Since electric vehicles are the future, there's a lot of attention for their development, and a battery is currently the most important part of the vehicle, because we still have problems with storing large amounts of electrical energy.

The US is making a lot of moves for helping domestic manufacturers, which worries its allies



Zimbabwe also decided to take advantage and try to boost its economy with some protectionism

According to Nansen Research, he lost  $100 million in Ethereum and USDT playing at crypto casinos like Stake, Bitcasino, and others. The dots begin to join and Binance’s unveiling of the misappropriation of customer funds now seems to make sense.

A US jury has returned a US$1.7 billion verdict against Ford Motor Co. involving a car crash that claimed the lives of a Georgia couple, their lawyers confirmed.

Jurors in Gwinnett County, just northeast of Atlanta, Georgia, returned the verdict late last week in the years-long civil case involving what the plaintiffs' lawyers called dangerously defective roofs on Ford pickup trucks, lawyer James Butler Jr confirmed today.

Melvin and Voncile Hill were killed in April 2014 in the rollover wreck of their 2002 Ford F-250. Their children Kim and Adam Hill were the plaintiffs in the wrongful death case.

"I used to buy Ford trucks," Butler said on Sunday local time.

"I thought nobody would sell a truck with a roof this weak. The damn thing is useless in a wreck. You might as well drive a convertible."

Ford did not immediately respond to requests for comment. But in closing arguments, lawyers hired by the company defended the actions of Ford and its engineers.
The Michigan-based automaker sought to defend the company against accusations "that Ford and its engineers acted willfully and wantonly, with a conscious indifference for the safety of the people who ride in their cars when they made these decisions about roof strength," defense lawyer William Withrow Jr said in his closing arguments, according to a court transcript.

The allegation that Ford was irresponsible and willfully made decisions that put customers at risk is "simply not the case," another defence lawyer, Paul Malek, said in the same closing argument.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs had submitted evidence of nearly 80 similar rollover wrecks that involved truck roofs being crushed that injured or killed motorists, Butler's law firm, Butler Prather LLP, said in a statement.
"More deaths and severe injuries are certain because millions of these trucks are on the road," Butler's co-counsel, Gerald Davidson, said in the statement.
"An award of punitive damages to hopefully warn people riding around in the millions of those trucks Ford sold was the reason the Hill family insisted on a verdict," Butler said.



https://www.9news.com.au/world/ford-ordered-to-pay-over-1-billion-us-dollars-after-truck-crash-court/4b391438-8ca7-4af1-9a3b-96ff37dbfedc

This made think,  all this and more maybe was the reason why bitcoin was created to liberate we all from such Fiat control financial system.

Campaign for fiscal responsibility

Walker has compared the present-day United States to the Roman Empire in its decline, saying the U.S. government is on a "burning platform" of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, expensive overcommitments to government provided health care, swelling Medicare and Social Security costs, the enormous expense of a prospective universal health care system, and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_M._Walker_(U.S._Comptroller_General)#Campaign_for_fiscal_responsibility

Year right cause ^IXIC losing 33% from the ATH is still worse than crypto losing 75%.
Let's go back on a 5y graph and see that BTC is lower than 5 years ago while ^IXIC is up by a third?
We dropped like a stone this year and you actually make a case on this against stocks?

As for FTX, everyone talks about the crash after, but nobody says a word about the fake growth that we had while this guy was pumping markets with money he didn't have. Same as Luna, while Kwon was buying BTC with IOUs everyone was cheering, when the crash happened, suddenly they forgot about that part.

This would've never happened in the EU or the US. You send someone to the closest ATM and the guy with the winning ticket gets paid on the spot. IN the EU they would've called cops on you right there when you said you don't have money.

Then the guy hires thugs to help him redeem his winnings of $200? Where I live those guys would charge at least $100 each for help. Nobody would come to your aid and risk a 2 day stay in jail for a few bucks.

In your opinion. What do you think is the biggest waste of money and most useless thing that SBF spent money on.

Tech’s reality check: How the industry lost $7.4 trillion in one year

• The Nasdaq has tumbled sharply from its all-time high a year ago, as layoffs, inflation and rising interest rates roil the tech industry.
• Companies are slowing spending and responding to a weakening economy after seeing their stock prices tank.
• “You just don’t know what it’s going to be like going forward,” Jeff Grabow, venture capital leader at EY, told CNBC.

