Call it a Wash
Aspiration
We have talked recently about greenwashing, a popular way for companies to present themselves as eco-friendly without actually doing things to prevent climate change or help the environment. For some companies, greenwashing is a core marketing pitch. Meet Aspiration:
Aspiration is part of a wave of digital companies promising to help the environment while providing convenient but otherwise mundane services like checking accounts and debit cards and the occasional investment account. Its claims seem to justify the “green” mantle: Aspiration has said it has planted 35 million trees over the past 12 months. And it touts its mutual fund, which it says is “free” of fossil fuels.
It will shock you to learn that the company selling “green” checking accounts and debit cards - whatever those are - is not actually living up to those promises:
Aspiration’s signature marketing claim — about its tree-planting program — turns out to be overblown upon closer examination. “In the past year, the Aspiration community has planted over 35 million trees,” CEO and co-founder Andrei Cherny said on an Aug. 18 webcast
[…]
After weeks of questions from ProPublica, during which the company declined to say how many seeds or saplings have actually been planted, Aspiration said the actual number is 12 million.
I mean, sure. Tree planting is popular, in part because the public sees it as a way to directly impact climate change. It’s also a way for scammers to make money. There is healthy skepticism in the science community that we can plant our way out of climate catastrophe, but giving Aspiration the benefit of the doubt, let’s take a look at some of their other claims:
There’s a second key footnote, one that appears in materials for Aspiration’s signature “Plant Your Change” offering. That program lets consumers who use a debit or credit card — whether provided by Aspiration or an unrelated financial institution — choose to have every purchase rounded up to the nearest dollar, with the “change” used to plant a tree. It generally costs 10 cents to plant a tree, according to Eden, and Aspiration will fund one tree for each purchase. In other words, whether you bought an item that cost $9.89 or $9.09, the leftover change will be used to plant one tree. What happens to the remaining 81 cents in the second example? It goes to Aspiration, which says it uses it for “administrative costs, marketing and promotion costs, third-party vendor fees, and other conditional costs.”
Ah yes, the old “round up your purchase” language, except Aspiration is pocketing the difference. Then there’s the company’s mutual fund:
Aspiration’s investing arm also appears to be less environmentally friendly than the company’s marketing suggests. It offers a mutual fund called Redwood, which Aspiration describes as a “fossil-fuel-free fund investing in sustainable businesses that are leaders in their industry.”
[…]
But the mutual fund’s latest shareholder report, filed with the SEC, reveals that it owns shares in multiple companies that are either huge users of fossil fuels or are in the industry itself.
Of course. Greenwashing is central to Aspiration’s marketing campaign, which has helped it attract celebrity investors like Leonardo DiCaprio and Drake. Aspiration is going public via a SPAC - which we talk about more and more these days - and needs to keep the hype going, insisting it’s both a green, eco-friendly “fintech” company and also profitable, which it is not. When your core product is boring - consumer banking - and you don’t have any interesting tech in your fintech, pretending to plant millions of trees and invest in eco-friendly companies is as good a pitch as any, I suppose.
PredPol
We have talked a little about “predictive” policing and the machine bias that can creep in. Recently, The Markup obtained a bunch of data from one of the major policing software companies, because they left it sitting around on a server:
We found the crime predictions for our analysis through a link on the Los Angeles Police Department’s public website, which led to an open cloud storage bucket containing PredPol predictions for not just the LAPD but also dozens of other departments. When we downloaded the data on Jan. 31, 2021, it held 7.4 million predictions dating back to Feb. 15, 2018.
Setting aside the fact that PredPol left reams of its data sitting on an open cloud server, it’s unsettling that the only way the public is able to get a look inside how police departments make decisions about policing is when a tech company makes a mistake. PredPol, like nearly every tech company that works with the police or military - taxpayer funded public entities! - claims trade secrets when journalists pry. So, how good was PredPol and achieving its goal of crime deterrence?
Residents of neighborhoods where PredPol suggested few patrols tended to be Whiter and more middle- to upper-income. Many of these areas went years without a single crime prediction.
By contrast, neighborhoods the software targeted for increased patrols were more likely to be home to Blacks, Latinos, and families that would qualify for the federal free and reduced lunch program.
These communities weren’t just targeted more—in some cases they were targeted relentlessly. Crimes were predicted every day, sometimes multiple times a day, sometimes in multiple locations in the same neighborhood: thousands upon thousands of crime predictions over years. A few neighborhoods in our data were the subject of more than 11,000 predictions.
The software often recommended daily patrols in and around public and subsidized housing, targeting the poorest of the poor.
