1. I was looking at concrete and it turns out that China used more cement from 2011 to 2013 than the US did in the entire 20th century. I uh... suspect that has something to do with why Evergrande is failing now jeez. And sand, one of the key ingredients, is often mined illegally and with devastating environmental impact. More than half of the sand is mined illegally from Morocco's beaches. It can change river flows, destroy estuaries, and exacerbate flooding.
2. Chatham vs ACA - No real takeaways here just a really interesting story.
In 2017 and 2018, the bonds of American Media started to trade implausibly high prices. Just going crazy and it was really easy to see who was making that happen - Chatham Asset Management, a hedge fund firm that owned most of these bonds. Last April, the SEC brought a case against Chatham who settled for $19 million. Basically because different funds within Chatham could only own a certain amount of these bonds. Because Chatham liked these bonds and didn't want to sell them off entirely, when one fund couldn't keep these bonds, they would sell it to another fund within the company. Technically this did make the company more money (higher selling price = more fee) but it seems like they just...liked the bond and wanted to keep them. Literally didn't really NEED to sell them at higher prices?
It gets a bit weirder because of course a fund can't just sell to another fund within the company so they needed to use a broker. Brokers just kept accepting the higher prices because...well they knew Chatham would buy it back so why not? Since Chatham are basically the only people buying or selling them, they set the price and the "fair market value" was entirely based on their own trades. And since they kept going just a bit higher on the next one...the end price got really high. The SEC's complaint was that this was "fraud or deceit upon any client or prospective client". Super vague law and I guess since they did get a bit more commission out of this, I think it does probably apply.
But the newest development is that Chatham is now suing ACA because ACA is their compliance consultant. ACA is saying that they weren't aware that Chatham was setting the price and Chatham is basically saying what's the point of a compliance consultant if everyone on the outside could see something was wrong, and ACA with full access to Chatham's books didn't even flag these trades. Identifying potential issues is a compliance consultant's entire job. On the other hand though, Chatham is a hedge fund manager ... and this was a really basic and really stupid wrongdoing. Maybe they both can be fined lol.
3. In a bit more of a depressing news, the Hugo Awards are under controversy. Basically the Hugo Awards work a bit differently than most other literary awards in that a host country is chosen ... and then largely gets to decide almost everything about the awards.
So the controversy starts in the vote between the final two potential locations for the Hugo Awards/WorldCon. It's between Canada and China and last minute a massive amount of votes seemingly coming from China sways the decision to China. All that's required to be a voter is to be a (paying) member of the organization. It turns out though a huge number of these votes for China are coming in without a street address which brought up potential concerns for fraud. In the end a vote was taken to determine whether an address had to be actually filled out for the vote to count. It passes 47-30 but was actually overruled by the Discon 3 chair because all of these votes are nonbinding. My opinion on this is that this decision is okay? to me. If a street address hasn't been explicitly required in the past, I can see the decision being made that at the end of the day, these are paying members, who have essentially paid to vote on this matter. But it does point to a larger organizational mess of non-binding votes and so much power given to whoever is currently sitting in the seat. Similarly all of the power of the individual World Con goes to the country hosting it.
And then things get worse. World Con is delayed. The voting faces technical issues. Since voting is done online, the finalists usually comes out immediately, but this was not the case. Voting completed April 30th but the finalists were not released until July 6th. Finally when the finalists were announced, there were numerous omissions that ... raised eyebrows. When the detailed statistics were released (delayed I might add), several books/authors were "deemed ineligible" with no further explanation including Babel by R. F. Kuang [her response] or Xiran Jay Zhao or even Sandman episode 6 by Neil Gaiman. Just looking at these omissions there certainly seems to be a pattern. Paul Weimer, a popular fanwriter, was also deemed ineligible and it seems like the only potential reason would be his posts in calling Tibet China? or a post of his that argued against holding World Con in China.
Dave McCarty, one of the committee members, spoke on his public Facebook page about how he made the call to delay because of potential issues in the numbers. When asked about these statistics, he was extremely rude while refusing to provide any clarity. He said things like "asked and answered. Are you slow?" or "It is not my job to answer further than that or help you with reading comprehension" when people complained that his non-answers weren't enough. There were also other issues with the numbers including that it seems like there is a strong dropoff in the votes that do not appear in other previous voting which suggests that these numbers have been doctored. Anyway, all in all, these results ... probably aren't "real" which absolutely sucks for all of those omitted, but also those who were longlisted as they will now have to wonder if it was actually on their own merit.
4. In lighter but possibly even more crazy book news, JD Barker wrote a ...spicy? book and in his promotion of said book when he asked book influencers to take...risque photos with his book for potentially a free copy of the book or payment. The book apparently has a plot involving doing increasingly taboo tasks so it seems like this PR campaign was supposed to be a play on that. Here's a link if you want details on what was asked of these book influencers: https://www.today.com/popculture/books/jd-barker-email-booktok-controversy-rcna135917. Obviously WTF. Barker then apologized about these PR emails and said they came from a PR firm that was hired (even though it turns out he actually owns this firm and the emails said they would be "personally reviewed" by Barker).
5. I learned about Singapore's car licenses that are needed (since Singapore is so small and densely populated and has no need for cars anyway) that makes it one of the most expensive places to own a car. A Toyota Corolla can cost nearly $200,000 when the prices for these licenses surge.