Not one of the 15 most valuable U.S. tech companies has generated positive returns in 2021. Microsoft has shed roughly $700 billion in market cap. Meta’s market cap has contracted by over 70% from its highs, wiping out over $600 billion in value this year.

In total, investors have lost roughly $7.4 trillion, based on the 12-month drop in the Nasdaq.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/25/techs-reality-check-how-the-industry-lost-7point4-trillion-in-one-year.html

• The electricity grid is being pushed to the breaking point and California, parts of the Midwest and parts of the South Central United States are at “high risk” for energy shortfalls.
• The grid is being challenged as it goes through an unprecedented transformation from fossil fuel based energy to renewable sources of energy.
• NERC officials emphasized how important it is for grid operators to be very conservative in retiring generation, particularly in regions of the country where the system is at its max already.

America’s electrical grid is being pushed to the breaking point, and California, parts of the Midwest and parts of the South Central United States are at “high risk” for energy shortfalls, says the not-for-profit organization charged with managing and evaluating the grid.

“High risk” regions, marked in red on the map, may see shortfalls at “normal peak conditions,” according to the 54th annual assessment from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation released Thursday.

The reasons for the shortfalls vary.

In the Midwestern states and Ontario, more power generation is being retired than is being added back online, NERC’s Mark Olson told reporters Thursday. Energy shortfalls have been projected in that region since 2018, Olson said.

In California, the risk is due to a “variable resource mix” and “demand variability,” Olson said. That means there’s a lot of renewable energy in the state, and its generation is not coordinated with the times people need the most energy. NERC predicts that demand could fall below supply for 10 hours during peak summer months in 2024.

Much of the rest of the Midwest and the rest of the Western part of the United States are at “elevated risk” (yellow on the map), which means shortfalls may occur in extreme conditions, like during severe weather or hot spells where everyone is running air conditioners. In New England, the elevated risk comes in the winter when people use generators that depend on natural gas.

“The natural gas capacity can be insufficient for generators, leading to use of backup fuels, stored liquid fuels, and there are risks to being able to maintain sufficient fuel storage during long duration events,” Olson said.

The Southwest could also suffer when demand is high and wind energy generation is low in the region.

‘Extraordinary times’

“We are living in extraordinary times from an electric industry perspective,” John Moura, the director of reliability assessment at NERC, said on Thursday.

Increasing awareness of climate change is pushing utilities to phase out fossil fuel-based sources of energy that generate carbon emissions. Renewables like wind and solar don’t contribute to climate change, but have period where they don’t generate any energy (when the sky is dark or the wind is still).

Renewables also don’t necessarily map to where demand is, unlike fossil fuels, which can be transported and burned near where they’re consumed. That means more transmission lines are needed, and building them can take from seven to 15 years, Moura says.

Another area of note, according to NERC, is the increased power demand of cryptocurrency mining and the need to plan for energy usage there.

Then there’s the weather. It’s tricky to tie particular extreme weather events to climate change, but it’s generally true that a warmer world is a wetter one, according to NASA climate scientists.

“Year after year, we’ve seen extreme weather leading to increased reliability impacts. And so when we look at events over the last several years, it’s clear that the bulk power system is impacted by extreme weather more than it ever has,” Moura told reporters on the media call.

These factors are placing increased strain on the grid, and NERC representatives urge grid operators to be conservative in their planning.

“Managing the pace of our generation retirement and our resource mix changes to ensure we have enough energy and essential services are an absolute necessity,” Moura told reporters on the call. “We need to work with the entire ecosystem to make sure we’re managing that base, and to be very clear that we’re not retiring generation prematurely — that is done in an orderly fashion and especially in areas that are right on the edge.”

For its annual long-term electricity security assessment, NERC looks at the coming decade, but energy and capacity risk assessment goes out for the coming five years, from 2023 to 2027. There are too many moving parts and uncertainties for a risk assessment past the next five years to be worthwhile, according to NERC.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission certified NERC to measure and enforce safety standards for the energy grid in the United States in 2006. NERC is subject to the oversight of FERC, which is the federal governmental agency in charge of regulating interstate electricity transmission.


https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/15/california-midwest-at-high-risk-of-electricity-shortages-nerc.html

After auto repossessions tumbled during the pandemic, they are now approaching their pre-pandemic levels with industry analysts worried the trend will continue.

