OK. I did some research.

In 1990, Richard Gere offered Julia Roberts $3000 for a week. And that was

a) 35 years ago and
b) in an aehmm... more price conscious oriented market. (but not low budget either)

So as a conclusion: If you pay $500 for food and sex, at least one of that will not be classy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Woman#Plot

I'm not an expert in that field, but I dare to say that escort services for people who pay $500 for dinner have long left that price mark behind.

A really good developer did a weekend project and came up with a working prototype of a knockoff/alternative to Briar and/or Meshtastic. (Briar can use BT, too, IIRC) That's greeat and he may have been 10x faster than any other dev I know, but so far it's just that: an interesting work in progress. He hasn't opened a new company selling selling crypto snakeoil.

This is interesting. Not more, not less.

Exactly. And the "hundreds of laymen" were out of probably millions of users who saw the altered picture und insterbook or wherever.

There is no judge unless that's what you now call the regular social media mob.

If no one knows that alterations beyond adding a logo have been made, it's not "gaslighting"

I'm not saying it's impossible or unfeasible, but it has to be taken care off. It's effort, it's part of a device that can fail or break. There's something nice that the spinning metal takes care of that automatically. Physics has much less bugs than software.

But I agree that there are probably easier ways to cope with that problem than building a nuclear power plant.

Load yes, but synchronizing a DC battery to a frequency (including phase!) is a different thing.

Exactly.

But that's what this whole thing sounds to me like. You have a company that's about to go belly up, and you somehow strike a deal to suck everything of value out of it instead paying back bills, credits or any other kind of liability, scr*wing over all your creditors. And, in this case, customers.

Someone is transferring money to himself that belongs to the creditors. A fraudulent scheme.

So I cold set up a straw man company that takes out a credit to buy a car, then sell the car (its asset) to me for a dime on the dollar and then go bankrupt and not having to pay back its liabilities?

Sounds like a) fraud and b) similar to what is happening here.

But so is the crime of bankruptcy fraud when you would such a tactic to remove assets from a company before it goes belly up instead of using them to cover liabilities.

But then again, selling all assets to cover as much liabilities as possible is part of the bankruptcy process..

So I could go to a restaurant or a car dealership and only buy lunch or a car as an asset but not buy the bill that comes with it because it is a liability? (Of course I may have to do that through a third party)

No. But fraud is.

What you can get from context is amazing, too, but what happened here is the exact opposite as I gave literally NOT context when I asked for the meaning of "like a hogshead in a duck pond"

Decoding that with context would have been something like "Have you seen that drunken guy on the dancefloor stumbling around like a hogshead in a duck pond"

But you don't even need fake etymology. I don't know if it's a feature of language or intelligence, but we are able to understand language constructs, that have not existed an instant before. The whole humor of malapropism works on that principle. We not only can coin new phrases, but often understand them without explicit explanation.

But of course explaining some "new" or "newly made up" term like it has always existed is a new form of funny.