#trade violations

[trendynewsnow]

U.S. Fines GlobalFoundries $500,000 for Trade Violations with China

U.S. Imposes $500,000 Fine on GlobalFoundries for Trade Violations The Biden administration announced on Friday its decision to impose a substantial fine of $500,000 on GlobalFoundries, a prominent U.S. chipmaker, following the company’s unauthorized shipment of over $17 million worth of products to a Chinese entity listed on a restricted trade list. This action highlights the ongoing scrutiny…

[braintapes]

Yeah yeah impossible architecture this, backrooms that, endless hallways and looping corridors, we've all seen it. You know what's really fucked up? What's really terrifying, down to the quick of your soul? A house/building that's almost completely normally but was just atrociously built. All the infrastructure is bad. The planning was bad. An ongoing cascade of bad decisions allowed to reach their dreadful crescendo.

A house with barren walls, no outlets to be seen. Parts cut out of doors and walls because otherwise it would smack into the light fixtures or ventilation ducts. Piping and ducts that cut into each other, somehow. Spaghetti wire that leads to nowhere, abandoned eons past and left to rot and fester. Multiple different crews of people had to actively spend time installing these things. Did they know? Did they care? Could they do anything to stop the tragedy?

And you know, maybe it can take on a supernatural element. Those wires grew and grew like climbing ivy, no goal but to sprawl across the house. A second light switch appears almost completely on top of the previous one, just slightly rotated so you can see the old one underneath. The sharp angles in the ducts get just a little sharper, sharper still until they cut better than your best knives. The appliances sink further and further into the wall with each passing day until the House devours them completely. The pipes are leaking an unidentifiable liquid. Shoddy moulding crackles apart revealing something you'd like to hope isn't raw muscle underneath. Water damage bubbles the ceiling, pops it open like popcorn and millions of tiny eyes stare back. What is it that they're looking for? The termites in the attic are getting louder and louder. The wires creep closer and closer...

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

GOP Presidential Hopeful Ramaswamy Sued Over Strive’s Practices | Bloomberg

In separate lawsuits, two former employees at the candidate’s Strive Asset Management claim that the anti-ESG investment firm pressured them to violate securities laws.

Vivek Ramaswamy has been rising in presidential polls partly on the strength of his business accomplishments. Before he started running for the Republican nomination, where polling averages now put him in third place behind Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, Ramaswamy founded and ran a drug development company, Roivant, which he took public in 2021. Then he started an asset management firm, Strive, presenting it as a conservative answer to the ESG movement’s focus on investments’ environmental, social and governance impacts. Strive’s motto, meant as a contrast to ESG, is “invest in excellence.”

But two former employees have filed lawsuits in recent months against the investment firm as well as Ramaswamy and his co-founder Anson Frericks that suggest practices at the company were something less than that. They accuse Ramaswamy and Frericks of aggressively pushing employees to violate securities law and of mistreating staff. They also suggest that the company has struggled to meet lofty growth goals for its “anti-ESG” investments.

Christopher Lenzo, a lawyer for plaintiff Joyce Rosely, said the two suits raised questions about Ramaswamy’s seriousness as an asset manager. Strive “was founded, in retrospect, largely as a PR mechanism for the presidential campaign of Ramaswamy,” he said. “Not a lot of thought was given to running it as an investment firm.”

Neither lawsuit has been previously reported. Ramaswamy’s track record will be in focus during next week’s presidential debate, when DeSantis allies have signaled that he plans to concentrate attacks on Ramaswamy. “Strive intends to vigorously defend itself,” the company said in a statement. “Beyond that, it is our policy not to comment on active litigation.” Tricia McLaughlin, Ramaswamy’s communications director, didn’t comment on the lawsuit. She noted that Ramaswamy, who served as Strive’s executive chairman until earlier this year, left Strive when he decided to run for president. “Strive is completely separate from Vivek and his campaign,” she said.

The first suit, filed in Kansas by a regional sales chief who was dismissed as part of a reorganization in March, also says Ramaswamy misrepresented the company’s finances to employees and investors, exaggerating its growth when pitching venture capitalists and recruiting staff. The former employee, John Phillips, claims he was induced to leave a job at JPMorgan that would have paid him more than $1 million in 2022, based on promises made by Ramaswamy and others that Strive was well financed and that Ramaswamy was dedicated to the company.