WASHINGTON — A growing number of consumers are falling behind on their car payments, a trend financial analysts fear will continue, in a sign of the strain soaring car prices and prolonged inflation are having on household budgets.

Repossessions tumbled at the start of the pandemic when Americans got a boost from stimulus checks and lenders were more willing to accommodate those behind on their payments. But in recent months, the number of people behind on their car payments has been approaching prepandemic levels, and for the lowest-income consumers, the rate of loan defaults is now exceeding where it was in 2019, according to data from ratings agency Fitch.

Industry analysts worry the trend is only going to continue into 2023 with economists expecting unemployment to rise, inflation to remain relatively high and household savings set to dwindle. At the same time, a growing number of consumers are having to stretch their budgets to afford a vehicle; the average monthly payment for a new car is up 26% since 2019 to $718 a month, and nearly one in six new car buyers is spending more than $1,000 a month on vehicles. Other costs associated with owning a car have also shot up, including insurance, gas and repairs.

“These repossessions are occurring on people who could afford that $500 or $600 a month payment two years ago, but now everything else in their life is more expensive,” said Ivan Drury, director of insights at car buying website Edmunds. “That’s where we’re starting to see the repossessions happen because it’s just everything else starting to pin you down.”

'Recipe for disaster'

For those in the repossession business, it’s been difficult to keep up. Jeremy Cross, the president of International Recovery Systems in Pennsylvania, said he can’t find enough repo men to meet the demand or space to hold all the cars his company has been tasked with repossessing. With the holidays approaching, he’s been particularly busy as people prioritize spending elsewhere, and he’s expecting business to keep up throughout next year and 2024.

“Right now, it’s really the perfect storm,” said Cross. “Over the last two years, vehicle prices were inflated because there was no new car supply, people were still buying like crazy because they had a lot of stay-at-home cash, they had inflated credit scores, so it was like a recipe for disaster.”

At the same time, the number of repossession companies has shrunk by 30% as many firms closed up shop and the workers found jobs in other industries when repossessions tumbled during 2020, Cross said. Now, he said, lenders are paying him premiums to repossess their cars first in anticipation of a continued increase in loan defaults.

“The volume is picking up, and the remaining companies that are still performing repossessions are very busy,” Cross said. “The overall numbers are still not prepandemic numbers, but we will see a big change coming in ‘23 and ‘24 that I think the lenders are starting to recognize because they are offering financial incentives that they never had to do in the past. They’re jockeying for position knowing that there’s only a certain amount of bandwidth available.”

It’s an issue that’s raised concern among officials at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, who say they are seeing troubling signs in the auto market, particularly among so-called subprime borrowers, who have below-average credit scores, and those with loans taken out in 2021 and 2022 when auto prices were particularly high.

“Loans taken out in those years are performing worse than prior years just because those consumers had to finance cars once the supply chains were jammed and the prices started to go up,” said Ryan Kelly, acting auto finance program manager for the CFPB. “Those consumers got hit with inflation twice. First, when they had to finance a car after the prices went up, and then when they had to put gas in the car after the Russia-Ukraine conflict started. So there’s just a lot of consumer stress.”

If the economy deteriorates as many economists are predicting in 2023, the number of those falling behind on their car payments should continue to rise, even as consumers tend to give priority to their car payment ahead of most bills because of the importance a car plays in getting to work or potentially providing shelter, industry analysts said.

Still, the rate of defaults and repossessions isn’t expected to reach 2008 and 2009 levels, when there was a spike caused by the financial crisis. The percentage of auto loans that were 30 days delinquent was at 2.2% in the third quarter compared with 2.35% delinquent over the same period in 2019, according to data from Experian. By contrast, just over 4% of auto loans went into default in 2009.

“We’re expecting it to continue to increase and maybe even breach prepandemic levels because of the macroeconomic headwinds of higher interest rates, higher cost of borrowing and expectations for unemployment to continue to increase,” said Margaret Rowe, the lead auto analyst at Fitch. “I think our expectation is that we’re going to continue to see it go up, but it’s just been so low that even going up isn’t like what we saw in the Great Financial Crisis.”

'A lot of stress'

Cox Automotive analysts forecast that while loan defaults and repossessions will increase from their pandemic lows, long-term through 2025 they predict overall defaults and repossessions will remain at or below historic norms.

