It’s a less complicated story than it probably seems from the headlines.
A 35-year-old Israeli citizen living in the United States was one of seven suspects who has been charged by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) with 16 counts of conspiracy to defraud the US, money laundering on behalf of the Russian government and smuggling ammunition and weapon components to Moscow.
The accused, and his Russian wife, allegedly used an Etsy store with overt sympathy messages for Ukraine… to smuggle American military technology into Russia for killing Ukrainians.
The unassuming couple also outwardly sympathized with Ukraine throughout the 10-month war. Brayman, who lists Kyiv as his hometown on Facebook, shared a video on the site of a Ukrainian dance group…
Here’s the kind of portrait he posted that definitely screams suburban America small craft store owner.
“Hello I am gentle lover of crafting please visit online shopping for selection of gift… or maybe you end up dead.” Source: Facebook
Ok, I’m just going to throw out for the sake of a FSB long-game argument he wasn’t actually born in Ukraine and probably lied to get Israeli citizenship. “Vacation” to Israel may even have been to meet his FSB handlers. Allowing his wife to be Russian in the open would then suggest the FSB were being stingy/lazy.
But what do I know? I’ve really never been into crafting.
A recently filed lawsuit exposes the Facebook profit model, once again, this time in Ethiopia.
Amare’s son, researcher Abrham Amare, appealed to Facebook to have the posts removed but heard nothing back for weeks. Eight days after his father’s murder, Abrham received a response from Facebook: One of the posts targeting his father, shared by a page with more than 50,000 followers, had been removed.
“I hold Facebook personally responsible for my father’s murder,” he says.
Tesla first started offering FSD in 2016, initially as a hardware package that the company said would receive necessary software updates over time to deliver the promise of true self-driving capability. CEO Elon Musk said at the time that he expected a Tesla to be able to travel from Los Angeles to New York “without the need for a single touch” on the steering wheel as soon as 2017.
Two important points.
2017 is not a long term goal for a 2016 announcement. In fact, it’s rediculously short.
The announcement wasn’t aspirational. It used “single touch” to demonstrate confidence in delivery, because that is something easily proven.
And we all see in 2022 that the above two statements were fraud, right?
I called Tesla driverless the Titanic of our highways because they were going to predictably kill so many people.
It’s still amazingly relevant because I pointed then to why Tesla driverless engineering was so poor and misleading; I wanted to see the company held responsible for the unnecessary deaths it already was causing… wanted to prevent further disasters and needless suffering.
Fast forward and we find a growing graveyard of Tesla owners.
Tesla said its driverless feature would increase safety, yet no other car is even close to its fatality rates. Source: tesladeaths.com
Tragic. Preventable.
And it’s within this context some tone-deaf Tesla lawyers want to clown around and insult everyone’s intelligence by saying this:
“Mere failure to realize a long-term, aspirational goal is not fraud,” Tesla’s lawyers wrote in a Nov. 28 court filing, according to CNN.
Tesla also cited… that the plaintiffs weren’t really harmed by the fact a true self-driving car hasn’t been delivered…”
Now let’s compare and contrast what Tesla did (A) with what Tesla lawyers say (B):
A) Tesla’s CEO said people should pay advance fees because driverless was short term reality.
B) Tesla lawyers now want to say the failure to deliver on short term reality should be treated as long term aspirations.
A) Tesla’s CEO said people should pay advance fees because driverless was all about safety and immediately would save lives and prevent crashes.
B) Tesla lawyers now want to say the mounting injury and death toll, as well as property loss from crashes, should be treated as “weren’t really harmed”.
Josh Brown is dead because of Elon Musk (who tweeted directly at him). That company’s lawyers want to argue now that being decapitated by Tesla isn’t a harm?
Is this another “thank you for smoking” example of lawyers who will say anything for a dollar?
Tesla lawyer arguments actually expose that the company has engaged in the very definition of advance fee fraud (AFF), also known as the African 419 Scam.
Like many successful con men, William C. Lange made people believe that he really cared about them—even as he looked them in the eye and took their money.
Lange, like Tesla, had asked victims to put money into his “short term” engineering plans. Instead he used investors money to buy Twitter and become its CEO.
Just kidding, but not really.
How is Lange not Like Musk? One was sentenced to 22 years in prison while the other walks free.
Look at a typical AFF model that increases cost incrementally to keep victims hooked and then this:
FSD cost $5,000 when launched in 2016, but Tesla raised the price to $10,000 in 2020, and again to $12,000 earlier this year, and finally to $15,000 in September.
More to the point, both Uber and Tesla “driverless” programs killed a human pedestrian in the same month of the same year.
Uber cancelled it’s program, whistleblowers disclosed details that proved it was being careless, and the driver was charged.
Tesla… raised the cost of its program, hired more lawyers and targeted critics.
Fraud.
In related news, Elon Musk keeps saying he wont sell Tesla stock right before he dumps huge amounts of Tesla stock, treating his investors like an ATM.
It was just last April that he promised very loudly he would sell no more shares, to keep the price high… before selling another $14.4 billion. Liar, liar cars on fire: there couldn’t be a bigger fraud.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Senate unanimously approved a bill that would ban the wildly popular social media app from devices issued by federal agencies.
And several governors have ordered their agencies not to use the app on state-issued devices. This week, Alabama, Georgia, Idaho and Utah joined four other states — Maryland, South Dakota, South Carolina and Nebraska — in issuing such bans.
In related news, and for contrast, Twitter itself is pushing censorship of targets without any transparency or consistency.
On November 6, Musk pledged that he would not ban @ElonJet. “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” Musk tweeted. On Wednesday, less than a month later, Musk reversed course entirely[…]. Hours later, @ElonJet was suddenly back, without explanation, and subsequently suspended for a second time.
Open, censored, open, censored. Chaos.
All that “fire, ready, aim” trigger pulling was only within about a month. It started with a false premise of not caring at all about safety and then abruptly caring a lot, without accountability.
It’s called lying — permanent improvisation of dictatorships — and should diminish if not disqualify Twitter management from governance.
FTX’s CEO is now in deep trouble for the same selfishly unstable antics, and somehow Elon Musk avoids his due.
Maybe they even are discussing what it was like back during the 44 months in America under the Office of Censorship.
…censorship must focus tightly on a narrow objective such as fighting against racism, fighting against pandemic and fighting against… enemies of democracy.
Twitter’s CEO objectively is an enemy of democracy. He has reinstated hate speech and disinformation accounts, while attacking professional news reporters.
[Musk] put up a poll with a variety of options, asking if or when he should reinstate the journalists’ accounts. When a plurality of respondents voted to restore the accounts immediately, he deleted the poll….
Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., tweeted that she had met with Twitter representatives on Thursday who said the company would not take action against journalists who criticize the platform. “Less than 12 hours later, multiple technology reporters have been suspended.”
Twitter representatives? Nobody gets to make any decisions in the company anymore except the insecure chief executive firing anyone critical of him. Sounds like China or Saudi Arabia, right?
