How ‘Crazy Eddie’ Electronics Chain Scammed America

In 1983 the annual revenue at the electronics chain Crazy Eddie was roughly $134 million (or about $372 million today), remembers The Hustle. The next year they’d sold $44 million just in computers and games — and eventually grew to 43 stores. The company’s stock ticker symbol was CRZY.

“There was just one major problem,” the article notes. “Crazy Eddie had been lying about its numbers since its inception — and the higher the stock soared the further founder Eddie Antar went to maintain the illusion.”

It’s a colorful story from the early days of home PC sales. Antar’s uncle hid up to $3.5 million in cash in a false ceiling at Antar’s father’s house, according to The Hustle. “Eddie Antar kept close tabs, usually calling his uncle twice a day to see how much money they were skimming…. The skimming strategy allowed Antar to not only hoard cash but also evade sales taxes. His employees were also paid off the books so Crazy Eddie could avoid payroll taxes.”

“Money was always in the house,” said Debbie Rosen Antar, Antar’s first wife, to investigators in the late 1980s. “And if I needed it and I asked him, he would say, ‘Go underneath the bed and take what you need….'”

Why would a company built on a family fraud go public? Somebody told Antar he could keep making millions skimming cash, but he could make tens of millions if the company traded on the stock market. Strangely, Crazy Eddie’s fraudulent history gave it an advantage. To provide the illusion of quickly increasing profits ahead of the IPO, the Antars simply reduced the amount of cash they were skimming. With millions more on the ledger instead of in the family’s pockets, the company’s profits looked more impressive.
As a public company, Crazy Eddie then made up for its inability to skim cash by initiating new fraud streams.

– The company embellished its inventories by millions of dollars to appear better-stocked and better positioned for profits.

– The Antar family laundered profits it had previously skimmed — and deposited in foreign bank accounts — back into the company to inflate revenues….

In November 1987, a hostile investment group led by Houston entrepreneur Elias Zinn pounced, purchasing Crazy Eddie. As Antar’s cousin later recounted, Antar thought the sale would at least give them an opportunity to pin the fraud on the new owners. But Zinn immediately discovered $45 million of listed inventory was missing. Stores soon closed, and the company went bankrupt in 1989.
Two disgruntled ex-employees then brought fraud allegations to America’s stock-regulating agency, the article reports, while the FBI “started sniffing around, too.” Crazy Eddie fled the country, using forged passports to escape to Tel Aviv, Zurich, São Paulo, and the Cayman Islands. But he was eventually arrested in Israel, sentenced to 12.5 years in prison, and ordered to repay investors $121 million (though he apparently served only seven).

But Crazy Eddie also became a cultural phenomenon — sort of. In the 1984 movie Splash, Darryl Hannah’s character even watches a Crazy Eddie TV ad. The Hustle’s article also includes photos of a Crazy Eddie stock certificate — and an actual “Wanted” poster issued the next year by the U.S. Marshalls office.

Yet just four years before his death in 2016, Antar — a high school dropout — was telling an interviewer from The Record that “I changed the business….”

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Will Europe’s Push to Reduce Russian Fossil Fuel Use Hurt Its Climate Goals?

In 2021, the European Union imported about 40% of its gas and 25% of its oil from Russia, reports the Associated Press. But now EU officials “are fixated on rapidly reducing the continent’s reliance on Russian oil and natural gas — and that means friction between security and climate goals, at least in the short term.

“To wean itself from Russian energy supplies as quickly as possible, Europe will need to burn more coal and build more pipelines and terminals to import fossil fuels from elsewhere….”
[T]he EU plans to reduce Russian gas imports by two-thirds by the end of this year, and to eliminate them altogether before 2030… In the near-term, ending energy ties with Russia puts the focus on securing alternative sources of fossil fuels. But longer term, the geopolitical and price pressures stoked by Russia’s war in Ukraine may actually accelerate Europe’s transition away from oil, gas and coal. Experts say the war has served as a reminder that renewable energy isn’t just good for the climate, but also for national security. That could help speed up the development of wind and solar power, as well as provide a boost to conservation and energy-efficiency initiatives….

The rapid pursuit of energy independence from Russia will likely require “a slight increase” in carbon emissions, said George Zachmann, an energy expert at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels. But “in the long term, the effect will be that we will see more investment in renewables and energy efficiency in Europe,” Zachmann said.

Plans that wouldn’t have been contemplated just a few months ago are now being actively discussed, such as running coal plants in Germany beyond 2030, which had previously been seen as an end date. Germany’s vice chancellor and energy minister, Robert Habeck, said there should be “no taboos.” The Czech government has made the same calculation about extending the life of coal power plants. “We will need it until we find alternative sources,” Czech energy security commissioner Václav Bartuska, told the news site Seznam Zprávy. “Until that time, even the greenest government will not phase out coal….”

