uPeople Who Bought Pontiac Silverdome For $583K Now Asking $30M For Run-Down Arenar

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  Anything of real value has been stripped from the Silverdome, but the owners believe it’s worth $30 million, 51 times what they paid for the arena in 2009.

  The Pontiac Silverdome hasn’t played home to the Detroit Lions since 2002; the Pistons fled 27 years ago. Aside from a handful of one-off events, it’s basically gone unused for most of the last decade, with much of its few remaining assets recently auctioned off. And yet the company that paid only $583,000 for the arena at a 2009 auction are now asking for a whopping $30 million.

  This isn’t sitting well with some Oakland County, MI, officials who unloaded the massive venue in 2009 as the economy cratered. The hope had been that the buyers, a Canadian company called Triple Investment Group, would take what was effectively a free stadium and do something positive with it, but nothing has come of the arena that used to hold more than 80,000 fans.

  “The fire sale of the Silverdome for $583,000 without a development agreement to make sure the purchaser made the proper investments in the project and returned it to productive use is a worst-case scenario for Oakland County property values and one of the most strategic parcels in the region,” the Oakland County Treasurer tells Detroit News.

  He calls the $30 million price tag “real estate speculation at its worst” and says the owner’s actions prove they never had any intention of actually developing the site.

  The sad thing is that even though the $30 million figure is more than 50 times the auction sale price, it’s not even close to the $55.7 million that was spent to construct the stadium — and that’s in 1975 dollars! That’ more than $200 million these days.

  Over the years, a number of brave souls have ventured into the corpse of the Silverdome, which is a misnomer since the fabric dome has long since vanished. Most recently, BMX rider Tyler Fernengel filmed this video of him pulling off some pretty breathtaking stunts among the incredibly depressing ruins of the arena:

  
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by Chris Morran via Consumerist

uIs The iPod’s Disappearance From The Top Of Apple Website A Sign Of Its Impending Doom?r

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• Well, that was quick: Only a few days after Apple announced its new subscription music service, Apple Music has replaced the iPod at the top of the company’s site. Here’s where everyone starts checking the deathwatch clock.

  The iPod used to sit on the top of the site with the categories Store, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Watch and Support, but alas, Music has taken its place, notes AppleInsider, in what appears to be yet another sign of the device’s slide into obscurity.

  This doesn’t mean that you can’t still buy an iPod, you just have to find them in the online Apple Store or at the bottom of the Apple Music page.

  The first usurper to the iPod throne was the first iPhone in 2007, as it allowed people to carry their music and make phone calls/text/use the Internet on one device. Why carry two devices when one will do?

  While the iPhone and other smartphones surged in popularity, the iPod has slowly been fading away, with sales declining every quarter for the past few years, notes AppleInsider. In the future, the company won’t even be revealing its quarterly sales.

  The last major update for the iPod came in 2012, followed by the demise of the iPod Classic in September 2014. Though there are rumors of a product refresh potentially happening this year, it seems it’s only a matter of time before the iPod finally bites the dust, to live on only in boxes of dusty, unused hardware and in my memories as the only person to live in New York City without an iPod in 2004-2005. Commuting was hell, I tell you.

  iPod’s disappearance from top of Apple website signals further slide into obscurity [AppleInsider]

  
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by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

uSen. Elizabeth Warren Has Some Choice Words For Chase CEO Jamie Dimonr

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• Earlier this week, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie “It sounds like Diamond” Dimon, was quoted as saying that Sen. Elizabeth Warren, an outspoken advocate of financial reform who helped create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau before becoming a lawmaker, was clueless about how banks actually work. The Massachusetts senator says that Mr. Dimon doth protest too much.

  “The problem is not that I don’t understand the global banking system,” Warren said on today’s “So, That Happened” podcast for Huffington Post. “The problem for these guys is that I fully understand the system and I understand how they make their money. And that’s what they don’t like about me.”

  Warren has been a leading figure in the effort to reduce risk in the financial sector in order to prevent more “too big to fail” banks that need to bailed out when they do collapse. Her critics have accused her of being too reactionary and of pushing policies that unduly hurt banks.