In reality, according to the suit, Strive was “undercapitalized,” and Ramaswamy was planning a presidential bid. The suit was filed in June, three months after Phillips claims he was fired by Strive without cause. Strive has filed a motion to dismiss the case.

In the second suit, filed Aug. 8 in a Union County, New Jersey, court, Rosely claims she was fired as co-head of institutional sales in retaliation for raising concerns about sexual harassment at the firm and violations of securities laws. She contends she saw a Strive executive make aggressive sexual advances toward a more junior staffer.

When Rosely, a veteran of State Street and Goldman Sachs, complained to Frericks, Strive’s president, he told Rosely it was “none of his business,” according to her complaint. At the time, Frericks, a former beer distribution executive who went to high school with Ramaswamy, held the company’s most senior position.

Like Phillips, Rosely claims that Ramaswamy and Frericks pressured her to violate securities laws. She says she was asked to use sales materials that improperly promised future returns and urged to allow employees who were not yet registered to sell securities to pitch clients. Rosely also claims she complained about Ramaswamy’s social media posts, which she believed constituted unlawful securities sales.

Both Phillips and Roseley were fired in March, alongside another executive who Rosely says was also complaining about the securities law violations. She claims that Strive told her the firing was part of a reorganization but also that everyone who was dismissed as part of the reorganization was over 40 years old. Her suit alleges that she was the victim of age discrimination, as well as retaliation for raising concerns about harassment and securities law violations.

In April, a month after the dismissals, Matt Cole, Strive’s chief investment officer, was named chief executive officer. In a June memo, Cole acknowledged the departures of “underperforming members of the distribution team.” He also signaled that Strive, which manages exchange traded funds (or ETFs) with about $1 billion in total assets as of Aug. 17, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, would tone down its political rhetoric and focus on promoting “shareholder capitalism” instead of criticizing ESG. The memo, first reported by Semafor, said that growth in the firm’s funds had slowed in 2023 in part because investors had seen the firm as “political over investment oriented.” The memo said growth had resumed and would accelerate in a “‘hockey stick’ fashion” starting in 2025.

[feleshero]

Click the heart for a thread with The Fel! (Earth-194's Worst Nightmare)

IF YOU WANT THE HERO ONE INSTEAD? CLICK HERE.

ADVANCED WARNING: There may be some disturbing topics discussed/portrayed. They will be properly tagged, as they have been on this blog so far. If you're unsure as to what might be there, or request that something else be properly tagged, feel free to ask at any point in time!

You wanna see a dead body??

[thoughtlessarse]

The European Union should suspend its trade and institutional ties with Israel to deter war crimes that amount to genocide in the Gaza Strip, the UN's special rapporteur on Palestine has said. Francesca Albanese - who recently concluded that the threshold of the crime of genocide has been met Gaza - told Euronews on Wednesday that the EU has "an obligation" to suspend its Association Agreement with Israel given that its offensive violates that agreement's provisions on human rights. "Israel has the political, financial, economic means to continue operating business as usual. It has no incentive whatsoever to change conduct," Albanese explained. "Europe is the main trading partner - which accounts I think for 30% of Israel's trade - so it has a huge power and it should use that power. In the end, this is not an option, it's an obligation because Article 2 of that association agreement foresees the suspension in case of violations of human rights," she added. A recent initiative by the leaders of Ireland and Spain calling on the European Commission to suspend the EU-Israel agreement has been met with resistance by other member states eager to uphold the bloc's stance of solidarity with Israel. A decision to halt the agreement would require the unanimous backing of all 27 EU member states. But the bloc's leaders have consistently clashed over their collective stance on the conflict that erupted following Hamas' attack on Israel on October 7th. Albanese said the EU's reluctance to use the measures in its power to hold Israel to account perpetuates Israel's impunity and reveals a "disconnect" between Europe's political class and the large portion of European society that has persistently called for a ceasefire in the besieged Gaza Strip. She also said EU leaders need to take more concrete counter-measures against Israel, including revoking diplomatic recognition and targeted sanctions on government officials.