Still, the financial squeeze has been particularly difficult for lower-income consumers looking for budget vehicles, which have been particularly hard to find. While in the past, those car buyers would have purchased a used car for $7,000 to $15,000 they are now having to spend $20,000 to $25,000 for the same type of vehicle. Among dealers that cater to subprime and deep subprime consumers, the average listing price on their cars has almost doubled since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the CFPB.

“That near prime and subprime group of consumers, they’re getting hit very, very hard by inflation. That group of people did not have much disposable income. They had to finance a more expensive car and then they got hit with prices going up overall. There’s just a lot of stress,” said Kelly.

Ally Financial, which has a significant share of loans to subprime borrowers, said in its October earnings report that it expects delinquencies to increase to as much as 3.8% compared with 3.1% in 2019.

Another risk to car buyers’ finances is the growing length of auto loans, many of which now exceed seven years. While those longer term loans can lower the monthly payments amid higher prices, consumers risk paying off the loan much more slowly than the car is depreciating, leaving them underwater if they need to sell the vehicle. It can also mean higher interest costs over the life of the loan on top of already inflated vehicle prices.

For consumers, there is unlikely to be any relief over the next year. Interest rates are expected to remain high for those needing to borrow to buy a vehicle, and Covid-related plant closures and material shortages are continuing to ripple through the car manufacturing supply chain, limiting the number of new vehicles.

“I dare think what happens to people who are signing up for new loans today,” said Drury. “It’s not going to be better when we see these payments so high.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/economics/car-repossessions-are-rise-warning-sign-economy-rcna61916

Used vehicle demand and prices continue to decline from record highs

• Wholesale prices of used vehicles reached their lowest level in more than a year last month, as retail sales decline amid interest rate hikes, rising new vehicle availability and recessionary fears.
• The Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index, which tracks prices of used vehicles sold at its U.S. wholesale auctions, has declined about 16% from record levels in January.
• The decline is good news for potential car buyers, however not great for companies such as Carvana that purchased vehicles at record highs and are now trying to sell them at a profit.

Cox Automotive said Wednesday that its Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index, which tracks prices of used vehicles sold at its U.S. wholesale auctions, has declined 15.6% from record levels in January through November. The index dropped to 199.4 last month, below 200 for the first time since August 2021, and is down 14.2% from the same month a year ago. It marks the sixth-consecutive month of declines.



Image link:  https://i.ibb.co/ky2F5mW/used-car-prices-2022.jpg

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/07/used-vehicle-demand-and-prices-continue-to-decline-from-record-highs.html

 Nope. It's not a sure-fire way to treat Alzheimer's since there has not been a cure yet, although medication and management strategies may help reduce the threat but won't stop the inevitable.
 
I also doubt that psilocybin helps in the repair of brain damage as it has side effects such as visual and mental hallucinations
More insight on this is gotten on this link
check here and also hampers the energy needed by the brain to function properly
  and here

OP, there's nothing new about it, and it has been like a gambling parlor since the beginning of the existence of markets. The Tulip Mania, the South Sea Bubble, the bull market during the 1920s, and all the other market manias/bubbles in history. Everyone bought something, and hoped to be rich and wealthy.

The long cryptocurrency super cycle ITSELF will have its own manias and its own depressions, its own peaks and valleys, and there's NOTHING that can change this fact.

Late in the afternoon on November 14, a historic email landed in the inboxes of hundreds of California farmers whose land lies within the Westlands Water District, the largest agricultural irrigation agency in the country – and one of the most controversial.

For decades, Westlands has led the fight against environmental rules that restrict the flow of water from California's rivers to its farmers. It sued the government, lobbied friendly politicians, and took on critics wherever it found them, even in Congress. "Where's the outrage, that government decisions have created zero water supplies for communities in the San Joaquin Valley?" Westlands General Manager Tom Birmingham admonished a congressional committee in 2016.

Tim Quinn, former executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies, says Birmingham and members of the Westlands governing board "were pretty entrenched in adversarial decision making. It was us versus them, and we were going to win and they were going to lose."