In Britain, which is no longer part of the EU, Prime Minister Boris Johnson says it’s “time to take back control of our energy supplies.” Britain will phase out the small amount of oil it imports from Russia this year. More significantly, Johnson has signaled plans to approve new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea, to the dismay of environmentalists, who say that is incompatible with Britain’s climate targets. Some within the governing Conservative Party and the wider political right want the British government to retreat on its commitment to reach net zero by 2050, a pledge made less than six months ago at a global climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland….

Yet the shock waves from the war cut both ways. Sharply higher gas and electricity prices, and the desire to be less dependent on Russia, are increasing pressure to expand the development of home-grown renewables and to propel conservation. The International Energy Agency recently released a 10-point plan for Europe to reduce its dependence on Russian gas by a third within a year. Simply lowering building thermostats by an average of one degree Celsius during the home-heating season would save 10 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year, or roughly 6% of what Europe imports from Russia.

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Creative Commons Opposes Piracy-Combatting ‘SMART’ Copyright Act

The non-profit Creative Commons (founded by Lawrence Lessig) opposes a new anti-piracy bill that “proposes to have the US Copyright Office mandate that all websites accepting user-uploaded material implement technologies to automatically filter that content.”

We’ve long believed that these kinds of mandates are overbroad, speech-limiting, and bad for both creators and reusers. (We’re joined in this view by others such as Techdirt, Public Knowledge, and EFF, who have already stated their opposition.)

But one part of this attempt stands out to us: the list of “myths” Sen. Tillis released to accompany the bill. In particular, Tillis lists the concern that it is a “filtering mandate that will chill free speech and harm users” as a myth instead of a true danger to free expression-and he cites the existence of CC’s metadata as support for his position.
Creative Commons is strongly opposed to mandatory content filtering measures. And we particularly object to having our work and our name used to imply support for a measure that undermines free expression which CC seeks to protect….

Limitations and exceptions are a crucial feature of a copyright system that truly serves the public, and filter mandates fail to respect them. Because of this, licensing metadata should not be used as a mandatory upload filter-and especially not CC license data. We do not support or endorse the measures in this bill, and we object to having our name used to imply otherwise.

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Are Movies Dying?

As viewership drops for Hollywood’s annual Academy Awards ceremony, “Everyone has a theory about the decline…” argues an opinion piece in the New York Times.

“My favored theory is that the Oscars are declining because the movies they were made to showcase have been slowly disappearing.”

When the nominees were announced in February, nine of the 10 had made less than $40 million in domestic box office. The only exception, “Dune,” barely exceeded $100 million domestically, making it the 13th-highest-grossing movie of 2021. All told, the 10 nominees together have earned barely one-fourth as much at the domestic box office as “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” Even when Hollywood tries to conjure the old magic, in other words, the public isn’t there for it anymore…. Sure, non-superhero-movie box office totals will bounce back in 2022, and next year’s best picture nominees will probably earn a little more in theaters. Within the larger arc of Hollywood history, though, this is the time to call it: We aren’t just watching the decline of the Oscars; we’re watching the End of the Movies….

[W]hat looks finished is The Movies — big-screen entertainment as the central American popular art form, the key engine of American celebrity, the main aspirational space of American actors and storytellers, a pop-culture church with its own icons and scriptures and rites of adult initiation…. The internet, the laptop and the iPhone personalized entertainment and delivered it more immediately, in a way that also widened Hollywood’s potential audience — but habituated people to small screens, isolated viewing and intermittent watching, the opposite of the cinema’s communalism. Special effects opened spectacular (if sometimes antiseptic-seeming) vistas and enabled long-unfilmable stories to reach big screens. But the effects-driven blockbuster, more than its 1980s antecedents, empowered a fandom culture that offered built-in audiences to studios, but at the price of subordinating traditional aspects of cinema to the demands of the Jedi religion or the Marvel cult. And all these shifts encouraged and were encouraged by a more general teenage-ification of Western culture, the extension of adolescent tastes and entertainment habits deeper into whatever adulthood means today….