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[ursa-arrowbreaker]

Actually straight up having fun learning about insider trading regulations. The sec really saw this shit go down and went:

[daforged]

gnawing on the end of voyager 1x09 prime factors like its a new flavoured chewbone tossed into my enclosure and i’ve been starved for 3 weeks

[flannelepicurean]

do not care about the actual context, here are the 💯 facts:

bulma did something illegal.

highly intelligent, HIGHLY illegal. and incredibly silly.

vegeta is shouting an increasingly preposterous list of excuses, stream-of-consciousness style, about why he did what he did, in the way that he did it, when he intervened to keep bulma out of super jail.

he is making these frantically-escalating excuses to trunks.

not because trunks is a baby and can't handle the things daddy did to the super police. but because this happens way too goddamn often, and he just knows trunk is so, so disappointed in both of his parents.

[apollos-boyfriend]

mr beast being sued for labor violations then having his food brand discontinued for mold then being reported to the FBI and now being investigated for roughly $23M in crypto-related insider trading feels like the ultimate don’t stop the party

[nationallawreview]

Artificial Intelligence and the Rise of Product Liability Tort Litigation: Novel Action Alleges AI Chatbot Caused Minor’s Suicide

As we predicted a year ago, the Plaintiffs’ Bar continues to test new legal theories attacking the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology in courtrooms across the country. Many of the complaints filed to date have included the proverbial kitchen sink: copyright infringement; privacy law violations; unfair competition; deceptive and acts and practices; negligence; right of publicity,…

[ralfmaximus]

Sweeping changes to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines aimed at cleaning up the polluted, confusing world of online product reviews went into effect on Monday, meaning the federal agency is now allowed to levy civil penalties against bad actors who knowingly post product reviews and testimonials deemed misleading to American consumers.

Fucking finally.

Curious to see how enforcement works, and/or if they're going after retroactive violations. Full text of the August 2024 rules change here.

If you like this kind of thing, don't let Trump back into office. Because, well, you know...

[aralintheobsessive]

And why does America grow so much fucking corn? Well, several reasons, but dominant among them: Subsidised revenue insurance programs! "In 1949, government payments made up 1.4% of total net farm income — a measure of profit — while in 2000 government payments made up 45.8% of such profits. In 2019, farms received $22.6 billion in government payments, representing 20.4% of $111.1 billion in profits."

Bad year? Bad market? Get paid anyway. Grow corn! Why go to all the risk and expense of diversifying your operation to try and grow crops there's an actual market demand for when you could instead go all-in on corn and soybeans? Now so many farmers have gone down this route that if the government reduces those subsidies, it would devastate entire regions. In today's agricultural industry of broadacre cropping, most farming is done by massive, expensive, highly specialized machinery. You can't just pivot, because you're in debt on giant machines that really only work on corn. So the government isn't going to cut the subsidies. So more farmers are going to go all-in on the safe bet that is corn. It's a horrible self-perpetuating cycle.

(Source for quote and image: https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-data-says/)

I will write this thought about Veganism and Classism in the USA in another post so as to not derail the other thread:

There are comments in the notes that say meat is only cheaper than plant based foods because of subsidies artificially lowering the price of meat in the United States. This is...part of the story but not all of it.

For my animal agriculture lab we went to a butcher shop and watched the butcher cut up a pig into various cuts of meat. I have had to study quite a bit about the meat industry in that class. This has been the first time I fully realized how strongly the meat on a single animal is divided up by socioeconomic class.

Like yes, meat cumulatively takes more natural resources to create and thus should be more expensive, but once that animal is cut apart, it is divided up between rich and poor based on how good to eat the parts are. I was really shocked at watching this process and seeing just how clean and crisp an indicator of class this is.

Specifically, the types of meat I'm most familiar with are traditionally "waste" parts left over once the desirable parts are gone. For example, beef brisket is the dangly, floppy bit on the front of a cow's neck. Pork spareribs are the part of the ribcage that's barely got anything on it.