That November email, however, revealed an unprecedented power shift at Westlands. In an election for the organization's nine-member board, candidates from a self-described Change Coalition had won all four open seats. The winning candidates are calling on the district to spend less time fighting legal and political battles and more time figuring out ways to live with less water. It amounted to a repudiation of Birmingham, an imperious figure who has run Westlands for more than 20 years. Birmingham later announced he'll retire at the end of the year.

The vote is a sign that even in the most conservative parts of California's Central Valley, home to the biggest source of America's fresh produce, attitudes are shifting. Farmers are coming to terms with the fact that their operations will have to change — and in many areas, shrink — to survive chronic drought, depleted aquifers and climate change.

A legacy of political power

Sarah Woolf is an unlikely rebel. She grew up in a farming family just outside the boundary of Westlands Water District, then married into another one — the Woolfs, who run one of the biggest farming operations in the district. She became an expert on water policy while working for a California congressman, then started her own consulting business, Water Wise.

More than anyone else, she catalyzed the movement for change at Westlands. "I just didn't feel that it was appropriate to go along to get along," she says. "We weren't making positive strides."

To understand what she wanted to change, you have to go back to the 1950s and 1960s. Farmers needed water to grow food on the western edge of the San Joaquin Valley but there are no big rivers; growers relied instead on deep wells drilled into aquifers. But that underground reservoir wouldn't last long, and everyone knew it.

The farmers and their backers got the federal government to build a new dam and canal that connected their land to the system of dams and aqueducts known as the Central Valley Project. President John F. Kennedy himself showed up for the groundbreaking. "It is a pleasure for me to come out here and help blow up this valley in the cause of progress," he joked to the crowd.

The new canal delivered water from dams hundreds of miles to the north, like Shasta and Trinity. Westlands Water District was formed to distribute that water to 600,000 acres of land. Mark Arax, a writer who has chronicled the rise of Central Valley agriculture, calls it an act of "pure political power."

"We had a fair amount of clout, legislatively," Woolf says. "We were a very rich district; we had politically active landowners. We hired very talented lobbyists." The 700 or so farms within Westlands are mostly large, high-tech operations.

In 1992, though, Westlands met the limits of its power. Over its protests, Congress enacted the Central Valley Project Improvement Act. The law limited water deliveries to farmers when this could threaten the survival of wildlife, such as fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta — the sprawling network of waterways that empties into the San Francisco Bay.

The act, together with rulings from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, cut the flow of water to Westlands dramatically during years of drought. Some years, the growers got no water at all. They were shocked and furious.

"The district's approach was to fight it. Tooth and nail," Woolf says. "They hired the best attorneys. They hired the best lobbyists." Their approach, she says, was simple: "We will fight this and we will win because we are right."

Yet Woolf grew increasingly convinced that this battle was futile. Farmers were up against too many other powerful interests. She decided cooperation was the only solution and urged Westlands to stop pushing legislation "that was only beneficial to us."

In 2012, after Woolf was appointed to a vacant seat on the Westlands board, she tried unsuccessfully to get Westlands to sit down with other groups, including environmentalists, to explore possible compromises. She ended up butting heads with Tom Birmingham, partly over policies and partly over Birmingham's personal style. "He's an authoritarian, even a dictator," Woolf says with a laugh. "It's his show." Birmingham declined to be interviewed for this story.

In 2018, Woolf resigned from the Westlands board with a public letter of protest. She wrote that her efforts to "direct our district in a more collaborative and progressive direction" had met stubborn resistance.

Then, other farmers started reaching out to her. They were increasingly worried. Drought was becoming more frequent. In four of the past nine years, Westlands has received no water at all from the Central Valley Project.

Westlands farmers had stayed in business by pumping enormous amounts of groundwater from shrinking aquifers. But a new California law, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, will severely restrict their ability to do this.

"I think this farming community is really struggling at this point," says Justin Diener, whose family grows vegetables and almonds near Five Points. "There are a lot of people who are kind of looking at the walls, wondering what they are going to do."

"I sat down with many of (the growers), gave them the history of what I had seen, and they started attending meetings," Woolf says. "They started being challenged by the general manager when they would ask questions. And then they got riled up and upset. And we made it clear, if you want to make a change, you have to get on the board and do something."

Earlier this year, dissident farmers named themselves the Change Coalition for Westlands Landowners, and settled on four candidates to run for the board. Diener was one of them. Woolf worked behind the scenes, but chose not to run.

