Why don’t people on the other sides of frauds get fired?

by philg

We’ve read about a variety of frauds lately, some in the business world and some at the government trough. We hear about the fraudsters being sanctioned, but never the people who were responsible for ladling out the cash. Our first example happened at JPMorgan (source: Association of Certified Fraud Examiners):

In late 2021, JPMorgan announced they were acquiring Frank, a fintech startup founded by [precious female entrepreneur] Charlie Javice that promised to simplify the college financial aid application process. The company reportedly had more than four million users who used the app to help them navigate the complex and difficult process of applying for financial aid. However, by December 2022, JPMorgan filed a civil lawsuit against Javice, alleging fraudulent claims over the amount of customers Frank had. Instead of the around four million customers Javice reported, Frank had fewer than 300,000 actual users. Federal prosecutors then brought criminal charges in early 2023, and in March 2025, Javice was found guilty on multiple counts, including securities fraud, wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy charges.

The discrepancy was significant, as Frank had only about 7% of the users it claimed to have during negotiations with JPMorgan Chase. Evidence showed that Javice had actually hired a data scientist for around $18,000 to create synthetic user data, which was then presented to JPMorgan during the acquisition process as a selling point.

Wims Morris, a JPMorgan executive, relied heavily on Javice’s claims about user data.

How’s Wims Morris doing now? Her LinkedIn profile says that she’s now in charge of $88 billion in auto loans:

Next we go to the geniuses at BlackRock, in charge of $12.5 trillion in assets (mostly index funds?). “BlackRock Stung by Loans to Business Accused of ‘Breathtaking’ Fraud” (WSJ):

The lenders have accused [enricher] Bankim Brahmbhatt, the owner of little-known telecom-services companies Broadband Telecom and Bridgevoice, of fabricating accounts receivable that were supposed to be used as loan collateral. The lenders filed suit in August. They said Brahmbhatt’s companies owe them more than $500 million.

The lenders allege in their complaint that their investigation determined that every customer email Brahmbhatt-owned companies had provided to verify invoices over the past two years was fake. They also said they discovered fraudulent contracts from customers dating back to 2018.

In other words, it seems that anyone able to type “Please generate some invoices and customer emails for my hypothetical telecom company” into an LLM could collect $500 million from the smartest folks on Wall Street. A Google search for “BlackRock firings after Brahmbhatt fraud” yields zero relevant results.

The same lack of accountability can be observed in government. Somalis living in Minnesota managed to defraud taxpayers of more than $1 billion via various welfare program schemes (on top of the taxpayer-funded housing, health care, food, and smartphone to which two-thirds of Somali households in Minnesota are entitled by virtue of having over-the-table income lower than 200 percent of the poverty line (MNCompass)). It got to the point that even the New York Times was willing to implicitly criticize war veteran Tim Walz: “How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch”:

The fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness. … fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided. Federal prosecutors say that 59 people have been convicted in those schemes so far, and that more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots they are investigating. That is more than Minnesota spends annually to run its Department of Corrections. … Ms. Hassan is of Somali ancestry, as are all but eight of the 86 people charged in the meals, housing and autism therapy fraud cases, according to prosecutors. A vast majority are American citizens, by birth or naturalization.

“The message here in Minnesota,” [Tampon Tim] Walz said, “is if you commit a crime, if you commit fraud against public dollars, you are going to go to prison.”

The worst part is not the $1 billion extracted from taxpayers who had to work extra hours to send money to Somalis and Somalia, but that people might mistakenly believe that Somalis, two-thirds of whom are entitled to every form of welfare (see above), aren’t “hardworking”:

“The actions of a small group have made it easier for people already inclined to reject us to double down,” said Abdi Mohamed, a filmmaker in Minneapolis. “The broader Somali community — hardworking, family-oriented, deeply committed to Minnesota — is left carrying that burden.”

Missing from the article: “Joe Bureaucrat was fired for not noticing this obvious fraud and ladling out more than one $billion in tax dollars.” Also missing… reader comments. The NYT disabled comments on the article from the beginning so that none of their readers could commit Wrongthink and erroneously suggest that Minnesota would be better off without enrichment by Somalis.

The Somalis who defrauded the white say-gooders of Minnesota weren’t Hollywood-style supervillains with IQs of 160. JPMorgan could have discovered precious female entrepreneur Charlie Javice’s fraud by making about 10 phone calls. Ditto for BlackRock and Bankim Brahmbhatt (believed to be back in India now after enriching the U.S. for enough years to obtain U.S. citizenship (FCC filings)). If nobody can be fired then what’s the incentive to perform basic due diligence?

