So, I was fascinated by that video and kept asking myself "wait, that's a thing?". I found this great article by the pilot of the video that talks about the practice and economics of cherry drying: https://blog.aopa.org/aopa/tag/cherry-drying/
Respect and courtesy are nice but I think the reason this style is so effective is different. It makes the counterparty believe that you are collecting the paper trail to file a lawsuit. And behaving like you are preparing to file a lawsuit is much more effective than just claiming you will be filing a lawsuits.
I imagine that when presented with a choice of $88 payment or having to deal with a lawsuit, 100% of decision-makers will chose the former. And it’s not about the lawsuit outcome. Even if some complete garbage is filed which has no chance of success, the burden it creates on the business is clearly much higher than $88.
So, what if a business was successful, not impacted by covid, and wasn’t planning to lay off any employees anyway? Say, technology consulting company with 100 employees. Took out a PPP “loan”, which will be promptly forgiven since they keep the staff, who gets to keep the money? Something tells me 100% goes to business owner and 0% to employees.
I think there are quite a few companies like this. Hence “money goes to those who least need it”.
You are exactly right. In fact, I know of a few businesses that actually had MORE business (wholesalers), and the CEO of one told my friend that he was just going to use the money to buy his wife a new Porsche. This is anecdotal for sure, but there is no reason why firms wouldn't rely on free money as long as they are amoral enough.
If I had implemented the plan, I would have just created a program where the program only covered a % of the wages (say 80% instead of 100%) and mostly only for people who were not able to work. Of course, that brings other problems, but there is a middle ground somewhere in there.
And I know a business owner who is shopping for a new house after getting a PPP “loan”. Sure, PPP money is supposed to be used for payroll. No problem, one can indeed use PPP money for payroll 100%. But then use the business revenue, 90% of which would normally be used for payroll, to take out a nice bonus and buy a house.
Comments about storage costs are nice theory but don’t tell me those storage costs went up 50 dollars a barrel to cause CLK0 to go from +10 to -40 within something like 30 minutes. It was all forced liquidation by brokers like IB and people absolutely bamboozled by negative prices puking their positions. Nothing to do with costs for actual storage.
Strategic Petroleum Reserve uses salt caverns to store crude oil and has the capacity of 797 million barrels [1], which is equivalent to roughly 500-700 larger tankers. Both construction cost and carry cost per barrel are, of course, much lower vs. tankers.
At recent market prices ($-37 a barrel as of April 2020),[5] the SPR holds over $-9.26 billion in sweet crude and approximately $-20.4 billion in sour crude (assuming a $15/barrel discount for sulfur content).
This would be only true if the cost of storing would be free.
Would creating, say, online marketplace to help people lose desired amount of money with certainty - for example, via some sort of specially crafted financial instrument - violate any applicable rules & regs? Idea for the next YC batch?
You don't need to do anything special for this. I don't see the need for a startup to "help" with this. Existing options are already sufficient. It would take a financial professional less than a day to write up a comprehensive guide to such a strategy.
E.g. if you want to lose $5,000 just buy a bunch of options that are way out of the money, that have a perhaps 1% chance of paying off.
99% of the time you lose $5,000, which is what you wanted.
1% of the time you win $500,000, which is a nice problem to have. That payoff will probably dwarf the financial penalty of whatever discontinuity you were trying to work around.
This is not ironic as it's absolutely not relevant.
The HDD that you buy is not redundant, don't provide more than a very limited throughput, is not distributed across multiple geographic areas, is not connected to the internet, comes without any of the hardware to make it spin and is not benefiting from s3 APIs as far as I know.
You are comparing the costs of buying gas vs the costs actually associated with driving.
https://www.raft-tech.com/