Of course it is. Normally, when you’re building an algorithm, you want to enlist experts - researchers, academics - to help ensure it’s providing the correct outcomes. But, due to the secrecy around PredPol, this is the first time anyone outside the company is seeing it:
“No one has done the work you guys are doing, which is looking at the data,” said Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at American University who is a national expert on predictive policing. “This isn’t a continuation of research. This is actually the first time anyone has done this, which is striking because people have been paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for this technology for a decade.”
We don’t even know whether police departments were using PredPol as intended - to increase patrols in suspected high crime areas:
It’s impossible for us to know with certainty whether officers spent their free time in prediction areas, as PredPol recommends, and whether this led to any particular stop, arrest, or use of force. The few police departments that answered that question either said they couldn’t recall or that it didn’t result in any arrests, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers said its members are not informed when crime prediction software leads to charges.
Cool! It appears that some of the departments using PredPol realized it wasn’t worth the money and ditched it entirely:
Only 13 law enforcement agencies responded to requests for comment about our findings and related questions, most with a written statement indicating they no longer use PredPol.
PredPol’s results data may not have been subject to outside scrutiny but its algorithm was a few years ago, and the results were not good:
Yet according to a research paper, PredPol’s co-founders determined in 2018 that the algorithm would have targeted Black and Latino neighborhoods up to 400 percent more than White residents in Indianapolis had it been used there.
The company did not provide the study to its law enforcement clients, MacDonald said, because it “was an academic study conducted independently of PredPol.”
A faulty algorithm, combined with uneven crime reporting statistics, meant PredPol’s system was both receiving and producing bad data, and reinforcing biases in police departments to lend credibility to their draconian tactics:
We examined more than 270,000 arrests in the 11 cities using PredPol that provided those records to us (most refused) and found that locations with lots of predictions tended to have high arrest rates in general, suggesting the software was largely recommending officers patrol areas they already frequented.
Whether police departments keep using this specific piece of software, predictive policing seems to be here to stay. HunchLab, one software company behind the infamous St Louis police department’s police tactics, was bought by ShotSpotter, a company embroiled in its own controversy when its employees were caught altering data to support police actions. Contrary to right wing talking points, US police departments have not been defunded at all, and many have massive budgets they need to find ways to spend. Opportunistic tech firms claiming they can use math to prevent crimes are just another hog at the trough of the American police industrial complex.
TMTG DWAC SPAC PIPE
About a month ago I speculated what would happen when TMTG, Trump’s totally-real media company, tried to go to institutional investors and raise a PIPE, because he likely realized he’d made a lousy deal with his original SPAC, and wanted more money. It’s conceivable he also thought raising money from large, reputable sources would be good for his company’s share price, which would juice the significant amount of stock he still owned.
The problem with raising money from - presumably - more savvy investors is they might realize TMTG is a media company on paper only. So Trump’s team put together a slightly more…coherent slide deck, but not really? Here are two of my favorites:
For those of you who do not work in either tech or media, it is not standard practice to only have first names and last initials for your entire technology team, or a footnote that said team is “subject to change”. Also, I can only speculate, but I am not sure the person who made the deck meant to use the logo for America’s Funniest Home Videos in the bottom left, but it is excellent regardless.
In this slide, we can see the classic infrastructure hierarchy, which includes Users, who may also include traveling sales representatives and actors? For some reason?
Aside from TMTG’s apparent lack of technical knowledge and its cast of nameless employees, the PIPE deal is actually hilariously bad for Trump, which Matt Levine explains:
In a sense, the PIPE investors are buying TMTG stock at a price of $33.60 per share. That is a nice number! It is higher than $10, but lower than $44.97; Trump is getting a good deal (selling stock at a higher price than in the SPAC deal) and the PIPE investors are getting a good deal (buying stock at a lower price than the current public price).
It’s important to note that $33 is a significant discount to $45, so Trump is still selling shares of his imaginary media company to hedge funds or whoever for far less than they’re worth. And then there’s this:
DWAC and TMTG have promised the PIPE investors that they’ll be able to freely resell their stock the minute the merger closes. If they can’t — if the SEC has not yet signed off on the registration statement — then they get 2% to 6% interest per month, paid out of a 20% escrow on the money they put up.
Here’s a weird thing. The PIPE investors get to resell their stock starting the day the merger closes. But the number of shares that they get is set based on the trading price of the stock over the 10 days after the closing, with a 40% discount. That is, they get to sell the stock before they find out how many shares they get.
Matt explains the finance-y part of this better than I could, but the important bits for our purposes are:
Trump is selling a billion dollars’ worth of his stock for less than it’s worth.