  The senator contends that she’s not against the notion of banks taking risks in the hope of financial gain. Her problem is when they do it with money that’s insured by taxpayer money.

  “You want to get out there and take on risk? Okay, go do it,” she explains, “but don’t do it within the structure of a bank that gets backed up by the federal government.”

  She points out what she sees as hypocrisy on the part of the federally guaranteed banks who cook up incredibly complicated banking structures and then “they come in and complain that ‘Whoa, regulations are tough’ and “Regulations are too complicated.'”

  “There’s a way to fix that,” says Warren. “If banking is boring, the regulatory part can be boring too.”

  The senator acknowledges that financial regulators are often two steps behind banks because they are waiting to react to questionable practices rather than pushes for structural changes that keep federally guaranteed banking “simpler and easier to follow for everyone.

  
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by Chris Morran via Consumerist

uPolice Searching For Man Seen On Security Video Urinating Into Store’s Mail Slotr

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  (AZCentral.com)

  Contrary to what you might believe, the world is not, in fact, your toilet. Which is why police in Scottsdale, AZ are looking for an unidentified man who was caught on camera peeing through the mail slot of a furniture store.

  Public urination is not a victimless crime, as the furniture store ended up with a soiled rug and a bunch of ruined mail that had gone through the slot before the man decided to unzip on the street, reports AZCentral.com.

  The store’s surveillance footage shows a man walking a dog past the building late one night, before he disappears from view for a few seconds. He returns, with unleashed dog following behind him, and seems to hesitate. Could he be wondering, “Can I hold it?” We will never know.

  Perhaps in an attempt to show his dog how to do it, he then approaches the front door of the store, unzips his pants and answers the call of nature.

  Police want anyone with information to call them. And I want anyone who can’t hold it to at least go find a dark, empty corner where such things won’t bother anyone.

  Police: Man used mail slot as urinal in Scottsdale [AZCentral.com]

  
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by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

uJudge Says USA FREEDOM Act May Scuttle Twitter’s Transparency Lawsuitr

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  (Tom Raftery)

  Last October, Twitter sued the Justice Department, the U.S. Attorney General, the FBI, and FBI Director James Comey, because the social media platform believed it has a First Amendment right to be fully transparent with its users about the number and nature of national security requests it receives from the government. But with the recent passing of the USA FREEDOM Act, the judge in the case says there may be no need for the lawsuit to move forward.

  Twitter’s complaint involves a Jan. 2014 letter from then-Attorney General Eric Holder to a number of tech and online companies (but not Twitter) detailing when and in which formats they could publicly reveal data about national security requests for user account information.

  Companies are basically given two options. The first allows the company to give more detailed information about the kind of data requested, but any numerical info would have to be banded in groups of 1,000. So a company could break down the requests into categories like the general number of accounts affected, content-related requests, and non-content requests, but each of those categories can only be published in ranges of 1,000 (i.e. 0-999; 1,000-1,999; etc).

  The second option allows the company to provide more precise information about the number of national security requests, by reducing the banding size to groups of 250 (i.e. 0-249; 250-499; etc). The catch is that the company is forbidden from providing additional information about these requests.

  Under either of these options, Twitter doesn’t have the freedom to tell its users that it didn’t receive any national security requests, as 0-999 or 0-250 would be the lowest values it could share publicly.

  In its complaint, Twitter called out what it believes is hypocrisy on the part of law enforcement.

  “The U.S. government engages in extensive but incomplete speech about the scope of its national security surveillance activities as they pertain to U.S. communications providers, while at the same time prohibiting service providers such as Twitter from providing their own informed perspective as potential recipients of various national security-related requests,” wrote Twitter at the time.

  On June 3, the day after President Obama signed the FREEDOM Act, which is intended to add more transparency to the national security request process, recently appointed Attorney General Loretta Lynch filed a notice [PDF] with the court to point out that the new legislation includes some new banding options for disclosure reports that allow companies to report data in bands as small as 100 requests.

  Lynch also noted that the FREEDOM Act allows recipients of these requests to obtain judicial review, something Twitter had taken issue with in its original complaint.

