Phantom Debt.

 A lawsuit against Universal Debt and Payment solutions was revealed, alleging the firm’s tactics included purchasing personal information from data brokers that operators could use to convince victims to pay debt they didn’t owe.

 

Agents tell consumers they risked jail time if they didn’t pay immediately. The claims were bolstered by operators’ citing personal information, including bank account numbers, the CFPB alleges, that had originally been obtained by payday loan lead generation websites and sold to data brokers.

 

The caller stated that he had a ‘restraining order against (the consumer) to appear in court if I didn’t settle with them.’ The caller said the consumer had 24 hours to pay $500 on a $1,600 debt to Bank of America, or the collector would ‘contact (the consumer’s) employer to levy (his) wage, and they were also contacting the local police to serve papers,’” the lawsuit alleges

 

Consumers were harassed, threatened, and deceived as part of a reprehensible scheme to collect debt that was not even owed,” said CFPB Director Richard Cordray. “We are taking action against the many parties that allegedly contributed to this phantom debt collection operation. The ringleaders of the scheme, the telemarketing company that broadcast millions of robo-calls, and the companies that processed the payments should all be held accountable for taking advantage of vulnerable consumers.”

I suggest the chair.  Just a thought.

Follow the Money.... Healthcare

A report issued Wednesday says that the most recent official projections indicate that the U.S. will spend $2.5 trillion less on health care from 2014 until 2019 than had been originally estimated at the time the Affordable Care Act [ACA] became law in 2010.

That represents a nearly 11 percent decrease in projected spending, according to the report issued by the Urban Institute.

Nearly half of the decrease in projections comes from lower spending estimates for Medicare and Medicaid.

While the exact impact of the ACA cannot be determined, it is clear that the nation has successfully expanded health coverage to Eleven Millions, and is now expected to spend considerably less than anticipated even before the law was enacted."
Kathy Hempstead, who directs coverage issues for the RWJ Foundation, said, "The impact of health reform on this slowdown, and whether it can be maintained, are very important issues."

This is a win/win/win program. More covered, Less utilized, and Surplus. Every turn you find Obama care beneficial. Opponents are crushed.

Just a thought.

Young Manipulate...


Stevens was a marketing manager at a dating service called Perfect Match, supervised Nourn. She was [18 yo.] in a "very intense" relationship with then-35-year-old, [with a wife and two kids] whom she met after seeing his profile on the Internet.

Barker wasn't available for her that holiday evening, so Nourn decided not to waste the evening, she'll try Stevens, spent the evening and part of the night with him.  During which [one thing led to another] she had sex at his place.

After leaving, Nourn returned to her home, and was confronted by an angry Barker. She told him she was and had sex with Stevens, but then she said he raped her. Barker wanted to end their relationship, but Nourn begged him not to. Her plan is to get him to leave his wife and be with  her and jealousy was the way.

Nourn chose to go along with a plan to kill Stevens and burn his body in his car, the prosecutor said. That should wipe the past and start fresh with her lover. She returned to Stevens' apt. and tricked him about car trouble.

After the murder, Nourn moved in with Barker, the mistress, the wife, and the kids for a while. She still wasn't able to manipulate the system as she wanted.

Nourn decided she has no use for Barker any more, she has the upper hand so she went to the police to report the murder and put it on him. She got caught, and her manipulation process of getting red of men one after the other failed miserably. One dead, two in jail and families destroyed.

Just a thought.

True to yourself.

Roman Catholic nuns and brothers in robes along with conservative activists and lawmakers, all surrounded Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana as he signed  religious freedom law. Smiling and proud, some of them had cheered the bill as a way to protect religious business owners from having to provide cakes and flowers to same-sex weddings.

Later, the state’s top Republican legislative leaders announced they were changing the law to specify that it will not authorize discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity. A different cast stood behind them, including a prominent gay businessman and corporate leaders from Eli Lilly, the Indiana Pacers........

The winds have shifted swiftly, leaving some Conservative Christian leaders unsettled and uncertain about what may come next for religious freedom state laws.

Here is what's coming:

"'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' and behold, the log is in your own eye? 5"You hypocrite.......

"For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you.…"

"Treat others the same way you want them to treat you.

"for all have sinned and fall short "

Count on it.    Just a thought.

Less Pasta

Pope Francis is being warned by Italian doctors to “eat less pasta, walk more often, and lose a little weight to take some strain off his aching back,”.

The workaholic 78-year-old Francis, who’s not been shy about his love of pizza and who typically rises at 4:30 a.m. to start his busy days, also admitted in his Holy Thursday homily that he’s just exhausted.

Last month, Francis suggested he, too, had retirement on his mind when he told the Mexican broadcast outlet Televisa that he felt his papacy would last only “four or five years …

An overbooked, stressful schedule has forced Francis to miss his daily walks, and the weight gain has made the pope fatigued and is causing him back issues. A healthier diet and more regular exercise should help with all of his health issues, according to the doctors.