Storing water underground

There's a range of views within the Change Coalition about what exactly they'd like to accomplish. Diener, who was elected in November, wants a realistic plan to survive. With climate change, droughts are persisting longer. The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains is melting faster. Future floods may be more intense.

If the most recent decade is a guide to the future, Diener says, the district can only expect to receive enough water to grow crops on about 300,000 acres in an average year. That's half the original area of Westlands Water District, and 40% less than what's available to grow crops today.

What's worse, the water comes in bursts. In 2017, when rain drenched California, Westlands actually turned away potential water deliveries because no growers wanted it. Other years, the district gets no water at all, except for what it can buy on the open market at exorbitant prices. Such drastic fluctuations in water availability have been especially tough on growers with almond trees that require water every year just to stay alive. Growers now are ripping out some of those parched orchards.

What's urgently needed, according to Diener and other growers, is the infrastructure to store water underground when it's abundant, so that it's available when the rains stop.

An example: On Woolf family land southeast of the city of Huron, there's a dry creek bed that fills with water when it rains. Every half-dozen years or so, it floods, and because the creek's natural course is blocked, floodwater spills across a floodplain. A layer of silt, built up from years of floods, prevents the water from percolating into the earth, so much of it evaporates.

The Woolfs and neighboring landowners have now built a system to capture and store that water. When the next flood comes, they'll divert the water to a field where it will soak into the ground, all the way down to the aquifer. Farmers — and the nearby city of Huron — will be able to pump that water from their wells.

Westlands should be doing much more of this, Woolf says. Other water agencies in the San Joaquin Valley certainly are. But Westlands has lagged behind. "That's a lack of vision, and a lack of focus on things that we can control," says Jon Reiter, a farmer and consultant who works with Westlands growers. Instead, Westlands focused "on things that we can't control," like decisions by courts and Congress, he says.

Replenishing the aquifers during periodic storms can ease the pain during drought, but it also means growers can't expand their fields when water is plentiful. They'll have to restrain themselves, keeping land fallow, allowing water to soak into the ground so it's there when they truly need it.

Talking with adversaries

Woolf, meanwhile, wants Westlands to be a better neighbor. "What we do is important; growing food is important, it's something to be proud of," she says. "But if we're just fighting with people, I'm not very proud of that." The fighting, she says, blocks discussions — and potentially, compromises — between farmers and other groups with their own claims on California's water.

Such discussions among adversaries are underway in the San Joaquin Valley Collaborative Action Program (CAP), which formed in 2020. It's a forum that brings together farmers, advocates for safe drinking water in disadvantaged communities, local governments, water agencies, and environmentalists. Westlands is not participating, but Woolf and Reiter are.

"I spent much of my career in the San Joaquin Valley watching [these groups] fight with each other," says Quinn, now a visiting fellow at Stanford University's program on Water in the West, who helped launch the group. "I wasn't really convinced that they were ready for the kind of collaboration that I thought was necessary. And turns out, by God, they were."

The group this fall released its goals, which include safe drinking water for communities that don't have it now, better management of water for agriculture, and coordinated shifts in the use of land. That includes converting some previously irrigated farmland into habitat for wildlife. "That's the future," says Quinn. "You can't make progress in 21st century California without adopting a collaborative approach."

For Westlands, such collaboration might mean working with Rey León, the mayor of the mostly Latino town of Huron, in the heart of the Westlands Water District. He's launched efforts to plant trees, reuse wastewater, share electric cars, and build bike lanes.

He's had very little contact with Westlands and never met Tom Birmingham, the water district's general manager for the past two decades. Most landowners of Westlands don't live nearby, on the land they farm, but in Fresno, 30 or more miles away. Yet the fate of Huron's residents has long been linked to decisions that Westlands landowners make about water and farming.

Farmworkers no longer crowd the town at harvest time, since many growers switched from vegetables that require hand labor to almonds that are harvested by machine. If there's another shift, this time from agriculture to, say, solar farms, León wants Huron residents to get access to those jobs. "We have to be innovative, and develop new models of collaboration, because they haven't existed in the past," he says.

Change wins

In October, a month before the Westlands board election, the candidates who were running as the Change Coalition laid out their priorities in a letter to Westlands landowners. They proposed storing more water underground, relying less on "legal and political solutions" to the district's water problems. They also advocated developing a long-term plan for the district's land that includes other uses, such as solar farms and wildlife habitat, and improving relationships with "moderate environmental groups, disadvantaged communities, and safe drinking water advocates."