Maybe I am out of step with the rest of humanity. For example, I would have imprisoned the Theranos Board, its attorneys, and anyone who invested other people’s money in Theranos rather than prosecuting and imprisoning Elizabeth Holmes. Believing that a Stanford dropout knew stuff that all of Europe’s PhD chemists didn’t know is criminal-level idiocy in my opinion! I would have sent Elizabeth Holmes out on a speaking tour (not a Hillary-style “listening tour”) where she could tell venture capitalists and money managers that sometimes credentials actually do matter.

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Venezuela is too dangerous for humans to occupy and also parents want their children to live in Venezuela

by philg

“Deported and Desperate to Be Reunited With Their Children” (New York Times, November 25, 2025):

Across the United States, children have been left in the care of relatives and neighbors after deportations. In Venezuela, parents are clamoring for the return of their sons and daughters.

While some families have been deported together, many mothers and fathers have been landing in Venezuela without their children, setting off a diplomatic scramble inside the Venezuelan government to track down and repatriate the children.

Families clamoring for the return of their children have put almost all their hopes in Mr. Maduro. They have readily participated in government-led rallies in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, and recorded heartfelt videos shared on social media. In August, many families signed a letter to Melania Trump, the first lady, asking her “to listen to the cries of families.”

We’re informed that Venezuela (population nearly 30 million) is too dangerous for humans to occupy, which is why Venezuelans were able to claim asylum and Temporary Protected Status during the Biden-Harris administration (extended most recently on January 10, 2025, ten days before Joe and Kamala left office). At the same time, we’re informed that parents who love their children want their children to grow up in this place that is too dangerous for any human to occupy rather than in the cradle-to-grave welfare state of the U.S.

Separately, I still can’t figure out how any of this comports with the Constitution’s guarantee of Equal Protection or basic concepts of fairness and seeking to reduce inequality. In a Righteous American’s ideal world, a Venezuelan who was healthy enough to walk across the U.S. southern border is entitled to four generations of taxpayer-funded housing, health care, food, and smartphone. A Venezuelan who is too old, too sick, or too poor to make the journey is entitled to… nothing.

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Image creation in Gemini vs. ChatGPT and Grok

by philg

Advice from a guy who will be paying taxes to keep the Mamdani Caliphate running: “I would ask: “May I meet you?” before engaging further in a conversation. I almost never got a No.”

Gemini applying this for Mindy the Crippler:

ChatGPT does a comparatively crummy job:

Grok is off in its own world (I could get it to use this puppyhood picture of Mindy the Crippler, but it simply ignored my request to use the one of the golden retriever standing on the windowsill of the minivan):

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The academic dream world in which high-income women seek energetic stay-at-home husbands

by philg

It’s National Special Education Day. Let’s look at the latest from the towering intellects of the Ivy League: “Winning the Bread and Baking it Too: Gendered Frictions in the Allocation of Home Production” (NBER with authors from Princeton, Penn, and a university in Chile).

From the abstract:

We document that female breadwinners do more home production than their male partners, driven by “housework” like cooking and cleaning. By comparing to same sex couples, we highlight that specialization within heterosexual households does not appear to be “gender neutral” even after accounting for average earnings differences.

Final sentence:

the next frontier of gender equality may be encouraging men to “lean in” at home, including teaching home production skills and changing norms about task provision from a young age. This will allow men to maintain competitiveness on the marriage market even in an environment where their labor market advantage fades

The PhDs who wrote this are saying that a man who is interested in doing a ton of housework will be pursued for marriage by women with great jobs, but it seems that they never met an actual woman with a great job who said “I want to find a good homemaker to be my stay-at-home husband”.

The absurdity of this idea becomes readily apparent when one considers the interaction between the authors’ ideas and the typical state’s family law and family court. The stay-at-home husband who gets tired of the hardworking middle-aged wife can sue her and collect alimony and child support in order to fund his new relationship with a young woman (or young women). She was the breadwinner and he is entitled to maintain his lifestyle after he discards her in favor of someone younger. From Massachusetts Prenuptial Agreements:

One case that we looked at involved a successful financial services industry fund manager. Due to the Wall Street-style checks rolling into the household, her husband decided to relax at home, watch the nannies raise the children, surf the Web, pursue hobbies, etc. As the wife was getting ready to retire the stay-at-home husband asked “Do I need this woman to earn more money?” The answer was no due to the fact that she was about to stop working. He then asked “Do I need her around to provide a stable environment for our children?” The answer was no because the kids were nearly launched. Did he need her to produce more children? It would have been biologically impossible due to her age. After a bit of litigation it turned out that, under the Massachusetts no-fault system, “I want to have sex with 22-year-olds off Craigslist” is as good a reason for a divorce as any. The husband got paid tens of millions of dollars down at the local family courthouse. Although he only netted half of the money that his wife had earned, his practical spending power had increased due to the fact that the wife, like a lot of self-made people, was a saver while he was a spender.