Under these pressures, much of what the movies did in American culture, even 20 years ago, is essentially unimaginable today. The internet has replaced the multiplex as a zone of adult initiation. There’s no way for a few hit movies to supply a cultural lingua franca, given the sheer range of entertainment options and the repetitive and derivative nature of the movies that draw the largest audiences. The possibility of a movie star as a transcendent or iconic figure, too, seems increasingly dated. Superhero franchises can make an actor famous, but often only as a disposable servant of the brand. The genres that used to establish a strong identification between actor and audience — the non-superhero action movie, the historical epic, the broad comedy, the meet-cute romance — have all rapidly declined…

[T]he caliber of instantly available TV entertainment exceeds anything on cable 20 years ago. But these productions are still a different kind of thing from The Movies as they were — because of their reduced cultural influence, the relative smallness of their stars, their lost communal power, but above all because stories told for smaller screens cede certain artistic powers in advance.
The article argues that episodic TV also cedes the Movies’ power of an-entire-story-in-one-go condensation. (“This power is why the greatest movies feel more complete than almost any long-form television.”) And it ultimately suggests that like opera or ballet, these grand old movies need “encouragement and patronage, to educate people into loves that earlier eras took for granted,” and maybe even “an emphasis on making the encounter with great cinema a part of a liberal arts education. ”

In 2014 one lone film-maker had even argued that Ben Stiller’s spectacular-yet-thoughtful Secret Life of Walter Mitty “might be the last of a dying breed.”

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That Big Tech Exodus Out of California? It Didn’t Happen

“Wannabe innovation hubs from coast to coast have been slavering over the prospect that the work-from-home revolution triggered by the COVID pandemic would finally break the stranglehold that California and Silicon Valley have had on high-tech jobs,” writes a business columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

“Here’s the latest picture on this expectation: Not happening.”

That’s the conclusion of some new studies, most recently by Mark Muro and Yang You of the Brookings Institution. They found that although the pandemic brought about some changes in the trend toward the concentration of tech jobs in a handful of metropolitan areas, the largest established hubs as a group “slightly increased their share” of national high-tech employment from 2019 through 2020. (Emphasis theirs….) “[T]he big tech superstar cities aren’t going anywhere,” Muro told me. “There’s a suggestion that we’re on the brink of an entirely different geography. I don’t think recent history or the nature of the technologies point in that direction…. ”

“The California metropolises really do retain their irreplaceable depth and strength,” Muro says. “That’s not to say there won’t be some movement. Early in the period we saw some exiting, especially from the Bay Area, but it turned out that much of it was within California, rather than to Kansas.” This shouldn’t be too surprising. The value of concentrated ecosystems in nurturing innovation has been documented for decades….

The pandemic-driven shift to remote work does seem to have opened entrepreneurs’ eyes at least to the potential for doing away with centralized workforces. In a recent survey of tech startup founders, the share of respondents saying they would prefer to start a firm with an entirely remote workforce from Day One rose to 42.1% in 2021 from only 6% in 2020. Among physical locations where the founders said prefer to launch their businesses, however, San Francisco still dominated, at 28.4%, with New York a distant second….

Unlike service industries such as leisure and tourism, most tech industries experienced barely a hiccup in their long-term growth trends during the pandemic.

The column also questions when, “if ever,” work-from-home jobs will become a significant share of the workforce. “Full-scale work-from-home only applies to about 6% of workers, UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti says. That’s triple the 2% level of the pre-pandemic era, but still an exception to the rule.”

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CDC Coding Error Led To Overcount of 72,000 COVID-19 Deaths

Last week, after reporting from the Guardian on mortality rates among children, the CDC corrected a “coding logic error” that had inadvertently added more than 72,000 Covid deaths of all ages to the data tracker, one of the most publicly accessible sources for Covid data. The Guardian reports: The agency briefly noted the change in a footnote, although the note did not explain how the error occurred or how long it was in effect. A total of 72,277 deaths in all age groups reported across 26 states were removed from the tracker “because CDC’s algorithm was accidentally counting deaths that were not Covid-19-related,” Jasmine Reed, a spokesperson for the agency, told the Guardian. The problem stemmed from two questions the CDC asks of states and jurisdictions when they report fatalities, according to a source familiar with the issue.

One data field asks if a person died “from illness/complications of illness,” and the field next to this asks for the date of death. When the answer is yes, then the date of death should be provided. But a problem apparently arose if a respondent included the date of death in this field even when the answer was “no” or “unknown.” The CDC’s system assumed that if a date was provided, then the “no” or “unknown” answer was an error, and the system switched the answer to “yes.” This resulted in an overcount of deaths due to Covid in the demographic breakdown, and the error, once discovered, was corrected last week. The CDC did not answer a question on how long the coding error was in effect.