The Change Coalition candidates won all four open seats. Together with two allies already on the nine-member board, they appear to have a working majority. A week after the election results were announced, Birmingham announced he'd be stepping down.

Dan Errotabere, a retiring member of the board who supported Birmingham, is skeptical that the new board members really will do anything different, or better, than their predecessors. He says he examined the Change Coalition's program and "there's nothing that we're not doing. We are doing all those things. I think they'll recognize that, when they get on the board, and they see all the fine details."

But Quinn calls the Westlands transition a "sea change." Mark Arax, the author, says it's a historic step for the leaders of Westlands to accept the fact that water is scarce, and that their farms will have to shrink. "I don't think that's window dressing," he says. "I think it's a real change, and if that's acknowledged, that's a big story. Westlands, this behemoth, has cut itself in half."

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/15/1139932893/some-of-americas-biggest-vegetable-growers-fought-for-water-then-the-water-ran-o

NEW YORK - Sam Bankman-Fried’s lies, US prosecutors say, stretched back to the very beginning.

From the founding of his cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2019, Bankman-Fried engaged in widespread fraud, federal authorities said, and used his customers’ deposits to finance his political activities, buy lavish real estate and invest in other companies.

According to civil and criminal charges filed against Bankman-Fried in the Southern District of New York on Dec 13, he repeatedly lied to customers, investors and lenders about the structure of his business empire and how he handled the billions of dollars in funds that crypto users deposited in his exchange.

In a 13-page criminal indictment, Bankman-Fried was charged with eight counts, including wire fraud against customers and lenders, as well as conspiracy to defraud the United States and violate campaign finance laws. A civil complaint filed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) laid out a detailed narrative of FTX’s collapse, claiming that for three years Bankman-Fried had misappropriated billions in customer deposits to fund his business and political activities.

The charges against Bankman-Fried came on one of the most dramatic days in the rapidly unfolding collapse of FTX, which has rocked the crypto industry. In Washington, the company’s new chief executive officer, who took over when the firm filed for bankruptcy, testified in Congress, laying out the myriad management failures that contributed to the exchange’s implosion. In Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, Bankman-Fried appeared in court for the first time, having spent the night in a police cell after being arrested at his home on Dec 12. He was denied bail and remained in custody.

The arrest surprised the FTX founder and his parents, who were visiting him, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Bankman-Fried was taken away in handcuffs.

Bankman-Fried appeared in Magistrate Court, dressed in a blue suit and white shirt, eschewing his usual dishevelled outfit of shorts and T-shirt. He was escorted inside by police, while his parents, Stanford Law School professors Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, sat in the rear of the gallery.

The lead prosecutor for Bahamian authorities, Mr Franklyn Williams, argued that Bankman-Fried was a flight risk, with sufficient financial resources to escape the country. A lawyer for Bankman-Fried said his decision to remain in the Bahamas after FTX collapsed showed he had no intention to flee, adding that Bankman-Fried required medication for depression and attention deficit disorder.

The court’s chief magistrate Joyann Ferguson-Pratt ruled that Bankman-Fried should remain in custody. He was allowed a few minutes with his parents, who embraced him in a long hug as the courtroom was cleared.

Bankman-Fried’s arrest was a stunning fall from grace for an executive who was once described as a modern-day John Pierpont Morgan, and became a darling of big investors in Silicon Valley and a prolific Democratic Party donor. These days, Bankman-Fried, 30, is more often likened to Bernie Madoff, the fraudster who orchestrated a notorious Ponzi scheme.

As FTX collapsed, the SEC said in its complaint, investors were kept in the dark about what was going on. Federal prosecutors said Bankman-Fried’s lenders were also kept in the dark. And hundreds of thousands of FTX customers around the world were kept in the dark, too – only to find out that their money was gone.

“Bankman-Fried was orchestrating a massive, years-long fraud, diverting billions of dollars of the trading platform’s customer funds for his own personal benefit and to help grow his crypto empire,” the SEC said.

According to court filings, Bankman-Fried was indicted by a grand jury on Dec 9. The arrest took place three days later, when Bahamian authorities took him into custody at Albany, the luxury apartment complex where he has lived since he moved FTX to the island from Hong Kong in 2021.