I find the paper interesting mostly because it shows the academic contempt for practical knowledge. They assume that American men without PhDs are behaving irrationally and need to learn from their intellectual superiors. Unemployed and low-income men who become champions at housework are going to snag hot wives who earn $500,000 per year because it will never occur to the $500,000/year women that they could be exposed to a family court lawsuit as soon as their hotness fades. That real-world American men aren’t pursuing the suggested strategy for “maintain[ing] competitiveness on the marriage market” doesn’t cause the academics a moment of self-doubt. They couldn’t even do a Google search, which would have yielded, for example, this Washingtonian article:

“What’s noteworthy to me is the fury of the women,” says Heather Hostetter, a prominent divorce lawyer in Bethesda who handles cases in Maryland and DC. “I just don’t experience that as much with men who are confronted with the fact that they have to pay alimony. And part of the fury relates to this idea of ‘What exactly am I paying for?’”

“It may be a shock to some women [because] they are not interested in supporting, nine times out of ten, what they call the ‘loser’—and that’s why they’re getting out of the marriage, because he’s a ‘loser,’ or he’s strayed, or whatever it might be,” says Cheryl New, a family lawyer who has been practicing in Maryland and Virginia for three-plus decades. “I think it is really hard emotionally for women to wrap their arms around this phenomenon.” Especially considering that in Maryland, Virginia, and DC, it doesn’t even matter how long (or short) your marriage was—you can still be made to pay.

One ex I spoke to told me that when she and her husband split four years ago, “he cleared the house out when he left. He took the TV, the china, my flatware. All of the things you would anticipate a man would say, ‘I don’t want this, you can have it.’ ” She pays child support and covers major bills for the kids—tuition, camp, insurance. “It’s a harsh reality,” as she put it. “I often look in the mirror and wonder whether this whole feminism thing backfired on me.”

These are the same folks who think that they can offer us practical advice on how to structure the welfare state (giving SNAP/EBT to 17 million in 2000 will never create 42 million SNAP-dependent Americans in 2025 (remember that there are additional federal food welfare programs so the number of Americans who receive taxpayer funded food is considerably larger than 42 million)), how we should change our lifestyle so as to reduce CO2 emissions enough to save our beloved Earth, how we can give every American unlimited medical procedures at a modest cost, and how we can have open borders without exacerbating what the same academics have identified as an affordable housing crisis, a working class wage crisis, a health care system capacity crisis, etc.

In case you’re wondering if it is only these three authors who have a blind spot regarding the family court exposure and the lack of any real-world women trying to find low-income stay-at-home husbands, here are all of the experts who assisted them:

We are grateful for useful comments from seminar and conference audiences at Brown, Harvard Business School, University of Michigan, Cornell University, Chicago Harris School, New York University, University of Pittsburgh, Drexel University, Arizona State University Applied Microeconomics, Barnard Economics of Gender Symposium, Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics gender session, May Ridge Forum on gender economics, Society of Family and Gender Economics, New Advances in Family Economics Ravello, and Zurich Workshop in Economics and Psychology.

See also this hater who claims that men actually do more work once ensnared into a partnership with a female:

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Meet at Art Basel in Miami Beach on Friday for lunch? Or breakfast in Miami?

by philg

It’s Art Basel time again here in Florida. See Art Basel Miami Beach and Art Basel Miami 2021 for some photos of earlier versions. Who wants to meet at the event on Friday for lunch? Please email philg@mit.edu with a subject line of “Meet at Art Basel” if interested. Alternatively, we can meet near my hotel for breakfast on Friday. Paying $2,000/night to be with all of the fabulous people in the heart of Miami Beach is a mere rounding error for me, which is why I’ll be across the Venetian Causeway next to Trinity Cathedral. I’ll be blasting back north via Brightline in the evening.

A prescient work by Christine Wang from 2021:

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Who’s in love with Gemini?

by philg

Gemini 3 has been out for a couple of weeks now. Who is finding it more useful than ChatGPT, Grok, et al.?

I gave a simple tree identification task to Gemini 3, ChatGPT, and Grok. All three failed the task with supreme confidence. A plants-only image classifier handled the task nicely and without any boasting based on the following images of a neighbor’s tree:

Here’s Gemini getting it wrong:

(It’s important to have cold-hardy plants here in Palm Beach County in case it gets slightly below freezing, as it did in 1989, or briefly snows, as it did in 1977.)