“Working with near real-time data in an emergency is critical to guide decision-making, but may also mean we often have incomplete information when data are first reported,” said Reed. The death counts in the data tracker are “real-time and subject to change,” Reed noted, while numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics, a center within the CDC, are “the most complete source of death data,” despite lags in reporting, because the process includes a review of death certificates.

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Kaspersky Named First Russian Company on Security Risk List

The U.S. placed internet-security provider AO Kaspersky Lab on a list of companies deemed a threat to national security, for the first time adding a Russian entity to a list dominated by Chinese telecommunications firms. Bloomberg reports: The Federal Communications Commission on Friday also added China Telecom (Americas) Corp, and China Mobile International USA Inc. to the list. Once a company is on the list, federal subsidies can’t be used to purchase its equipment or services. The action is part of the FCC’s efforts to “strengthen America’s communications networks against national security threats,” Jessica Rosenworcel, the agency’s chairwoman, said in a news release.

Kaspersky is a well known provider of anti-virus software, and has conducted investigations into a range of nation-state hacking incidents. It calls itself the world’s largest privately-owned cybersecurity company on its website. It says it protects over 400 million users and 240,000 companies. […] For Friday’s update of the list, the FCC said it relied on findings by the Department of Homeland Security and an executive branch interagency body called the Committee for the Assessment of Foreign Participation in the United States Telecommunications Services Sector.

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Sony Addresses Troubled Gran Turismo 7 Launch, Gives Angry Fans One Million Free Credits

bbsguru writes: Sony/PlayStation has been taking a lot of heat for making the new Gran Turismo 7 more dependent on microtransactions. Gamers say the well-reviewed game had taken advantage of those reviews by waiting until after it was released to jack up the cost of playing the game. Acceptance wasn’t improved by the more-than-a-day outage that accompanied the changes. [To make matters worse, Gran Turismo 7 owners weren’t even able to play single player because the DRM servers that require an online check to play the game went down.] After several tentative responses, Sony is [finally] paying out, “gifting players with a million in-game credits and outlining the near-term updates for Gran Turismo 7 that will address the problems,” writes Eurogamer’s Martin Robinson. “We want to thank you for your continued patience and valuable feedback as we grow and evolve GT7 to make it as enjoyable and rewarding for as many players as possible,” wrote series creator Kazunori Yamauchi in a blog post. “We always want to keep communication lines open with our community so that we can work together to build the best racing experience possible.”

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DirectStorage Shows Just Minor Load-Speed Improvements In Real-World PC Demo

Andrew Cunningham writes via Ars Technica: Microsoft’s DirectStorage API promises to speed up game-load times, both on the Xbox Series X/S and on Windows PCs (where Microsoft recently exited its developer-preview phase). One of the first games to demonstrate the benefits of DirectStorage on the PC is Square Enix’s Forspoken, which was shown off by Luminous Productions technical director Teppei Ono at GDC this week. As reported by The Verge, Ono said that, with a fast NVMe SSD and DirectStorage support, some scenes in Forspoken could load in as little as one second. That is certainly a monstrous jump from the days of waiting for a PlayStation 2 to load giant open-world maps from a DVD.

As a demonstration of DirectStorage, though, Forspoken’s numbers are a mixed bag. On one hand, the examples Ono showcased clearly demonstrate DirectStorage loading scenes more quickly on the same hardware, compared to the legacy Win32 API — from 2.6 seconds to 2.2 seconds in one scene, and from 2.4 seconds to 1.9 seconds in another. Forspoken demonstrated performance improvements on older SATA-based SSDs as well, despite being marketed as a feature that will primarily benefit NVMe drives — dropping from 5.0 to 4.6 seconds in one scene, and from 4.1 to 3.4 seconds in another. Speed improvements for SATA SSDs have been limited for the better part of a decade now because the SATA interface itself (rather than the SSD controller or NAND flash chips) has been holding them back. So eking out any kind of measurable improvement for those drives is noteworthy.

On the other hand, Ono’s demo showed that game load time wasn’t improving as dramatically as the raw I/O speeds would suggest. On an NVMe SSD, I/O speeds increased from 2,862MB/s using Win32 to 4,829MB/s using DirectStorage — nearly a 70 percent increase. But the load time for the scene decreased from 2.1 to 1.9 seconds. That’s a decrease that wouldn’t be noticeable even if you were trying to notice it. The Forspoken demo ultimately showed that the speed of the storage you’re using still has a lot more to do with how quickly your games load than DirectStorage does. One scene that took 24.6 seconds to load using DirectStorage on an HDD took just 4.6 seconds to load on a SATA SSD and 2.2 seconds to load on an NVMe SSD. That’s a much larger gap than the one between Win32 and DirectStorage running on the same hardware.

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