The buyers can sell it the minute the deal closes, for an immediate profit.
If those sales tank the stock, the buyers get more stock which they can also sell at a profit.
If anything holds the deal up, the buyers get money every day until the deal closes.
These are not terms you’d negotiate if you had a real company with strong financials that was, according to markets, worth billions of dollars. They are terms that essentially give a 9+ figure windfall to whomever is willing to buy your stock, and even if it goes badly Trump’s company is essentially guaranteeing they won’t lose money. You’d expect nothing less from the King of Deals.
I am a little sorry to keep writing about Trump’s ridiculous “media” “company” but it’s both our first glimpse behind the scenes of how Trump actually runs one of his disastrous business enterprises and a potential cornucopia of securities and financial fraud playing out very publicly in real time, so it’s hard to resist. This will be less funny when Trump gets away with everything, becomes president again, and I am only be able to publish this blog on TRUTH Social, the country’s sole Internet provider, but until that happens we can share a laugh together.
Stolen Relics
We talk a surprising amount around here about stolen relics and artifacts. Some hedge fund billionaire I’ve never heard of has received a punishment I’ve also never heard of and been “barred for life” from collecting antiquities, as part of a settlement with the Manhattan DA’s office:
The prosecutor’s office struck an agreement with Mr. Steinhardt after a four-year multinational investigation that determined that the seized pieces had been looted and smuggled from 11 countries, trafficked by 12 illicit networks and appeared on the international art market without lawful paperwork, the office said.
“For decades, Michael Steinhardt displayed a rapacious appetite for plundered artifacts without concern for the legality of his actions, the legitimacy of the pieces he bought and sold, or the grievous cultural damage he wrought across the globe,” District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said, adding: “This agreement establishes that Steinhardt will be subject to an unprecedented lifetime ban on acquiring antiquities.”
Holy moly! I am used to reading about how the billionaires who stole the artifacts have to give them back and say they are sorry and won’t do it again, and then a year later they once again apologize and give back some more artifacts, but it seems Cy Vance got his man in this case. Steinhardt’s attorney, of course, paints a slightly different picture:
“Mr. Steinhardt is pleased that the District Attorney’s yearslong investigation has concluded without any charges, and that items wrongfully taken by others will be returned to their native countries. Many of the dealers from whom Mr. Steinhardt bought these items made specific representations as to the dealers’ lawful title to the items, and to their alleged provenance. To the extent these representations were false, Mr. Steinhardt has reserved his rights to seek recompense from the dealers involved.”
Yes, surely he believed all these ancient artifacts were acquired legally, because some random art dealer in Italy would have legal right to Cretan bowls from the 5th century B.C. The DA’s office says they agreed to deal without bringing charges because it would get the artifacts back to the countries they were stolen from more quickly, which feels like the best outcome we can hope for in cases like this.
Smart Homes
A major outage of Amazon’s hosting network this week, which was bad because it took a lot of services down that people use for work, like Slack, et cetera, but it also had a fun little side effect:
The outage at Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud-computing arm left thousands of people in the U.S. without working fridges, roombas and doorbells, highlighting just how reliant people have become on the company as the Internet of Things proliferates across homes.
The disruption, which began at about 10 a.m. Eastern time Tuesday, upended package deliveries, took down major streaming services, and prevented people from getting into Walt Disney Co.’s parks.
I say fun but it was obviously not fun for people who did not have working fridges, packages delivered, or were stuck standing in line at Disney. Commonly referred to as the Internet of Things, derisively referred to as the Internet of Shit, outages like these expose how reliant we’ve become on a bunch of computer servers in a handful of warehouses in Virginia. Happy holidays, everyone!
Short Cons
AP - “Saudi authorities have conducted their biggest-ever crackdown on camel beauty contestants that received Botox injections and other artificial touch-ups, the state-run Saudi Press Agency reported Wednesday, with over 40 camels disqualified from the annual pageant.”
ProPublica - “Thoroughbred horses, auto racing, massive ranches, luxury hotels. The hobbies and side businesses of the ultrawealthy create huge write-offs that can let them get away with paying little or no income tax for as much as a decade at a time.”
The Markup - “Life360, a popular family safety app used by 33 million people worldwide, has been marketed as a great way for parents to track their children’s movements using their cellphones. The Markup has learned, however, that the app is selling data on kids’ and families’ whereabouts to approximately a dozen data brokers who have sold data to virtually anyone who wants to buy it.”
Tips, thoughts, or sexy camel photos to scammerdarkly@gmail.com