ChatGPT, “almost certainly” and with a convincing explanation:

Grok, asked “What tree is this?” answers that it isn’t a tree at all:

Here’s a Yucca filamenta photo from a nursery:

What is the neighbor’s tree? Almost surely Coccothrinax crinita (Old Man Palm), an immigrant from Cuba:

I can’t figure out why all three of these AI overlords did so badly. Yes, the plant classification web site has a smaller database of images to deal with, but given my prompt with the word “tree” in it why weren’t the general purpose AI services able to narrow down their search and do as well as a plants-only image database system?

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If we’re against inequality, why do we have Temporary Protected Status for migrants?

by philg

Donald Trump made the news recently for ending the Temporary Protected Status for Somali migrants who live in Minnesota. USA Today (Reuters):

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Nov. 21 that he was immediately terminating the temporary deportation protections for Somalis living in Minnesota.

Trump’s move to remove protections for Somalis comes after years of targeting Somali immigrants in every campaign cycle in Minnesota since he first ran for president in 2016. The state has become a destination for Somali immigrants in recent decades dating back to the 1990s.

In the decades since the first wave of Somali migrants came to the state, Somalis have established flourishing cultural and business districts, sent their children to its colleges and universities, and elected leaders from their own communities to Minnesota’s city councils, mayorships, legislature and to the U.S. Congress.

(It’s an established journalistic fact that the districts are “flourishing”; household income for a typical Somali family in Minnesota was less than 200% of the poverty line (source), i.e., 2/3rds of Somalis in Minnesota were eligible for SNAP/EBT, Medicaid, public housing, and Obamaphone and, therefore, “flourishing” means “lifestyle funded by taxpayers”)

This will turn out to be just a few hundred enrichers, a fraction of 705 total (see below for nationwide data).

How many Somalis are there without Temporary Protected Status, i.e., Unprotected Somalis? About 20 million (i.e., the U.S. government takes the official position that Somalia is too dangerous for a human to inhabit and, at the same time, Somalia has one of the world’s highest rates of human population growth).

If we’re against inequality, how is it reasonable to anoint 705 Somalis as being worthy of protection and at the same time say that 20 million Somalis are not worthy of protection? If Somalia is too dangerous to inhabit, thus justifying TPS for some, why shouldn’t anyone currently in Somalia have the right to go to Aden Adde International Airport in Mogadishu and get on Turkish Airlines to take up taxpayer-funded residence in the Mamdani Caliphate? Here are some $2,855 flights from Mogadishu to JFK for Christmas Day (economy is available for $1,359, but presumably the U.S. taxpayer can afford to welcome Somalis in comfort and style):

Doesn’t a hatred for inequality require that we treat all Somalis equally, without preference for Somalis who are already here in the U.S.? Same question regarding other countries. Here’s March 31, 2025 data:

What’s special about 140 Lebanese in the U.S. that entitles them to TPS while 6 million Lebanese in Lebanon get nothing? Humans cannot survive in Cameroon, which is why the population has grown from 5 million in the 1960s to 30 million today (6X), so it makes sense that 4,920 Cameroonians are entitled to TPS. But why aren’t the remaining 30 million Cameroonians entitled to move to the US and enjoy TPS?

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The lazy Floridian’s Halloween and Christmas lighting

by philg

Happy Official Beginning of Christmas Season for those who celebrate. (I guess younger Americans think it is okay to decorate for Christmas even before Thanksgiving.)

Gretchen Wilson and lyricist John Rich in “Redneck Woman”:

And I keep my Christmas lights on, on my front porch all year long

It turns out that HOAs aren’t huge fans of this approach. Traditionally people get cheap strings of outdoor-rated lights and put them up themselves or hire professionals to do it for $thousands. The light strings then have to come down after New Year’s. The typical Florida house, however, is built with a lot of exterior light sockets. There are recessed cans underneath loggias, for example, and the typical house has plenty of loggias where people can sit outside in the shade. There will be some sort of front entrance light, perhaps coach-style lights with candelabra bulbs. There may be flood light sockets that can hold PAR38 bulbs.

Why not turn the house itself into the holiday light display? Replace all of the existing bulbs and recessed trims with RGB WiFi, Zigbee, and/or Thread bulbs? This is a report on our 2025 mostly-Govee solution.

We opted for an all-WiFi approach because we wouldn’t have to plug in a bridge, e.g., the one required by Philips Hue. Also, we have reasonably good WiFi coverage even outdoors thanks to TP-Link Omada (still going strong after 3.5 years, though it doesn’t even try to do most of the stuff that Unifi offers to do).

