timely nor accurate in posting pack configuration odds, and seems to somehow have nobody competent enough to properly ensure that the same cards don't all get clustered in the same box. On multiple occasions I've bought cases where 3 out of 10 cards of a player were pulled, and multiple 2/10s. The checklist is only 100 cards. The case had 384 cards total. It's downright negligent, but screw the consumers, right? Thanks, Lina Khan, for making it all happen.
There's money to be made but it's a lot of dumb money mixed in with some very sharp acquisitions. Who knows how it'll play out. The market is inefficient largely because USPS is effectively a crapshoot in a time-sensitive market. The likes of Courtyard.io have only partially caught on, and ArenaClub, their competitor, ran for 2 years where a bookmarkelet allowed the user to turn what was supposed to be a random draw into a completely predictable purchase at way below market. Upon reporting, they just added a line in their ToS that put users in theory on notice. They did not fix the bug. They don't even have a SECURITY.md. The company served so much unnecessary data on their API that I now have Steve Nash's personal cell number, among others, before they designed their front page.
There's a gold rush going on but this really should be a hedge. At some point the market correction will screw over a ton of people.
It's basically an offshoot of the same appeal of crypto/NFTs but you get something to look at, I guess, and the grading companies make good money off of it.
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