At a news conference on Dec 13, US attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams said the investigation into FTX was “very much ongoing” and “moving very quickly”.

He called the company’s collapse “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history”.

Federal prosecutors will need to extradite Bankman-Fried so he can face trial in federal court in the United States. But while the Bahamas has an extradition treaty with the US, that process could stretch for weeks or months if Bankman-Fried contests it.

Mr Mark Cohen, a lawyer for Bankman-Fried, said his client “is reviewing the charges with his legal team and considering all of his legal options”.

Just over a month ago, Bankman-Fried was widely viewed as one of the few reliable figures in a freewheeling, loosely regulated industry. He contributed US$5.6 million (S$7.6 million) to President Joe Biden’s 2020 election effort, and FTX also spent lavishly on TV commercials with an array of celebrity endorsers such as basketball star Stephen Curry and NFL quarterback Tom Brady. Bankman-Fried had been at the forefront of an industry-wide effort to bring crypto into the mainstream of American commerce.

But strip away all the references to crypto in the SEC’s civil complaint, and a picture emerges of garden-variety lies to investors – falsehoods that date back to 2019.

Regulators say Bankman-Fried lied to dozens of big venture capital firms and wealthy family offices, as he raised nearly US$2 billion (S$2.7 billion) to finance his company.

The SEC claims that he misled those investors in reports about the financial health of FTX and its sister company, Alameda Research, a crypto trading platform that he had helped start. He also misled investors about the close ties between the two companies, the SEC said, and concealed how he had allowed his trading firm to routinely borrow money from FTX customers – borrowing that occurred despite claims that all customer money was safe.

The mixing of money allowed Alameda to make bigger trades, invest in other crypto companies, buy Bahamas real estate and make personal loans to FTX executives. The fraud was enabled in two key ways, the SEC said: FTX customers were directed to deposit fiat currency, such as US dollars, in bank accounts controlled by Alameda, and the trading firm could draw down from a “virtually limitless” line of credit funded by FTX customer assets.

Then in the spring, when the crypto market began to crater, other crypto firms that were lenders to Alameda began to call in their loans, demanding repayment, according to the authorities. That forced Bankman-Fried and others at FTX to double down and take even more money from FTX customers to make Alameda whole.

The strategy of taking money from FTX to keep Alameda afloat imploded when customers of the crypto exchange started demanding their money this autumn. The financial hole was US$8 billion (S$10.86 billion), so big that the whole enterprise collapsed.

In the indictment and accompanying court papers, federal prosecutors echoed many of the allegations in the SEC’s complaint. They also claimed Bankman-Fried had broken campaign finance laws by making political contributions to both the Democratic and Republican parties “in the names of co-conspirators, when in fact those contributions were funded by Alameda Research with misappropriated customer funds”.

The scheme was “in the service of the defendant’s desire to influence the direction of policy and legislation on the cryptocurrency industry”, prosecutors wrote in court papers.

Before his arrest, Bankman-Fried was scheduled to testify at a Dec 13 hearing in front of the House Financial Services Committee, which is investigating the collapse of FTX. The hearing went ahead without him, featuring testimony from John Jay Ray III, a veteran of corporate restructuring who has taken over as CEO of FTX.

In his opening statement, Mr Ray blamed the collapse of FTX on the “absolute concentration of control in the hands of a small group of grossly inexperienced and unsophisticated individuals”.

In the early 2000s, Mr Ray oversaw the unwinding of Enron, the energy trading firm that collapsed in an accounting scandal. At the hearing, he called the perpetrators of Enron’s crimes “highly sophisticated”, whereas FTX executives appeared to have engaged in “really just old-fashioned embezzlement”, he said.

“Even with most failed companies, we have a fair road map of what happened,” Mr Ray said in his testimony. “We’re dealing with a literal paperless bankruptcy. It makes it difficult to track.”

The SEC, in its complaint, amplified those concerns and warnings. The complaint said that from the beginning, “FTX had poor controls and fundamentally deficient risk management procedures”. The SEC said the company treated assets and liabilities as “interchangeable” in its accounting ledgers and bookkeeping.

For now, however, no one other than Bankman-Fried has been charged.

https://www.straitstimes.com/tech/tech-news/ftx-was-engaged-in-a-massive-yearslong-fraud-us-prosecutors