The front of our house has 6 candelabra bulbs that we replaced with Govee ($10/bulb). The 8 recessed cans we filled with Govee trims at $30 each. Govee, unfortunately, doesn’t make anything in PAR38 so we got Feit RGB WiFi bulbs at $15 each. For a table lamp inside we replaced a three-way bulb with a $20 Govee 1200 lumen RGB bulb. We already had some entryway recessed bulbs (BR40 and BR30) on the Philips Wiz system (their ghetto-level WiFi bulbs for people who don’t want to invest in Hue). I installed everything myself after borrowing a neighbor’s ladder for the floods and had it all connected up in less than two hours, including setting on/off schedules for each group of bulbs.

For a little more visual pizazz we indulged in two Govee light strips ($120 each for 100′) that we can hide in the bushes, but will likely have to roll up and store until next fall in order to keep them safe from the landscapers. These required some extra work because their power supplies aren’t waterproof so I purchased waterproof boxes from Home Depot. Finally, I tried to find a use for a 50′ string of Govee “permanent outdoor lights”, intended for under-eave attachment, that I’d previously tried out around a loggia in a failed experiment. These too have a non-weatherproof power supply.

The Govee app has a few built-in holiday schemes and, of course, lights can be infinitely customized by the patient or simply set to a solid color of one’s choice. Loyal readers won’t be surprised to learn how disappointed I was that there is no Pride festival scheme.

The Feit app is more basic and, as far as I can tell, doesn’t have even a Christmas scheme. The Wiz V2 app is perhaps somewhere in the middle in terms of power/complexity. It probably makes the most sense to stick with either all-Govee or, if money is no object, Philips Hue.

How did it work out? The flood lights ended up being a mistake. A bright light of color (not a hateful “colored light”) pointing at the viewer’s face isn’t useful. We got plunged into a world of tech support hell with the WiFi Govee lights after an Omada outdoor access point failed and we let the TP-Link tech support folks in to change a bunch of roaming settings. The Govee lights don’t work well if the WiFi network is trying to be clever about supporting roaming and optimizing the access point selection for each device. Probably it is smarter to user Matter over Thread or Zigbee (Philips Hue) and thus have just one hub that is a WiFi client. Many of the Govee devices are compatible with Thread, though not fully controllable using their app via Thread.

Our neighbor’s awesome house, mostly done with inexpensive non-WiFi stick-in-the-ground 12V lights (handheld RGB control):

Our house, using primarily the sockets it was built with (we can’t take credit for the lion statues; they were installed by a previous owner!):

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Meet in downtown Minneapolis on Wednesday?

by philg

Dear Readers: I’m headed to Minneapolis this week. Please email (philg@mit.edu) with a subject line of “Meet on Wednesday” if you want to get together on Wednesday evening. Perhaps we can meet at one of the coffee shops in George Floyd Square? It’s definitely safe after dark, right? Google AI:

George Floyd Square’s safety after dark is a complex issue with no single consensus, and opinions on it vary significantly among residents, business owners, and activists. … the area was often self-policed as an “autonomous zone,” and some residents reported that police and ambulances avoided the area, leading to increased crime, including fatal shootings and gang activity. Some nearby residents at the time reported feeling unsafe and experiencing ongoing trauma. … Police data from early 2025 indicated only a few isolated incidents of robbery, burglary, and gunfire over several months, suggesting a reduction in the previous levels of violent crime.

Robbery and gunfire only on Tuesdays and Thursdays and, therefore, at least “mostly peaceful”?

We are informed that the twin pillars of the Minnesota economy are marijuana (“hemp”) and harvesting federal welfare dollars (see below), but it is my comparatively boring life as a software expert witness that brings me to the city.

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Growth on food stamp spending vs. growth in immigration

by philg

I hope that none of the loyal readers of this blog went hungry yesterday.

Today is the 35th anniversary of the EBT system for food stamp benefits (later, “SNAP”). The Mickey Leland Memorial Domestic Hunger Relief Act was signed on November 28, 1990. Let’s have a look at inflation-adjusted spending on taxpayer-funded food:

We’re spending roughly 14X what we spent in 1970. What else has grown dramatically since 1970? The number of foreign-born people living in the U.S. is about 5.5X:

Correlation can’t be causation here, of course, because we’re informed that low-skill migration makes America rich and the SNAP data suggest that the number of poor people in the U.S. has grown dramatically, from 17 million beneficiaries in 2000 to 42 million in 2025 (see Number of Americans dependent on food stamps has been reduced from 17 million in 2000 to only 42 million today).

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