You may be the "Pope" of your family, so that is what you have to do.

 Just a thought.

Newly Wed-II

Police in Washington, D.C., arrested a woman in connection with the killing of a lawyer who was found stabbed to death inside a district hotel room.

Police charged Jamyra Gallmon, 21, with first-degree felony murder while armed in connection with the death of David Messerschmitt. His body was found inside a room at the Donovan Hotel 2/2010.

Messerschmitt, 30, had sent a text message to his wife the day before his body was discovered, saying he'd be home in an hour.  But when the newlywed didn't return to his home in Capitol Hill, his wife, Kim Vuong, filed a missing persons report. 

Police didn't say what evidence led investigators to charge Gallmon but said they believe she was pictured in a surveillance video released by police. She will appear in court soon.

Last week, Vuong asked for help finding her husband's alleged killer,  "In one day, I lost the most important person in my life and the man I loved so much," she said. 

Real life stories can be stranger than fiction. Just a thought.

Run...*!

Anthony Stokes, 17, was driving a car that matched the description of a car used to flee a home burglary, in which a masked person allegedly shot a gun at an 81-year-old woman who was home, Roswell Police spokeswoman Officer Lisa Holland told ABC News.

The driver allegedly refused to stop, and they chased him. "The car lost control at an intersection, ran over a curb, hit a pedestrian and ran into big, metal pole," Holland said.

Stokes had an enlarged heart in 2013 and was given six months to live without a heart transplant. At the time, doctors said they wouldn't give him a transplant because of "noncompliance," which means they didn't think he could be trusted to follow medical directions.

His mother told ABC News, at the time, that she thought doctors made their decision to deny Anthony because he had low grades and trouble with the law.   Stokes died from injuries sustained in the crash.                   Why running from the police? It always end badly.

Just a thought.

Idiologies

To create a successful investment process you’re bound to have competing ideologies at times depending on where we are in the investment cycle.

Buy and hold strategy only works if you’re able to both buy and hold when markets crash. And while it can be difficult to follow your plan during a market crash you have to have a completely different mindset during a bull market.

To practice buy and hold you have to be a practicing contrarian when stocks are going down and a practicing trend-follower when stocks are going up. You have to be willing to use two competing schools of thought at different times. That’s not always so easy to pull off.

In many ways this is similar to the two most well-known quantitative investing strategies value and momentum. Each of these strategies seeks to take advantage of over- and under-reactions made in the market, but in very different ways. With a value strategy, stocks that have performed poorly for one reason or another become cheap as investors over-react by selling first and asking questions later. With a momentum strategy, stocks that have done well recently tend to continue doing well for short periods of time because investors initially under-react. Value and momentum each rely on mean reversion, but in different ways and over different time frames.

Both Value and Momentum have historically been shown to work well as stand-alone strategies. But these two contrasting ideas actually work very well when you pair them together because they can make up for each other’s deficiencies during certain market environments. Therefore, diversifying these two return streams helps increase risk-adjusted returns.

But the implementation of a value/momentum combination will never work if the investor isn’t willing to accept that there are two schools of thought that can complement one another.  Really this idea of dealing with competing ideologies will be true of any successful long-term investment strategy.

At certain times you will have to be willing to take an uncomfortable stance. Sometimes that means going against the crowd. Other times it’s going to mean going along with the crowd.

I think an actual contrarian strategy can be one in which an investor is willing to combine different approaches and consistently follow them throughout various points in the market cycle to manage risk and improve long-term performance.   [Ben Carlson]

Sad Gathering

One Pilot...

 







A lawsuit filed relates to a New York-to-Las Vegas JetBlue flight on March 27, 2012, in which the pilot, Clayton Osbon, told his co-pilot that “we need to take a leap of faith” and that “we’re not going to Vegas,” among other bizarre actions, according to federal investigators.

The co-pilot locked Mr. Osbon out of the cockpit and diverted the flight to Texas, where federal authorities charged Mr. Osbon with interfering with the flight crew.
A federal judge in Texas found Mr. Osbon, 52 y.o., not guilty by reason of insanity.

The suit claims breach of contract and negligence by JetBlue for allowing him to fly on the day of the incident despite evidence that he was suffering from mental-health issues. He is seeking more than $14 million from JetBlue.

Mr. Osbon said in the filing that he suffered from a “complex partial brain seizure” and that his actions before the flight—including missing the preflight meeting and struggling to complete the preflight checklist—should have made clear he was mentally unfit to fly.

Mr. Osbon was one of JetBlue’s first pilots, hired shortly after the airline formed in 2000. Shortly after the incident, then-JetBlue CEO Dave Barger said that he knew him “personally for a long period of time and there’s been no indication of this at all in the past.”

Good Luck with that.!!!!!!   Just a thought.