  Twitter responded [PDF] on June 9, saying that the issues raised by Lynch don’t actually relate to the government’s pending motion to have much of Twitter’s complaint dismissed.

  Twitter said it will meet and confer with the government “at an appropriate time regarding the potential impact of the [FREEDOM Act] on other aspects of this case.”

  But yesterday, the judge in the case disagreed.

  In an order [PDF], the judge writes that, “Contrary to Twitter’s position, it does appear to the Court that the USA Freedom Act has provisions pertinent to those at issue in the motion to dismiss and at the heart of Twitter’s Complaint, including permissible disclosure of aggregate data regarding legal process obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) and the constitutionality of the statutory standards of review applicable to NSLs. Indeed, the Court is concerned that the new legislation moots the claims for relief in Twitter’s Complaint.”

  Because the judge wasn’t sure if the two parties had even gotten together to confer in the wake of the FREEDOM Act’s passing, he ordered them to confer before the June 26 deadline for filing supplemental briefs.

  
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by Chris Morran via Consumerist

uDish Talking To Banks About Potential T-Mobile Mergerr

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• The romance is heating up between potential merger mates T-Mobile and Dish, with the satellite company reportedly talking to banks about putting together a bid for the magenta-hued “uncarrier.”

  This is according to the Wall Street Journal, which reports that Dish is looking to borrow between $10-15 billion for the cash portion of its potential offer to T-Mobile.

  Most of the deal would be a stock-based transaction, with T-Mobile currently valued at around $31 billion, just short of the $34 billion valuation for Dish.

  As always, there’s the caution that nothing is set in stone and there’s the possibility that Dish may never make an offer for T-Mobile.

  The combination of the two companies is similar to the currently pending merger of AT&T and DirecTV. It may even garner less scrutiny because while AT&T does compete with DirecTV to some degree in the pay-TV market, T-Mobile has not yet ventured beyond the wireless communications business.

  Dish recently acquired a stockpile of wireless spectrum through federal auctions, but it doesn’t sell its own wireless services yet. A merger with T-Mobile would give it a purpose for this spectrum.

  AT&T attempted to acquire T-Mobile in 2011, but that deal fell apart when regulators at the FCC and the Dept. of Justice raised concerns about the impact it would have on competition and rates.

  In the wake of that merger collapse, AT&T had to pay T-Mobile billions in cash and spectrum which the company used to roll out an LTE network that now competes with the much larger market leaders. The company has also led the push toward consumers paying full price for their wireless devices in exchange for lower monthly data plan rates.

  While T-Mobile has grown under the guidance of CEO John Legere, it still continues to battle with Sprint for the #3 spot in the U.S. wireless market, and both are far behind AT&T and Verizon.

  Legere would reportedly remain as CEO of the merged companies, while Dish co-founder Charlie Ergen would be chairman of the board.

  
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by Chris Morran via Consumerist

uWedding Gown Store Closes, Owner Disappearsr

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  (nathanmac87)

  Where is the owner of a bridal salon in Endicott, New York? That’s a good question, and the brides who haven’t yet received the gowns that they paid for would like to know the answer. The store abruptly closed earlier this week, and the owner hasn’t been heard from.

  Customers tell TV station WBNG that it turns out the current owner hasn’t been paying vendors for gowns even accepting payment for them, so they will have to dispute the charges through their credit card companies.

  The store’s owner had taken it over recently, and the previous owner of the business still owns the building. She has taken charge of this disaster, and is helping make sure that brides get the dresses they ordered…even if they end up shipped to another retailer.

  “She’s doing the best that she can to make sure that everybody stays focused on the brides instead of trying to attack the business, or the boss, or anything like that,” one customer told WBNG about the store’s previous owner.

  Customers have been told to check their credit card statements to make sure they were charged in the first place, dispute the charges if so, and find a different source for their gowns.

  Bridal salon owner abandons store, brides [WBNG] (Thanks, Sarah!)

  A SIMILAR CASE:
  Bridal Gown Consignment Store Closes With No Warning, Gowns Inside

  
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by Laura Northrup via Consumerist