Reality Imitates Fiction: California Family Makes Millions Moving Bottles and Cans Between States For Recycling, Like Classic Seinfeld Episode ‘The Bottle Deposit’ – The Problem? It’s FRAUD – Say Prosecutors

Arbitrage is a trade strategy to generate gains from the difference in a security’s price in different markets. You purchase assets from one market at a lower price and sell them in a another at a higher price, thus generating a profit.

A crazy application of this principle can be found in the classic Seinfeld episode called ‘The Bottle Deposit,’ in which insane neighbor mailman Newman learns that bottles and cans can be refunded for 5 cents in New York but go for 10 cents in Michigan. The scheme bonds Newman and fellow loony Kramer into and adventure that goes sideways, as is usually the case.

Yahoo reported:

This scheme has been widely used in real life, but – as it happens – it’s against the law. California prosecutors say that a family that made $7.6 million from recycling materials that they purchased in Arizona has, in fact, defrauded the state of California.

…This illegal ‘arbitrage’ capitalizes on the discrepancy in recycling redemptions from state-to-state.

When someone purchases a plastic or aluminum bottle in California, they pay 5 to 10 cents in ‘Redemption Value’, which the one can have repaid by returning the items to one of the state’s more than 1,200 recycling centers. Arizona has no such program – meaning you can buy the recycled material much cheaper.

Someone should just make the disaster movie and be done with it (after the Hollywood strike, that is).

Ocean current system could shut down as early as 2025, leading to climate disaster
https://www.space.com/ocean-current-system-shut-down-2025-climate-disaster

A major system of ocean currents that ferries heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic could shut down far sooner than expected, according to new predictions. Such a collapse would prove catastrophic for Earth’s climate.

The system, known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) had previously been measured to be dramatically weakening in conjunction with rising ocean temperatures. Despite this, however, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently announced that climate scientists don’t expect the AMOC to totally switch off within the century. 

But a new study is now challenging that conclusion, raising the specter of a halted AMOC to as early as 2025…

Finding that direct measurements of the AMOC’s strength have only been made for the past 15 years, Ditlevsen’s team applied sophisticated statistical tools to ocean temperature data going all the way back to the 1870s for an enhanced dataset. This detailed analysis ultimately suggested significant warning signs of the AMOC shutting down between 2025 and 2095, with a staggering certainty of 95%. [😂]

“Trust the science,” they said. “We will no longer have snow in our lifetimes,” they said.

More specifically, the team’s results evidenced that the most likely time for this collapse would be around 2057.

Still, other climate scientists remain cautious, saying that there are still uncertainties in the data that could affect its accuracy. However, it’s worth considering that even the mere possibility of the AMOC shutting down so soon is rather alarming.

And (drum roll 🥁) the takeaway:

“Our result underscores the importance of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible,” Ditlevsen said.

Global warming and climate change aren’t working well enough. They had to find a new shiny object.