And that stuff is a tier above the "meat" that is most of what poor people eat: sausage, hot dogs, bologna, other heavily processed meat products that are essentially made up of all the scraps from the carcass that can't go into the "cuts" of meat. Where my mom comes from in North Carolina, you can buy "livermush" which is a processed meat product made up of a mixture of liver and a bunch of random body parts ground up and congealed together. There's also "head cheese" (made of parts of the pig's head) and pickled pigs' feet and chitlin's (that's made of intestines iirc) and cracklin's (basically crispy fried pig skin) and probably a bunch of stuff i'm forgetting. A lot of traditional Southern cooking uses basically scraps of animal ingredients to stretch across multiple meals, like putting pork fat in beans or saving bacon grease for gravy or the like.

So another dysfunctional thing about our food system, is that instead of people of each socioeconomic class eating a certain number of animals, every individual animal is basically divided up along class lines, with the poorest people eating the scraps no one else will eat (oftentimes heavily processed in a way that makes it incredibly unhealthy).

Even the 70% lean ground beef is made by injecting extra leftover fat back into the ground-up meat because the extra fat is undesirable on the "better" cuts. (Gross!)

I've made, or eaten, many a recipe where the only thing that makes it non-vegan is the chicken broth. Chicken broth, just leftover chicken bones and cartilage rendered and boiled down in water? How much is that "driving demand" for meat, when it's basically a byproduct?

That class really made me twist my brain around about the idea of abstaining from animal products as a way to deprive the industry of profits. Nobody eats "X number of cows, pigs, chickens in a lifetime" because depending on the socioeconomic class, they're eating different parts of the animal, splitting it with someone richer or poorer than they are. If a bunch of people who only ate processed meats anyway abstained, that wouldn't equal "saving" X number of animals, it would just mean the scraps and byproducts from a bunch of people's steaks or pork chops would have something different happen to them.

The other major relevant conclusion I got from that class, was that animal agriculture is so dominant because of monoculture. People think it's animal agriculture vs. plant agriculture (or plants used for human consumption vs. using them to feed livestock), but from capitalism's point of view, feeding animals corn is just another way to use corn to generate profits.

People think we could feed the world by using the grain fed to animals to feed humans, but...the grain fed to animals, is not actually a viable diet for the human population, because it's literally just corn and soybean. Like animal agriculture is used to give some semblance of variety to the consumer's diet in a system that is almost totally dominated by like 3 monocrops.

Do y'all have any idea how much of the American diet is just corn?!?! Corn starch, corn syrup, corn this, corn that, processed into the appearance of variety. And chickens and pigs are just another way to process corn. That's basically why we have them, because they can eat our corn. It's a total disaster.

And it's even worse because almost all the USA's plant foods that aren't the giant industrial monocrops maintained by pesticides and machines, are harvested and cared for by undocumented migrant workers that get abused and mistreated and can't say anything because their boss will tattle on them to ICE.

[voulezloux]

i’m gonna be so glad when this semester ends for the facts i won’t ever have to deal with FYE again and i won’t have to read through multiple responses in my law discussion boards where people are incorrectly interpreting the law and adding in things that aren’t even there

[overmorrowpine]

i hate being jewish. well, i love being jewish. i hate being jewish around other people.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Fifty per cent of web users are running ad blockers. Zero per cent of app users are running ad blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that’s a felony. (Jay Freeman, the American businessman and engineer, calls this “felony contempt of business-model”.) So when someone in a boardroom says, “Let’s make our ads 20 per cent more obnoxious and get a 2 per cent revenue increase,” no one objects that this might prompt users to google, “How do I block ads?” After all, the answer is, you can’t. Indeed, it’s more likely that someone in that boardroom will say, “Let’s make our ads 100 per cent more obnoxious and get a 10 per cent revenue increase.” (This is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website.) There’s no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn’t install a counter-app that co-ordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold. No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete or, in other words, “IP law”. IP isn’t just short for intellectual property. It’s a euphemism for “a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers”. And “app” is just a euphemism for “a web page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to mod it, to protect the labour, consumer and privacy rights of its user”.